one big one: scalability.
Scalability is defined as ôThe potential for a business or an aspect of a business to continue to function effectively as its size increases.ö (Money Words: Scalability). This is saying a lot for a company like Amazon.com, where ôhugeö does not even begin to describe the scale of its systems, its customer base, or its product lines. Amazon.com has six global websites (Kohavi and Round, 2004). Because Amazon is constantly adding new technology to provide refinements to its web site experience, its oft-modified systems do occasionally hit a glitch. Jeff Bezos laughingly tells the story of the very first glitch, which occurred in 1995 when Amazon.com was still being run from his garage. He had hired an excellent computer guru who tested the web site and discovered that a customer could order a negative quantity of books; not only that, when the customer placed that negative order, his credit card was credited for the amount of the sale! (Amazon.col: Differentiating with Technology, 2002).
More recently, Amazon suffered a much more serious problem when a bug in one of its web pages ôexposed numerous email addresses of the siteÆs Affiliate membersö (Olsen, 2000). It was found that if an email address was entered, and the user kept refreshing, it would bring up another address. ôThe big problem here is someone could write a quick program in under 10 minutes to automatically keep refreshing the page and grabbing the email addresses," he said. ôI could leave (the program) running all day and easily scoop up hundreds or thousands of addresses if I wanted to" (Olsen, 2000). Although no customer or account information leaked out, this glitch was still a serious problem because it demonstrated the potential for a more critical leak. Just before Christmas 2004, Amazon.com experienced another glitch where many of their customers failed to get messages verifying that their purchases had been com...