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Opinionated Infrastructure: Convenience Beats Cost, User Experience Drives Margin, On A Train

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What the Heathrow Express Can Tell us about Tech, Commodity and Convenience. In this video I talk to convenience, cost and margin. Commodity doesn’t always win, or provide the best user experience. The question to ask is not what will be cheapest, but what will be best for the users’ needs?

IBM PureSystems sponsors this Opinionated Infrastructure video series. We also record regular Google Hangouts with a range of experts on issues du jour.

2 comments

  1. Rackspace has always had the reputation of being all about service, particularly when it comes to technical support. And you pay for that. They’re far from the cheapest when it comes to managed servers, in fact they’re very expensive, but you know you can phone up and get someone (usually) very knowledgeable very quickly.

    The same applies with open source and the enterprise companies. You get the products for free but if you need help and support (even going onto consultancy and training, although that’s not so relevant for this point) then you can pay for that. Or wait around in the community forums for non-urgent best effort support.

    Convenience is an interesting “feature”. It means something different for consumers and in the consumer space it seems people are willing to trade privacy for convenience…but that’s another story.

    1. thanks for the comments David. Fanatical Service is hard to scale, but it can certainly help convenience, as long as it doesn’t get in the way but genuinely helps.

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