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There are a lot of blogs and traditional media news reporting the delay on the Zune's valentines special edition delivery. But the major blog/media coverage was about the answer MS gave to its buyers: "We are sorry for the delay. We'll refund you. AND you'll get your Zune for free."
That's it. They can't make what they promised, they will give your money back and then give you the product they promised. I'll not talk cheap here about doing this kind of thing - obviously, MS do that to attract media coverage and to potentially get a differential from Apple, who's best known to launch better products over newest products and made all their customers unhappy. Some people are ironically saying that's because they didn't sell so it's not really a backlash for MS to give it away...
But a lot of companies - and here I'm talking specially of Brazilian ones - should learn from that example. Although there's a "customer code" law ("código do consumidor", in Portuguese) there are a lot of service providers who don't get even closer to really help their customer.
Refund or "get it for free" is a great way to show compromise and ethics in business. One thing that always made me proud about my ex-company (GrupoW) was that. No matter the financial backlash, we never let any client alone. We stick with the projects till their end, renegotiate, found ways to get it done. Still now that I'm out of the partnership, we are offering clients some options and I'm helping their employees with some older softwares I made to not let clients with errors or incomplete systems. I'm not saying we - or me - where perfect, but we're trying to build on confidence, respect and professionalism. Sometimes we failed, assumed and somehow corrected it and then moved on.
That's what I call ethic, respect and doing your job. MS is learning that - or at last is opening a great precedent and starting a discussion about it. I only hope this expands more and more into the services area, where things are never really clear, specially on-line.
Note: get this news firstly from an ironic post - in Portuguese - by Carlos Cardoso at MeioBit web-site, linked right bellow this post title. Only to show an example of the article, here goes a lousy translation of the title: "One more dirty MS way to get more consumers: respect".
Labels: brasil, internet business, microsoft, respect
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The numbers are huge:
- 660% growth in number of cities with broadband internet access in the last 3 years
- 20% growth in the last year
- Computer (PC) market 46% growth last year
- Positivo is the market leader, with 835.000 computers sold in 2006
This was made possible by a happy combination of many factors, like reduced taxes, increasing obligation of computer knowledge to apply for jobs, entertainment possibilities, etc. The bottom line is: more people here has internet access and computers. And that's fantastic for the Brazilian technology market.
Looking 10 years back, when I started, things were so different... I felt like I was begging for something or, better saying, felt like I was stealing something from them. "Internet is just fashion", "It'll pass by", "Wait, this amount of money for just a web-site?"... I heard a lot of that back in that days.
Now it's not SO different, but people look for the internet (and web, specially) and recognizes its importance, its influence over the crowds. And it reflects back to the computer and internet access market, and then back to companies like GrupoW, thanks god!
Being respected for what you do and getting some money for that is not a crime, is what every worker should have. And I'm glad we (internet builders, webdevelopers, designers, entrepreneurs and all people that work with internet related business) are finally starting to get it.
Labels: brasil, computer market, entrepeneur, internet business, respect, work
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Charles Pilger (linked above) writes a great piece against the hope of some members of the (Brazilian?) Linux community that new MS Windows Vista will bring more users to Linux due to lack of hardware to run the hungry Operating System that Microsoft started shipping this days.
It's good to see a defendant of the open source community speaking clearly and focused about the challenges OS (specially Linux) community faces to win the "war" over Windows on desktops. He concludes the article saying something like "get games, get users". I somewhat agree with him.
He says that home users don't like to switch systems, to learn everything again and specially they don't like to lose all their apps they're used to. It's really an entry barrier for Linux to the desktops and one reason of the high levels of piracy in Brazilian "PC Para Todos" ("computers for everyone", in a lousy translation).
In order to get people moving to Linux, the OS community around them will have to guarantee users the same (or almost) of what they get in their Windows. And let not talk about the "my work computer" vs. "my home computer"... or why piracy at home is somehow tolerated while enterprise piracy is highly combated.
Labels: brasil, linux, opensource, pc para todos, piracy, windows
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