|
Expectations of Free and Beta/Alpha ServicesApril 13th, 2008 at 5:30 pmSource:CenterNetworks
GrandCentral is listed as a "beta" and it’s also a "free" service. What should we expect for a service in beta or a service that is considered live but is free? I printed business cards with my GrandCentral number on them. Was this a mistake to trust a service in beta? When Skype was down, they too handled the outage poorly - they blamed Microsoft. Twitter for example is free and not in beta. It’s been down a good bit (though more stable now) and we’ve all bitched and moaned about their downtime. With a service that apparently has no revenue model yet, is downtime allowed? If so, how much? What I’d like to see is an expectations document (i.e. a contract) that explains what can be expected from a startup. I am guessing these documents would need a legal stamp but they would be very effective for setting guidelines and customer expectations. Lastly, for any service that we rely on (e.g. GrandCentral, AIM, Skype) these services should have a status page that we can monitor at any time. Non-essential services (e.g. Google search, Mahalo, CenterNetworks) a status page isn’t required but an explanation of any outages would be beneficial. Check out our interview with GrandCentral Founder Craig Walker along with his top tips for startups. Partner Links
|
