Scailure is a completely fictional word I use to describe the failure of a system or structure due to it’s inability to operate efficiently above a certain size. Simply put, scailure is the failure to scale efficiently. You might be thinking “Hey, I’m on to you! You just took the words ‘Failure’ and ‘Scale’ and shoved ‘em together. That’s cheep and hackish, and anybody could do that!” Well, you my friend would be sorely mistaken pretty much dead on. That fact notwithstanding, I happen to think the word is just geeky enough to be mildly amusing, at least to me.
So lets’ explore this fictional word here. What are some examples of this phenomenon? Well, of course there’s everyones favorite whipping boy when it comes to examples of how not to do things: The Federal Government. Democrat, Republican or*gasp* Independent, you can hardly talk to anyone about the Federal Government without using terms like ‘waste’ and well, ‘waste’. This is an example of scailure. The transparency factor doesn’t scale well as political systems get larger, so the kind of accountability that comes from having a great amount of transparency in the system breaks down and allows for wastful behaviors to become entrenched. Smaller local political systems tend to be less unwieldy because gross negligence and corruption are harder to hide for long periods of time.
To borrow another oft-used comparison, take a gander at two different search engines front pages: Google and Yahoo. Yahoo has stuck with the portal approach, listing a large amount of links and news in it’s front page. The only problem with this system is that as they try to appeal to wider and wider audience and as the amount of information proliferates, you end up with the visual stew that is the Yahoo front page. Google, on the other hand focuses on it’s search feature alone on it’s homepage. No matter how much information there is on the web in the future, Googles’ homepage will be able to scale gracefully.
Craigslist is another example of a service that had to deal with the scaling issue. By fighting the urge to create a massive index of everything that’s for sale everywhere, but instead focusing on their core value of geographically contextualized classifieds Craigslist was able to sidestep the Scailure phenomenon. By breaking down the listings based on location Craigslist was able to define the scope to which it would have to scale: there are only so many cities in America after all.
I’m sure there is probably a perfectly legitimate word in the English language to describe this concept, but unfortunately, my attention span is prone to scailure and so I never got around to looking it up.
