The 'Dear Erica' letter
November 14th, 2009
We rely a lot on the RentaCoder and Odesk networks for your work. Both networks have their advantages:
- RentaCoder has a solid arbitration system. Along with the ratings of sellers and buyers, you can see how many projects were put in arbitration and what was the outcome.
- Odesk has a lot of tools as part of its service. One of them is the integration with CVS, the code repository system. Or rather 'was' CVS. Odesk has suddenly announced it will stop the service and within 6 weeks, all source code should be moved somewhere else.
Erica Benton, Odesk's Marketing Communication manager, has a hard time explaining this to the unhappy user base. Among the protests is a 'Dear Erica' letter, suggesting the company what a correct reply to its users could be. Maybe this letter will deserve a place in the history books, along with the so called 'Dear John' letter.
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Dear Erica,
The best reply to this all would be:
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We're sorry we handled the svn phase-out poorly. Based on the feedback we received, we have learned that
- our users find the basic service useful,
- the transition time is too short,
- we should have consulted our users what they think of the service.
So we have come up with following solution:
- the current svn service will remain operational for another 6 months
- during that time we will integrate our site with the one from CVSDude
- as part of the odesk subscription, you can use the basic CVSDude subscription for free
- users wishing to use a more advanced service, can upgrade to the professional service of CVSDude at a discounted rate of x %.
I bet you'll get a lot of advantages
- good press
- happy users
- phase out of your own support for cvs
- CVSDude is happy because they'll get more revenue in the end
Everybody happy!
Just a thought
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The link to the Linked In group where the letter first appeared is here.
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