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What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

blog.mixlr.com

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Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#41

Post by bradleyland »

jmilloy wrote: post #38
rexreed wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article linked in the Mixlr blog post ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another... ) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls,…

Well, I wouldn't discount the bias in the New York Times; they have every incentive to maintain ongoing controversy. Also, notice that it's a NYT blog , which I take less seriously than a news article.

I don't think this can be understated. The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 24-hour news cycle.

I agree with the parent poster that the truth probably lies somewhere in between, but like you, I don't think we can give NYT much extra credit here.

I'm also surprised to see that more technologists aren't empathetic to the "tens of thousands of end users" matter. In a group of people over 100,000, we can begin to expect a fairly sizable number of users who have configuration issues that would cause their own host of problems. I'm not indemnifying Mixlr, but it's worth keeping in mind when finding the middle ground about what really happened.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#42

Post by bradleyland »

nashashmi wrote: post #17
jmilloy wrote: post #16

I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions: >Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for Okay, so what is Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have.…

It allows for multiple screens to be broadcasted and the screens to be sent to everybody. Everybody can also chime in. Apparently, it was a one way feed from the President to everyone else. Nobody could chime in. How is that a conference call.

There are plenty of scenarios where the term "conference call" is used to refer to one-to-many communications. For example, quarterly shareholder conference calls are usually one-to-many calls. You can dial in, but you can't speak.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#43

Post by auctiontheory »

jmilloy wrote: post #16

I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions: >Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for Okay, so what is Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have.…

I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr.

Yup. Huge opportunity missed - they should have hired a real writer to tell the story, instead of "this happened, then this happened, then ..."

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#44

Post by abbottry »

40 comments, not one trace of "Congrats", who cares what Obamas intentions were, for any founder out there you know this is exciting -- HN is becoming difficult to read.

Congrats guys, it has to feel great having something like this go so well!

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#45

Post by dragonwriter »

bradleyland wrote: post #41
jmilloy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I wouldn't discount the bias in the New York Times; they have every incentive to maintain ongoing controversy. Also, notice that it's a NYT blog , which I take less seriously than a news article.

I don't think this can be understated. The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 24-hour news cycle. I agree with the parent poster that the truth probably lies somewhere in between, but like you, I don't think we can give NYT much extra credit here. I'm also surprised to see that more technologists aren't empathetic to the "tens of thousands of end users" matter. In a group of people over 100,000,…

> The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 2-hour news cycle.

I think you mean "...because advertising".

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#46

Post by rexreed »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #39
rexreed wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article linked in the Mixlr blog post ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another... ) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls,…

> I don't see what the incentive for NYT to overstate or mischaracterize things, unless just to cast Obama further into a negative light Perhaps the NYT blogger's editorial goal is to counteract the blame aimed at OFA / Obama by pointing it at Mixlr instead.

The NYT blog doesn't once mention Mixlr and instead refers constantly to this being something offered by OFA... so the reverse of what you state here.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#47

Post by clarky07 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #28

Meanwhile, even though we’re not US voters, our hats are off to the President and his team for being agile, using third party web services and trying to be as engaged as possible with his constituents. We love that he’s done an AMA on Reddit, that his team uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram regularly, and we’re seriously proud they now use Mixlr too. ------- Hardly. They do maintain some sort of vain presence, so a…

didn't they have planted questions too?

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#48

Post by clarky07 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #28

Meanwhile, even though we’re not US voters, our hats are off to the President and his team for being agile, using third party web services and trying to be as engaged as possible with his constituents. We love that he’s done an AMA on Reddit, that his team uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram regularly, and we’re seriously proud they now use Mixlr too. ------- Hardly. They do maintain some sort of vain presence, so a…

didn't they have planted questions too?

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#49

Post by clarky07 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #28

Meanwhile, even though we’re not US voters, our hats are off to the President and his team for being agile, using third party web services and trying to be as engaged as possible with his constituents. We love that he’s done an AMA on Reddit, that his team uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram regularly, and we’re seriously proud they now use Mixlr too. ------- Hardly. They do maintain some sort of vain presence, so a…

didn't they have planted questions too?

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#50

Post by mcenedella »

I disagree with this point, which is not supported by the facts:

"The press are now all over the OFA team and criticising their ability to procure technical solutions or web services (rightly or wrongly). But in this case, obviously we’re a third party service provider so this really has nothing to do with the President’s team’s ability to execute."

It is indeed a reflection of the President's team's ability to execute when they reach out to a vendor on a Friday for a Monday call, mangle the details so that the vendor and the audience have mis-set expectations, and, most importantly, did not do testing to determine whether or not their event will reflect well on their boss and organization.

They've done these calls before - for example, after the State of the Union: http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-ofa-c... -- so dropping this order in the lap of a new vendor with 72 hours to go almost guarantees that some mistake will happen.

I understand this is OFA, not the White House, and perhaps for a seat-of-the-pants campaign style event under normal circumstances, this would be excusable.

But these are not normal circumstances.

When your boss is under fire for his rollout of the most important government tech program since the Moon landing, and you arrange a call to discuss that rollout, it is imperative that you make sure the technology works. Guaranteed. No questions asked.

If you can't guarantee that, then don't use that vendor, don't do the event as a conference call, or don't do the event.

Why? The resulting PR mess, which might not be germane to a start-up tech audience, but is very germane to the Office of The President, will come and will be costly.

The post serves to reinforce the image of a management team around the President that does not understand that making very urgent requests of technologists does not mean that the technology will automatically obey.

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