What is Microsoft thinking with there recent ad campaigns? First, they brought in Jerry Seinfeld, who is a pretty clearly documented Apple fan. Besides not being funny, the ads show out of touch Microsoft is with it’s user base:

What is it are they trying to sell in this ad? There is no mention of Vista. It is a minute and a half of banter with a tagline about computers being moist like cake. Are you kidding?

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, they released this:

It’s four and a half minutes that aren’t funny, and more than anything, show how out of touch Microsoft is with it’s customers. We all know that, but why come right out and say that in an ad?

Over the last couple of weeks I have formed a theory. I believe that they knew these ads would get talked about - not necessarily because they were clever or well-done, but more because they were pointless and awful. They’ve succeeded. In the last two weeks I’ve read and talked more about Microsoft or Vista then I have since it was released. I know the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but does it hold true in this case?

Now, Seinfeld has been kicked to the curb after only two ads and Microsoft seems to be starting fresh with their Apple rip-off “I’m a PC.”

What do you think? Has Microsoft’s marketing team lost their mind or is there something more to this?

You can’t read a tech blog this week without hearing the buzz around the new search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”). The promise was that it would be something unique that returns results in a different way than Google does. Interesting, I thought. I can get behind a search engine that filters queries a different way to return useful information. Well, I wouldn’t call it “different” as much as I’d just call it “wrong.”

When I searched for “Relevanty Speaking” I got 11 results on the first page. Not a single one actually directed me to relaventlyspeaking.com. Instead, they provided links to video sites that host our content, and in some cases link dump sites that pull in content for the purpose of trying to bring in ad traffic. Another peculiar result is the images that it pairs with it’s results. They seem to be totally random and not-at-all associated with the pages they find. To make sure this wasn’t some sort of anomaly I tried several other searches and got surprisingly similar, and inaccurate, results.

Besides the fact that Cuil just flat out doesn’t work, the bigger question is why get in the search engine game now? Google has swallowed nearly every other competitor - Yahoo and Microsoft are hanging on for dear life. It just doesn’t make sense to me to show up at the field with your bat and glove after the game has already been called.

Is this purely an an acquisition play? Are the folks at Cuil hoping that they’ll get enough attention that Google will snap them up just to keep the road clear of debris? What am I missing here? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

There’s quite an uproar today over people discovering that many of their followers have disappeared. In some cases it is hundreds of people. Twitter is claiming that it because they deleted spammers. That may be true, but I know for fact that on my accounts many of the legitimate people that were following me are gone. For example, we just started a Twitter feed for Relevantly Speaking a week ago. Our numbers were still small, but you can see what’s happened overnight:

This may be the last nail in the coffin for Twitter. You work so hard to build up a community, then literally overnight, Twitter breaks something and erases it. For some people Twitter is a fun service they use to kill time or keep in touch with family. But for some of us this is a business tool. I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours working with various people and companies helping them to build a meaningful and relevant community. Now, poof! It’s gone overnight.

I am holding out hope that Twitter will fix this and recover whatever data they say they didn’t lose, but I am skeptical. They can’t get their capacity issues worked out after all these months, what makes us think they can recover lost data?

Sprint is my current mobile carrier in Santa Barbara California. For much of my area their coverage is pretty decent. In my enclave, the coverage is awful. The neighborhood I live is in an established one, about a mile from the ocean and the tourist areas, city college, and downtown. With the greater-Santa Barbara population somewhere in the range of 200,000 people, I should have adequate coverage. I don’t.

About six weeks ago I started working more out of my home office. Because my wife and I’s mobile phones are the only household phones, it meant more conference calls, more phone meetings with my boss in New York and with my partner in crime, Christopher, in Grover Beach. Suffice to say, the service is awful. Calls are dropped. Some never ring through to my phone. Others are unintelligible because of the “Luke, you know I’m your father” Darth Vadar voice.

So, I called Sprint. Oh wait, the service is so bad that the call kept dropping. Wait, maybe if I hold onto a sheet of tinfoil in my backyard with my right arm raised at 45 degrees above my head I can get a signal…nope. Ok, I’ll email them. I get the automated “Thank you for contacting Sprint Online. Customer E-Care has received your email and will respond to your request within 24 hours.” Ok, fair enough. I wait two days and never receive a response. I write again and get the same automated response. 25 hours later I get an email asking me when this problem started, was it just on my phone, and was it just at my home or everywhere? I responded to the questions and waited another 22 hours for a response. This time “Harold” called me. He asked me the same questions the previous person had asked me in email and said he would have to consult their technical team and call me back in 15 minutes. I waited for his call and after two hours received a voicemail stating that he couldn’t get through to me (no signal) and that I should call their 800 number for support. Again, because I can’t make a decent call from my house, I email again explaining the problem. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. This goes on and on for 10 days and 15 emails.

I finally reached my breaking point and asked to be let out of my contract. I have a year and half left on a service plan that I can’t use 99% of the time. They have conveniently ignored that request and have continued to promise me tech support and resolution of my issue within 24 hours.

We all have horror stories with companies we deal with everyday. So why do I bring this one up? I think Sprint is missing a customer relations opportunity and one for positive branding. Here’s what I think Sprint has done badly in this situation:

1. They impose a deadline on themselves of getting back to you within 24 hours. In the flurry of emails that have been sent, they’ve only honored that timeframe twice. The rest of the time I had to send follow-up emails asking when I could expect to receive support. Don’t set an arbitrary goal that you can’t reach. It makes your service look bad and it gives customers a false sense of hope.

2. After a customer has exchanged 15 emails with you, offer a direct line to a supervisor instead of the general service pool. I’ve already spent 3 or 4 hours of my time answering questions. Don’t make me waste another hour sitting on hold. This is especially true in my case where I may have to drive to a park or somewhere that I can find a signal to make the call. Respect your customers’ time.

3. Assign a service rep to a complaint and let them own it. If that’s not possible, at least keep better records of the interaction thus far. Every time I emailed I was assigned a new case number and a new rep that asked me the same questions. This meant I had to respond to them and then wait 24 hours (or more) for someone to get back to me. We’re now 11 days into this mess and I’m not a single step closer than I was after the first email.

4. When a customer is in limbo for a long period of time with unusable service, offer them a refund or significant credit. When I asked for something like that I was given 40 bonus minutes. Seriously? I pay for 2000 minutes a month, unlimited data, text messaging, and my service is dead in the water and you offer me 40 bonus minutes? I was beyond insulted.

5. No carrier wants to let customers out of a contract, but if you can’t resolve a customer’s service issues, let them out of their contract. I realize in the fine print they have every legal right to make you pay a termination fee, but that’s not ethical (especially since I paid nearly full retail price for my phone, not the subsidized promo rate). Plus, there are really only four major carriers in the U.S. With number portability there is a good chance that you may see this customer sign up with you in the future. Don’t make a bad situation worse by holding them hostage and insuring that they’ll never do business with you again.

How will this all turn out? I have no idea. I do know that the economy is in a downturn and businesses are hurting everywhere. You need every advantage you can get to position your brand in the best possible light. Handling a situation so poorly so that it ends up on a blog is certainly not helping Sprint in the eyes of potential consumers.

In the end, I believe that if companies just did the right thing and acted in good faith, the rest would probably take care of itself. Sprint, do the right thing.

I am always thinking about what drives and makes our company and its culture unique, fresh and contemporary, as well as what drives us to grow and flourish. As the CEO of MediaTrust, it is important to me that our organizational culture and technology stay in sync and drive each other as we move forward. Many times visual tools that communicate this concept become important influencers of our companies heart and soul. I think this video from the TED “ideas worth spreading” web site says it all. Inspiring innovation that demonstrates not only the fine line between art and engineering, but the synergy between them as well. This type of work makes me feel passionate and inspired! Innovative work such as this is illustrates how we can approach our industry, our partnerships and our relationships

TEDTalks star Theo Jansen’s talk inspired me to think about the infinite realm of possibilities. I encourage you to watch his presentation us to think about what is possible.

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All of the recent hype around “meta social networks” like Facebook and Myspace and their experimentation with new and bold forms of advertising belies the fact that advertisers and users are still on an elusive quest for relevance between themselves and what’s available on the web (other users, content, and ads). The quest has lead these parties to discovering social networks as a way to, well…discover.

The act of discovery is a simple exercise in finding other items (content, people, ads, etc) that are relevant to you and your interests. This desire to find new and interesting things on the web has drawn people into social networking, yet Facebook and Myspace are falling short because they are mere aggregators of massive amounts of people. The current movement from these larger Social networking “Portals” to niche networks with deeper and more relevant content (reminiscent of the late 90’s user migration from meta portals like yahoo and MSN to smaller, niche player sites) simply means that people are discovering more relevance on the smaller more focused sites. Facebook and Myspace are too busy acquiring users without focusing on the use of those users….and people are leaving. Just look at the success of Ning. The current valley quip says that as soon as your network gets big enough, you goto Ning.

Focus is the reason that the online user is finding that the smaller sites are better source of content. Any site worth its beans will have social networking tools in the future and their focus alone will make them more relevant to their users. Not rocket science.

For an example, look at bookQube. Its a new “social network” for those interested in books. Books, like TV and other media, provide the ultimate water cooler conversation and consequently a great place to aggregate like-minded individuals around common subject matter (relevance, anyone?).

Not only does bookQube provide the blogging, commenting, networking and book club creation tools, it also allows its users to visually locate other users, content, and books they might like based on their interests they have already expressed.

This process of intuitive discovery is the future of social networking. Discovery as it is today will be turned on its ear by semantic web functionality like recommendation engines and real-time data analysis that can tell users (and advertisers) what media and users they will like and “auto-magically” recommend them to the user — vastly speeding the process of discovery (and improving a site’s navigation and engagement.)

This is where the web, or web 3.0 (excuse the hackneyed dotcom nomenclature) gets fun. A well designed site will have enough information about the user and the content on the site to dynamically tell them what on the site is most interesting to them and point them in that direction. The user wins with relevant content and friends and advertisers and publishers win with more relevant ads that people actually click on because they are not the usual interruptive tripe.

By David Taber.

It’s 1966, and the largest car company in Europe is looking to create an

inexpensive, fun sports car. They own the biggest single automobile plant

in the world, so manufacturing won’t be an issue. They have Pininfarina

under contract, so styling will be clean and sexy.

The Spider hits the market at a price below most competitors, with a solid

marketing campaign and good global distribution. It sells pretty well and

is a cool car for 20-somethings not suffering from testosterone poisoning.

They got 1000 things right with this product — the convertible top

mechanism should have won a Nobel prize — but they got one thing wrong. It

was made by Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino — a company that customers

called “Fix It Again, Tony.”

This month, we’re not looking at

href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-18.htm”

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>branding or

href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-42.htm”

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>market timing: it’s about product design.

What’s Old is New Again

Whenever innovation provides a competitive edge, great designs (and quick

tweaks) will yield way more profits than you can get once a product category

is mature. In the early 80s and 90s, the high-innovation market was

hardware. In the late 90s, it was software and the internet. Today,

product design — and design errors — have come back as important issues

for hosted services, web 2.0, and open source products.

Product Design is at the core of the Product Management function, and it

permeates conversations between Marketing, Engineering, Executives and

Sales. As with the FIAT Spider, the market gives you very few points for

all the things you got right, and hits you hard for the one or two things

that went wrong. So it pays to put quality time into this.

Of course, a great product design can’t happen unless you know who the

href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-15.htm”

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>customer is, why they really

href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-13.htm”

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>need it, and how much they’re

href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-16.htm”

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>willing to pay. Read the linked articles to get ideas

about product strategy. Assuming you got all that under control, it’s time

to examine product design.

At the executive level, product design decisions manifest themselves as a

series of tradeoffs, budgetary and schedule allocations among:

• Features
• Ease of Use / OOBE
• Performance
• Scalability / adaptability / robustness
• Quality / fit-and-finish

The problem is, these choices usually present themselves serially, along the

lines of “do you want feature X, or do you want to delay the launch?” This

is a false choice. The trick is to look at these five as a simultaneous

equation, trying to optimize the five domains of the product goals against

the five possible cost areas (budget, time, market size, team morale, and

company reputation).

When Design Really Matters

I hate to sound like a New Age throwback, but upper management needs to look

at product design and resource allocation decisions holistically, not

hierarchically. The whole company produces the product and the customer

experience, not just one department.

An

href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/shared/images/newsletter/awards.gif”

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>award-winning product does not need to be best on the

planet along every competitive measure (indeed, it is quite unprofitable to

even attempt this). Instead, management should be looking for the optimal

tradeoff where the product is good enough for most every expected use, and

world beating for at least one important use case. As I

href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-13.htm#Xtreme”

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>wrote earlier, products need to be developed around a

coherent thesis that evolves incrementally. The product description must

not be a requirements bible, a tome written by marketing and read by nobody.

Instead, use an evolving document where key product team members insert

incremental contributions throughout the design cycle. Three-ring binders

and this stuff called paper are amazingly effective.

So how does an executive team know if this kind of iterative, flexible

product development process is in place? Here are some questions you can

ask to assess the health of your product development team — and the success

of your product design — long before problems surface:

• Product development team membership: is someone from customer 

  support or sales on the product development team? They needn’t attend every

  meeting or review every document, but they can’t be out of the loop, either.

  Ideally, an early customer acts as a design partner both for the product’s

  features and its commercial aspects.

• Product development team trust: do the members of the team

  actually work together, or are they adversaries? Generally speaking,

  product management should have 51% of the vote on the team…but the product

  manager will have to earn that trust through good decisions. Healthy debate

  is a good thing, but if you ask a team member why a decision was made and

  hear something along the lines of, “those jerks insisted,” there’s probably

  trouble. In the extreme, engineering and marketing are at war…and the

  company is the loser.

• Bugs, board revs, and chip spins: nothing is worse for a

  product schedule than

  href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-22.htm”

  target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>unanticipated rework. If the team (or management) is in

  denial, it’s deadly. Ask whether a lot of bugs have been re-prioritized

  (either their severity or priority), or testing skipped, or simulation steps

  deferred until after tape-out. Any hint of these maneuvers does not bode

  well for your product design or its implementation schedule.

• Multiple realities: for any one product, there should only be

  one feature list, one set of release/launch criteria, one set of benchmarks,

  one bug list, and one schedule.

  • If there isn’t one of each of the items above, you’ve got a 

    problem with engineering or marketing maturity. Very young companies have

    an excuse. But fix this situation no matter what.

  • If, on the other hand, there are more than one of any of the 

    above items (like “the official bug list and the engineering bug list”)

    you’ve got a severe organizational disconnect. The first thing to do is

    outlaw fiction, and find out what’s true. Watch out for

    href=”http://www.taberconsulting.com/download/dtr-32.htm”

    target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>weenie behaviors. You will rapidly uncover other

    problems from the overall list.

Rectifying problems here may mean a reset to the schedule or a change

to your product expectations — but delay will only make things worse.

• Big bonus syndrome: big incentives can improve team 

  performance, but can distort good judgment. If an executive has $100K or

  more on the line, he is all too likely to ship garbage. This can kill a

  product, a product line, or a whole company reputation. Restructure the

  bonus so it’s contingent on product profitability, including the costs of

  excessive customer support.

• Come-from-behind syndrome: when most companies are trying to 

  recover from a tarnished reputation, it’s really hard for the customer to

  believe that your new product will pass muster. Negative branding is in

  play. This is what happened to FIAT (the Spider had good relatively good

  quality, but nobody would believe it) and is happening now to GM (their new

  designs are pretty good, but nobody notices). There are some companies that

  can pull off come-from-behind product victories (think Microsoft), but it

  takes tenacity and real patience.

• Incomplete product syndrome: engineering says the product is 

  done, marketing says it’s not so sure, and sales says they can’t sell a

  product that isn’t complete. This is a really common problem, and causes

  blatant political behaviors on all sides. Unfortunately, the big political

  implication is that upper management has not been sufficiently involved with

  the product or its customers. The fastest way to solve this is to involve

  customers in candid product reviews where upper management is present…and

  in listen mode.

• Guess-wrong syndrome: has marketing or engineering gotten

  something completely wrong in the product design? Guesses and assumptions

  are part of any innovative process, but if marketing completely

  misunderstood what customers meant, or if engineering misinterpreted the

  requirements and designed something nobody would want, you’re out of tune

  with the customer. Either the team is missing domain knowledge is missing,

  or they are not actively listening to customers.

• Wild product positioning: somebody (maybe an airhead in

  advertising, maybe a pointy-haired executive) has come up with product

  positioning or messaging that simply is not believable outside of your

  offices. For political reasons, Sales may actually use the marketing

  message, but with poor results. The product design is blamed for not

  complying with the unrealistic product positioning. But marketing is not

  about making fantasies true, it’s about making the truth interesting and

  motivating to a customer. Bring positioning back to reality by talking with

  customers.

• In software companies, infrequent builds: there is no

  substitute for doing a build of your entire software system on at least a

  weekly basis, with incremental builds every night. Ask around — if a

  system build takes a week or even longer, and making the system fully

  testable requires heroic efforts, you’re on the road to big problems.

  Invest in automated build infrastructure and establish real schedule

  expectations.

• In IT companies, can’t eat the dog food: sometimes, you’ll

  find that your internal operations people won’t use early releases of your

  software or hardware. This means they aren’t willing to bet their jobs on

  your quality, performance, or features. Using the product internally in

  Marketing and company operations should be a hard requirement. Fixing this

  means reforming both engineering quality and your internal operation’s

  practices.

• In high-tech products, user interface: whether it’s a GUI, an

  instruction manual, or a web site, user interface mistakes are like a bad

  haircut. You just can’t hide them. Nothing will make users angry more

  quickly or raise your product support costs more dramatically. Don’t

  economize on your product’s installation, upgrade, or “OOBE” — out of box

  experience — if you want it to be a hit. This can have the biggest payoff

  of any product investment you can make.

Contents copyright 2006 by DOTnet Consulting, Inc., all rights reserved.

From

target=”_blank” class=”offsite-link-inline”>The Taber Report.

bookQube offers all the resources you need to immerse yourself in the literary world. Based on the information you provide, bookQube will match you with books, users, and groups that cater to your interests. You can also search for titles to add to your virtual bookshelf and build your social network so you can share and discover great reads!

• Discover great reads in any genre, from the classics to contemporary works, and add your favorites to your bookshelf.
• Explore and contribute reviews and rants, ideas and opinions relating to your favorite books and authors.
• Engage in open discussions in book groups, private analysis in book clubs, and one-on-one dialogues with friends.

bookQube is the first social networking system built upon the new social media platform, oneQube.

To participate in the bookQube beta, go to:
http://www.bookqube.com, sign in with the username: staging and the password: st@g1ng

Once you’ve activated your account, be sure to fill out your profile and soon you’ll be on your way to making new friends, participating in groups and collecting ebooks!

(For any questions, bugs or inquiries, send email to errors@bookqube.com)

 
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The way the ‘always on’ generation stays informed. widgetQube is an interactive virtual desktop accessory that makes it easy to view news from favorite websites and blogs by leveraging rapidly growing widget  based standards and technologies. widgetQube makes it easy to see  what’s going on in the world, with up to the date news conveniently  delivered right to your desktop. No searching or surfing required!  widgetQube is a constant and ‘always on’ desktop companion. Its  persistence will insure that you stay informed and up to the minute  with news and information in our busy modern age. Best of all,  widgetQube is free.
 
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