Seems like the Launch Party is returning. More modest perhaps.
Reminds me of the bad old days.
AOL: Doing Sumpthin Right?
AOL is having a pretty bad run over the past month or so.
First there was the uproar created when Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his account. This was followed up with stories of folks having trouble canceling the accounts of deceased relatives.
This was followed by a leak to the WSJ about moving to a free service
In what would mark a dramatic shift in strategy, Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit is considering offering its entire menu of services, including email, free of charge to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, people familiar with the matter said.
Which seems like a pretty darn good idea to me given the rate at which they are losing paying access customers. Of course they have to execute.
Which might be a bit of a problem. Giving stuff away seems to have its own set of challenges. Again, according to the WSJ:
As many of the Time Warner Inc. unit’s 17.7 million subscribers in the U.S. have started logging on to explore the company’s offer, they have run into a logistical tangle that has left them scratching their heads over how and when to switch to free service — and vexed to find out they are being asked to do it by phone.
They then made the mistake of releasing the Web search data of about 650,000 users.
But buried in one of the WSJ articles was this statement:
A package for $25.90 a month … includes additional security features and 50 GB of backup storage.
This is via Xdrive. That is a lot of storage. At $.50/GB per month. And they are giving away 5GB for free. Perhaps this is just what the crowed online storage market needs to take off. And I am not alone in thinking it is gonna take off.
Then again, try finding the offer on the Xdrive site.
Here is some help.
If they can clean up the Xdrive Web site, client software, and Web app they are heading in the right direction. If they can then layer more file type specific applications on top of the storage, AOL has the right concept here. If…
Tumi or Not Tumi
Got a little spam yesterday.
From Tumi. Tumi is a brand I love. I have no less then seven pieces of theirs. Have been using it since my days in NYC back in ’92. It is the bag and wallet I carry every day.
The email was for Reactive Wear.
Tumi is a great brand. This is a bad brand extension.
The brand name adds no value to a clothing line, and is ill fitting (pun intended). This extension dilutes the Tumi brand.
Extending from luggage and briefcases to wallets I get. Tumi is assocated with great products to carry stuff around in. They should stay in that realm.
I do not think you will see Hartmann following this move.
A Little Scare
It started last Thursday.
A general tightening in my chest. Something that I assumed to be stress. Though given my current workload why I would be any more stressed than a sloth is hard to comprehend.
By Saturday I feel a little worse. Started doing some upper body work to relieve the tension. Skip yoga on Sunday.
Monday morning I go for a little two mile walk/run. Still recovering from knee surgery last fall, so 26 minutes with an 11 minutes back end mile was not bad for me. It feels good.
Leave the house to go to a client. Chest pain so bad I pulled off the road. Call the Kokomo Kid who is on the way back from Indiana with the kids. Head to the ER. Piedmont Hospital despite their current dispute with Blue Cross.
Walk in. Admitted rather quickly and taken to a room. Vital signs are good. Heart rate of 60 and BP around 125/75. Does not change much during periods of pain. Do the blood work (God, I hate needles). Give me an IV just in case.
Five hours later the blood series is complete. It looks good too. Pass the time watching Ted Talks. They release me.
I go back to my client. In a meeting. Call from the Kid.
Lance: Don’t call the insurance company just yet.
Kid: Piedmont called, they said you need to get back there as soon as possible and will be spending the night.
Lance: What?
Kid: You need to go back to the hospital now!
Lance: Stop joking me.
Kid: It’s not a joke, you need to go now, do you want me to come drive you?
Lance: No
I figure I can still drive though my pulse is most likely in the 130 range at the moment and I was feeling pretty weak.
Get to the hospital. Readmitted. Not quite so quick this time. Pulse is 143/89. Go to a case doctor that is looking at an EKG that screams LEFT VENTRICULAR BLOCKAGE in the upper left corner. Pulse hits 150
Take me in, wire me up again. Take blood sample. Give me oxygen.
Lance: Why are you giving me oxygen this time?
Nurse: It is required of all our potential heart attack patients. {Pulse hits 160.} Do you need anything else?
Lance: A glass of wine.
The Kid shows up with the kids. I get a little teary. They look scared.
The attending physican, Susan Kinsella comes in. Nice woman.
Tells me I am here because someone saw something on the EKG from the morning session that they did not like. Asks the routine heart attack, excuse me, infarction, questions that I have memorized at this point.
Dr. K: We need to do a stress test to make sure it is not heart related and we can’t do one until tomorrow morning. If you want to you can stay here, where it is loud, you have an uncomfortable bed, and people will be bothering you all night. Or you can go home, spend some time with your family, and get a good night’s sleep.
Lance: What if the big bad one happens.
Dr. K: The big bad one is not going to happen, and if it does 10 minutes is not going to make a difference.
Lance: What would you do?
Dr. K: Go home
After two margaritas at Uncle Julio’s Casa Grande pulse returns to normal.
Took the stress test on Tuesday. Passed with flying colors.
My chest still hurts, but the ticker is good.
UPDATE: I was diagnosed with Costochondritis I was prescribed a steroid to speed the healing. Victor Conte did not provide them to me.
Density Matters
Nice story posted by Seth that properly executed marketing can make a difference. Excerpt:
Most marketing problems aren’t intractable. They are solved with persistence, consistency and attention to detail. When marketing doesn’t work, it’s usually because the product is lousy. But the second reason is that the organization picks too big a marketplace in comparison to the resources they have available.
If your marketing program hat has any citizen, viral or WOM component, and in this day and age it must, the size of the market that you proactively address is key. Why? Your target needs to be dense enough so that when you start drop in a little marketing uranium you create critical mass in the marketplace and get the chain reaction needed for an effective marketing program.
In Seth’s example he is talking about a relatively low budgeted effort. The concept does extend to much larger budgets. There was a time when I was spending a $90 million marketing budget. While the company has a national footprint, the money was being directed to less then 20 cities.
Why? Because it worked.
Density, not size, matters more in marketing.
About to Quit Quicken
Be forewarned, this is a rant.
Like Ed Sim over at BeyondVC, I really do not care for bad software.
I have been using Quicken since 1993. That’s thirteen years. And with thirteen years of financial data, Quiken could be the most deeply valuable piece of software on my machine. I know that the file that contains my financial data is the most important.
Possible exception is that picture I took of Kate when she was two.
For some reason that escapes me at the moment Intuit semi-forced me into upgrading my software program to 2005 awhile back. I did not care for the program too much from the start. They made it much more difficult to enter info in investment accounts by removing the ability to do so via a register. It literally made the interface not usable for that purpose. So I switched to downloading all the transactions from my brokerage accounts. Something that is not an easy process, but further ensnares me in the software. I am sure some 0_o product manager over at Intuit has ensnaring users as a metric.
On top of this the net worth tracking module in the main view of Quicken 2005 is a mess. For some reason, it does match up with the acutal numbers in the financial overview. This has been going on for me for some time. And with the Kokomo Kid on her summer tour, I decided now is the time to fix the problem.
And over the past two days, or more correctly nights, I have spent at least 12 hours trying to get this fixed.
Quicken’s online support forums offered no help. None. So I took it upon myself to call customer support. Three things stand out from that experience. One is that the first thing they tell you is that it is going to cost $25 to talk with someone. Two is that no one named Kate or Jack is going to answer the phone. Three is that the people that have been hired in GMT +5.5 do not use the software or have any clue on how to help people.
The first woman that I talked to was more interested in getting my credit card number than solving the problem. She ran me through an export/import process that left my checking account wiht about $350k more than it has. She insisted she had fixed the problem and that if a gave another rep my charge number (a telling sign about the internal thought process), that they would fix my problem if she had not.
After spending a few hours trying to bring the accounts up to date I noticed that the same problem had appeared.
I called again. Dude’s English was so bad I just hung up.
Called again. Nice person. Could not solve the problem. Escalated me to an “Investment Specialist”. That’s progress.
The Specialist spends 10 minutes reversing the charge on my card. Walks me through a rather convuluted process to get the figures to match. Seems to be a known bug. There is no published solution. Makes very certain I give him high marks in the survey to follow. Now I can’t replicate the process.
Lots of people in the tech world today seem to think that customer service does not matter. It does. Right behind a good product. Somebody at Intuit needs to go buy the MacBook Pro that I want, fling it against the wall, or something slightly less destructive, and experience Apple’s support. Good, no not good, a great experience every time.
I am not alone in my feelings on the direction of Intuit.
It will be interesting to see if Intuit has some clue, is monitoring the blogosphere, and sends in the Cavalry.
I bet not. I hope that I am wrong.
Einsteins – Maybe, Maybe Not
Ever since Royal Bagel went out of business the only real option to get bagels in Atlanta is Einstein Bros. Nothing against those guys but it is just not the same.
There was a group of traditional Jewish folks that used to while away their Sunday mornings with a bottle of Scotch outside the Royal Bagel.
When I was in NYC I became quite fond of a particular type of bagel sandwich. The Kokomo Kid refers to it as a Lance Weatherby special.
I went to Einstein’s recently to get a special. It did not quite play out that way as the following email that I sent via www.einsteinbros.com describes.
This morning I went to my local Ansley Mall Einstein’s and ordered
something that I had been buying for years. A plain bagel with lettuce,
tomato, and onion.The counter clerk informed me that this was a Veg Out and would cost
$5.49. I pointed out to him that according to the sign in the store a
Veg Out was feta pine nut spread, a garden veggie shear, veggies, and
included a choice of fruit or potato salad and a pickle and all a wanted
was the above mentioned bagel which included no side, no pickle, and no
feta pine nut spread. I was told that it was corporate direction that
my order be charged at $5.49. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese for
$1.99.I mentioned this to the store executive manager. He also told me it was
corporate policy and there nothing he could do. That is why I am
writing you and would like this note to be forwarded to whomever was
responsible for setting this product/pricing policy.I have been ordering plain bagel with lettuce, tomato, and onion from
your store for years. It cost me a bit less then $3. Your new pricing
policy is absurd. I would like to understand the rationale for this
move.What I really want is to be able to order a bagel with cream cheese and
add on three veggies. I crave them.
I did not mention in my note that they threw the special away because I would not pay for it.
I few days later a received this reply:
The correct way to price a bagel with a spread, plus 3 veggies would be
as follows:Bagel and CC
First veggie is free when you have a spread on a bagels
Second veggie is $.50
Third veggie is $.50When there is anything more than that, it goes to the price of a vegout.
I will pass along your comments to the store management team and make
sure we are being consistant.I am sorry for any confusion, and would like to send you a couple of
free lunch coupons, could you email me anaddress where I can send them
to?
Fair enough. This was from Joe, the District Manager. I declined the free coupons.
Recently I got the craving again. Went into Einsteins with some trepidation (exactly how I want my customers to feel when doing business with me). Ordered it up. They priced it out just like Joe said. He had followed up with staff training.
Good man.
Now if they would just empower their employees to make rational decisions when dealing with customers.
They experienced some bad WOM on this one.
My Yahoo is Broken
Is yours?
http://my.yahoo.com/ is been giving me a blank since yesterday afternoon.
Update: Now it is fixed.
Reviewing “Citizen Marketers”
I have been reviewing "Citizens Marketers" the new book by Ben and Jackie over at Church of the Customer.
It is hard to fathom someone five years ago making a post on the Internet for a bunch of unkown and non book industry people to review a draft of a book.
Jackie only asked for two things. Honest feedback and not to distribute the contents of the book. I can tell you they are getting great feedback.
They are also responding to it like you would expect. With a healthy respect for those that are representing the viewpoint of their potential customers.
I can also tell you that based on what I have seen so far, the final product is going to be an interesting read.
We live in great times.
Improved Yahoo Finance Message Boards?
Yahoo Finance recently made some changes to its message boards. Seems to me they made the navigation much more difficult in order to increase page views.
Ho John Lee’s post is a nice summary of what is going on.
And like him, I am hearing that people are fleeing Yahoo’s message boards in droves.