A gentlemen's agreement • Hacker News Board

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#11

Post by alrs » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 3:54 PM UTC

I won't be signing up for this.

Having an operations team that can keep things going through adversity is a competitive advantage that doesn't come cheap.

Redundancy and ops talent cost money. If your competitor made a cost/benefit decision that let them down, I say tough luck.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#12

Post by samolang » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 3:56 PM UTC

I strongly disagree. That is not how capitalism works. You should take advantage of every opportunity you can to get people to try your product. If you have a superior product they'll stay, if you don't they won't.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#13

Post by Nursie » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 3:58 PM UTC

eterm wrote: post #7

"We shake hands with guys at conferences" Only the guys? ducks

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#14

Post by smithian » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 3:59 PM UTC

The real reason not to do this is that it makes you look like a scumbag. It's not in your interest to make that association in your customer's minds. For instance, I run a small datacenter on the east coast. We had no downtime due to Sandy, but the level of MSP/CoLo/Managed hosting company cold calls I got in the two weeks after trying to use their uptime during the storm as a sales pitch was unbelievable. every single one of them went in my "scumbucket vendor" file.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#15

Post by rm999 » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 3:59 PM UTC

amirmc wrote: post #9

I don't understand. Sure, this may be a special case related to the PyCon stuff (which should be more clearly referenced in the OP imho) but I don't see how it's a general point. What if you really do believe that you have a better service than that competitor? What if you can demonstrate better uptime/benefits/customer-service/whatever? Do you just sit around and wait until customers fall into your lap? While I appr…

It's an implicit form of negative advertising, which is rarely noble or "gentlemanly". I think most people would be disgusted if a politician started running ads about how healthy he is when his opponent is in the hospital. This situation is similar: while the sites are touting themselves, it's the obvious contrast they are creating that makes it negative.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#16

Post by nmcfarl » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 4:00 PM UTC

I don’t know - I think I’m a bit darwinistic here.

Having suffered through some products with bi-weekly downtime, I tend to think competitors should be allowed tout whatever their strengths are including uptime if that’s one of them. And it doesn’t reflect poorly on them (in my eyes). When suffering I like to see solutions offered…

Of course most companies with horrible re-occuring downtime, have no serious competition… So there’s that.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#17

Post by Shank » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 4:02 PM UTC

I don't agree with this - because in all honesty, SendGrid probably should have had some sort of contingency plan setup to handle extremely high amounts of traffic. Sure, the public facing website may have gone down, but the API & other servers should have been able to scale up or down depending on load.

When your service is as relied upon as an email provider, it needs to have near perfect uptime in order to keep trust. People were tweeting @SendGrid wondering why it was down for hours, and were looking for other providers to pick up anyway.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#18

Post by jiggy2011 » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 4:03 PM UTC

Getting 6 nines uptime costs money, if you make that investment in infrastructure/staff then you deserve to make it a selling point.

OTOH I can certainly see an exception when it comes to what is effectively digital terrorism.

There seems to be at least some belief that Adria was let go at least partly to stop the fallout from the DDOS attack.

You can't let 4channers get the idea that they can set policy decisions that affect others and ultimately have nothing to do with them.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#19

Post by dwc » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 4:03 PM UTC

This isn't a clear cut line not to be crossed. It's a matter of personal ethics. There are times when you do something differently precisely because you think it's a better way and gives your company and your customers an advantage. When that advantage becomes clear for all to see there's no reason to deny it, hide it, pretend that it's just blind misfortune that could have happened to you just as easily, when you have taken active steps to make sure it didn't. You don't need to tear down your competitors, but you shouldn't avoid pointing out why you are good/better.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#20

Post by benatkin » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 4:05 PM UTC

I agree with most of this, but they should have waited weeks to post this, so it didn't seem like they were trying to use reverse psychology to engage in the exact behavior that they're railing against. Also "gentlemen's agreement" was a poor choice of words because it isn't a gender neutral term.