Amos Publications Is Completely, Utterly Useless.

@GeoffHa...



Yes, I've tried them all; some a number of times over the years...

Michel is by far the furthest in technological sense. They've got all the parts in there, but usability is still so-and-so. Their sore point is pricing (even with -30% to -50% discounts their offers are expensive)

Yvert is likely the best in 'usability' and the price is pretty nice too. Sadly the contents doesn't rival (or exceed) Michel except for France & related areas. But if you're happy with the level of data that's in Scott or SG SOTW, then you're likely more than happy with Yvert.

SG is bit mixed case. They've got some good things, and some not so good ones. Technically speaking they don't seem as bad as Amos, but they are good number of years behind of Yvert & Michel.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm putting my money on updating print titles right now and getting prepared for the fact that within next 5-6 years all the major publishers have shifted to eBooks and online subscriptions only. I'm hoping for the best (great digital products at collector friendly prices), but preparing for the worst (limited features at very high cost).

-k-

scb

Many thanks - really helpful. Your conclusion is pretty much where I've wound up. I have a number of older catalogues plus SOTW, which I've recently augmented with some current Yvert and Maury volumes. My inclination is to stay with this until, as you suggest, the offerings develop a little further (or the hard copies disappear). I do very much like the Yvert and Maury printed catalogues - in the case of Yvert, they can offer even less information than my ancient SG France in some instances, but they are beautifully designed books!

Regards.

Geoff

And right on the heels of that fustercluck, the scottonline.com domain has now been unreachable for the last 2 days.

What the hell are the idiots at Amos doing (or not doing)?

And they wonder why people want digital content that is accessible offline.

MORONS!

I sent them an ultimatum that if they (1) can't be bothered to have robust reliability, and (2) won't make the content available for offline use, then I want a refund for the money I have paid for content I cannot access. This bovine excrement means I cannot work on things I need to work on.

It's worse than I thought. Amos is clueless from the top to the bottom.

I just received the following reply from Amos customer service (can't fault the young lady; I'm sure she's just replying with what she's been told to say).




A full week outage?! SERIOUSLY??? In 2015?

My response:




Seriously, a week outage in today's day and age is unheard of, even if someone set fire to the damned server. I have had server hard drive failures at times over the years, and when that happens, they pop in a new hard drive (or put in a new server box if the problem is bad enough), restore from the previous night's backups and I'm back up within a day at most.

And these are the support provisions for a hobbyist... non-commercial, non-mission-critical applications.

If I were offering a commercial paid-for service to the extent that Amos is, not only would there be RAID 1 or 10 systems for hard drive redundancy, but there would be server mirroring with failover redundancy in case a box fails completely. Bandwidth failure? You have redundant bandwidth providers. Catastrophic datacenter failure (the building blows up), well that's a bit more severe, but that's not what we're talking about here. Even still there are ways around that, like having your mirrored servers in different datacenters in different cities.

A week for "the server is down".

Jeebus... apparently this *IS* rocket surgery... good grief.

RevC, thanks for sharing this information. I tried to log on last night, and after the failure of several days ago, I just decided to leave it alone overnight and check back this morning.

I do agree -- this is entirely unacceptable for a commercial operation offering a for-pay online service.

I had already been thinking about asking for a refund after that last problem. Now, I really must. I have to go back to the print version.

Unbelievable. Totally unbelievable. A week??? If anyone but us was interested, this would be newsworthy.

I can't disagree there. One of the digital news sites my company manages recently had a serve crash and they were offline for all of, oh, 40 minutes, give or take.

I try to give benefit of the doubt, but I just can't get the archaic thinking/approaches that seem prevalent at Amos. I hope these are growing pains of a major digital transformation that is coming.

That would certainly make lemonade out of this lemon. But you would think Amos would publicize an upcoming entry into the current digital age if that were the case.

An annual uptime of 99.99% would mean that a server is down for a few minutes for the entire year; this is a standard IT target for any server that is generating income for a company. Being a smaller company, I can understand that Amos would not have a 'roll-over' server in place. A 'roll over' server would be a server which comes instantly online in the event of the primary server failing; these are usually in another physical location for redundancy.

In the absence of a live roll-over server, companies will typically have additional hardware and software backups to restore to them in event of a failure. I have replaced servers in this scenario in less than 15 hours.

The fact that they are saying that it will take a week is simply unbelievable. It is a sign that they never planned for ANY contingencies and do not have any prioritization in place to ensure uptime. How a company which generates income from online services can be in this situation is beyond excusable. Not only would I fire the IS decision makers but I would also consider firing other 'leaders' in the company.
Don

Dear God, the cost of redundant hardware in the form of a failover server is far cheaper than a week's worth of lost business. This isn't even Business 101, it's business .0001. With various virtualization and hosting options, there is simply no excuse for being down for more than maybe an hour or two at the absolute most. If they're self-hosting on their own servers, pretty much every vendor offers 4-hour (and even 2-hour) onsite repairs these days, the cost of which is, again, minimal compared to being down for days. If this company is still around in 10 years I'll be absolutely amazed. Not only are they inept technologically, but apparently they're not too bright when it comes to general business decisions, either.

They may have been hit by a zero-day ransomware virus that makes all their machines unusable, including mirrored backups. I am aware of a company (in Silicon Valley) that was in that position last spring and was down for 4 days, which would make Amos' 7-day estimate believable. The virus (a) required the payment of $100,000 to obtain a decryption password, (b) was not capable of removal by any commercial antivirus solution, and ultimately required on-site consultants from one of the leading AV providers, and (c) lay dormant for over a week while it infected the company's mirrored backups as state data and files were replicated between the active and failover servers. The company got back online only by building a third set of servers on new, clean metal, and then transferring files in small batches after cleaning them on a fourth server that had an Internet air gap.

My point is that the new generation of malware is posing extreme challenges even to conventional failsafe, redundant mirrored system. You actually need three servers: active; mirrored; and backup with an air gap, realizing that this third one may not be up to date, at least as to state data, when a failure occurs with the first two.

CJ,
Sorry I do not totally agree with your post. Most of the ransomware targeted and exploited older versions of software; this would then beg the question of why they weren't up-to-date with security patches. And frankly having malware or a virus take down your company is certainly no excuse for being down extended periods of time. Buying new server(s), installing fresh OS and restoring previously scanned and clean backups might take 48 hours. (Backups should be scanned and clean. Additionally and at a minimum they should have daily, weekly, monthly and annual archived backups stored off-site. The chances of all of these being infected is slim.)

But let's assume that they screwed up so badly that their archived backups are unusable. Does this reflect better on them? I would still be firing people.

And lastly, there are many ways to achieve security without having to do it in-house. If Amos had any questions or concerns that they could not pull off the properly redundancy they could have simply out-sourced it to any of thousands of others who specialize in this service. The fact that they did not do this, and are now off line for a week, is a clear indication that someone in Amos made bad decisions with the justification of false economy.
Don

Anyone who has looked at the catalog over the last 40 or 50 years really cannot be very surprised by this. It's a stone age company.

Amos's problem is lack of competition. While having no competition can be a great position for a business to be in, the lack of a major domestic competitor is also a problem as it leads to complacency and stagnation. Amos has never needed to innovate - they own the US catalog publishing market and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Even specialists who use Michel, Gibbons, Yvert, et. al. as their main catalogs still probably own at least one copy of Scott if they're buying or selling in the US. It would be nice if Michel published more of their catalogs in English and their numbering system caught on. If nothing else it would give Scott a little competition.

My heartfelt apologies to all those affected. I feel your pain and would be very, very upset. I hope Amos resolves this ridiculous situation soon.