ralpress.org

Paul Graham has published a broad list of entrepreneurial ideas that YCombinator is interested in investing in. It’s a very interesting list for not only does it target the often-cited broken models (e.g. traditional media news, DRM-protected digital media, shopping guides, etc), but also many of the first wave of “new” solutions, such as EBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, photo-sharing sites, and other applications that are often regarded as web-era success stories.

Pointing out that the traditional news media model is broken is trite now, but even so, I thought this was a good summary of the situation:

“As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they’ve been slow to adapt to the web. It’s more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives.”

So I’ve done them a favour and lightened their load by one.

I ordered a couple of hard disks from dabs two days ago. Yesterday morning I discovered an email from them telling me that “You have received this email because we were unable to confirm the details of your address with third party agencies.” I received exactly the same message when I made my last purchase from them, back in September of last year. (I’ve made dozens of purchases from dabs.com over the years, so I’m not exactly an unknown quantity to them.)

I returned my address and other details they wanted well before start of business yesterday. I received an automated reply asking me to be patient, to wait for a reply and to please not send any further messages until I’d heard from them.

By 23:00 last night I’d received no response. Given that I’m not allowed to seek clarification about the situation, I cancelled my order and took my business straight to one of their main competitors (who had no problem processing my card details). I just have zero patience with these web-wrapper-around-warehouse businesses these days.

Oh, and I’ve received no contact from them about the cancellation either. They just don’t seem to care — or if they do, they’re overwhelmed and can’t cope. Either way, they don’t need my business.

(PS. If you’re wondering, I have never defaulted on credit card payments or experienced any kind of “personal credit” problems).