Smart companies know that Support = Sales. Others still have to learn that Lousy Support = Lost Sales. I’ve had my fair share of poor support experience with HP, including the rep who would rather damage the brand by claiming they sell mismatched units than look for a solution, or this other fellow who is still gathering information for me – since October 2007.
But these were the typical after-sales support situations, I was not a potential customer, not a source of new revenue, just cost. Pre-sales support must certainly better, after all, I want to spend $ with the company … or is it?
The other day I set my mind on buying additional hard disk space. Yes, I “live in the Cloud”, but music, photos and movies are an exception: I still prefer to keep a local copy, largely due to bandwidth restrictions. Writing my own piece on media decay recently made me realize I better take action, soon. But which way to go? Internal or external drive? Both have pro’s and con’s, but luckily enough HP has come up with an innovative concept: a drive that is both. A complete external unit that slides in to a special slot of HP computers and acts as an internal drive.
Great.. and my computer is compatible with it … I think. I only think, because my User Guide is full of references to this drive, in fact it’s the only one, and HP’s website also says that the Media Center Pavillion PC’s all have this slot. But I’m a bit confused, especially since my user guide appears to be fairly generic, the inputs / outputs on the back show little resemblance to my computer. OK, search the HP website, by computer type, bu hard drive, by .. whatever. Bummer. There is no clear definition of my computer, and only a vague reference that the Personal Media Drive works with certain HP computers, but no compatibilty list. Unbelievable! They really make it difficult to buy their products.
After trying to research the issue for an hour, I ended up contacting Support. Remember, I am not a whiny user now, but a potential new customer. What follows is the support chat script – the only thing I changed is the name, to “protect the innocent”, and added comments in italics.
Me : Do I have a HP Personal Media Drive Bay or just regular harddisk bay? Thx. [this is the initial question after filling out a form with the exact model number and other data]
Support : Welcome to HP Total Care. My name is […]. Please give me a few moments while I review your problem description details.Me : Hi […], thanks
Support : Hello Zoli
Support : Please elaborate on the query so that I can help you better?
[What is there to elaborate here? I had a simple, black-and-white question, any further detail will just create confusion]
Me : ok, i want to install a second hard drive. i see a door that says "expansion bay" just below the dvd drive
Me : also another dummy cover underneath, this one is narrower.
Me : i don't know what fits in there
Me : can i just slide in the hp personal expansion bay - is this pc equipped for it, or do i need a traditional hard drive?Support : Expansion bay is to install an additional CD/DVd drive in your PC.
Support : And it is not possible to install a normal Hard drive in a Personal media drive bay. You have to install a personal media drive to the personal media drive bay.
[What is he talking about? This has nothing to do with my question]
Me : but that is exactly my question, i don't know if i have a personal drive bay or not.
Me : the manual talks about personal drives, but it's a generic manual that talks about a lot of hp desktops together
Me : i have not found a compatibility list for the personal drives - i.e. whether a6157c is compatible or not.Support : Personal media drive bay is not available in your PC however, you can use a USB cable to connect the personal media drive to your PC.
[Bummer, I don’t have the proper slot.]
Me : ok, thanks. then the last question: under the expansion bay, i have what looks like a dummy plastic door, right above the jack and usb inputs. is that just a piece of plastic or is there another bay behind it?
Support : I am sorry Zoli, I see from the specification of the PC that the PC has a Personal Media drive bay. So the front plane has the following bays. Memory card reader is at the top, CD/DVD drive is below to the Card reader, an expansion bay, and Personal Media drive bay.
Support : Please visit the web link below to find the steps to add/replace the Hard drive in your PC. Support : http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01035705&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&rule=39140&product=3451988
[Oh, so I do have it, after all? But where? I don’t think he got that part of my question.]
Me : thanks, i've seen that. but if what looks like a piece of plastic (under the expansion bay) is indeed the personal media drive bay, than I don't need this page. I suppose i just break out that little plastic cover and slide in the personal media drive?
Me : My PC looks similar to the pic on the url you gave me, but the section between the expansion bay and the input jacks is different.Support : Please wait.
Me : on the pic there is a slot to slide in something. is that what a personal media drive looks like? That area on my unit is a flat piece of black plastic cover.
Support : There is no need to break the black plastic cover to insert the PMD, you just need to slide the PMD in the PMD drive to work with it.
[Is he really not hearing me?]
Me : ok, then please read my line just above your last answer.
Support : PMD bay is the one below to the expansion slot.
Support : expansion slot- expansion bay.Me : than i guess the a6157c does not have it after all.
Me : because i cannot slide something into a piece of solid plastic cover.
Me : this is what's so maddening - confusing documentation.
Me : Here's what I mean: http://cdn.overstock.com/images/products/L10825909.jpg the area where the PMD slot should be is different.Support : According to the picture, there is no PMD bay is available in your PC.
[Finally, he got it…]
Me : that's my conclusion, too - no matter what the specs say :-(
Support : The tool which helps to check the specification of PC's are not working.
Support : I suggest you to get back to us later to check the complete specification of your PC.Me : lol .. is that a web-accessible tool i can check, or only for hp internal support use?
Support : Here is the reference number of this conversation: [……..].
Me : thanks
Support : It is an Internal tool and hence you cannot access it.
Support : Have a nice time ahead.
Support : Thank you for contacting HP Total Care Real-Time chat support. If you need further assistance, please contact us again at: http://www.hp.com/support/chat Chat support is available 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week.
Well that was really useful, albeit not positive. HP’s documentation, printed and online is misleading, I cannot use the Personal Media Drives. But it shouldn’t have taken a major investigation to figure this out. Oh, well, adieu HP – off to order a Seagate FreeAgent drive.
The past few days we saw a new Cloud based storage service called Soonr getting buzz in the Tech Blogosphere. In fact, I didn’t even get what is great about Soonr when there are many such services already existing in this space. Nevertheless, I decided to try it out and see what is so great about the service. After I set up my account and logged in, it showed me the space available for free users like me. 500 MB. Yes, you heard it right, 500 MB. For a moment, I thought I am living in the previous century. Who offers 500 MB in this era? In fact, why would anyone try this service when competing vendors offer anything from 2 GB (Dropbox) to 5 GB (Live Mesh)? I am not someone who falls for the free 50 GB (Adrive) and 1 TB (Oosah) storage offerings. I perfectly understand that computing resources costs money for the vendor and I actually appreciate those companies who charge for storage upfront. In fact, I am a happy paying customer of Sugarsync who, by the way, also offer iphone application.
Once I checked it, I tweeted my disappointment about the 500 MB storage on Twitter.
Soonr is a joke. My account is just 500 MB. Who gives 500 MB in this era?
Later I got a response from someone who appears to be part of the Soonr team. He said
First, I got a bit confused about the response and then realized that he is asking me to shut up and live with it just because it is free. This is not a way to do business. This doesn’t give me confidence that I can rely on this service to store my important data. They have got two things wrong. Offering 500 MB free is a big put-off for many people. In fact, I would have gladly tried it out if they offered only paid plans. Second, their approach to customer service, in this era of social media, is also not so encouraging.
I have already talked about storage pricing but I will emphasize once again. Cloud Storage startups should do the math in advance and announce their pricing when they open up for beta. I do agree that one of the unique advantages of SaaS and other Cloud based services is that vendors can push new features, get instant feedback and then iterate towards maturity. But it is valid only on the technology front and not on the pricing front. Users invest quite a bit of time and, in some cases, money to try out these services. Taking them for granted with price changes in between or telling them to shut up and take whatever free storage they offer is not a smart way to do business. It will definitely not enhance the confidence of consumers on SaaS and other Cloud offerings.
Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
Here is a note to all cloud storage startups. Please set your price before going into beta. Almost all the cloud based storage startups I have come across open their business to beta without even having any idea of what they are going to charge for their service in the future. I do understand that they need to go through the beta stage to figure out the challenges they face as a business. However, they are driving users crazy with their shoot first and think later strategy.
I have had this experience with many of the storage startups. In fact, only one among them, Sugarsync, was blunt in accepting the fact that they are clueless about their pricing. I was very frustrated when I heard about it. I stopped using Sugarsync till they actually came up with their pricing plan. Now, I am a happy customer. In fact, my experience with Dropbox, Syncplicity and others were also the same. Now, there is a new player is in town with the name Livedrive. Like Syncplicity, they are also offering unlimited storage right now in beta stage, without any information about how much they will charge in the future.
I know of many users who uploaded tons of data because Syncplicity offered unlimited storage for free. Once they started charging after the beta period, those users had to give up their data on Syncplicity either because they didn't want to pay for the storage or because they can't afford to pay the price due to the high currency conversion rates. I definitely do agree that storage startups have to pay their bills and hence they cannot offer it for free. I also agree that those users who lost their data on Syncplicity, when the service moved from free to paid plans, are the ones to be blamed. But it highlights a very important dilemma for users. In the absence of any word about the future pricing plans, users are hesitant to put their data on these storage startups, usually offering generous amounts of storage space. Why would anyone spend their valuable time uploading data into these services, only to find out at a later time that they cannot afford their pricing. It is a complete waste of people's time.
It is very important for these storage startups to do their math on pricing if they want the users to take them seriously. Seriously, no one wants to spend their time uploading data to find out that they cannot afford it or they do not want that pricing. It is not just a waste of user's time. With ISPs like Comcast limiting the bandwidth (and in some countries, people pay based on their bandwidth usage), it is also a case of losing money. This is my suggestion to all the future storage startups. Please announce your pricing information when you signup users for beta. Only then your company will be taken seriously.
Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
In this edition of Living in the Clouds Series, I am going to talk about two apps, one web app and a desktop app. The combination of these two apps is a very potent tool for anyone wanting to backup their data on the Clouds. Amazon S3 is the cloud based storage offered by Amazon Web Services. It is a highly scalable, reliable, decentralized, fault tolerant storage built inside Amazon clouds. At the cost of 15 cents per GB storage, 10 cents per GB inbound bandwidth and 17 cents per GB outbound bandwidth, this is a cheaper way in which one can protect their valuable data. Amazon has recently added datacenters in Europe to help add more geographical diversity for those who want such a protection.
Jungledisk is a desktop application that helps you backup your data automatically and also mount Amazon S3 buckets as a network drive. This app makes the entire cloud based storage experience seamless. You can learn more about how to use Jungledisk to setup backup with Amazon S3 in this article.
As it is customary in this series, I am adding a video that will help anyone setup their Amazon S3 account. The video uses a firefox extension to access S3. Even though it is also very powerful, I strongly recommend Jungledisk to make the experience seamless.
As I usually do in this series, I am listing out the Pros and Cons that are important from my point of view.
Pros:
Cons:
When several, seemingly unrelated threads on TechMeme discuss the same things, you know they are onto something big. Today it’s data. Where you store it, how accessible / safe it is – and no, today’s s safety discussion isn’t about protecting it from intruders: it’s about whether you, the rightful owner can assess it safely.
Computing Without a Whirring Drive is an interesting article in The New York Times about how hard-disk industry executives are worrying about their future with the advent of of netbooks, smartphones and other devices. Some data may be on SSD’s in these gadgets, the rest in the Cloud – and today’s teenagers increasingly don’t care where it is, they trust it will always be available.
Which operating system is best for solid-state drives? –asks ComputerWorld, ironically the same day a new forecast predicts Netbook SSD usage may fall in 2009. Whichever way the trend goes, hard-disk execs don’t really have to lose a lot of sleep: data has to be stored somewhere, even in the cloud. In fact if you buy into to IDC's Storage Paradox ( I don’t), we’ll soon create more data than we can store.
But whether you store it locally or in the Cloud, how certain are you you can always access your data? Not only computer-generated data, but your music, photos, videos – even paper. Paperless office was a popular phrase but remained largely a dream for decades, but it’s now happening for real. Hardly any new information is generated on paper, so finally we are now willing to digitize old stuff and shred the paper originals. Soon all our information will exist only electronically. But there’s a problem as discussed over @ Technium:
The storage medium itself can decay. Turns out that paper is much more stable over the long term than most digital media. Magnetic surfaces flake, peel, shatter. And the supposed durable CDs and DVDs aren't very stable either.
The proposed solution: move your data regularly, probably at least once every 5 years. Now, for most of us, with computer-generated data it’s never been a problem, as we keep on replacing old computers with new ones, copying data over and over again. But do you have digital archives of really old data (rarely accessed documents, music, photos..etc) typically stored on CDs and DVDs? They may not be perfectly readable after a few years.
We don't know what the natural movage respiration cycle is for digital media yet since it is still very new, but I suspect the cycle is much shorter than we think. I would guess it is 5 years. No matter what digital format you have your precious stored on, you should expect to move it onto new media in five years -- and five years after that forever!
Move it, move it, move it.
For some of us the solution will be keeping everything on large hard-disks, syncing it between multiple machines, backing it up locally or online. But there is some naivete regarding online backups, as illustrated by this comment to the Technium post (emphasis mine):
i keep all my data on the built-in hard drive of my laptop. no dvds, no external drives. this way i can always be sure the physical media is still working. whenever i run out of disk space i buy a larger hard disc (and one for backup of course) and copy everything over.
in addition i push the really important stuff to amazon s3 regularly - in the cloud there are no physical media. oh wonderful world.
“In the Cloud there are no physical media” – really? Information still has to be stored somewhere, Cloud or local. When we move it to the Cloud, we’re simply pushing the responsibility onto others, trusting they do a better job then we would. But let’s face it, Cloud services have not been around long enough to face the issue of storage decay, and until they start talking about it, we don’t really know how they safeguard rarely accessed old data.
Then there’s the issue of formats and continuity. I’m not even talking about media formats (Last year I found my old University Thesis on a 5 1/4” floppy disk – I keep it as a souvenir, but can no longer access it). No, let’s assume you moved all your stuff from floppies, VHS tapes ..etc: you are savvy enough to take care of media format conversions before they become obsolete. I keep all digitized (formerly paper) documents in PDF format, hoping that will last forever.
But here’s the hidden trap: your application data my become inaccessible, even while you keep on upgrading to the most recent release of the application itself. A few examples:
The list could probably go on and on. The point is, that you’re in danger of losing access to data where you expect it the least: when you’re a “good customer” upgrading to new releases, and think you are safe, since all your data is created by the same application.
Digital continuity is important, and not something you can take for granted. Whether you take care of it yourself or outsource it to a provider “in the Cloud”, make sure your data is:
We can argue all we want about the benefits of SaaS, discuss
hypothetical use cases at length, but the best showcases are served up by real
life, often unexpectedly.
A startup CEO friend asked me to take a look at his Powerpoint deck before he would send it to a VC. (Incidentally, I don't believe presentations should be sent in advance of a meeting: if your deck has enough content to convey the message standalone, than it's not a presentation... but let's put that aside for now.) I agreed to help, and he fired off an email with the PPT attachment.
Too bad I could not open it. I have MS Office 2003 on my Windows computer - that's the last version I purchased, since moving to the Cloud, and I won't buy an Office package ever again - and he has Office 2008 on his shiny Macbook Air. (Standard issue for hot startup CEO's in San Francisco?). Yes, I know there's a converter thingie I can download from MS, but apparently I haven't done it on this particular computer, so my friend quickly saved it for me in the older format.
I reviewed and commented on it, and as an aside noted that the fonts and the text alignment were way off on a page. He did not see the text problem on the version I sent back. Then came a second round of conversions and emails. It became apparent that no matter what we do we always end up seeing different layouts - so much for the MS to MS conversion - so we just focused on content, and I sent back the revised version. It took a while... hm, no wonder, the PPT deck that started it's life as a 2MB file first became 5, then 7, finally 9 Megabytes. Wow!
What an inefficient process! Emailing multiple bloated copies of the same file, never seeing the identical version, leaving quite some footprint behind, when we could have started with an online presentation, collaboratively work on the one and only copy online, see the same and not clutter several computers with the garbage files.
I will come back to this in a minute, but here's another benefit my CEO friend missed out on: providing the latest and greatest information. The VC Partner he was talking to was about to to go on vacation, and she was planning to review the presentation in the next 2 weeks - who knows when. This startup was at the time in advanced discussion with major prospects, and signing any of those deals would materially change the presentation. Had my friend sent just a URL to the online presentation, he could have safely update it any time, and be assured that whenever the VC reviews it, she will always have the latest and greatest information. Does this scenario ( sans the VC) sound familiar? How many times have you hit "send" only to wish you could retract the email and replace the attachment with the correct version?
Back to the storage footprint issue. On my count, just between my friend and myself, we generated and stored nine copies of this presentation, the last one being 9MB, up from 2. It's probably fair to assume a similar rate of multiplication in the process the original deck was created, between the CEO and his team. Next he sends it to the VC, who will likely share it with several Associates in the firm, and in case there's more interest, with other partners. Of course my friend will send the same presentation to a few other VC firms as well, so it's not beyond reasonable to think that there are at least a hundred copies floating around, occupying a Gigabyte of storage or more. Oh, and I did not even consider the footprint of this presentation at ISP's and all hops it goes through. Not that I ever bought into IDC's Storage Paradox, but this is clearly a very wasteful process.
All of that could be replaced with one central copy on the Web, represented by a URL.
Oh, and the irony of all this: my friend is the CEO of a GreenTech startup. 
