Month: October 2011

It’s been an unfortunate week of customer support around the board.

Last year, I purchased 11 licenses of the Backblaze online backup product for Makalu. Even then, the experience of working with the Backblaze people was a little odd; for example, I had to go through the process of getting a quote from the sales guy, which turned out to be precisely 11 times the cost of a consumer single-license. Whatever.

We moved forward, had our corporate account setup, installed the software, and begin receiving monthly usage reports from Backblaze.

A year later, we’ve decided that we can get by with four, rather than 11 licenses. (Dropbox has made Backblaze redundant for us, to a certain extent.)

The original content of this article was removed on September 27, 2012. That article described a poor customer service experience I had with Anthony Tseng,…

I’m looking forward to a future in which I no longer need to do business with dinosaur enterprise software companies like PGP, and their recent acquirer, Symantec.

My encryption needs have always been simple — I’d like to selectively encrypt files that I keep on a company-accessible server, and I’d like to be able to occasionally encrypt the text of an email message. I could do this easily with earlier versions of PGP — around version 6, and back when PGP felt like small company.

But then they turned their sights on the enterprise, and everything has gone downhill since.