Eliot Lear's Ramblings

iPhone Rollout Redux?

iPhone

Well, July 11th, iPhone Day, came and went. The Believers waited and most got their phones, but even I could not have predicted the farsical mess that then ensued. Apple was unable to handle the registration of some 1 million phones in the period of a weekend, while their provisioning infrastructure ground to a halt. This is the added kick in the pants Believers must really enjoy.

While we wait for news to leak out of Apple as to what actually happened, let me speculate just a bit. Let us assume the following statements are true:

Apple did in fact test their provisioning capability prior to rollout.
That of the three days the million phones were sold, most were sold and activated in the first twenty-four hours. In particular, let’s assume a 70%/20%/10% distribution. I don’t actually know the real one, but we have reason to believe that the load was top heavy on Friday, as problems dissipated later in the weekend.
There were a average of two transactions per registration. That is- one to provision the phone with services, one to create MobileMe or whatever additional functionality that Apple offers. Normally we’d include a third for creation of an iTunes account, but since we’re talking about Believers they already have their account.

700,000 sales times 2 transactions over 24 hours would be about 16 transactions per second. That’s really not that many transactions, considering that benchmarking systems measure that number in the hundreds and thousands. This makes one wonder: what if we introduced latency into a transaction. Latency can occur for many reasons, but the biggest one would be some sort of wide area communication. For instance, an 80 millisecond round trip time would mean that one might not be able to process any more than about 12.5 transactions per second. Now add a second round trip and you cut the transaction rate in half.

As to Apple’s testing, if they tested their provisioning system either on a local area network or on a network that had lower latency than the time needed to complete the day’s transactions, they wouldn’t have caught the problem. This is actually a classic concern that most database vendors fully understand, and it is often the reason to use stored procedures.

Anyway, that’s my guess.

Exclusionary Rule In Trouble

The police are supposed to be our protectors, but in the control of a despot, they are oppressors. The Supreme Court formally recognized early in the 20th Century that the police could not be allowed to get away with crimes in order to find and convict the guilty. Thus was born the Exclusionary Rule. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials have, on the one hand, complained about the rule, and on the other hand, managed to provide generally strong protection against criminals without having to violate it. According to this article by the New York Times, the United States is unique in its adherence to the rule. The article goes on to say that we may not adhere in the same way for long.

While it might sound reasonable to allow a judge to hold a hearing to determine whether or not tainted evidence should be allowed, we should remember that the rule is there to protect us against wanton police abuse and corruption, that the government has a vast amount of coercive power, and that it incredibly hard to identify abuse, absent the rule. A police officer already has enormous abilities to cite, arrest, and search individuals, pragmatically speaking without cause. Now the Court will consider weakening protections against those cases where the situation is blatant.

Keeping in mind that no rule is perfect, and that some criminals have been able to use the exclusionary rule to get their cases dismissed, the Court should tread carefully in an area where despotism looms, especially when we can argue that the rule has done its job well.

Let’s Outlaw Religion before outlawing homosexual marriages

vote button

One of the odd “advantages” of being married and gay in San Francisco must be that couples get to have weddings every couple of years. At first San Francisco passed a domestic partner law back in the 1990s and then they started issue marriage licenses under Mayor Gavin Newsom. At some point those were invalidated and now couples can once again get married. But wait, California has an initiative on the ballet to overturn the legality of those marriages. Presumably this debate will seesaw from one side to the other, and each time it becomes legal to do so, a gay couple can marry. The county clerk’s office makes out like a bandit until everyone gets tired of the game in the process.

Here’s the problem: each time a law is passed that forbids gay marriage, someone’s rights are taken away, in this case the right to be recognized as married, to have spousal rights, and to take advantage of other perqs only offered to married couples.

If the government is going to discriminate in such a way, we should ask either who it helps or who it hurts if they don’t. One could easily see why the government might need to restrict movements of someone with an infectious illness. One could agree with the argument for not giving driving licenses to the blind. But here, who is hurt if a marriage license is given to a gay couple? Nobody. Absolutely nobody.

It might make a person feel good to take someone else’s rights away, until that person has his or her rights taken away. Suppose we forbid the practice of religion? I could argue that there are immense social benefits to doing so. In fact I might continue that line of thought in the future. But keeping in mind the Spanish Inquisition, the recent abuse children in the Catholic church, and everything that went on in between (including standing by while many died in WWII), we could make a strong argument that religion is harmful, because we’ve seen evidence of it being harmful. We cannot say the same with gay marriages.

So let’s outlaw religion first, at least for a while, and see if the abuses curb. If not, then let’s agree to keep government out of the church. But let’s also agree to keep government out of the bedroom.

Final Thoughts on Airline Upgrades

As we discussed, customer loyalty is worth something to airlines. They spend billions of dollars worth of free services each year in order to maintain that loyalty, and their strategic alliances are intertwined with that customer loyalty.

And so let’s look at the customer. Be the customer a frequent business traveler or a casual tourist, one problem that could exist is that he or she may not be able to afford an upgrade if it is somehow connected to actual dollars. And while in my previous post I suggested that the cost would be in miles, there would be a conversion from dollars to miles. And so some segment of the customer based could end up unable to participate in the auction because of wealth disparaties. Such a customer might then be inclined to pick another airline that has a different upgrade allocation mechanism such as what we mostly have today.

That’s the risk. Is it worth it?

More On Airline Upgrade Auctions

When last we left our hero (me) we were talking about airline upgrade auctions, noting that Priceline already does this for seats.

Some of the problems that airlines would face with auctions would be these:

Upgrades are a huge perq for elite frequent flyers, where they either make or strongly influence their airline selection. Business travelers in particular make up the vast amount of revenue.
Inviting frequent flyers to use their miles as value to get these seats could imply that their miles in fact have value, and the IRS and SEC might like to know that. For years airlines have fended off attempts to view miles as any form of liability that would need to be written down. While I am sure that in recent times with the current set of passenger-hostile rules, this notion has at least been temporarily dispelled, one could easily envision governments taking a second look if they believed there was a logical monetization.

There are several approaches that may yet be available to airlines:

Run several auctions for the same seat, so that those in the same class are allowed to buy the seat first. This would be very close to how things are run today.
Provide elite members a discount on the final price. For instance, if you are a silver member, maybe you would get a 20% discount, but if you are a gold, perhaps that discount rises as high as 50%.
Reserve some seats for the Old Fashion methods of buying them in advance and using miles.

We may already be past the point where we could ever expect the auctions to be run in real money, simply because so many people have so many miles banked.

Potential Revenue of Business Class Upgrades

What this graph shows is normal business class revenue in red, and the potential for additional revenue in green. Note that the horizontal green line just indicates a random equilibrium. In reality that price would jump up and down based on the popularity of the flight, its length, and just how important it was to someone to get upgraded.

Again, this would need to be done in such a way as to preserve customer loyalty.