The Customer Service That Wasn’t
My lovely girlfriend and I were out trying to find some good boxing day sales earlier this week. We made away OK, but of course, I sunk a little deeper into debt. Ah well, I got some nice shirts in the process so it was all worth it in the end.
We stopped for a high-quality meal at Burger King, and after going back in to get my second burger, we decided to stop by the DVD store that had newly opened across the street. After all, they had a big sign on the window that said "grand opening - boxing day sales!" so, it’s a win-win.
There was noone there. Let me shed some insight into why - or, at least, my opinion why.
First off, the DVD organization was horrible. If you walked along the wall (which was large racks of cases in alphabetical order), your eyes got terribly lost, very quickly. Then, you needed to contend with the DVD islands. These islands were organized into strange groupings, that wouldn’t be so strange if all movies were arranged that way. They just weren’t groups you’d see everyday. Things such as silent films, all Canadian, box sets, etc… all appeared. There wasn’t really a top-40 section per se, or new releases. Everything was kind of mashed.
This is bad news; if the store made it easy to find the DVD’s they were looking for instead of getting confused and feeling dwarfed by the number of items, they’d make more money.
Now, we found some movies we wanted to buy. They were good, and I would have loved to be sure. We got up to the front, I gave them the worn out MasterCard, and voila — didn’t work. Tried it again, and same thing. This went on for another 5 tries before I offered up by debit card. Same thing, nothing was working. OK, the guy at the counter tries changing the phone line, try again (MasterCard & Debit Card), and nothing.
Now, what would I do here? As a manager, I’d make sure that the clerk had the ability to say, "hey, we’re really sorry that you couldn’t complete your purchase. You have three DVD’s here — take one for free, and we’ll put the others on hold for you to come back."
Did they do that? Nope. They put all the DVD’s on hold. Will I go back? No way. They were nice, don’t get me wrong — just not as on the ball as I would’ve expected, especially when the store just opened, and you could still smell the newness. Oh well, I’ll make sure to pick-up what I was going to at another store in the near future.
Oh, and my girlfriend (the lovely one mentioned at the top of the post) found the BEST thing ever. There’s a Canadian clothing company called Smart Set that had an amazing ad campaign run in the Summer / Fall of this year. The song was custom-written for the ad, so you could never get it. Well — they released it for download, and three others from their campaign as well. Go to their site and click on "Fun Extras" in the Flash menu on the right, and then "Download the Music" — enjoy. The prime pick is You Are So Beautiful.
I’m off to get some Kraft Dinner. Oh yah, baby.
Procrastination
I am so guilty of procrastination, and have been ever since I can remember. My Mom used to get really angry with me about it, as it hindered me from doing my school work. I’ve realized a few things since then, and have come to see it’s a problem that everyone has to deal with. I came across a cool article on the subject, and recognized that it didn’t talk about one thing that I use to pull myself out of this brutal time killer - opportunity cost.
Google defines opportunity cost as such:
"The difference between the yield that funds earn in one use and the yield they could have earned had they been placed in an alternative investment generating the highest yield available."
This is a little more descriptive than the definition I have in my head:
"What you pay for doing one thing instead of another."
Thinking about this each time I need to sit down and do something, and I find myself doing something else helps me keep on track. Of course, there is also the inspiration factor. I find my pool of inspiration drawing from more and more each day. Here are a few things that I’ve found to be really effective:
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Hillman Curtis, and his books
This list goes on and on. There is a common denominator between each and every one — it’s what I find inspiring about them. It’s their clear passion for what they do — it can be found in every single word they write. It’s hard not to get excited reading a blog post from Scoble about Windows Vista, or from Brad Feld about term sheets. It’s totally contagious, and I love it.
Keep it up everyone.
SQL - Re-Loaded
I’ve been using MySQL for quite some time now, and have been anxiously awaiting the release of MySQL 5.0. Well, it happened a while ago, and I am not playing around with it.
I am a big fan of the things that MySQL did not have up until this point - triggers, stored procedures, etc… I am not going to pretend like I have a handle on using them within the framwork yet. PHP MyAdmin does not yet support their creation / management through their time-saving UI, so it’s back to command line for me. Yikes — I’m pretty rusty. Being all holed up in a nice cushy office job has taken some of the shine I once had on my coding abilities when I was doing it everyday.
Ah, no matter. That’s what Christmas day is for, right? That, and going to see newly opened movies.
Happy Holidays!
95% Uptime
As we progress further into the whole Web 2.0 concept, an increasing level of importance will be placed on uptime. I thought the best way to start was to define "uptime". Google offers this:
"The amount of time a web site is available. The industry benchmark at this point in time for availability is 99.99%." - Google Definition
The question that nags me a little, is does 99.99% make a good benchmark? I don’t believe it does; it’s more of a stretch target. Is it feasible that applications running on servers, which are sometimes extremely far away from their users, are up for nearly 100% of the time?
I still feel the idea of executing full-blown applications over the Web is still a relatively "new" concept. If the industry benchmark is currently 99.9%, how long until it reaches 100%? It can’t be too far off…and when it hits, some SLA’s are going to cause CEO’s to lose many nights of sleep.
There is an article on C|Net about how Salesforce.com suffered its longest outage ever. It was for 7.5 hours over the course of a day, so almost an entire business day. Will this affect SLA’s? Not if Salesforce.com is up from now until the end of the month with only regularly scheduled outages. So, therein lies the ability to achieve this seemingly impossible 99.9% dream. It’s based on aggregate numbers. There are 8,760 hours in a year. To go above an beyond a common, "industry standard" SLA, a Web-based service would have to be up for the entire 8,760 hours. However, I’d say it’s a good guess to assume that most will schedule roughly 2-3 hours per month (in non-peak times) to do maintenance. That leaves 8,736 hours in a year. If we knock that back to 99.9% of the time, we’re left with 8,727.264 hours.
How does this work for Salesforce.com? Well, they proclaim on their site they live up to the 99.9% figure:
"In the year 2000, salesforce.com achieved a practically unheard-of 99.9% scheduled uptime level." - Salesforce.com Quote
Let’s work with that 7.5 hour outage they had today. If we remove that from the 8,727.264 figure, we’re left with 8,719.764. We’re left with 99.914% uptime, which is still pretty damn awesome in my book.
If you are still with me, you are a saint in my book. Thank you. Do I have a point? I hope so. It is simply that I don’t want exciting Web-based services like:
Get hit in the press when they go down. It can be argued both ways: it spins a buying decision positively, or it spins a buying decision negatively. Look at Salesforce.com. They have an awesome reputation in the Industry and are used by a ton of people everyday. Did it piss folks off they couldn’t get access to their leads and other data for over 7 hours? Of course. Does it mean that a business is going to make a huge investment and switch over to another service? I don’t think so. At the end of the day, it will only help a company like Salesforce.com as it brings generates added buzz.
What if Basecamp started getting stories written about the downtime it was experiencing because of a good thing (increased business / usage / etc…), and they lose hard-earned revenue because of it? This is why I think having 99.99% as the industry target is somewhat of a lark. It should be more like 95%, since that’s when the actual hours start to show impact. It would take an outage of over 700 hours to knock Salesforce.com down to that level. Since 99.99% will always just "be there", floating in the consumer’s collective conscience, it’s easy to set 95% as more realistic. If a company hovers between 97 and 98%, that’s awesome. If they are running down around 80%, you know there may be some issues to look into further.
At the end of the day, there are much more important things that a business can be judged on other than its uptime. Look, hardware is awesome nowadays, the coding is getting better by the line, and the means in which it can be delivered and charged for are increasingly complex and creative. The right fit needs to be the focus and less on "99.99%". That’s just my opinion - but I don’t really know much.
Get Out There
Folks have been in that "just execute" type of mood. Rick Segal just made a great post about getting out there, and in essence, putting all the bullshit behind you and just getting things done.
There’s no better feeling than keeping this at the forefront of your mind each day. It really helps - no lie. To be honest, I’ve been failing at it myself, and have been slowing down a little as a result. Thanks for waking me up again, Rick. Now is the best time to put all that crap in the past and just freakin’ get things done.
