Jun
29
A chance encounter with a UPS service clerk yesterday, led me to an unbelievable and astounding discovery, but before I get ahead of myself let’s start at the beginning:
I received an XBOX 360 Elite from my daughter for Christmas last year (2007); the whole family loves it and we are all somewhat addicted to Rock Band. I had hoped that by opting for the “Elite” version of the XBOX that I would be getting a newer and better tested design, thus avoiding the “red-ring of death” problems that plagued so many people. After five months of light use (about once or twice a week) I noticed that the XBOX would sometimes freeze up, especially when starting up. When this happened the screen would freeze the picture and no fumbling with the controller would help. To unfreeze it, I would have to unplug the system from the power outlet, wait a few minutes, and then plug it back in. This would solve the problem and we would continue on with our game.
Over the course of the last 30 days this problem happened about seven times, and then suddenly last week it froze every time I started the system. The XBOX would randomly stop at some point in the boot sequence, and the screen would just freeze solid. After trying to restart the system about 15 times, I searched on the internet for “XBOX Screen Freezes” and found that Microsoft has a page dedicated to the issue.
I tried everything in the article to solve the issue, before determining that it wasn’t going to be fixed by me; I needed have my XBOX repaired. I called the XBOX support line, and was walked through a series of questions intended to diagnose whether or not I had a real problem. At the end of the process I was told that they would ship a box to me in order to package my XBOX and send back with a postage-paid shipping label.
I received the unmarked, white box within two days and dutifully packaged my system for shipping, including the prepaid UPS shipping label. While running some errands I stopped into the local UPS store to drop it off. As I walked into the store the woman behind the counter looked up and before I had a chance to utter a word she said “XBOX?”
I laughed and said “Yes, do you get a lot of these?”
Her reply astonished me: “We average about sixteen-a-day.”
I do not live in a dense urban area (there are only 45,000 households within 5-miles of this UPS according to 2000 census data) and there are at least 7 other UPS drop off locations within that radius as well. Some quick math: Total US Households = 105 Million and Total US XBOX 360 Sales = 10 Million. That means that about 1 in every 10 households have an XBOX, or in other words, there are about 4,500 XBOX’s within 5 miles of this UPS store.
Even though there are at least 7 other drop off locations near here, let’s assume that this store gets one-half of all the broken XBOX shipments in the area, because it is in a good location. That means that 32 of 4,500 XBOXs are failing and being shipped back daily. For the mathematically challenged, that would mean that about 70,000 XBOXs are failing EVERY DAY! At that rate, Microsoft would need to service every single XBOX over about a six month period.
Even if you assume that my numbers are an order of magnitude (10x) off of reality (due to some unique demographic in Mason, OH), that would still mean that they are servicing at least 25% of the installed base of systems every year, and that does not account for many, many systems that were purchased and used too infrequently to encounter an issue.
How can a blunder of this magnitude escape the eyes of the press and investment community? Why is no one reporting this? I can only surmise that the efficiency of Microsoft in dealing with the issue has mitigated any negatives with regard to the massive number of failures. What did Microsoft do right?
- Efficient, friendly and apologetic tech support.
- Postage paid shipping with packing materials (they even included the box tape).
- Fast repair and shipment back to the customer.
I can’t imagine that dealing with these issues in a fast and efficient manner has been cost effective for Microsoft, but the alternative would have been console suicide. The few people I have heard talk about this are praising them for doing the “right thing”, but I find it hard to give Microsoft points for doing what is necessary to save their business; I can’t imagine what they would have done with this problem if they had a monopoly in the console business as they do in operating systems.
What does all this mean? Did anyone lose their job over this? Do we think that Microsoft will learn from this and emerge a better hardware company at the end? Is this a harbinger of Microsoft’s death and does this mean that Dvorak was right? I would love to know what you think.
Jun
18
This evening, I watched the replay of Tim Russert’s memorial service on MSNBC. There were many laughs during the course of the service, and several times that I was brought to the point of tears. This surprised me because while I certainly was a fan of Russert, I did not know him personally and never even met the man. Never the less, the passion and love that the speakers felt for Russert came across in powerfully in their eloquent eulogies.
Pondering on the power of eloquent speech to invoke emotion made me immediately think about the charge that Hillary Clinton and John McCain have tried to create that Barack Obama is all speech and no substance. This naïve and simplistic characterization of Obama is a microcosm of the fundamental issue at stake in American public policy. The simple fact is that the American people have, over the course of the last four decades, surrendered the reins of our participatory democracy to multi-national corporations who fund propaganda campaigns that we call American politics.
At this turning point in history, we desperately need a visionary leader who can leverage the power of honesty, intelligence and eloquence to evoke the emotion necessary to get the American people out from behind their TVs and into the public square to discourse with each other on what type of role this country will have in shaping our own future and the future of the world.
It is important to remember that the world was at an equally precipitous point 68 years ago today; three days after Paris fell to the Germans, Winston Churchill grasped that moment in history to address the House of Commons, the English people and the world:
“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
Listen to an exerpt from Churchill’s “Finest Hour” Speech (1.4mb)
Churchill’s eloquence at this moment of crisis for the world, changed the course of human events. I hope that the American people rise above the base emotions of hate and fear to elect an equally eloquent leader that can ignite the fundamental fairness, spirit and energy of the American people in a way that would make Tim Russert proud.
Jun
18
Clicks to Cliques
Filed Under Social Media, Trends, Web | 1 Comment
It should be of no surprise that on twitter very close knit groups of people band together who have similar interests (e.g. friends, work colleagues, etc.), because twitter was designed to allow social groups to stay on top of what each other are doing. What intrigues me are the public cliques that form dynamically from people who have similar interests.
In my own effort to gain a twitter following, I have surfed twitter profiles by clicking on profiles of people I know and looking at who my friends are following on twitter. If those people look interesting (e.g. Interesting twitter posts or a good blog) I follow them and then click through to people that they follow and do the same thing. The act of doing this has led me to find several distinct groups of like-minded individuals who form what I call a twitter clique.
There are some obvious cliques like the Tech Podcasters (Laporte , Scoble, Veronica, et al), the Web 2.0 crowd (Rose, Calacanis, Arrington) and pro bloggers like Joy Wang, May Woo and Erica O’Grady. There are a lot of people who simply use Twitter for self promotion and there is a big clique of book authors who take every opportunity to pimp their next signing and tell us about how their current projects are going. However, the most interesting cliques are very unexpected like the 120+ people who follow the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (Roller Derby). I have found that Cliques can swarm around any subject and don’t seem to be limited to one social cast, for example I cannot image more diverse groups than work at home moms (Mommye), adult cam girls (Stacie Adams) and Obamamainians (Barack Obama).
It surprised me at first that most of the self organizing groups have formed around women or issues that are important to women, but then I realized that most men who are early adopters of technology are generally introverted geeks; therefore the early adopter women became the driving force behind clique swarms like raw food evangelists (emilyraw, 1rawgirl), Expat ESL teachers (Mleec), and wannabe actors who are always off on auditions. Eventually, I think that marketers will pay a lot of money to mine conversations of these cliques to better understand and market to specific demographics, but for right now I just am enjoying the conversation.
Your Turn
I am sure that the 500+ people that I am following just barely scratch the surface of the many cliques that intersect on twitter and other social media sites, what are some of the unique clique swarms that you have discovered?