The One Boring Reason Why People Use the AWS Service

One of my clients recently started using a relatively new AWS CI/CD Service, and I just stumbled on a defensive/marketing type post from one of the traditional providers. And it made me realise how much vendors can miss the reason people choose to go with the AWS/GCP/Azure service, even if it’s inferior.

Aside: I’m not going to link to the article because they don’t deserve the clicks.

Back to their post, it went through a familiar structure:

  1. “But it doesn’t have all the features, our lovely features”
  2. “You can’t self-host, you’re LOCKED-IN!”
  3. “Why not buy into our broader platform?”

I’ll go through these in turn, before getting to the actual reasons.

“It doesn’t have the features…”

It doesn’t. It’s version 1 of an AWS product… they always launch very lean and gain new things.

And yes, it only supports 3 integrations while Vendor supports around 30. Turns out though those 3 are the most important ones. Others will be added I’m sure, but only where people will use them.

“You can’t self-host, you’re LOCKED-IN”

Good. I literally don’t want to.

I know that some Ops-Teams feel happier that they can touch a container or an instance, but this is a product that can be replaced quite easily, include by this Vendor should the need arise.

They do have a SaaS offering you can pay for, but it’s relatively expensive for small-teams. (And we’ll come onto legal things later)

“Why not buy into our broader platform?”

Lock-in to your cloud provider is bad, but if you use all of their products you can get a great unified experience… which sounds a little like, erm, lock-in.

The simple reason people choose the service on their Cloud… procurement

Companies generally make buying stuff difficult. Every new vendor is a new round of legal review, potentially procurement exercises. It’s a painful affair.

This Vendor does sell their SaaS platform on the AWS marketplace, but it’s another End User License Agreement (EULA) that needs to be accepted. And that means it has to evaluated by a legal-team: like most other EULAs the lawyers will probably go “Yeah, it’s got a bunch of stuff in it that nobody could ever enforce, so proceed at a tiny risk”.

When you already have a cloud-provider, and the legal/finance agreements are in place, it’s just easier to use the provided service.

The ‘default’ product may well be inferior, have less features, and even be more expensive: but if I can click “use this” without involving legal – it’s the one I’ll likely choose.

The Need Not to be Needy

Emailing me with 24 hours of using your service getting me to invite friends, feels kinda needy.

I recently installed the iPhone version of a social app that was previously iPad only.

In less than a day I got the “welcome to the iPhone version, you want to invite your friends?” email.

It was needy. I’m not inviting them.

Calls to Action are a pain to write. Too passive and they won’t drive people, too pushy and they’ll drive people away. And invariably what works for some won’t work for others. Judging the assertiveness/aggression is tough; but easier is never, ever, sounding needy.

Asking me to invite people within 1 day of installing something feels that.

It might be a considered decision to strike while the iron is hot, but failed; for me, at least.

The Real Test if Old Spice gets the Internet

Updated: Sure the @oldspice videos have been funny, but this voicemail generator showed just how well they get the internet.

Update: Was done with their encouragement.

Sure the @oldspice videos have been funny, but if this voicemail generator is not part of the campaign, how they handle it will be the real reflection of how well they get the internet. @oldspice played along with this voicemail generator and showed they “got it”

I’ve seen followers on twitter saying things like “@oldspice wins the internet”, and their video responses to people tweeting by the actor in their adverts have been generally funny, and impressive for really engaging with people. The knowledge behind comments addressed to the founders of Digg and Twitter gave them decent internet gravitas.

Enter now the Oldspice Voicemail generator: now I don’t know if it’s something that somebody has genuinely done by someone else, or if it’s just another part of this oh-so-viral campaign (I’m a little too tired to go digging properly, so I wouldn’t be surprised). If it is an external thing, how they handle it will be the real indication if they “get” the “internet”.

Don’t go slapping a take-down notice, as you’ll replace a load of Win with an Epic Legal Fail.

They set the campaign free, I suspect this will be the textbook “how to merge big campaign with social media” example for a few years. Look forward to a many piss-poor imitations.