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Pastimes : Silicon Investor ThinkTank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BryanB who wrote (1537)	7/6/2000 10:17:31 PM
From: Razorbak	Respond to of 3372

Bryan: Thanks for answering all of the questions posed by OMD. Thanks also for standing up and taking the heat as your organization's leader. I, for one, greatly appreciate direct communication from the top when things go wrong. Razor

To: BryanB who wrote (1537)	7/7/2000 2:11:45 AM
From: Pink Minion	Respond to of 3372

2. What testing was performed on the database changeover before it went live. BB - Apparently, not enough. :) I don't think that's funny, but it's about par (shooting for eagle). This was a major change. A lot more major than the user interface code change. That is fluff code. You provided a beta site then for us to test out, you should have done it this time. I much rather be asked than forced to test major changes (that's why their called beta releases). You can forget about two weeks, but that's my Dilbert experience talking.

To: BryanB who wrote (1537)	7/7/2000 3:12:17 AM
From: levy	Respond to of 3372

Bryan regarding "14. Do you believe that SI should refund its members' money for the past week? BB - We have something in mind along these lines and will be sending another Mass PM shortly." First of all I'd like to say no amount of money could repair the damage...just thinking about all the stress you have put on me begins to make me nauseated...I can't sleep at night knowing and thinking about what has happened...thats why I am here right now posting at this late hour....that being said, this idea of yours is great and makes all the complaining worth while. So I want an invitation to the next great GO2NET party, otherwise the complaining continues.

To: BryanB who wrote (1537)	7/7/2000 11:51:58 AM
From: IEarnedIt	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3372

Bryan! Exactly what many have been trying to tell you from Day One. <<13. Do you personally think it was appropriate for SI to wait nearly six full days before issuing a statement to its members about the problems associated with the upgrade? BB - Boy, that's a tough one. There's an old saying, "When you're knee-deep in alligators, it's tough to remember that your original mission was to drain the swamp." We didn't issue a statement, because we didn't have complete information. In hindsight, we probably should have at least said, "We aware of the problems, and we're working our butts off to fix them." Again, my apologies.>> You have lumped your membership into the "swamp" and have not cared what we think, what we feel or what we say. So much so that in the middle of a Major Crisis you don't even THINK to consider what is going on with US and completely FORGET that we even exist or may need or want some form of communication. Bryan I commend your honesty in even admitting this to be true. That took guts. It is something we have all felt for quite some time. It has gotten to the point where I have felt you are either intentionally working hard at ruining SI or are incredibly stupid or both. At this point, it is history and I for one hope that you have learned a very hard lesson and that lesson is this. Your membership IS your bread and butter. Without us SI is nothing. Please stop attempting to tell us what we want and start "listening" to what we are saying. The old SI was based on a premise. That being that sophisticated investors had a place on the net to communicate with each other minus having to contend with the "yahoos" elsewhere AND that membership was more than willing to pay for the privilege of doing so. ALL of the other "bells & whistles" that you continue to attempt to jam down our throats are available elsewhere on the net, some free, some not. Great if you want to offer them BUT NEVER at the expense of cutting our ability to communicate with one another in the manner that we all joined SI to do. <<14. Do you believe that SI should refund its members' money for the past week? BB - We have something in mind along these lines and will be sending another Mass PM shortly.>> It ain't the money Bryan. IMO I'd like to see SI readopt the original concept of the Dryers as firm policy and assure that it remains in place. SI is an international net community. It's own city in cyberspace, if you will and any city manager has the obligation and duty to insure that the residents of that city are well cared for even through rebuilding and change. The residents must be his/her first thought. I don't think you are ever going to get 100% agreement. That's why cities have elections BUT to consistently ignore or decide what is best for your citizens is a huge mistake. I hope you have learned that and I hope that you will pay better attention in the future. You have a choice here Bryan. I hope you make the right one. Sincerely, JD JD

To: BryanB who wrote (1537)	7/7/2000 3:38:36 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3372

Bryan, I logged in this afternoon while on vacation and found your post. A pleasant surprise. Thank you for your answers. I commend you for taking on the questions. I also do not wish to get into an extended debate. Suffice it to say that I found several of the answers refreshing, but a couple of them were very troubling. To wit: 1. On #5, I gave you the exact words that were attributed to Jill, but you dodged #6 by saying you didn't really know what Jill said (I suppose you could ask her...). I meant by #6 to pose the question, is the statement attributed to Jill true or false. It's the "we immediately fixed the problem" part of her statement that disturbs me, because it was clear to me as a user that the problem was not fixed, and your answer to #11 suggests that you knew all along that the userid problem had not been fixed in that the root cause had not been identified. And we, the users/content providers, were struggling with a site where it sure didn't seem like the problems were "fixed." Studying how Intel and Cisco have handled past major performance issues on a PR level would be an instructive exercise for you to cascade down through your organization. Stuff happens, everybody knows that and will tolerate it up to a point. It's how the stuff is handled that separates the good organizations from the bad. When your B-school alma mater does case studies of corporate crisis management and damage control, Intel and Cisco will be on the "this is how you do it" side. SI should strive to get there in the future too. 2. In the "Did Busby change his post" questions (8-9), I did not mean that he posted something and then changed it, but rather that he had written something and, before posting it, been ordered to change it. (My experiences make me a highly suspicious character, I guess <g>). I think your answers imply that whatever changes he made were done on his own, and I can certainly accept your answer on that level, but I found it a little troubling that the answers were being couched in terms of him not changing or removing anything from "a posted message." The thrust of the question was, did he write something which was ordered sanitized before it was posted in the first place? I think your answer was, "no, that didn't happen," but in a literal sense we were talking past one another a little. 3. Your answer to #11 really, really concerns me. Not the answer so much as the sequence of events and SI thought process it describes. I gather that SI essentially knew that the userid problem might very well resurface and chose, deliberately, to "test" that notion on a live site so that the programmers could "watch for it." Moreover, because that was the plan, SI was reluctant to issue a statement until it had a chance to do that. I am willing to stand corrected, but that sounds an awful lot like crashing a car into a wall, extracting the injured from the wreckage, then, in an effort to figure out why the car crashed, putting the injured back into the car, revving it up and running into the same wall all over again. What the hell, they're already injured anyhow, what will a few more abrasions matter? (Feel free to take exception to this analogy, I just wanted to inform you how that answer made me feel.) Would it have not been better to cut off the site's link to the outside world but leave it up internally, then see why it was happening and fixing it? (I am not a programmer by any means, but that alternative seems logical to me.) 4. As for hiring more programmers (or perhaps better ones), I meant the question as a way to encourage you to increase headcount and salaries. Which you probably understand is the real issue. These are all quibbles, and in my view important ones. But I don't want to lose sight of the fact that, in the course of a difficult week and some troubling questions, you did make an honest effort to answer them and provided answers even though the questions were uncomfortable to say the least. I really, really respect that. We can all sit back in our armchairs and nitpick and criticize (I guess you already know we can do that <g>), but in the end that doesn't do anybody any good. It is solving the crisis and improving the processes and dealing with the damage that was left behind that does good. I thought your answers for the most part were a constructive way to help accomplish that. Thank you.