19. The Consortium (7.4 points). Do you remember 1968? [( blogdex : recent )]

» Dear god you elected this guy president?

Well actually, no, you probably didn't.  But enough of you did that he slimed his way in anyhow.

Is this national news in the US?  Or even page 4?  I'd really like to know...

 

Got a referrer from Organica which is a crawler looking around for popular things BlogDex style.  It's certainly faster than BlogDex and it will be interesting to see whether it develops it's own identity and set of services.

 

Great day today.  After talking with Jake on another 5:15 AM call this morning about the next release of Frontier/Manila, I got so jazzed up that I went for a (muuuch needed -- perhaps its Dave's influence) walk in the arboretum next to my home.  An 1:40 minutes later, I returned totally energized (given that the weather in NE today is humidity free and 72 degrees -- it was a divine pleasure).  This next release of Frontier is going to be huuuge and provide us with a framework that will let us go the distance with our customers.

Speaking about customers:  thank you very much for all the business you have provided us during this gloomy summer.  Despite the depressed outlook you continue to buy our products at a solid pace.  BTW: our client list over the last month has included an extremely high percentage of the biggest names in industry, academia, and media.  Thank you!

This proves two points:

1) The demand for low cost, user-driven, content management is growing quickly.  98% of sites on the Internet (and organizational Intranets) are static flat files that need to move to an end-user driven content management framework.  This will help them shave costs,  improve flexibility, and keep end-users happy.

2) Companies and Universities are starting to deploy K-Logs networks.  Ground up knowledge sharing via K-Logs is turning into an increasingly powerful counter-weight to big vendor top-down integrated portals.  Why?  K-Logs provide a low cost of entry, organic growth, higher rates of participation, and observable results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» Excellent news.

 

6. "Bush's Shame" (8.3 points). new york times ... big bunch of phonies [( blogdex : recent )]

» Excellent piece, worth going through the free NYT sign-up to read.

"This ties in with a larger concern that human rights activists share toward America today --- a concern that post-9/11 America is not interested anymore in law and order, just order, and it's not interested in peace and quiet, but just quiet."

This sounds right on the money, and yet I wonder what proportion of American's care about the shifting views of non-Americans towards their country.

My hopes aren't high.

 

[Editors note: I have now edited this post for language and content]

I think this is my first blogrant but I am disgusted by Symantec's idea of customer service.

Like so many companies these days they hide any mention of a telephone number on their website.  I have one of their products though so I can find the customer service number in the manual.  I don't want customer service, I want pre-sales, but that's the only number available.  Why don't I use their web forms?  I need to wrap this up today.

So I call the number and then hold, and hold, and hold for 27 minutes until I can't listen to the message telling me about how great their web site is.  I was going to hold on just so I could vent the considerable bile I had accumulated at a human being, however in a lucid moment I realised that wasn't going to give me satisfaction.  They don't pay these people enough to care.

And that's just it, I guess what Symantec are saying is "We have a shiny but useless web self service system like every other anonymous corporation.  If that's not good enough then you can go screw yourself!"

My last company was in the CRM market.   Unless their selling a Mercedes or 30" Sony WEGA the only message you hear from customers now is "do it cheaper, screw the customer."  I guess that's why my company was failling, we were trying to improve live interaction.  It's not a space that vendors care about.

I hate this new world of anonymous companies.  The web site should be their, it should be informative.  But if all you can offer me is another empty self service channel I shall take my business to a smaller vendor, that still cares about it's customers and whether they are happy.