1% Can Be A Large Number

Jared Spool

By Jared Spool

January 10th, 2006

Internet Retailer reports:

“Over the holidays, Amazon processed at least 108 million orders and shipped on time 99% of the time, the company says. “

1% of 108,000,000 is 1,080,000. That means more than a million people didn’t get an order on time.

In the world of the internet, it’s not unusual for numbers to be in the millions: users, orders, pages, products…

Even when 99% of whatever is perfect, that 1% imperfection is still a pretty big number. Almost perfect isn’t perfect.

It’s just something to remember when we’re making all those compromises in our designs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Amusing, Management . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “1% Can Be A Large Number”

  1. Ara Pehlivanian Says:
    January 10th, 2006 at 4:27 pm

    Which makes the Bank of America commercial, where the guy says (paraphrased) “we handle a billion cheques a day; we take one cheque and process it perfectly then repreat that a billion times,” even more poignant.

  2. Moe Rubenzahl Says:
    January 11th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    I often fight the word “most.” As in “most” have screens wider than 800×600. But 12% don’t. I find it astonishing that our product managers think that it’s OK to alienate 12% of our market.

  3. Ben Byrd Says:
    January 11th, 2006 at 6:57 pm

    I’ve been trying to emphasize this with the people who always want do really fancy things with their site that older browsers would have a problem with. If Amazon lost 1% of their customers because of the netscape 4.0 or ie 5.0 user they would have lost a little bit of money.

  4. Ara Pehlivanian Says:
    January 12th, 2006 at 9:20 am

    Ben: Which is why unobtrusive JavaScript and graceful degradability are such important issues. But hey, that’s just the geek in me speaking. :-)

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