Salesforce outages vs Competition

Since last October there has been a lot of writing about Salesforce and their outages. This has of course started a discussion about the reability of SaaS. Like this one 'Salesforce.com's hiccups'  (Rough Type, 2006-02-01).

In order to be transparent Salesforce created the site http://trust.salesforce.com.
A site that monitors the uptime for their service.

However, the surprising part is that other SaaS companies are using this to impress the market. "Some of its rivals have taken to monitoring the site and sending e-mails to reporters whenever something is amiss."   The Tech Beat 2006-04-27 

How clever is that?
I guess the question the potential customers are asking themselves are if to go for a webservice. Not which one. Like pointed out in this ZDnet article 'Are Salesforce's outages sullying the reputation fo the SaaS model?'