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Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

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Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#21

Post by drucken »

citricsquid wrote: post #3

If the decisions made by Heroku to misrepresent the product were made prior to the Salesforce acquisition (December 2010) do the founders of Heroku have any liability? Would this sort of thing be a consideration with an acquisition?

It would have been an issue for the acquirer before or during acquisition, if it were present at the time, of course. Some, perhaps many, investors into startups also insist on liability insurance.

But the founders of Heroku have no more liability than the company in control of its assets, which in almost all cases would be some sort of Limited Liability vehicle.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#23

Post by iends »

arihant wrote: post #19
eli wrote: post #4

IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…

I think after reading the article, it is pretty clear they did not notice the routing issues until they noticed slowed down performance and till their consumers complained. That makes perfect sense, you don't really dig deep into routing until you hit a bottleneck, specially when you are unable to monitor it, and specially when your provider is lying to you about how they route.

Several people have posted support logs that Heroku knew about the issue long before.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#24

Post by kapilkale »

eli wrote: post #4

IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…

Rap Genius isn't suing.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#26

Post by anigbrowl »

redthrowaway wrote: post #2

>Heroku declined our request for further comment. “Unfortunately, we can’t publicly comment on legal matters,” said spokeswoman Dana Oshiro in an email. “Heroku is committed to our customers’ success and focused on delivering the best possible product and experience. We’ll continue to update our customers via our blog.” I don't run a company, and I'm not responsible for maximizing return on my shareholders' investmen…

There's a middle ground; it is better to fess up and try to square things with your customers in a situation where you've done wrong, but at the same time you don't want to be exploited by unscrupulous plaintiffs in turn. Most of those customers just want what they paid for or to recover their actual losses (what are called economic damages in law) but a few may see a lawsuit as an opportunity to enrich themselves. The court system is supposed to prevent that, and overall it works moderately well, but once papers are filed it's better for the arguments to take place in court rather than outside.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#27

Post by chubot »

rdl wrote: post #22

Heh, nothing will make people go back to taking Heroku's side faster than a class action lawsuit on the other side. This would be an awesome form of submarine marketing if they were actually behind it :)

Um, why? I was one of many plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against EA (which was settled in our favor). That did not help EA's image at all :)

It looks pretty bad when your customers complain about problems that are hidden by your own monitoring tools, and then you tell them to buy more crap to fix it! It's not a small amount either -- as mentioned the queuing time was larger than the request time. And on top of it you're paying out the nose for this crappy monitoring tool.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#28

Post by jaggederest »

tomlemon wrote: post #16
eli wrote: post #4

IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…

> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long? We didn't know how bad the performance was because Heroku's tools (logs and New Relic) reported incorrect performance data (i.e., they said requests weren't queuing when they were actually spending a ton of time queuing) EDIT: > Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation…

New Relic isn't Heroku's tool, man. It's like a car dealership selling you a Pioneer stereo.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#29

Post by w-ll »

bridgeyman wrote: post #15

In MIT's Mathematics for Computer Scientists course (6.042), I remember learning from Tom Leighton that in certain cases randomly distributing jobs actually IS the optimal solution to load balancing. This technique was somehow associated with Akamai, Professor Leighton's company. Maybe I am misremembering...

I dont know, but I would assume it has to deal with the fact you can't predict how long a job will take to complete, and a random selection would have more resources-more free-more often, verses FIFO where a group of really large tasks could halt everything.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#30

Post by rdl »

chubot wrote: post #27
rdl wrote: post #22

Heh, nothing will make people go back to taking Heroku's side faster than a class action lawsuit on the other side. This would be an awesome form of submarine marketing if they were actually behind it :)

Um, why? I was one of many plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against EA (which was settled in our favor). That did not help EA's image at all :) It looks pretty bad when your customers complain about problems that are hidden by your own monitoring tools, and then you tell them to buy more crap to fix it! It's not a small amount either -- as mentioned the queuing time was larger than the request time. And on top of…

Even people who have been somewhat screwed by this issue with Heroku tend to love Heroku; Salesforce could make this right with generous payouts to affected people and 2-6mo of engineering to offer a better load balancer as a service (Actually, I think I could build this as a third party provider, even)

EA is basically a lost cause; their business model and culture is the problem. Having better sacks at Dachau wouldn't have helped the Nazi image, either (to auto-Godwin)

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