Tuesday, October 8, 2002 |
09:15 - Paying for Privilege
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Okay, so there was a .Mac outage yesterday morning; mail, the iDisk servers, and the whole shebang was pretty much unavailable for several hours. There were like four articles posted about it on various websites yesterday; the same thing had happened a couple of weeks ago.
Then, yesterday afternoon, I got the following e-mail:
Dear .Mac Member,
We hope you haven't been greatly inconvenienced by the two .Mac network outages we've experienced in the past two weeks (including this morning) and we sincerely apologize for any problems you've experienced. The outages were the result of equipment failures, and since the equipment vendor has not been able to persuade us that the problem will not occur again, we've already begun installing new equipment from a different vendor.
We're completely back up and running now, and no data or mail was lost. We expect the equipment change over to be complete within the next several weeks, and we'll be working hard to ensure that there are no further issues during that time. In the meantime, we appreciate your patience while we make this transition, and if you do experience any difficulties, please go to www.apple.com/support for up-to-the-minute information and status.
Sincerely, The .Mac Team Apple Computer
Now, I'm no marketing manage-droid (thanks be to Eru). But this did just strike me as a tad... forthright for a party-line to tell one's customers about. Doesn't it? Since the equipment vendor has not been able to persuade us that the problem will not occur again, we've already begun installing new equipment from a different vendor... geez! They sure want people to feel they're getting their money's worth, apparently.
I guess they're applying some of the premium-customer-service lessons they've been teaching themselves in preparation for selling the Xserve, now that they have a premium-service setup for regular consumers too.
The outage wasn't even what I'd consider "bad", either. I hope whatever new vendor they've found knows how to salute and stuff.
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