File this under “rants“.

Big business has a herd mentality.  It seems all the financial institutions I use, and other large non-financial institutions I use, all use Epsilon.  I can’t see a reason for it except that they’re all acting like sheep.  Over the past two weeks, I’ve received three or four emails about Epsilon stealing my data. And I’m thinking, why is it that the big companies always screw us over, and then try to hide what’s been going on?

Now, I understand that shit happens.  Data get breached.  Of course, data don’t breach themselves.  And breach didn’t just come down about the data like a plague of locusts.  ”Data” are not “breached”.  Systems are.  ”Data breach”  is a blameless way of saying your shit got hacked.  This could be because of lax data, systems, and security practices.  Or it could not be.  It seems to me when this happens to big companies, two themes repeat themselves:

1. They try to hide or sugarcoat the problem
2. They care about the bottom line more than they care about me
3. They’re pompous bastards (maybe I can’t count)

On the other hand, the small guys, the startups, innovators, mom-and-pops…what ever you want to call them, really care about their product an their client.  Some of them fail because they spend more effort into creating a superior product than selling it.  And of course, we too are susceptible to “data breaches.”  But, to the one, we give it to you straight, we work with you to solve the problem, and we eat several helpings of humble pie.

I guess the difference is simple:  We are proud of our work.  Big business is proud of their bottom line.

Discuss,

Shantih,

—mickey

This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 12:07 pm and is filed under It's Just Business, Philosophy, Wall of Shame, Web News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.