We must be doing well if our biggest competitor resorts to spreading false information
Posted by Kevin Micalizzi on Thu, Sep 17, 2009 @ 08:00 PM
David Chao of Cisco/WebEx published an article yesterday (9/16/2009) on "The Web Conferencing Blog" called "Dimdim Review". The idea that he (as a competitor) would publish a "review" of Dimdim surprised me. The fact that he would base his review on false information shocked me.
Three and a half years ago Dimdim was created because the existing web conferencing tools weren't doing what the team needed and they were too expensive. The goal was (and continues to be) to democratize web conferencing. We want web conferencing to be available for everyone, not just large companies with big budgets.
We not only built the technology, we built our own data centers to host the service.
In the blog David says:
"DimDim is a web conferencing provider based in Lowell, MA that has built its business on a open source-based value proposition. They can be a cost effective solution for the right buyer but know that the biggest risk with DimDim is reliability, performance, and security. (Note: These three major risks are not directly because of DimDim but indirectly through their business relationship with Amazon.)"
It's a testament to the work we've done if David feels our only risks are based on a relationship with Amazon (that doesn't exist.) Dimdim can run on Amazon EC2, and a few customers have chosen to do that, but they are the exception. David goes on to say:
"Though DimDim is a SaaS-based company, they do not actually own their technology network since they rely solely on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Whether this is because they cannot afford to build out their own network or because they want to try to keep things "open," EC2 does have its limitations and drawbacks which ultimately negatively effect DimDim and DimDim customers."
I'm most offended by this article because David presents it as a "Review" of Dimdim, when in fact it's a technique some of our customers have told us the WebEx sales staff uses. I seriously thought a company like Cisco wouldn't resort to tactics like this.
We're either being attacked for our CEO's comments that "WebEx is history" or because our work to democratize web conferencing is hitting too close to home for them. I understand it's tough to compete with free web conferencing when you're a big expensive player, but it's not acceptable to create fiction for your arguments.
-k
Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
Dimdim Web Conferencing
e: kevin@dimdim.com
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dimdim.com/facebookp.s. In the interest of fairness, I did post a comment to David's blog around 9am EST this morning (9/17/2009) to clarify that we do not use Amazon's EC2 infrastructure, but it has since been removed.
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