How not to sell something
November 19th, 2008
This morning, I received this email. At first, I wanted to hide the company or the product but I told myself that a company this big deserves some critisism. I can’t believe this made it through the marketing department. It was obviously written by someone who knew the product very well and couldn’t explain it at all. Not a winning combination!
Here is the email along with my comments (or what I was actually thinking while reading it)
Dear AWS Customer, (thanks, what’s AWS again..? Oh Amazon Web Service - ok)
Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta of Amazon CloudFront (cool!), a new web service for content delivery (hmm..? You mean S3 version 2.0?). With CloudFront, you can distribute content using a worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds (is this distributed S3..?). CloudFront works seamlessly with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 (Ah so it must be different than S3..?), and like all AWS services, is self-service with no up-front commitments, no long-term contracts and pay-as-you-go pricing. (Sounds good, but what is it exactly?) You can sign up for CloudFront - and begin using it today - at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront. (Yes, but what is it??)
The initial release lets developers and businesses deliver popular, publicly readable content worldwide. (like my web server..?) CloudFront has a number of exciting features (Exciting yes, but what is it exactly?) that differ from many traditional (woah, is this http ng?) methods of content delivery. It:
- lets you get started easily there’s no need to contact a sales person or negotiate a contract. Anyone can get started in just minutes with only a credit card. (Wow! but what is it again?)
- works seamlessly with Amazon S3 - you can start delivering your files stored in Amazon S3 through CloudFront edge locations in a matter of minutes. (Cool! So it’s really not S3 then?)
- is simple and easy to use - a single API call is all that’s needed to get started delivering your content.
- lets you pay only for what you use there are no minimum fees and no long-term commitments. (So I don’t need S3 anymore then, or do I?)
- To Use Amazon CloudFront, all you need to do is store your objects in Amazon S3 (make sure they are publicly readable), then, make a simple API call to register your bucket with CloudFront. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location used by Amazon CloudFront for fast delivery of your content. No negotiations, no upfront fees, and no volume commitments. It’s that simple. (Oh, looks like I still need S3 after all…)
You can learn more about Amazon CloudFront and get started using the service at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront. (I don’t want to click there to find out more. I should know everything by now!)
Sincerely,
The Amazon CloudFront Team (oh well…! [deleting email])
So of course, I’m being a bit silly but the point is this email was sent to a lot of people who WON’T have a clue about their new service. Even I am not too sure what this is. It looks like an Akamai clone. If so then be more direct about what you sell. Give examples, show pictures, etc. If that’s not what you’re selling then you missed the boat completely and I won’t take time to find out if this unknown product solves a possible pain that I might have…! Right now, everything runs very well without this CloudFront so I guess it’s not THAT important, right?
Posted in Marketing, Rant, humour | Comments (2)
December 1st, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Haha, awesome post. I got the same email and wondered about the same things–I just wasn’t clever enough to blog about it
Well done!
A lot of the AWS documentation is similarly vague….
December 1st, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Heheh I’m not very clever, I was just a bit upset about them that day I guess… I have some weird reporting issues with Amazon these days so it was an easy prey. A company like Amazon should get their act together I guess, especially when the economy is going downhill and we have the choice.