BenBlog

Ever since I was a child my dad was always promoting local businesses. He refused to shop at the big box stores, opting for the mom-pop stores. He believed that the service was better, and that the prices were fair. His theory (which I believe has some scientific merit) was that of every $1 you spend locally, $.70 goes back to your community.

I too work for a locally owned company. I know the president of my employer (Profitability.Net) very well, and feel very fortunate to work with them.

I had a feel good deal the other day that gave me the idea to write this post, and that’s of Waltz Business Systems.
We’re a very, very small client of theirs but they seem to care about our business. When we have toner go dry at our offices, we don’t call up Staples or any of the others, Waltz Business sends out a guy to our office to take care of the situation. And at the end of the day, the price is good and fair.

I like to express to my clients that they are not a number. That each account is important to me. Matt Jehn and the rest of the crew at Waltz Business seem to hold these same values dear. If you’re in the need of copiers, printers, or tech training, I’d at least give them the opportunity to quote and keep the business local!

Popularity: 13% [?]

Email is a mission critical application.

10 years ago it wasn’t, but that was before everyone’s IPhones and BlackBerries buzzed their pocket.  That was before when you didn’t respond to an inquiry, they wouldn’t search for your competition and by the time you responded, the business was lost.

Email is a mission critical application.

GMail had a worldwide outage last night, successfully making Eastern Europe unaccesible via Gmail for the better part of their day.  Should they be mad?  Well, yes and no.  Yes they should be mad that Google hadn’t posted a rhyme / reason / resolution for the outage.  I guess their guys were head deep in a server cabinet in the Google bunker and didn’t have a PR guy to post an update.

But on the other hand, you get what you pay for.  Did you really think that paying $50 / year for your companies email would really include true 100% uptime, or even 99%?  1% of the year is 87+ hours!   Do you really think that they have someone on the other side of the phone ready to answer your question and give you a backup plan?

One day this may be a viable option.  One day we may be able to only use dumb servers to connect to a server in “The Cloud” that will serve up all our content and 100% of the time everything will work in this pretty fluffy cloud.  Care bears and all.  Until then, I’m only going to trust multiple load-balanced mail servers, serving not millions of users, not 100,000′s, but a managable load.   My email is important for my business.   My business is important to my clients.  They’re important to me.

Email is a mission critical application.

Gmail Down!

Popularity: 14% [?]