The days of physical media are almost over. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Blue Ray disks bite the dust in a few years and I’m not the only one, but that’s another topic. The future is online and the only thing really holding back online adoption by the masses is clumsy DRM punishment for customers who buy music and movies online. Most people don’t even know what DRM is, but they do know what it means when they find out they can’t copy a song from their favourite device to their new computer (I’m looking at you Apple). This is severely annoying and the industry still doesn’t get it. We have been able to rip, share, and use our CDs and DVDs on any device we saw fit, but unfortunately this is not the case with our downloaded purchases. The industry needs to stop locking down things we paid for! Stop treating your paying customers like criminals, the people pirating this stuff will continue to do so and you only hurt legitimate users.
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Lets face it, most of us hate change, even if it is for the better or in the form of progress. You hear it all the time with technology, “Oh who really needs that”, or “The Internet is a fad”. Sometimes it’s something smaller like oh… I don’t know… “I hate the new Facebook design!“.
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We all know that spam is just bad and wrong and plagues us daily with useless garbage. Why don’t we feel the same about telemarketing?
I recently got a new cell phone and was going to transfer my regular phone number to the new cell, but then thought about how many telemarketing calls I get a week. On weekends sometimes I get 2 or 3 on Saturdays alone. There is constantly messages left on my machine too. These are not places I do business with either. It’s always a survey, or I have been selected for a really great interest rate, or if I could just give a few moments of my time. No I can’t give any of my time. My time is important to me, especially on the weekend. No you can not have one moment of my time, if you are my client and you want to pay me for my time then fine, I’ll hear you out, otherwise buzz off and stop calling me. I am always as polite as I can be, but I do interrupt them as soon as I realize it’s a sales pitch. I usually cut in and say I’m very sorry I’m not interested and could you please take me off your call list. I do not allow the conversation to go beyond this point, but usually as I’m putting the receiver down I can still here the sales person on the other end pleading for one more moment of my time just before the click of the receiver.
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The blog sphere has really beat up the Canadian cell carriers over the past few months and rightly so, but I and many others still gave in and bought into pricey long term iPhone plans with loads of hidden charges. At the end of the day it just seems like the Canadian carriers only goal is to confuse their customers into spending more money than they actually want too and further destroy their brand. One can only hope that the new national carrier Globalive will make a difference. Right now they run yakMobile which seems to have honest pricing. By honest pricing I don’t mean cheap (although they do have cheap pricing), I mean I want to pay what they say I will pay on the plan I have chosen. Why can’t all these useless fees just be part of the total fee, because that’s what they are. They aren’t special fees to the government or taxes, they are just carrier fees that are part of your plan but are not listed in the total price of your plan so it looks more attractive than it is. It’s dishonest advertising.
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What is it with companies and their hard sell tactics? I wrote about this already in Extended Warranties and the hard sell and less then two months later I have experienced similar tactics with Bell support.
I recently bought an iPhone which was also my first cell. It’s rather pricey and I don’t really have a need for two phone bills so I called up Bell to cancel my home line. I will still continue to use their Internet service, so I have not completely left them. I fully expected the customer retention spiel and even put up with it for the first five minutes of the conversation.
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The makers of the incredibly popular Scrabulous application for Facebook were told to remove the application or face legal action by Hasbro, the makers of the original dusty Scrabble board. Hasbro lacking any vision of their own waited until they had their own Scrabble application. Reports are saying that this application is not near as polished as Scrabulous was.
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We have all see it, spam messages in your email, spam on your phone, spam in your blog, forum, social media portal and chat windows. A quick search will show that unsolicited email accounts for 80-90% of the email we receive. This seems high, but a quick glace at my Gmail inbox currently shows a spam box with 3438 emails and Gmail deletes spam that is older than 30 days. By the way, Gmail has an incredible spam filter.
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Browser specific websites used to be the norm in the early days of the web. Back in the days when a site would tell you what resolution you should be using and what browser works best. This should be a thing of the past, but every now and then I still see “This site best viewed in such and such a resolution” and sometimes a splash saying “This site is only supported in Internet Explorer”.
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Okay, I seriously don’t understand what people have against the browser back button; especially large corporate sites, what did the back button ever do to you? Today I was looking at wireless plans. There was a huge list of plans so I started clicking on them to find out more, I click back, see the page for a split second only to be forwarded back to the page I have already finished reading. I look around the page and oh, there’s the tiny button that will take me back to the list of plans. Why would you invent new functionality that already exists and is very familiar to the user? Okay, maybe it’s for users who don’t know what the big backwards facing arrow at the top of their browser is for, but the vast majority of us do know how to use the back button and it is much faster than looking for a web graphic back button which could be anywhere on your page.
This is an extremely basic good usability practice. The best part about this one is you don’t even have to do anything to have this functionality. In fact you actually have to go out of your way to annoy your users. There are some instances where a form may need to break back functionality, but I see it in places where it isn’t necessary at all.
So maybe all the protesting over at Ruined iPhone and other places on the web have paid off. The whole iPhone outrage even hit mainstream news media. Basically Rogers and Fido (which are the same company) will allow you to take a phone plan and add a $30 6 GB plan to it. This is a temporary “deal” you can buy into with a 3 year contract before Aug 31st. It is a much better deal, but a lot of people are asking why it’s only temporary?
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