Amazon.com kills themselves for approx. 15 mins

I'd be a bit curious to see just how many people *tried* to get through to the Amazon.com web site at the designated 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, November 23, 2006 (Thanksgiving day).  I'm fairly sure that the number will be as predicted by some (in the millions, as in over 6 million, and possibly more like 60 million, but who knows for sure).

Either way, Amazon's Black Friday inspired, much hyped "Amazon Votes" event that offered the chance for 1,000 people to buy an Xbox 360 Core system at a ridiculously low price of $100 each seems to be an event that some would say was a mixed success at best.

According to Amazon's web site the Xbox 360's sold out at the original price quite quickly.  (Well, d'uh!)  For those that were finally able to get the web page to show up for them at approximately 11:15 - 11:20 a.m. pacific time, that was the news they saw.  For most people, Amazon's main site was offline for a solid 15 - 20 minutes, and possibly as long as 30 minutes total.  During that time anyone that was visiting Amazon for any *other* purchases that they may have wanted to make were left sitting in front of a computer screen that was completely non-responsive.

Amazon will likely consider the event a success, given the number of people that registered votes for which offer they felt would be best, and given the number of people that tried to get through to Amazon's site to get the deal, but at the same time I have to believe that many people that might have ordered something from Amazon during the time that they were basically shutdown by their own self-inspired denial of service attack may never place those orders with Amazon at all.

A much smarter move would have been some sort of lottery that took e-mail addresses and enough personal information from customers to make sure that only one winner per household would possibly get through and get the offer.  Draw the names randomly in advance and then announce the winners of the drawing in some way that would not have given away any personally identifiable information.

Doing that would likely have spread the web site hits out much more, and kept Amazon's site online all day today, rather than killing it completely and leaving everyone that tried to get the offer with a serious case of the blah's.