31–40 of 85 posts
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.
>>When someone you compete against is suffering, especially as a result of any kind of infrastructure issues, shut up and keep your head down. Why? Seriously Why? Companies that are not attacked by their competitors become lazy. I think is fair game. They are not doing anything illegal and frankly I don't think the situation is scummy at all. This guy sounds like a kid yelling "is not fair" and "you are a big meanie"…
Although Postmark did receive an uptick of signups, they didn't take the opportunity to market against SendGrid as an unreliable service, because they know there is no 100% reliable service, anywhere, ever.
I have a story: a few years ago, the US had a nasty hurricane called Katrina. This hurricane directly hit New Orleans, and other cities. After this time, all insurance companies pulled all operations out... With exception of one. This company, once called Government Employee Insurance Company, realized that they could raise rates by 400% and be the only one willing to sell.
The company is Geico, run by Berkshire Hathaway.
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.
While misleading statements about competitors should be unacceptable, since it hurts customers and the industry, the same cannot be said for vigorous competition.
It is also worth pointing out that it's expensive to prepare for rare events, and the costs make you less competitive when those rare events are not occurring. This event was difficult to anticipate, but so are large natural disasters, and it isn't difficult to imagine even more random attacks.
Maybe Dyn isn't any more prepared for an unpredictable DDoS attack of the same scale, but I don't know either way, but at the very least there is a case for being part of one's failover plan.
This gentleman's agreement.. What crap it is. I have a story: a few years ago, the US had a nasty hurricane called Katrina. This hurricane directly hit New Orleans, and other cities. After this time, all insurance companies pulled all operations out... With exception of one. This company, once called Government Employee Insurance Company, realized that they could raise rates by 400% and be the only one willing to sel…
I'm not saying it's the same as forming a cartel, maybe a cartel lite. Think about it: from the point of view of the customer of a downed service, competitors doing some opportunistic PR is only beneficial.
So competitors not doing opportunistic PR is depriving customers of a benefit, while helping the industry itself.
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.
True, but I don't think you can afford to have 100% uptime. Basically nobody can do that. Even in the heyday of the Bell system, Ma Bell couldn't quite guarantee 100% uptime. 99.9999999%, maybe, but do you have any idea how much engineering effort and work went into achieving that?
I won't be signing up for this.
What, acknowledging reality? Look, I don't think the OP was saying that you shouldn't compete on reliability and uptime and other quality guarantees. But if something extraordinary happens to a competitor - which could just as easily happen to you - then it's silly to launch a specific, targeted effort to try and steal away that competitor's customers in reaction that specific event.
There's a difference between a demonstrated pattern of better uptime/reliability, woven into a consistent marketing message over time, and a predatory attack reacting to a moment of weakness.
>>When someone you compete against is suffering, especially as a result of any kind of infrastructure issues, shut up and keep your head down. Why? Seriously Why? Companies that are not attacked by their competitors become lazy. I think is fair game. They are not doing anything illegal and frankly I don't think the situation is scummy at all. This guy sounds like a kid yelling "is not fair" and "you are a big meanie"…
"She," actually. And she is the owner of a company that benefitted from SendGrid's unfortunate circumstances. Being the owner of such a service, what she saw other competition doing disturbed her. So she wrote about it. Although Postmark did receive an uptick of signups, they didn't take the opportunity to market against SendGrid as an unreliable service, because they know there is no 100% reliable service, anywhere,…
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 competiti…
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.
What a load of bunk. Nothing about capitalism per-se prohibits a firm from having a sense of ethics, or from having principles. Promoting this way of thinking is the reason so many lefties find so much ammunition to attack capitalism.
Firms (especially privately held ones) certainly can choose to withhold from certain kinds of behaviour while competing fiercely, and succeeding, in the market.