Korean Government Leaders Bash Kakao for “Digital Platform Disaster”
It is amazing the consternation the loss of Kakao services for about two days has caused in South Korea and now the government is ready to step in and regulate them to prevent another “digital platform disaster”:
The ruling and main opposition parties lashed out at tech giant Kakao Corp. on Monday, branding a massive service disruption that occurred over the weekend as a “digital platform disaster” and summoning its founder to a parliamentary audit.
On Saturday afternoon, a fire started at a SK C&C building that houses the data center that Kakao uses, prompting a power outage that disrupted the company’s namesake messaging service KakaoTalk, as well as ride-hailing and public services tied to the app that more than 40 million use.
The blaze also affected Naver, the country’s top internal portal, which uses the same data center.
“The point of this crisis was that the business did not have appropriate backup systems in order to cut costs,” Rep. Park Hong-geun, floor leader of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP), said, accusing Kakao of failing to “think about responsibilities while maintaining the market dominant position.”
“Considering that digital services provided by the private sector have deeply permeated into the people’s lives, we can no longer leave things to individual companies,” he said. “We will swiftly provide legislative measures so that we will not again become helpless against such digital platform disasters.”
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
Korea needs to get their IT act together.
Not exactly IT… but a failure for the same reasons Korea’s software fails:
Any time I deal with a Korean company for support, I am left with a bad taste.
I am ashamed to say I have influenced some large purchasing decisions to America and Japan because I looked at the websites for all three products.
Korean company websites come in two flavors.
1. The original website they made in 1996 when they were proud to have the first online presence in their industry. That would actually be great except there is absolutely nothing useful on it. I can find out how many lathes or what brand of fusion splicer they have. I can find a stylized map to their factory with north not necessarily at the top. I can find a cut and paste word from the CEO talking about whatever CEOs talked about in the mid-90s.
Product manual? Software? Any mention at all of the 20 thousand dollar product they sold 5 years ago?
You jest.
2. The most amazing website you have ever seen. The coder clearly went down the list of tricks and included every one of them… not quite correctly, sometimes… six levels of menus close as you move toward the thing you want… and you won’t be accessing it on a computer made in the previous decade… and you might have your epilepsy triggered with all the random motion on the screen.
Product manual? Software? Any mention at all of the 20 thousand dollar product they sold 5 years ago?
You continue to jest.
And as a bonus, unlike the simple website, there are more menus but an equal lack of useful information.
America, Taiwan, Japan, even China, generally have websites with all the useful stuff you need… many times in a way that is attractive but not vomit-inducing visual noise.
This is not a technology problem. This is not a coding skill problem. This is a thinking problem.
Fortunately, Koreans are clever and adaptable… so there is hope.
…but pretty much having the monopoly on social media and a lot of other things but having no backup makes that hope fade a little bit.
Come on Korea… get your act together or Korea companies will go the way of Sharp, Toshiba, Takata, and Mitsubishi.