How About 100% Uptime for Us Regular Idiots?

I reviewed these two news items today, which have a common theme:

Global Crossing's Unparalleled IP Network Performance Enables New Guarantees on Converged IP Services

Excerpt: Global Crossing's upgraded SLAs offer customers industry-leading guarantees for its converged IP services provisioned over the premium Class of Service (CoS), including: End-to-end availability of 99.999 percent, compared to the previous guarantee 99.9 percent.

Japan's NTT Communications Selects Micromuse's Netcool Solutions for Business Service Management Backbone

Excerpt: Netcool Solutions Help Support Global Carrier's Guarantee of 100% Uptime of New Hosting Services

I've often thought that there must be a huge market in the small business and consumer markets for computing systems and connectivity that actually work. I would be willing to pay good money if someone could sell me 100% reliability for my home office network and computers. Heck, I'd even settle for 99.999%!

AB -- 11/29/04

Pay-Per-Click Fraud Increasingly Visible

I've been concerned for a long time about the problem of click fraud in the pay-per-click search engine advertising game.

I've been advertising on a PPC basis in search engines for a few years now and have tried several media. So far, the search engines that seem to bring in real qualified traffic are Google and Overture. Even so, I have never felt that a Web visitor brought in from a PPC ad was as valuable as one who comes in through a normal Web search.

I can imagined that many people in the developing world would love to have a job clicking on ads all day at a penny a shot, and you know this must be a burgeoning underground industry.

This news item from today brings it to mind:

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/Nov/1097151.htm

Google has launched a lawsuit against a company for click fraud, which is bringing this issue more into the public eye. The company that issued this press release is offering a free white paper on preventing click fraud.

AB - 11/29/04