Biz
-
Sony VAIO customer service – an exploration
Jane Galt vents most eloquent on her frustration with the Sony Corporation, specifically Sony Vaio tech support. Short version; it’s lame.
In the post she states
So instead, I’ll try to change the cost-benefit analysis. With your help, I’d like to make this little incident as expensive for Sony as possible.
Let’s remind Sony that sometimes, the dumb bitches have blogs. And friends with blogs.
So if you’re reading this, and you have a blog, if you wouldn’t mind linking to this post, preferably with the words “Sony VAIO customer service” in the link, I’d appreciate it awfully.
Sure, it’s revenge. But revenge has positive social uses. If it gets expensive enough to screw over their customers, they’ll stop doing it. To all of us.
We’ll see what happens. It creates an interesting exercise in feedback, i.e. an advancement in the first of of the OODA loop.
That would be a good company to start – a service that monitors the blogosphere for mentions of a product and somehow differentiates the positive and negative threads so one could track the source and find hidden problems with the business process.
-
Yet another FireFox tip
Type about:config in the address bar, filter by cache, and change the value of browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true. It speeds up the browing experience by quite a bit on ssl sites, particularly if they use Ajax.
-
An interview with Charles Koch
A blogger was kind enough to post his transcription of this interview with Charles Koch of Koch Industries (the biggest company you’ve never heard of). Of particular liking to me
Studying business in school is way overrated. There seems to be absolutely no evidence suggesting that people with a business degree excel more than those without one. As you go to college, you don’t want specifics on how to run a business; you will learn this as you go along in real life. You need to have fundamental tools, such as reading, writing, doing math and science, understanding reality, and having good values that enable you to work with people and create real value.
That has always been my gripe with the MBA’s I’ve met. They’re certainly more confident (which is important) but of the three main tasks of a business (moving it, making it, and selling it) they’re not any more capable than they they would be without the MBA.
Much thanks to C.S. Hayden for posting the interview.
-
Stigmergy and signalling
Stigmergy is defined as a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. My Digital Tool Factory project has been evolving in that direction lately and it occurred to me that the internet is evolving that way too.
In the political blogsphere one can draw conclusions about an author from the use of the phrases “The fall of the Soviet Union” vs. “The fall of Communism”. In the corporate realm the use of feathered graphics is a good indicator of the age of the designer and the focus of the company.
Food for thought.
-
Affirmation
Yesterday I went to the lovely and prestigious offices of Green Media Works and got a lovely jolt of purpose and enthusiasm.
Working at home there’s no good way to tell if you’re a heroic entrepreneur writing your name upon history or some loser typing frantically in a messy office. To go out and mingle like minded people in a tremendous psychic push for the former.
-
Application wanted
Some time ago I read that Bill Clinton (starting in his younger days) would try to meet as many people as possible in a day, and then at night write down the particulars of everyone he met. It would be nice to have some sort of visual web app to do that. It would allow the user to note all of the relevant details about a person, and also visually show his connections to existing contacts, companies and concepts/entities. It can be done manually in Visio, but that’s hardly a workable solution. Does anyone know of any products that do this?
If not, then it goes on the list of stuff to build.
-
Thursday link roundup
- Hitchens has a sharp pen – Jimmy Carter is his particular target today.
- The economics of The Wire – I suppose I need to write one about the economics of the Shield to fully flesh out the crime show econ world.
- Top 100 website run by one guy – hopefully someone will be writing that about me.
- How to photography silhouettes
-
A needed innovation
Last night I spent about seven hours trying to get a particular Microsoft web product to work, only to discover at the end of a long search that you simply couldn’t make it work that way. I was trying to update the error message dynamically and have it appear in the VCE
It would be quite handy to have a list of things that a product CAN’T do, it would save so much time trying to prove negatives. Perhaps that should be a new site idea.
-
Local cooling
I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it’s 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.
I wonder if there’s a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project…
-
Monday link roundup
- It’s Wiretap the Internet Day – what have we come to in this country. Sigh.
- Entrepreneurial Adages – All quite true. in particular
Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible — small budgets give big focus
- Battlefield spy-bot – really cool
- Tribal Minds
- The indispensable Col. Patrick Lang has an outline of what a diplomatic solution to Iraq might look like. I would read all of it. Webbed version of the outline is here.