

Comparing Heroku and Instacart Screw Ups - dark_knight
http://jakeheis.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/4/

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derefr
Wanting companies to be _humble_ , of all possible things, seems like insanity
to me. Companies are not people; they do not have emotions; they do not
participate in psychosocial guilt/submission demonstrations as a way to signal
status transfer.

A (B2B) company is a machine you rely on to run your own business--sort of
like an office printer. When the printer stops working, do you expect an
apology? The best thing the printer can do is to just start working again--to
make you money _now_. Everything that has happened in the past is a sunk cost.
Time spent apologizing is time spent _not printing_. (Imagine how much time
Mr. Wiggins has spent giving people apologies instead of making Heroku work
better.)

"Peace of mind" is for consumers. When you run a business, the only thing you
should think about the B2Bs higher in your supply chain is "wow they're good
at what they do." Whether they _whimper believably_ will not help your own
business succeed.

~~~
rdtsc
> When the printer stops working, do you expect an apology?

Actually, the better thing a printer can do is explain to me _why_ it failed
so I know how to avoid, work around it, or understand what to do next. I feel
the FAQ is tons better than "sorry". My printer already says "sorry, print job
failed". Try again, "sorry, print job failed". Then it is me cursing at it
"piece of shit! tell me why it failed, I need to get my stuff
printed"..."sorry, PC load letter"..."Arghhhh!"

So actually I like Heroku's response more. Technical info for technical users.

~~~
derefr
Exactly. This is part of the _make me money now_ idea: you need some
information from the printer to get back to using it, so to make you money, it
has to first teach you what you need to know to use it. It doesn't have to bow
and scrape while doing it; it just needs to get you back to it being useful.

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hoov
It doesn't seem like this is a fair comparison because the target audience is
so different. Were I a consumer using Instacart, I'd just want the situation
to be fixed, and I wouldn't care so much about the technical details. If I
were burned by the Heroku issue, I'd likely be technically oriented developer
and would want to know exactly what happend, why, and be assured that it
wouldn't happen again. It seems like both companies did a fair job of
communicating with their target audience.

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ultimoo
I feel that the magnitude of money involved should be weighed in this
comparison. Instacart was talking about something like 70-odd people with
about a $150 per person membership, which adds up to $10k. Whereas Heroku-gate
is probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions.

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tbrooks
The post you cherry-picked doesn't show the whole context. You're ignoring an
earlier post where a Heroku GM apologized profusely. Read the 2nd and 4th
paragraph:

[https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/2/15/bamboo_routing_pe...](https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/2/15/bamboo_routing_performance)

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hayksaakian
> Disclaimer: I was not affected by either of these companies’ mistakes; this
> post it just comparing Heroku’s response and Instacart’s response

> Too bad Heroku. You just lost a customer.

So did you/he or did you/he not use Heroku?

It seems like you/he didn't in the start, so how could heroku have lost a
customer?

~~~
dark_knight
Sorry, I definitely should have been clearer there. What I meant was that
while I was not directly affected by Heroku's problem, their reaction
surprised me so much (in a negative way) that I decided to stop using their
product.

~~~
artursapek
You must not be a heavy user if the decision was that easy.

~~~
L0j1k
You make it sound like an irrevocable addiction.

~~~
artursapek
Hah yeah, the common usage of "user" between software and drugs is a long-
running joke.

