What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

A few years ago there was a post here that told Patrick how he should run his business. That was a classless act and it made me pretty mad. At least Patrick had the good grace to first enquire if a post like this would really be welcome and he proceeded with Colin's permission (see twitter status linked elsewhere in this thread). Now I hold both Colin and Patrick in high regard, so I'll try to be as balanced as I can in my response here.

Patrick has a number of valid points but as far as I know Colin is well aware of almost every one of them. Just like other people shouldn't be telling Patrick how to run his business Patrick would do well to recognize that Colin and he have different drives and factors not easily digested into a blog post (however well intentioned) that equate to optimizing conversion or maximizing the number of dollars taken out.

None of this could not have said in an email to Colin, and as such it serves as a way for Patrick to show publicly how good he is at fixing problems that are related to marketing and conversion, it does very little for Colin other than to make it very public that he's not running his business in a way that caters to most enterprise types. And that's possibly a good thing, depending on what your assumptions are on what motivates Colin.

I'm going to send my own $0.02 on what Patrick wrote to Colin in an email rather than to post it here for all the world to see, Both Patrick and Colin are good men and I'd rather see stuff like this happen in private.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and even writing a solicited blog post is not always the best solution to the problem at hand.