Not gonna use it? Don't fucking make it!

June 8th, 2009

I’ve noticed a few things in my life. Well more than a few things actually. But I’ve been noticing a trend thru out the years which is just based on mere feeling and experience.

Stuff that is made by people that don’t use the stuff they are making, sucks.

It just sucks.

But when people make stuff they use them self they usually turn out quite good. Just look at Apple and the CEO Steve Jobs, who seems to me to be a guy that has a huge company to make stuff for him self (and sells it to others while he’s at it). You can also take 37 Signals as an example, they use their own products. Awesome products.

Here is one example of a product that is obviously not in use by it’s maker.

Ethernet Big Disk

Lacie the portable hard drive manufacturer made a disk called Ethernet Big Disk . They are pretty big in this market so they make products that sell, but unforutionatly they just don’t work so well. They sell it as a 1GB Ethernet disk with “1 x Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000 (for file-sharing)”. But there is one catch.

• It’s morbidly slow!
• It has a crappy and slow admin interface
• You have to have a special program to find it on your network (no Lacie, the DHCP feature doen’t work)
• The powersupply blew after 2 months, no replacements availible where I live.
• The iTunes share is sketchy… works sometimes.
• Oh and the USB plug is just an ethernet in disguise. Pops up as a network drive.. doesn’t mount at all.

Sorry, I lied, there were a few more catches.

Here are quotes from few reviews on Amazon

• Junk. Class action waiting to happen
• Lacie: the worst product and support quality I have experienced in ~30 yrs of computer use
• Don’t Do It
• Too big, too slow, terrible customer support

Conclusion: I doubt that the CEO of Lacie is using his Big Disk right now. If he is, he’s probably a r-— or a 97 year old that just recently experience the blindingly fast 9660 baud-rate modem that they obviously installed instead of a proper ethernet card.

Note to Lacie if you read this: Thanks for posting the source code to the operating system that is running on your Big Disk. I plan to learning C just to fix bugs. I just love when companies go for the “Hey man do it yourself, we’re to busy snorting cocain for the money you paid” approach. No really. Just love it.

A note to you, the reader

If you plan on buying stuff make sure the company is using their own product, if not it probably sucks.

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