What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

The biggest fault with this is the assumption that the geek market isn't big enough to do serious business in. I wouldn't alienate existing customers by an enterprisey makeover.

Even when it comes to B2B, it is better for a service like this to get into enterprise via their geeks than try to appeal to their suits, because Tarsnap's strengths mean nothing to a suit.

How about serving both geek market and B2B market? As Patrick noted, Tarsnap Basic will still exist for all geeks to pay pico dollars by usage.

I do consulting for hedge funds in NYC. Most of them use an accounting system called 'Advent Geneva'. This particular software solution has a Unix component where the actual accounting data lives. My clients would like to back up this database securely and reliably. Security is extremely important as for a given hedge fund, their trades and positions are extremely sensitive information. Tarsnap is exactly the backup solution these clients would want to use. As a consultant, I don't think I will ever be able to sell Tarsnap in its existing form to these clients. Keeping aside pricing, these clients would want an SLA (and other legal stuff mentioned in the article) for the backup service. These clients are more than willing to pay costs associated with this higher level of service and will benefit tremendously from using Tarsnap.

I do not know any backup solution which is better than Tarsnap and it's unfair that businesses will have to use less-than-ideal technical solutions ONLY BECAUSE Colin doesn't want to adjust 'business side' of his product offering.

Or just sell the same product through two different channels. Call it "Tarsnap" and make it work via a CLI and low-fi Web site for the geeks who appreciate such things, and call it "Super Secure Backup Pro XP" (or whatever name appeals to normals) with a GUI and a lickable Web site for the non-geek population.

Underneath it can all be the same product, just packaged differently depending on who the potential customer is.