So what's more important on the internet? Search? Or transactions?

"In the end, many executives are left wondering how many additional sales they might have made had the site responded normally."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2222015,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday
By Evan Schuman
November 25, 2007

Lowe's, Macy's, Victoria's Secret and others are hit hardest where it hurts?in the transaction times.

A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macy's and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit.

But they were far from the exception, as almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance.

Many retailers count on Black Friday to turn their red ink black, but the fact that most slowdowns occurred during the transaction phase of the interactions may have reduced that salvaging effect considerably.

Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, said the slowdowns "impacted the product search and check-out processes?and presumably will impact online sales."

The Keynote study added that "the worst performing sites on Black Friday were showing as much as a 400 percent slowdown," which White said "will lead to consumers abandoning a product search or checkout."

Macy's, for example, saw site performance fall off from its typical 12 seconds to about 15 to 20 seconds. "But it's not happening on their homepage," White said. "It's happening when [site visitors] are actually searching the site."

Among some of the other hardest hit e-tailers were Lowe's?which saw a roughly "300 percent decrease in performance," White said. Site performance "used to be 100 percent [rapid response], but it's now fluctuating between 20 percent and 30 percent."

OfficeDepot went from 10 seconds to 25 seconds. Buy.com and Borders also suffered significant slowdowns, White said.

White noted that, in general, homepage performances were good, but that delays crept in later in the purchase process, typically when the site visit moved from product description pages to either search or checkout. That is when sites move transactions to other servers and?quite often?to other sites entirely.

Indeed, some performance degradations may not be the direct fault of the retail site. But White said that major retailers can and should "put pressure on suppliers [and] partners" to optimize their own systems. He added that SLAs (service-level agreements) should include guaranteed response times during holidays and other anticipated high-traffic periods.

A site slowdown?as opposed to an outright outage?can be especially frustrating because steady?and oftentimes sharply rising?sales camouflage the problem. In the end, many executives are left wondering how many additional sales they might have made had the site responded normally.

How long is too long for a site to respond to a mouse click? That depends on the individual shopper and that shopper's patience. White cited the popular 8-second rule, but said that many factors influence how lenient shoppers will be.

Consumers may be willing to wait longer for exclusive products or information, such as the balance of their bank accounts.

Consumers might also be more patient with a graphic-intensive site that has images they truly want to see. Victoria's Secret, for example, experienced a huge slowdown Thursday night?from a 5-second response to a 15-second response?but White speculated that its customers might be more tolerant of delays because they're expecting a more graphic-intensive experience, and the delay is thus worth waiting through.

Predictions for retail generally suggest that 2007 will have one of the weakest years in terms of sales growth since 2002, the worst of the dot-com implosion years.

But the National Retail Federation on Sunday predicted that Monday will show a sharp increase, with "72 million consumers planning to shop online from home or at work tomorrow, up from 60.7 million in 2006 and 59.0 million in 2005." The NRF survey found that 31.9 percent of adults will shop on Cyber Monday, up 17.3 percent over last year.

I-Man,

My god! A post from you without a single "VCSY" in it - what is going on?
Well at least it's as long and relevant to the post as always...

"I didn't find much in the way of direct Windows Vista deals."

NewEgg is advertising 32-bit OEM Ultimate at $170 and 32-bit OEM Home Premium at $105 with 20% cashback if you pay with paypal. Best price I've seen so far. Anyone seen better?

Yes Karl,
Free open source community Linux distros, free to download at distrowatch.com. And without the DRM and the Bloat. On sale everyday.

As long as that technology gap causes Microsoft to fail to deliver on their proclaimed web vision, the shareholder is speculating Microsoft won't be flown into a blind-sided engagement where the other giants like IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe and others suddenly reveal they have permission to sell the technology Microsoft is fighting against.

If you like speculating blind, keep reading only Microsoft material. They're certainly not going to tell you what's going on. It's why Microsoft has been running in stealth mode for over a year now.
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FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2007

Vertical Computer Systems, Inc. Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Microsoft Corporation

Fort Worth, TX, April 20, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE)? Vertical Computer Systems, Inc. (OTCBB: VCSY)(www.vcsy.com) announced today that on April 18, 2007, Vertical Computer Systems, Inc. filed suit for patent infringement against Microsoft Corp. in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. VCSY claims that the Microsoft .Net System infringes U.S. Patent No. 6,826,744.

And if you're speculating Microsoft will be able to ship technology that will be able to lift Vista out of the tarpit you find the Windows OS struggling with.

Vista SP1 doesn't solve the problems. And that means Microsoft failed to populate Vista with the XML magic they claimed all along up to the end of 2004. What XML technology was taken from Microsoft at that time? VCSY was granted patent 6826744 and Lucovsky left to go to Google.

So now the shareholder has to speculate that Microsoft won't continue trying to fight the VCSY Siteflash patent and will settle. If the shareholder is wrong and Microsoft decides to fight the patent battle all the way to court, it's going to be 18 more months of this kind of sideways shareprice movement and worse. Worse because there's no speculation that Microsoft's larger competitors DO have technology that slaps Microsoft around.

I say the Microsoft speculators are wrong and they have no information to substantiate their speculations.

"Worse because there's no speculation that Microsoft's larger competitors DO have technology that slaps Microsoft around." - i-man
Ya, but did the competitors pay VCSY money for the tecnology? Or did they come up with something else? If they could come up with something else that does not infringe why is not possible for MS. Or is that others can infringe and VCYS being a patent troll does not care about them they are only going after MS because of ego and money? Someone has to pays for the VCSY CEO jet. Like Eolas making users suffer for a years until they settle with MS. You all owe me money for breathing.

"Microsoft Loses Bid To Overturn $142 Million Patent Judgment"

The court said there was no reason to overturn the jury's finding that 'Microsoft's Windows XP and Office products breached patents' held by Michigan-based z4 Technologies.

LOL chips, :)

Your post reminds me of the T-Shirt, "The box said 'Requires Windows 2000 or better.' So, I installed Linux."

My day job, Systems Engineer, and my night job, Adjunct CS Professor, require that I be fluent in both Windows and *nix. To that end, I have a small networking lab in my basement. It's made up of older, recycled computers and firewalled on a separate subnet from the rest of my home net. Currently, I have two Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (6 month free trial) boxes configured as parent and child domain controllers and an Ubuntu 7.10 server. Two other boxes typically serve as Windows and Linux desktops or whatever other systems I need to understand. A fifth box typically runs Wireshark under Knoppix.

If a Vista Business COA happened to "fall off a truck" in front of my house, I'd put it on my lab net to observe how it (mis)behaved. I'd be willing to pay a few bucks to do that geek experiment, but certainly not the full cost for a Business license.

"Circuit City Offers Laptop, Printer, And Router Bundle For Under $300"

"The Circuit City deal includes an all-in-one printer, a wireless Wi-Fi router, and Norton Internet security software. The Compaq Presario laptop has an 80-Gbyte hard drive and featuresMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Windows Vista operating system."

Quote:
n0neXn0ne :

"Circuit City Offers Laptop, Printer, And Router Bundle For Under $300"
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And it could be about $50 less than that for $250 by installing Linux and not Vi$ta Ba$ic.

Its nice to see MS Vista get the reconigition it deserves:

Vista makes the top ten worst products in history list by CNet.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49293700-10,00.htm

Quotes from the link: "Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor's reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

Windows Vista conforms to all of the above. Its incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list."
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I repeat, TRAIN WRECK.

Microsoft "learning" from WGA failures, but the lesson should be: kill it

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071126-microsoft-learning-from-wga-failures-but-the-lesson-should-be-kill-it.html

Quote from the link: "The introduction of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) anti-piracy program was met with emotions ranging from indifference to outright anger by legitimate Windows users. Certainly those who were falsely accused of pirating Windows had something to be upset about, as did the people who suffered from the service being unavailable earlier this year. Even those that have not been caught in the WGA snare are uncomfortable with it: the idea of a low-level system process watching your system for signs of piracy so it can reduce the functionality of your system is just a little Orwellian."