I agree with everything he writes. I frequently do. Here he makes his case very clear.
For his profession to be interested in human perception and its inner workings makes allot of sense.
Category: marketing
Dear provider: yes, I will ‘go green’ and sign up for email invoices the moment you stop sending me solicitations to get more stuff form you by the pound.
Wiredrive is a system that operates in a similar space as INTERDUBS. Naturally their press releases get my attention.
The last one announces that
Wiredrive recently dumped its open source, clustered storage system in favor of Isilon.
I don’t think that it would be appropriate to go into detail here why INTERDUBS uses a different storage solution. Or why I think that such details do not matter for the clients, as long their data is 100% protected. Isilon works, I would not exactly title it meaner and leaner myself, but people can feel about what they do in any way they want and express it accordingly. Would not be worth the blog entry.
The question that is worth being raised is how Wiredrive using Isilon is newsworhty at all. This Wiredrive document outlines how Isilon is in use. While it itself is not dated it references the 2006 Olympics and 250GB hard drives.
And -as so often- he has a point.
I am developing some exciting new features for INTERDUBS. I made the mistake of not testing the code I wrote for 3 days in Internet Explorer. When I check it again I realize that this cock-sucker of a browser just quits. So I had to roll through three days of changes to find out what exactly made this piece of shit simply quit. No warning, no indication. Nothing. Just fucking ended displaying the page. 6 other browsers were fine, and had been during those three days of development. There were no warnings, no hints of something causing a problem. Nothing. Turns out that a simple
made the ‘thing’ puke. This wasn’t the first time that working around Internet Explorer took almost as long as doing the actual work. Internet Explorer is just horrible and bad. Later version might be better. But overall Internet Explorer is a waste of time.
This would not be worth the ramble. It has been like this for a long time. But Microsoft has the audacity to put out a page like
this. Here it feels that IE8 is just awesome. Indeed it is much better than Firefox.
Which is pointing to a bigger problem: Somehow people started to believe that in marketing everything goes. They believe that it is OK to blatantly lie about things. The bigger the better. I don’t know where that comes from. But it is rampant. A competing company to INTERDUBS inflates the client count by roughly 200% on their public site. They don’t deliver the slightest proof for that number. Their web site looks very pretty. But it is still emitting something that is outside of the truth. And somehow that is supposed to be OK.
I think it is a problem. Not so much on their end. I can understand that they try to get away with as much exaggeration than possible. The problem is us: We let an administration get away with getting into a war over weapons of mass destruction. When there were not any, somehow nobody ever cared to follow up on that. So if nobody gets in trouble for sending the country into war for the wrong reasons, what could be so wrong in tripling your client count? What is so wrong on Microsofts end to claim that IE8 is more secure than Firefox? I personally think it is a miss-conception that something really great can be built on skewed facts. Maybe that competitor hopes to reach that claimed count one day and therefor make their lie less wrong. Problem is, that during the process they lost all credibility. Internally and externally.
Truth is a tricky thing. It will show up. Always did, and always will. Everything else is just a detour. Microsoft will learn that too.
Just too bad that Verzion isn’t. So I think I could use FiOS. The Verizon website however has a problem with the address that I happen to have. A message then claims that I could call to find out if Fios is available. Calling that number I just go through 5 menus only to be disconnected when the system tries to hand me over to the next station. On the internet that’s called a broken link. I am sure Verizon has spent some money on marketing to make me aware of Fios. They also have spent money to put the actual thing in place. Too bad that they are unable to make a sale since their sales tools just happen to be broken. I guess they need a bail out too pretty soon …
With a MacBook you pay around 50 extra to get it in black. Now with the iPhone 3G there will be a white version. But that will only be available for the larger 16GB version. I never ever have filled up the 4GB I had. So you have two choices now with the iPhone 3G: pay too much because you can and don’t show people (get the black one) or let people know that you don’t need to care about the extra 100. The new price of 199 is pretty low, compared to last years launch. But I would guess that the 20$ a month extra for 24 months rule is still in place. You pay AT&T or whomever, but you pay. That’s 480 dollars extra that any iPhone will cost you. So the price started out at 1079 for the 8GB / 979 for the 4GB and now has arrived at 879 / 779 respectively.
Turns out that the data plan is now $30 and not $20 any longer. So the total price for an iPhone2 is $1019 / $919.
In the Apple store I had a quick look and hands on with the MacBook Air. And I am quiet underwhelmed. Yes, it is light. Yes it has thin edges. Thin edges are probably a great thing when you would like to put your computer into an inter office envelope. Funny thing is, I never had reason to do that. Since six years I have been pretty on various laptop models for the greater part of my waking hours. I have use the thing in various places in in rather unorthodox ways I think. But, never ever did I say to myself: “Darn, the laptop does not fit into this interoffice envelope!”. If the 15″ was to big then I took the iBook aka Macbook. Works for me. If the 15″ is to small then I hook up another screen or get on a real computer. Yesterday I used the big iMac for instance and it just worked great.
I really don’t see the point to spend allot of money for a machine that has allot of drawbacks, and whos only upside seems to be that it does fit into an envelope.
Too bad, would love to justify a new computer.
BluRay would have been a better thing than this Air hocus-pocus.
That’s an actual quote of a client in an email received a couple of minutes ago. It is his first month with Interdubs, and he is not used to the fact that the bill will only arrive once the month is over. And then he can pay it. Or not. If he should feel like that. Which sounds ‘good hearted’ or ‘weak’. But it makes actually allot of (business) sense: Most of my clients have made more money with the site in their first week of using it, then it will cost them for whole month. A not so significant part of them actually takes just a few hours to make the 285 that the services costs them. Either by direct billing or by improved client relationships. I was aware of this when I designed the system and set the price. The price is solely based on the system working as well as it seems to be. It is arranged around my costs and the future potential of more clients. And maybe on the fact that I like to code fast.
I really hate the business model that tries to leach on to the success of its clients. Network Neutrality is one of those. Phone companies would sure love to charge more for important business conversations than for idle chit chat.
But back to Interdubs: having a super reasonable price that are people actually eager to pay makes everything much easier on everybody. So far people paid their bills. The majority of companies in record time. Thanks again and also from here. If I would try to squeeze more money out of the service, then I might need an accounting department that starts bugging people. I’d rather not.
On the other side with the latest feature additions the price / performance ratio is in danger to tip from “great” to “ridicolously great”. I have feedback from many of my clients saying that the service is too cheap. And I suspect that I could actually sign up more people if the price were higher. Most people think just because the competition is ten times more expensive it also would be better.