Never heard that no manager has ever been fired for hiring IBM?
When you go with the market leader, or a big player, the perception is that there's a smaller chance of things going wrong, and when they do, they have more resources than the smaller player.
I thought that had more to do with the fact that if something goes horribly wrong no one will fault you for going with the market leader - where as if you took a risk on something unproven you may have also risked your job.
Yes, and the reason none will fault you is because the perception I spoke of, which is molded by marketing campaigns like we're seeing here. So I was talking about the reasoning of _why_ being perceived as the leader, or as the best tech supplier, is important.
Vapid in the sense that it makes no difference? Or that it has no context?
Ok, so right now I see ~300,000 (315, but let's round down - because 15,000 hps is nothing, right?). Let's assume DoubleClick has some very big customers who all do lots of traffic. Let's say they have at least 10 big clients like Amazon that could bring their peak traffic up to a theoretical 10x more than the current average of 300K. That's 3 million hits per second, minus adsense adwords etc.
That is enormous. Astounding. And from my point of view, impossible to do without an extremely well laid out infrastructure. This number is therefore not just a vapid boast but a telling example of how awesome their network and applications are for being able to handle load of such magnitude. Even if it were only 5x the current load, 1.5 million hits per second is no walk in the park. You can't handle traffic like that without a truly robust design and several really scalable, really reliable layers, from appliances to handle incoming dns traffic all the way back to the app and database servers.
According to this document (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nqfZBBPVbikJ:w...) in 2006-2007 DoubleClick's peak ad delivery rate was 250,000 with 900 servers (before they switched to using some . Right now it's current average is more than that.
I agree it would be nice to have some comparison to their peak capacity right now, but if you consider how tough it is to handle their current load and that they have to account for significantly increased load, the result is a network which is gigantic. To me this means I can rely on them to properly handle whatever meager site I throw at them to serve ads for.
It is cool, I suppose, but also vapid. It's a meaningless boast. Reminds me of the McDonald's how many billions served signs.