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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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Since my last text, a lot of talk has gone into the blogs about the open social layer that Google is trying to implement.
As already pointed, this approach tries to rival with Facebook, by leveraging power and option for the developer, who has not to re-write its widget/app for each social network he intends to target.
But Google's proposal has drawbacks, too. I haven't seem any "license agreement" or something like that. To be truly open, the social layer has to allow social networks to join and feel safe about the environment they're joining. What if Google starts to charge then? What if Google starts to charge developers? Like Google's approach in many of their APIs and open initiatives, there's a lack of transparency that makes me feel a little "F. U. D." about sticking to them. Let's wait the official site on this.
Another thing to note is: everybody is taking this Google initiative as a reaction to Facebook "growth and profit", but it's real? I think Google is constantly and consistently advancing in this direction (open social layer and using social data beyond Orkut and other social web-sites/apps) since sometime now.
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I'm long wanting and talking about a social-powered internet, where your network (friends, co-workers, etc) matters. And where you can use they knowledge and data to make your life easier, to get your attention focused on what really matters. From anti-SPAM and anti-VIRUS systems to better search results/page rank, the use of social data can make our on-line life easier than never.
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Bob Sutton (writer of "The No Assrole Rule") talk about Mozilla Foundation and their commercial counterpart, Mozilla Corporation. It's a long but entertaining post about the numbers Mozilla has made. Worth the read but you have to know that actually, too many of this money comes from Google, who pays Mozilla for every search started through Firefox by Google's embedded search box.
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W3C finally has opened an office here in Brazil, aiming to help Brazilian's internet authorities to develop, promote and implement web standards. I sure hope this comes with some law enforcing the use of web-standards at least at government web-sites - or something like that for commercial web-sites.
As I love web opportunities and freedom, I'm also a web-developer since Netscape and iCQ days. The lack of standardization through user agents is a major drawback for the "web-everything" approach we all love so much.
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Finally, trying to find some answer to a strange bug in ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 - where cfdocument tag generates a PDF without justifying the text - I ran over a blog post by Andrew Powell complaining about the lack of standardization on CFML (the open-source language besides ColdFusion).
I'm with him: there's need to standardization through CFML implementations and that includes Adobe. People at Adobe has to know that we do not buy ColdFusion on the tags but on the surrounds, ie, the administrator interface, the possibility to extend CF power with other applications such as Flex, LifeCycle, Flash, etc.
The standardization do not need to go with ColdFusion being open source, Adobe can implement advanced functionality that will degrade gracefully in others implementations, at least until they can make something more likely what Adobe ColdFusion does.
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Talking about standardization, what is happening at Microsoft? SilverLight? (yeah, I know, old news). Come on! There's Flash out there for so many time, you really believe people will change? You're nuts. And you think we, web-developers, are learning machines of some kind and we do not need to sleep, eat, have sex, etc.
Go with what is already a standard - as everybody does with Windows - and stick with Adobe Flash.
Labels: adobe, cfml, choice, coldfusion, google, high-tech, internet business, microsoft, respect, simplicity
Leave a comment | Links to this text |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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