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ASCI customer satisfaction survey results online, for phones, computers and much more

On MSN Money Central news today, Qwest and Verizon rated highly when it comes to fixed-line telephone companies in the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) customer satisfaction survey.



“The ASCI measures customer satisfaction on a 100-point scale in four telecommunications subsectors: fixed-line service, wireless service, cable and satellite television and cell phones. Qwest (NYSE: Q) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) both scored 72 in the survey. Cox Radio Inc. (NYSE: CXR) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: ATT) both scored 70. Comcast Corp. (NYSE: CCW) scored 67. Embarq Corp. (NYSE: EQ) scored 66.”


Google ranks at the top of internet search engines, Yahoo! (followed very closely by AOL and MSN) for Internet Portals,  and in Personal Computers Apple bested Dell by five points (closely followed by HP).


Tags: Microsoft, loyalty, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service.

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Lucky Lindy would have made a great programme manager

On this day in 1927, Charles Lindbergh completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight, landing at Le Bourget airfield near Paris.


This from Wired’s Wired magazine’s today in tech:



Late in life, “Lucky Lindy” became an outspoken environmentalist, warning, among other things, of blindly embracing technology. “All the achievements of mankind have value only to the extent that they preserve and improve the quality of life,” he said. In a 1967 interview, he elaborated: “The human future depends on our ability to combine the knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness.”


In the conception, preparation and planning for his flight, Lindbergh had to be a constant cheerleader for his unorthodox idea of making the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight. Just goes to show that with a great idea, the right tools and tremendous determination — plus the vision that you can accomplish a task — you have a recipe for success. Passion, follow through and tenacity are also great traits. 😉


Much like Lindbergh, a young flier today is Barrington Irving, a 23-year old senior majoring in aerospace at Florida Memorial University, who concerned himself with the planning and building of an airplane built from scratch (with each individual piece donated by the manufacturers) to kick off an around the world flight that his site notes “will make him the first person of African descent and the youngest person ever to fly solo around the globe.”



“Barrington was just 15 but had found his passion. He started spending afternoons and weekends at the airport, washing planes for private aircraft owners in exchange for half-hour flights or money he could use for flying lessons. Every evening he practiced flying on his own using $40 Microsoft Flight Simulator software. Focused on the dream of becoming a pilot, he turned down college football scholarships and enrolled in a community college where his tuition was partly covered by a Florida Bright Future Scholarship based on his high marks in high school.”


And some people think that playing video games will net today’s youth no usable or valuable skills. Good for him.


You can follow Barrington’s flight on his blog at http://barringtonirving.spaces.live.com/ (a little behind schedule due to weather) and on his site at http://www.experienceaviation.org/.

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Mary Jo Foley: Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft

Last week, ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley posted on her blog the Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft.


“When it comes to building community — and profiting from it — Microsoft’s Xbox team is helping write the playbook. That fact isn’t lost on the rest of the company. Increasingly, other divisions at Microsoft are studying what the Xbox folks are doing right and trying to apply those lessons to their own products and services.”


She’s right, IMHO.


Mary Jo spoke with JJ Richards, the GM of Xbox Live, to collect his thoughts on what other parts of the company could learn from the Xbox. Here they are…



1. Tiers need to be clear and simple. In Xbox Live, there is gold and there is silver. Fewer, simpler SKUs are better.


2. The dashboard is the UI. Users want access to lots of data, all in one place. They don’t want to have to hunt for it.


3. An online marketplace sells content. The Windows and Office Live teams already grok this one. Making Microsoft and third-party wares available as a one-stop shop helps move more add-on hardware, software and services.


4. Arcade: Not everyone is a shooter-game pro. Users come with different skill sets and interests. Some prefer “Geometry Wars” to “Gears of War.” Microsoft’s Developer Division gets this, and is launching Express versions of its tools for hobbyists/nonprofessional programmers.


5. Achievements are a way to stay in touch. The more ways you can encourage community members to stay in touch, the better.


6. Ubiquitous voice and text are de rigeur. In the Web 2.0 world, everyone’s a multi-tasker. All services and apps should bake-in messaging, mail and other unified-communications technologies.


7. Roaming accounts are key. Users want their audio and video content, contact lists, address books, favorites and other settings available on any device, anywhere at any time.


8. Build communities within your community. Gamerzones in the Xbox world allow similar types of users to more easily connect. What’s the business equivalent of Xbox Live’s “Underground”? Good question.


9. Points are the new online currency. Office Online already is moving in this direction, and other Microsoft Live services will likely do the same.


10. Gamerscore = reputation. Other divisions at Microsoft have been wrestling with how to rank community participants by “reputation” to help users gauge which content/commentary to trust. Gamerscore could become the model here.


“Richards acknowledged that the Xbox Live team can learn a thing or two from other Microsoft divisions, as well, such as how to handle child safety settings in world with more and more user-generated content. But it seems to me that it’s Microsoft’s non-gaming businesses that have more to learn from the Xbox team — at least when it comes to building community — than the other way around.”


I’ll add number 11: Connect with your customers. Customers want to be heard and sometimes appreciate that they have influenced product design and delivery with their feedback. More and more, teams have formalized how they get direct responses from customers, whether it’s internally through a dogfood deployment, more formally through a Connect-managed beta or customer focus groups to see how people react to and how they use a new product or service. Some of the teams that have the best understanding of their customer’s needs are connecting directly in 1:1 and 1:many discussions, whether it’s on Xbox Live in head-to-head matches and play, or on blogs like the Xbox team’s Gamerscore blog, the Xbox team blog on MSDN and of course Major Nelson.

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Your questions: “What is going on? aQuantive… sounds like a Silicon Valley deal.”

I was asked this morning by a friend from down south at a not-so-small Internet services company: “What is going on up there [in Redmond]? Six billion for aQuantive? That is a bunch of money. It sounds like a Silicon Valley deal.”


A new record-setting, massive Microsoft acquisition, the largest the company has done. And yes, it sounds more of the type of acquisition you’d see being made in 94025, 94306 or 94043 rather than 98052.


The Seatte Times has a couple of articles today that take a look at the aQuantive acquisition announced yesterday, including this one on “What Microsoft saw in aQuantive: tools, tech and top-tier ties” from reporter Kim Peterson.



“Still, the acquisition news left some wondering why, exactly, Microsoft would pay so much for an advertising company. What is aQuantive all about, anyway?


“The 10-year-old company has grown mainly by offering top-to-bottom services for advertisers. It helps them create advertising and branding campaigns. It serves, or electronically places, those ads on popular Web sites for maximum exposure. And it offers sophisticated tools for tracking when people clicked on those ads and what they did on the Web site that followed.


“If you went to a banking site, for example, aQuantive’s system would note that and could show you ads for that bank when you visited other Web pages. And it wouldn’t be the same ad each time, either. The system could show you a sequence of ads targeted to your interests.


“AQuantive also creates Web sites for companies. It built the Postopia.com gaming site for Kraft, for example, and a site about youth travel programs for Disney. It created a “Fanta-island” Web site to help the Fanta beverage company reach out to teenagers.”


From my friend: “I’m surprised that you [referring to Microsoft corporate, not me personally] didn’t buy 24/7 [Real Media] for their technology [ad management systems and analytics]…” which was WPP’s announced purchase this week, for roughly a tenth of the aQuantive deal.


Good question.


Given the number of online properties Microsoft has, across Microsoft.com (plus popular subsites like Office Online), Live, MSN, MDSN, TechNet and Xbox, there is an opportunity to leverage AQuantive’s experience in the complete cycle os ad services, from develpment to placement and ultimately the analytics to see how the ads fare in the marketplace.


Given Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick to augment their display advertising business, as well as Yahoo’s controlling purchase of Right Media, I wonder about the future of other online advertising technology company firms, including as ValueClick and Viewpoint.


See also Times’ reporter Benjamin Romano’s article “For $6 billion, Microsoft buys huge slice of online-ad pie” which includes this excerpt:



“Asked whether the acquisition is in part to prevent a competitor from getting aQuantive — one the last large independent digital-advertising houses — Johnson talked only of the opportunity.


“We looked at how rapidly this industry is consolidating and unfolding, and we felt like now was the time to put a stake in the ground that says we are going to take our advertising platform to the next level and we are committed to this industry for the future growth of our company,” Johnson said.”

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“Thank you for your visit” could mean you’re curious or just gullible

Lisa Vaas of eWeek has an article today on how nearly 500 people took the bait to ‘Click Here to Get Infected.’ It was as simple as setting up an innocent looking domain name (drive-by-download.info), one with an ‘.info’ suffix that is reportedly popular with malware providers, as noted in the article. If you managed to find the ad and click through, you received a “Thank you for your visit” message. Sounds innocent enough. 



“That was evidenced by the 409 people who clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs. The ad, run by a person who identifies himself as security professional Didier Stevens, reads like this:


Drive-By Download
Is your PC virus-free?
Get it infected here!
drive-by-download.info


“Stevens, who says he works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group, has been running his Google Adwords campaign for six months now and has received 409 hits. Stevens has done similar research in the past, such as finding out how easy it is to land on a drive-by download site when doing a Google search.”


In other words, be careful what you click on.


Although the site owner and the mock-site owner claims that no PCs were harmed, it goes to show that a significant number of people will click on ads or other interesting tidbits that have the potential harbour potential malware or malicious code. (In a related post, see “ani exploit via e-mail: you’d think hackers would know how to spell ‘Britney Spears’.)


You can read more about this on the site owner’s blog at http://didierstevens.wordpress.com/tag/malware/.


For more, see my past note on how there’s no immunity from security vulnerabilities.



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