Yahoo Live's Scaling Problems Prove: Release Early and Often - Just Don't Screw Up

Tech Crunch chomped down on some initial scaling problems with Yahoo's new live video streaming service Yahoo Live. After a bit of chewing on Yahoo's old bones, TC spat out: If Yahoo cant scale something like this (no matter how much they claim it’s an experiment, it’s still a live service), it shows how far the once brightest star of the online world has fallen.

This kind of thinking kills innovation. When there's no room for a few hiccups or a little failure you have to cover your ass so completely nothing new will ever see the light of day.

I thought we were supposed to be agile. We are supposed to release early and often.  Not every 'i' has to be dotted and not every last router has to be installed before we take the first step of a grand new journey.

Get it out there. Let users help you make it better. Listen to customers, make changes, push the new code out,  listen some more, and fix problems as they come up.  Following this process we'll make something the customer wants and needs without  a year spent in a dark room with a cabal of experts trying to perfectly predict an unknowable future.  Isn't this what we are supposed to do?

Then give people some space to work things out before you declare their world ended and that they are an embarrassment to their kind.