Gizmo Has Gremlins
Dear Gizmo Project,
I have a bone to pick with you. Sunday morning I had a podcast to record and, well, Gizmo Project is my main VOIP tool. Your built in call recording and overall good audio quality makes it a logical choice for these P2P calls.
However, Sunday morning, your entire service was down. Not only was it down, but had been down for at least about an hour remained down a two hours afterward. We tried to jerry-rig something using Skype but we ran out of time before we could get everything completely in place.
However, what bothered me about the whole ordeal wasn’t that Gizmo Project and your SIP server went down at an inopportune time, but that no one at Gizmo Project was doing a damn thing about it. Sure, there was a forum posting about the outage, one started by a user and maintained by other users, but no one from Gizmo Project itself posted on it until today, over 24 hours AFTER the outage was resolved.
Still worse is that there is no system status indicator. Skype has one. even Cox Communications, the bane of my customer service existence, has one. Why don’t you?
However, the ultimate slap in the face is what happens when you Google for “Gizmo Project” and “System Status”. You find this forum post where an admin tells a user requesting a system status feature that “We are NOT going to create a public status page any time in the near future.”
That, my friends, is bullshit and I’ll tell you why.
My Problem With You Gizmo
“The vast majority of users would never check the status page. ONLY extreme power users would ever look at it.”
I’m not an “extreme power user”, I’m not even a power user. I only have about ten dollars in my Gizmo account (for emergencies) and only use it once a week. Yet, when the service went down, my FIRST thought was to check the system status. Perhaps “only” was too harsh of a word.
But more important is this: Shouldn’t power users be the exact group you should be serving the most anyway? They spend the most money, rely on the service the most and are the backbone of the community. Just because power users would be the target of a service is not a reason to kill it, it is an argument in favor of creating it.
It would do you little good anyway…. when “obvious” things happen, like a server dying, we generally know right away, and fix it quickly.
Yeah, so your entire service being offline for three hours wasn’t “obvious” to you guys. That’s very discouraging and speaks very lowly about your backend. Frankly, I worry about the viability of Gizmo now that I know this.
Besides, I agree with the user named kieranmullen. Obvious is a relative term. While it might be head-smackingly clear to you that such and such server is down, all I see is my Gizmo client hanging up when it says “starting agent”. That doesn’t help me at all and it lead me to think the problem was on my end.
So yeah, thanks for the update after I spent nearly an hour adjusting proxies checking my own connection. If my podcast colleague hadn’t reported the same problems, who knows what I could have done or how long I could have spent? Great service guys.
“We already have internal monitoring to check our systems. We would NOT expose that level of detail to the public.”
Yes, it’s such a great security risk that even the IRS has one. Boy, exposing this information must be a horrible risk.
The worst outages occur when more subtle problems occur that we don’t notice right away… (which logically means that a public status page wouldn’t display those problems either).
Yeah, because your SIP server going down is so “subtle”. I grant that it was at a bad time, but if a podunk Web host in nowhere Alabama can provide 24/7 monitoring, certainly you can too. You run a phone service for God’s take, people rely on this. Treat it accordingly.
It would be a LOT of work to create a system that properly filters that information (about outages), and makes it generic enough for the public to see….
Wah. Cry me a fucking river. Seriously, this is just pathetic.
I don’t know how to set up a system status page, but then again, I don’t run an Internet telephone company either. However, at least this is an honest excuse, it is hard to do and would take a lot of work.
But here’s the deal, your competition has it and if they can provide better service than you, which they are, they are going to eat your lunch.
Which brings my to my next point. The real purpose behind this letter.
Dear John
You see, in reality, this is a Dear John letter to you Gizmo Project. I’m done with you. It’s not your reliability that did me in, it’s not the lack of a system status page either, it is the callous way you treat users that had the gall to ask for it.
I had two reasons for joining Gizmo over Skype. The first was that I wanted to support open protocols and the second was that I loved your record call feature.
However, in our scramble to get a podcast done, we discovered a way to record podcasts for free over Skype. In fact, we can record straight into GarageBand now. This is great for my colleague as he actually creates the audio files and it means that the “call record” feature is meaningless as recording works the same on both services now.
Though I love to support open protocols and open source software, it is not worth putting up with an obviously inferior service. I do not use Linux as my main computer, not anymore. However, I do use Adium, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and many other open source applications because they are as good, or better, than the alternatives.
I want to love Linux, the same as I want to love GIzmo Project, but I will not put up with an inferior product just because it is “free”. It’s an open market to me and I will use whoever has the best solution. Most of the time, open source and open protocols win. Sometimes, the proprietary guys come out on top.
I won’t stand on morals alone because morals don’t get work done. If you want my business back, you have to win it back the hard way.
Bottom Line
What it all comes down to is this Gizmo Project, you’ve lost me, a paying customer, to a superior competitors. You didn’t lose me because of an outage, but of your handling of it and your relationship with your customers.
Sure, I wasn’t a big customer by any stretch and I doubt that you could care any less, but I am the kind of technophile that is watching the VOIP marketplace to find the right time to make the jump completely.
Unless something changes between now and then, I can promise you that you won’t be the company I make the jump with.
I’m sorry Gizmo, this relationship is over. I’m with Skype now. It was fun while it lasted.
Sincerely,
John Black
PS: To answer Claw’s question in the forum posting: “Would you be satisfied with a forum section dedicated to announcements? That’s much more feasible than a standalone page.”
The answer: Sure, if you made it a standalone forum and actually posted to it promptly, not 24 hours AFTER the fact. This is why most companies go through the trouble of automating their status page.
Comments
Leave a Reply
