Seems that someone at BestBuy didn’t read the memo…
http://www.flx-tech.net/2006/11/zune_on_early_sale_at_bestbuy_1.html
“By coincidence i got my hands early on an Microsoft Zune, bought as a regular customer at BestBuy…
“They dont seem to care that the release day is next tuesday. They werent displayed in the store itself but i asked a salesmen if i could pre order a Zune. Then he told me they were already in and he could sell one to me. And so he did.”
The
“A year ago, The Seattle Times compiled a list of shortcuts for thwarting the phone systems at 60 local and national companies and government agencies.
“Again this year, we’ve spent nearly 2 1/2 soul-sucking hours on hold so you don’t have to, creating an updated list of tricks for reaching live help.
“The good news: Wait times were somewhat shorter this year. More companies are providing estimated wait times. And we found one company, Comcast, that will call you back if all their human helpers are busy.”
The complete table of companies surveyed by the
Microsoft was faster than Dell (3 minutes) or Apple (2.5 minutes) for the time it took to get a hold of a real person: Microsoft clocked in at one and a half minutes. That’s 90 seconds – and they used our main 800 line. In comparison, eBay was over 12 minutes – but I have to say that I have found their email support to be quick and effective.
Trouble is, that time rates “worse” on the newspaper’s scorecard as compared with 2005. It’s 90 seconds or so off of the nest time (Nordstrom’s) but appears to be much better than most firms listed on the chart.
How to do better? I first wrote about this in a blog post earlier this year.
First, check out Microsoft Product Assistance to select your individual product and see what assisted support options are available for your product (for product software purchased separately from your computer). If you need support for software that came bundled with your PC, call the support number for your OEM (Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony…) as listed in your product documentation.
And click here for more info on phone support in the US . We state upfront that “wait times will vary” when you call during West coast business hours. And keep in mind that Microsoft customers receive two (2) support requests included at no charge – many people don’t realize that. I called our 800 line for support and got thru to a live person in less than four minutes.
Here’s a quick lilst of the direct support numbers depending upon where you fall:
Hours for Phone (Pacific Time): Monday – Friday
I’ll ask our customer support folks this week and see what their response is to this report.
The Seattle Times has an article today on the new ways that web companies are devising ways “to mine human intelligence” through te semantic web, or Web 3.0. Here I was, thinking that Web 2.0 was the razor’s edge…
“Their goal is to add a layer of meaning to the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than 50 years.
“The effort, referred to as Web 3.0, is in its infancy, and the idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies such as IBM and Google and at small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.”
The article references that we can see some examples of this Web 3.0 potential in new offerings such as UW’s Knowitall, which is financed by Google. Opine is a mining system uses Knowitall abilities to ferret out the information you would want to see from various online resources, like customer feedback and product review websites. And TextRunner “searches 77,652,885 tuples extracted on the topic of nutrition, and sorts the results by probability.”
I believe that a tuple is essentially records housed in a database with at least two components or more. And a good “Word of the day” candidate. 😉
There’s an interesting but brief interview in PC Magazine with Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO. John Batelle interviewed Schmidt, and asked him among other things about Google’s “office suite” which includes Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
“Schmidt took issue with the “office suite” moniker: “The argument goes like this: For many people, it would be just as easy to have the computer in the cloud store the information that you use everyday. Furthermore, if you have that model, it should enable very rapid sharing so we embarked on a strategy more than a year ago to build applications that are focused on sharing and collaboration,” he said. “The sum of that is a different way of managing information and we don’t position it as an office suite. We position it as something you’d use everyday in everyday life.”
“Yes, but it is still a replacement for Office,” countered Batelle.
“We don’t see it as a replacement of Office. The focus we have is not the focus they have,” Schmidt said, referring to Microsoft. “Our focus is on casual sharing and casual collaboration.”
But Batelle was not having it. “But the benefit is that its free.”
“Well you could pay people to use your product,” said Schmidt. And that was the end of that.
When was the last timeyou casually shared a spreadsheet? I’m not talking about using Microsoft Excel to create the batting line up for your five-year-old’s T-Ball team. Personally, I couldn’t remember an instance where I used Excel “casually.” As for Microsoft Word, I had to struggle to recall a time when I sent .doc files to someone in “casual” collaboration: 2004, for a neighbourhood block party invitation. And even then, I think I relied more on Outlook email than Word.
Now OneNote, sure. 😉
Jack Palance passed away, and that is a real passing on many levels.
Briefly, I’ll mention one anedote that I recall more often to people, one item that I think mention most often.
Yes, it’s the “one thing” from City Slickers. OK, sounds trivial, but stick with me for a second. In the movie, Mr. Palance’s character mentions that there is “One Thing” that really matters in life. It starts with Palance asking Billy Crystal, “Do you know what the secret to life is?”
“No, what?”
Palance answers: “One thing, just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*#.”
Crystal looks puzzled and asks, “That’s great, but what’s the one thing?”
“That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”
That one thing for each of us is to find out is that thing that drives us, our passion. That singular focus is really important, and it’s something that I often see in so many people in our industry, people involved in work outside their office (with our family, kid’s school, charities and friends).
I saw it this week walking through building 26, as we closed on Vista RTM. I saw it in people in the buildings where much of the Office team works last week. I saw it in the Xbox and Zune teams this week as we near the holidays. It’s all over… in MSN/Live, MBS, SQL, Longhorn Server, MS hardware (ooh, I want one of those new mice), online services and devices (I love my jasjar and my wife should enjoy the new Dash). It’s everywhere. I saw it this week with a new bunch of employees going through orientation (our “MS101” program which is so well done), new employees that were excited to be at our company to make a difference.
People are truly passionate about their work and that in itself is exciting. They’re truly interested in getting our products into the hands of customers and partners, to get their feedback and work on improving the products. They’re focused on making sure that we have the most satisfied customers out there. Over the next year we’ll release an incredible number of products, and it is really an exciting time to be not only here at a company that is driving so many different products, but also being one of the consumers at home and at our office (as we eat our own dogfood) looking forward to the new innovations and releases. I know that it won’t be all smooth sailing – we anticipate that there will be both satisfied and… well.. less than satisfied customers. But from what I’ve seen and experienced so far, the products are solid and the new things slated in the months to come are really exciting.
For me, the “one thing” at work is to make sure our product teams have what they need in their effort and focus on improving the customer and partner experience across the board. I work hard on my “one thing” focus at home on my family and friends. Figure that out the “one thing” for yourself and do it.
Have a good weekend.