Madplanet

Tenori-on Japan launch: Great way to treat your home turf, Yamaha

So, after months of waiting, Yamaha’s much-feted Tenori-on went on sale in Japan today. For some reason they’ve chosen to sell it through the site of YP Video Corporation, who I presume are a subsidiary. A subsidiary with a server that has muscles like knots in cotton, by the look of it.

The web store supposedly went live at 11am today, and the best I’ve been able to do so far is progress to the “confirm your order” screen—once—at around midday. A subsequent call to the support number (they claimed to be the “Steinberg upgrade line”, which didn’t bode well) confirmed the worst, that the order hadn’t made it through. Since then, it’s been a long stream of timeouts, “maintenance in progress” pages, and general waiting around like an idiot (or rather keeping busy with work).

It’s disappointing after a gradual global rollout that presumably gave Yamaha a good chance to gauge demand (and then, factoring in Japan’s higher scale of geek voracity, multiply it by about 3X for good measure) and put in a few extra servers for the day. For goodness’ sake, guys; it’s embarrassing that at 6.30pm your site is still timing out.

Update: From the look of it, they’ve done an emergency rejig to an almost entirely text-based site, which is, if glacially slow, actually loading. Amazingly, given that the servers appear to have been getting the pounding of their life all day and that supposedly only 1,000 units are available, I seem to have scored one. Although at this stage I wouldn’t be surprised to get a message saying that the ordering system is in such a mess that they’ve actually confirmed the order in error. Fingers remain crossed for now.