Archive for August, 2007
Good Explanations
When much-loved IP telephony service Skype had a major outage, users wanted to know why. Their explanation sounded pretty weak:
The widespread failure of Skype’s Internet telephony service last week happened when millions of Windows users tried to log in to the system at the same time, after downloading a software update from Microsoft and rebooting [...]
BofA’s (Green) Monster of an Ad Campaign
I got to be a Bank of America customer the easy way. They came to me, by way of Bay Banks, which was gobbled up by Bank of Boston, which was swallowed by Fleet, which was - what’s left? eaten alive - by BofA.
Their service, by the way, has been fine, and I do appreciate [...]
Powerless in the Face of PowerPoint?
We love to hate PowerPoint, as Abhay Padgaonkar observes over at MarketingProfs. But is it PowerPoint, or just people using it badly? Does PowerPoint deserve more ire than, say, Word (used to create unreadable documents) or Excel (used to create meaningless spreadsheets)?
Padgaonkar says:
Remember, PowerPoint is simply a means to an end. It is only a [...]
Midwest Nice: more to say about customer service
A while back, I posted on the unbelievably excellent customer service provided by CDW of Vernon, Illinois, when I placed an on-line order for a privacy filter for my laptop. (I actually don’t particularly want or need a privacy filter, but I did want and need something that would cut the brighter-than-a-thousand-suns glare emanating from [...]
Fill Up That Feed, Please
I’ve always found partial RSS feeds - the ones where you get a teaser of the beginning of an article, but not the full text - really annoying. I read all my feeds (blogs, news feeds, etc.) in Google Reader, and being forced to navigate elsewhere just annoys me. Most often, I scan the beginning [...]
Little Touches that Kick Ass
Just two happy customer service stories.
Number one: it’s indoor season in Houston. This may be hard for those of you who don’t live in hot, muggy, swampy places to relate to, but August is the time of year when Houstonians spend lots of time inside. It’s not like the happy days of November or February, [...]
Force fed: on acquiring a new cell phone
I didn’t want a new cell phone. I was, after all, perfectly happy with the old one.
Well, maybe not perfectly happy, but happy enough.
But it wasn’t holding its charge for all that long, so I trekked in to the Verizon Wireless store to get the battery replaced.
As it turns out, I am a victim of [...]
Everything’s Gone Green
There’s nothing inherently wrong with green marketing - if your product or service helps the environment, why not talk about it.
Some things are a stretch, though, like this email I received from my fax-to-email provider:
Smartfax promotes a no-paper communications network. By lessening the use of paper in all offices, Smartfax helps in the [...]
P.W.S.? Puh-leeze!
I’ll admit it. Having just ordered a cool aluminum bottle to carry it around in, I’m a newly baptized tap water snob.
I’m lucky. I live in New England, and our water tap water is downright excellent. So, in fact, is our most prominent brand of non-tap water, Poland Springs, which actually does spring from Poland Springs [...]
Weekend Bits: Web 3.0, Social Networking, Declining Attention Spans
Some odds and ends from the “blog me” list…
1. Google’s Eric Schmidt answers a relatively silly question well in this video. The question: “What’s Web 3.0?” (My smart-ass answer - “a bug-fix release!”) My favorite part about the question is the comment that came with it: “I’m sure Google has lots of sound bites about [...]
