You all should know by now that yesterday was Festivus. One of my favorite festivus traditions is the “airing of grievances”. In that spirit I present this post. I’ve got a lot of problems with you people…
MSFT – I have a few beefs with you, but the biggest is probably the stock price. From 36 to 19 over the last year. Really? Hire Jerry to compete with the Apple messages and then drop something that had good potential. Really?! Vista! Really? And our own Ledgard Live search cashback FAIL after waiting 4 weeks to hear back from support? Really?!? Letting us hire away some of your best people over the last year and watching other talented LV 64+ folks leave in disgust… wait, I kind of benefit from that one. 🙂 I’m hoping for Windows 7 to help turn this ship around. Really… I am.
Safeway.com – I kept hoping you’d invest in the online shopping experience… which has slowly deteriorated to the point where it is, again, faster to drive to one of your stores and shop. You had so much potential if you just borrowed some simple concepts from other online retailers like favorite lists, meal combos to order everything at once, recommendations, product ratings, etc. Instead you just let the site rust and suffer severe performance and search failures. Amazon Fresh FTW with delivery windows down to an hour (not 4 hour windows with late drivers as seen on safeway.com) and a store that leans on Amazons premiere online shopping experience.
Online Project Management Tools – You are all on notice. Someone is going to come into this space and eat your lunch in the next year as companies continue to look for online tools to streamline workflows and reduce costs. If you are going to charge upwards of $10 per seat for this stuff I shouldn’t be teaching everyone on my team to middle click your links during triage sessions because opening items takes forever. You need to let people remove the fields, reports, and parts of your applications that are not needed. SCRUM should be simple. There’s a set of stories & associated tasks & bugs… it shouldn’t be this hard.
Twitter – Between the outages and the lack of forward progress on the platform & features you made my grievances list. Conversation tracking anyone? How about grouping users? It’s one thing to say it’s a platform and let all the Air developers hack away, but it’s another to outright ignore the needs of your users by not providing useful features… that maybe people would pay for and give you some revenue. Make the ultimate client in 2009 and charge for it for starters.
Facebook – Is it my fault that I’ve used your service to connect with over 100 people? Now my news feed is useless and I expect you to help me do something about it. Why do I have to “install” an application (and give them access to my PII) to see a Christmas card? Didn’t we figure out E-cards via e-mail 10 years ago? There are multiple steps backward here for the social networking step forward. It reminds me when I saw an IPTV demo once and they said “Look, you can change channels in less than a second!” Great, you haven’t caught up with TV from the 50’s yet!
Ebay – I’m not sure what happened to you. Your service ushered in the democratization of online commerce. It used to look like this. Step 1: Find junk. Step 2: Take picture, enter title, description, & price. Step three 3: Profit. Have any of your employees actually tried to sell something recently? It’s like an 8 page form that doesn’t remember any of your settings. Here is a free idea… Make your iPhone app a 1 step listing tool. I take a picture of something, you use a service like Amazon has to recognize items for categorization. I give you a price, title, and description… matched up with the data you bring back on the item and similar items… and my item is for sale. I’ll volunteer to pay an express listing fee. Start saving me time again and not costing it with your crazy listing process.
Online Television – I’m hoping that you’ll figure out a model soon. Remember that we got DVRs to skip commercials. Now the industry thinks they can backdoor commercials into our lives by injecting them over and into online shows. I won’t stop using Hulu (yet), but you are coming close to crossing a line with me and the ad space. May I suggest a radical new model to throw cable companies for a loop… I can watch as much free
TV as I want online with the ads injected… hell, put more in, but once I decide to subscribe to a show take the ads out for me. TV ala-cart with a sampling model. Then, for the shows I’m subscribed to let me play them on my devices.
Honorable mentions:
Comcast – You charge me too much for all this stuff I don’t use and your traditional support/servicing model sucks. Please put @comcastcares in charge with a big promotion in 2009… those guys made my Holiday Cheers list coming soon.
Local Telcos like Verizon – You also charge too much for too little and tried to scare me when I canceled my service to go cell/skype only. “You know that if there is an emergency in your house your family could be in danger because the authorities won’t have your exact address…” how much for this piece of mind… $16 a month… no thanks.
The Yankees – CC, Burnet, AND Mark Teixeira? You would have made the main list if it wasn’t so much fun to hate you as a Red Sox fan and you didn’t gladly pay your luxury tax to the other teams.
Merry Christmas & later peeps!