I had a bootstrapped B2B company that was stuck in a similar situation, lot of transactional SMS. We initially used (started over a decade ago now) SMS gateways like [email protected] before we had a mobile app. These worked great for a while, but in the last few years they have become very unreliable.
So we started really driving people to push notifications, but users liked the text messages. Especially if they believe your messages are important. As the gateways become more unreliable, users became frustrated and weren't interested in switching over to push notifications.
I did all the research you did, and while we were profitable taking on SMS was going to become a major cost. I couldn't do it. So we took these steps:
1. Immediately stopped providing SMS gateway texts to all new customers. This stopped the expectation that text messages were included. These customers were told we only had push notifications.
2. We went with Twilio and with our decade of data we had a good idea how many text messages per customer. We begin offering a new package that included text messages. We really didn't mark up the price at all, we just covered costs.
When a customer would complain about only have push notification option, we sold them the text message package. When the SMS gateways were unreliable for a customer, we sold them the text message package.
To answer some of the questions posed to this comment, I really think the problem is many school districts do not have enough buses and drivers to transport their entire student body at the same time.
By having secondary start first, you require 50% less buses.
If we were to switch secondary goes second and primary age students go first, your primary age children would leave for school around 7am and arrive home at 3pm. Most parents are not home at 3pm and this causes a large problem for families. In some instances, the older children who are in secondary schools -- watch the younger children until parents get home.
Sometimes older siblings contribute to childcare. A 9th grader that is home at 3pm, can watch a 4th grader that is home at 4pm until parents arrive home at 5pm.
I don't. Nor did the study answer that question. But that's my point -- consumers need to be reassured that their EV vehicles are safe plugged in within their home while they are sleeping.
This is kind of misleading. Are gasoline vehicles more fire-prone? Sure, I believe that's true if you account for all types of vehicle fires.
If your car is parked in your garage, what is more fire-prone? Your turned off gasoline vehicle, or your plugged in EV? That's where some of this concern is coming from. Is it a freak occurrence? Probably!
They need to address that issue head on, explain how rare it is or why it happens etc, rather than just claiming EVs are less fire prone then gasoline vehicles.
If you tell me tornados cause more destruction and death each year than earthquakes, does that mean we should just accept that we're lucky to have had an earthquake instead of a tornado?
As a developer on a very small team for many years now for a B2B product, I've spent years now filling feature requests, adding new features, and enhancing the product. The users seem to be getting more demanding and less thankful/polite.
One of my least favorite days are when we announce new features. Nobody takes a minute to say thank you, instead they want to submit new requests or demand updates on something previously submitted.
I also think, users do not understand the complexities involved. They see software every where that does so much these days for little to no cost and they just demand and think it can be done in a minute.
Sure we get paid well, and it's not a physically demanding field. But it is a mentally demanding job. We are often under appreciated. And then the users blame you for everything. It just gets to you after a while and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of the angry old developer.
I love my job, I love making software that solves real world problems. I just don't appreciate users telling me how my life's work is worthless because it doesn't have this one feature only that person seems to need and I should be able to add it in a minute if I was good at my job.
This happened to me about an hour ago. Suddenly my machine started restarting. No notice. No ability to stop it. Anything running was forced closed.
I had no idea software was updating in the background. No notice provided that anything was updated upon restart. Only after digging through the event log did I find out what happened.
Highly recommend you uninstall "Intel Computing Improvement Program"
Claiming a journalist makes "false claims" and is "misleading" could be injurious to their reputation as a journalist. Which would hurt them in their business or profession.
It's not a slam dunk for him by any means, but I can understand why he filed.
For the first few years of my product, I was in the same situation of being the solo-developer offering phone support. There were a few huge benefits, some mentioned in the article and a few downsides. Some highlights:
When talking a user through a set of actions, hearing them stumble or fail to understand the UI is quite the humbling experience. You literally pay for it with your time as you listen to them struggle.
Feature requests over the phone allowed the user to fully explain the need and helped me understand why that feature was important. The majority of the time a compromise could be struck between us where I could fulfill the feature request meeting my technical and time requirements while solving the problem for them. You can’t do that with emailed forms.
A major downside is I would often get sidetracked to solve trivial problems for frequent callers who I had developed a working relationship with from frequent calls. The squeaky wheel gets the oil problem. While some of these enhancements probably added great value to the product, it was more difficult to pull off the big projects. Maintenance in particular suffered.
In the times of a major problem like an outage or error, I did feel some frustration in those rare times. It was critical to answer the barrage of phone calls, to let them know we were aware and working on the situation. But as the only one who could fix a situation, being stuck on the phone in a repetitive loop delayed things. I just wanted to fix the issue, where each caller wanted to explain it.
It was a valuable experience for me, but I am generally happier to no longer have a phone on my desk.
I agree -- aside from passenger airplane manufacturing I can't imagine a more difficult industry to just jump into without really good reason.
If they want to make an "Apple" car with some bells and whistles on it, why not take an existing vehicle and enhance it. See what happens with that at least. I'm thinking like Shelby did with Mustangs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_Mustang
how do you think this would work today with our interconnected world? we absolutely need standardized times or everything falls apart.