Wow! Doubling your prices overnight: how many real businesses could pull this off, without losing more than half of their customers? And that’s exactly what MP3Fiesta did. I’m sure I will check out the competition again, once I’m through my current balance.
It’s not that I’m against increasing prices. I guess inflation hits everybody. But the inflation has been nowhere near 100% last year, not even in Russia I would think. And I am aware that even with their prices doubled, the songs are still dead cheap. But at least, they could have had the politeness to warn their users, they have our email adresses. I wouldn’t have cared if the price of single songs would have gone up with 1 cent (still a respectable 10%), but when you decide to double you prices, I guess there are some basic levels of customer care you provide (even though thinking about customer care would probably automatically exclude doubling prices). You let your users know that such a change is at hands.
They probably feared a rush on their servers if they told their users of their plans. And true enough, some people would try and download as much as possible before the change was implemented. But issuing the warning sufficiently early enough would have spread out the server load. And maybe they thought about people that would quickly buy everything on their wishlist, people that now are forced to finish their wishlist at a much higher price. But I don’t think it works this way: I think a lot of those people will just buy less from their wishlist (I’m sure I will!).
I am sure there are people now who think that people who download from services as MP3fiesta and friends deserve no better. Fair enough. I, myself, have always hated everything which smelled like DRM, and have avoided Itunes as the plague. And even now they start selling DRM-free songs, I still don’t think it fair when a downloaded mp3 album costs almost as much as an album you buy in your everyday cd store (and if you wait for two years, the real life album - with booklet - is probably cheaper than the downloaded version).
That’s why I like services as Magnatune. They provide a direct link between performer and audience, resulting in much cheaper music for the buyers, and much more profit for the artists. Everybody happy! (Except for the big bosses of the music industry of course, they’ll have to do with a Rolls or two less…)
Not too long ago, I signed up with DrupalValueHosting for a BlowoutPackage2008. So far, I have been very pleased with the services they provide, and I have yet to have performance issues on my websites (though, admittedly, these sites are of the very-small-homebrew type that normally don’t attract millions of unique visitors each day).
A first issue I had was that on the temporary IP address they provided for accessing files I uploaded to the public html directory, it was not possible to run php scripts (due to safety reasons). Clearly, I had no clue about what was going on, so I opened a service ticket. Not only did they respond quickly - on a Sunday morning - but moreover, they assigned me a private IP address so I could test my sites before changing the DNS servers. Great service.
The second issue I had was with the free domain name that comes with the blowoutpackage. After a couple of days, I noticed that my domain name still hadn’t been registered. As I had gone back and forth a couple of times during the sign-up, and even changed the domain name once, I thought I messed up the registration. Opened another service ticket, and an hour later, the domain was registered and online…
As I haven’t been using DVH for long, I can only speak for this short period, but I really wanted to share how well they treated me up till know. (And as you can see, I haven’t signed up for the referral program, so you can really trust me, I make no money by telling you this. I might sign up though, as additional users mean an additional load on the server I am using myself. At least, I get something in return that way…)
Edit: I did sign up for the program, so this review is no longer unbiased :-)
I imagine that the keyboard real estate is a hard business to be involved in, these days. Keyboards tend to get tiny, as devices with keyboards are getting smaller, and small devices like cell phones are being fitted with fully functional keyboards. One of the major complaints of the average Asus Eee PC user, besides the small screen size - an issue that is being tackled with the new version as we speak - seems to be the awkwardly small keyboard.
Then why, one wonders, do all keyboard manufacturers all over the world put utterly useless keys on the board? I think the most useless part of my laptop, besides its 56k modem (and to be honest, I’m pretty sure that if I would try hard enough, I would be able to think of a situation where a 56k modem comes in handy), is the insert key. Is there one living soul that can explain to me what it’s use is? The only use I can see for it, is luring you into touching it while hitting the backspace, and subsequently sending two full sentences to sentence valhalla before you realise what’s going on. And of course, you wrote those sentences half an hour earlier, so you don’t remember them too well, and everything you substitute them with doesn’t really flow nicely.
I think ages ago, when a mouse was still something you tried to catch with a rusty piece of metal and a bit of cheese, it might have made sense to use the ‘overtype’ mode. In those times, you couldn’t easily select a bit of text, and type something else. So if your alinea didn’t flow nicely, you would go to the start of it, hit the insert key, and start allover. But those times are over! Now, we have more than 2 or 4 colours on our screen. We don’t use floppy disks anymore. 640 k was clearly not enough for everybody, and guess what: we don’t need the insert key anymore.
So I humbly suggest to all keyboard designers in the world, to find a good alternative use for the insert key. Even a smiley key would get used more often on my keyboard…
