The UnSub

My new Dell Inspiron 530, a Quad Core, 3Gb RAM together with 3-year Plus Phone Support is less than inspiring. Less than 3 weeks old and it is failing. The phone support on the invoice states that support is available on Sat 0900-1600 but

the number to the Plus-Phone-Support is nowhere to be found. For goodness sake, just print it on my invoice or put it clearly on your support site.

Dell has done a heck of a job with their direct sales and logistics management. So far, I am very pleased with the order fulfillment and delivery process for both desktops and servers.

Unfortunately when it comes to my own machine, Dell’s support site looks like a cacophony of irrelevant information. I can’t even find a simple phone number after many clicks and searches. Yes, there are plenty of other numbers that is “manned” by pre-recorded messages but where is the Plus-support number? If a tech-savy user can’t find support number that works on Saturday, how would you expect a non-savvy user to find it? And the weird thing about their search engine is it returns some results that were seemingly relevant but are zipped up in a file.

Why put information into Zip files that contains nothing more than some HTML and images when you have a website?!?

The site has everything but the relevant telephone number that I was looking desperately for. The very idea of displaying all the troubleshooting issues and forum gives people the perception that the products are problem ridden. I have about 10 years of computing experience since the days of DOS6.22, I’d done enough of troubleshooting, nowadays I pay for someone to fix my problems.

The most annoying thing about the support systems of most businesses is the use of IVR or Interactive Voice Response system. IVR is invented for the benefit of businesses that are short of man-power to handle calls. No one, whose purchase is broken, has little if not any patience to listen to your long-winded pre-recorded message.

No matter how diplomatic the speeches in your IVR might be, all I hear is: “Sorry, we don’t work on Saturdays”.

After all a round of frustration while filling up their email support that DID NOT WORK on Firefox browser, I called the sales line and to my surprise, a human!!! Actually not a surprise considering sales-lines are “revenue” centers while support lines are cost-centric. Naturally, she has to take the first blow of my sarcasm before I got hold of the so call Plus-support extension. It’s just too bad that she was the first person who represented Dell who spoke to me after digging around their stupid website and listening to recorded messages for 10mins or so.

The next person on the line was basically Dell’s saving grace. Of course much of my lethal negative energy in me was fired at the first Dell representative, she basically did a good job of asking the right questions and making the arrangement for an on-site engineer. Before this event, i have never considered other desktop brands because they have done a good job making online configuration and purchase convenient (and of course cheap). The next buy will definitely NOT be a Dell.

Things failing within 2 weeks+ is not acceptable, regardless of how well you can sell and distribute. It’s time to look at the basics and common sense when it comes to designing portals. Dell’s search engine is basically crap compared to Google. A unhappy user needs a phone-call to a human who is trained to make arrangements to resolve the problem, not some pre-recorded message that says “we don’t work on Saturdays”, or a bunch of irrelevant information littered on your website.

An interesting Dailytech entry that can be concisely summarized by Mr Huang Jen-Hsun’s (CEO of NVidia) statement: “How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?”. LOL

Sean’s recent SMS really made my day. I was told that the staff from 中环茶餐厅 were quite positive about SMSPerks after receiving their training from Sean. We both hope that consumers will also positively receive this novel way of sharing good deals and services. In these times of inflation, who doesn’t want to save some $$$ with discounts and perks?

It has been an interesting journey for me; from idea to implementation to operations. After all the delays of trying to work things out with a few “business” partners, I am thankful that SMSPerks is finally a reality together with my old-time friend. I do not have 100% certainty that it will make us a fortune, but at least our perseverance and patience have paid off. The satisfaction of making our system potentially useful for the merchants has no price tag.

Now I just can’t wait to see our posters at 中环茶餐厅 outlets!

Here’s a sad story… Fall of Motorolla. It’s ironic.

http://www.songwriters.ca/studio/proposal.php

Though I am not a Canadian, I strongly support SAC’s direction towards monetization of peer-to-peer music sharing. The point here is NOT just about money. It is about their willingness to propose, open up discussions, listen to alternatives and adapt to changes for positive outcomes.

These are worthy efforts to work together for a better environment for all multi-parties, the consumers, the creative folks and associations/lawmakers. Technologies are nothing but tools, in the end, it is how people master and adapt the tools for win-win-win situations.

Avenues to connect fans and musician directly through blogs and social networks are already there. In short, it is way cheaper to get information and news to the people than it was in the past. It is also good that technology providers can make it even easier for independent artistes and musician to enjoy direct monetary rewards (simplest eg. “Donate” buttons from Paypal).

We can now even jam in a virtual online portals together, what’s stopping fans to pay to jam with favorite musicians online or even book a time-slot with your favorite guitar hero? Even if it were to be free, it makes a good PR activity!

It is reasonable for more musician to perceive technology as less a threat but more of an ally to bring creative works to the people, and be rewarded for effectively and efficiently delivery. In short, the present reality of internet opens up ways to connect people and different revenue models for musician.

No matter what the outcome of law suits and debate is, the fact remains that peer-to-peer technology is one of the most cost-efficient ways to distribute digital contents. One positive example is the case of Dutch University deploying software patches across campus with Bittorrent. I strongly believe that peer-to-peer is already the de-facto carrier for creative contents, legal or not, is more a matter of distributing money to the right people.