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A gentlemen's agreement

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Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#51

Post by samolang »

mindcrime wrote: post #40
samolang wrote: post #12

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.

That is not how capitalism works. You should take advantage of every opportunity you can to get people to try your product. 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 t…

You don't have to do anything unethical to take advantage of your competitors' struggles. Was it unethical for domain registrars to offer sales when Go Daddy was catching flak for supporting SOPA?

All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#52

Post by PuercoPop »

bjterry wrote: post #47
PuercoPop wrote: post #42

So you thought it is loable to not exploit your opponents weaknesses? And it is loable to leave potential customers stranded with a subpar service that has failed their expectations by not being available? It think you should read Sirlin's definition of a scrub[0], and decide if you want to continue being one, but you have no moral high ground, you are just limited by your own made up rules. [0]: http://www.sirlin.ne…

The English word for loable is "laudable." Also, I agree that that is a great article. Cheers :)

My bad I forgot to proof read it. Thanks.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#54

Post by jusben1369 »

Many of the comments here are missing the point a little. To summarize:

"If your customer experiences a freak event that no one can really plan for trying to turn that into a win for yourself is inappropriate" - We should argue on the merits of that. Don't confuse this with a service that perhaps experiences ongoing issues. Those are material points that a buyer should know and are fair game to raise in marketing.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#55

Post by mindcrime »

samolang wrote: post #51
mindcrime wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how capitalism works. You should take advantage of every opportunity you can to get people to try your product. 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 t…

You don't have to do anything unethical to take advantage of your competitors' struggles. Was it unethical for domain registrars to offer sales when Go Daddy was catching flak for supporting SOPA? All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed.

Was it unethical for domain registrars to offer sales when Go Daddy was catching flak for supporting SOPA?

No, but that wasn't a "black swan" event that GoDaddy could not control. They chose to support SOPA. In my mind, that's a pretty different scenario.

All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed.

I basically agree with that; I just think the OP's post is pointing out a very specific edge case where a certain sort of behaviour is indicated.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#56

Post by alrs »

mindcrime wrote: post #37
alrs wrote: post #11

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.

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

My reference to "signing up" means that I won't be entering in to a gentleman's agreement. I'm on good terms with reality.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#57

Post by samolang »

mindcrime wrote: post #55
samolang wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to do anything unethical to take advantage of your competitors' struggles. Was it unethical for domain registrars to offer sales when Go Daddy was catching flak for supporting SOPA? All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed.

Was it unethical for domain registrars to offer sales when Go Daddy was catching flak for supporting SOPA? No, but that wasn't a "black swan" event that GoDaddy could not control. They chose to support SOPA. In my mind, that's a pretty different scenario. All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the…

In my mind it's a harmless crime. If you are doing something unethical then you risk turning off customers with your scummy behavior. If you have the superior product, then you are doing the customers a favor. If you have an inferior product, then the customer will simply switch products again.

I don't think a 'gentlemen's agreement' is needed.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#58

Post by OzzyB »

protomyth wrote: post #25
rm999 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Politicians would wish their opponent a speedy recovery after their morning jog[1], like a website might say it won't take advantage of another's situation by writing a blog post with a link to the competitors problems[2] and pointing out some other competitor is acting poorly. 1) or tennis on The West Wing 2) I do believe their post is in good faith, but I spent a chunk of my life dealing with politicians and I thin…

I want to give your brain a hug.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#60

Post by nmcfarl »

shill wrote: post #39
nmcfarl wrote: post #16

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…

OP is talking about kicking someone when they are down as the result of a random catastrophe. You won't gain many customers doing this, and the ones you do gain won't be very loyal.

So perhaps what I’m saying is that at some point you have to kick when down, at least if a vendor is always down. Every marketing campaign I’ve ever been involved in ran for longer than 2 weeks. And in my example I was not joking - we were paying for a service that had roughly bi-weekly, unplanned downtime of multiple hours, for many many months. A marketing campaign would have inevitably run concurrent with a downtime.

I agree - running attack ads after 1 random catastrophic event is in poor taste. But at some point - 3 in a year?, 3 in a month? - it becomes reasonable, and tasteful, to tout uptime as an advantage.

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