Throughout time and in almost every culture, we’ve been told that giving is better than receiving (or hoarding). Dickens wrote about it, Jesus taught it, Buddha practiced it.
Well, it turns out that it may not be just altruism at work. This week’s Science has an article on a study that shows giving makes the giver happier than if they kept the money for themselves.
Which, of course, makes a bunch of economists fairly unhappy. But at least they now know how to fix it!
[Ed: Thanks for Matt from Slicehost for correcting me, as I've confused the outage that 37signals suffered in November via Rackspace, with Slicehost. Both are the top quality services that I relied upon, and my hazy memory confused them My apologies. Corrected post is below.]
Slicehost is the hosting company we are using on AllYourPals.com. And they have been very impressive so far. Super diligent and conscientious, very good at communicating status and planned maintenance. It’s by far the best hosting company I’ve used over the years. Many others in the industry agree.
When I was at Microsoft, leading the server product team for a web service, I used to work with the MSN ops team there all the time. At the time the MSN Ops team was very difficult to work with, and we had to constantly battle it out. They were a relatively new org at the time, and being a cost center that hardly ever get credit but lots of blame, they were always defensive when we ask them any question. We would approached them, wanted to know what caused a service outage, and they would frequently use “networking” or “hardware” as the answer because those are the areas where we would be least familiar with, thus had the highest likelihood of avoiding further discussion. There would be plenty of time where we were 90% SURE what they were feeding us a line, but couldn’t prove it or just not worth pushing it. Trust was not high. The worst outcome was that it was hard to learn their pain, and what could have been done simpler, cheaper, more reliable, had we worked together, never materialized.
Compared to that kind of corporate disfunction, Slicehost is way easier to work and live with. Unlike 98% of hosting companies out there, they don’t oversell capacity. They waitlisted us for 3 months before we got our service provisioned. But after countless troubles with hosting in the past, I appreciated their stance on their belief that quality of service trumps quantity of customers and revenue. Slicehost is always proactive about communicating issues, and never one to slide one past you.
There’s alot to be said about a competitive market. In MSN we had no choice but to use the internal ops team, and they used the monopoly position to protect themselves. Slicehost, on the other hand, must attract and retain customers based on its own merit, and they work hard at delivering their promise. Any other approach and they will kill their own business.
And that’s who you want to be on your team when you are a small web startup. Vendors like Slicehost that tells you exactly what they are selling you and deliver on it.
Scene: Sasi Cafe, Kirkland, Washington
Female Microftee: I really want an iPhone. I thought I was going to get it for Christmas but I didn’t get it.
Friend: Oh I heard they are great. I’d love to have one.
Microftee: My birthday is coming up, maybe I’ll get one then.
She is the kind of the people AllYourPals will help to delight. I wanted to interrupt their lunch and pitch them our service and see what they think. But I was wolfing down a yummy Portobello sandwich and decided I wouldn’t be very articulate with that much fungus in my mouth.
Amazon.com should probably have started life as Books.com. IRS should probably be Tax.gov, rather than Irs.gov. But Stupid.com nailed it from the start: They are a gag gift seller, carrying such gems as:
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Gag gifts are sometimes good when you run out of ideas on what to give. But like a good buzz from a night on the town, the good vibes won’t last till the morning.
And I quite like their web site design as well. It has the feel of an Archie-McPhee meets Microsoft Frontpage template circa 1995. Not to mention all the animated GIF that’s fit to host. Don’t forget to check out the Vintage Stupidity “gallery” for a rollicking good time.
All Your Pals is a startup that my partner and I are working on launching later in 2008, but currently is still under wraps. We thought sharing some of our thoughts and ideas would be a great place to start our journey. Stick around and follow us in our quest to revolutionize gift giving!
