This post from Randy Holloway describing his experience with Cingular tells an all to familiar story of crappy customer service and reps that appear to have no power to please people.

I wonder how this trend of providing lackluster customer service got started; and I wonder if it will ever reverse.

What do you say Robert? Email me at tkitta AT oakwoodsys DOT com if you want to hook up.

I've been following this story just like everyone else. The music execs have lost their mind (or have never found it). It's no fluke that iTunes was the first venue to offer legit music that people actually want to buy online. There is something to their model.

Jobs is no idiot, and based on the music industry's track record of being complete morons, I will not be surprised when they go through with their threats to abandon iTunes and fail miserably. My thought is that $0.99 is about the top end of what people are willing to pay for a song.

Lesson 1) you cannot and will not stop music piracy. Sorry won't happen. So you need to offer an incentive to go legit. Charging $2.00 for a Britney Spears song isn't the way to go.

Lesson 2) Micro-payments work. If you charged $0.50 or less per song, you'd have people going hog wild. Right now, I'm more of a fan of the subscription model (i.e. Yahoo!, Napster) because of the value I get for my dollar. However, in a perfect world I would like to own the music. If I could pay less than half of what iTunes charges and own my music I would probably go that route, even if I ended up spending more overall than Yahoo! (of which I am currently a member).

The moral of the story is that the music execs are being greedy when they go against Jobs' advice. And let me define greedy. I don't mean greedy in the sense that they want more money. DUH. That's what business is about: making more money. But greedy in the sense that they are willing to make stupid decisions in the pursuit of making more money. They will never get back to the days where people are paying close to $20 for a CD. Won't happen; live with it and move on.

What crack has TiVo been smoking lately? I have been happily using my current Series2 for 2 and a half years, but after this one needs upgrading, I can't see myself buying another one.

Question is, what else is out there at a reasonable price point ($1000+ for a Media Center PC is way too much) that is any better? The options are pretty weak.

You can read more about it in my introductory post, but essentially I wanted a place where I could focus the content on some technologies in which I am interested in a condensed fashion.

I hope you check it out.

Man!! This is annoying.

J. Edgar Hoover would be proud.

It seems as if there is a "white list" of technology blogs (there is also a politics vertical) which are tracked, and when a particular post starts being discussed it shows up on the main page. This makes for a very high desirable content to noise ratio. Overall, I'm very impressed and will continue to use the site.

Does anyone have pointers to how the site actually works? (i.e. how the white list works, if that is automated or not, etc.)

I agree with Dare here, even though I did not consider this fact until I read his post. I've done some playing with the Start.com gadget's and I think they are awesome. I see this kind of architecture really inspiring some creativity. I mean come on, plug-ins for a web page? That is a pretty huge paradigm shift, and a pretty big deal in my opinion.

I digress... By using the familiarity of RSS for the Start.com manifests, I believe the team made a good effort to not muddle up the schema world, but like Dare said it seems to be a hack and an abuse of an existing format.

I can't read Microsoft on this one. In my opinion, any exposure of .NET to developers is a good thing, even if it is on a Linux platform. Microsoft had the attention of several thousand presumably devoted devs last week, why not let them see what's out there related to the platform? I think rather than being scared of Mono, Microsoft should embrace it (or at least not try to hide it). Mono could not prosper without the success of .NET on Windows, so I don't think there's too much to be afraid of here. Am I wrong, could Mono be a threat? More here.

Wow, I sure have been writing a lot about Microsoft lately. At least I'm writing again. :) Let's see if I can keep it up.

I'd call it garbage more than interesting. What is that? Kinda strange that Scoble will be there. And Terry Semel?

Very weird. I haven't seen Robert even mention this, unless I completely missed it.

UPDATE: Robert had blogged about this (well, kinda) this morning.

And of course you have Mini-Microsoft, who makes all kinds of posts like this.

While Mini-Microsoft is anonymous, Rory, Dare, Scoble, and countless others, are not. These guys (and girls too I'm sure) have the balls (in the guys case) to openly criticize their employer to the rest of the world; and in Dare's case, openly admit that he does not plan to stay with the company for the long term. Talk about open.

I think Microsoft's policy on blogging will help them in the short- and long-term. It is helping the rest of the world to see the human side of the software giant. I have to wonder though, if many of the execs expected such candid views from their own employees. These types of conversations are generally held for internal discussion, if at all. Surely Ballmer can't be too happy about a lot of what is said in the public forum, but I also think a lot of these blogs, etc. will hold feet to fires and get things done. At least that is what common sense tells me.

From what I can tell on the outside, Microsoft is generally a good place to work, and despite what some people say, Microsoft is innovating and putting out great products. Microsoft has 60,000+ employees; the odds tell me that not everyone will be happy and that due to the sheer volume of employees there will be bureaucracy and politics.

However, this openness that we have been witnessing over the past couple years can do nothing but help in my opinion. What does anyone else think? I can also see how this kind of public laundry airing could be viewed as somewhat chaotic.

Personally, I think this is great. I certainly don't want to see this country decline in the quality of innovation and intellect that we have so much enjoyed over the past century. While this program obviously won't change the world, it's certainly a good step to doing so.

This is via Wired.

Check it out.

He details an encounter he had with "the head" of the Windows Forms team at the PDC. The claim from the Microsoft employee was that Windows Forms is not dead, or even dying, and that Microsoft will continue to invest huge amounts of money in to R&D. This even with the advent of Avalon and Vista.

I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will be putting huge amounts of anything in to Windows Forms in another year or two. Why would they? Windows Forms will not be the go-forward solution for Smart Client development on any platform; that's what WPF/e is for.

With that said, I'm sure Windows Forms will be around for years to come; even in new development. Avalon will not catch on overnight. I just can't see any major advancements in that area after Vista comes out unless there is a major paradigm shift.