In the latest Navisite (Nasdaq: Navi) news, the unbelievably incompetent web hosting provider has finally proffered some statistics about the devastation that the company's indifference has wrought for thousands of small businesses. In a post earlier tonight (which is no longer there), the famed Mark Clayman (has anybody actually talked to this guy?) said:
We have now mitigated all outstanding issues that were holding up progress and are steadily bringing up more servers live. More than 60% of the servers are now on line, and we currently estimate that all servers will be live within the next 24 hours.
So, in other words, more than 80,000 web sites are still down fully 110 hours after Navisite's incredibly botched decision to physically relocate Alabanza's servers from Baltimore to Andover, in direct contradiction of what they told customers they would do in the first place. Remember, we all thought that the move would be a "virtual" one.
But, apparently, Navisite thought the virtual move was taking far too long so it yanked the servers out of the Baltimore facilities, tossed them into trucks and headed to Andover...where nobody was prepared for an actual physical migration. Because the original plan was for a virtual migration.
No plans. No strategy. Just toss the things into a truck and drive and hope that someone would figure out what to do once the servers arrived in Andover. I'm speculating, of course, on what Navisite was actually thinking.
The company itself doesn't explain why it made the decision it did or whether it was prepared to implement the hideous plan B that it extemporaneously devised. (I highly suspect the decision to yank the servers and hit the highway had something to do with saving a buck or two. The answer as to whether Navisite was prepared to implement plan B is, by now, screamingly and obviously no.)
I would even hazard a guess that a good chunk of the servers that have been brought up have only been made live on the Internet within the past 24 hours, far past the point at which most Navisite customers could have emerged from this whole mess unscathed. I've received phone calls and emails all day from desperate, hollow sounding small business owners and web hosting resellers asking for advice, or to let me know of their dire situations, or to find out what I know. Tracking down my phone number hasn't been the easiest thing in the world either, so that just shows how awful people feel.
Why have I received these phone calls and emails? Because I've been blogging about the situation. And because Navisite is still not answering customers' phone calls or emails.
One man called me this morning to say that his business, which entailed 1,000 web sites directly hosted by Navisite, is now dead. Navisite hasn't returned any of his phone calls. Or emails. And despite promising to bring top management into the endless, useless conference calls Navisite has been hosting since last Sunday, this man told me that he had been on a call all morning...but no one from Navisite chose to participate.
And yet, and yet...the company proclaims great sympathy for the people whose lives it has messed up. In an interview with CNET reporter Elinor Mills, Rathin Sinha, chief marketing officer at NaviSite, said he was sorry for the customer service problems and that the company was doing everything it could to ameliorate the situation.
InfoWorld's Paul Venezia aptly summed up the situation. Navisite's disastrous and truly horrible, no good, devastating (are there any more words for the awfulness that has occurred) indifference, incompetence, irresponsibility has gone "from a tragedy to a farce and back again."
The mainstream press is finally starting to pick up what Navisite has done. But it's too late for so many people.
I'm doing fine now. My servers are up. My sites are functioning and I can proceed. But I feel just terrible for the folks who continue to comment, ask questions, feed me information, call and post on this blog about the traps they are caught in. These are desperate people watching years worth of work go down the drain. And Navisite won't return their phone calls.
The company's utter arrogance -- and refusal to apologize -- is the icing on this absurd cake. Earlier tonight, "Mark Clayman" had the temerity to make a comment to the effect that, looking on the bright side, the sites that are up are functioning better than ever. (This statement is no longer up on Navisite's web site. I wished I had preserved it for posterity's sake. Ed note: statement found and is in update below.) That's like saying, looking on the bright side of things, the deck chairs on the Titanic were the best that money could buy. Who gives a crap.
They just don't get it. They just don't understand what they have done to so many people. To everybody whose sites and email are still down, I'm sorry for you all.
Update: The great Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe, who moderated the closing panel for us last week at The New Video Summit, has this piece today in which Navisite's Sinha describes the problems as "hiccups." Geez...
Update: Ahh...I found "Mark Clayman's" quote about how much better things are for companies that have been brought up online. Someone posted it on a bulletin board.
It is worth noting that for the clients that have been brought back online, we have been hearing that the performance of the environment has improved vs. the Baltimore environment. This was part of the rationale for the migration.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:37 PM | Print | Comments (18)
As a longtime cable industry watcher, I'm amazed that U.S. cable operators are slipping perilously close to becoming the minority multichannel video provider. Although we're not there yet, the signposts are leading that way.
Case in point: Time Warner Cable, which issued its Q3 07 earnings results this morning, (PDF here) is experiencing continued loss of basic subscribers, to the point where TWC's penetration rate (basic subscribers to homes passed) now stands solidly at 50%. Which means that half of the homes in TWC's territories either buy TV service from someone else or they don't buy it all.
During the quarter, Time Warner lost 83,000 basic customers, with most of the lost subscribers, or 66,000, flowing from two recently acquired systems in Los Angeles and Dallas. During the companies earnings call, execs tried to dismiss the losses by pointing to the problems in LA and Dallas as somewhat intractable and noting that around half of the remaining lost customers are decidely marginal, i.e. those who purchase only the lowest basic service tier and not much else.
As is true of most cable operators, Time Warner is experiencing a slow-down in high-speed data and digital TV customer gains. But, Time Warner's digital voice service continued to gain steam during the quarter, a contrast to Comcast's slow-down in voice service growth. During the quarter, Time Warner added 280,000 net new voice customers during the quarter, a run-rate up 47% year-over-year and 14% sequentially.
At the end of the quarter, Time Warner Cable counted 2.7 million telephony customers, representing around 10% of all homes passed.
Time Warner issued its Q3 07 earnings release today (PDF here) and AOL still looks like a stinker for the media conglomerate. Despite the tremendous effort that Time Warner made to turn AOL into an Internet ad giant, the online unit continues to barely eke out growth on the ad front.
From Q2 07 to Q3 07, AOL's ad revenues ticked up by only 3%, climbing from $522 million to $540 million. Total page views are on the decline, dropping 9% quarter-over-quarter from 52 billion to 47 billion, although during an earnings call, Jeff Bewkes, soon to take over the reins as CEO of all Time Warner, attributed this drop to a change in measurement methodology and said he expects page views to jump next quarter.
A further, perhaps last-gasp, push to get AOL into the top ranks of online advertising is the company's deal, announced (release) this morning, to buy Internet advertising tech supplier Quigo for a reported $340 million.
Even if Time Warner manages to turn AOL's ad businesses around, the unit continues to lose its margin-rich dial-up customers, resulting in an overall steep decline in revenues generated by AOL. During Q3 07, AOL lost around 1.1 million "subscribers," as the dial-up customers are still called, ending the quarter with around 10.1 million total dial-up subscribers.
Actually, that's still a pretty impressive statistic. Who, exactly, are these 10 million or so people? Are they all older Internet users still not comfortable with the Interweb? Are they folks who don't feel they can afford broadband connectivity, even though most telcos offers low-speed DSL options at prices not much higher than AOL's dial-up service? I find it pretty intriguing that the slope of AOL's dial-up loss hasn't been steeper so far.
In any event, the combination of the tepid ad revenue growth with the declining subscriber growth resulted in a 39% year-over-year drop in total revenues to $1.2 billion.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:34 PM | Print | Comments (1)
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