Dear Mr. Dickson, et alia ...
This is a difficult e-mail to send, not because of what I intend to say,
but because your websites can make it horridly difficult to access
anything.
First, I appreciate the fact that Digital River apparently bought rights
to Simtel Net in order to keep it alive; for some reason I'd always
thought that since mirrors were generally educational institutions, the
public service of Simtel Net would never become an endangered species.
However, this message is to advise you that the way Simtel Net is
currently being handled it may soon cease to be viable. Simtel Net was
always a place where one went to find software that wasn't available
anywhere else, or at least nowhere else it could be easily found. But
lately Simtel Net is the place one goes to be utterly frustrated.
So much of what made Simtel Net so valuable -- the ability to do the
initial search off-line, the ease of download with choice of home or
mirror sites, the e-mail updates automatically generated when software
authors uploaded new or updated software, to name just a few -- have
flat out disappeared. And "service" has been, apparently, thrown out
the window in favor of ad revenues. Courtesy and clarity of goal has
certainly gone by the board, at least in some areas of your enterprise.
Before I started this message, I wanted to find out if the *cause* of
this message was actually affiliated with Simtel Net and/or Digital
River; a search of the Simtel Net site produced nothing, and just
accessing the Digital River site required I be able to read HTML and
parse the correct HREF in the correct manner to even access the DR site.
[I wonder how many potential customers are lost because of that flawed
web design?] Searching everywhere, I failed to find David Kirschbaum
listed by name anywhere ... so if he does not work for Digital River or
Simtel Net, I suggest that you track down how he managed to intercept
e-mail and respond to it in the rather crude manner relfected in the
e-mail exerpt which follows this main message.
If he does work for you, I suggest that the stance he is promoting is
far from beneficial for Digital River. As a former CPA, I know that
"Goodwill" is considered a valid asset, something that is often sold at
a defined value along with selling the company itself. I also know that
certain types of activities [supporting a PBS auction, for example] can
provide positive advertisement for a company at costs far below what
would be paid for equal exposure via purchased advertising time. For
reasons such as that, certain companies have always made a point of
providing "free services" of a sort to "non-customers." It was just
plain considered good business.
Rudeness and whining, however, have never been considered good business.
If David Kirschbaum is one of your webmasters, as I suspect, his message
and his website design are very poor recommendations for Digital River
and its web hosting business. Who would *really* want a website that
excludes ANY potential customer? Who would *really* want a website that
is so complex and so muddled with javascript fragments, that the *owner*
of the website had not way in hades to do upgrades or even the simplest
changes on his/her own, and it cost $$$$ each time the smallest change
was made?
There used to be a prime rule in business and customer relations: KISS
It may well be worth considering reimplimenting that approach.
While you're considering that, why not read what "your people" are
saying to people like me?
Sincerely,
l.d.
L.D. Best
P.S. If your websites were USABLE, we'd be glad to visit them and use
them to scan and access files available for download. However, your
webmaster has made those pages and that downloading impossible for many
MANY browsers.
------------ Read it and Reconsider ----------------------
Re: simtel access, David Kirschbaum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> We are totally disinterested in your inability to reach ftp sites.
>
> We make it very clear that we expect all visits, all downloads, to be
> through our web page. How else do you expect us to stay alive here?
> Only page visits pay our salaries, the updating of equipment, the very
> Internet access itself!
>
> We stopped publishing the file catalogs, the .IDX files, because
> thieves and "link archives" were stealing them, using them to build
> their own "archive site", getting all the visits, using OUR sites
> for the downloads, letting us do all the work.
>
> We could not survive that way. So .. no more .IDX files.
>
> Is it so much to ask that you visit our web page for your downloads?
> That's where you'll get the latest descriptions, the download counts.
>
> If you do NOT visit us .. well, we just won't be here any more. Then
> what will you do?
------------------------Sad, so sad, the attitude--------------------
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