Entries Tagged 'Businesses that Suck' ↓

 I came across this post on twitter’s blog.  Really?  Your all-time record tweets per second is 3283, and your systems are consistently over capacity?

I got the failwhale page several times in the past week.  Seems to me to be pretty #fail that you can’t handle that relatively small of a load.  This is the age of the internet, of cloud, of decoupling and taking advantage of radically different architecture concepts to scale beyond what traditional big iron could ever hope for.

That’s a patently absurdly low rate of small messages per second to handle, particularly when the medium allows for eventual consistency.  Shame on you guys.  You have enough cash, go get some guy who used to run systems for financial firms.  Then get him drunk, and put him up in front of a whiteboard after getting him used to the idea that this data isn’t as important as trades, he doesn’t have to worry about milliseconds before a message that pops in somewhere pops out somewhere else.

Azul Systems is releasing a virtual appliance version of their JVM as part of their Zing Elastic Software Platform, so you don’t even have to buy a hardware Vega-based appliance.  Maybe you should look into it.

I finally, despite hating AT&T and resenting the crap out of Apple, had decided to pick up a 64GB 3g iPad yesterday to get in on the remaining opportunity to the unlimited 3g plan.

I went to the Apple store on 59th St, and upon spotting an employee blue shirt in the tumultuous sea of humanity, asked, “Where do I go when I know what I want?” — in itself an indicator of a failure of sorts for Apple, I’m sure, but not one cool enough to fix. Of course, in true don’t-let-the-customer-help-himself,-manage-his-experience Apple fashion, it depends what you want. Also in true Apple fashion, “We don’t have it, no other stores on this island have it, probably, and the best I can do for you is give you the phone numbers, so you can call them yourself.” No thanks, guys, I have your phone, and the experience using it for the same is far better than the experience you’re giving me in-person.

Here was me, owner of several iPods, an iPhone, an AppleTV, and a Mac Mini trying to buy the highest-priced item in a product line on a whim, and nobody can tell me even semi-definitively IF I CAN BUY IT TODAY?

Steve: If you insist on controlling the experience, you’ve got to get it right. You have to find a way to recognize that the savvy customer doesn’t want the velvet rope. If I’m ready to pay the premium price, and you can save the “concierge” service for those who need it, let me just find out where I can simply buy a SKU and thereby increase your margins.

Random off-the-wall conspiracy prediction: Sprint 4G iPad soon. Sprint could really use the juice, and would be willing to commit a lot to accelerate 4G roll-out, including an iPad-specific unlimited plan which would explicitly allow tethering. Sprint needs some kind of major play to become relevant, the Pre didn’t do it, and the Evo’s ultimately doomed by battery life — we can’t afford to have our phone batteries die because we had to use an access point for a while.

I was just thinking about what back room wrangling may have gone on to have the iPad contract-free 3G service through AT&T happen.

Obviously, as a book reader, Apple could offer the Kindle up for comparison, and Steve could certainly make the case that ubiquitous connectivity would have to be better than that offered by the Kindle to make his device transcendent. He could get people to pay for that transcendence — it was going to be a premium experience, so people would pay for it. But people hate cell phone companies, and contracts in particular… so it had to be easy to enable and disable, with the option to bump up your plan if you’re running over, without the possibility that you’d get a $5000 bill from AT&T because you left a video stream going.

Steve had a few things to offer up. First, he’d go along with the whole mini-SIM thing to appease AT&T. People couldn’t use their iPhone SIM in their iPad, so they’d have to get the additional service. They’re not going to get rid of their iPhones — you can’t carry the iPad everywhere. Average revenue per Apple fanboi would go up, and with the simplified pricing plans and self-service provisioning, the cost of servicing the additional load is just a technical problem, something that can be solved by using money.

So Steve might have said, “OK, we’ll tell Verizon to screw off, make it so people can’t just use the one subscription for iPhone and iPad, and increase your ARPU. You give us a self-serve no-hassle unlimited-use option and another at a lower price for those who aren’t yet sure how much they’ll love our magical boogie board. And this iPhone 4? It’s gonna be awesome, too, and bring even more folks into the iPhone fold. It’s going to do Skype, so invest in the data side, and you can even drop your spending on the voice side. You do this for us, and we’re going to make you THE carrier of mobile data. Buy the towers, buy the routers, run the fiber — just be ready.”

It seems logical to me to have gone that way. Even if the details are off a bit, we can’t know.

One of the most troubling things about exclusivity agreements is that we know so little about them.

When does an exclusivity agreement between market leaders turn into anticompetitive collusion? Isn’t the team of Apple and AT&T almost its own vertically-integrated market monolith?

Additionally, the terms of such agreements are obviously incredibly material to the financial health of both companies, and investors are prevented from accurately gauging corporate prospects without access to that data.

It would seem to me that disclosure of such terms should be required to be disclosed publicly, with well-defined regulation around what can be redacted, and what the allowed reporting delay can be after contract execution.

I’ll admit that I’d be happy to see the side effect of increased competition when the light is shined into dark corners. I’d love to see service providers competing on the price and value of their service, rather than relying on exclusivity agreements and paying kickbacks. They should be competing for my business, not Apple’s.