Developers Who Point the Finger At Someone Else

One of my long-standing frustrations in the realm of geekdom is when I run into software developers who, when faced with a problem with their software, point the finger at another company or application and expect someone else to fix the broken experience for their customer. A year ago this month I ran into a repeat problem with FTP Voyager, a product I had been using for years – I’d upgraded faithfully year after year. In other words, I was a long-time customer of theirs with an investment in their product. Here’s the email I sent (remember this is March 2006):

“I reported a bug a few months ago where FTP Voyager uses up 99% of the CPU and it turned out to be caused by the Windows XP SP2 Firewall being turned on. I just installed FTP Voyager on a brand new PC (my old one died) and did an upload, and again I was smacked with the 99% CPU use bug because I had forgotten to turn off the XP Firewall. I’m surprised this bug hasn’t been fixed yet, because asking your users to deactivate security measures just to be compatible with FTP Voyager seems silly, it not downright irresponsible. When is this bug going to be fixed?”

My basic point was that their product was incompatible with the default configuration of a Windows XP SP2 machine. It seemed pretty cut and dry to me: they needed to fix their product. The response I received from one Louis C. Branch of Rhinosoft had a very different line of thinking:

“I don’t consider the XP firewall to be a security measure. It is not a particularly effective firewall and does not respond to configuration as it should. This is not a bug in FTP Voyager, but a bug in the XP firewall implementation. I recommend using the Kerio or Zone Alarm firewalls if you feel the need to put a software firewall in place on an XP box. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

There are a lot of ways Rhinosoft could have approached this problem – having a user prompt upon install that suggested de-activation of the Firewall, or them actually coding their product to work with the XP Firewall (like every other FTP program seems to be able to do). Instead, they pointed the finger at Microsoft and the XP Firewall and expected the customer to deactivate a security feature of their operating system – sure, it might not be as effective as a dedicated product such as Zone Alarm, but it’s better than nothing. And if I did de-activate it, I’d have to remember to turn it on when connecting to WiFi access points on my laptop every time.

This was the last straw for me (I should have seen the writing on the wall when I had to convince them that multi-threaded upload/download was useful) and I switched to using SmartFTP – a program that, interestingly enough, requires no firewall configuration. Go figure.

Reason #1 Why I Use Google First

A few weeks ago I created a post on this blog specifically designed to help people who were in my situation: they owned a Star Trek DVD box set and lost a DVD from it. Since I couldn’t find anything on the ‘Net when I was searching, I wanted to share my success with people who were looking for the same thing. Today I decided to do a bit of searching to see if my blog post was indexed. I was very happy with what I saw:

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My post is the #1 result for “lost star trek DVD”, #1 for “lost star trek DVD box set”, and even for “star trek DVD lost” (searching like Yoda they are). That’s awesome and I couldn’t ask for anything more of Google. I created the content, they indexed the content, and now people can find a relevant result for the subject when they search.

The same search in Microsoft’s Live Search doesn’t have the blog entry listed on the top 50 – and Microsoft wonders why more people don’t use their tool. It just doesn’t seem to have the results that people want (need) to see. Yahoo has similarly sucky results. There’s a reason why “the Google” (I chuckle when people call it that) still rules the search world.

Back from the MVP Summit, Grand Hyatt Internet Access Sucks

I arrived back in Calgary Thursday night, just before midnight, and man does it feel great to be back home! The MVP Summit was a lot of fun – and I definitely learned a few new things – but it’s always exhausting. This time around Microsoft paid for our hotel room, but we paid for our flights. That’s a change from the past 10 years of MVP Summits, where the Windows Mobile team would cover the travel costs of their MVPs. It’s a sacrifice to take time off work – vacation time for most – to come to the MVP Summit, so eliminating the financial burden was always appreciated by the MVPs. It seems though that the MVPs from other product groups who didn’t get their flights covered whined brought the issue up and the MVP leadership decided to make things “fair” for everyone and banned the product teams from subsidizing any MVP travel expenses. A flight for me to Seattle is pretty cheap – under $400 – but it’s still $400 that I’d rather spend on something else if I had the choice.

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Flights for MVPs from outside North America are much more expensive – one MVP from Australia I know didn’t attend the Summit because his flight would have cost around $3000 AUD ($2300 USD). That’s a lot of cash – the kind you’d spend going on a real vacation, not flying up to a Microsoft event. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of MVPs from Europe and Asia that did attend, but I know in speaking with some of them they were wondering if spending the money was really worth it. I predict the 2008 MVP Summit (already announced as happening in April 2008) will have less of an international presence, which is unfortunate because product teams only receiving input from North American MVPs are missing out greatly on the wealth of knowledge that international MVPs have.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing of the whole Summit was the horrible Internet access at the Grand Hyatt Seattle, the hotel many of the MVPs were staying at. The hotel itself was beautiful – I’d stay there again in a heartbeat – but they simply didn’t have the infrastructure to handle the number of people who wanted to go online. It’s a classic scenario that is mirrored in the way your local ISP (cable or DSL) works: when they’re rolling out their networking hardware, and laying digital pipe, ISPs adopt a model where they only put in enough hardware to handle what they estimate to be the average percentage of users in the neighbourhood that will be online at any one time. Hotels are the same way: if there are 500 rooms in a hotel, they build their network (DNS server, DHCP server, authentication server, total bandwidth pipe) to handle perhaps 20% of that number (100 people) – meaning that when person #101 tries to get online, the system can’t handle them. That’s exactly what happened for the three days I was staying at the Grand Hyatt.

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The first night I got connected after about 30 minutes of trying (mostly fighting to get authenticated, their server kept timing out) and when I finally did get on, Outlook 2007 could not send email. I hadn’t changed any of my SMTP settings, so it should have worked, but it did not. I ended up having to use a public-facing IP address, outside their hardware firewall, before I could send email. Even pulling RSS feeds failed. Strangely enough, the Windows Mail client could send email, just not Outlook 2007. The next night was another 60 minute struggle to get online, and another tech support call, and the third night was the worst of all: it took me two hours to get online, with yet another tech support call, and I had no choice because I needed to check my flight times.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that I was paying $50 per 1 MB of roaming data (auggh!) on my phone so using my Pocket PC wasn’t much of an option.

I’m Off to Seattle for the MVP Summit

Just like the title says. I’m all packed and leaving shortly for the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle. I’ll be gone until Thursday night, and connectivity is always a question mark at these events – even in the hotels that offer high-speed access because they rarely have systems equipped to handle 400+ geeky MVP guests who all use lots of bandwidth. If I’m slow to respond to email, that’s why. Off I go!

eBay Feedback Finally Evolving

I’ve been on eBay since 1999, and I’ve watched it grow and change from a marketplace of mostly individual sellers dealing with individual buyers, to a huge online industry of professional sellers moving 1000’s of items a month. I’ve seen prices get higher, items get worse in quality, counterfeit items abound, and worst of all, shipping charges go through the roof as sellers abused buyers trust by padding their auctions with grossly inflated shipping and handling charges. It’s not uncommon to pay 300 to 400% more in shipping than the actual cost.

The problem with eBay’s feedback system is that it’s completely binary – the experience is either completely positive, or completely negative according to eBay. The reality is the buying and selling experience is more nuanced than that – so over time I’ve found myself doing things like leaving positive feedback with neutral to negative comments. eBay’s binary system has created a sort of “cold war” where buyers are afraid to leave negative feedback for fear of damaging their own feedback rating – and when an average buyer (less than 100 feedback) is dealing with a power seller (more than 5000 feedback) a single negative feedback rating has much more impact on the “little guy”. I’ve seen power sellers with 30 negative feedback ratings in 30 days, yet they still have 99% positive feedback rating because they’re doing 500 transactions a month.

The new eBay system won’t address the issue of buyers being afraid of leaving negative feedback, but if this new system allows for a more nuanced approach where a buyer can indicate that a seller shipped a good product, but charged too much for shipping or took forever to ship, this new system will be a significant step in the right direction.

clipped from www2.ebay.com

Hi… I’m Brian Burke, Director for Global Feedback Policy. As eBay continues to grow, it is important that we continue to evolve the Feedback system to ensure it remains a credible measure of trust. For almost two years, eBay has been working on a new project to enhance our current reputation system. Feedback 2.0, which Bill Cobb announced at the eCommerce forum last January, adds a new dimension to eBay’s premier online reputation system, allowing buyers to better rate and evaluate sellers on important aspects of a transaction.

Detailed Seller Ratings – In addition to the current positive, negative or neutral comment, buyers rate their sellers on specific transaction aspects — Item Description, Communication, Shipping time and Shipping & Handling Charges. Scores are based on a conventional 1 to 5 scale, with 1 being the lowest and 5 the being the highest rating. The average score for each rating is displayed on the seller’s Feedback Profile page.

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Can You Market To Your Customers Too Much? YES

I’ve been a VistaPrint customer for a few years now, mostly because they offer prices that can’t matched by anyone local – and the print quality is excellent. But I’m amazed at how often they send me “specials”. Just for fun I kept track of all of the messages I recieved from them over a nine day period:

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Six messages over a nine day period? That’s an average of one message every 36 hours. They all pretty much contain the same deals as well – every one offers 99 cent business cards, so after a while (a short while) as a customer I don’t percieve their “specials” as being special at all. It’s like that store in the mall that has had a “90% Going Out of Business Sale” banner hung over their storefront for the past two years. The value of the marketing effort is diminished, if not destroyed, by over-use. And in some ways, it can even backfire: I’m starting to resent VistaPrint for their insanely high volume of email. I could unsubscribe from their mailing list – yes – but since I do order products from them every couple of months I’d have to sign up again and again. So instead I delete their messages as soon as I see them, without even looking, pausing only when I need their products. Hardly an ideal situation to put a long-term customer in, is it?

Ideally as a customer I’d like to control the frequency that I’m marketed to: if the company decides that sending out a promotion every 36 hours is good business for them, I’d like to recieve their best deals once ever two weeks. Give control to your customer and he’ll be more receptive to your marketing efforts.

Lost a Star Trek Box Set DVD? There’s Hope!

A couple of months before Christmas, Ashley and I were watching season six of Star Trek: Voyager. We were on disc six, and took it downstairs to my office to watch an episode there (I think I was re-formatting a PC and needed to baby-sit the OS install). When we were finished watching the first episode on the disc, we removed the DVD and it stayed downstairs. A few days later when we wanted to watch the next episode, we went looking for the DVD and couldn’t find it anywhere. My office is already fairly well-organized, so it was baffling that the DVD went missing. Over the next week Ashley and I searched the house, and could find no trace of the DVD anywhere.

I turned to Google and searched for any information on what the procedure was for getting one DVD replaced – I couldn’t find anything, but it seemed ridiculous that I’d have to buy a whole new box set for one DVD. Giving up on that approach, I then tried to contact Paramount Home Pictures directly. The box sets themselves are no help, offering no contact information, so I found a phone number on Google (the number I ended up calling was 1-323-956-3010). I can’t remember exactly what department I got transferred to, but I believe I got the operator and asked to be transferred to someone that could help me replace a lost DVD. I left a voice mail on the system I was transferred to, and after more than two months passed without hearing back, I had given up on having it replaced. Then, much to my surprised, I received a phone call from a woman from Paramount Home Pictures on Friday. When I explained what I was looking for, she took my address and said she’d send me the DVD I was missing, free of charge. I was quite surprised that it would be free, so I asked her if they sent it out for free because it was so hard to get in touch with the right person – she laughed and said “Pretty much.”

I haven’t received the DVD yet of course, but I’m fairly confident I’ll see it before the end of the month. While I wish Paramount would have some process in place for the replacement of a lost DVD from a box set (Star Trek or not), it’s good to know that if you find the right person to talk to, they’re willing to help. I’m hopeful that this blog entry will show up in the search engines if anyone is looking for the same solution I was. Live long and prosper. 😉

ReviewMe.com: A New Low in The Online World?

Things are blowing up with Review Me, the site I mentioned in a previous post. It seems that there was some sort of loophole (if you can believe the Review Me spokesperson) that allowed people that didn’t actually own a site to submit said site for whoring out inclusion in Review Me. The full story is on Consumerist; it’s worth checking out. The real deal here is that from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view, this is a new form of “organic content”. Rather than the traditional approach of contacting bloggers/media and asking if they’d like to review the product, the companies involved are opting to simply buy the attention of the bloggers. The bloggers might claim that the actual outcome of the review isn’t tainted by the money, but stop and think about this for a minute: if the blogger writes an honest and scathing review, what are the odds that he’ll be selected by another company to write a review if his last one was anything less than positive? Someone with money to spend is looking to buy good commentary, period.

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Because of this story, I spent a minute looking through nine pages of results for the word “thought” just making sure that none of my Web properties were showing up there. None word. Thoughts Media commentary isn’t for sale.

The problem isn’t that people are getting paid to write reviews, the problem is that they’re not disclosing it properly. Look at one of the sample reviews that they show off: there’s no indication that it’s a paid advertisement until the very end, the last sentence. That’s completely unethical, and if I had read that thinking it was the author’s real opinion and saw that at the end, it would make me doubt the sincerity of what I had just read. It would also make me doubt the integrity of the entire blog. Based on the number of blogs that have signed up for Review Me, it seems there’s more than a few people willing to prostrate themselves at the altar of Review Me.

Is it possible to get paid for something and still be objective? Yes. I don’t consider myself a journalist and do not follow the strict code of ethics that journalists are expected to follow – I routinely get invited to events (Mobius, Featured Communities) where my flight/hotel/whatever is covered. The things I write about those events are my honest, un-biased opinions. But I never assume that everyone is going to believe that, so I’m always clear to state up front that I was invited down to those events, and explain what was paid for – that gives the reader the information they need to filter my comments however they wish. I also reveal what I was given at those events. It’s all about the disclosure. Until Review Me requires that bloggers have a statement of disclosure in the very first part of the “review” (and the blogger doesn’t get paid until that happens), this is nothing more than bloggers whoring themselves out to companies looking for publicity and tricking their readers into thinking their “reviews” are something they are not.

I find myself thinking that I can’t trust the opinions of any Web site or blogger that is partnered with Review Me, and I also would think twice about reviewing a product from any company that was playing bloggers to review it – because people might think that my review was paid for like the other reviews. Companies using the services of Review Me may be shooting themselves in the foot with all legitimate media…

Disclosure: It’s a Good Thing, If Done Well

Because the blogging boom continues to grow, and because you have things like Pay Per Post and ReviewMe (this is particularly tricky for instance) popping up, disclosure is becoming a popular topic. I think disclosure is a very, very good thing – but like all things, if it’s not done properly it can be a very, very bad thing. I saw this Web site that helps you to create a disclosure policy similar to that of coming up with a Creative Commons License. The problem with wizard-driven output of course is that it often reads as though it were written by a lawyer. I saw this disclosure policy over at ZuneMax, a site we link to frequently from Zune Thoughts, and after reading their disclosure policy I couldn’t help but be left with a negative impression of the site because it essentially says they get paid for every post – which I highly doubt is the case, yet their disclosure policy left me wondering. I’d encourage any blogger concerned about disclosure to simply write their own statement of disclosure rather than using a template-driven tool that makes things sound worse then they really are.

Yeah Baby, I Funked Up My Laptop!

The other day I complained about the scam situation that is brokerage fees from courier companies, but I didn’t explain what exactly I had shipped. Well, here it is: a custom-made skin from DecalGirl for my Fujitsu P7010D laptop. The skin is a durable vinyl that’s sticky, but not so sticky that it was difficult to work with or pull off and re-apply.

I’m not really a “bling bling” type person, but I thought a DecalGirl skin would look great on my laptop, and I was right! I’ve long wanted to make my laptop more customized. Voodoo PC “tattoos” their laptops, but the process is expensive and they only do it on Voodoo-branded machines – which of course I don’t have. The DecalGirl skin was an inexpensive way of giving my laptop a customized look – I think it ran me $24 USD for the unique size that I required. There are a huge variety of skins to choose from – and they make skins for not only laptops, but iPods, Zunes, and other devices. The install was quick and easy (just peel and stick), and the air bubbles were very easy to push over to the edge and out.

About the only problem I had with the install of the decal was that it was just a smidgen too large – resulting in the edges looking like this:

That was easy to fix by cutting the corner piece in half, then laying the two edges on top of each other. I’m thrilled with how this looks and I’d highly recommend DecalGirl products to anyone – just remember to factor in the nasty shipping and brokerage fees if you live outside the USA.