On Fri, 26 May 2000, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
Welp, they had another 'something' in the northeast today, and no more information than a "there is an outage and we're fixing it" was released.
I think the funniest part of the whole thing was when a UU sales driod called me mid-afternoon today trying his monthly sell-thing on me, and when I asked him about the current outage, he said he was unaware and that he'd get right back to me. I've not heard from him yet.
This seems pretty SOP for Worldcom. After the AT&T frame-relay outage, worldcom sales reps were calling to let everyone know about it. But when worldcom had a frame-relay outage, you couldn't reach a worldcom sales person for days and then they didn't know anything. After the abovenet IP network outage, worldcom sales people were calling letting everyone know about. But when worldcom/uunet had an ip network problems, the sales droids know nothing about their own network.
When will large companies learn that hiding from outages like this is a bad thing?
Because its not a bad thing from their point of view. Look at the difference in coverage in the places shareholders look at. Abovenet's "full disclosure" earned it a lot of ugly press, which will get quoted every time there is a story in the future because most reporter's "research" consists of punching the company name into NEXIS. UUNET's disclosure policy earns it a few disgruntled posts on mailing lists, which Worldcom's PR people will likely dismiss as gossip, but no permanent coverage. While us techies may say we like abovenet's reaction more than uunet's reaction to their respective incidents, most of the buying decisions are made by managers who find abovenet's honesty scary and uunet's lack of publicly reported incidents comforting. If you talk to the PR people, they will all tell you if you have "major problem" you should be as honest and transparent as possible. But if it is a "minor problem" you don't want to attract more attention to it than the problem deserves. The "problem" is you don't know what type of problem you have until its too late.
On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 12:18:28PM -0700, Sean Donelan wrote:
While us techies may say we like abovenet's reaction more than uunet's reaction to their respective incidents, most of the buying decisions are made by managers who find abovenet's honesty scary and uunet's lack of publicly reported incidents comforting.
Well, I did make my buying decision based on AboveNet's full-disclosure policy, and so I am voting with my wallet. I didn't follow it, but I don't think that AboveNet's stock price reflected poorly on their policy either. Full disclosure is the only way to build better networks. If your customers can't see how you're performing, they can't choose based on that information. If you build a good network, you should have nothing to hide. Now, the question is: Is there a way to encourage more NSP's to be open about what they provide? It isn't a free market if providers collude to keep the information that consumers need to make an educated buying decision from them. -SteveK -- Steve Kann - Chief Engineer - 841 Broadway suite 502 - (212) 533-1775 HorizonLive.com - collaborate . interact . learn "The box said 'Requires Windows 95, NT, or better,' so I installed Linux."
On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 03:53:13PM -0400, Steve Kann wrote:
Now, the question is: Is there a way to encourage more NSP's to be open about what they provide? It isn't a free market if providers collude to keep the information that consumers need to make an educated buying decision from them.
Have someone establish the equivalent of a credit-bureau for outages. When dirty laundry becomes available - even if for a fee - it comes to their advantage to disclose it all. A black mark in your records saying "Outage occurred - reported by 200 ISPs, no explanation given" reads far worse than "A bug in the roto-rooter 20000 caused the loss of all frame connections." "Followup: Bug fixed, problem should not recur."
-SteveK
-- Jeffrey Haas - Merit RSng project - jeffhaas@merit.edu
Well, I did make my buying decision based on AboveNet's full-disclosure policy, and so I am voting with my wallet. I didn't follow it, but I don't think that AboveNet's stock price reflected poorly on their policy either.
Some companies believe that they can best serve the interests of their shareholders, and hence the share price, if they service customers better. Other's (like UUNET it seems - whoever they are nowadays) seem to believe that increasing share value is the only aim, and anything that can potentially lower that value - even if only for a very short time - must be avoided at all costs. This includes admitting to failure. I subscribe my own company (who is not public, and no plans to do so, hence share value is not volatile anyway) to the former value set. Very few people will admit publicly to managing a company of the latter - since this in itself may lower share values :( I also suspect that the punative principles of the US civil law system contribute to companies never admitting fault or liability, even when protected by contracts. Note that I am not knocking that system - I like the general prinicple of corporate punishment (no pun intended, but it reads well anyhow :) - but abuse by ambulance chasers is too easy, or so it appears. Peter
participants (4)
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Jeff Haas -
Peter Galbavy -
Sean Donelan -
Steve Kann