Alsop's Small Thoughts

Bad Wired!

Wired is worse than the rant below suggests. I just got a renewal notice and my subscription doesn't expire until July 2007! Not only did they reduce my subscription term by two months by shipping already printed magazines, but they are trying to renew me 22 months in advance! Did they think I wouldn't notice? I did. This magazine must have terrible circulation problems, to be scamming its customers like it is.

Not Hertz Again?!

This time Hertz sent me an email, so how can I resist? I guess they are thinking that this is a great example of advanced customer service. Yeah? The email is unformatted and told me to visit a web site to update my profile. It gave me the URL but they didn't turn it into clickable text, so I would have to copy and paste the URL into my browser. But the best part of this email was the note at the bottom which read:

"This e-mail was automatically generated from a non- response mailbox. To contact us regarding this message or regarding your Hertz #1 Club Gold membership, send an e-mail to gold_service@hertz.com."

Most emails like this say "Do not reply to this email as it was sent from an unattended mailbox." Hertz actually mangled that so bad that you have to think about what it means that an email is automatically generated from a non-response mailbox. It means that Hertz sent me an email without thinking about it and without making it useful or interactive! Very advanced....

CS Rant: Wired Ain't

In July, I bought an issue of Vanity Fair that I was really impressed with (I read Vanity Fair from time to time and like the fact that it covers the media the way it does; I've even subscribed to it in the past and let my subscription lapse when I decided I wasn't reading it enough to justify the cost). I decided to subscribe again. I went to the web site and ordered a subscription. It turned out that Wired is also published by the same company (Conde Nast), so on a whim I also subscribed to that magazine. (The whim was related to the fact that the last issue I bought, the July 2005 issue, had a very smart retrospective on the birth of the commercial internet).

Yesterday, I just returned from a week overseas and today, I got my first mail delivery. Guess what: two issues of Wired showed up on the same day, the July and August issues that I had already bought on the newsstand. Do you know what that is? A rip-off. One that's totally inconsistent with Wired's editorial approach and position. Since I spent 15+ years in the magazine business, I know exactly why it's a rip-off.

Let's see if I can explain: When I ordered a subscription, Wired sent me issues it had already published and then counted them as part of the subscription I had ordered for future issues. I subscribed in July 2005, after reading the July issue (which is actually published in June to allow time for printing the copies and distributing them through the postal system). When Wired received my subscription request from their Web site, they transmitted an order for the already-printed July and August issues to be sent to me. They recorded my subscription as renewing in July 2006, just 10 months later. But Wired sold me a 12-issue subscription. So they played a game with my subscription that meant they only had to service me with 10 new issues and 2 old ones. This is the most venal customer service you can imagine -- taking advantage of customers who aren't paying attention (or don't actually know how the magazine business works) in order to maximize profitability.

Next time I get a subscription renewal from Wired, I'm going to think a lot harder about whether the editorial content justifies such despicable business policies. And I hope that I don't get the July and August issues of Vanity Fair (which I have also already bought on the newsstand) in my mail tomorrow.

End of an Era (or Life As We Know It?)

Palm announced that it will begin building future Treos using Windows instead of the Palm OS, according to the New York Times. I know that the Palm guys will try as hard as they can to preserve the look and feel and usability of the Treo. I know that they are making this switch because they can't get what they need out of the Palm OS, since development of that OS has been mismanaged and misdirected over multiple generations.  But I also know that I won't get the same Treo I have now: The article says that GoodLink won't work at first. And every other Palm app is going to have to be rewritten. And Windows has a habit of making everything less useable. So I just don't think Treo will continue to be an option, at least for me. Maybe at long last, Steve Jobs and the Apple corps will develop a really useable PDA that works really well with the Macintosh? Hope and dream.

Darn. I'd only just managed to get free of the Blackberry and start using a Treo the way I always wanted to, even though Goodlink is so poorly integrated, I lost the ability to email photos, beam contacts, and do other basic Treo tasks.

La Plus Ca Change

The faster change changes the faster change changes: Since I was in Israel, I had to miss a talk by Ray Kurzweil in San Francisco Friday evening, sponsored by the LongNow Foundation. But Stewart Brand provided a summary of the talk that included the following:

"Kurzweil's Law of accelerating returns: 'technology and evolutionary processes progress in an exponential fashion.' Thus, since the rate of progress doubles every ten years or so, we will see changes in the next 90 years equivalent to the last 10,000 years, and in the next 100 years changes equivalent to the last 20,000 years.  It is always the later doublings where the ferocious action is.  The many skeptics about the Human Genome project being done in 15 years thought they were being proved right at year 10.  They were astounded when the project came in on schedule.  'People look at short sections of an exponential growth curve and imagine they are straight lines,' said Kurzweil."

Rocking in the Dead Sea

I'm sitting in a conference at Le Meridien Resort in the Dead Sea, Israel, listening to Li-El, a 16 year old singer.  Wow! And what a session I've been watching, particularly two one on one interviews with Haim Shaban and Arnon Milchel. These guys have just invested in Israeli media companies and are seeking approval of regulatory changes that will allow them to run the businesses more effectively. The conference, called TIME (for Telecom Internet Media Education), is sponsored by the Israeli Minister of Communication, a firecracker named Dalia Itzik. The fireworks were far beyond anything I've seen in an American or European conference and very entertaining, even though I had to listen through a simultaneous translation.  

Customer Service Through Bankruptcy

Isn't this great positioning? Can you imagine the marketing meeting where everybody sat around, thinking about how to position going bankrupt? "Hey, let's say we decided to go bankrupt to simplify the whole experience of being an airline customer!"
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Dear Mr. Alsop,

As you may know, Delta Air Lines filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. We have taken this action as part of our ongoing efforts to make Delta a simpler, more efficient and cost-effective airline. On behalf of the tens of thousands of Delta employees worldwide who look forward to welcoming you onboard every day, I want to assure you Delta is open for business as usual:
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The email goes on to explain how my miles are secure and the airplanes still work and everything. But I do feel re-assured, particularly since I'm getting on a Delta airplane on Sunday!

Blue Toothless

I've tried three different Bluetooth headsets for my Palm Treo 650 now. And I'm not happy with any of them. The latest is the one Palm sells as the anointed Bluetooth headset. At least this one doesn't lose its "pairing". (With Bluetooth, you have get the phone to recognize the headset so the link is secure.) But it does take sometimes 20-30 seconds for the headset to make the link. That creates situations like
      1) when I dial into voice mail, I miss the part that tells me how many new messages I have and
      2) when I answer a call, the other person isn't sure if the call went through since I'm answering on the headset that hasn't connected yet.

Then there's the Bluetooth scramble: I don't like to always wear the headset; I look like a geek and it wears on my ear. But if I don't have the headset on when the phone rings, it will sometimes take me too long to get it on my ear to be able to answer the phone before the call goes to voice mail (even though I've now set my phone to answer after six rings).

I'm just not sure this technology is read for prime time....

CS Rant: Web Banking

I recently paid off a lease at Chase. I also recently closed two accounts at Wells Fargo, which I had had for more than 15 years. In both cases, as soon as the accounts were closed, I no longer had access to my history at either firm. Disappeared! Somehow, this strikes me as really bad customer service: As much as the firms would be maintaining account history without any fees to cover that access, they have also ensured that I won't return to do business with either one of them if I can help it.