Zoho opens up their kimono and the blogosphere applauds

Big news from Zoho (provider of online applications and services that compete with Google and Microsoft). As of yesterday, they have reached the next level in uptime transparency by launching Zoho Service Health Status! As Raju Vegesna states in their big announcement, "This initiative is yet another step to being more open and transparent with our users." Kudos to Zoho for recognizing the need and delivering. They join Amazon AWS and SalesForce as the three large service providers offering a very public health dashboard of their services.

I'm really excited to see that the blogosphere gets the significance of this move:

Mashable:

"One frequent problem with web applications and services - and thus the whole web 2.0 phenomenon - is lack of communication when something goes wrong. Sure, it’s nice to have your online e-mail client available from every computer, but what happens when it goes down? Often, it’s just you in the dark, waiting for problems to be resolved, with little or no official information on what’s happening to ease your mind...

This is a great idea. If something goes wrong with any one of Zoho’s applications, you can quickly check out if the problem is on your side or theirs. Of course, I’m sure that the folks at Zoho will continue to inform their customers about problems, updates, downtime and similar issues via blog posts, but being able to see what’s wrong for yourself, at any given time, is an advantage Zoho’s customers will certainly enjoy. All other web startups take notice: this is the level of transparency we’d like to see from everyone, not just Zoho."

WebWorkerDaily:

"After taking a look, I’d say that all applications hosted online could benefit from this level of kimono-opening."

CNET:

"Web application specialist Zoho has joined the growing ranks of companies willing to share detailed information on how well their online services are holding up.

This move toward transparency is increasingly important as potential customers consider relying on such services...

Publishing the performance measurements for online services is catching on as cloud computing grows more serious. Going hand in hand with that is offering service level agreements (SLAs) with specific uptime commitments."

Who's next to open up? I'm looking at you Google!

Kudos to Microsoft for showing humanity and transparency in a recent Entourage regression bug fix

From Microsoft's Mac Office blog:

"We’ve been working hard for the last week and a half to bring Entourage users today’s 12.1.4 update. It’s incredibly frustrating when we get through a release process and a new issue is introduced by an update. When we start to hear feedback and customer reports about issues with an update, I simply cringe because so much work goes into preventing that from happening. Unfortunately, the recent Office for Mac 2008 12.1.3 update introduced a bug that prevented some Entourage users from sending meeting invites to others. We’re sorry.

However, we also believe it’s better to pair an apology with a solution. With that in mind, with the just released 12.1.4 update, meeting invites will be working as expected once again for all Entourage users.

A lot of work goes into every update release to make sure that we are improving the product's quality. With every update, each and every change that goes into the release is under tight review. There are multi-developer code reviews, focused test passes, and verifications with targeted customers who reported the issue we are targeting to fix. Even then, sometimes things do not work out. With 12.1.3, we did all of the above, yet two cases slipped-through..."

Read the details on the release here. Why don't we see this kind of honesty more often?

Google G1's email service is down, but does anyone know where to get help?

As reported by Gizmodo, T-Mobile G1's POP3 and IMAP email is down right now. The big question is whether or not anyone knows that the only place to get information on the status of the downtime, and the only way T-Mobile is communicating with it's users is through this thread on the T-Mobile Forum. How many support calls and emails is T-Mobile getting right now?

I'm not a T-Mobile customer, but if I was experiencing this problem, I would go to http://www.tmobile.com/, click Support, and end up here. And then I'd be stuck. If ended up digging through all of this help, I would spend at least 10 minutes figuring out where to go, or end up calling the support department.

The solution is not complicated. Your customers need a single obvious place to go find out what's happening right now. The fewer calls into support the better, both for you and for the customer. Or put another way, broadcasting broad updates to all of your customers is much more efficient both for your customers and for your staff.

In this specific case, I would suggest a big link or button off of the Support page taking the user to a page similar to our Hall of Fame AWS Service Health Dashboard with a running feed of user updated and more importantly responses from the T-Mobile support people as often as possible.

A boat load of links about cloud computing

Enjoy!

P.S. Is "Cloud Computing" the new "Web 2.0"?

Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

I'm glad to see someone else felt there was a need for an online users bill of rights:

"Before you architect your application systems for the cloud, you have to set some ground rules on what to expect from the cloud vendors you either directly or indirectly leverage. It is important that you walk into these relationships with certain expectations, in both the short and long term, and both those that protect you and those that protect the vendor.

This post is an attempt to capture many of the core rights that both customers and vendors of the cloud should come to expect, with the goal of setting that baseline for future Cloud Oriented Architecture discussions."

This is focused specifically on cloud computing providers. First there was version 0.1, followed by version 0.2, followed by a Wikified version. I especially like the wiki version (clean, straight forward, to the point). I see a lot of overlap between this and a general "Online Users Bill of Rights".

The big question is what it will take for online service providers to give a damn and agree to any sort of bill of rights. It's hard enough to get a consistent and worthwhile SLA in place. Maybe it's too early to push this on companies. Maybe we need to wait for some major downtime that disrupts business in a serious way for users to realize the importance of something like this. But isn't that far too late?

Google Video gave it the old college try.

I just came across Google Video's blog. Looking at the history of the posts, looks like they had a pretty good run at transparency for about a year, and are not pooped out (last post being in June 25th 2008). Good effort!

A good analysis of how ecosystem monitoring will make your life easier

My college over at Webmetrics posted a really good discussion of ecosystem monitoring, and how it aims to solve the problems described in my previous post. Check it out: The Benefits of Eco-System Management.