171–180 of 193 posts
What I'm interesting in is a front end where the underlying payment provider can quickly be replaced when Stripe/PayPal etc cancel you (for any reason at all).
Spreedly used to be this, but they went enterprise-only, raised prices 30x, and become so customer-hostile that I recommend avoiding them now.
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> but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time. Microsoft's annual revenue is almost US$200 billion. Even if the migration would "cost them millions", they can easily afford it, it would not make any material difference to their ultimate financial position. And, it would actually be justifiable as an investment in their own ERP suite – "eating their own dogfood" would send a signal to their…
I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there'…
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We use Stripe Billing and it's gone very well overall, but the biggest miss for us is that Stripe conflates "contract term" with "billing frequency." We sign up customers for annual contracts but bill them monthly, but Stripe Billing only understands the "bill monthly" part of that. Are there any plans for first-class contract term support coming?
This is one of the darkest dark patterns I'm glad they don't allow it
If you rent a home, you pay monthly despite the contact lasting a year or longer. If are employed you probably get paid monthly, even with a fixed contract duration of 6 months or a year.
Auto-renewing yearly contracts, on the other hand, are definitely a dark pattern. Luckily many places are outlawing it, so as an alternative a 12-month contract will often automatically convert to a monthly one at the end.
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I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there'…
It’s a major distraction even if they have money and resources. I am a CFO who has purchased/integrated multiple products from SAP/Oracle/etc (different companies). I’ve never once factored into my purchasing decisions whether they were dogfooding or not. If I was told they were dogfooding, I’d have placed zero value on that. That’s just me though.
[0] Recent example - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/oracle-at-oracle/ - although they were saying similar things 15 years ago, albeit minus the cloud part
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Just personally, I value companies who "dogfood" their products a lot more than similar companies that don't. An example is 3D printers. Prusa makes fantastic 3D printers, and about half of the structural parts for their printers are printed on their own printers. So they have 600 of their own 3D printers printing 24/7 printing their own parts. That means they are forced to address long-term durability and reliabilit…
I shuddered a bit when i heard that some GCP services are just external wrappers over internal systems. Feels like a bad setup for everyone involved: customers, wrapper owners and internal system owners.
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I used to work for Oracle. I can recall Oracle sales reps telling me how important it was that we internally used the software we sold to our customers, because if we didn't trust it with our own business, why should they trust it with theirs? Maybe Microsoft doesn't think the same way? Of course, Oracle has so many different software offerings (duplication due to acquisitions, and lots of industry-specific offerings…
Agreed, it's definitely not one size fits all. The story of Amazon migrating off Oracle is probably in the same ballpark (if that story is true - I don't know one way or the other). To which point, again... it's a totally valid perspective that you have!
Amazon themselves say it is true: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
Although note this small print:
> Amazon’s Consumer business just turned off its final Oracle database (some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated).
No idea what those “third-party applications” are and how significant they are - they could be insignificant fringes or extremely core business systems (such as payroll or general ledger)
Whenever I hear about a US based payment processor, I feel compelled to mention UPI, India's Unified Payment Interface. Basically, with fairly modest investment, the Indian government put together a system to allow instant transactions between bank accounts. There are no transaction fees. We have so many companies (sometimes the same company with multiple faces - Paypal/Venmo, Stripe, Clover, Square, all of whom want…
You're right there is no technical reason, but there is a very strong political reason.
They way things are now, people in the US have to pay for a lot of things that people don't pay for in other countries. Bank Transfers is just one example. Health Insurance (and care) is another. Higher education. Filing taxes. This list is endless.
Making people pay for this stuff is extremely good for the economy, and probably a big part of the reason the USA has the highest GDP.
It also makes many, many hundreds of billions of dollars for those entrenched in those industries, who will spend tens upon tens of billions of dollars lobbying to make sure it never changes.
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I shuddered a bit when i heard that some GCP services are just external wrappers over internal systems. Feels like a bad setup for everyone involved: customers, wrapper owners and internal system owners.
What services have you heard this about?
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Google has invested heavily in sound management in their rooms, and issued noise cancelling headphones to everyone awhile back they got to take home. That might explain some things.
But isn't Google Meet's background noise cancellation far superior to that of Zoom's? Or maybe I misunderstood your comment. EDIT: I see above that others have claimed the opposite, but my experience has been different. I simply cannot take a call from a cafe in Zoom without complaints, but Meets is regularly tolerable, according to those I meet with.
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So, same reason why Microsoft uses SAP instead of Microsoft Dynamics. They would use their own product if they were to start now, but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time.
Just personally, I value companies who "dogfood" their products a lot more than similar companies that don't. An example is 3D printers. Prusa makes fantastic 3D printers, and about half of the structural parts for their printers are printed on their own printers. So they have 600 of their own 3D printers printing 24/7 printing their own parts. That means they are forced to address long-term durability and reliabilit…