Everyone who has ever worked with me in sales or marketing is going to giggle to hear me say this, but it's really bad form to make your pitch on your competitor's negatives. Every point that salesperson had to make could have been made purely on positive terms, like:
* "I think you'll find our support is hard to beat, because of our advanced support portal you can see [here], and because we offer 24x7 phone support."
* "We're convinced that we currently offer the best pricing in the industry for your expected usage; [explain here]. If you're getting a better price for that usage from someone else, we'll beat it."
* "We have a different architecture than other cloud providers, because we provide OS-level isolation from other customers. No other customer app failing in our cloud will impact yours, because [etc etc]"
And on and on. The direct jabs at Heroku here just make me think this guy is skeevy.
Yeah but the guy said explicitly that he was comparing the two providers. It's like me walking into a Ford dealership and saying that I'm trying to decide between a Taurus and a Chevy Malibu.
Direct comparisons would be reasonable and helpful although you'd be a fool not to vet them afterwards. If a competitor is missing a feature (24x7 support in this case), I'd say that's absolutely fair game.
Even if you want to be very direct about your competitive differences, you can do it without ever stating an overt negative. Just say, "ask them if they can XXX", or "ask them if they really YYY". Then say "we can, and here's why that's awesome:".
One very simple reason why the direct comparison is a bad idea is right there in the blog post: Heroku falsified one of the Engine Yard guy's claims, and blew his credibility up. There's always a risk that can happen to you when you badmouth a competitor.
Be subtle about competitor flaws, and very very overt about your benefits.
I agree, those jabs at heroku were in very poor taste and I'm glad that they've taken measures to avoid sounding like that in the future. It's just sleazy.
* "I think you'll find our support is hard to beat, because of our advanced support portal you can see [here], and because we offer 24x7 phone support."
* "We're convinced that we currently offer the best pricing in the industry for your expected usage; [explain here]. If you're getting a better price for that usage from someone else, we'll beat it."
* "We have a different architecture than other cloud providers, because we provide OS-level isolation from other customers. No other customer app failing in our cloud will impact yours, because [etc etc]"
And on and on. The direct jabs at Heroku here just make me think this guy is skeevy.