I completely understand that consumers should read their warranties and that businesses are not charities and that sometimes Wired magazine makes mistakes. And I have been involved with technology long enough to know that it’s all shiny and sparkly to distract us from the fact that it doesn’t work, often breaks, and to brainwash us into thinking that “I guess I have to reboot” is a functional method of operation.
So when my new Vista-esque Sony laptop with the fantastic screen and the DVD-only mode turned out to be a string of salesperson-uttered broken promises, deathly blue screens, and unexpected shut downs, I considered it to be a normal, operational computer. When the shift and control keys stopped working, I didn’t bat an eyelash and simply remapped them to function keys. So I had to train my fingers to move up rather than sideways for capital letters and copy and paste. This is the way of Windows. But when the k key and the 0 key and the l key randomly stopped working… well, that started to get in the way of my productivity. Then 10 minutes it took to get out of sleep mode didn’t help either. Nor did the USB ports that only worked when they decided the air was exactly the same temperature.
I broke down and called Sony. After the requisite half hour hold, I talked to someone who said they’d be happy to have me send the laptop back so they could check it out. And if they decided the problem was under warranty, they would fix it and send it back. How long would that take? About 14 days.
Let me interrupt my sad, sad story to revisit what I said before. I know this is how their warranty works and Sony is delivering exactly the service is promised. And it’s easy to say that consumers are dumb not to read these things and know what they are getting into. But I don’t know that consumers are stupid.
Instead, I think that consumers enter into a kind of contract with a company during a purchase. I pay money in exchange for a reasonable expectation that the thing I’m buying will actually work. We don’t put a great deal of emphasis on the “what if something goes wrong” part of the deal because if we expected the item not to work, we likely wouldn’t buy it in the first place.
But my laptop didn’t work and it’s my only working computer right now. How do you think I would do without a computer for 14 days? Right, I may as well go without coffee. Or the air.
I asked the nice Sony rep if any options were available that would enable me to exchange the non-functioning laptop for a functioning one. He said I could call customer care and they would help me with that. Great! I called the number. And listened to lots of ads for Sony products.
Tip #1 for phone support: don’t try to sell things to people who have problems with your product and are patiently waiting on hold for help. This happens to me all the time and I cannot imagine a scenario in which the person finally reaches a real person and says “well, I was originally calling because this thing you sold me doesn’t work, but forget all that. Now I’d like to buy more stuff from you!”
I finally got through to a person who said I had called the online sales number and she could only help me with purchases directly from them. Well, I bought the laptop at Fry’s. I had to return it to them, then. I had tried that and they said they had a 15 day return policy; after that, I had to call Sony. She helpfully gave me the first Sony number I had called. I explained that I had already talked to them, so perhaps there was another number I could call? Nope, that was the number.
Tip #2: Educate the employees who answer the phone. A customer with a problem isn’t likely to be made super happy by waiting on hold a half hour, only to be caught up in Dante’s seventh circle of phone scavenger hunt hell.
She eventually transferred me back to the original tech support line. I talked to an amazingly unhelpful person who explained about the warranty and how the whole send back for 14 days thing is in writing. I completely understand it’s in writing. I get that they are doing exactly as they promised. But they sold me a laptop that clearly doesn’t work and some amount of working with me might have caused me to write a blog post about how Sony confidently backs up its products and supports its customers and goes beyond what they have to in customer service rather than writing, well, this blog post and quoting forum posts like this one that I perhaps will link to with anchor text from the title of the thread: don’t buy a Sony Viao–
They will not even lend me a replacement because it did not fail within 2 weeks. 2 weeks? Is that all that they can comfortably commit too?
This has made me rethink my policy of buying Sony for its reliabilty and quality. I accept that things can go wrong but the first rule that I instill with my team is that the complaint must be dealt with promptly and resolved a quickly as possible.
Clearly Sony do not subscribe to this principle.
So what’s a girl to do. I sadly have two other laptops — one with a broken screen and one that randomly shuts off every few minutes. Apparently, I’m a poor steward of technology. I figured I’d better get yet another laptop, and I’d better do it fast. I could get a cheap PC, but those don’t seem to have a great track record with me and besides, I’ll send the Sony off for its 14 day tour and get it back fixed, so I don’t really need yet another Windows laptop.
I know. I can barely bring myself to type it. Me, the champion against all that is unholy and wrong about Apple holding the world prisoner with its shiny, shiny lure of nonfunctionality. That same me walked into an Apple store and exchanged large piles of money for a Macbook Pro.
In my defense: not only is the Macbook Pro very very pretty, but all I had to do was take it out of the box and turn it on and I was online in about 15 seconds, as I admitted recently when I was a guest on SEO Rockstars.
I’ve now had the Mac for a couple of weeks and while it’s not the perfect utopian paradise, with frolicking, scantily clad fairies, unlimited lattes, and showering gold that one is led to believe — it does occasionally freeze or not understand that a full signal wireless connection means I should be able to get on the internet — it’s BILLIONS of times better than my Sony laptop of doom. One forgets how much easier it is to get things done when one isn’t restarting from the blue screen of shattered dreams and unsaved documents every ten minutes.
The biggest drawback of the Mac is that I know absolutely nothing about it. Give me a PC and I’ll fine-tune your registry settings, reinstall your drivers, and work from the command line. Give me a Mac and I’ll… well, I’ve almost figured out how to launch applications. I’m going to use bootcamp to install XP on a partition (although someone on Twitter suggested vmware fusion or virtualbox instead), but I’m going to keep the Mac OS too and see if I can figure out how to do more than just gaze at it longingly.
Will I become one of those crazy, hippie Apple-loving fanatics who likes Apple just a little too much and who smugly tells everyone I “think different” with no ironic nod to that phrase’s grammatical incorrectness? Will I trade in my bursting-with-function Smartphone for the shiny iPhone of uselessless?
In the unlikely event of such distruption in the natural order of the universe, I give you all license to remind me of my English degree and smack me in the head with one of my many nonfunctioning iPods.
Earlier today, we reported that over 4 million Google AdSense ads were being indexed by Microsoft Live Search. Tonight, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center blog has posted that they’ve identified and fixed the issue and that search results should return to normal within the next few days.
What happened? Google AdWords URLs are blocked by Google’s robots.txt file with this command:
Disallow: /pagead/
Facebook is attempting to reduce the app invite clutter by consolidating all those zombie, vampire, and duck hunting requests into a single link. I never accept any app requests, mostly because I just haven’t had time yet to figure out how being a zombie really adds value to my life, so the requests have just been sitting there, mocking me and my inability to recognize the usefulness of having an entourage.
It’s nice of them to simplify things for me, but I found the request they decided to promote somewhat interesting.
Huh. Three “You’re Hot Requests”. Not three people saying I’m hot, or three people asking if they’re hot, but it seems like Facebook is asking me if I think I’m hot. Three times.
I can expand the requests and see what else I’m being asked to do. Here’s just a snippet:
I also have two “hotness” requests, which are apparently entirely different, as well as all kinds of requests that I have no idea what to do with. I’m totally doing that ink’d one though. We all could use more tattoos.
Vanessa Fox made her entrance into the search marketing industry as the “face” of Google’s Webmaster Central team a few years back. I remember it quite clearly, thinking “Wow! A woman engineer at Google! And she’ll talk to us!” Vanessa started popping onto everyone’s radar, it was amazing.
According to a new post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, the supplemental index is no longer, well, supplemental. Google has long had a two-tiered index and webmasters have generally feared the second, supplemental tier. A Forbes article earlier this year called it “Google Hell“, as historically, those pages weren’t crawled as often as those in the main index, weren’t returned in search results unless the main index didn’t contain enough matching pages, and were labeled “supplemental,” which implied they were inferior to the other results.
In July, Google removed the supplemental label, saying that they had overhauled the supplemental crawling and index system and therefore the label was no longer needed. Now, they say that the next set of improvements are complete and that they now search both the main and supplemental index for all queries, not just the long tail queries that the main index can’t satisfy.
A PEW/Internet Survey out this week found that 47% of internet users have done ego searches, up from 22% five years ago. That nearly half of internet users are searching for themselves seems excessive, but only 3% say they check regularly. Most (74% of those who have done such searches) have only checked once or twice. As our use of the internet decreases our privacy, the study also found that most internet users don’t find this to be a concern. 61% of adults don’t feel they need to limit the amount of information found out about them online. Only 38% have taken steps to do so.
It makes sense that most people don’t search for themselves regularly, as they probably don’t make internet news often enough for the results to change much. However, as more companies, landlords, and dates use search in addition to or in lieu of background checks, it may be smart for everyone to everyone to “google” themselves periodically to make sure those pictures of that one party never made it online. Reputation management companies have so far focused on businesses and people who are newsmakers, but maybe they should start offering regularly monitoring services up to everyone, like credit reporting services do: www.freereputationmonitoringreport.com.
Today, Google’s Webmaster Tools have been updated with new diagnostic features that alert site owners to problems Google may have extracting content from pages. In addition, they’ve added Video Sitemaps. They’ve also added Hungarian and Czech to the 20 languages already supported. Below more about these features and how best to use them.
Identifying Content Extraction Issues
A new section called Content Analysis lists issues that Google has had extracting content from the pages of the site, with links to the specific pages. In the help file, they say that the goal is to help identify ways to improve the site for visitors, but in many cases, these issues cause problems in the search result display as well. Fix these things, and your page might be a more compelling result for searchers to click on. The help stresses that pages that have these issues won’t experience ranking problems and that fixing them won’t improve ranking (although that’s not entirely true, as pages that Google can’t extract content from are unlikely to rank well).
Everyone’s been talking about how the social graph is the next evolution of search. Search 4.0. The next step forward after Search 3.0’s blended and personalized search. Today, Mahalo is taking that next step and adding a social layer to their search results. Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder, says that the problem of search will be solved by a combination of machines, human curation, and social interaction, and with today’s launch of Mahalo Social, Mahalo adds the beginning of that elusive social interaction. The new features include profiles and the ability to recommend links for search terms. Much like Digg or Delicious, users can add friends and see what those friends are recommending. Below, more information on how Mahalo plans to deal with spam, work with webmasters, and if this approach will scale.
Jason acknowledges that Mahalo is a content site rather than a search engine. 30% of the site is editorially generated by their staff, but it’s presented in a search context. Mahalo contains about 26,000 pages so far and Jason says they’ll never cover the long tail of search. But he does think they’ll catch up with the amount of content on Wikipedia, and within five years should be covering up to half of what people are searching for. (Don’t worry Jason, it’s mostly Britney Spears and sex. And I see you’ve got those two subjects covered.)
At Pubcon last week, Matt Cutts mentioned a change in the way Google handles subdomains. To better understand this change and what this means for search marketers, let’s revisit common site structure choices, how they’re handled by Google, and how that impacts SEO.
Although URLs may take many forms, the overall structure can be distilled into one of three basic types: within a single domain (pages from the root of the domain as well as within subfolders), subdomains, and separate domains.
First it was the Jeeves, the Ask Butler. He was all sweet and helpful with his pinstriping and his red tie, and yet ask.com encased him in carbonite and he was never heard from again.
And now the Ask-powered Bloglines plumber is MIA.
Sure, he always seemed confused and not quite sure what the tools in his hands were for, but he had that cute hat and you couldn’t help but like him even though you had no confidence he could do anything other than look under your sink and shake his head in sympathy and you would have to assure him that it was OK. You didn’t really need running water anyway, and would he like for you to bake him a cookie?
Now when you go to bloglines.com, you just see crazy bouncing colored balls that send mixed messages of “no feeds for you!” and “90s dance party for teens!”
Maybe the plumber has given up the pipe wrench and soldering gun and decided to try his hand at something more well-suited for him, like checkers. But someone might check the local carbonite supply shops and see if any largish orders have been placed lately…
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