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I love it when a bunch of people rise up and fight against the man. I love it even more when I know that I will directly benefit from said revolution. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, TextDrive, the fabulous hosting company I use (and just purchased a lifetime hosting plan with), has been trying to renew it's Urchin license for about a month now. (Urchin is a web statistics program owned by Google.) For whatever reason, the people at Urchin/Google are not interested in letting TextDrive renew. It appears they're considering restructuring their pricing. Here's an explanation from a blog following the debacle:
Since about mid-August or so, the fine staff have called, e-mailed, and otherwise tried to hunt down someone at Urchin that could help them pay the company money.
Since the Google acquisition, it seems that Urchin has moved datacenters and is “re-evaluating� their pricing model. Looks like they’re pushing hard for a subscription-based, Hosted model.
Meanwhile, thousands of TextDrive’s loyal customers have no web analytics package because Google’s done gone and swallowed them up.
That’s HORRIBLE customer service. I can’t imagine not responding to someone who wants to BUY MY PRODUCT!! Furthermore, a company, that is quite popular, who is ALREADY A CUSTOMER!!!
So, what are the TextDrivers gonna do?
And you know what, I have no doubt it will kick Urchin's ass. When you put together a bunch of smart, passionate, geeks who have been wronged, you can build a hell of a piece of software. I suggest everyone watch the drama unfold at the blog and also respond to the survey about your current webstats software (doesn't matter if you're an Urchin user or not).
This is gonna be good. (Props to Garrett Dimon on the link.)
Update (10/1/05): Just to be clear, I don't actually believe they're going to take down Google or even create a program that outsells Urchin. However, I have no doubt it will be a whole lot more kick-ass than Urchin ever will be.