Global Neighbourhoods

StartUps On Stage

My friend and former client Gibu Thomas over at Sharpcast has been in start up launch mode and has invested a fair portion of his company's resources in presenting at some of the major tech conferences. Most of us know that people pay to go to these top tier industry schmoozes and companies pay to present.

Wat most people do not realize is the chasm of difference that goes into the production.  Some producers, such as DEMO, go through agony to select the best possible companies and guide them toward making the best possible presentations. Others, apparently including Web 2.0, seem more intent in getting the money and letting the companies flounder through an experience that would make Kafka wince.

Gibu has a long and passionate post of the differences in his personal experience. Any tech entrepreneur should read it.  Any conference attendee should read it and keep it in mind while watching some company founder struggle against the demon of shoddy production at their own financial expense. Mostly, producers should read this and be called upon the carpet for it.

I spent years covering conferences for Conferenza, one of the best resources on the topic.  This was among our hot buttons, getting us on the dirt list with many producers for pointing out their shoddy preparation of presenting companies and we lauded Chris Shipley and DEMO for precisely the same reason.

For producers, there is not that significant a cost for building quality in. All three of your communities deserve it.

Scoble Weighs in on Masked Apple blogger

Scoble has a few good things to say about the Masked Apple Blogger as well as Richard@Dell who has been joining the conversation in several places including my recent post on the subject.

Apple Computer, real issues & a challenge to Masked Blogger

Well, I seem to have stirred up a bit of stuff with my earlier post on Shel Holtz' Hell with Apple Computer. I also botched the link, which is corrected here as in the earlier post.

First off, I triggered not one, but two, anonymous bloggers, both who left comments supporting Apple overall. One of them, a masked blogger claims to be an Apple employee and makes a good point that Apple is a product-driven companies with a terrific track record of retaining loyal customers. He also wonders how you can provide great customer support when junior people interface with customers.  Most recently, he wonders what's wrong with being anonymous and further wants to know how blogging has improved support anywhere.

All good issues.  But, as he has learned, being anonymous itself creates a distraction from even the issues he raises. Another blog has started a guessing game of who the masked blogger is and yet another blogger speculates that the culprit is Keith Collins, a London blogger . As it turns out, Rick and I are having dinner in London with Keith Saturday night and he flatly denies the charge pointing out that he is not now, nor has he ever been a member of the Apple Computer team. He says the smoking gun was tracked into his hand because Keith's blog is the only Masked Blogger site link, and the erstwhile detective followed the wrong trail and made a bad assumption.

To me, the mystery search is just an unfortunate distraction. To me there are two key issues, neither of which have been fully explained:

(1) Has Apple delivered a faulty product in the Mac Pro? There is some evidence that this is the case and that it's support has botched the very real problems of trusting customers.  There is also pretty good evidence that Apple has a long history of providing superior support, which makes the case even more disturbing.

It seems to me that the best way to resolve this is for Apple to step forward and have real person tell the real story and answer all the questions that are being raised. The best place to do this is on a blog where a dialog can be public ally held and legitimate questions can be answered.

(2) Why do loyal employees have to blog anonymously.  Masked is obviously intelligent, cares about the products, cares about the tarnish that is appearing on Apple's shiny image and given the chance might champion Apple successfully in the blogosphere.

Masked, until you show yourself, you will lack credibility.  Just look at the comments you are receiving.  Until you show yourself, you will make finding you a game. Meanwhile, people are buying the Mac Pro every day and I'm curious to know what percentage of them are going to end up frustrated and angry as did Shel Holtz who is hardly the hot-tempered type. As did Marc Orchant, who has been a Mac enthusiast for more than a decade.

As far as the rest of the issues, you raise, Masked, I feel like being a bit tart and say that either my book or Shel Holtz' book would answer a great many of the questions you raise. Dell Computer is a poster child for a blog improving the company support and public perception of it. Transparency is an old saw on the blogosphere because people who hide their identity often turn out to not be who they say they are. Companies provide great support through junior people by having company leadership demand great support and by training your team to be great at it.

Masked, I'd be happy to give you greater detail, but we would have to go offline. I pledge Here and now in front of all these people that I will not reveal your identity, but I'll be very happy to answer any ten of your challenging questions, if you will answer ten of mine, letting me publish them on this blog, while keeping your name private.

Shel Hell Dampens my Mac Envy

It's ironic.  Despite my publicly proclaimed faith in my Lenovo Thinkpad, I've been feeling this angst in my belly as one, techcentric CEO after another these days shows off their new Mac Pros.  When using the Parallel Software, it runs OSX and Windows pretty close to seamlessly.

But two events have occurred today that will stop me from straying from my Thinkpad monogamy. First, Manish  Hira left a comment here, showing that he too received a new computer after registering complaints about the one he had and the support that at first he was not getting.

Then Shel Holtz, my friend and namesake described how Apple has lost him as a customer because their ludicrous efforts to not support him in a crisis put him through Shel Hell.

Both of these incidents reminded me that the hardware and software, the OS and security issues are really no longer the issue. It took them long enough, but Windows and Office work pretty well for most of Microsoft's hundreds of millions of customers most of the time.  The same can be said for Apple Computer whose customers have remained the most passionately positive for as long as I can recall.

Where the rubber meets the road is in those rare times when things don't work well. Shel was in a crisis.  His disk went dormant, if not dead.  He was traveling.  He had deadlines. Lots of us feel the pain.

Apple responded with disdain, with inconsistency on what to do, with no appreciation for the urgency of a customer's problems. This is enough to keep me away from becoming more than an iPod customer in the foreseeable future.  I want to do business with companies who will be there for me when their products let me down. I just got a case of someone I trust getting helped by Lenovo and screwed by Apple. That's all I need to know to decide.

BTW, anyone from Apple Computer wishing to join this conversation is free to do so.

Enie Loves Apple Support & kicks Dell's

My friend Ernie the Attorney writes about why he loves Apple Computer Customer Service and compares it sharply with a bad three-year-old experience he had with a Dell. Apple service has had it's own controversies, but overall seems to be one of the reasons why its rising numbers of users are so passionately loyal to the company.

Ernie is not the first critic of Dell, nor will he be the last. I have vented much personal frustration to the company who seemed to have ruined its own reputation for value by squeezing quality out of its boxes and reputation out of its support hotline. But I think Dell-kicking may be inching to an outdated habit. It's invested $100 million into improving support. It's blog is becoming both useful and interesting to it's user base, and last week the respected reviewers at CNET gave Dell's new Core 2 Duo computer the highest ranking against four competitors. As I've recently written, I thought they did a pretty good job handling the exploding battery fiasco as well.

It's out of fashion to say nice things about Dell.  But I am motivated in this blog to shout at companies when it becomes clear they won't listen to their own customers. I feel that the #1 problem people feel about large organizations is that the organizations want all communications to be one-way. In short, they don't listen. I think the evidence is starting to stack up that Dell is trying to listen.  Personally, I think this is a survival issue for them.

But I also think that the user wins, if Dell can reverse the course of its long-plummeting downward spiral and I think its worthy of mention.

Why Customers shout at Companies

We used to shout at our TV sets, but no one on the other side could possibly hear us. Most of us have found ourselves shouting--or wanting to--because of a nearly universal sense of frustration that large corporations were doing everything the could not to listen to customers like us.

I've been reading the Church of the Customer blog by co-authors Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell for well over a year and find their views and passion for customer evangelism to be valuable.  I sometimes envy the great stories they either find or amplify. The case of a customer so angry with T-Mobile to post this message on his or her back window is a sign of the frustration we all sometimes feel.

Now, I've heard very little bad about T-Mobile and when they were my carrier I liked their service but their signal just didn't work in my area. But don't you just want to know what this car owner went through before going through the car customization effort?

This is the power of word of mouth. At least two bloggers have now posted this photo.  If you are about to make a decision on a new mobile carrier, you now have a data point of an extremely unhappy customer.

If T-Mobile blogged, this customer may have posted a comment there.  The customer may have been irate, but I'll wager you the dialog would be less damaging than this photo will prove to be. People are more polite when they think you are listening.  The blog is just the best current tool in letting customers offset rage and teaching a company where they need to improve if they wish to serve their community.

In the same post, Jackie and Ben mentioned Dell who earlier this year announced a $100 million plan to improve customer service, then acted commendably, in my opinion, a couple of week's back when the battery issue, er... exploded. These two announcements have moved me from a certified Dell hater to a cautious, slightly suspicious Dell watcher. In short, they are starting to turn me around. Their blog has evolved from corpspeak to not so bad and continues to unevenly improve.

All they need to really turn me around is to hear real users--perhaps people I know and trust--to tell me about good experiences they have personally had. Perhaps that day will come soon, perhaps not.

It may surprise you to know that I'm rooting for them.

Burning Batteries: Dell & Apple do right, but what about Sony.

I have not always had the kindest words for Dell and Apple Computer companies, but in the case of the serious issue of laptop batteries bursting into flames, the two companies have behaved in first-rate fashion.  They responded to customer complaints. They listened and responded.  They explained the source of the problem--Sony in both cases. They warned customers. They are exchanging potentially dangerous batteries for safer ones.

Sony, however has me feeling a bit dubiously. As far as I can tell, they have not issues a press release on the subject.  Their is an inconsistency to the state,ments they have issued through Dell and Apple.  As CNET reports, Rick Clancy, 'an official company spokesperson' stated in Dell's press releases that Dell had the highest incidents that Sony knew about and that Sony anticipated no more problems.  There were six incidents and the first time the two companies discussed the issue was way back in October 2005.

A week later, Apple reported nine incidents had occurred. This time Clancy did not talk about the issue, but once again stated that Sony anticipated no other computer maker anticipates a recall.

We shall see. For me, I cannot help suspect that Sony knew there was a problem and that more incidents had occurred over at Apple when it made its comments. Therefore, i wonder what surprises will come out next week.

I also wonder just what we will learn about how Sony's quality control system went so amiss for a specific period, we are told, to ship 15 exploding batteries and the potential for others among about six million laptop owners. They also have not made clear what they have done to ensure this will not happen again.

In fact, what little I know comes from an apparently candid interview by the US Computer Product Safety Commission, which made the determination of the danger, its source and the recommendation of the two recalls. Two days after Clancy was saying there were no additional recalls anticipated, a commission spokesperson was on NPR hinting strongly that more could be expected.

Even if Clancy was intentionally lying then, I do hope he was telling the truth the second time with Apple. Laptop batteries that go boom on the lap--or on an airplane are anything but funny, and the world is scary enough without further incidents such as these.

AOL Fires CTO over Customer Data Disclosures

The Wall Street Journal Online says AOL has fired three people including Maureen Govern, it's CTO over the recent revelation of data showing what 650,000 of its customers have been looking at online.

To read the full article online, you have to be a paid subscriber, but I'm sure you can find the full story elsewhere online.

Dell to Recall 4 Million Laptop batteries

Dell, earlier today announced the recall of more than four million notebook computer batteries because of fabled overheating problems, which in at least two cases, can burst into flames.  The Wall Street Journal said it was the largest recall in computer history.

Direct2Dell, the company's corpspeak-laden blog said that the recall was decided after a lengthy investigation during which the decision to "err on the side of safety was never in doubt."

This is an expensive recall.  Perhaps not as expensive as the potential litigation that could come from not making it. But that is not the key point.

The key point is that in this particular case, the company has done the right thing and they are to be applauded for it.

[NOTE: This post was fixed because of an error pointed out by Marc Orchant in the comment section below.]

Dell--What really burns ...

... are the flames shooting out of yet another Dell. This from Gizmodo .  Maybe, next year, instead of a Burning Man event, we could have a Burning Dell somewhere out in the desert.

I would almost feel sorry for those Dell folk until I remember all the people sitting and waiting, and waiting for help on the Dell support lines. Dell Hell has no flames.  It is actually more like limbo, where you wait and wait for the help that never comes.

This is only the second burning Dell, at least to be photographically captured. There are many more burned customers.