Google paying customers didn’t get memo |
And now for the darker side of the Google Analytics launch …
Zvents is an Urchin hosted customer who has been paying $200/month for stats. One might think an announcement that they were saving $200/month is a good thing, but apparently these Google paying customers learned about the same time as the rest of us — and experienced the same quality of service.
Ethan Stock vents:
Right now, I feel like Google doesn’t care about me enough as a customer to tell me that they’re changing a product I pay for. They don’t care enough about me as a customer to make sure that my login doesn’t change, or that they at least ask or warn me before changing my login. They don’t care enough about me as a customer to make sure that the re-launch of their product doesn’t dramatically impact the people who are already paying them lots of money.
If this is true this seems pretty irresponsible on Google’s part that they didn’t give their customers some kind of head’s up … or at the very least put all the new folks like me on a different set of servers. Ones that were perhaps less reliable as the ones that the people who were paying them were on. Seems like we were all sucking on the same thin pipe today.
Doh.
And what is it with Google, bandwidth and scaling lately? Google blog search and Google Reader both launched with horrible connectivity issues. They are sitting on billions so they should know by now that they have to have the computers to pay for these launches where the initial onslaught is going to be immense. Then again, maybe this is some sort of strategy that makes no sense?
TechCrunch indicates that Google has now closed off new signups. I’m glad that I got in earlier but feel a bit bad about negatively impacting paying customers like Mr. Stock.
Still waiting for the 12 hour initial period to pass.
Update 11/15/2005 8:40am PST: No available stats yet and it’s still turtle slow.
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I have an enhanced take on this:
For some of our clients we use the older, fully downloadable and client sided versions of Urchin 5 and below.
This is a necessity because those clients are required by law to follow specific accessibility-guidelines (enabling access for the visually and otherwise impaired by ensuring 100% compatibility to special browsers etc.). In this sense it is not an option to apply any javascript-snippets / cookies whatsoever.
Also, in various prospective-future-client-situations we like to ask for an excerpt from their logfiles of the past in order to illustrate to them where their client-traffic of the past can be improved. To my knowledge this is also not possible with the newer, online versions of urchin/google.
It now seems that, along with the re-branding, any opportunities to obtain older versions of urchin are gone, too. which would also keep us from ever enhancing our current amount of licenses.
We bought Urchin along with the advanced support. Hardly ever used anything of it, also, at no point, got infomed about any plans to cease holding the older versions available.
An e-mail to the urchin/google-customer service is on it´s way, so there´s still the slight chance that they keep up the described kind of service on individual request.
However I´m concerned to also fall into the “don’t care enough about me as a customer”-gap.
Comment by Andreas Wagner — November 15, 2005 @ 9:24 am PST