Scalping and Hacking

Earlier this month, I had occasion to comment in this space about the Major League Baseball playoffs and the issue of ticket scalping; you can see my entries on Lovable Losers? and Getting Scalped respectively, if you missed either of them the first time. But today, I am pleased to bring you a story that combines both of these themes with the always-vexing subject of computer hacking.

As you may know, the World Series starts this week, and features the teams from Colorado (the Rockies) and Boston (the Red Sox) in what some are calling a classic duel between a club that has one only one world series title since trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees nearly a century ago, and a club that has only been around 12 years and has never won anything of significance in that time. What you may not know is that within an hour or so of the tickets going on sale over the Internet, the Rockies’ ticket sales web site crashed, preventing any of the 8.5 MILLION people who attempted to purchase tickets from getting anything, even access to the site. You can read the Associated Press story about these events if you missed it.

Now comes the news that the crash was not caused by the high volume of people clamoring for tickets. Rockies officials are announcing that their site was the target of a direct, external attack that required shutting it down until the early hours of this morning. Officials from Paciolan Inc., the company that runs the Rockies’ online ticket sales site says the attack had affected their entire North American network, causing a shutdown of every system they run. The company assured the AP that none of this was the Rockies’ fault, and that the system would be back up shortly.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Rockies fans have been completely frantic, trying anything they can to get onto the site and purchase their tickets at face value before the scalpers get hold of all of them and jack up the price by the usual $300 or $400 per ticket. Locals have reported long lines of people waiting to get into the public library and use the high-speed terminals there (in the hopes of getting onto the ticket site faster), only to be disappointed at having no greater success than they had at home.

I think the situation makes several interesting business points, which is why I’m wasting both my time and yours (if you’re bothering to read this) making this entry. First, this is the biggest business opportunity the Colorado ball club has ever had, and if their success in the last month really does turn out to be the fluke the statisticians are calling it, Denver may never see the like of it again. That being the case, screwing up the ticket sales, alienating your loyal fans, and (worst of all!) failing to take their money is, well, stupid. Second, outsourcing your ticket site only makes sense if the company you’ve outsourced it to can take care of you ticket sales BOTH more cheaply and more reliably than you could have in house. Otherwise, this was also stupid.

But I think the most important point to be made here is that during the past year, we have witnessed giant, multi-billion dollar companies suing people without a dime to their names over illegal music downloads that don’t actually cost the music companies anything (since these people would not have been able to afford the files they “shared” in the first place; it’s not that they had the money and chose not to spend it), yet nothing is done about large ticket brokerage companies snapping up thousands of tickets and then screwing every possible cent out of the people who would have paid the face value of those tickets – if they were allowed to. Meanwhile, the company being paid large sums of money to ensure that ordinary people get a fair chance to purchase tickets for their own personal use has just about guaranteed that the ticket brokers will get all of the available tickets sometime between midnight and dawn tomorrow, and spend the rest of the week happily putting the screws to the baseball fans in Denver.

Somehow, “stupid” seems far too mild a term for this. The only thing I can imagine that would be worse would be actually shelling out $450 for tickets with a face value of $8. But I’m pretty sure that someone will…