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By Root 2039 0

to the web economy as shovels at a gold rush, and their sellers priced them accordingly. The cheapest solution from Kana's rival eGain cost more than a hundred thousand dollars. Larry and Sergey would have preferred to write our replies longhand with quill pens rather than sink that amount into someone else's code. Nor were the vendors willing to bend very far to accommodate a small startup like ours. Any features we wanted to add could only be considered during their regular development cycle and would be incorporated only if they were beneficial for their other, more significant clients.

So we looked at second-tier firms that offered stripped-down versions we could strip down even further. After evaluating a half dozen, we settled on a year-old company I'll call "Miasma" that offered what we needed: a simple solution to routing mail, a way to store a list of responses, and support for some foreign languages. Miasma proposed to give us five seats (that is, individual user licenses) plus a one-year maintenance contract and installation at a total cost of thirty-five thousand dollars, plus travel expenses for their technicians to come and plug everything in. I thought that was relatively reasonable.

"The technology's okay, I guess," Sergey told me after seeing a live demo, "but they should pay us to implement it. They need reference clients, and we're growing very quickly. They could learn a lot from watching how our usage changes. And make sure to get two extra licenses for Larry and me. They should throw those in for free because it doesn't cost them anything and we'd be good test users."

Miasma wouldn't pay us, but they did cut their price almost in half, including five seat licenses and the cost of traveling out to install their product, contingent on our willingness to act as a reference for them (evidently Sergey's logic was not entirely unconvincing). We scheduled an install date and awaited the arrival of the technology that would simplify our lives.

Miasma's techs worked industriously to get the software up and running while training us to write rules for routing mail to the proper queues and for forwarding messages to our staff "experts" for translation or sales follow-up. Everything was going according to plan, and though we were falling even further behind during the transition period, I was confident we had put into place a scalable solution to a growing problem. We said goodbye to the install team, certain that we would be caught up on our email in no time.

The problems at first were minor. Our engineering "experts" couldn't read our rich-text-formatted attachments on their Linux-based machines, so they couldn't help us answer technical questions. Some of the routing rules were unpredictable, and everyone who contacted us received multiple automated responses. Then, one day, a help request I sent to Miasma's own corporate mail system bounced back as undeliverable. That seemed a touch foreboding.

Miasma's staffers were eager to help when we finally got in touch with them, and we continued plugging in patches as needs arose. They fixed reporting so we could see how far behind we were and gave us access to the system remotely via the Internet. We added RAM to the server sitting under Denise's desk and learned how to restart it when it froze, as it did frequently. Though Miasma improved our organization of email, it ran slowly and required repeated manual intervention. With the new technology completely installed, we weren't responding to users any more quickly than we had been before.

We fell further and further behind. I checked the queue one day and saw we had more than ten thousand unanswered emails. Miasma's tech staff came back to tweak and tune and reboot the server, but—after months of fits and starts—we gave up. We declared email bankruptcy, archived the unanswered mail, and started over with a blank slate. We were able to normalize our system after a few months, but we never approached the level of rapid response we had envisioned. Each week as I reported our anemic numbers, I felt the pressure