Firstly, since I am in an apologetic mode these days, let me apologize to the early European customers. It has been a bumpy ride, we are very sorry. Here’s the most obvious not to do launch list for any of you aspiring startups:
-send them devices late
-have them not work
-don’t listen when they complain
We did all of that to the first few early users in Europe. But that is done – we are getting through the issues and listening loud and clear now! Be ready, we are doing something special in Europe, roaming is a huge issue and together with Spotnik we hope to be a huge solution.
Anyways, I know I have mentioned this before, but I’ll do it again. In my spare time I am a soccer goalie. Development and goaltending have a lot in common… sometimes you let a goal in. Sometimes those goals stink and you wish you had done better. Humble pie.
We have seen better weeks at Peek:
1. Worst outage in a long time on July 4th
2. Googlevoice “incident”
3. Initial European customers having a bumpy ride
Since some of you are more technical readers of this blog, I’ll share some of the details of the July 4th outage. Annoyingly, we had a comedy of errors. Our monitoring system (we use Zenoss), crashed the morning of July 4th. Annoyingly, some key components in our system crashed shortly thereafter. Since our monitoring system was down and it was the long weekend, we were slow to respond. Monitoring system crashes are scary, its like reading the book Blindness (one of my favourite books/authors).
Anyways, dear customers, please hold tight. We will do better and improve.
Nag | 07-Jul-10 at 12:49 pm | Permalink
Well… It is a happy end… great job during the last few days!!!
JimMc | 07-Jul-10 at 1:18 pm | Permalink
Fairly or unfairly, the service you guys get compared to is BlackBerry. On pricing, Peek wins hands down. On features and functions, BlackBerry wins but Peek is gaining steadily. Not to mention (AFAIK) Peek is the ONLY email-only device around. You’ve got that market cornered for now. But on reliability, Peek still has a LONG way to go.
BlackBerry, for all it’s clunky user-unfriendliness, sets the gold standard for reliability and timeliness of wireless message delivery. Yes, they’ve had about a decade-long head-start on Peek to perfect their systems. But that is where you guys want to get to. That is where I want you guys to get to. I’m an ex-developer so I’m familiar with the trials and tribulations, but I’m sure it won’t take you nearly as long as it took BlackBerry. And hopefully most of us Peeksters stay with you for the duration of the (somtimes bumpy) ride.
dan | 08-Jul-10 at 9:06 am | Permalink
Jim – 100% agree. I rolled out and managed BlackBerry in 17 countries in a past life. They do have their annual “catastrophe” where BlackBerry’s are down for a day and its on the front page of the New York Times, but generally their reliability is so good that they end up helping fix the carrier networks when folks complain of issues. We’re getting there, we had a solid run of 99.999% – 100% uptime months going. Though you hear a lot about our “new features” we are working on, we highly prioritize stability fixes first and our general development weight is far more towards stability. By far and away stability and speed of receiving emails are the most important aspects to customers, and the two metrics I have to report on each month to our board.