I personally switched banks after three calls in a row were answered by someone whose English was unintelligible. I didn't think it was unreasonable to expect that the people a company puts on the phone to talk to English-speaking customers actually be able to speak and understand English.
In the end, putting customers first can work as a business strategy, but only when customers aren't focused on the "lowest-price-at-any-cost" model. And at some point, people start realizing that it isn't worth it to buy that Made in China car when you'll have to have it towed to the junkyard in 90 days.
When I was working my way through college, my manager had a saying: The bad aftertaste of poor quality will linger long after the sweetness of the low price is forgotten.
It's funny how everyone wants to have it both ways: a car priced like a Hundai with treatment at the dealership like you bought a Lexus. Let's face it--companies make rational decisions. When everything is telling them that the low price is all that matters, that's all they focus on. Good support (heck, any support) costs money, and customers generally aren't willing to pay more for it, so why increase the price of your product to cover good support? Just do what's cheapest so you can sell more gizmos at the lowest possible price.
I applaud Netflix for this move. I hope more customers come the the realization that price isn't the only thing that matters so that more companies will make choices like this.
Point number six should actually be #1
on
Kids Review the OLPC
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm widely travelled (for an American:-> ) having spent a good deal of time in Europe, Africa, and Central America. My take (of course, this is just from my personal experience) is that government corruption and an inability to implement the rule of law is behind a lot of the problems non-industrial countries face.
The economic friction caused by having to bribe the city police, the port inspector, and the cargo handlers can make small-scale export unprofitable. Or, if you look at the example of Zimbabwe, government price controls can make it unprofitable to sell basic necessities on the "legal" market. If 20% of your profits are eaten by baksheesh, that's a big problem. Most of those problems were avoided by the U.S. during our transition to an industrial-based economy because of the traditions and culture fostered by the founders.
As an aside, I think that's one of the reasons the U.S. is now having difficulty. The increasing corruption (by both parties and all sides) in government, and the apparent abandonment of the rule of law in favor of celebrity justice and the quid-pro-quo is going to become an increasing drag.
Back on topic, I agree that most folks in non-industrial countries don't need the sort of help that's often implied by slashdotters. One reason that's expected though is that the U.S. media routinely protrays other (non-Euopean) countries as desolate wildrenesses populated by teeming millions living in mud-hit squallor. Considering the many, many Americans whose entire knowledge of the "outside" world comes from National Geographic and appeals for aid to impoverished nations, it's not surprising to see this point of view.
the epitome of Renaissance Man, so only things that they find personally useful or interesting are worth anyone else's time and effort. Everything that they aren't personally interested in is useless crap. In addition, since each/.er is the center of his/her own universe, all other points of view are also useless crap.
It's a pretty significant (and unfortunate) bias here.
There's no magical incantation that makes an "open, transparent" information editing environment inheirently better. You just get a different bias, and it's more difficult to figure out where that bias is coming into play.
With Brittanica, you have a (known) establishment bias. With a Boeing sales brochure, you have a (known) "areospace is the ultimate industry" bias. What you generally see on Wikipedia are astounding examples of groupthink. Wikipedia's NPOV is a bias, make no mistake. And just because you can "see" the bias of article editors, that doesn't mean that the bias of the "Wikipedians" is easier to find, define, or overcome. All this does is make one type of bias more obvious. That doesn't solve the problem.
All content contains a bias. Knowing that is a good starting point for interpreting the content. This project is fine, as far as it goes. But implying (as you seem to) that somehow Wikipedia wonks are more trustworthy and less biased than other editors is, well, silly.
Welcome to the world of free software, where developers write software for their own use, without reference to pesky things like interoperability, interface standards, or usability.
Let's face it, what's holding free software back isn't some evil conspiracy by a shadowy group of corporations working behind the scenes to subvert the moral goodness of the software ecosystem. It's the apparent inability of free software developers to make their code attractive at any level other than price.
In my opinion, the essential examples of this are gimp and Ubuntu.
Why is Ubuntu popular? Not because it's Windows-y, but because it installs painlessly (without the requiring obscure command-line incantaions that a lot if distros do). You pop in the CD and answer about five questions and you wind up with a box that has all the "standard" software (a browser and some basic tools) that's on the network and ready to go. The interface is clean, it generally works in expected ways (keyboard shortcuts do what you expect, it has a "trash can", etc)
The gimp, on the other hand, is a messy pile of usability errors looking for a home. Obscure names for common tools are only the start--the odd behavior of the separate application windows is also egregious.
Free software will only become a real competitor to close software when people espousing it come to the realization the price is not the only factor.
out there who doesn't understand the concept of "unintended consquences" this is a case study.
On both sides of the aisle, we have a bevy of nitwits who can't further than the next election cycle and who are barely familiar with the idea of rational thought (one politician was apparently in a library, once, perhaps even on the same floor as several books on logic).
And it happens consistently on both sides of every argument: In this case, conservatives want measurable outsomes with rewards and consequences (which results in teaching to the test and the kind of don't-lower-our-averages thinking in this story) and liberals want touchy-feely "how-does-math-make-you-feel" classes (which results in children who can't do basic arithmetic).
The solution is balance, which in our increasingly polarized society is unlikely.
The whole concept of virtual money that is traded in a virtual environment was a "bank-run" waiting to happen.
Linden-dollars (or whatever they're called) are backed by the full faith and credit of Linden Labs. Which is a lot less comforting to the average person than being backed by the U.S. government. Once Linden starts to lose credibility (and how was money "stolen" from the stock market) all those Lindenbacks are going to be worth the bits they're printed on.
I'm shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling going on here.
Like all other application, Firefox (and Safari, and IE) can be closed with a keyboard shortcut that's farily well known. Heck, my mom closes windows with Alt+F4.
Color me unimpressed. I guess there's a lot a add revenue to be had when thousands of folks come to downlaod your Firefox plugin or something.
I write tech docs in my day job, and frankly, "interesting" isn't going to solve the "problem" of users not reading the docs.
Part of my M.S. program was a research project about software document usage and the vast majority of users don't "read" documentation in the same sense that you read a narrative: start at the beginning and read through to the end, with spine-tingling chills, mystery, and adventure galore in the intervening chapters.
Software documentation is mainly used in two situations: first, at install time to install and configure and second, when a problem arises and the user needs to find an answer. Neither of these is really helped by adding puzzles or poetry. If you want to read/write that kind of stuff, take a night class in English Lit.
The things that get users to "read" a document are unrelated to the content and the factors that make documents useful are a logical structure, a good TOC, and complete index.
But deregulation is working fine where I live in the US. I can get broadband three or four different ways (cable, DSL, satellite, etc.) and I pay ~$20 a month for a 6mbps(down) connection.
Mind telling what you pay and your speed over there in the central planning paradise, just for comparison?
I bought one of these to help with my RSS and it has made a big difference. Aside from the more-natural vertical grip, I can move the pistol mouse around all sorts of ways if my hand get tired--resting on top of the "barrel," holding it by the base, etc. It has left, right and center buttons and a scroll wheel.
It also gets a lot of comments by people passing by my office:-)
In the past this has meant "whenever a competing product looks like it is gaining parity with Word"
This is completely unacceptable for a long-term document archive solution. It's not an open format, so you have to rely on Microsoft making "converters" for older iterations available, or reverse engineering. In addition, you have to realize that since the formation is closed, your reverse-engineered implementation may not correctly handle some "features." And that when MS decides to change things, your solution may not correctly handle the new "improved" format.
Not that Microsoft would intentionally break compatibility, of coure... What is it that the Office team says? "RTF isn't done until OpenOffice won't run"
Though that can be a factor. I'm 6' 1" myself, and I hated my wife's late 80's Toyota for that reason. There was no way someone 6'+ was going to ride comfortably for more than a few minutes in a car designed by and for midgets. I could hardly get my legs under the steering wheel and the rear "seat" was basically a seat in name only.
Leaving comfort aside, though--now I've got a daughter who is 14 months old. There's no way that I'm going to put her in a car seat in some 500 lb bit of plastic and drive around sharing the streets with badly driven box trucks and 18-wheelers. There's no "cost savings" that's worth that.
And frankly, all the talk about how SUVs are the big danger to small cars is ridiculous. Sure there are a lot of blonde soccer moms out there talking on the phone while driving their Excursions--but far more dangerous (and scary) are the hordes of untrained, ignorant, and oblivious drivers of heavy equipment: big delivery trucks and tractor-trailers. You might get injured if a Suburban hits your Suzuki, but when a Peterbuilt meets a Prius, it's the end of the line.
The poster's right about phones not being extremely cheap, but generally speaking people pay significantly less than "retail" for their phones when they sign up for a contract. The phone subsidy is how the wireless company gets you to agree to a longer contract. I paid ~$50 for my RAZR, which seems pretty reasonable. The way it works is that you either get a cheap phone and a service contract, or you pay more and get an unlocked top-of-the-line model. It's not that complicated.
Another point is that the "national network" thing is more important than you might think. Sure Japan needs a greater cell tower density than the flat states because of terrian similar to Colorado, but here in the States not only are there numerous mountainous states, each of those states has a significantly greater land area than Japan. Think about the number of cell towers needed for 377,873 sq km as opposed to 9,631,420 sq km
It doesn't seem to me that there's some evil conspiracy by wireless providers to prevent customers from getting "good" phones. But complaining that you can't get a top-end phone on the cheap is silly
Windows rules the corporate roost, where the average life of a PC is 2-3 years. You also have lots of folks buying a new Windows box when their old one "becomes slow" because of malware. You probably have an average Windows computer lifespan of around three years. Every time a Windows box heads for the landfill (or is donated to a school, re-tooled with a Linux install, etc.) you potentially have another Windows sale.
Macs, on the other hand, tend to be kept a lot longer. There are a good number of folks with 5-6 year old Macs that are still happily using them. Every one of those six-year-old macs means that Apple has 1/2 the OS sales (per user) as Windows.
That's why I'm baffled by the spurrious price comparisons between Macs and Windows PCs. Sure my PowerBook cost 25% more than your Dell. But in three years, when you send your Dell off to laptop heaven (or more likely, if it's Dell, laptop hell) my PowerBook will still have at least three years of useful life left. Making your 25% "savings" actually a loss.
My wife is a good example. She has an older Dell laptop but long admired my PowerBook, and wanted a new laptop for her birthday. So we bought her a MacBook Pro.
So I set it up for her (which mostly involved adding the MAC address to the wireless access list and installing a couple of apps) and turned her lose with it. Almost the first comment she made to me was that her favorite site (some home design TV show thing) wasn't showing the videos. Sure enough, HGTV's Design Star (I think it's called) site uses a codec that's not supported in Safari. Flip4Mac solved this, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect a less-technical user like my wife to figure out that a video codec is unsupported, discern that an application is needed to enable playback, then find, download, and install that app. Especially on "less-friendly" distros of Linux.
I agree with your assertion that the market will decide, but I wouldn't rule out the average user finding it annoying when something on the Internet that "always worked before" doesn't work on first boot. Whether that "first boot" experience is a factor in purchasing is something else.
Face it, basilisks (born from a rooster's egg hatched by a serpent) are an endangered species. If Harry Potter kills one, that would definitely spoil things.:-)
system in the world. Baikal, in Russia is a _single_ lake with a freshwater volume greater than that of _all_ the "Great Lakes" combined. Lake Tanganyika, in Africa, is also larger.
I'd like to complain about the implied slur on our profession. Heck, I'd far prefer writing man pages for APIs to the sort of "this is the mouse/hello computer" writing that is usually associated with "tech writers." Bleh.
Of course, with many of my fellow writers bearing a closer resemblance to "Tina" from Dilbert than technophiles, maybe I'm speaking for the small minority.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally switched banks after three calls in a row were answered by someone whose English was unintelligible. I didn't think it was unreasonable to expect that the people a company puts on the phone to talk to English-speaking customers actually be able to speak and understand English.
In the end, putting customers first can work as a business strategy, but only when customers aren't focused on the "lowest-price-at-any-cost" model. And at some point, people start realizing that it isn't worth it to buy that Made in China car when you'll have to have it towed to the junkyard in 90 days.
When I was working my way through college, my manager had a saying: The bad aftertaste of poor quality will linger long after the sweetness of the low price is forgotten.
It's funny how everyone wants to have it both ways: a car priced like a Hundai with treatment at the dealership like you bought a Lexus. Let's face it--companies make rational decisions. When everything is telling them that the low price is all that matters, that's all they focus on. Good support (heck, any support) costs money, and customers generally aren't willing to pay more for it, so why increase the price of your product to cover good support? Just do what's cheapest so you can sell more gizmos at the lowest possible price.
I applaud Netflix for this move. I hope more customers come the the realization that price isn't the only thing that matters so that more companies will make choices like this.
I'm widely travelled (for an American :-> ) having spent a good deal of time in Europe, Africa, and Central America. My take (of course, this is just from my personal experience) is that government corruption and an inability to implement the rule of law is behind a lot of the problems non-industrial countries face.
The economic friction caused by having to bribe the city police, the port inspector, and the cargo handlers can make small-scale export unprofitable. Or, if you look at the example of Zimbabwe, government price controls can make it unprofitable to sell basic necessities on the "legal" market. If 20% of your profits are eaten by baksheesh, that's a big problem. Most of those problems were avoided by the U.S. during our transition to an industrial-based economy because of the traditions and culture fostered by the founders.
As an aside, I think that's one of the reasons the U.S. is now having difficulty. The increasing corruption (by both parties and all sides) in government, and the apparent abandonment of the rule of law in favor of celebrity justice and the quid-pro-quo is going to become an increasing drag.
Back on topic, I agree that most folks in non-industrial countries don't need the sort of help that's often implied by slashdotters. One reason that's expected though is that the U.S. media routinely protrays other (non-Euopean) countries as desolate wildrenesses populated by teeming millions living in mud-hit squallor. Considering the many, many Americans whose entire knowledge of the "outside" world comes from National Geographic and appeals for aid to impoverished nations, it's not surprising to see this point of view.
the epitome of Renaissance Man, so only things that they find personally useful or interesting are worth anyone else's time and effort. Everything that they aren't personally interested in is useless crap. In addition, since each /.er is the center of his/her own universe, all other points of view are also useless crap.
It's a pretty significant (and unfortunate) bias here.
Or, more politely, I think you're mistaken.
There's no magical incantation that makes an "open, transparent" information editing environment inheirently better. You just get a different bias, and it's more difficult to figure out where that bias is coming into play.
With Brittanica, you have a (known) establishment bias. With a Boeing sales brochure, you have a (known) "areospace is the ultimate industry" bias. What you generally see on Wikipedia are astounding examples of groupthink. Wikipedia's NPOV is a bias, make no mistake. And just because you can "see" the bias of article editors, that doesn't mean that the bias of the "Wikipedians" is easier to find, define, or overcome. All this does is make one type of bias more obvious. That doesn't solve the problem.
All content contains a bias. Knowing that is a good starting point for interpreting the content. This project is fine, as far as it goes. But implying (as you seem to) that somehow Wikipedia wonks are more trustworthy and less biased than other editors is, well, silly.
There's no "bonus" here
Welcome to the world of free software, where developers write software for their own use, without reference to pesky things like interoperability, interface standards, or usability.
:-)
Let's face it, what's holding free software back isn't some evil conspiracy by a shadowy group of corporations working behind the scenes to subvert the moral goodness of the software ecosystem. It's the apparent inability of free software developers to make their code attractive at any level other than price.
In my opinion, the essential examples of this are gimp and Ubuntu.
Why is Ubuntu popular? Not because it's Windows-y, but because it installs painlessly (without the requiring obscure command-line incantaions that a lot if distros do). You pop in the CD and answer about five questions and you wind up with a box that has all the "standard" software (a browser and some basic tools) that's on the network and ready to go. The interface is clean, it generally works in expected ways (keyboard shortcuts do what you expect, it has a "trash can", etc)
The gimp, on the other hand, is a messy pile of usability errors looking for a home. Obscure names for common tools are only the start--the odd behavior of the separate application windows is also egregious.
Free software will only become a real competitor to close software when people espousing it come to the realization the price is not the only factor.
Sorry for the rant
Like, it's the best, man.
out there who doesn't understand the concept of "unintended consquences" this is a case study.
On both sides of the aisle, we have a bevy of nitwits who can't further than the next election cycle and who are barely familiar with the idea of rational thought (one politician was apparently in a library, once, perhaps even on the same floor as several books on logic).
And it happens consistently on both sides of every argument: In this case, conservatives want measurable outsomes with rewards and consequences (which results in teaching to the test and the kind of don't-lower-our-averages thinking in this story) and liberals want touchy-feely "how-does-math-make-you-feel" classes (which results in children who can't do basic arithmetic).
The solution is balance, which in our increasingly polarized society is unlikely.
'til FireFox won't run.
:-)
But, wait... it's IE that usually fails to implement standards in a standard way, isn't it <head explodes>
The whole concept of virtual money that is traded in a virtual environment was a "bank-run" waiting to happen.
Linden-dollars (or whatever they're called) are backed by the full faith and credit of Linden Labs. Which is a lot less comforting to the average person than being backed by the U.S. government. Once Linden starts to lose credibility (and how was money "stolen" from the stock market) all those Lindenbacks are going to be worth the bits they're printed on.
I'm shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling going on here.
Hello? Why the FUD?
Like all other application, Firefox (and Safari, and IE) can be closed with a keyboard shortcut that's farily well known. Heck, my mom closes windows with Alt+F4.
Color me unimpressed. I guess there's a lot a add revenue to be had when thousands of folks come to downlaod your Firefox plugin or something.
Longer answer:
I write tech docs in my day job, and frankly, "interesting" isn't going to solve the "problem" of users not reading the docs.
Part of my M.S. program was a research project about software document usage and the vast majority of users don't "read" documentation in the same sense that you read a narrative: start at the beginning and read through to the end, with spine-tingling chills, mystery, and adventure galore in the intervening chapters.
Software documentation is mainly used in two situations: first, at install time to install and configure and second, when a problem arises and the user needs to find an answer. Neither of these is really helped by adding puzzles or poetry. If you want to read/write that kind of stuff, take a night class in English Lit.
The things that get users to "read" a document are unrelated to the content and the factors that make documents useful are a logical structure, a good TOC, and complete index.
But deregulation is working fine where I live in the US. I can get broadband three or four different ways (cable, DSL, satellite, etc.) and I pay ~$20 a month for a 6mbps(down) connection.
Mind telling what you pay and your speed over there in the central planning paradise, just for comparison?
http://www.monstergecko.com/
:-)
I bought one of these to help with my RSS and it has made a big difference. Aside from the more-natural vertical grip, I can move the pistol mouse around all sorts of ways if my hand get tired--resting on top of the "barrel," holding it by the base, etc. It has left, right and center buttons and a scroll wheel.
It also gets a lot of comments by people passing by my office
I really like it.
In the past this has meant "whenever a competing product looks like it is gaining parity with Word"
This is completely unacceptable for a long-term document archive solution. It's not an open format, so you have to rely on Microsoft making "converters" for older iterations available, or reverse engineering. In addition, you have to realize that since the formation is closed, your reverse-engineered implementation may not correctly handle some "features." And that when MS decides to change things, your solution may not correctly handle the new "improved" format.
Not that Microsoft would intentionally break compatibility, of coure... What is it that the Office team says? "RTF isn't done until OpenOffice won't run"
Though that can be a factor. I'm 6' 1" myself, and I hated my wife's late 80's Toyota for that reason. There was no way someone 6'+ was going to ride comfortably for more than a few minutes in a car designed by and for midgets. I could hardly get my legs under the steering wheel and the rear "seat" was basically a seat in name only.
Leaving comfort aside, though--now I've got a daughter who is 14 months old. There's no way that I'm going to put her in a car seat in some 500 lb bit of plastic and drive around sharing the streets with badly driven box trucks and 18-wheelers. There's no "cost savings" that's worth that.
And frankly, all the talk about how SUVs are the big danger to small cars is ridiculous. Sure there are a lot of blonde soccer moms out there talking on the phone while driving their Excursions--but far more dangerous (and scary) are the hordes of untrained, ignorant, and oblivious drivers of heavy equipment: big delivery trucks and tractor-trailers. You might get injured if a Suburban hits your Suzuki, but when a Peterbuilt meets a Prius, it's the end of the line.
The poster's right about phones not being extremely cheap, but generally speaking people pay significantly less than "retail" for their phones when they sign up for a contract. The phone subsidy is how the wireless company gets you to agree to a longer contract. I paid ~$50 for my RAZR, which seems pretty reasonable. The way it works is that you either get a cheap phone and a service contract, or you pay more and get an unlocked top-of-the-line model. It's not that complicated.
Another point is that the "national network" thing is more important than you might think. Sure Japan needs a greater cell tower density than the flat states because of terrian similar to Colorado, but here in the States not only are there numerous mountainous states, each of those states has a significantly greater land area than Japan. Think about the number of cell towers needed for 377,873 sq km as opposed to 9,631,420 sq km
It doesn't seem to me that there's some evil conspiracy by wireless providers to prevent customers from getting "good" phones. But complaining that you can't get a top-end phone on the cheap is silly
foreigners living outside the country.
Windows rules the corporate roost, where the average life of a PC is 2-3 years. You also have lots of folks buying a new Windows box when their old one "becomes slow" because of malware. You probably have an average Windows computer lifespan of around three years. Every time a Windows box heads for the landfill (or is donated to a school, re-tooled with a Linux install, etc.) you potentially have another Windows sale.
Macs, on the other hand, tend to be kept a lot longer. There are a good number of folks with 5-6 year old Macs that are still happily using them. Every one of those six-year-old macs means that Apple has 1/2 the OS sales (per user) as Windows.
That's why I'm baffled by the spurrious price comparisons between Macs and Windows PCs. Sure my PowerBook cost 25% more than your Dell. But in three years, when you send your Dell off to laptop heaven (or more likely, if it's Dell, laptop hell) my PowerBook will still have at least three years of useful life left. Making your 25% "savings" actually a loss.
My wife is a good example. She has an older Dell laptop but long admired my PowerBook, and wanted a new laptop for her birthday. So we bought her a MacBook Pro.
So I set it up for her (which mostly involved adding the MAC address to the wireless access list and installing a couple of apps) and turned her lose with it. Almost the first comment she made to me was that her favorite site (some home design TV show thing) wasn't showing the videos. Sure enough, HGTV's Design Star (I think it's called) site uses a codec that's not supported in Safari. Flip4Mac solved this, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect a less-technical user like my wife to figure out that a video codec is unsupported, discern that an application is needed to enable playback, then find, download, and install that app. Especially on "less-friendly" distros of Linux.
I agree with your assertion that the market will decide, but I wouldn't rule out the average user finding it annoying when something on the Internet that "always worked before" doesn't work on first boot. Whether that "first boot" experience is a factor in purchasing is something else.
What the ???? step is in
1. Download GPL software
2. ????
3. Profit!
Face it, basilisks (born from a rooster's egg hatched by a serpent) are an endangered species. If Harry Potter kills one, that would definitely spoil things. :-)
system in the world. Baikal, in Russia is a _single_ lake with a freshwater volume greater than that of _all_ the "Great Lakes" combined. Lake Tanganyika, in Africa, is also larger.
I'd like to complain about the implied slur on our profession. Heck, I'd far prefer writing man pages for APIs to the sort of "this is the mouse/hello computer" writing that is usually associated with "tech writers." Bleh.
Of course, with many of my fellow writers bearing a closer resemblance to "Tina" from Dilbert than technophiles, maybe I'm speaking for the small minority.
We don't call it a "space probe graveyard" we call it a sparing ring for robot boxers and their earth-created punching ba... I mean sparing partners.
you're bound to imagine services "in the cloud"