"Better" was probably the wrong term, but if you start thinking about enterprise technology, a lot of it is actually just straight up based on how much cost savings or performance improvement something can deliver (e.g., a DB that gives an order of magnitude performance improvement for certain verticals). You're right that consumer stuff is a different story.
And as far as the sales comment below...as mentioned in the post, sometimes it's not worth me shoving it down their throat if they're not going to be pumped about coming in to work everyday.
"sometimes it's not worth me shoving it down their throat if they're not going to be pumped about coming in to work everyday."
Good sales pitches don't involve feelings of having things shoved down one's throat. Don't think "sales" in the slick marketing vernacular -- think translation that your team members can understand, in spite of their (in)familiarity with the market.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. We understand where you're coming from, but we wanted to present the "business side" as it's own independent view. And while you're correct that Part 1 is a bit short, it was much too long to condense into one readable post.
Ultimately, we're still learning and we'll keep your points in mind for next time.
Stop wasting our time with this. Post it when it's done, divided into parts or not.
I will read part 1 and only part 1 if that's the only one available at the time it was posted. I will not return to your site to look for that content again.
I thought: Maybe someone (me) can write a little app that notifies you after the story is completed. But I will not, this behavior should not be stimulated. If you have something to say finish what you want to say and then post it to HN. It's not even possible to have a meaningful discussion right now.
TL;DR: You're wrong. And you sound like someone from Yelp trying to "game the system" and write positive reviews about yourself. Maybe PG's algorithms should censor you without any evidence?
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My parents had the exact same experience as in the article.
- A few years ago, they didn't really know what yelp was, but a customer was surprised that the reviews up there were pretty bad, mostly just from customers who were upset we had to send them letters after they didn't pay their bills.
- We encouraged people to review the business on Yelp. Despite numerous people (including a couple Yelp Elites) writing positive real reviews, interestingly, none of the reviews showed up on Yelp.
- Customers told us their reviews had not shown up, and when we called Yelp to find out why, a few reps either claimed there was no way to put the reviews back or they denied their existence. The one thing they did have in common was they promised things would be "fixed" if we advertised with them. I'm pretty sure that's closer to extortion than smart business.
- Last week, my dad finally caved and placed some ads on Yelp.
- Within an hour, there were suddenly dozens of additional reviews on there for the business, and the rating had shot up from 2 stars to 4.5 stars.
So let me ask you, if Yelp really thought those hidden reviews were trying to game the system, why were those reviews placed back when we agreed to spend some ad money? Yelp can't argue that their reviews are unbiased when stuff like this happens.
I have no affiliation with Yelp. Click on my username anytime if you want to read who I work with and some background. It's right out in the open. However, I had to look at your posts to learn that your new startup is in the local review/recommendation space which is something you should actually disclose when bashing a competitor.
If what you're saying about Yelp's ad reps and software is truthful, then you should be spreading your father's story far and wide (call your local newspaper, they'd love the story), and you should feel comfortable recommending that your father cease to do business with them (why did he?).
I didn't think you worked at Yelp, but you were defending them just like my parents' customers were defending them. And as you point out, it's wrong of me to accuse you of gaming the system without any evidence that you work for them. Doesn't feel that great, does it? You actually illustrated my point quite nicely.
Also, we're not really competing with Yelp at all, so I think it's all fair game. In fact, we're integrating with Yelp's API, since we do recognize that despite how screwed up I may think their business is, people still trust them.
And my father did it because the few hundred dollars he spent is paid back if it prevents a couple customers from leaving, or even if he doesn't have to spend another hour on the phone with them. Doesn't mean what they did is fair, though.
That doesn't surprise me.
Depending on the business, Yelp is powerful and you may have to play by their rule.
See my previous post earlier, at least my wife small business is not too dependent on Yelp because customers are signing for classes spread over 10 to 12 weeks.
But it's terrible to see the effect of purchasing Yelp ads change Yelp system so much!
We (a YC alum with 2 MIT grads) are working on our new project, Midtown Row. We've noticed there are a lot of awesome businesses in our area, but a lot of our friends still haven't heard of them for some reason. Moreover, whenever we went somewhere new, our friends would tell us a dozen places we had to check out while we were there. And when we did, we realized why.
Therefore, we came up with the idea of creating a marketplace to connect small brands and local businesses with customers they typically have not been able to reach (e.g., due to geography, marketing, or something else). We'd love some feedback on our landing page and on the concept.
The concept is difficult to give feedback on as it isn't entirely clear on how you'll be connecting the brands to the customers. Signed up for the mailing list, I'll see what happens from there.
Yes, it will be tough, but you will have time to earn money. Many MIT students work during the school year and in the summer to be able to pay for school. Here are some options for you if you do decide to go to MIT, all of which have been done by MIT students in the past:
1) Take that $100K.
2) Get a summer job: $10K - $15K saved right there (more if you do a hedge fund / finance gig over the summer)
3) Get a job over IAP. Another month's worth of salary.
4) Get a job at MIT. MIT's great about giving opportunities for students. You can get paid to do research through the UROP program. You can get paid be a grader, a lab assistant, a TA, a deskworker in your dorm (i.e., get paid to sit around while you do your psets)
5) Start a business
6) Get a job somewhere else. There's plenty of people willing to hire MIT kids part time, and plenty of those pay very well
7) Start a stock trading operation in your dorm
8) Learn poker
9) You get the point
One other thing you might try is to petition for financial aid and explain your situation. MIT typically lets you petition anything, although I don't know if that applies for financial aid.
Amazon makes it pretty clear that Availability Zones within the same region can fail simultaneously. In fact, a Region being down is defined as multiple AZs within that zone being down according to the SLA. And since that 99.95% promise applies to Regions and not AZs, multiple AZs within the same region being down will be fairly common.
Edit: One more point. In the SLA, you'll find the following: “Region Unavailable” and “Region Unavailability” means that more than one Availability Zone in which you are running an instance, within the same Region, is “Unavailable” to you. What it implies is that if you do not spread across multiple Availability Zones, you will then have less than 99.95% uptime. So spreading across AZs should still reduce your downtime, just not beyond that 99.95%
I have to disagree with you. The SLA is just a legal agreement that really serves to limit AWS's liability. Here's what the main EC2 page says:
"Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location."
That's the spec that everyone was building to, but that isn't what is happening. Of course you're right, multiple AZs can fail at the same time, but I read the above as saying that they should fail independently/coincidentally (until the entire Region fails).
We always, always use the SLA offered by a vendor as the basis for our information. We trust it more than any marketing page, sales pitch, tech support FAQ, or anything else. That's what they'll hide behind, so that's what I'll have in mind when I design my setup.
I think it's great to check the SLA. However, there's enough wiggle room in the AWS SLA that I think this outage could continue for the rest of the month, and Amazon would still not owe a penny. I don't even know that the SLA covers this outage, because network connectivity isn't affected.
Even if Amazon breach their SLA, I think they only have to refund 10% of one month's bill per year - i.e. a 1% discount. I suspect they'd make a good profit even if they paid out a full 10% refund every month.
Unless an SLA is accelerated - i.e. >100% refund - I don't think it's worth taking particularly seriously.
Of course if an SLA only guarantees 95% uptime, that's probably a big hint to design for failure!
It's a good analogy and I certainly accept your point. It could just be a marketing thing though:
Suppose it's the same hard disk with a black sticker instead of a blue sticker. Drive with 1 yr warranty @ $100, 5 yr warranty @ $150, 20% additional failure rate over the extra 4 years, 50% redemption rate on failed drives. Cost per replaced drives = 20% * 50% * ($100 + $30 processing costs) = $13 = $37 profit.
Totally fictitious numbers to try to prove my point, of course :-) But as the SLA becomes increasingly low in value, the signalling value decreases in my book.
One of them may be planning to be out of business, sell the HD business unit in 2 years, shove off the risk via financial wizardry, etc.
My guess is the great majority users will not RMA a dead hard drive after 4.5 years regardless of the stated warranty. Even if they did, it would only represent replacement with a future smallest-possible-capacity drive.
"Of course you're right, multiple AZs can fail at the same time, but I read the above as saying that they should fail independently/coincidentally."
As far as I know we've heard nothing to the contrary from Amazon - it's totally possible that multiple AZs happened to fail independently/coincidentally. Perhaps it was simultaneous equipment failure? Or maybe one AZ failed and a sufficient number of people attempted to "fail over" to another AZ causing a chain reaction of failure?
If I had to, I'd guess that AWS's messaging/monitoring/control infrastructure is likely to be the SPOF, as in the 2008 outage: http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html It's an obvious weak spot in the independence/isolation of AWS' nodes, and it would seem to be the one most likely to cause failure to reach across more than one AZ. (Apart from a stampede from one, affected AZ to others perhaps.)
I'm sorry, designing your service without taking in to account the SLA is just stupid. See how Netflix survived the failure for example.
Now if you understand the SLA and still choose not to do cross-region deployments, then you've taken a cost/complexity vs uptime trade-off, which may well be right for you. quora.com probably is ok - who cares if its down for a day?
The SLA uses great legal weasel words: "AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon EC2 available"
So anything that is beyond commercially reasonable is outside the SLA.
In truth, as with all businesses, the reputation for uptime weighs more heavily than the written contract. It will be interesting to see how the AWS people attempt to make amends.
"Commercially reasonable" is a standard legal term used to define efforts short of "best efforts". It allows for the party also look out for its own commercial interest in a way that's consistent with industry practice. So, for example, if Amazon had to choose between fulfilling the SLA and keeping it's own retail site up, it could be held liable under a "best efforts" standard but not under a "commercially reasonable" standard.
It's kind of unfair to describe these as "weasel words" when it's unlikely that any decent lawyer would let them sign up to something that exposes them to more liability than this. Customers who are using any cloud service provider have to expect reasonable steps to maintain availability, not an absolute promise.
Great point, I'd second that. Could even be due to the fact that Google is used to taking money from businesses, not consumers. Amazon and Apple, consumer-focused companies, probably know how to do a better job at getting us to spend our cash from all their other experience.
First, Top Gear is testing on track conditions, and that will certainly give different results than the 220 mile range found on the EPA's ideal testing conditions. Top Gear has previously shown that a BMW M3 gets better mileage than a Prius in track conditions, but I don't think anyone believes this is representative of the cars on the whole.
Second, there's very few data points on the range aside from Tesla's press releases that I can find, but the two I can find are much closer to Top Gear's number and were also from less aggressive testing than what Top Gear did:
93 miles: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20080124/green/398811820/163...
The main problem I think is that the episode showed the Tesla apparently out of juice, being pushed into a hanger by the crew. Clarkson's closing comments were along the lines of 'it doesn't work' (before hailing fuel-cell cars as the future because they can go further without a charge).
Tesla are arguing that this event was staged and in the script produced the day before the road test was filmed, that the car didn't actually run out of power on the test track, and that the episode unfairly paints the vehicle in a bad light.
It's worth remembering that the modern Top Gear is an entertainment show that happens to be about cars. It hasn't been about accurate consumer reviews for many years, it's very scripted and not at all unbiased.
So first, the 55 mile claim was one of the 5 main points of the suit, which is why I brought it up.
And while I agree that much of new Top Gear is entertainment, I'm just saying that based on other information available, Top Gear doesn't look so outrageous. Autoweek also stated that their car died down well before the 220 mile range and went into a reduced power mode.
Moreover, Top Gear isn't the first to point out mechanical or electrical problems on a Tesla (couple examples below). The car itself was delayed because of such problems. And I along with most people also be worried if some fuse controlling my brakes was busted.
And in the episode, they don't hail fuel-cells because they go further without a charge, they hail them because they fit with the model of car ownership that we're used to, allowing you to drive however long you want and just fill up intermediately.
Perhaps I had a poor choice of words, but I certainly understand what Tesla is claiming. I'm more just confused that they would file suit like this especially given that from what I can tell, Top Gear's claims seem valid given not only the accounts of the situation, but also reviews from other publications.
Edit: Speaking of fiduciary duty, Tesla's apparently asking for "not more than £100,000" in damages, so I'd say this is a waste of the shareholders' and taxpayer money (given its $0.5B bailout).
http://www.motorauthority.com/blog/1057705_tesla-vs-topgear-...
Not quite sure where Tesla is expecting this to be headed towards? Are they expecting the compensation to cover their sales? Or better sales after the suit? Or do they really want not to have anymore review coverage? Or someone in Tesla really hates Top gear/Stig/Clarkson?
Tesla's corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to respond to something that hurts their brand this badly. Top Gear is the most popular car review show globally with around 350 million viewers world-wide.
Apparently a lawsuit is the best response they could come up with.
So they'll be suing themselves now? Because this lawsuit is hurting their brand a lot more than the Top Gear review did.
I remember seeing it when it came out, and thinking how positive it was. Sure, Jeremy ridiculed it for running out of power, but at the same time he spent a long time talking about how fast it was. From memory he said something like "if this is the future, bring it on"
By your logic, what should Audi do when he said (paraphrasing): "All Audi drivers are cocks"?
Apparently their fiduciary duty also includes waiting almost 3 years after the review to finally do react. Seems like well-timed headline grabbing to me. I'm sure in 3 years they'll sue me for saying that.
On your point #3. Actually, you are incorrect. Profit is revenue - all costs. Whether or not it counts as COGS is only relevant for gross margin, a metric which isn't the best to judge software companies. R&D is an expense, so it affects your profitability and your net margin. If your company spends $100 less, that's $100 more you have in the bank, $100 less that you need to sell people on.
gross margin is unquestionably the metric used to gauge software companies. That's why we are so scalable. Especially SaaS. It's because our COGS are typically so low that we can afford relatively large R&D budgets (compared to other industries).
Lots of software companies have gross margin's north of 60% or even 80% (GOOG, afaik) which is unheard of in other industries.
If you focus your business on growing revenue and having a reasonable gross profit margin, you are focusing on the right knobs. If you are focusing on decreasing R&D as a means of maximizing net profit, you are focused on the wrong things.
And as far as the sales comment below...as mentioned in the post, sometimes it's not worth me shoving it down their throat if they're not going to be pumped about coming in to work everyday.