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A gentlemen's agreement

wildbit.com

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Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#61

Post by PuercoPop »

mindcrime wrote: post #48
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…

So you thought it is loable to not exploit your opponents weaknesses? There's a big difference between exploiting a weakness in general, and taking advantage of an extraordinary circumstance that harms your competitor. To me, this comes down to sportsmanship. To use a bit of an analogy... I wrestled in high-school. We trained to identify weaknesses in the game of our opponents, so I might well enter into a match with…

I disagree about the adequacy of the analogy. The more apt analogy would be if I know he is susceptible to upper body takedowns. Sendgrid didn't do their homework and decided to treat a technical problem like a PR problem.

We are talking about email services not rocket science. Nor is it the case that an vindictive ex-employee took advantage of some inside knowledge to take their servers down(which would still be negligence on my book). They have been shown to be unable to deal with the basic hazards of hosting and email service. Plus instead of trying to learn and solve the real issue (hey we all have much room for growth) they decided to defuse the situation with PR.

tl;dr Besides, unlike some lame-ass startup with an executive team that's clearly never solved hard problems, I've actually run e-mail before.[0] I mean seriously, do you want the executive team that fires someone because they can't handle a bit of adversity then claims victimhood?[1] [0]: https://twitter.com/tunixman/status/314887921956184064 [1]: https://twitter.com/tunixman/status/314887439216955392

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#62

Post by yesimahuman »

niggler wrote: post #5

I disagree strongly with the ultimate basis of this: it is a dog eat dog world. There is a finite pool of customers. I don't mean to say you should do what the other company did (email bashing while others are down) but you shouldn't be afraid to talk about your other strengths.

I wonder if the modern customer is more nuanced than that though? We've all been fucked over by capitalism, it's refreshing to see companies not be douches about it.

I'm really happy with Sendgrid, but this really gave me a good feeling about who Wildbit is, and now I'm inclined to give them my business.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#63

Post by peterwwillis »

alrs wrote: post #56
mindcrime wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could just agree not to be a jerk...

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#64

Post by peterwwillis »

Nursie wrote: post #13
eterm wrote: post #7

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

See also "A Gentlemen's Agreement". Personally I think the language police can go and do something gender-appropriate and painful to themselves, but after the nature of that particular shitstorm, it does seem a touch out of place!

The definition of the phrase ("An arrangement or understanding which is based upon the trust of both or all parties, rather than being legally binding") doesn't specify a particular gender, though a word in the phrase can. Taking the phrase in the spirit it's intended would lead one not to consider it sexist, though if you take the position that any mention of sex (or any reference to old-world patriarchy) in speech is inherently wrong we'd be here all day.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#65

Post by Nursie »

peterwwillis wrote: post #64
Nursie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also "A Gentlemen's Agreement". Personally I think the language police can go and do something gender-appropriate and painful to themselves, but after the nature of that particular shitstorm, it does seem a touch out of place!

The definition of the phrase ("An arrangement or understanding which is based upon the trust of both or all parties, rather than being legally binding") doesn't specify a particular gender, though a word in the phrase can. Taking the phrase in the spirit it's intended would lead one not to consider it sexist, though if you take the position that any mention of sex (or any reference to old-world patriarchy) in speech…

That's why I said I have no time for the language police!

I find it an interesting phrase to have chosen for an article title in light of what the recent furore is all about, but not an offensive one. Then again I'm rather hard to offend.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#66

Post by steven2012 »

The company I work for was disrupted by SendGrid's downtime, so this very question was something I was actually thinking about. I'm on the fence about this.

One of my former bosses told me that you never take advantage of a competitor's bad press, because who knows when it will be you that get's the bad press. It makes sense, because you don't want to look opportunistic on someone else's bad luck.

But if you're a startup, and you need to get some traction against a competitor, it might be a good way to get some new customers. You better be able to live up to your claims though otherwise your entire credibility is in question.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#67

Post by pseut »

mindcrime wrote: post #48
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…

So you thought it is loable to not exploit your opponents weaknesses? There's a big difference between exploiting a weakness in general, and taking advantage of an extraordinary circumstance that harms your competitor. To me, this comes down to sportsmanship. To use a bit of an analogy... I wrestled in high-school. We trained to identify weaknesses in the game of our opponents, so I might well enter into a match with…

I like the general sentiment, and I generally act the same way, but I can't help but think, "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying." Another analogy: I played tennis in high school and in every match I've played in my life, there are no refs and the players call balls in or out on their own. Some people cheat on that and, all else equal, they tend to win more points. If I had millions of dollars at stake on these matches, I'd be a hell of a lot more likely to cheat than I did. As it was, I'd try to call things fair unless my opponent was cheating; then I'd blatantly call balls out to, um, "persuade" my opponent to knock it off. None of your opponents choked you in high school? No hard to see punches?

The analogy somewhat falls apart because reputation matters more in business: the OP is to some degree PR.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#68

Post by larrys »

hnolable wrote: post #10

For those who don't know, it was Dyn. I personally liked the email. While sendgrid was down we were running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find a replacement. We started setting up postmark but didn't get it up before sendgrid came back up. We've been using DynECT for DNS for a long time and it's been perfect. Having them remind us they do email (at a time when it was critically needed) was act…

Why do you feel it was dyn? I got that email and didn't remember it referring to anything in particular. I just took another look and here is the copy:

"In today's demand-driven marketing world, getting email into the inbox and sending that email is as crucial as turning on the lights in the morning. Social media is awesome, but when it comes to the most trusted form of communication with customers, prospects and fans, email wins hands down.

See that graphic above? That's a screenshot from about an hour ago, a visual representation of where emails sent through our servers are being read at that instant around the world. At a billion+ messages sent a month, there's no better time to move your email delivery services to Dyn.

We've relaunched our packages, introducing an entry-level option for just $3 per month -- roughly the amount of a large coffee. Isn't your transactional email program worth more than that?

It's time to deliver through Dyn. Sign up now. Send today. Be successful tomorrow."

Explain why you feel that a) dyn sent this in reaction to the "situation" and b) even if they did how this was a bad thing.

By the way here is the dyn.com blog post I'm not seeing anything there that dovetails and makes them the company the OP is referring to:

http://dyn.com/blog/email-delivery-dynect-deliverability-sca...

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#69

Post by xtrumanx »

jusben1369 wrote: post #49
cryptoz wrote: post #27

By writing this post, you're actively working to benefit from someone else's outage. A bit hypocritical, no? Hitting the front page of HN with a post talking about how great you are? Yeah, okay, you're not trying to benefit off this outage at all.

You do realize the logic of your argument results in "You can't comment on this because any exposure you receive based on your comment makes you a hypocrite based your comments"

I disagree. I don't know Wildbit or who their competitors are. All it took for me to figure out the "shitstorm" that was referenced was to hover over the link.

The same message could have been made with no reference to SendGrid but they chose not to. Whether that was a conscious decision is unknown.

Re: A gentlemen's agreement

#70

Post by juan_juarez »

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.

If you actually have the infrastructure and ops to withstand a freak DDOS, you've got a leg to stand on. Taking advantage of a freak shitstorm to steal clients is dishonest because you have just been lucky enough to avoid a shitstorm. In all reality, the people that just went through the DDOS will be better prepared to stand up to one in the future than a system/team that hasn't recovered from one.
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