News: "U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship"

Phillip H. Zakas pzakas at toucancapital.com
Thu Aug 30 22:14:15 PDT 2001


> Adam writes:
> As far as your opinions of our business, well, I'm really uninterested
> in getting into a pissing match with you.  The reality is that
customers
> and investors give us money tp produce privacy tools, and they, not
you,
> are the ones I need to keep happy.

The reality is that people like may and lists like this one that may
help your customers and investors understand what they are and aren't
getting.  For example, your investors probably don't realize that you
can't use zks tools for more than x% (I'm guessing 45%) of the us
consumer market right off the bat because of self-imposed operating
restrictions of your products (if you're not fully compatible with aol
mail and web browsing, you're missing much of your usa market...btw >85%
of aol users use the internal aol browser not an external browser so I
doubt they will figure out how to download let alone launch an external
browser and follow your arcane load/unload/re-load aol usage
instructions.)  plus investors probably aren't aware that limiting
outlook support to 'internet only' mode cuts your outlook customer base
quite a bit (I haven't seen the latest figures, but I believe a large
group of outlook users configure their software for corporate/workgroup
mode.)  and investors probably don't realize how complex (in my opinion)
the software is to set up and operate -- I'm disappointed that you've
not released usage figures that I could find easily on your website
(both downloads and average customer lifespan for the standard or
premium products)...are people rushing to use the products?  oh, and a
minor point, but how much further have you cut your market share by
focusing only on w2k, w98 and wme?  You should correct me if I've
mis-analyzed the info provided on the zks website.
 
Anyway I don't like criticizing products per se (every products has
weaknesses), but I do think criticisms lead to more aware
investors/customers and perhaps even better products in the future.  So
in a sense it's helpful to listen to commentary from may or lists like
this one.





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