Admit Your Frailty and People Will Respect You
So Zendesk (more on them here) had a bad day. Their Worst Day Ever. CEO Mikkel Svane’s face paints a picture: To quote from his post: …a planned hardware maintenance with our service provider exceeded the one hour service window with a whopping three hours. Monday morning we experienced unusual high email traffic, which tipped […]
Bought a Netbook or Super-slim Notebook? The “Free” Windows 7 Upgrade May Cost You a Bunch.
It’s back-to-school time, and there are some amazing bargains if you’re looking for new laptops: following Walmart, just about all major retailers offer at least one sub $300 model – a bit underpowered, if you ask me, but for $100 more you can get fairly powerful computers, still below the $500 treshold. Netbooks are no […]
Amazon, the World’s Default Shopping Destination (or is it Zamazon now?)
Recently I wrote about PaaS by Amazon – an no, as much as we like thinking of Amazon as the the key Cloud Computing infrastructure provider, it wasn’t about Platform as a Service. It was about Pasta as a Service. Yes, I am buying Al Dente Carba-Nada as a subscription. After all, before it become […]
The New Lenovo: Nice Hardware, Dumb Support
Lenovo, home of the (formerly IBM) Thinkpad’s is not exactly known as a price leader: those Thinkpads have a great reputation and a matching price-tag. But times are changing, and Lenovo is becoming budget-friendly: the recently announced Ideapad U series, the G550, and the all-in-one Ideacentre are all “cool” computers with an attractive price. For […]
The $199 Palm Pre that’s Really $299 for Some
…And I am not even talking about TCO, calculating life-time cost with subscription. No, just plain simply purchase price, with a dirty industry trick: rebates. The long expected Palm Pre will be available from Spring on Jun 6th, at $199 with qualifying data plan, and after a $100 rebate. And therein lies the rub – […]
The Social Media Customer Care Machinery
Comcast Customer Service s*cks Comcast Offers Great Customer Service on Twitter. Both are true. Frank Eliason, the Customer Service Director behind @comcastcares is now a Social Media star, being invited to speaking engagement left and right. The buzz surrounding @comcastcares served as eye opener to many other companies who are jumping on Twitter in his […]
Can Social Media Customer Care Scale? Should it Scale?
Frank Eliason is a Comcast employee. – how … uninteresting. Frank Eliason is a Social Media Celebrity – how exciting. Both are true. Frank is better known as @comcastcares on Twitter – he is the Customer Service Director who came up with the idea to use Twitter in an effort to improve the Cable Giant’s […]
Choosing Your Customers: Smart Business or Arrogance?
Remember To Make It Easy To Buy: oh, yes, I agree with the points Rob Di Marco raised in his recent article – but I’m also surprised. Rob discusses Atlassian, makers of the excellent bug tracking software Jira and the enterprise wiki software Confluence as a company not easy to buy from. I’ve often been […]
Trust the Cloud, but Have a Backup Plan. Google Lockouts are not Fun.
Just about every few month we get a high-profile case of someone getting shut out of their Gmail and other Google services. Google is notorious for freezing accounts without a warning, often in the users defence, i.e. when they detect probability of hacking. When you’re Loren Baker, Editor of Search Engine Journal and blog about […]
