Micorsoft’s Iowa Caucus App has Unsuccessful Launch

Image courtesy of mashable.com

In a promotional move, Microsoft created vote counting and reporting apps that debuted last night at the Iowa Caucus for both the Democratic and Republican parties. Voting via the internet is still a scary concept that is officially a ways away, but the parties both decided that they wanted to try out the “app approach.”

Microsoft provided the free app and aimed to minimize errors that have plagued past Iowa Caucuses. In a blog post in June, Microsoft’s vice president for technology and civic engagement Dan’l Lewin, said the software company was “honored to support the 2016 Iowa caucus via a new, mobile-enabled, cloud-based platform that will facilitate accuracy and efficiency of the reporting process.”

The system was meant to “enable precincts to report their results directly by party and will ensure that only authorized Iowans are reporting results. This announcement represents the first-of-its-kind major technology component to caucus reporting,” he wrote.

While the concept was exciting with the apps being available both on mobile and PC platforms, there was a bit of a hang up for users which they expressed on Twitter. Some users were throwing conspiracy theories at Microsoft because the site kept crashing. While there were not grounds for these accusations, political rivalries can get heated and angry people were reacting negatively over the glitch.

Microsoft released a statement saying that both apps worked without issue, and they technically did, people are trashing the apps and are generally unhappy with them.  It was speculated that the Democratic app was the one being tampered with, even though the same error occurred with the Republican app as well, because Microsoft had donated more than $200,000 to Clinton’s campaign.

While we can assume that none of these accusations are true, this goes to show what kind of reaction an app can inspire when it malfunctions on a large scale. While enterprise employees hopefully won’t be as quick to point fingers about a developer’s ulterior motives, a highly populated bad opinion is certainly something you need to avoid, even if it means pushing back the deployment date.

What this teaches us about large scale apps is that you have to take the amount of traffic into consideration and don’t put an app out until it’s been thoroughly tested. It’s common that some patches will be needed shortly after launch, but these are usually user related and small updates that are only made clear to the developer. Since enterprise apps are deployed on such a large stage, a “glitch” of this magnitude is unacceptable. Not only could it be unsecured and compromise your sensitive data, but it will also cause your employees to lose faith in the app and not use it.

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