I had a bootstrapped B2B company that was stuck in a similar situation, lot of transactional SMS. We initially used (started over a decade ago now) SMS gateways like number@txt.att.net before we had a mobile app. These worked great for a while, but in the last few years they have become very unreliable.
So we started really driving people to push notifications, but users liked the text messages. Especially if they believe your messages are important. As the gateways become more unreliable, users became frustrated and weren't interested in switching over to push notifications.
I did all the research you did, and while we were profitable taking on SMS was going to become a major cost. I couldn't do it. So we took these steps:
1. Immediately stopped providing SMS gateway texts to all new customers. This stopped the expectation that text messages were included. These customers were told we only had push notifications.
2. We went with Twilio and with our decade of data we had a good idea how many text messages per customer. We begin offering a new package that included text messages. We really didn't mark up the price at all, we just covered costs.
When a customer would complain about only have push notification option, we sold them the text message package. When the SMS gateways were unreliable for a customer, we sold them the text message package.
To answer some of the questions posed to this comment, I really think the problem is many school districts do not have enough buses and drivers to transport their entire student body at the same time.
By having secondary start first, you require 50% less buses.
If we were to switch secondary goes second and primary age students go first, your primary age children would leave for school around 7am and arrive home at 3pm. Most parents are not home at 3pm and this causes a large problem for families. In some instances, the older children who are in secondary schools -- watch the younger children until parents get home.
Why not ditch the buses and just start everyone around the same time? In Australia, all levels are starting around 8:45am (3-18yo). There's a bit of flexibility in that a school yard is monitored a bit earlier, or the first session is free play ("Investigation") which allows children to be dropped off sequentially if parents are handling that. Ends up being a window of about 8:35-8:55 so my school run can get two both schools in time.
There is affordable and easy to book out of school hours care for anything earlier or later.
Outside of formal lessons, I'd fill gaps with investigative play, extracurricular at-school sport, or casual activities to line up various year levels.
Sometimes older siblings contribute to childcare. A 9th grader that is home at 3pm, can watch a 4th grader that is home at 4pm until parents arrive home at 5pm.
This is kind of misleading. Are gasoline vehicles more fire-prone? Sure, I believe that's true if you account for all types of vehicle fires.
If your car is parked in your garage, what is more fire-prone? Your turned off gasoline vehicle, or your plugged in EV? That's where some of this concern is coming from. Is it a freak occurrence? Probably!
They need to address that issue head on, explain how rare it is or why it happens etc, rather than just claiming EVs are less fire prone then gasoline vehicles.
If you tell me tornados cause more destruction and death each year than earthquakes, does that mean we should just accept that we're lucky to have had an earthquake instead of a tornado?
FWIW when renewing our home insurance they asked whether we had any EVs that charge or are parked in our garage. I’m not sure how it would have affected our premium as I don’t own an EV, but the fact that they’re even asking makes me think they must see it as an elevated risk.
I don't. Nor did the study answer that question. But that's my point -- consumers need to be reassured that their EV vehicles are safe plugged in within their home while they are sleeping.
As a developer on a very small team for many years now for a B2B product, I've spent years now filling feature requests, adding new features, and enhancing the product. The users seem to be getting more demanding and less thankful/polite.
One of my least favorite days are when we announce new features. Nobody takes a minute to say thank you, instead they want to submit new requests or demand updates on something previously submitted.
I also think, users do not understand the complexities involved. They see software every where that does so much these days for little to no cost and they just demand and think it can be done in a minute.
Sure we get paid well, and it's not a physically demanding field. But it is a mentally demanding job. We are often under appreciated. And then the users blame you for everything. It just gets to you after a while and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of the angry old developer.
I love my job, I love making software that solves real world problems. I just don't appreciate users telling me how my life's work is worthless because it doesn't have this one feature only that person seems to need and I should be able to add it in a minute if I was good at my job.
This was amazing to see during my work with a startup.
The CEO would take any feedback and try to integrate it into the platform while also refusing to actually talk to our users because "big data knows better" (we had a small database...). It was also fun how they ignored any feedback from the in-house people actually using the product day to day because "they're just low level, they don't understand", and I can vouch that their understanding seemed proper.
The COO would just browse the internet for cool articles and find features of other platforms and just cram them up into the backlog. You'd see him go to the toilet, come back in 30 minutes and fill up 5 - 6 backlog items, like 'conferencing system like Twilio'. This was also done while ignoring his day to day tasks.
It was rather hilarious at times, all that needed to happen is for some feedback to come through some channel and the CEO would instantly get everyone focused on new issues, even if the feedback was minor our out of touch with our actual product.
It feels in hindsight that they used features to pile on top of a bad understanding of the market and total lack of vision.
I think the users- while empowered, feel the gap of their own lack of power in the knowledge world very cleary, on a sub-concious level. They are dependent on devices, they do not understand, can not repair or change, so the hostility from both sides is part of a steep, invisible power-asymmetry, that previously has turned on other users and ate their lunch.
It's better for society to adapt to people's biological clocks than to force DST on populations at different latitudes for commercial reasons. In reality, schedules would change every six or three months, not every month.
The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.
I don't have boss. But I am not going to go to sleep at 10pm, just to wake up at 6, because I do things later in the day. Like going out with friends and going to sauna later in the evening and 10-6 schedule would be disturbed a lot.
I just thought it would be funny if someone watched The Wire, internalized its message (which is pretty succinctly put in the GGP comment) and forgot its name. It felt more substantive than commenting "oh, that's the Wire!"
So we started really driving people to push notifications, but users liked the text messages. Especially if they believe your messages are important. As the gateways become more unreliable, users became frustrated and weren't interested in switching over to push notifications.
I did all the research you did, and while we were profitable taking on SMS was going to become a major cost. I couldn't do it. So we took these steps:
1. Immediately stopped providing SMS gateway texts to all new customers. This stopped the expectation that text messages were included. These customers were told we only had push notifications.
2. We went with Twilio and with our decade of data we had a good idea how many text messages per customer. We begin offering a new package that included text messages. We really didn't mark up the price at all, we just covered costs.
When a customer would complain about only have push notification option, we sold them the text message package. When the SMS gateways were unreliable for a customer, we sold them the text message package.
The product is still sold like this today.