http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1864437,00.html?cnn=yes
As needs become more ubiquitous on hardware that better suites those needs, its my prediction we will see less “generalized” devices such as the “notebook”. Smart Companion devices will be more focused yet flexible. Will the notebook makers be ahead of this curve or behind?
“I’m tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It’s in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.” The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn’t tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years…
Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products.”
– from Mark Hurst (Good Experience) –
Netflix is investing in telephone customer service, based in Oregon,
to provide the edge they need in building an all-around good
customer experience, to beat Blockbuster. An interesting strategy
for an online company.
Here’s a NYT story - http://urlx.org/nytimes.com/5937f - that
discusses the investment:
> Netflix [decided against] other lower-cost places in the United
> States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would
> present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then in July, Netflix
> took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated
> e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions,
> complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which
> is open 24 hours a day. The company’s toll-free number, previously
> buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed.
Netflix teaches two lessons here in customer experience management:
- Fix the site first: For an online company, the website is the
primary experience. Netflix did the right thing by optimizing their
site first, and then looked to optimize the secondary experience -
customer service requests, which only crop up after the customer has
gone through the site experience.
- If you invest, do it right: Netflix invested not just in “more
call reps” (which may have been nice in a press release but not
great in reality) but in a more expensive domestic call center. And
not just any domestic call center; it found the best city for its
needs - polite Portland, Oregon.
The outcome of the Netflix-Blockbuster battle is yet undetermined
(the latter has size and retail locations as advantages), but I like
Netflix’s ongoing commitment to customer experience.
– from reveries –
“This phenomenon, generated by market forces, media hype and twitchy retailers, creates a cycle in which products are constantly improved even if they don’t need to be,” writes Allen Sarkin in The New York Times (7/15/07). He’s talking about “feature creep,” or “the incessant rush of innovation that pushes manufacturers to tamper with products that consumers feel are already perfect.” The issue is particularly pronounced in the running-shoe category. “There’s this need to continue to evolve and have consumers feel like things are getting better, and that the needle is being moved even if it isn’t,” says David Willey of Runner’s World magazine. David admits that his magazine is part of the problem.
– from nyt — july 5, 2007 David Pogue / Pogue’s Post–
Last week, I spoke at a cellular-industry conference in Lake Como, Italy.
My topic was the increasing number of cool services that tie together the phone and the Internet. I’ve reviewed a number of these service in The Times recently: GrandCentral, which makes all your phones ring at once so people don’t have to hunt you down (and was just bought by Google); Teleflip, which turns your e-mail into text messages on your phone; SimulScribe, which turns voicemail messages into text that arrives on your phone or ine-mail; and so on. The talk went well, but in the end, I wound up learning as much from the attendees as they did from me.
The cellular industry is going through insanely rapid change. Almost everyone there - 800 attendees from 200 phone companies in 65 countries - was running scared of VOIP. That’s voice over I.P., better known as Internet phone. VOIP includes cheapo unlimited home-phone service like Vonage, as well as absolutely free computer-to-computer calling with programs like Skype. It’s all growing like crazy, which is making a huge dent in these companies’ ARPU.
Apples iphone pricing model….
I am sick of widgets.
Widgets are a perfect example of narrowly viewed opportunism. The latest snake oil, widgets become a self-fulfilling prophecy that agencies and companies convince each other of their possibilities and grandeur. Widgets become the hot ticket… the “must have” item of the summer.