I think the above questions say it all. I’ve been answering an endless stream of questions on YouTube after posting a bunch of Zune videos, and with some of them, I feel like I’m an AOL forum moderator in 2001 fielding questions from people who are looking for the “Any” key. I don’t know how some of these people even manage to work a Web browser, let alone post a comment on YouTube…
A married couple, friends of mine, are having relationship troubles. You know the old story: she’s on Hotmail, he’s on Gmail, and they can’t see or share their respective calendars. A problem as old as time. 😉
I figured the solution was simple: move her away from Hotmail, to Gmail, and they’d live happily ever after sharing their Gmail calendars. Why Gmail? I think Google’s Web-based email and calendar system is superior to Hotmail, though I confess I’m not as familiar with Microsoft’s offerings as I used to be (I don’t do Web-based email). I created a Gmail account for her, logged into her Hotmail account, and tried to set up a simple forward that would shunt all her Hotmail email into her new Gmail account until everyone started to use her new Gmail address. I didn’t count on huge road-block that seems right out of 1998:
WHAT? Hotmail’s email forwarding will only forward to other Microsoft email accounts? What’s the point then? That’s something I’d expect from the 1998 “We want to rule the world” Microsoft, not the newer “We want to work with the world, as long as we can make money doing it” Microsoft. Having a limitation like this is just a slap in the face to a Hotmail customer – sure, she’s trying to leave Hotmail, but there’s no reason to make the exit an ugly one. If Microsoft offered a real forwarding option, it would leave the door open to coming back. I haven’t thought very highly of Hotmail over the years (mostly because people using the service never seem to get my email), but this really drops the service down a few notches in my eyes.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I find it incredibly hard to believe that what I want to do is really this hard. I’ve done a bit of research and found a few desktop-PC programs that act as email re-directors, but that’s not a good solution. Possibly something Web-based? I thought Hotmail would have an option to function as a POP3 account, so I could use Gmail to pull her email in, but they don’t offer that either. It’s no wonder Gmail is so popular, Hotmail is really unimpressive.
I’m usually pretty good at working the system, but this morning I got worked over by the system. Yesterday I ordered a cheap Dell Vostro 1000 laptop to donate to my church – we needed something ultra-basic for registrations and whatnot, so the base $499 model was a good fit. I wanted something with 14″ screen rather than a 15.4″ screen, but the price jumps up by $200 to get the smaller screen (go figure) and I didn’t think it was worth the price jump. I did add in a DVD burner and opted for the six-cell battery, which bumped the cost up to $564. I thought I’d have several options at the $499 price point, but the Dell Vostro was the only one I could find from any of the online stores.
This morning I checked my email and Best Buy had one-day only $300 price reduction on an HP 2610ca laptop, offering it for $599. That was pretty close to the $564 I was spending on the Vostro, but it had a faster CPU, bigger hard drive, and a 14.1″ screen. No brainer. There were about 62 left when I added it to my cart and went all the way through to the end of the ordering process. While I was doing this, I was waiting on hold to talk to a Dell customer service agent to cancel my order. The whole order cancelling process took 19 minutes, but I didn’t want to order the HP laptop until I was sure my Dell order had been cancelled (I’ve had problems with Dell not cancelling my orders in the past and didn’t want to end up with two laptops). Once the Dell order was cancelled, I flipped back to my browser and clicked SUBMIT to order the HP laptop. Nope, sorry, you have to log in again because your session timed out. I did so, and wouldn’t you know it, the system wouldn’t let me order the HP laptop because they were now all sold out. 🙁 So back to ordering the Vostro I go…
The lease on Ashley’s Mini Cooper is up in April 2008, so we’re looking at getting a new car in the spring. I’ve always enjoyed the look of Mitsubishi cars, and now that they’re being offered in Canada (that happened a few years back) I’m seriously considering either a 2008 Eclipse or a 2008 Lancer. Given the strength of the Canadian dollar, I figured I’d check into how much the cars are selling for in the US: I wasn’t overly surprised to see a 2008 3.4 litre engine Eclipse, fully loaded, selling for $30K USD. The same car in Canada? $36K CAD. No equitable pricing there. It’s always been less expensive to buy a car in the US though, which is why some Canadians will drive down and buy their cars in the US. There are costs involved in bring a car across the border, and some paperwork hassles, but $6000 is worth a fair amount of effort.
What was surprising to me was the conversation I had with the local Mitsubishi dealership: the saleman informed me that in October of this year, Mitsubishi segmented their warranty. Previously they offered a North-American wide warranty, meaning if you bought the car in the USA, you’d still have the 10-year warranty in Canada. No longer. If I were to buy a 2008 Eclipse in the USA and bring it up here to Calgary, I’d have zero warranty. Worse, they won’t even sell me a warranty – if anything went wrong with my Mitsubishi car I’d have to take it back down to the US to get it fixed under warranty.
I understand that Mitsubishi is under pressure from Canadian auto dealers to stop this cross-border buying practice, especially with the dollar disparity, but the solution would seem to be obvious: make the prices fair in both markets so buyers don’t feel like they’re being punished (price-wise) by purchasing from a local reseller. There will always be price discrepancies in different markets, but when I can drive down to Montana in five hours and buy the car for $6000 less…that seems a bit extreme to me. I don’t like it when companies use their power to abuse the consumer, so this is definitely a strike against Mitsubishi – the Eclipse and Lancer had better test drive damn good for me to continue to want one!
It’s funny what Google AdSense will put up on a site sometimes…
[This was originally published at Pocket PC Thoughts and Smartphone Thoughts, but I want to get it out to as many people as possible, so I’m publishing it here as well.]
While researching the HTC Touch that Rogers is releasing today, I came upon something that made my jaw drop: the “special” data plan pricing that Rogers is offering their customers.
In case you went blind looking at the sheer ridiculousness of the prices there, let me recap: the cheapest monthly fee is $15/month (keeping in mind $1 Canadian is about $1.05 USD now) and that gets you 2 megabytes. 2 FREAKIN’ MEGABYTES. What can you do with 2 MB of data? Perhaps if you stick to short, plain-text email messages, and you browsed WAP sites from 1999, you might be able to live with that.
Oh, if you go over, you’ll be charged $10 per 1 MB that you use. If you’re willing to pony up $60 per month, Rogers will graciously extend to you 30 whole MB of data transfer, and only charge you $7 per 1 MB over that amount. Isn’t that nice of them? If you want to get their biggest and best plan, $80 per month will get you a whole 200 MB of data, and if you go over you’ll only be charged $5 per 1 MB. Gosh! Golly! At those prices I can maybe even receive a few HTML messages or attachments per day on my Windows Mobile device.
Digging deeper, I looked at their data plans page (which renders horribly in Firefox I might add) and realized that Blackberry users are even worse off: $60 a month will only get you 25 MB of data. They have a Windows Mobile data plan page here as well, and I was baffled to see only one option offered, a new plan I had heard about a month or two ago: $65 per month for 1000 MB of data, and $1 per addition MB. What a minute…that’s almost (but not quite) reasonable. They recommend this for “tethered laptop use”. It’s certainly a massive cost savings when compared to the $80/200MB plan, but is it enough? No, not by a long shot.
Rogers, like most North American carriers, is constantly being battered by subscriber churn (a customer leaving for another wireless company) and desperately wants two things: to keep their customers from leaving, and to increase their ARPU (average revenue per unit); meaning the amount of money they make off each subscriber. Current data plans are a way to get a lot of money out of a small number of people. What Rogers and most of the carriers don’t seem to grasp is that there’s more money to be made overall if much larger numbers of users had less expensive data plans. Rogers seems content with charging 1000 people $100 a month instead of getting 10,000 people on a $20 a month plan.
Time and time again, I’ve had friends and family express interest in Windows Mobile devices, only to have them be scared away by the cost. And we’re not talking the cost of the device – it’s always the cost of the data plans. People are much more willing to spend $500 on a nice piece of hardware than spending $60 a month on data, year after year. Windows Mobile adoption is being crippled by the expensive data rate plans of Canadian carriers, and until they address the pricing issue, they’re not going to see Windows Mobile smartphones selling as well as they could be.
I’m a big fan of the Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) blog – it’s hilarious, and extremely well-written. Yet since subscribing to the great RSS to Email option from Feedburner, I’ve slowly been turned off of reading it – and today I unsubscribed. Why? Volume. I think every blog, and every Web site, has to remember that people have a finite amount of time in their day. There’s only so much content they can chew through, and if you start to focus more on quantity rather than quality, you’ll lose people. Yesterday FSJ published nine entries. Nine! One was great [language warning], most were not. Dan Lyons, the author of FSJ, seems to have bought into his own hype that “more is better”. It’s unfortunate, because Lyons is clearly a great writer and humourist, but sometimes less is indeed more.
It seems my personal blog is the subject of some sort of school assignment:
“The first blog I went to was a vanity blog about a guy named Jason. He lives in Canada with his wife. He had recently gone to an amusement park and had pictures of him and his friends in go-carts. They were cute! Ironically he is a technology geek so that was funny in the fact that I am just the opposite and know very little. He talked about what he installed on his computer lately, about burning CD’s and his camera.”
The author, a woman named Terry who’s a mother and attending a school called COC (possibly College of the Canyons?), seemed to have an assignment about writing regarding two different types of blogs. “Vanity” blogs and “information” blogs. Her conclusion is that “information blogs” are better because they contain useful information, while vanity blogs are less useful because she has no desire to read about someone else’s life. While I can’t argue with the basic conclusion, the point that Terri is missing is that all blogs, even the so-called “vanity blogs”, contain information that’s useful to someone, somewhere.
[As a side note, I find this whole thing highly amusing because when I was teaching a class about online communications at Mount Royal College for two semesters, I had my students use Blogger to do little assignments like this…and here I am the subject of one!]
While I know there are blogs out there that are 100% pure vanity blogs (“This morning I had orange juice to drink. It was orange.”), most blogs contain more than that. It might be about an experience they had with a certain product that was awful, a band they went to see play that sucked, a CD they bought that they thought that was great, a store they went into that has a great sale…all of those things are information. Are they usable to the general public? No way – most people aren’t going to read a personal blog unless they know the person in some way, or unless they truly find that person fascinating. But that’s where the magic of search engines come in – they slurp up all the information they can, which is why no matter how obscure the information you’re looking for is, odds are good that someone, somewhere, has written something about it. Continue reading Every “Vanity” Blog is Still an “Information” Blog
I live in Calgary, and get my cable TV from Shaw, the local monopoly provider. In general, I’ve been quite pleased with Shaw over the years. I use them for Internet access (a 10 Mbps cable modem), analog cable (for my Media Center) and HDTV (with a Motorola PVR tuner), and both of my phone lines. Every month my bill from Shaw is just shy of $200. Compared to the other 800 pound gorilla in this market, Telus, Shaw is an absolute delight to deal with. Telus is a relic, a ex-government organization that hides behind a Byzantine phone menu system that has disconnected me at random half the times I’ve used it. I’ll do almost anything to avoid dealing with Telus (although I’m considering using their DSL service for a project, more on that later).
Shaw has been shuffling their TV channels around a fair bit lately – I believe twice in the past year – making room for new offerings. Their latest switch was moving all of our HD channels from the 300 block down into the 200 block, and they added around 10 new HD channels – ones that are part of some “enhanced” HD package that we don’t get as part of our regular HD package. Ashley sat down a few weeks ago to program the Motorola PVR to record the TV series we like to watch: all the CSI shows, The Unit, Heroes, etc. The fastest way to find TV shows is to use the guide search function, find the TV show you’re looking for, and tag it to record the whole series. That’s exactly what Ashley did – so imagine her shock when two of the nine or so that she flagged didn’t record.
What recorded instead? Well…something did. When we tried to play back two of those shows, it would start the playback stream, the freeze. It turns out those TV shows were on the HD channels that we don’t receive as part of our package. It seems idiotic that the PVR would let the customer flag shows for recording if the customer didn’t receive those channels as part of their package. I can’t flag a Pay Per View event for recording without first paying for it, so the PVR clearly has some capability to differentiate between what it’s allowed to record and what it’s not.
I decided to call Shaw and give them some feedback about how it would be great if their system didn’t work like this, and instead would tell the customer they couldn’t record that instance of the TV show because their didn’t receive that channel. It would be cool if it found another instance of the TV show on a channel that the customer did receive. Or what about an up-sell right then and there if the customer couldn’t watch the show at all with their current package?
There are many ways to do the right thing for both the customer and for Shaw as a business…so imagine my surprise when the Shaw representative I was speaking with (Jay, ID # 5217) proceeded to argue with me, insisting that their system worked perfectly. He said that as a Shaw customer I should be aware of exactly which channels I have access to, which ones I don’t, and keep that in mind when looking at the guide data. I was incredulous. “But I have access to hundreds of channels – you honestly think it’s reasonable for me to mentally compare what I’m seeing in the guide data to what channels I have in my package?”. Jay thought that was perfectly reasonable. Either Jay has super-human memory, or he’s one of those people who can’t understand something negative until it happens to them – which is not a good trait for anyone in customer service to have.
All I was looking for was a “Wow, that must have been frustrating to miss the season premier of two of your TV shows – let me make a note of this and we’ll see what we can do” type reply. Ultimately Shaw sends this type of customer feedback to Motorola so the next generation box might be just a bit smarter than the current one. That’s all I was looking for, and instead I got someone who insisted that I simply wasn’t using their product in the right way. What happened to the customer always being right? Shaw, you can do better.
My wife Ashley cashed a cheque for $93 USD today (a deposit from a timeshare rental we made for some friends) and came back with less than $93 in Canadian dollars. I was puzzled. Last I checked, there was still a 3% difference. It seems that a lot can happen in a short period of time. Even if, on paper, the US and Canadian dollar has reached parity, the banks alway screw you over just a little bit extra. Here’s what the Royal Bank of Canada has to say about the exchange rate:
Simply…amazing. For the first time in my 32 years on this planet, the US dollar is now the weaker currency. And for someone such as myself that gets paid primarily in US dollars, that’s just depressing. I know Canada’s surging natural resource industry is partly to blame, but there are a lot of things very wrong with the US economy that, if fixed, would make a big difference. This just sucks.