Comment by ahoyhere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahoyhere | Hacker News Reader

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Sad to see the discussion is more about "what'll get you customers" instead of "what does it mean to do business ethically."

Capitalism, fine. Competitiveness, fine. Postmark is not a company afraid of customers or competition. But they believe in competing in a classy, ethical way. Most importantly, their competitive advantages are based on facts, things they can control, things their competitors could control but don't.

How can anyone disagree with that?

But sure, let's look at it from a ruthless, ethics-free standpoint:

What if you do run attack ads, what if you do kick the competitor when they have a freak event that they did not cause and could not have prevented -- an enormous DDoSing campaign by an organized group -- and which could happen to you, too?

What if you lure customers away with these attack ads?

What will those customers do when you have a freak event?

No service has perfect uptime. DDoSing can happen to anyone.

So even if you have the ethics of a rutabaga, all you get for your efforts are customers which do not tolerate the occasional freak event. What do you think they're going to do when you have something you have no control over?

Your marketing will have created the results that you deserve.

Business doesn't exist in a vacuum. You do not "win customers for life." Customers are not all equal (far from it). This is a long game. Being classy, being honest, is the best way to create a business you -- and your customers -- can live with for a long time.

"all you get for your efforts are customers which do not tolerate the occasional freak event" <- spot on.

Said another way: companies' customers are a reflection how the company behaves. If you want customers who are a pain to deal with, who threaten to switch at any unmet whim, and who will step all over you as a vendor, then by all means go ahead and step all over your competition to get those customers. A company that acts like a jerk is going to have customers who are jerks and who wants to deal with that.

But if you want customers that are fans and proponents and evangelists for your company - then act in those positive ways yourself.

Their is a long time debate between the ideals of communitarism and the ideals of cosmopolitanism, but another term for courteous noncompete agreements with your competitors is cronyism.

When does being nice to your competitors undermine your users' best interests? When does generosity toward people within your industry community benefit your industry at the expense of other communities, and how old does your company have to be before you can call that behavior cronyism? Do you have to smoke cigars in a poorly lit room? What if you just like being more generous to people who smoke cigars in dark rooms more than people who occasionally go outside, and are active? Does that make you a crony?

Reading these comments I get the impression that people want to be nice to others in companies like their own, more than they are describing any type of universal ethical guidelines.

"but another term for courteous noncompete agreements with your competitors is cronyism."

And another term for this sentence is a strawman argument. Nobody at all said there was a gentleman's agreement not to compete. Please read the article.

You might argue that it is a slippery slope argument, which is not a problem in itself, especially since there is a loose definition for what constitutes cronyism, but it is not a straw man argument.

The post calls for not drawing attention to when a competitor experiences a failure. That sort of chumminess does not encourage more robust infrastructure, it makes it difficult for new entrants to compete based on better reliability, and ultimately does not benefit customers.

I love this point of view. If every business person thought like this, and could visualize far enough down the road to see the effects their actions have, capitalism wouldn't have a bad reputation. :-)

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