Nathan’s Daily Grind

You really need to read this article.  Great humor and an amazing story to boot.  Thanks for sharing Scott!

…As you might imagine, when you tell a doctor that you think you have a very rare condition, that doctor will tell you that it’s very unlikely. Your first impulse might be to point out that “very rare” is a lot like “very unlikely,” but you don’t do that, because doctors have wide latitude in deciding which of your orifices they will use for various medical apparati….
[Via The Dilbert Blog]

Adam Barr posted an interesting article today – Microsoft’s New Pinball Wizard: Robert Scoble:

…If you can get Scoble interested in your prototype, so that he blogs about it, does a Channel 9 video, etc. then beyond the immediate satisfaction of recognition, you have the potential to push it closer to the more significant goal of executive approval. In the end Scoble cannot greenlight any projects, but he can throw significant weight behind them. External users can weigh in on the merits and deficiencies of an idea, and early-stage communities can form around them much sooner than in the current system. Plus, the conversation is now taking place (at least partly) on a public blog, so it is much more transparent….
[Via Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters]

Adam, while I follow your logic I don’t quite agree.  Yes, projects for new products need to get sold internally at Microsoft (and any other manufacturer of a tangible or virtual product).  BUT, I disagree that Scoble is a force behind getting things pushed through that process.  Rather Scoble is an evangelist for projects that have already run the gauntlet.  MS’s legal team would never want him to disclose products or ideas that aren’t making it to market – why give a leg up to the competitors and let them know you’re going to tack before you execute the maneuver?

Channel 9’s role, in the cynical view of the world, is to be the first out of the gate to generate marketing excitement in the user community; or to at least fan the flames that have already been started.  Sure, I’ll grant you that some of the stuff shown out of the MS Research teams is advanced and not ready to hit the market yet, but I’ll bet you the patents or other legal protections are in place for that intellectual property before it shows up on the business end of a Ch.9 video camera.

That all being said, I can’t agree more that services like Channel 9 and people like Robert Scoble (and blogs like the Blogger Status blog I wrote about earlier today) are definitely changing the way companies interact with their users.  Perhaps your underlying point here, Adam, is that we’re seeing companies realize that they need to involve the user community in product decisions more than they used to.

Because if they don’t then someone else will create what the market is looking for, and the online community will help evangelize your competitor instead of you! 

I want to take a moment and commend the staff that runs Blogger.  They’ve been battling a number of hardware and software issues over the last year, and it’s been fun to watch.  Fun?  Yes – because it proves that even highly successful services suffer the same issues those of us who run smaller IT shops face.  We’re not doing something wrong … shit happens.

That being said, it’s also a GREAT customer communications tool to be open about what is happening with your system!  If I couldn’t post to my blog or readers couldn’t get to my site, I sure would want to know what’s going on.  Now I’m still not warm and fuzzy when things go down (though for me it just means I can’t post – my content is hosted on my own server) but at least I know what’s going on.  I can say “oh, well that makes sense … I’ll try later.”  The alternative is “this darn system is just plain down again and I have no idea what’s going on and when it will be back.”  The later is much more frustrating and prone to loosing users.  I’ve seen similar status pages for AIM and MSN (though I’ve never seen them actually updated during an actual incident).  Why can’t more services do this?

Here’s the blog post from Blogger…

Some users are currently getting “403 Forbidden” errors when viewing their blogs, and “Permission Denied” errors (or variations thereof) when publishing. You may recognize this problem from Monday.

The offending server is being replaced and then shot. We’ll let you know when things are back up. Shouldn’t be too long.

Until then, affected blogs will be unavailable and unpublishtoable.

Update, 5 minutes later: All fixed!

[Via Blogger Status]

Want a non-tech example of great customer communication?  Puget Sound Energy’s automated phone system.  We had a storm yesterday and power got knocked out to our home just before 6p.  [Note to self – make sure the cable modem gets plugged into the UPS … and buy a replacement for the one that died 3 months ago!].  I called up PSE’s toll free number from my cell phone, followed the prompts to report a power outage, and it asked if the address in question started with “36…”.  How did it do that?  PSE has my cell phone number on record as a contact number.  When I call the hotline they use caller id to link my call with my account!  I have no idea what my account number is.  :-)  After I confirm the address the system told me the outage had been reported by 38 of my neighbors already (I’d waited a few minutes to call), a crew had been dispatched, the outage was caused by a tree falling into a main transmission line, and there was no estimate on restoration yet.  ALL that without bothering a human being!

If organizations could leverage their customer and service data more like PSE has, people wouldn’t be so ticked off at an automated phone answering system.  PSE’s line is the only number I actually look forward to calling and working with the computer!

Funny story there … later last night I called back to get an update and restoration estimate.  For some reason the system transferred me to a live person to get the resolution estimate (it’s never done that before … and we have power outages all the time).  Unfortunately for Alicea and Jeff, who was in PSE’s call center, I had the call on my Blackberry’s speakerphone.  Alicea let out a tremendous burp right as Jeff answered.  HA!