Monday, June 02, 2008

It weren't me sir, it was him, honest ...

Mike Arrington has launched another tirade against Blaine Cook. If you don't know who Blaine is, he was the former lead architect for Twitter, a messaging service, which according to the article suffered terrible reliability problems whenever Blaine wasn't there.

Whilst the tone of the article is hell bent on making Blaine responsible for his own absence and everything else to boot, it does stop short of adding the death of dinosaurs, global warming and 'Don't pay the Ferryman' by Chris de Burgh.

I have almost a decade of trouble shooting experience from which I have learnt that it is rare for a situation to be just one guy's fault. The most common causes of failure with any new service tend to be either politics or a lack of resources, vision, commitment, investment, hardware, planning, useability, viability, management skill and luck. However, the most common reason given for failure is the guy who isn't there.

By the way blogger seems to be having some issues today. I'd just like to note that Blaine isn't there either.