| HN Mirror

Bunnie Huang had a really interesting take on the evolution of the markets. It was just a 30 second quip, a mere nugget falling from the ingot which was the lecture. This won't do it justice but to paraphrase him he basically said (w/r/t Shenzhen where effectively every retailer is selling a commodity, eventually they bottom out in price-competition) - the way that merchants differentiate themselves is via being "the guy" who can provide services in a reliable fashion. He goes to the same guy every time to pick up his 10k spools of resistors to throw into the pick'n'place even if its a few cents more on the bottom-line to the BOM[1] because he has developed a relationship and reputation with those vendors. I've had some catastrophic failures with Rackspace but even with proof of concepts with one tiny 400/mo box[0] they spent easily 12-15 hours with high-level engineers to help resolve some pretty obscure WAS stuff. I'm pretty sure they ended up bringing in software guys to help, or those Rackspace IT guys had some of the most in-depth and wide-range knowledge I've only seen in people like Brad Fitzpatrick[2]. They really went above and beyond - which is why I don't mind paying 4x what an OVH box might cost.

There are so many shitty engineers, shitty lawyers, shitty automotive mechanics, doctors and hosts out there that your market differentiation can literally be phrased in a sentence: "Be just a little bit more competent & reliable than your lazy competition". I'm not the smartest guy, but being dependable to your customers is certainly worth paying the premium.[3]

[0] I've got a lot of equipment with them so I'd expect that kind of treatment if I was operating under my own account but this was off a brand-new account where a speculator bought an energies trading platform from a distressed company. His IT partner didn't have much WebSphere experience so he brought me in, gave me the company card and asked me to get it to work

[1] Even the high priced merchants in Shenzhen are significantly cheaper than what we get at Digi-key and Mouser :(

[2] In that, you'd be very hard pressed to find an engineer who can code "high level Perl" (it was as high level as web-apps went during the LiveJournal days), could write Memcached, could write kernel patches for network drivers, do UI (though things were admittedly far more simple then), all the while taking care of the physical IT ops (see: Coders at Work, for a fantastic account)

[3] And any client you have who doesn't recognize this, you should choose to fire as soon as possible. They don't see the value in the services you deliver and you surely aren't being compensated appropriately.