[time-nuts] Sparkfun

[David Martindale]

It's always possible to underestimate the demand for something.  And "free"
seems to be a powerful motivator to people.

A while ago, someone who used to be one of the Unix sysadmins at a local
university (UBC) left to work at the group within Google that runs their
computer systems.  A while later, he was back in town and gave a talk to the
local Linux user's group.  One story he told:

There once was a neat application called "keyhole" that showed the Earth
with images (satellite photos, air photos, whatever) mapped onto it.  It
allowed you to zoom from a whole-planet view down to a very local view,
however much made sense with the quality of the data available.  The actual
data was on Keyhole's servers, and you paid a yearly subscription for access
to it (I think it was tens of dollars, not that much).  They had a certain
number of subscribers as a paid service.

Google decided to buy the company, rename the service "Google Earth", and
make the most basic level of access free.  People at Google knew that more
people would use the service when it was free than were willing to pay for
it as Keyhole, and several Google people tried to estimate the appropriate
multiplier - how much higher the load on the servers would be for the new
free Google Earth.  They made sure they had the server capacity to handle
that predicted load, then made Google Earth "beta" available for download.
Lots of people started using it, and within a very short time the Goggle
Earth server traffic was *ten times larger than the largest estimate* of
what the load would be.

Google removed Google Earth from their download page for a while, to slow
growth in usage, but they didn't block access to people who had already
downloaded it (though the servers were sometimes slow).  Eventually, they
added enough capacity to support the load, and made it freely available
again.  But they got badly surprised by how fast the demand grew - even
though Google already had more server capacity and network bandwidth than
most organizations due to their search engine.

     Dave