In the startup world, server spikes and downtime are a fact of life. We’ve seen countless startups fall prey to the huge rushes of traffic they receive at launch, and while it can be frustrating at times (see past comments), it’s not generally viewed as a sign of failure or incompetence.
But when you’re one of the largest tech corporations in the world, launching a much-hyped service, you’d think you might be prepared for something out of the ordinary.
Today Microsoft released Photosynth, a site that stitches plain photographs together to create a pseudo-3D world. Microsoft first presented the product back in 2006, and has since demoed it a number of times. The two year wait for Photosynth ended today as Microsoft finally opened the doors to the public.
And the millions of users who clamored to try it out promptly brought the server to its knees.
Okay, so Microsoft’s servers failed. It’s not something that should be happening to a massive tech company, but it isn’t the first time and it certainly won’t be the last. But instead of issuing a standard explanation apologizing for the outage, Microsoft wrote a blog post that sounded downright happy. Here’s an excerpt:
With everyone waking up around the world traffic has been on a steady ramp up since that release and has far exceeded even our most optimistic expectations.
Getting ready for the launch we did massive amounts of performance testing, built capacity model after capacity model, and yet with all of that, you threw so much traffic our way that we need to add more capacity. We are adding that extra horsepower right now and should be back up shortly.
Thank you for the incredible reception!
We see similar optimistic responses to server failure all the time from startups. Except they’re startups. Imagine if Apple had responded to the iPhone’s server registration outage by proclaiming that it was overjoyed by the overwhelming response. It’s understandable that Microsoft is happy to have made a product people like, but let’s save the celebrations until the program actually works.
That’s right. Microsoft suck if the fail, suck if the succeed, suck if they launch something new, suck if the launch something old, suck, suck, suck… Give it a break, will you?
Not trying to defend their incompetence, but beating Microsoft is getting old.
I agree. This story is a big meh. Let bloggers for MS say whatever they want. Its a blog, let them be candid.
Also remember, this is a “free” service from microsoft. Its not like it is a PAID service from Apple.
I agree, Mike, come back down to the ground mate.
James
Microsoft? I never heard about it anymore. Microsoft is not a major player in the internet anymore
You must be kidding
Tried it and Ive got nothing but errors, I even wrothe this up on my blog, but decided to suspend it till i have more success.
http://tech4000.blogspot.com
PhotoSynth is truly amazing for a 3D experience.Complete info here:
http://vishtech...experience.html
That’s why they wanted Yahoo. At least Yahoo knows how to run server farms.
First Apple fails with MobileMe and now Microsoft fails with Photosynth. It does seem like there are only a handful of companies (Google, Yahoo, and Amazon) that can really scale their services to any significant level.
this is far more complicated than “running a server farm” … microsoft can easily do that… why don’t people understand that this is some pretty complicated computation. What yahoo does is nothing compared to this… looking up stuff from huge hash table stored on disk is nothing.
Yeah…ok. A search engine is nothing more than a hash table on disk. Did you just learn about hash table in school, and are using the term everywhere you can?
please refrain from ridiculing people over small points. In essence my point was that the complexity of reconstructing a 3d scene from a huge set of photographs is more complicated than storing an index. Yes i realize that creating a large scale search engine has many engineering complexities, but from a computational perspective it is really not much more complicated … why don’t you read the paper on the google file system, BigTable and MapReduce. All of these are simple concepts.
I seem to remember outages by Amazon and Google earlier this month too…
Selective memory is a great thing, isn’t it, when ou want to bash someone….
sorry dude… did you know Gmail was freaking down for few hours… atleast Hotmail did not have any such Email service down issues…
go and get life (or beer)
There’s a world of difference between underestimating the interest in a research project, and screwing up the launch of a $399 device for hundreds of thousands of users – the same number who came out for the previous product a year ago.
And that’s before we even talk about the lost / inaccessible email comedy of the MobileMe launch where you already know exactly how many users you have!
To be fair, the difference in your Apple example is that their registration problem prohibited people from using their cell phones. That’s serious.
With the Photosynth service we’re talking about a novelty. With their outage no one missed business calls, no one was prohibited from sending or receiving important text messages.
I kind of like Microsoft’s response. It’s optimistic, and that’s appropriate. Why manufacture uncertainty around a new product launch unless it’s completely necessary (as some would argue was the case in the Apple launch).
Looks like Microsoft took more of a startup approach on this project. Shouldn’t we be focusing on an idea from MS that has impressed many people.
Same as Andrew,
Photosynth is a free experimental service. Why would you compare it to and Apple expensive service (and by the way MobileME was a total failure and people paid for it).
And it’s not like a business will rely on photosynth, is it?
I am glad to see Microsoft acting like a startup again.
I think I see what is happening here. Using simple cryptography from the British Enigma machine, I was able to cross out letters from “PHOTOSYNTH” and “MONTY PYTHON” leaving only “SHMYN” or reorganized as “MS YH N”. Clearly a message meaning the MSFT-Yahoo merger will never happen. Case closed.
Jason, you really sound pissed… you didn’t get the chance to test it?
Anyone can see that the features photosynth provides brings an unusual load for its servers…
well microsoft has a lot of ideas that been gaining them a lot of money…
thanks for letting me comment here.
AAPL’s response is basically “We’re Apple, we’re cool. Pay up, deal with it.” That’s better? Please, how else to explain the author’s viewpoint other than a rabid MSFT bias?
Jason,
I think you should understand that Photosynth isn’t just another bs social networking aggregator/web service. Unlike twitter or apples MobileMe there is some extremely *heavy* lifting going on in the backend. It takes an immense amount of processing power to do what they are doing. Reconstructing 3d scenes from photographs is not on the same level as a productivity web app.
I for one give Microsoft a huge round of applause for creating an app that is REALLY REALLY cool … it’s projects like these that show that microsoft truly is at least *trying* to do new innovative things.
Startups go down, but thats comparing apples and oranges… most of the startups I have seen basically do nothing other than simple database stuff on the backend… certainly not any major computation.
Even for a huge company like microsoft its an amazing technical feat to scale this to millions of people without any hurdles.
Jason, let me get this right – are you high?
How in the world can you compare Photosynth’s service (free) with iPhone’s (leg & arm) ….. get a sense of journalism for God’s sake! Just when I though you were getting better than Arrogant, you mess it up.
Peace,
P2
i am losing interest in techcrunch with all these biased posts….doesn’t anybody review them before publishing…..
I’m more curious as to how much of the Microsoft hosting side has been shifted to conform to their prefab datacenter expansion strategy (tactic?) that’s being called the “container-based” approach.
i.e.
http://www.yout...h?v=Rnvya5ZgEvc
Photosynth is very cool.
I also see nothing wrong with their server not being able to handle the load. People aren’t paying to use it and it’s not a critical application.
To compare it to Apple’s MobileMe failure is just an unfair comparison. MobileMe and iPhone activation issues are more like if Microsoft’s activation process failed and prevented people from using Windows or Office (which I think has happened once or twice). Photosynth failing is more like if Google App Engine failed (which it did many times)
The Photosynth team should be very proud of the application they built. Microsoft Live Labs is akin to Google Labs. The stuff in there is not guaranteed to work all the time.
Give Microsoft credit when credit is due and don’t judge them just because they are Microsoft.
Jason, we have enough negatively biased bullshit from the media. Please spare us worthless posts about how Microsoft should just sit there and fire up more load balanced servers without commenting on how popular the service was.
Would you prefer Google’s approach, after the repeated Fails of Gmail and Google Apps- they keep mum and deny its happening which is REALLY frustrating, and arrogant.
“Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.”
and what about ubuntu?
Ubuntu? Ha ha.
Microsoft is hardly going to waste time trying to support an operating system that is used by about 0.00001% of the world’s computing population.
It would be a colossus waste of time. Can you imagine any Linux fan boy embracing any kind of Microsoft technology? No matter how innovative or groundbreaking that technology might be their judgment will always be clouded by their hatred of all things Microsoft.
First of all, Linux users now comprise nearly 2% of desktop users. Waste of time? Only if you consider 20+ million people insignificant (that’s roughly the population of Australia).
It’s understandable that Microsoft isn’t building a Linux version, but it has nothing to do with how many non-Windows users there are. (If they really cared, they would start paying attention to the TWENTY PERCENT of Internet users that browse the web with Firefox.)
We complain all the time that huge corporations behave like huge corporations and not the scrappy upstarts they once were. I see your point Jason, but when Microsoft (or Google or Yahoo!) channels some of that startup spirit, even though it may feel weird, shouldn’t we like it?
Wow, Photosynth is here. I remember Microsoft’s demo of Photosynth at IIT Techfest earlier this year. They made a new 3D image at IIT Itself to show us. It was kewl…
I am sure, its worth the wait!
I guess its yet another biased post here on TC. I loved the product and see nothing wrong in the company’s response to the surge in traffic and them being optimistic about it .. Certainly not the same thing as Apple mess with the iPhone registrations ..
Photosynth has actually been featured on one of the CSI’s(Don’t remember which)
There was a murder during Prom, and one thing led to another and they had the cameraphone of every single visitor.
They refered to photosynth and I noticed something that somehow resembled Microsoft, so I was like orly…?
I googled it and got to the photosynth beta sample page.
So yeah, blast from the (not so) past
This episode was probably around April/May this year
I say Kudos to MS, with the amount of processing their servers are doing, the huge surge of traffic and the output of media and to have the system back up and running in just a few hours is pretty impressive in my opinion.
It’s been several weeks now and the Iphone and MobileMe (both paid services and important to the daily work of many) are still not working correctly, where as Photosynth, a “Labs” project with probably more visitors today than Mobileme in a week is back up and running.
Poor comparision once again by TechCrunch.
All I care about is if their Fail Whale page is better than Twitters! Hehehe. Or is it just synonymous with “Microsoft”
I do not like MS technology one bit. I have never owned a PC with Windows and never let one in my house and never worked on Windows in my entire career. The only time I was forced to I quit my job – and it was a really good job too. But … I think that their honesty and candor is refreshing for a company their size. I applaud their blog post and optimism.
To mac users, it says”
“Unfortunately, [b]we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet[/b]. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.”
…now thats what you call optimism!
hahaha i just saw that. pure and total sarcasm on their parts. maybe a little bit of jealousy??
Jason: you are looking at this incorrectly. Often these sorts of projects within giant tech companies will maintain a nuclear startup style environment and feel. And they posted on their own blog, not on microsoft.com or anything.
> let’s save the celebrations until the program actually works.
Why not save Techcrunch posts for something that isn’t totally idiotic?
Apple usual response to problems, at least at first, is nothing at all. Same with google. I’m happy they are feeling chatty and it is good to see a often moribund company really excited. As pointed out the iPhone comparison is woefully misguided since people are buying a critical communications device not just fiddling around with something wicked cool. How someone that is supposed to understand tech can’t see the difference is almost beyond comprehension. Or maybe the tone of this whole post was just a petty overreach huh?
Are you aware of how much traffic Microsoft’s servers handled in their serving of Olympic content via Silverlight? Oh right – you didn’t report on that because it would be hard to find an angle critical towards Microsoft on that story.
I think they can do a terrific job at scaling and this article is nothing but a petty attack.
I think it’s funny that they didn’t expect it to be that popular. Search Google for “demo of the year” and you’ll find that I called this demo of the year in 2006. I knew that it would be wildly popular.
They should have done an invite-only rollout like Gmail did. This is precisely why Gmail rolled out with invites so that they could control how many people got access each day. Microsoft screwed up here by not doing that.
Who are you?
Your joking right?
Finally got a chance to try it.
Seems cool, but the album has to be synthable!! Another installer, don’t like it. I wonder why MS didn’t use Silverlight.
I checked Tajmahal Album, which the site says is 100% synthable. Interesting. But there seemed to be traces of un-refreshed pixels. Looked like dirt around the snaps. MS send some one to broom the dirt.
@ChiragPinjar – those aren’t actually unrefreshed pixels – they are the “point cloud” representing the 3-d points that photosynth has reconstructed from the photographs. You can cycle through the three views: “photos+pointcloud”, “pointcloud-only”, and “photos-only” by pressing the ‘P’ button.
jason you’re a piece of shit! you iditic buffoon. this isnt a paid service, it’s a free service. and it came from microsoft research. you know what that means, it was an experimental program they’re starting. it’s unlike apple’s mobileme, a paid service that people subscribed to and sucked.
get your act together. before i kick your stupid nose.
Jason are you drunk ? WTF are you sayin’ ? Come on man relax !
i tried phtosynth yesterday, and i was amazed, there is really technology behind this, and its impressive.
this story is classic ‘microsoft sucks no matter how cool and great products they have released’
apple is cool, even if they took our money but screwed up on service.
people like to be owned by apple, keep it up then fanboys.
Jason,
Seems that you people at TC are bent over to drive everyone to greener pasture, i.e. less biased ones. I don’t care how big or small a company is, the important thing here is they brought amazing technology for everyone to use for FREE. When was the last time Apple did something like that or even Google (search is free, but clearly you noticed that it being free is Goggle businees model).
Let them enjoy the fact that their wildest models failed, I’m sure you’d love to have your servers up in smoke just because you created something interesting, oh wait you don’t create, you criticize, soory.
Sorry, no big fan of any corporation, but when someone deserves a thumbs up, give it to them.
I don’t think you can’t compare Photosynth to Apple’s activation stuff. Photosynth is free and it’s a product of Live Labs, after they release a real product (when it leaves Live Labs) they probably have their act together.
Did you think a second about the massive computing power that is required to calculate and render all those synths? I’m amazed they allow *everybody* to make use of their service.
Maybe MS purposely used less servers or a proper connection to generate more hype.
Tried the demo. It was okay, but did it isn’t something to “wow” about.
I really dont understand why bloggers criticize whatever MSFT does. This is a great technology, I love it and it is FREE.
If this had come from google , You guys call it a BIG WOW!!!
Jason chill! It is a small division of MS which launched the project and it isn’t odd in them underestimating the load. it is the PR dept. at MS that deservers some credit. the news is in every blog/site i read, even newspaper in India covered it.
I try to surf the site, but still get blank web page. ms should provide a static page for explainning.
I guess its okay to show the happiness when the user accept your product , specially when you see that high load on your traffic monitor
Doesnt matter if its a startup or msft.
Are there only microsoft fanboys around here ?
When one is about to release a extremely expected thing like photosynth, anybody on the web would tell you that you have to do it on an inviation basis only. You don’t just open the door and wait for the crowd to destroy your toy. That is a very basic technics that does not cost you anything. Just a bit of organisation. Remenmber Gmail ? Joost ?
What Jason is reproaching to microsoft is to not know about the basics of internet launching of new concept : ramping up !
Video on the web is not a new concept, so no need to report about it.
The key issue in that story is that microsoft is not really used to releasing “new concept” !
ANd BTW, I had been waiting for photosynh since I’ve seen the demo 2 years ago. This is the sort of service you’d better propose as desktop based application (it indeed use lots of computation power that is available in your desktop). Willing to provide everything online show limitations of this model. The computation should be done on user desktop, and only the results should be shared online…
You obviously didn’t even check out the product. Also, the fact that you reference Joost as a model of deployment is quite funny. Hulu was already king by the time Joost got to market. Joost is bound for the deadpool.
It’s clear you didn’t install nor test the product.
There is a lot of local computation going on and the requirements on the desktop side are also modern. DirectX7 video graphics card e.g. is essential.
[open]
But you are correct, Microsoft never really released a new concept, except for a talking paperclip.
[close sarcastic mood]
Microsoft doesn’t have fanboys… it has croines!
I’m not exactly surprised to read another blog post practically flaming ‘them there corporate bigwigs’ at Microsoft – something I think we’ve *all* done at some point in our lives. There are several points that jump out at me from having read the post and the ensuing torrent of comments:
- This is an experimental, beta, free service from Microsoft. They’ve put themselves on the line and said “we’ve been developing something cool, look, and you can all use it for nothing”.
- I’m not going to nit-pick at any one other company’s recent problems, but as many commenters have pointed out, nobody lost out with this outage, and it’s not like it’s a product any of us have paid for.
- Microsoft bloggers have done an amazing job at making the company and it’s various platforms more friendly and open to the public. The corporation has a human face, and that’s much more than can be said about certain ‘keep everything to ourselves’ style companies.
Yes, it’s always a dissapointment when there’s server downtime. Every now and then my IMAP email server goes down, or I can’t get onto twitter. Don’t even get me started about sending text messages on New Year’s Eve. But it’s get some perspective here…
It’s pretty clear from some of the really exciting, FREE and up-coming online services that have come to light recently that Microsoft are listening, and learning. It’s far easier for a small company to change direction, but for the biggest company in the world? Credit where credit’s due.
It’s all too easy to have a rant when you’re trying to fight golliath. I guess I just feel it’d be a *far* better use of my time to read a balanced revlew of a product than a tabloid-style rant!
Salik Syed identified the real issue at hand. Photosynth isn’t some dinky website running LAMP. This is real software running a real application and it may take some time to tweak in the wild. That being said, the downtime is a little embarrassing, but nothing major. MSFT has the resources to recover quickly. I congratulate their team and one can sense their excitement and passion about the product. I personally don’t think I have a use for the app, but hey, kudos to MSFT for investing the time and money to make something cool. TC needs to start focusing on the good. It’s easy to point fingers and your negative attitude is straining.
If you read this article, then the comments, you get a real sense of just how far from the real world sites like Techcrunch have drifted.
The mission is “it’s Microsoft, find a way to make it look bad”. It’s so obvious it’s painful.
Photosynth is an incredible technology that’s free. Techcrunch need to get a grip and think about writing articles that are actually of use to their readers rather than trying to score points in their “we hate Microsoft” mission
Swing! Whiff!
It gets worse…
“Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.”
Big disappointment all round.