Comment by andrewcooke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewcooke | Hacker News Reader

what happened to the post that raised ethical questions about this? i think it had a valid point.

the hard drive shortage hit us all. this one company coordinated a mass buying operation from commercial stores when the rest of use were looking for personal use.

while i don't think this is illegal, it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy inside either.

when there's a shortage, the "noise" in traditional distribution means that small buyers (like me, and many others) can still find what we need if we put in some extra effort. it functions like a "soft buffer", making the transition to a complete lack of resources more gradual. action like this removes that buffer.

this feels like one group of people - driven by their desire to do business - beat out a load of other people who didn't have the same logistical resources. there's something uncool about it. i am not sure i have explained very well, but it's to do with crossing the line from business to personal.

[edit: ah, thanks - separate thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630910]

[edit2: wtf? i thought someone replied here? was about to upvote you. thanks anyway.]

While I really enjoyed the story, I felt much the same way as you about the ethics. They justify their decision to run business as usual, supporting the same rate of natural growth, etc. by saying they didn't want to raise prices for their customers, but I don't think that's really a fair reason (eminent business failure would be a fair reason). There were other options:

1. freeze registration of new accounts and purchase only the drives necessary to keep existing contractual obligations

2. charge new accounts at a different rate, promising to drop the rate once drive prices returned to normal

3. change plan storage volume limits

The only reason they didn't pick any of these 3 options, as far as I can tell, is because all of them were bad for their profit margins and it would be nice if they were upfront about that as the real driver for their actions. It's not clear that their business would have failed had they chosen one of these options.

So they chose a path that would screw over the little guy needing a new hard drive in San Francisco. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and the timing made it very difficult to act on these other options, or their cashflow couldn't handle it. That too would be nice to know, if it's the real driver of their actions.

Entirely rational behaviour (in the same position I'd do the same), but while an entertaining story, it's a hard to story to feel enthusiastic about even though in every other way it shows great leadership.

> this one company coordinated a mass buying operation from commercial stores when the rest of use were looking for personal use.

Important to remember that really it wasn't this one company, they were just in the rare situation of needing drives enough to try and buy lots, and not needing enough that they could go further up the food chain in the search of them.

Think of companies such as PC manufacturers, you'd be amazed what was going on behind the scenes.

I don't see an ethical issue here. BackBlaze came up with a creative solution to a supply chain problem. I see it like there not being enough food to go around; it doesn't make sense for everyone to starve to death. If BackBlaze had started the drive shortage, that'd be a different issue, but they found a way to survive in a tough spot.

What would you have them do, just sit there and eventually be unable to provide their service to their customers?

i don't know. surprisingly enough, when it comes to difficult moral questions, i don't have all the answers.

Well, I'd suggest that the fact that they were financially able to carry out this operation suggests that they provide enough value to others for it to be a net gain. Money doesn't necessarily indicate value, of course, but it's a decent first approximation, especially for a business like theirs.

with that essential caveat, this is a very good point. My backup drive died in the midst of this crisis, and I specifically chose to use backblaze instead of buying a new drive. Obviously, it's not a 1-to-1 tradeoff in terms of functionality, but it was close enough for this data that I felt like I was better off paying them monthly than paying an inflated drive price upfront; they were drive farming for me by proxy.

I believe this is called "hustle".

It does not fit any definition of "hustle" that I am aware of, including these: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hustle

It's definition 2a[1] on merriam-webster.com.

  a : to obtain by energetic activity <hustle up new customers>

Seems like a pretty common use of the term in the sense of "that scrappy start-up showed quite a bit of hustle to pull it off."

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hustle

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