Think of the early days of the World Wide Web. Every print-advertising agency immediately became a web specialist; megabyte-sized Photoshop graphics were exported and showed up like that on the web. When the creative director got complaints that the page took too long to load over a modem line, he or she perhaps only answered, "The page loads pretty fast here." This was logical, because locally, a megabyte loads pretty quickly. It is, however, a completely different story over the Internet.

There is yet another problem area. Every time there is a popular event happening, say a tour by a very popular band, the demand for tickets is enormous (this could, for instance, be observed with the Irish rock band U2 in 2005). Once upon a time, you had to brave a long queue in order to secure tickets; now a lot of this is handled on the Internet. The various online ticket shops, however, have a real problem if access numbers on the Web multiply punctually at the very...