Imagine buying a house from a housing developer who insist that even after you’ve bought the house the developer will be allowed access to your downstairs bathroom. So that even after you’ve bought the house and moved in and got that nice kitchen cabinet design you’ve been eye-ing, the developer can still access your downstairs bathroom, no matter what. Worse still, the developer then decides to turn your downstairs bathroom into a public toilet.

Sound crazy right?

No developer would ever convince me to buy a house under such conditions, but Maxis seem to think they can push through something very similar in their Maxis Fibre to the Home (FTTH) Agreement. Before you sign up for your Maxis Home Package, you’re presented with a single page document to sign. The document basically states that you agree to the Maxis terms and conditions (T&C). A single page document sounds rather minimal, until you realize it’s a single page of 2955 words. Maxis squeezed 2955 words onto one page through a straightforward method of reducing the font size, basically making the agreement even harder to read–but you should read it, because point 6 of the Customer Terms for Maxis states:

I was looking for some detail on Maxis Fibre to Home service until I came across this while trying to to access the Maxis Customer Forum online:

In the early days of the internet, all the data flowing through was done in plaintext, this meant that everything flowing on the internet was fair-game for anyone to hijack and view. It was akin to sending postcards all around, all the post-men and intermediaries could view the entire contents of your messages because it was out there in the open, no need to open sealed envelopes. So everything from your letters to your uncle Bob or your resume for a new job or even your most intimate personal letters could only be sent via postcard–anyone could read it.

There was a strong requirement however to design a mechanism to encrypt data flowing through the internet, because unless you could encrypt data, personal and credit information couldn’t (or rather shouldn’t) have been trasmitted across the internet. So it was important that someone somewhere figure out how data on the internet could be encrypted to enable things like online shopping, social networking, even simple email. So sometime in the mid-90s Netscape (the default browser at the time was Netscape Navigator), took up the gauntlet and invented SSL.

At this point, I’m also reminiscing the days when browsers were actually pay-ware rather than freeware. Remember when Netscape Navigator Gold used to cost money?

Finally after a long long wait, I managed to get my Samsung Galaxy S3 from Maxis. I got the phone last Wednesday and now after just 5 days with it, I have to say – best Rm999 spent EVER!

For those of you still curious as to how I got it for Rm999 when I recently complained about Maxis advertising a “while stocks last promotion” as a “4 day long promotion”, here’s a nifty little piece of information that isn’t widely shared, Maxis is STILL offering the Samsung Galaxy S3 for Rm999 but only to Maxis One Club subscribers, you’d still need to subscribe to the Rm68 data plan which brings with it a good ol’ 3GB of mobile data, but any smartphone needs a data plan anyway. The maths is simple, you’d need a minimum Rm48 data plan which is for 1GB/month, so the difference between the Rm68 and RM48 is Rm20/month. Over the 2 year contract, that’s a Rm480 difference, the phone price itself is nearly Rm400 cheaper. So might as well, if you ask me.

As you know, I’m not really happy with Maxis. I was utterly disappointed by their latest S3 launch, I don’t think their cloud offerings of ebook portal is anything to shout at, and the if my wifes office would get decent Digi coverage, I’d switch in a heartbeat.

That being said, this is one of the times I think Maxis has done a decent job on their Loker offering. It is quite well executed, and if I do say so myself, getting 25GB of free online storage space when you purchase an S3 from Maxis is quite an enticing offer.

So what is Loker?

It’s also important to note that Maxis is offering the full 25GB to anyone who signs up for the Samsung Galaxy S3 package, which to me is a great value adding tool.

The service however, is only available to Maxis customers, and you need a Maxis phone number to register.

First off, let me come clean and say that I’m not really to please with Maxis today. I drove all the way to my local Maxis store on Friday to get an S3 at the offer price of Rm999, the phone was out of stock (which was acceptable for the hype around the phone) but I was told I couldn’t even pre-order or book the phone. Meaning, that when if I eventually get the phone – probably only after this weekend, I would have to pay the regular price of RM1399.

So Maxis launched their new ebook portal aptly title www.ebuuk.com.my, far be it from me to point out that an ebook portal should at least have the word book spelled correctly (don’t you think so Maxis), also judging by the SSL certificate it appears wanted to go for a more generic myebooks.com.my domain name before switching to ebuuk.com.my.

I’m an avid reader and was excited when I heard the news, so I headed over to the Maxis ebuuk page, and noticed that it wasn’t up to my expectations. I was completely annoyed by the fact that in some cases the prices for ebooks via the ebuuk page was about twice the price of books you could download from Amazon. And the proof is below, it includes a book I’m about to purchase called The Progress Principle, retailing for USD9.99 on the Kindle for Amazon, while Maxis ebuuk retails it for Rm68.99. Now USD9.99 is about Rm30 or RM32, and Maxis is retailing it for about twice the price, that’s ridiculous. This is an ebook we’re talking about.

After doing some research on Malaysian Cloud offerings particularly the IaaS offerings, I noticed something rather interesting from Skali. Now I always remembered Skali as an early web startup some time back in the 90s trying to ride the internet wave but failing all along the way, this however has some promise.

Skali takes cloud scalability to a whole different level with their cloud offerings, unlike other IaaS providers who offer a fixed number of machine types Skali offers a fully scalable machine that you can add processing power, Memory and Disk independently. In essence near unlimited amounts of options in terms of machine type compared to just 3 from Maxis Cloud.

The pricing still seems high, but it can go toe-to-toe with Maxis although it would depend on the specific requirements. From just the high level you can sense that these IaaS providers are going to compete for Malaysian customers but they’re competing with very niche offerings. Maxis ace up it’s sleeve would be the unlimited data transfer, which Skali charges at a mind-blowing Rm2/GB. Skali on the other hand offers an entire range of machine types (possibly in the hundreds), while Maxis offers just 3.

The choice between Maxis or Skali would be a simple one that would come down to how much data transfer or scalability you need in your application. That being said, let’s take a look at some other offerings from Skali Cloud.

Maxis recently launched their new IaaS offering in the form called the Maxis Cloud. According to Lowyat.net the Maxis Cloud is said to be the " the most advanced on-demand, real-time, fully managed cloud service in Malaysia, Maxis Cloud allows businesses to scale their cloud computing infrastructure according to their needs at any time through its self-service portal."

That’s basically calling yourself Jaguh Kampung. Pardon the sarcasm, but the Maxis Cloud does seem a tad bit expensive for a such a late entry into the game. You’d expect new IaaS providers that show up this late in the cloud game throw everything including the kitchen sink to get new subscribers. That however, has been lacking and a marketing strategy that seems more intent on selling IaaS to non-believers as oppose to selling the Maxis Cloud itself isn’t helping their case.

I’d loved to be rooting for Maxis, but most of it’s offerings just don’t add up, and there’s a whole bunch of questions about it’s bandwidth charges, support availability and API specifications that aren’t clear enough to me to make any sort of comparison or even recommendation. Plus the fact that its self service portal had a ’technical issue’ when I logged on didn’t really bode well for my experience.

That being said, while analyzing I noticed that there is one thing Maxis could offer that could tilt the tables in its favor, Maxis is a communications company after all (unlike Amazon or Rackspace) and I think there just might be a chance it could offer something niche that would make it stand out. But first, let’s take a look at some key concepts: