Sachin's Space

My life: London, LA, Stanford, Phi Psi, Apple, New York City, Posterous, San Francisco, Kate, Twitter.

Make a great product, gain a user. Have great support, earn a fan

Amazon emailed me last week. A product manager for S3 wanted to talk about our use of their services. (Amazon S3 provides the storage for all the images and video on Posterous). It seemed like a great opportunity to talk to someone within Amazon about issues we've been having, and features we'd like to see.

Once we got on the phone, it was clear that this person didn't want to help us at all. He just wanted to pick our brains to get ideas on how to increase sales and keep customers. I have no desire to give my time or my thoughts to Amazon so they can grow their business. And I told this directly to the person on the phone.

Why not? Because they don't have great support. Amazon doesn't care about me, so I don't care about them. They have a good product, so they have me as a user. They don't have good support, so they don't have me as a fan.

When we have issues, they don't want to help us. They force us to pay for support, which costs $500 per month, or 20% of your bill, whichever is greater. As we grow it becomes prohibitive to pay this. Instead of taking care of its largest customers, Amazon penalizes them. We're incentivized to leave.

I told the person on the phone that what Amazon needs to do to keep Posterous as a customer is offer better support. We need better developer tools to analyze our usage. We need better tools to stop abuse. We need a direct contact within Amazon for when we see issues. The Amazon rep didn't seem to care, he was too focused on pricing.

The other vendor we use to run Posterous is Rackspace. They take the opposite approach, and offer the best customer support imaginable. They go out of their way to make us happy. Because of their great support, I am a fan of theirs. I intro YC companies to Rackspace all the time. If Rackspace needs my help, I'm there for them. I wish there was more I could do to help them, because they are awesome.

There are plenty of companies that I would fight for. Costco, American Express, Rackspace, and many other companies I recommend endlessly, even though I don't get a penny from them. I do it because I love these companies, because they take care of me. They offer great customer service. And I am a fan.

To build a successful company, you need more than just a lot of users. You need fans who genuinely want you to succeed. And to do that, you need to give them a great product and great support.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

Amazon will be the largest company in the world and the 1st Trillion Dollar Company from @alexdmoore blog

Amazon has been at the forefront of all innovations in the ecommerce space and has lead the way with service. They are the only company to achieve worldwide scale and continue to expand their product offerings

Can you imagine Wal-Mart's board in good old Bentonville, Arkansas trying to figure out what the hell Amazon's 500 computer scientists are cooking up at a given time? The thought is hilarious.

There will always be a need for brick and mortar stores as it's fun to touch products with our own hands and get a feel for their aesthetic value in person, but more and more the trend of everyone buying everything online will continue. The only thing then that can stop Amazon is some sort of catastrophic future where the world is more concerned about toxic levels of CO2 or finding it's next meal then the new sexy digital camera it's going to buy. In either future though Amazon will be huge. Maybe they will have the lowest priced CO2 filter breathing machines and canned soup delivered to your door.

You should follow me on Twitter here:  http://twitter.com/AlexdMoore

via alexdmoore.com

I agree 100%. I've always been bullish on Amazon, almost took a job there in 2002 instead of Apple. Amazon is going to lead the way in online sales, which will one day be ALL sales.

No more overpaying for stuff at Sears, Comcast, Bank of America, Best Buy, or even iTunes. Soon, every single dollar spent will flow efficiently through Amazon, and they will take their tiny cut and count their pennies to trillions.

Why I decided to NOT buy a new Macbook Pro

Yesterday I drafted an email to my friend Avi at Apple about ordering a new Macbook Pro. I had been drooling over these since the launch, and they were finally available through Apple's employee discount program. So I wrote an email with all the needed information. The computer I wanted (MBP with 4gb RAM and 7200rpm hard drive), free printer (Canon MX700), addresses, credit card numbers, everything.

But then I didn't send it. I really wanted to, but i couldn't do it. I started asking all my friends at Apple if it made sense for me to trade in my perfectly working, previous generation Macbook pro for the new one. And the overwhelming response was "no".

So why didn't I do it:

1. Lose firewire 400 (I have devices that use this)
2. WORSE graphics for the same battery life. To get the same 5 hours my current machine gets, I have to use the integrated graphics. Booo
3. Glossy screen. Not a deal breaker, but definitely not a plus
4. You need another $100 adapter to use a 30" screen
5. You lose the USB port on the right side of the machine. I like having one on each side
6. While it's thinner, it's slightly larger and heavier

And what do I gain? A newer, GORGEOUS design. More rigid frame. Magnetic latch. These things are nice, but not worth swapping out the machine. My current Macbook Pro is PERFECT. It hasn't had a single problem. I REALLY get 5 hours of battery life.

I've always been the type to upgrade my electronics often. I constantly buy the newest camera/phone/ipod/computer and throw my old one on ebay, and pay the difference in upgrading (which usually isn't much if you buy the new item at a good price).

But that wasn't the case here. The new machine will cost me $2000. My old machine? It's on Amazon brand new for only $1450. So that makes my used one worth about $1200. Definitely NOT worth $800 to upgrade to a machine that isn't faster (might be slower) and generally is only improved by design.

So I'm sticking with the machine I have at least until the next generation. And I just saved $800. Yay.

Update: yeah, i know you can get a firewire 800 to 400 adapter. But that's still lame. And that still means 1 firewire port vs 2 on old machines

And as for the dual graphics: the integrated graphics is slower than what i have now. The discreet graphics is A LOT faster. But i'll never use it. Why not? Because it eats your battery life. So i'll use the slower one for sure. And i'll never switch to the faster graphics because you have to log out to switch. I NEVER log out. I hate closing windows and apps. Right now my machine has an uptime of 41 days.