Former Ticketmaster Employee here. I was a director of engineering & very much involved in the ticketing of the 2008 Olympics. I ended up leaving shortly afterwards for Google. So while I don't have any firsthand knowledge of the 2012 games, I thought I could share some perspective.
- The Olympic committees often have final say over design, but a lot of effort is invested. We all know the phrase of something looking like it was "designed by committee." Well, that's pretty much what happens here. You have a lot of individual people with great ideas, but many of they diametrically opposed, not to mention multiple levels of approval. Approval comes from multiple layers of the of the Olympic committees & the committees are often political appointees. They may have little-to-no experience with design (or ticketing), but may still offer "tweaks" and the like. Everyone has the best intentions, but, well...
- CAPTCHAs suck, but it or something similar is needed. Scalpers pound the site. I know fines have been raised, but all that really did was drive it underground, away from the everyday person. (Not to mention resulted in lots of empty seats.) Without it, almost every ticket would end up in the hands of scalpers.
- To that end, most of his "This is bad" section doesn't apply. The vast majority of events sell out. The empty seats aren't because tickets didn't sell, it's because they're sold & people didn't show. I hope the 2016 Olympics learns from this & allows them be re-sold.
- In 2008, we had a simple grid to show what events were & were not still available. I'm not sure why that was dropped. I disagree with only showing events that still have inventory. A common use case is people have their tickets, but want to hop online as the event nears to get more details. Having that data readily available is a good thing.
A lot of it is typical blog snark, so I may have missed some of other valid points.
However, the last thing I'd add is the that the technology behind ticketing is hard. Prior to Google, I'd worked at Yahoo. Those are the only two companies I know of that have both the technology & talent to build a credible ticketing system. Most people who people who tell me they could start a company that could crush Ticketmaster's technology and even have thoughts about the MySQL schema make me chuckle. They often just stare blankly when it's pointed out that tickets are not a fungile resource, not realizing what that means or scaling challenges it presents. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the problems.
When I was in Germany in 2006 during the World Cup, they had an online system in place to allow people to return their tickets. They would then periodically re-release those tix into the pool . . . it was through that reissue process that I secured all of my tix.
Of course, the Olympics is a far more complex set of events, but I'd have to imagine it would have been easy to implement this year (6 years later).
- The Olympic committees often have final say over design, but a lot of effort is invested. We all know the phrase of something looking like it was "designed by committee." Well, that's pretty much what happens here. You have a lot of individual people with great ideas, but many of they diametrically opposed, not to mention multiple levels of approval. Approval comes from multiple layers of the of the Olympic committees & the committees are often political appointees. They may have little-to-no experience with design (or ticketing), but may still offer "tweaks" and the like. Everyone has the best intentions, but, well...
- CAPTCHAs suck, but it or something similar is needed. Scalpers pound the site. I know fines have been raised, but all that really did was drive it underground, away from the everyday person. (Not to mention resulted in lots of empty seats.) Without it, almost every ticket would end up in the hands of scalpers.
- To that end, most of his "This is bad" section doesn't apply. The vast majority of events sell out. The empty seats aren't because tickets didn't sell, it's because they're sold & people didn't show. I hope the 2016 Olympics learns from this & allows them be re-sold.
- In 2008, we had a simple grid to show what events were & were not still available. I'm not sure why that was dropped. I disagree with only showing events that still have inventory. A common use case is people have their tickets, but want to hop online as the event nears to get more details. Having that data readily available is a good thing.
A lot of it is typical blog snark, so I may have missed some of other valid points.
However, the last thing I'd add is the that the technology behind ticketing is hard. Prior to Google, I'd worked at Yahoo. Those are the only two companies I know of that have both the technology & talent to build a credible ticketing system. Most people who people who tell me they could start a company that could crush Ticketmaster's technology and even have thoughts about the MySQL schema make me chuckle. They often just stare blankly when it's pointed out that tickets are not a fungile resource, not realizing what that means or scaling challenges it presents. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the problems.