Not Being Sarkari

Few years back, when I was a student, I used to hunt for Cafes which offered free Wi-Fi connectivity (I still do!). There were a couple of them in South Delhi and I used to spend hours over there with coffee, cakes, sandwiches and my iBook. At times, Wi-Fi used to stop working in between or worse not working at all. I used to complaint about the unavailability of service but most of the times sales people used to cut sorry figure. What used to baffle me was that they never used to show urgency in getting it rectified. Logic from my friends used to be, you get what you pay for. It made sense to me and I got used to these outages. After all 'Free' has some kind of magnetic attraction!   

 

A lot of people realized last week that Free may not be best, when Google was shut down for couple of hours and users were unable to access their emails. Unfortunately, there were no phone helplines where people can complain about it. Same is ture for Twitter which has had few outages in last two months. As more and more businesses (especially the smaller ones) are relying on these free service to connect with customers, increasing their reach and to market their services, outages hurt them, sometimes badly. But they cannot do much about it. Since users are not paying anything, there is no customer service/helpline available for these users. With missing customer service, user are left in lurch with nowhere to go. Google does have a premium account where they have phone helpline and they guarantee for some minimum up-time. I guess there will few takers for paid service as free has some magnetic attraction.

 

I think logic stands true - we get what we pay for.