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> Whether intentional or not, it's also great word-of-mouth advertising. Oh, this has really worked out for Backblaze and we know it. The first time we published our drive failure rates (I think January of 2014?) a few people said, "Uh oh, now Backblaze will get sued by the drive manufacturers." And we cringed and waited. :-) But the lawsuit never came, in fact there were NO repercussions, only increased visibility. People who have never heard of our company before find the data interesting, and then they ask "hey, what does this company do to own this many drives?" And a few (like yourself) sign up for the service. Existing customers seem to stick with us for a long time, and even recommend us to other friends and family from time to time. So one tech person who stumbles across these stats might ACTUALLY bring us 3 or 4 more customers over the next 5 years. That's real money to us. Not only have the drive manufacturers not sued us, they are actually NICE to us beyond the scale of our actual drive purchases! In one amusing example, our drive stats were used in a lawsuit as evidence. To be clear Backblaze was not the plaintiff or the defendant in the court case, we had no skin in the game at all and didn't want to be involved, but our drive data (and internal emails) were subpoenaed to be entered into evidence. Before we were served, the drive manufacturer called us and apologized for the inconvenience and made it clear they had no beef with us. Yes, a multi-national company that makes BILLIONS of dollars per year called a 40 person company (at the time) that could barely make payroll each month to apologize for the inconvenience. :-) We thought it was very considerate of them, and a little amusing. I'm proud to be the one that "signed" the papers indicating Backblaze had been "served". |
