So all weekend long I was having intermittent network problems with Comcast. Today I sat around waiting for the repair guy to show up - using dial up (argh) as backup.

He came, did some readings and found that the outlet needed to be replaced. We then moved the modem closer to the wall.

And bam!

This happened:

It was pretty fast before almost 6 megabit. But now it’s almost 10 megabit! Holy cow! All by just replacing some wires, and moving stuff around.

Talk about an awesome free upgrade!

I think it would be safe to say that people who know me would probably
describe me as being pretty easy going.
 
There’s only a few things that really get me going. Off the top of my head, the
top two would probably be:

1. Promises not kept, or under-delivered. (Which is what will happen to the
   person who buys
   
   this condo based on the headline!)
2. Not-my-job-itis.

This post is going to cover not-my-job-itis. You know what this is - when an
employee says "Not my job!". Not exactly a good thing to say to oh… someone
like a customer. Especially when you are in the hospitality industry.

That’s pretty much what happened multiple times at a dinner I went to at
Left Bank in
Santana Row in San Jose last night. I’ll let slide the fact that when the
entrees and desserts were brought, they inevitably went to the wrong person at
the table - mistakes happen. I’ll also let slide the fact that the entrees were
delivered in such a rush and hurry that my bread plate was literally shoved away
by the waitstaff  using my dinner as a shovel, or other dishes had the
sauces sloshed out because of the impact to the table - perhaps they were busy
(though not really at 10pm when our entrees were served.) And finally I’ll let
slide the fact that my entree was luke-warm - perhaps the heater lamps were
broken. After all, I realize that
I’mPer
Se - the price here is exactly an order of magnitude less. 

But that doesn’t mean that the service should be 2 orders of magnitude worse
- the service should be at least better than a
hole in the wall!!

1. When they began serving our entrees, one of the diners asked the
   employee about the appetizers which never arrived. What did the employee
   say? "Oh, I’m not your waiter." And that was that. Does that sound helpful
   to you?
2. When the waiter came by, and the diner asked about the appetizers again,
   he apologized explaining that he "forgot to hit send on the first screen."
   He then asked if we still wanted them (no) and then left. Was that really
   helpful?
3. My girlfriend’s entree didn’t come with a spoon. Perhaps it is cultural
   in that stews in French cuisine don’t come with spoons, but one was needed
   in this case. We looked around, and our waiter was never anywhere to be
   seen. I tried to wave down another waiter… and the hostess saw this but
   walked by. Hm, isn’t the hostess an employee? Strike 1.
4. Finally I caught the attention of another waiter - and this is the part
   that kills me: he turned to look both ways for our waiter before coming
   over. Not exactly "Not-my-job", but pretty darn close if you ask me. And
   finally we got a spoon - 5 minutes later. Strike 2. But this isn’t baseball,
   so 2 strikes and you’re out!

On the upside however, one thing that Left Bank did do well in this meal was
to not include 18% gratuity in the bill for parties over 8. I’m not sure
if this is policy, the doing of the waiter, or another mistake - but let’s just
say that 18% was definitely not deserved in this case.

It’s not like avoiding "not-my-job-itis" is even that hard. Not your job?
Offer to find the person whose it is! It’s that easy! Otherwise, if its not your
job, perhaps you shouldn’t have whatever job it is that you do have. Though thinking through this further, I suspect this is a problem at the management level - given how many times it happened. Respecting the customer is something is an attitude that has to start at the highest levels - so that it can diffuse to the front-line employees. It’s a culture that has to be reinforced. The
customer should always come first.

I saw this interesting post linked off of techmeme today:

Redeye VC: 53,651

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been on several phone pitches from west-coast companies that are looking to be the “flickr of XXXX” or “like del.icio.us but YYYY” or “the Digg killer”. It got me thinking – how many people outside of the valley have ever heard of these companies? I asked a bunch of local (Philly-area) acquaintances and the answer came back loud and clear: none – nada - zip. People here have barely heard of Myspace and Craigslist – let alone any of the “hot” Web 2.0 companies.

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

It’s an interesting observation - but I’m wondering if its more of a age segmentation than a geographic segmentation. Heck, my sister’s heard of myspace and she’s hardly tech saavy. In fact, it seems to me a lot of people outside of the Valley have heard of MySpace (not as much for flickr.)

In the end though, wasn’t Google just for geeks? Wasn’t the iPod just for geeks? Heck, it was only for Mac geeks at that since the first iPods were only Mac compatible for a while.

Besides time and a super compelling user experience, what else does it take to make a product successful in the mainstream?

I saw this on TechCrunch tonight:

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Wow that’s pretty remarkable! The list of support languages is pretty wild too!

1. Spanish
2. Mandarin
3. Russian
4. Vietnamese
5. Korean
6. Cantonese
7. Portuguese
8. Polish
9. French
10. Japanese
11. Arabic
12. Somali
13. Farsi
14. Haitian Creole
15. Italian
16. Hmong
17. German
18. Armenian
19. Tagalog
20. Hindi
21. Khmer
22. Bosnian
23. Punjabi
24. Bengali
25. Turkish
26. Amharic
27. Laotian
28. Albanian
29. Thai
30. Urdu

Whoa! They even have someone who speaks Hmong. There aren’t that many hmong speaking people.

Mark and his colleagues at Plaxo are having a Party 2.0…. uh… Party!

This after a successful and fun Lunch 2.0 that happened on Wednesday here at Microsoft.

(My apologies to SVC Reception 1 for having 20 people show up suddenly to register as visitors!)

Here’s an interesting quote from the recent issue of Time, where they preview the Nintendo Wii (aka Nintendo Revolution)

TIME.com: A Game For All Ages — May 15, 2006 — Page 4

But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal–they blog a lot–but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.”

Two things come to mind:
1. It’s amusing that the fact that Microsoft listens to its customers is cited as a fault - considering that for the longest time (and still?) there is a belief that Microsoft doesn’t care. (Fortunately we have Scoble working on that.)

2. Didn’t Steve Jobs say this once too? To ignore your customers?

Indeed this is a very tough problem to solve - how do you innovate and please your existing customers.

Companies that soar are ones that make new customers - not from their competitors, but the ones who aren’t consuming at all. Attracting people who are stuck with the status quo.

Take Southwest - you could say that they stole customers from the existing legacy airliners, but I think that they created new customers: people who never thought of flying because… well… they never thought they could afford it.

Making breakthroughs like this typically requires that you produce a product that is insanely easy to use, amazingly great, or ridiculously cheap - preferably all three of these. (Though as the iPod demonstrates - ridiculously cheap isn’t always necessary.)

Personally, I’ve only owned 2 video game console systems ever: a NES and a GameCube. And, truth be told, I only have 1 game on my GameCube: Mario Kart DoubleDash. I’m just not a FPS fan.

Will the Wii be able to win non-playing consumers over? I wish Nintendo the best of luck.

So recently I brought my car in for the 60k mile service.

Sure it set me back a bundle. Sure it discovered other problems that will set me back a bundle.

But the worst part was what had to be the least reassuring comment of the year: “You should expect to be stranded in the desert in the next 30k miles. You won’t know when it will happen. It will happen suddenly.”

Ok, so the fine folks at German Motor Specialists didn’t quite say that. But basically they told me that the coolant expansion tank in my car is known to crack after many thousands of miles, and that when it does it will be sudden, without warning. And then I’ll have to be towed.

I appreciate that they didn’t sell me on a new coolant expansion tank, and I appreciate their honesty, but this type of honesty sure doesn’t make you feel better. Guess I need to up my AAA membership level for safety.

In their display case of random parts, they actually had a coolant expansion tank, with the part that usually cracks highlighted in yellow:

I bet if these guys had a blog, their customer load would shoot up dramatically.

This is rather silly, but congrats to Great Neck South High for remaining in the Top 100 High Schools list:

The Complete List: 1,000 Top U.S. Schools - Newsweek America’s Best High Schools - MSNBC.com

31 Great Neck South Great Neck N.Y. 4.321 8.9 70.2