In the previous post, I had some problems with the Microsoft Office download server being pokey. It’s happened several times since. I have an installation running now that’s been going for four hours. I checked the bandwidth that it’s using by looking at the firewall, and it’s running an average of 2 kB/s, with some large swings. That’s about 5% of the capacity of my Internet pipe, so the problem is on Microsoft’s (or maybe Akamai’s) end. I’ve also had installations that went quite swiftly.
It’s early days in the Office 2013 roll-out, and there appear to be teething pains. Unless you’re a heat seeker, you might want to wait a while.
There’s a larger message here. As part of the Office 2013 roll-out, Microsoft is telling their customer base that they ought to let Redmond be their cloud service provider. However, they are currently demonstrating that their infrastructure is having a hard time dealing with the quite predictable demands of the initial release of the product. Shouldn’t customers be worried that the SkyDrive infrastructure might not be up to the task of dealing with the customer demands for access to their files in the wake of an unpredictable emergency?
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