EXHIBIT A:
I just tried to access my Backpack (handy online virtual notebook utility) at 3:15pm on a Sunday in Hong Kong, and I get this. Even though this maintenance was properly announced well in advance, it’s still annoying to have your “online virtual notebook” down for 4 hours in the middle of the day. (Chicago-based 37signals’ wee hours of the night and graveyard shift are the middle of my day.) It’s what I call the “coffee/beer” conundrum (having been on conference calls from Asia to the U.S. for the last 17 years where, when I’m drinking beer the other party is drinking coffee, and vice-versa).
Any of these cool SaaS online Web 2.0 apps that want to be a serious player in Asia (including those which I’m a big fan of: 37signals, Near-time and Ning) really need to take this into account. Minimally, all maintenance needs to be scheduled, so that users in Asia can prepare for it. Optimally, you need to figure out how to have a server farm or replicate in another data center or virtualize or something–so that you don’t have 4 hour outages. That’s really “20th century” and not very international. C’mon, e-commerce sites (amazon, etc.) don’t go down for maintenance in the middle of anyone’s night, because they lose clicks to shopping carts and revenue. SaaS’s (for which we potentially pay pretty good money for) need to start thinking the same way. For this reason (of potential outages in the middle of my day) I’m seriously considering Microsoft’s OneNote, instead of upgrading my Backpack account–for my ‘virtual notebook’ application (I’m still a very big fan of 37signal’s Highrise–even with these outages in the middle of my day.)
