|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: UUNet?
On Fri, 26 May 2000, Alex Rubenstein wrote: > Welp, they had another 'something' in the northeast today, and no more > information than a "there is an outage and we're fixing it" was released. > > I think the funniest part of the whole thing was when a UU sales driod > called me mid-afternoon today trying his monthly sell-thing on me, and > when I asked him about the current outage, he said he was unaware and that > he'd get right back to me. I've not heard from him yet. This seems pretty SOP for Worldcom. After the AT&T frame-relay outage, worldcom sales reps were calling to let everyone know about it. But when worldcom had a frame-relay outage, you couldn't reach a worldcom sales person for days and then they didn't know anything. After the abovenet IP network outage, worldcom sales people were calling letting everyone know about. But when worldcom/uunet had an ip network problems, the sales droids know nothing about their own network. > When will large companies learn that hiding from outages like this is a > bad thing? Because its not a bad thing from their point of view. Look at the difference in coverage in the places shareholders look at. Abovenet's "full disclosure" earned it a lot of ugly press, which will get quoted every time there is a story in the future because most reporter's "research" consists of punching the company name into NEXIS. UUNET's disclosure policy earns it a few disgruntled posts on mailing lists, which Worldcom's PR people will likely dismiss as gossip, but no permanent coverage. While us techies may say we like abovenet's reaction more than uunet's reaction to their respective incidents, most of the buying decisions are made by managers who find abovenet's honesty scary and uunet's lack of publicly reported incidents comforting. If you talk to the PR people, they will all tell you if you have "major problem" you should be as honest and transparent as possible. But if it is a "minor problem" you don't want to attract more attention to it than the problem deserves. The "problem" is you don't know what type of problem you have until its too late.
|