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What I’ve read… earlier this month

Can you believe that it’s already mid September?

A not-so-sunny day as I take a quick break from email (and lunch finally!), with the expectation of sun this weekend. Here are a few articles from the reading file for your commute home (thru August 19th).

As noted these are all (for the most part) available for download, making it easy to save for reading on mobile devices on your commute if you’re not on one of those snazzy new Microsoft Connector busses.

Have a good weekend.

 

A Borrower or a Lender Be – Prosper.com – Microfinance – Loan (Fast Company) – How Prosper.com is personalizing personal finance. From: Issue 114 | April 2007 | Page 24 | By: Michael A. Prospero | Illustrations by: Christopher Sleboda … saved by 2 other people

Monsoon Marketing – Stag – Umbrella – Ebrahim Currim & Sons (Fast Company) – How an Indian umbrella maker survived low-cost competition. From: Issue 114 | April 2007 | Page 22 | By: Anupam Mukerji | Photographs By: Raghu Rai

Inside InventionLand (Forbes.com) – By Kerry A. Dolan 11.27.06 George Davison peddles hope to inventors who are down on their luck. Who’s he really helping?

What Makes GE Great? (Fortune) – For the sixth time, GE is America’s most admired company. Its success does not come easy. Plus 7 Experts Talk About GE’s Strengths. by Geoffrey Colvin, February 24, 2006: 11:02 AM EST … saved by 1 other person

(Fortune: What Makes GE Great? : Download Library : News : GE – PDF of Fortune article above, courtesy GE.)

Google is the number one best place to work – Jan. 8, 2007 – The people are brilliant. The perks are epic. But can Google’s founders build a culture that doesn’t depend on the stock price? By Adam Lashinsky, Fortune senior writer. January 10 2007 … saved by 20 other people

Our Challenge Is Change, Not Globalization (Forbes.com) – Rich Karlgaard 11.27.06. America’s role in the world–regarding terrorism, foreign wars, immigration and economic globalization–was the alpha issue of the Nov. 7 election. It is certain to be the big issue again in 2008.

APC Tech support is top rate (PC Magazine Vol. 25, Iss. 18) – APC is not a huge company, and it sells fairly simple products. But if this Rhode Island tech company can get [tech support] right, what’s stopping Dell, HP, and others?

Mystery shoppers help businesses offer the best service (santa cruz sentinel) – August 19, 2007 by Teresa Thomae. Mystery shoppers help businesses offer the best service Mystery shopping. Secret shopping. Professional snoops. Anonymous audits. Telephone checks. Spotters. They all describe an estimated $600 million industry focusing

At Netflix, Victory for Voices Over Keystrokes (New York Times) – By KATIE HAFNER, August 16, 2007 – Ms. Funk is one of 200 customer service representatives at the Netflix call center here, 20 miles west of Portland, where she is on the front lines of the online movie rental company’s efforts to use customer service … saved by 1 other person

OSx86 Project Wiki – Welcome to the OSx86 Project – the undisputed leader in information regarding OS X on x86 hardware and Apple’s Intel transition. Open since 2005, the OSx86 Project offers users a place to trade and share information about OSx86 and the various hardware … saved by 1249 other people

Inside Apple: A Closer Look at the iSuites (PC Magazine) – 08.15.07 by ThinkSecret.com Staff. Apple took advantage of last week’s media event to blow out a series of product announcements, few of which should have come as a surprise to readers of this column. Among the list of new items were the widely expected…

Our Favorite Music Services, Part 2 (PC Magazine Review) – Our Favorite Music Services, Part 2 08.16.07 Even with heavy royalty fees threatening to cripple Internet radio sites, there are still some cool music services managing to provide an awesome platform to find the music you love. … saved by 3 other people

How To: Rip Netflix “Watch Now” movies to your hard drive – Lifehacker … saved by 86 other people

Featured Windows Download: Batch process images with FastStone Photo Resizer – Lifehacker – Image processor FastStone Photo Resizer can edit, correct, crop, rename, and watermark your digital images in batch mode—that is, in big bunches all at once. … saved by 59 other people

10 reasons to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com – August 9th, 2007, by Tiffany Songvilay. If you’re currently running Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v2 in your enterprise, you’ve probably maxed out all the creative ways you can use Content Editor and Page Viewer Web Parts — and your users still … saved by 3 other people

Q&A: Jonathan Schwartz on Sun’s open-source business strategy | Tech news blog – CNET News.com – August 8, 2007 10:39 PM PDT Q&A with Jonathan Schwartz on Sun’s open-source business strategy, Posted by Matt Asay. “Jonathan Schwartz is a man on a mission. While at Linuxworld today, I took an hour to visit with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystem … saved by 12 other people

CIO India – Microsoft Boosts Vista’s Speed – Microsoft Corp. this week released a pair of Windows Vista updates that had leaked onto the Internet at the end of July, but the company didn’t say when it will begin pushing them to users via Windows Update.

Ick, old married guys on Facebook (Perspectives, CNET News.com) – By Sabena Suri Published: August 15, 2007, 4:00 AM PDT perspective: It’s Sunday night and I’m trying to write that paper on The Great Gatsby I’ve been procrastinating on. Oh, and I’ve still got that math project. … saved by 2 other people

Microsoft Office is dead meme revived (Between the Lines, ZDNet.com) – August 14th, 2007 Posted by Dan Farber “…is StarOffice, Google Apps or whatever Adobe, Zoho, Zimbra, ThinkFree and others are doing a game changer, massive disruptors that will eviscerate Microsoft’s super-profitable Office business and free users…

The Vacuum Man Takes On Wet Hands (BusinessWeek) – JULY 2, 2007, By Steve Hamm. James Dyson moves beyond cyclonic vacuums to bring the world a better hand dryer… saved by 2 other people

Unchained From The Cable Box (businessweek) – JUNE 18, 2007 By Stephen H. Wildstrom. The FCC is breaking the cable hold on set-top boxes and letting rivals step in.

The Real Cost Of Offshoring (BusinessWeek) – JUNE 18, 2007 By Michael Mandel. U.S. data show that moving jobs overseas hasn’t hurt the economy. Here’s why those stats are wrong… saved by 14 other people

What Works In Women’s Networks (BusinessWeek) – JUNE 18, 2007, By Diane Brady and Jena McGregor. How three corporations crafted organizations for female employees that have an actual impact.

Napa Cabernet: Variations On A Theme (BusinessWeek) – By Robert Parker, June 18, 2007. Many types of wine are produced in California’s Napa Valley, but much of the region’s reputation is built on cabernet sauvignon. Fine cabs should be dense blue-black in color and have aromas that include black currants…

Also see Chart: It Was A Very Good Year? – Robert Parker’s chart for Napa Valley cab vintages

Building a Better Mouse – Robert Iger and Disney (TIME) – By SONJA STEPTOE, June 14, 2007. A look at Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger and his impact on Disney in Burbank, California… saved by 2 other people

Seven Secrets of Great Advertising (Aviza Group) – WESTFIELD, N.J., Aug. 8 /PRNewswire/ — Most advertising professionals know what makes great advertising. But they work in a volatile business and are generally afraid to talk about it — so they keep it a secret.

Business Processes – How To Optimize Your Contact Center (CIO) – By Katrina Howell, August 8, 2007 8:44AM. As today’s contact centers make the transition from cost center to strategic asset, accurate and effective matching of customer interactions to agent skills and availability is a fundamental requirement.

 

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Microsoft Gives Customers Something to Fall Back On… (bad DST pun)

New on MScom… Microsoft Gives Customers Something to Fall Back On… a Q&A with Rich Kaplan as he “discusses the second part of the Daylight Saving Time extension to come in North America, lessons learned from March’s “spring forward,” and the effects these changes have on customers around the world.”



PressPass: What’s the “call to action” for customers this fall? What should they do to make sure they’re ready?


Kaplan: Go to the Daylight Saving Time 2007 Web site and make sure you’re up to date on all the latest information. If you’re a consumer or small business, you may not need to worry about that as much, but if you’re an enterprise company that has worldwide operations, it’s certainly important to go there and make sure you understand the impact of these changes worldwide.


For the majority of our customers — consumers, small- and mid-sized businesses — we always tell them to have automatic updates turned on. With Windows XP and Windows Vista, you really get increased product quality, not just the latest updates to align the operating system with a Congressional mandate like Daylight Saving Time, but the latest security fixes and other general updates too. So that’s always a good thing to do.


In this environment, if you got the updates in the spring for Exchange, Windows and Outlook, and you have your automatic updates turned on, there’s a good chance you may have nothing to do in anticipation of the changes this fall. However, if you do business in other parts of the world, you need to make sure to get the corrections for those other time zone changes. Not just the United States and Canadian time zone changes, but rest of the world time zone changes as well.


For larger, enterprise customers, in general the “fall back” should be much easier. We had them running a tool at the beginning of the year, The Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool, to update people’s calendars. The majority of companies have run those tools and won’t have to do that a second time. If you’re not worried about the countries specified on the Web site listing the products affected by Daylight Saving Time, and you already took the updates for springing forward, then you’re in good shape.


The last thing I would say here is that, for customers who need to know exactly what they need to do to prepare for Daylight Saving Time — if they haven’t already — we are hosting a Web seminar on this topic at the end of this week on Friday, Sept. 14. So make sure and sign up for that. 


Of interest…
















•

Daylight Saving Time 2007 Help and Support Center

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Microsoft Products Affected by Daylight Saving Time

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Microsoft Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool

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September 14 Web Seminar


Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, DST. 632,522; 951,689; 1,750,000+

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What I’ve read this week… er, this past month

A sunny day and expecting more sun this weekend. Here are a few articles from the reading file and ones read during the commute over the last few weeks (thru August 9th – I will post the rest as I have time). Thankfully, most are available for download, making it easy to save for later reading on mobile devices.

Have a good weekend.

Hack Attack: One-click DVD rips (Lifehacker)  Purely for educational purposes, this is information on a one-click solution for ripping content, including menu structure, directly to your hard drive.

Virgin America takes off (USATODAY)  By Dan Reed, USA TODAY, Aug 7, 2007. Backers of Virgin America, the USA’s newest airline, spent several years trying to convince federal regulators that the carrier isn’t simply an extension of British billionaire Richard Branson’s worldwide aviation empire.

Customer service standards are vital for an organisation (Cybernoon.com)  Jagdeep Kapoor, Tuesday, August 07, 2007 12:12:54 IST Customer service standards must be set first so that can be constantly improved upon

Cisco optimistically looks to the future (CNET News.com)  August 7, 2007 4:08 PM PDT Posted by Marguerite Reardon. Cisco Systems’ CEO John Chambers said the networking equipment maker is poised to see meteoric growth over the next several years as the Internet enters a new phase.

Sony’s Stores, Web Site Offering Back-To-School PC Promos (TWICE)  By Alan Wolf — TWICE, 8/7/2007 11:21:00 AM San Diego — Sony has launched a back-to-school promotional program for its Vaio PCs exclusively through the vendor’s company-owned stores and e-commerce site.

Market Wire Business News: The Evolution of the Contact Center – MSN Money   In a recent survey conducted by Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), 97% of Best-in-Class companies that strive to improve call center quality report an increase in customer satisfaction.

Xbox repair process leaves gamers in a fix (CNET News.com)  Microsoft’s announcement that it will spend $1 billion to fix problematic Xbox 360s seemed like a step that would assuage disenchanted customers. Nearly a month later, however, some console owners are still less than pleased. By Erica Ogg, Staff Writer, CNET News

Kittens — the solution to spam? (InfoWorld News)  An executive at Microsoft has an unusual idea for beating spammers. Powerful software tools and supercomputers aren’t involved, but kittens are. By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service, August 03, 2007

64-bit PCs: Drivers wanted (Cnet news)  By Tom Krazit and Ina Fried, CNET News.com, Published: August 3, 2007, 4:00 AM PDT Now that they’re 64 (bits, that is), personal computers are still searching for developers to need them and feed them.

Fake Steve Blogger comes clean  For the last 14 months, high-tech insiders have been eating up the work of an anonymous blogger who assumed the persona of Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive and one of the world’s most famous businessmen. Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes

Tote a Small Library to the Beach (washingtonpost.com) Summertime: Time for the beach, and time for some beach reading. This year, I did my vacation reading the gadgety way, on Sony’s Reader, a device the consumer electronics giant hopes is an early draft of how the world will read books in the future.

A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators – washingtonpost.com   At the Yearly Kos Bloggers’ Convention, a Sea of Middle-Aged White Males By Jose Antonio Vargas, August 6, 2007; Page C01 CHICAGO, Aug. 5 — It’s Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers…

How I produce my audio shows, by Xbox Live’s Major Nelson I have been producing blogcasts (I call them blogcast since people think you need an iPod if you produce a podcast, and calling them blogcasts made a little more sense to me) since December 2004.

Catch Wii if you can: Do Sony and Microsoft have a chance? (The Utility Belt)  080307: Sony (SNE) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) long international nightmare isn’t coming to an end. Nintendo’s Wii console continues to clobber the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, with the latest numbers showing the Wii outselling number-two PS3 by a 4-1 ratio.

For Adobe, a tough lesson in (open-source) diplomacy (The Utility Belt)  080307: Adobe placed a little link in its popular Acrobat digital document software allowing users to automatically send print jobs to the closest FedEx-Kinko’s (FDX) location.

Survey: Amazon, Best Buy treat customers best online (computerworld)   August 02, 2007 (Computerworld) — Amazon.com Inc. and Best Buy provide customers the best overall online experience, according to a survey released by Keynote Systems Inc., a Web site performance measuring company. By Linda Rosencrance

How would you change the OLPC XO? – Engadget

Software Assurance and a case of denial | NetworkWorld.com Community  Submitted by Micronet on Tue, 07/31/2007 – 4:54pm. Microsoft insists that Software Assurance is achieving record renewal rates from enterprise customers, reports VNUnet.com.

NewsFactor Network | When ‘Getting Human’ Isn’t Enough   By Michelle Goodall Faulkner August 1, 2007 10:10AM Digg It! Bookmark to del.icio.us It is clear that to ensure the quality of the customer experience and to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction…

What’s Next: Ask, and You Shall Be Misled, Customer Service Article – Inc. Article  Customers can tell you a lot. But sometimes they don’t know what they’re talking about. By: David H. Freedman

PS3 to receive tuner, DVR capabilities before March 2008 (Engadget)   It’s been rumored before, now Sony’s marketing manager for Computer Entertainment in New Zealand has apparently, and likely pre-emptively, unveiled Sony’s intentions to turn the PS3 into a digital video recorder.

iPhone sales highlight Apple woes (Australian IT)   The iPhone is not just the most heavily hyped gadget in the fairly brief history of personal information technology, it’s also the target of obsessive scrutiny from Wall Street types paid to prognosticate on Apple’s shares…

Circuit City CEO Pitches Concept Stores (Multichannel News)  The CEO of Circuit City Stores pitched cable-operator partnerships here, describing the concept stores the retailer is testing in partnership with companies including Comcast and Ethan Allen furniture stores in an effort to provide a more complete custome

How I gave 640 people greener grass (Inside Office Online blog)   As I have blogged earlier, one of my favorite things here is how customers can upload their own templates. I noticed several were simple images (along with the Excel charts, Word resumes, and the like). So for fun–and to see how it worked

Off The Record: Panic mode (InfoWorld)   Lack of knowledge + heat of the moment = bad decisions By anonymous, July 31, 2007 03:00 AM

More information on the Microsoft Canada Development Centre in Vancouver (MS Canadian UX Blog)   As Qixing mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft is opening up a Development Centre in Vancouver. This presents an amazing opportunity for many talented designers and developers to join the Microsoft team and have an impact on the products…

The Man Who Could Kill YouTube (Esquire on MSN Lifestyle) Bob Tur is the little guy who is suing one giant (Google) to do what another giant (Viacom) probably never will — shut YouTube down. By Matthew Belloni

Hey!Cast  Hey!Cast is the ultimate tool to create video podcast powered by Hey!Watch. Quick, simple and intuitive.

My Pipeline Is My Inbox (alik levin’s blog)  I decided that the simplest way to focus one my action items is get them into one place – my Outlook Inbox. My customers send me emails, my friends send me emails, my manager sends me emails, my colleagues send me emails.

Software Notebook: Google revenue edges past Windows’ (Seattle PI)  For the first time, Google Inc.’s revenue edged out Microsoft Corp.’s sales of Windows for PCs in quarterly results reported by the companies last week.

Microsoft reveals specific product revenues (Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog)  This might have gotten lost amid the flood of data yesterday at Microsoft’s annual meeting with financial analysts, but some particularly revealing numbers emerged during a presentation by Chris Liddell, chief financial officer.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Shutdown, restart, and sleep Vista from the keyboard – Lifehacker: One of the first things keyboard fans noticed of Vista is that familiar keystrokes no longer work. The How-To Geek details how to access this menu from the keyboard in Vista.

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ACSI report: Apple’s customer satisfaction falls nearly 5 percent; Microsoft fell, too

The latest customer satisfaction numbers are out from the ACSI customer satisfaction study.


Ouch.



“Personal Computers: Apple Stumbles; Dell’s Problems Continue


“Dell’s result is not surprising. A year ago, even though the company’s ACSI score was up, customer service remained an issue and we noted that the company would need to take significant steps to reverse this trend.  However, it appears that any fixes the company may have attempted were short lived. Dell now resides among the lower echelon of measured PC makers, a solid 5 points behind Apple, and only 1 point above the Compaq division of Hewlett-Packard.    


MacNN.com reports that the American Consumer Satisfaction Index saw Apple’s customer satisfaction fall nearly 5 percent…



“Apple remains the industry leader of customer satisfaction despite falling 5 percent in the eyes of consumers since the second quarter of 2006 according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index. The Cupertino-based company along with Dell helped to drag down the entire PC industry 3 percent in total. Apple’s score now stands at 79. Dell, meanwhile, continues to experience customer service problems that have pushed the company back near the bottom of the PC rankings with a score of 74. HP improved 1% to 76, though its Compaq division is the worst in the industry at 73.


“Professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan, believes Apple’s decline may be related to the company’s outstanding performance. “Apple has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years,” Fornell said. “As Toyota can attest, it’s not easy to manage quality and customer satisfaction when a company quickly has to increase production or provide service to a larger number of customers.” Dell, conversely, ultimately worked its way back near the bottom of PC rankings, according to The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).”


The ACSI report contines…



“With more than $21 billion in revenue, Apple has grown by nearly 400% in sales during the past 5 years.  Recent demand for Mac computers is up by about 25%, which is more than twice the rate of growth for the overall PC market.  Many analysts seem to believe that Apple is gaining market share in part because of iPod users switching to Mac computers.  It is very difficult to ensure that both customer service and satisfaction stay high when a company suddenly needs to service many more customers.  This is probably what is behind the decline in customer satisfaction for Apple.  According to the Economist (6/9/07), there are also “grumblings about manufacturing defects and customer service.”


The ACSI found that Microsoft slipped to 70 percent from 73 percent a year ago, and Yahoo Trumps Google…



“With a new survey indicating that Yahoo has trumped Google in consumer satisfaction, analysts are attempting to interpret the survey results, with some suggesting that it’s not clear what factors contributed to Yahoo rising in consumer satisfaction and Google declining. “It’s not necessarily Yahoo search versus Google search,” said Greg Sterling.”


(See also these past posts re: the ACSI.)


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Some laser printers shouldn’t be used in a closed area, study says

I don’t like the smell of laser toner, and it turns out that it could be more than just annoying.


In his blog, Dennis Rockstroh references an article on ConsumerAffairs.com that calls out that laser printers are fairly active polluters.



“Working around some laser printers, especially in a closed area, may be equivalent to breathing in cigarette smoke, says a study.”


The study referenced is from the Queensland University of Technology, at Brisbane, where researchers “believe tiny particles of that toner escape from the cartridge during ordinary use, especially when the cartridge is shaken.”


From the article…



“[The researchers] say the problem can be mitigated by placing printers in a well-ventilated area so the particles can escape. Printers should not be placed in small, closed rooms, they say.


“The researchers said they investigated 62 different laser printers and classified 17 of them as “high emitters.” They characterized the worst of the 17 as releasing particles at a rate comparable to emissions from cigarette smoke.”


The researchers looked at printers from Canon, HP, Ricoh and Toshiba — my Brother laser wasn’t referenced — and published their report in a recent issue of Environmental Science and Technology.


IMHO, good to keep the window open, or consider adding a fan vent to your printer room.