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September 16, 2009

Comments

David Chao

Mark,

Thanks for your comments and apologize if you view the contents of the blog as "deceitful or unethical." All initial information came from a DimDim customer which they reference in one of their Marketing PDF's 'DimDim vs. WebEx.' (You might want to take a look at that PDF as their are some inaccurate claims that they make about WebEx. Being a WebEx user, I think they will immediately standout for you.) When Steve Chazen, DimDim CMO, reached out to assist with making corrections, I immediately made the updates on 10/2/09. I also made an IMPORTANT NOTE comment that DimDim does have its own hosted servers.

What else would you have suggested I do Mark? I'm open to your suggestions.

Mark Saner

As a current Webex customer I would like voice my displeasure with this post. We are currently reviewing our webconferencing solution and looking closely at Dimdim. The fact that you have not removed your comments about Dimdim's lack of hosted servers in your initial post nor have your even touched on the subject in your update is deceitful at best.

Reading this post has cemented my decision to move away from Webex. I do not want to support a company that uses such unethical marketing tactics.

Mark Saner

David Chao

Jared Finkenbinder, thanks for your comments. I can feel your PASSION for DimDim through your comments!

In life, mistakes and misunderstandings can happen. One simply hopes to learn from these experiences. I have posted a blog on "The World of Blogging," to briefly highlight some of the things I learned with this specific blog post.

The blog has been updated with the help of some DimDim insiders.

Again, thanks for your candid response and I'm sure DimDim values such passionate and loyal customers like you.

All the best Jared.

David Chao

Dinhcaraeht, thanks for your comments and clarifying that to your knowledge, DimDim owns its own servers.

I updated my blog with the help of some DimDim insiders.

Thanks.

David Chao

Moody T, with comments from Steve Chazin, DimDim CMO, I have updated my original blog.

David Chao

Steve Chazin,

Thanks for your comments and providing accurate data. I updated my original blog post with your comments and new data.

Please let me know if you have additional comments or questions.

I look forward to seeing updates and revisions in the DimDim corporate datasheets.

Thanks again for reaching out Steve.

Steve Chazin

David,

I'm Steve Chazin, Dimdim's CMO and Kevin's manager. Thank you for finally posting Kevin's comments and now noting on your blog that you work for Cisco WebEx. I believe that every blogger has a responsibility for transparency so readers can trust your content and ambitions.

While you have updated these comments, your original post still says we rely solely on Amazon and contains other inaccuracies:

* Dimdim Free is not supported by ads - it is a full featured product that lets 20 people meet an unlimited number of times for free
* We have over 60 full time employees
* We generate way more revenue than you suggest (curious how you could guestimate the revenue of a private company)
* Virtual Classroom Pack supports 50 students in each of the 10 Classrooms

Further, while your title suggests a Dimdim Review you haven't done one here: this is really an Amazon EC2 post. I'd be happy to personally provide a Dimdim demo to you our anyone else at Cisco Webex at any time. In fact, I'd be happy to invite all of your readers and do one live via Dimdim at at time of your choosing. Just say when.

David, many bloggers simply post a big UPDATE on the top of the offending blog post and correct the data therein when they know that data if left uncorrected will remain misleading. I'm happy to update and repost our datasheet when you do likewise to your blog.

David Chao

David Meerman Scott, thank you for your comments and your perspective.

In regards to "deleting" comments, I addressed this on the DimDim Blog and on mine own in the comments section http://blog.dimdim.com/blog/bid/21722/We-must-be-doing-well-if-our-biggest-competitor-resorts-to-spreading-false-information

In life there are always lessons learned. I plan to do a quick blog on some blogging best practices and things that I have learned through this specific blog post experience.

Thanks again Scott.

Again, thank you for your continued WebEx support and your comments.

David Chao

Steve Riley from Amazon sent me an email on Amazon EC2:

Hi, David, how are you? I saw your review of DimDim yesterday (http://davidchao.typepad.com/webconferencingexpert/2009/09/dimdim-review.html). We are keenly aware that data leakage can be a problem, so to prevent that both Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS zero-out disk blocks whenever capacity is provisioned by customers for ephemeral storage in EC2 or as a volume in EBS. Effectively, then, each customer receives scrubbed storage with nothing left over from previous customers.

Let me know if you need more detail.

--Steve

David Chao

Kord Campbell and I had an email exchange. Here is the communication we had about his comments on Amazon EC2.

-----------

Kord,

Appreciate your email comments. Very interesting stuff and thank you for sharing.

Sources I used:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#highlights
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/10/amazon-we-promise-our-ec2-cloud-will-only-crash-once-a-week-amzn-

If interested, take a look at the DimDim Marketing Collateral that they use as it's filled with inaccuracies. Not that you should care but it was the catalyst for my blog post.

Again, thanks for your comments Kord. Your company, Loggly, looks interesting.

David Chao

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Kord's response:

David,

Thanks for the email! I get a bit fired up about comments poking at EC2. I've relied on them before, and are now again relying on them for infrastructure! It's important to paint a clear and accurate picture of the cloud landscape for customers, and outline the advantages and disadvantages of the service.

Look at it from this standpoint. If I get SLA from someone like Internap, then the SLA they give me is based on BANDWIDTH and CONNECTIVITY alone. If, for example, my server goes down, then that's not their fault and they don't start the counter running on the SLA guarantee. With Amazon, more is included in the deal - bandwidth, EC2, APIs, S3, etc. It stands to reason, because of the complexity of the systems I'm using, they would have a looser SLA than Internap. BUT, and here's my main point, it's likely to be MORE reliable than me+Internap because I'm not having to maintain my own complex infrastructure and deal with failures in it - coupled with failures in bandwidth too.

Again, Amazon's SLA isn't a measure of their uptime by any stretch. Their actual uptime is usually much higher than the SLA - as is typical with most providers. You say companies should expect to be down 5 minutes a week - but in actuality they aren't. They should just expect they COULD be down up to 5 minutes a week before being compensated. There's a difference. Again, in practice, the downtime will be far smaller than this. You should clarify what you are saying with your comments about SLA!

Anyway, I was probably a little hard in my comments, but it's time we all start putting this fear of the cloud behind us. If we have evidence of problems with the cloud, then we should make clear arguments for SOLUTIONS to it, not arguments against the companies that use it - like Loggly. It's where we are going - like it or not - and there are opportunities to address everyone's concerns.

Appreciate you taking the time to email. Again, I had no vested interest in DimDim at all, just your general remarks about companies using Amazon.

Cheers,

Kord

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