This doesn't feel like an oversight or an accident. It'll be interesting to see how they try to explain this away.
Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#12Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community? How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC? Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.
It's a pretty good way to get the bill paid to be honest
I also run a B2B SaaS and I have found that over time the customers who I think are going to be terrible for paying, typically tend to be very good at paying and the customers who I think are going to be very good for paying (in that they have good standing in the community in things like that) tend to be pretty bad at paying on time (and with NET30 and all)
Ultimately I don't really understand why I shouldn't be paid on time (I've got to live too, and I have suppliers likewise) so I think this is pretty fair game, I sold you a product under the promise that you would pay in 30 days, if you're incapable of doing that (ignoring exceptional reasons) I don't necessarily want to go and lend you extra credit just because you're Mozilla
Having a terrible accounts receivable department isn't a exceptional reason.
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#13Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community? How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC? Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.
Totally agree but at least I don't know more about how long this has been developing for and what attempts have been made at curing it - if this is indeed the intention...
There's a thread here suggesting the idea that it's a stunt to get extort more money from donors. While I wouldn't go quite as far, I think it's undeniable that there's a rift between long time users of Mozilla products and their current strategies (or at least their tactics if they don't have a strategy).
I still believe Firefox is the best browser out there, mainly because they've resisted the temptation to take ad blocking APIs away but having to disable all suggested xyz, save to cloud, experiments, user metrics, ... Just takes a while and leaves you with little trust.
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#14I suspect the moral of the story is devops and operations staff need to keep all payments, secret rotations, certificate expirations, etc. on a calendar so no one forgets to pay the bills. I hope the employee who forgot to pay the bill learns from this.
You do know most companies in the world have a department specifically for handling financial matters, right? (Hint: it's not the IT department)
Also, I don't know if you're aware of this, but technology has advanced sufficiently that nobody needs to manually pay a monthly bill anymore. I know it sounds crazy, but there's these things called "bill pay", and "recurring credit card changes", that have existed for 20ish years now. Might want to read up on the latest trends!
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#15Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community? How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC? Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.
It's a pretty good way to get the bill paid to be honest I also run a B2B SaaS and I have found that over time the customers who I think are going to be terrible for paying, typically tend to be very good at paying and the customers who I think are going to be very good for paying (in that they have good standing in the community in things like that) tend to be pretty bad at paying on time (and with NET30 and all) Ul…
Because if you don’t, they might go somewhere else.
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#16I suspect the moral of the story is devops and operations staff need to keep all payments, secret rotations, certificate expirations, etc. on a calendar so no one forgets to pay the bills. I hope the employee who forgot to pay the bill learns from this.
Ops is an interesting domain, nobody knows what they do until they don't do it; so everyone wants the jobs to disappear, and when they do it's fun what happens. I'm beyond certain that someone will reply "use a cloud provider", which is ironic, as cloud providers just concentrate these kinds of ops people and charge you through the nose (often an order of magnitude more in my experience) than having people responsibl…
I agree, ops is like a toilet. Nobody cares, until it does not work.
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#17Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community? How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC? Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.
It's a pretty good way to get the bill paid to be honest I also run a B2B SaaS and I have found that over time the customers who I think are going to be terrible for paying, typically tend to be very good at paying and the customers who I think are going to be very good for paying (in that they have good standing in the community in things like that) tend to be pretty bad at paying on time (and with NET30 and all) Ul…
I'm totally with you on wanting to get paid in a timely manner. (I used to do NET 10 for consulting invoices.)
But you'd do a courtesy call before cutting off a B2B customer? Even just to make sure they got the bill, and that a payment they made hadn't mistakenly not been credited. Which would be an opportunity for an immediate funds transfer or CC charge, if necessary to keep the site up. (Also an opportunity for them to say, "Actually, if you could just make it read-only until the news cycle is over..." :)
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#18Organization with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and spend can't maintain servers? I would wonder if this is really something much simpler: an excuse to make things read-only, while implying that people really should give them money if they want things to work. Really, I can't lose any more respect for Mozilla at this point. It's all gone.
If you have ever done subcontracting work or been a supplier to a major automotive corps, you’ll know the can be extremely late to pay at times. They use their muscle to get a free line of credit from their suppliers by simply demanding to get an extra 30 days on their deadline every month.
Not saying this is Mozilla’s policy, just pointing out it may be an accident or it may be a lack of funds, or something entirely different.
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#19It makes sense to correct the title. Currently it says „Mozilla site down…“ but it is not the front page and not „down“, so most people using Mozilla products are not affected.
Better version would be „One of Mozilla sites is in read-only mode…“
Re: Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]
#20Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community? How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC? Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.
Well you don't know how long it has been unpaid for and I think it's good that it's transparent so that at least there is no confusion about why it's in read-only mode