September 2010 necro-update: How things have evolved through the last decade! There's now api-status.com to get the pulse of dozens of public APIs. You read it here first as per this entry originally from 2004.

People who use the Amazon.com web services routinely complain about their sluggishness. In the dedicated discussion board, after someone suggested they create an XML feed to advertise the current availability and average response time, as well as planned downtime, a developer from Amazon said they'd look into it. Better late than never, I advocated something similar for Paypal in late 2001.

Sometimes I wonder whether their web services are anything more than a cool gizmo for Amazon.com. They certainly don't give the impression they consider this a mission critical tool. Affiliates who use Amazon's web service need to cache the data and avoid live calls that might break their own site.

10/05/04 update: Rips in the Web 2.0 fabric.

11/05/04 update: Bringing Web Services to the Masses.

02/26/06 update: Trust.Salesforce.com.

09/24/07 update: this is finally something more companies are doing now, e.g. heartbeat.skype.com.

09/01/09 update: Google Apps Status.

To help other people from being sold a device that's not going to be maintained by its manufacturer, let me warn you that some versions of Nokia's E71 smartphone sold in the US (aka E71-2 NAM) have not received any firmware update since the product was introduced on the market last year. Meaning, known bugs have been fixed for some customers, but I and others are left hanging dry. That's rich for a $400 unlocked phone sold by one of the biggest ecommerce players in the consumer electronics world (Newegg.com). It's not like I bought the phone for cheap from the grey market and unlocked it with an unsupported hack.

Nokia is aware of the problem but doesn't even have a deadline to fix it. I thought they finally meant to be a competitive player in the US but it seems I was wrong. Also, apparently Nokia is too poor to py for decent upgrade servers.

Looks like Palm is back in the game so if Nokia doesn't get their act together I'll be on the market again soon for an unlocked phone that can work worldwide and is actually properly supported by its vendor.

02/15/09 update: proceeded with the finally available update. Going through applications to see things are working fine, Gmail settings didn't make it even after backup/restore (since the E71 doesn't save user settings through firmware updates - yeah it's stupid at that price range).

I'm a small business co-owner, but we're also a growing business, and ambitious at that. Dear "Enterprise" software vendor that desperately tries to look mightier than it is, understand that I'm making sure it's in our DNA to filter out your opaque, overly complex sales processes from the get-go. Not only will we not look at your product that won't tell its price publicly, but I've made it company policy that anyone foolish enough to waste time with such vendors will see their contract terminated. I'm not an OSS zealot by any measure, but if your price is not public, you're pretty much admitting your product is weak and overpriced.

We will not tolerate this crap and we will protect our productivity from your pre-sales BS. I bet that more and more businesses have been coming to similar conclusions these last few years. You want to see a company that gets it? Check out Atlassian (I'm not even their customer but these guys seem to do a lot of things right, from marketing to hiring).

I'm looking at security software in a couple different categories and bumped several times into this very brand of company that really, really doesn't want our business. I guess they're preying off bloated big companies because of widespread incompetence and CYA insecurity. These past few years, I think UltraDNS was the most egregious offender in the way they tried to sell to us. Those guys were really hilarious. We told them to never contact us again and eventually switched to Nettica for DNS management. Costs us $50 a year too for what I'm pretty sure is the same service.

It's surprising how often the proper answer is just, "give me a break."