The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass lives in a very curious world where, as she explains to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” That sentence sums up the world of e-commerce with uncanny accuracy: No matter how hard we work to knock items off the priority list, there are always new ones popping right up to take their place. In the first generation of e-commerce, the priorities were at least easy to define: Build a site in which most customers can make purchases without things crashing more than once or twice a week.
