please feel free to contact us with your comments
Thanks for the offer, John. I will.
<rant on>
Dear John:
Great, job, John! Nicely done, how you manage to pour gas on the raging fire. Finally, late in the day after nearly everyone here has struggled with this thing, given up, and gone home, you finally post something - but something that even start to own up to the massive bugs, security breaches, and out-and-out service failures we've all seen over and over today. Instead, in true bureacratic, Old-Economy doublespeak, you use sorry, cretinous euphemisms like "some site performance issues".
Did you ever read that copy of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" that somebody put on your desk last month? Or instead have you been taking lessons in public relations from Microsoft's crack legal team?
Our problems are not with "performance", John. Performance relates to something that more or less works properly but more slowly than one would like. Our problem is that you've taken something that was working reasonably well, which you then...
...made major changes to...
...without prior notice (other than a vague "scheduled downtime" PM a day or so earlier)...
...in the MIDDLE of a week...
....and did it without...OOPS! adequate (or any?) testing or QA...
And when those changes were found to be broken beyond hope of working, you...
...didn't think to roll back to a prior, working version...
...didn't bother to tell people about the issues (how long would a simple broadcast PM to your customers have taken?)...
...and still insist on pretending that there's nothing the matter.
In other words, our problems not with the site's performance. They're with your performance. Or, more accurately, the complete lack of it.
I won't even mention that you waited nearly 24 hours after the failures were clearly manifesting themselve before issuing this mamby-pamby, skirt-the-real-issues, corporate CYA feel-good-memo that actually makes the situation much worse. Instead of owning up to the problems, your missive (1) completely ignores them, and (2) pretends that everything's just hunky-dory now ("we will continue to monitor the site very closely", as if "monitoring" was all that you needed to do).
There's a reason SI is massively losing members and momentum to other competitive sites like Raging Bull, both in the number of postings and the number of new members gained. And - here's a clue, John - it's not about the $10/month you charge. It's about how you treat your customers, how you corrent (and own up to) your failures, and how much you actually act like you're running a real company instead of just playing DotComsRUs.
I sincerely hope that Go2Net uses this fine opportunity to re-evaluate SiliconInvestor's staffing requirements, so that you and others in management responsible for promulgating - and performing "damage control" for - this fiasco will have have lots of time off to consider their mistakes.
Yours in solidarity (and the probable non-renewal of my imminently-expiring SI membership),
-Rose-
</rant off>
Thanks. I feel much better now. |
