Be first in the last mile

Ah, the early days of the commercial Internet. Broadband was a pipedream, dial-up ruled the roost. “Lighter pages!” was the clarion call from VPs of engineering departments. Anyone remember @Home? (Later becoming Excite@Home – a most unfortunate combination of corporate brands.) They were the first to seriously tackle the broadband problem (sorry, ISDN doesn’t count) and like many firsts ended up in the dust bin of history. Don’t let that happen to your online retail business, I’ll explain in just a moment by way of an example.

10 years later broadband is plentiful and all our problems have been solved – or have they? Over the last few weeks if you were shopping for that cashmere sweater (yes it’s summer and that’s why it’s getting colder in San Francisco) at several online retailers  chances are that you never got very far online. The performance problems at some sites would have made you forget $4.50 gasoline prices, grab your car keys and head down to the local mall.

There are of course multiple culprits. If you’re a business manager or marketer reading this and decide to go down the hall with your flashlight to ask your techies (they don’t like lights, very green of them), they might say something like “it’s the Internet stupid”. But I say, don’t buy it. Sure there are network slowdowns but week after week? And only for your Web site?

Some pretty smart people at Google have looked into the last mile performance problem. And they will tell you that as much as 98% (those guys like precision) of the wait time could be caused not by the back-end but . . . wait for it. . . the front-end. Yup, the browser.

So 10 years later does the clarion call still remain “lighter pages!”? It might or it might just be smarter scripting techniques. But rather then guessing, figure out if you have a problem by looking into your last mile performance.

If you don’t know how you compare against the industry, just spend a few minutes in search land and your questions will be answered (psst, it’s no secret that Keynote publishes benchmarks for free and also has a nifty service to determine last mile performance).

Now that example I promised.  Remember that other pioneering company, Friendster?  What happened to them?   When asked that question by The New York Time (free registration required) John Doerr's response was pretty sobering:

“Everything boiled down to our inability to improve performance.”