I buy a lot of products on line, so my hard drives fill up fast. But they need not fill up as fast as they do. Why?
The problem is that online marketers often give downloadable files names that do not match the download links or the name of the product. I buy a product called New Masters of the Universe but download a file called 123Xamu.
But, of course, I don’t know the name of the file unless I happen to be watching it download. So I can’t find it.
So I download it it again. Sometimes I have as many as three copies of the same file, and some of them are quite large—well over 100 MB.
Why should a marketer care about my problem? Here’s why: Besides having a very irritated customer (me), the marketer has the cost of the extra bandwidth that was needlessly used.
Multiply that wasted bandwidth by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of customers, and you start to see the problem.
During a product rollout, your server could crash just because of duplicate downloads. And that is entirely preventable. Most of those duplicate downloads are caused by naming files thoughtlessly or for the marketer’s convenience, not for the convenience of customers.
Think about it.
