Having an operations team that can keep things going through adversity is a competitive advantage that doesn't come cheap.

Redundancy and ops talent cost money. If your competitor made a cost/benefit decision that let them down, I say tough luck.

True, but I don't think you can afford to have 100% uptime. Basically nobody can do that. Even in the heyday of the Bell system, Ma Bell couldn't quite guarantee 100% uptime. 99.9999999%, maybe, but do you have any idea how much engineering effort and work went into achieving that?

I won't be signing up for this.

What, acknowledging reality? Look, I don't think the OP was saying that you shouldn't compete on reliability and uptime and other quality guarantees. But if something extraordinary happens to a competitor - which could just as easily happen to you - then it's silly to launch a specific, targeted effort to try and steal away that competitor's customers in reaction that specific event.

There's a difference between a demonstrated pattern of better uptime/reliability, woven into a consistent marketing message over time, and a predatory attack reacting to a moment of weakness.

So not only is was the offending marketing not classy, it was based on a fantasy.

We've been using DynECT for DNS for a long time and it's been perfect. Having them remind us they do email (at a time when it was critically needed) was actually great. At this point I'm planning on signing up for it and using them as a failover for sendgrid.

"In today's demand-driven marketing world, getting email into the inbox and sending that email is as crucial as turning on the lights in the morning. Social media is awesome, but when it comes to the most trusted form of communication with customers, prospects and fans, email wins hands down.

See that graphic above? That's a screenshot from about an hour ago, a visual representation of where emails sent through our servers are being read at that instant around the world. At a billion+ messages sent a month, there's no better time to move your email delivery services to Dyn.

We've relaunched our packages, introducing an entry-level option for just $3 per month -- roughly the amount of a large coffee. Isn't your transactional email program worth more than that?

It's time to deliver through Dyn. Sign up now. Send today. Be successful tomorrow."

Explain why you feel that a) dyn sent this in reaction to the "situation" and b) even if they did how this was a bad thing.

By the way here is the dyn.com blog post I'm not seeing anything there that dovetails and makes them the company the OP is referring to:

http://dyn.com/blog/email-delivery-dynect-deliverability-sca...

What if you really do believe that you have a better service than that competitor? What if you can demonstrate better uptime/benefits/customer-service/whatever? Do you just sit around and wait until customers fall into your lap?

While I appreciate the sentiment for the current circumstances, I don't think it holds generally. It almost feels like the opposite of hustle.

This is very focused on the current circumstances, but applies to similar circumstances as they happen.

They found themselves somewhat embroiled in this situation simply by providing a similar service. She's not arguing against marketing your company as the best of the possible solutions, that's just good business. What she is arguing is that blatantly kicking someone while they're down and calling it "marketing" is dirty pool - especially while in the same breath making promises no company can keep.

1) or tennis on The West Wing

2) I do believe their post is in good faith, but I spent a chunk of my life dealing with politicians and I think seeing the gears makes one a bit cynical

If I ran a hosting service with better uptime than amazon I'd sure as hell let people know too.

"If your customer experiences a freak event that no one can really plan for trying to turn that into a win for yourself is inappropriate" - We should argue on the merits of that. Don't confuse this with a service that perhaps experiences ongoing issues. Those are material points that a buyer should know and are fair game to raise in marketing.

OTOH I can certainly see an exception when it comes to what is effectively digital terrorism.

There seems to be at least some belief that Adria was let go at least partly to stop the fallout from the DDOS attack.

You can't let 4channers get the idea that they can set policy decisions that affect others and ultimately have nothing to do with them.

Certainly, and I don't see the OP arguing against that. The OP just seems to be saying something that's analogous to the old schoolyard ethic of "don't kick someone when they're down".

If I can win customers by pointing out that company X is having problems and you wouldn't have those problems with my company (or at least would be less likely to) because we have superior infrastructure etc then I think it's perfectly fair to point that out.

If OTOH they are suffering as a consequence of some retard-spasm of the internetz that could just as easily have happened to us and more crucially is more likely to happen to us if 4chan get their way this time around.

Having suffered through some products with bi-weekly downtime, I tend to think competitors should be allowed tout whatever their strengths are including uptime if that’s one of them. And it doesn’t reflect poorly on them (in my eyes). When suffering I like to see solutions offered…

Of course most companies with horrible re-occuring downtime, have no serious competition… So there’s that.

I've no doubt Sendgrid have been DDOS'd before and survived, and that this was a significant attack, so can their competitors honestly say there's no chance they'd of not gone down in the same situation?

I agree - running attack ads after 1 random catastrophic event is in poor taste. But at some point - 3 in a year?, 3 in a month? - it becomes reasonable, and tasteful, to tout uptime as an advantage.

As another example: say a meteorite takes out your competitor's data centre. If you are running from independent data centres with capacity to handle a sudden failure of one, feel free to highlight that. If you're running from one data centre, you should probably just count yourself lucky that it happened to them and not you.

When your service is as relied upon as an email provider, it needs to have near perfect uptime in order to keep trust. People were tweeting @SendGrid wondering why it was down for hours, and were looking for other providers to pick up anyway.

The same message could have been made with no reference to SendGrid but they chose not to. Whether that was a conscious decision is unknown.

One of my former bosses told me that you never take advantage of a competitor's bad press, because who knows when it will be you that get's the bad press. It makes sense, because you don't want to look opportunistic on someone else's bad luck.

But if you're a startup, and you need to get some traction against a competitor, it might be a good way to get some new customers. You better be able to live up to your claims though otherwise your entire credibility is in question.

I have a story: a few years ago, the US had a nasty hurricane called Katrina. This hurricane directly hit New Orleans, and other cities. After this time, all insurance companies pulled all operations out... With exception of one. This company, once called Government Employee Insurance Company, realized that they could raise rates by 400% and be the only one willing to sell.

The company is Geico, run by Berkshire Hathaway.

So you say we shouldn't benefit from competitor's outages, but we can benefit from their failures of different types? Because every time you claim that you do something better than competition, it's simply you trying to benefit from their failure to do this thing right.

I think the line should be a bit further than you say. Benefiting from someone's downtime or any other kind of failure is perfectly fine, unless that downtime/failure wasn't easily avoidable. If the downtime/failure is because the company lack of professionalism then you should go and benefit from it. If their downtime is because they are hosting servers in their own office, under CTO's desk, and cleaning lady disconnected the cable, shame on them.

That said, this wasn't the case. DDoS isn't something anyone can easily protect from and because of that you shouldn't try to benefit from it. If you do, you basically lie to your customers by making impression that you could avoid such outage.

So in that respect, I think I am fair game to a "Switch to our service!" email and I don't see how that is unethical - happy customers don't move just because they get an email during an untypical service interruption. Dropbox could go down for the rest of the day, and I could get all the competitor emails they want to send me, and I am not going to switch. I did switch registrars during an outage, but that is because I had been less than ecstatic about them and just needed a kick.

I'm really happy with Sendgrid, but this really gave me a good feeling about who Wildbit is, and now I'm inclined to give them my business.

Only the guys? ducks

Personally I think the language police can go and do something gender-appropriate and painful to themselves, but after the nature of that particular shitstorm, it does seem a touch out of place!

I find it an interesting phrase to have chosen for an article title in light of what the recent furore is all about, but not an offensive one. Then again I'm rather hard to offend.

You might as well try to be in the running with some well-timed advertising. I'm sure you're emotionally invested in being a nice guy to the folks in the booth next to you, but as your customer I can assure you I'd rather see you fight.

And it is loable to leave potential customers stranded with a subpar service that has failed their expectations by not being available?

It think you should read Sirlin's definition of a scrub[0], and decide if you want to continue being one, but you have no moral high ground, you are just limited by your own made up rules.

[0]:http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html

There's a big difference between exploiting a weakness in general, and taking advantage of an extraordinary circumstance that harms your competitor. To me, this comes down to sportsmanship.

To use a bit of an analogy... I wrestled in high-school. We trained to identify weaknesses in the game of our opponents, so I might well enter into a match with a guy thinking "I know he's susceptible to upper body takedowns like a lateral drop or an armspin, so I'm going to pointedly attack that way". That's trying to exploit a weakness, and it's totally reasonable, expected and fair. But if I'm wrestling a guy and he slips on a wet spot on the mat and tears a groin muscle and is laying on the mat writhing in pain, should I jump on him and try to score a quick pin? No, of course not. Good sportsmanship dictates stand back, let the ref step in, give the guy his medical timeout, and then see what happens. If he can't continue, then you either "win" via forfeit or the match is vacated completely (I forget exactly which would have happened in that case when I was in HS).

Same in the business world... if my competitor has a known, exploitable weakness, like a less mature infrastructure and problems with uptime, and I market and sell based on an overall better quality of service, that's one thing. But if the competitor experiences a "black swan" event, should I "jump on and go for the quick pin"? I say "no", that doing that would be just as unethical as in the wrestling example.

We are talking about email services not rocket science. Nor is it the case that an vindictive ex-employee took advantage of some inside knowledge to take their servers down(which would still be negligence on my book). They have been shown to be unable to deal with the basic hazards of hosting and email service. Plus instead of trying to learn and solve the real issue (hey we all have much room for growth) they decided to defuse the situation with PR.

tl;dr Besides, unlike some lame-ass startup with an executive team that's clearly never solved hard problems, I've actually run e-mail before.[0] I mean seriously, do you want the executive team that fires someone because they can't handle a bit of adversity then claims victimhood?[1] [0]: https://twitter.com/tunixman/status/314887921956184064 [1]: https://twitter.com/tunixman/status/314887439216955392

The analogy somewhat falls apart because reputation matters more in business: the OP is to some degree PR.

If you play to be a better human being, and better at tennis, you are just fucking yourself in the ear if you cheat.

When you cheat, you know you can't win in a fair fight. You may win -- but you know you don't "deserve" it. You can tell yourself you "deserve" it because you were smart enough to take advantage, but some part of you will know you're a liar, and you couldn't hack it in a fair fight.

This is also why lying to people is a waste of time, because it creates a layer between you and the rest of the world. Chronic liars often find themselves facing depression because "nobody knows the real me." And cheats, when in a position where cheating won't help them, lack confidence.

I'm not saying it's the same as forming a cartel, maybe a cartel lite. Think about it: from the point of view of the customer of a downed service, competitors doing some opportunistic PR is only beneficial.

So competitors not doing opportunistic PR is depriving customers of a benefit, while helping the industry itself.

What a load of bunk. Nothing about capitalism per-se prohibits a firm from having a sense of ethics, or from having principles. Promoting this way of thinking is the reason so many lefties find so much ammunition to attack capitalism.

Firms (especially privately held ones) certainly can choose to withhold from certain kinds of behaviour while competing fiercely, and succeeding, in the market.

All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed.

No, but that wasn't a "black swan" event that GoDaddy could not control. They chose to support SOPA. In my mind, that's a pretty different scenario.

All I'm saying is capitalism works best when customers are sensitive to problems. The more alternatives they try, the more likely they try the best alternative, the more likely the best companies succeed.

I basically agree with that; I just think the OP's post is pointing out a very specific edge case where a certain sort of behaviour is indicated.

I don't think a 'gentlemen's agreement' is needed.

There are an abundance of opportunities to obtain new customers and demonstrate a superior product. While this might be one of them, it is not one I respect as a tactic to grow a business, and one I would never use myself.

Don't forget, the principles you set early should stick with your company as it grows. If you "take advantage of every opportunity you can" you may one day find yourself in a place you do not respect either. I think this is the definition of what people have termed "evil companies" in our industry.

It's your choice of course, and that's the beauty of it.

While misleading statements about competitors should be unacceptable, since it hurts customers and the industry, the same cannot be said for vigorous competition.

It is also worth pointing out that it's expensive to prepare for rare events, and the costs make you less competitive when those rare events are not occurring. This event was difficult to anticipate, but so are large natural disasters, and it isn't difficult to imagine even more random attacks.

Maybe Dyn isn't any more prepared for an unpredictable DDoS attack of the same scale, but I don't know either way, but at the very least there is a case for being part of one's failover plan.

That's quite a stretch, given the usual definition of anti-competitive. A "gentleman's agreement" to not lower prices, or not to expand into a certain market, etc., would be genuinely anti-competitive. This is simply an agreement to not kick somebody when they're down. That's just good sportsmanship and integrity. Personally, I think more companies should display this kind of thinking.

The nod and the wink about refusing to compete, and advocating an effective blacklist of companies that evangelize on the subject of reliability can't be anything more than a nod and a wink, because it would put the signatories in legal jeopardy.

Alternately, they could build extra capacity, and sell terms on how often they would provide overflow capacity to each other, but that would cost more than simply campaigning to prohibit discussion of failures.

There really isn't any kind of stretch to call this anti-competitive. It is pretty much the archetype for using an informal agreement as an enforcement mechanism in order to avoid a mutually detrimental nash equilibrium. More companies could engage in the type of behavior advocated here, but then it wouldn't be the dynamic industry that it is.

Who did that, and what does it have to do with this discussion?

There really isn't any kind of stretch to call this anti-competitive.

I think you're seeing something that isn't there. We'll probably just have to "agree to disagree" on this point.

Professional courtesy occurs in many professions including law, medicine and finance, and it causes real economic harm even though the harm is so spread out that it frequently goes unnoticed. The very nature of this type of collusion is that it is not obvious on the surface, and though the harm is real it is often well-intentioned and understood as courteous by the people responsible for it.

Only marginally more obvious is if you even hear people describing whether they raise the hourly rate for their gardener as a courtesy issue in regard to a friend who employs the same person. There the harm is almost blatantly obvious, but I assure you it is a common sentiment.

Here's an actual quote:

>When someone you compete against is suffering, especially as a result of any kind of infrastructure issues, shut up and keep your head down.

and, later:

>Not to mention, do you really want those customers who were so quick to leave? What do you think they’ll do when you go down next time?

which sounds like the argument about trying to hire A, B or C people—it's actually a pretty good idea to target really demanding customers. There is a random component to infrastructure failures, but it is nonsense to pretend that preparation, capacity, and redundancy have no effect, and that they are not only effective marketing topics, but features that are ultimately very important to users.

FWIW, I never claimed that, and I don't think the OP did either. At least for myself, I am very specifically referring to the "black swan event" situation, where something external, unlikely and damaging happens to a competitor. In that case, I don't see how showing some restraint, and not launching a targeted campaign to try and leech their customers, is anti-competitive. And to the extent that you can, somehow, define it so, I would argue that any damage is so absurdly trivial that it can be ignored.

If the two hurricanes and two tsunamis that rose to the level of 'astonishing' during the past decade are the only time that people grasp their likelihood, it is counter productive to treat these events as irrelevant. The same goes for DDoS attacks.

It doesn't matter what people think about this specific issue, since there should be no doubt that there will be many more attempts at this type of vigilantism. No one wants their company beholden to other people's whims and angers, so they should have better defenses. Whether competitors point out their failings or not should be the least of anyone's worries. The capacity to handle attacks up to varying levels of size shouldn't be an impolite or unmentionable subject, it should be a key part of business contingency plans for businesses and their customers.

Although Postmark did receive an uptick of signups, they didn't take the opportunity to market against SendGrid as an unreliable service, because they know there is no 100% reliable service, anywhere, ever.

Capitalism, fine. Competitiveness, fine. Postmark is not a company afraid of customers or competition. But they believe in competing in a classy, ethical way. Most importantly, their competitive advantages are based on facts, things they can control, things their competitors could control but don't.

How can anyone disagree with that?

But sure, let's look at it from a ruthless, ethics-free standpoint:

What if you do run attack ads, what if you do kick the competitor when they have a freak event that they did not cause and could not have prevented -- an enormous DDoSing campaign by an organized group -- and which could happen to you, too?

What if you lure customers away with these attack ads?

What will those customers do when you have a freak event?

No service has perfect uptime. DDoSing can happen to anyone.

So even if you have the ethics of a rutabaga, all you get for your efforts are customers which do not tolerate the occasional freak event. What do you think they're going to do when you have something you have no control over?

Your marketing will have created the results that you deserve.

Business doesn't exist in a vacuum. You do not "win customers for life." Customers are not all equal (far from it). This is a long game. Being classy, being honest, is the best way to create a business you -- and your customers -- can live with for a long time.

Said another way: companies' customers are a reflection how the company behaves. If you want customers who are a pain to deal with, who threaten to switch at any unmet whim, and who will step all over you as a vendor, then by all means go ahead and step all over your competition to get those customers. A company that acts like a jerk is going to have customers who are jerks and who wants to deal with that.

But if you want customers that are fans and proponents and evangelists for your company - then act in those positive ways yourself.

When does being nice to your competitors undermine your users' best interests? When does generosity toward people within your industry community benefit your industry at the expense of other communities, and how old does your company have to be before you can call that behavior cronyism? Do you have to smoke cigars in a poorly lit room? What if you just like being more generous to people who smoke cigars in dark rooms more than people who occasionally go outside, and are active? Does that make you a crony?

Reading these comments I get the impression that people want to be nice to others in companies like their own, more than they are describing any type of universal ethical guidelines.

And another term for this sentence is a strawman argument. Nobody at all said there was a gentleman's agreement not to compete. Please read the article.

The post calls for not drawing attention to when a competitor experiences a failure. That sort of chumminess does not encourage more robust infrastructure, it makes it difficult for new entrants to compete based on better reliability, and ultimately does not benefit customers.