Wednesday, October 9, 2002

The Wrong Truck Driving a small white delivery truck suddenly became a tense way to make a living yesterday. The delivery guys -- they are almost always guys -- set out early to beat the traffic, as always. They were hauling computers and futons and stained glass and PVC piping and everything else without which the Washington area would cease to function. Gradually they realized they were candidates for Public Enemy No. 1...more [Washington Post] Frightened people will do strange things. Fear is the reason Ashcroft and company have been able to trample our Civil Rights. This case is frightening, and the lengths we will go to solve it expose one of our deep dirty secrets -- we will give up freedom for safety, and those in power know it...mj 1:10:20 PM

Tuning Out the Customer With their defensive posture on digital piracy, media companies are damaging their long-term interests. Something has gone terribly wrong in the relationship between media companies and their customers... ...Says Jerry Michalski, long one of the smartest analysts of the digital age and now a consultant on customer relationships: "Because media companies see intellectual property as their only asset, they're willing to risk totally alienating their entire customer base in order to protect that asset." He says that instead the companies should learn to view their the customers themselves as the asset and figure out ways to partner with them, or treat them as what he calls "co-participants, rather than an inert audience that merely consumes media"...more [Fortune.com] This is an excellent article that I found thanks to Doc. THis is a strange war in which an industry has declared against it's own customers. The Big Media has been clueless to date, and has chosen to have a one direction conversation with their customers that says "we do not trust you, we only want to use you." THey better wake up soon, or they will join the buggy whip makers...mj 12:54:55 PM

Ballmer defends Microsoft license plan Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday defended the software maker's controversial licensing plans and its ever-changing consumer strategy. Ballmer, speaking here at a conference sponsored by market researcher Gartner, acknowledged that Microsoft's recent decision to implement a new software licensing plan has angered some customers. "Sometimes when you clean things up and simplify things, you wind up costing some customers more, and that's problematic," he said...more [CNet News] It's more than just problamatic, it's irritating as hell. Microsoft changed it's plans to line its own pockets, not help simplify things for customers. The only people who benefited by this were companies who previously bought every update that came out -- most companies don't do that. This reluctance to purchase every bloated/useless upgrade was 'hurting' Micro$ofts bottom-line (if you can call anything hurting a company with 30+ billion dollars in reserves). Meanwhile we wait to see what the outcome of the antitrust case will be -- Microsoft just continues to rape the computer buying public...mj 12:35:36 PM

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