I am not sure I should be amused, but I am ...

The day job has a registration page for people who are interested in purchasing high performance storage, deskside supercomputing, storage clusters, and other HPC like things from us. This registration page asks some very simple things: who are you, where are you, what your shipping/billing address is, what you want your user name to be, and what things you want information on. Registration is, fundamentally, a matter of trust. We guarantee we will not spam people. The entire purpose of this is NOT to gather marketing information. It is to let people order from our site, and get products from us online. Ok. I respect people who are leery of filling this stuff out. They think (based upon past experience with other groups) that they will be spammed. I should be quite unequivocal about this. No. This isn’t marketing information gathering for email lists. We treat the users EXACTLY the way we, and me personally (since I run the company, its easy for me to set this policy), would like to be treated. With respect. Without unnecessary emails/contacts. Further, we handle obviously false data in accounts by deleting the account. We don’t have time to waste with garbage like this, so we handle it in the only reasonable manner. Once you have an account, you can order online. This helps tremendously in fraud prevention. Ok so far … now here is what I know I shouldn’t find amusing, but I do.

While I respect peoples right not to fill out the form (and they can simply email us at info at scalableinformatics dot com), I guess I don’t understand why some people go to the trouble of filling out the form in order to tell us that filling out the form represents a hardship, and that it is too complex, and as a result, they won’t be ordering from us. I raise a glass of good beer to you … you have me there. Yeah, I shouldn’t laugh. Really.