[ic] Beima's Response!

[Greg Gaskill]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: interchange-users-admin@lists.akopia.com
> [mailto:interchange-users-admin@lists.akopia.com]On Behalf Of Jim Balcom
> Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 7:38 PM
> To: interchange-users@lists.akopia.com
> Subject: Re: [ic] Beima's Response!
>
>
> On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Ed LaFrance wrote:
>
> EL>>I really can't understand this attitude.  RH/Akopia has to make money

<Snip>

> Yes, I would have paid Akopia $180/hour to set up the server. But, as
> was quickly learned, it does NOT take 3 hours for even a total novice
> to get the server up and running!


I don't know about you, but if I were going to pay somebody for 2 hours
more than they needed for one part of a job, I would have 2 hours worth
of questions and other set-up tasks ready for them.

Certainly just getting the software installed isn't very useful by itself.
I had the tarball installed and running in a very short time,  but it took
about 6 weeks of hacking with the demo before I felt sure _I_ could use
Interchange to run our sites (that's about when I joined this list).  After
that it took me about 2-3 weeks of late nights to do a straight translation
of the old site into Interchange.  And now, almost 3 months later, I'm
still trying to get the rest of the staff up to speed.

My guess is that the Akopia crew could have done the basic setup in the
first week and not only saved me 2 months, but also saved me money, because
the old cart was through CCNow and was costing us 6.5% of our gross and 6.5%
of 2 months sales is a good bit.  But we had no reserves, so I realized that
even though it might take me a very long time, I had to muddle through on my
own.

The upside is that now I have people asking me to do the same thing for
them.

Greg Gaskill