I know this was a scheduled maintenance. I was reading the page that I see when I go to their site. They are giving 15% the purchase of 50 credits because of the inconvenience.

It says to hurry though because the offer is only good for two weeks. Then it says the offer expires on December 17th. Today is the 11th. By my math, the offer is then good for 7 days, which is one week, not two.    IS bean counters strike again. I guess they were rounding up. 

So they can't keep the site up for whatever reason (may be completely valid) so they give the buyers a discount which will be passed along to us.  Why do they get the big buck again? I guess one advantage of the 80/20 split is they lose more than I do. Think of how much better that will be after the new year... sigh.

I wonder if they mean you can only spend those credits for two weeks. You can buy them from 12/11 - 12/17 but can only spend them from 12/11 to 12/24.

I am hesitant to do this but ... it's time to call a spade a spade.  IStock has "Canadian-itis", a disease borne of the combination of an entrepreneurial inferiority complex and a climate of government protectionism and socialism.  One of the symptoms of Canadian-itis is that many businesses think that half-working IT is "good enough" (for g_d knows what reason).

I just visited another very large, important Canadian-based retailer.  I don't want to embarrass them so I'll refer to them as "Staples.ca".  I ordered something from them to be delivered to the store before xmas.  They never sent an email acknowledgment, the store never heard of the order and had no way of using the order# to look it up, and the company's main page was broken for at least an hour this morning.  Probably too many customers trying to find out what the f___ happened to their order.  So I put in another order from amazon.ca.

Canadians are not actually naive (I'm speaking as a Canadian) but they have a naive business culture.  It's probably nowhere near the worst in the developed world (I've heard stories about major Scandinavian companies where IT people won't even stay after 4pm to do server maintenance) ... but it suffers from comparison to the USA where business acumen seems to be bred in the bone.

One more brief anecdote ... long ago I was working at a Canadian IT company's HQ.  They offered an IT product line for which the sales pitch was, "With our products you can build a better IT system for your company than if you use American Leading Brand X".  The only trouble was, the Canadian products didn't seem to work very well, and the local engineering staff (who designed the entire product line) didn't seem to be interested in helping their own IT department to get the stuff running on their own internal IT network at HQ.  So the IT guys had no choice but to buy and deploy internally the Brand X product.  The management seemed to have no shame and no embarrassment about it.  Nobody ever went to the engineering staff and said, "Get this (*&#$ working or YOU'RE FIRED."  So the company (despite many, many million$$$ in government loans and subsidies) had stagnant sales and earnings, half the engineering staff quit and went to work for Brand X when they opened a branch office just down the road, and the Canadian company was sold for a relative pittance to a foreign company.  Just saying.