Am I the only one who wonders why Apple has to take their store offline every time the release a new product?
It doesn’t seem beyond Apple’s ability to “flip a switch” to make things instantly live.
For a company as secretive about product announcements, you could say they do it to ensure a higher level of secrecy, but I have to imagine they do it for the marketing buzz.
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i can understand the marketing buzz, but i would also argue that taking the store off line “buzzes” in a bad way. People get ticked off that they can’t, for instance, buy a laptop just because a new version of the iPhone is coming out. I agree that Apple should be able have things go live right away.
I wonder what the “update” workflow would look like if they wanted to just flip a switch, seeing as they still use WebObjects and most content needs to be seeded to Akamai in advance.
Could they even accomplish it, or does their use of those technologies prevent it?
Kyle,
I’m not familiar with WebObjects enough to guess how they might work, but just thinking off the cuff I’d say you could;
(1) Stage content at a “nonreferenced” URL out to Akamai - i.e. push it out to the CDN but don’t have it linked into the site.
That solves the biggest problem of caching, etc… right?
For WebObjects, again I’m not sure but it seems like a simple bit of code could show / hide released products.
e.g.
GET * from products where published == 1
Then the store can dynamically show / hide content. Or for that matter you don’t even need a new flag…. I’m sure the store shows out of stock items i.e. inventory == 0, but if inventory == -1 then just don’t show the entry at all…
Molly, people might be annoyed, but Apple users are loyal … they can (and will) wait to buy whatever it is.
There’s no such thing as *bad* buzz. Buzz is buzz is buzz. It’s all good.
And Jay, I’m with you. They do it for the buzz, and it works.
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