Well Duuuhhhhh

This is news? Not hardly. Anybody who has dealt with a customer service organization any time during the last two decades, maybe more, already understand the message via personal experience.

Boycotting works but usually it has to be well organized. I haven't purchased any music or listened to music radio in over two decades. I don't download music either. The personal benefit here is twofold: 1.) I don't line the pockets of music industry personnel, and 2.) I keep the money....for some other "toy".

I have personal experience with three "industries" where customer service has always been outstanding: motorcycles, the shooting sports, and ham radio.

I'm sure there are others.

So many more...

How about the 3" floppy as beloved by Sir Alan in the PCW?

The VESA high speed video bus that ran side by side with PCI when it first came out (in the pre-AGP era).

Best we don't mention the fun we still have with different voltage uses on the PCI bus! That still gives me headaches with obscure bits of hardware.

Oh well, at least I can still take a hacksaw to the end of a PCI Express X4 slot, and put an X16 card into it, then sit in wonder as it actually works (all be it slowly). Now that's cool.

still

Let's not forget hd-dvd also brought a better compression algorithm (1080p but into the lesser hd-dvd) even if it's now six feet under. I hope other will benefit from this and use so it ain't totally wasted.

Customer SErvice / Duplication / Choise

I could always read The Register instead.

The Reason For Existing

Unless and until a person finally realises, and not merely believing or disbelieving [i.e personal commentry], what he is born for, he’ll only act to satisfy his or others’ [or a bit of both] desires, not what he needs to to – what he is born for. His real duty. Unless and until a person knows him self, he won’t have an idea about others [other than mere “commentry”]. To realise one’s limits open the doors to the unlimited be that knowledge/truth or power – infinity, which brings us to the simpler side of things, like relationships, be that commerce, society, politics, ad infintum. All roads lead to Rome, as they say, and vice-versa.

Focussing on one part of the overall picture will not help for you have to get to the “root-of-the-matter” first and thereafter, other aspects will fall into place. A tree without good roots will either fall or won’t grow properly.

When we do not realise [for mere mental knowledge is insufficient] that all vital autonomic functions within our body are beyond our control, we then seek to achieve and achivements are about polarities – to gain power at the behest of truth or vice-versa [and as we all know too well, indivualised/relative “truths” has no relevency regardless of how deeply we believed in our own cause]. Balance or throughput, or “Tao” as Lao-Tze calls it [and logic is called the “principle of Tao” in the Chinese], is about non-polarities. Imbalances, or accumulations, means division and in the case of commerce, it is about greed [which comes attached with its alter-ego, fear, for polarities within humans, without exception, are always double-edged swords]. As the saying goes, accumulate manure in one pile and it stinks like hell but spread it around and it does good. Accumulation is the cause of ALL the problems we see ever since the human gained “independence” through raising his head from whence he was an animal.

The cervical plexus, at the neck-shoulder juncture, represents our anger-guilt, the source of our inability to witness – our ability to react from mental activities. Those within Nature that do not think but are merely instinctual, including vegetation and animals, do not have guilt nor anger – unless they are near to humans like “pets” or caged wildlife. One reason why there are no cures but merely addictions to pills, butchery and immortality bankers through the “gene” hard-sell .… which beings us to commerce. When balance is the guide, commerce means to offer service in exchange for, hopefully, a comforting income. Once that rule is transgressed, because greed-fear has no limits other than each other, the sky is the limit. There is no love/satisfaction within the mental realms other than justifications. Greed, for example, has no understanding of ANYTHING else other than what-it-stands-for/its-principle. Because a humanised entity, be that a convoluted structure called “customer services” or Joe Bloggs on his own, has many facets that stemmed from his evolutionary past [for almost all humans are actually partial humans], you can expect anything to happen and anything will happen. In that instance, what you see is what you’ll get and trust is merely relinquishing control. In the humanised relative realms, faith is blind whereas in reality, faith is infinite and has never changed since The Big Bang.

Love/satisfaction has no polarities/attachments and that can only happen when you are satisfied – regardless of how and what the other partial animal/human did to you. To arrive at the juncture where we can perform our true duty, much like a dog, say, whose evolutionary duty is to showcase loyalty and little else, we need to introspect and be less critical of anything other than the true status of our self. This does not mean letting “crooks run wild” – it merely means you then realised who the crook is – your minds of polarities. This is not about mind control, religion, science and other mental realms. This is about the miracle that Nature alludes to every second that we exist – our body and how we transgress against it every living moment – to the point of being able to see negativity in others ONLY. Hands up, the idiot-cum-lunatic who thinks that Nature is just some tree-stump waiting to-be-exploited/for-his-achievement. That’s the one who is popping the pills, waiting for his next butchery session and having his ears glued for the next episode of, “Your Saviour”, by the immortality bankers. The know-it-all democrat-cum-commie blankness.

Damn Dude!!

RE: The Reason For Existing

I want some of what you been smoking. No frelling idea what you were trying to say but I loved reading it..

What

Sounds like your common weed he's smoking there doug, nothing special.

ZZZZZ. What!?

Err, hello and wake up. The “consumer” never matters; they are assets to realise by companies. To pretend they are anything else is rubbish; a company will only issue a statement that they “care” for consumers as either:

A. A publicity stunt.
B. They have been “caught out” in some kind of way.
C. They want you to buy the crud they are peddling.

The winner is normally the one that creates the most spin that convinces the mindless hordes, and pays off the most “reviewers”.

Current crap seems to be about HDTV. Ohh, OK, if I pay for an expensive LCD TV HD TV, everything will be great, I’ll be ready for digital TV. No, with an analogue TV and a digital receiver, you will still be able to watch TV.

HD channels currently available don’t even transmit HD all the time because there is not enough HD content available. That episode of Dr. Who won’t look any better because they never filmed it in HD in the first place. In fact, your more likely to notice how crap the quality is than you would with an analogue CRT.

Do you really expect rivals to agree? HD-DVD Vs Blu-Ray is a prime example. The better format is not guaranteed to win as it depends on hype, and figures that are almost made up. EG Blu-ray is outselling HD-DVD because 30% more Blu-Ray disks were sold between date X and Y. All that’s really saying is that Blu-Ray owners are buying 30% more disks than HD-DVD owners. It does not say what the proportion of HD-DVD owners are to Blu-Ray ones. There could be twice as many HD-DVD owners as Blu-Ray owners, yet they are buying less. It’s a simple distortion of facts. Yet it’s very easy to start to buy into little things like that. And the masses will, because they are being told by mindless drones employed by stores that see a profit for one system or an other. If the likes of WallMart/Dixons/PC World get more profit from one format or the other, they are going to tell their drones to sell it to the public because it has more profit.

The end result is that the consumer is led into a technology that is not necessarily the best, just the most profitable to the stores.

There is nothing new here, and it will continue to happen again and a gain. The fight is not for the better product, but for the better profit.

Mindless

Good poins and I agree.

The vast majority of people have no idea about eh underlying techoloy they use from day to day, They only see the real life results, And this is shown to us by endless graphs and summerised statistacs, Or by people in shos saying one is better then the other.

The masses dont decde what they want, they are told what they want, its just which ever comapny shouts loudst, And in the tech industry its the ost evident as its the area people know the least about.

Digital cameras for example. There was or possibly still is a boom in these things where they are sold purely on how many Pixels the sensor has, However what people fail to know is that the sise of the sensor is a massive factor in image quality, more so then the number of pixels it has...im sure you guys can name countless more exampels, where an acctually good product is outsold by a worse item cause the worse item was focused on 1 or two key statists that people understand more.

When you get shafted, just shop elsewhere, find an alernative.

When companies mess you about respond by looking for an alternative.

When buying Vista Business I expected an email client capable of IMAP, and I did expect that Outlook would come on Vista Business. Neither of these are true. Just like the joke that is Vista Backup, the email client is piss poor too. So I googled and found something shiny called Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is an email and news reader, unlike Outlook it's free. At 6MB it's a relavtively tiny download and uses little resources on your pc.

A friend with a small business needed an IMAP email client and wanted a free alternative to Outlook. Vista Email and Outlook Express won't do IMAP email, so we tried Thunderbird and it works fine.

There is no calendar and it's not as feature rich as Outlook, but it's a small program, it's fast to use, and it does email in IMAP.

Why are MS not providing an email client that supports IMAP in Vista? Who knows, it's a silly mistake, it's driving customers away from their products and off to try free alternatives. Once customers get into the habit of getting software for free, can you imagine them paying for it?

And if part of my job is to make it cheaper for my customers to get their jobs done, then why would I promote costly and under-developed MS products when a free alternative can do everything they need?

Internet Explorer is ok, but it's not really wow. So I'd heard that Opera was going to be on some of the new wow mobile phones so I thought I would try the PC version of Opera. It's gold.

Opera web browser is free and your home page is actually called Speed Dial. This is where you can have 9 postcards of your favourite websites, just click on the postcard and that website opens. It's like Favorites, but more intuitive.

Opera is only 12MB download, and it's free. It looks pretty too. It's worth a try. Google opera web browser.

www.openoffice.org - Office, but free. 130MB approx. If you haven't tried it, then please do. It's easy to use because it looks just like the office tools you're used to. Seriously, once you try it you're unlikely to buy the other one.

Can you guys list some commonly used programs and some good free alternatives? I need one for MS Small Business Server, which I think is a great product, but it's cost puts off some small businesses, so I need a cheaper alternative. :-)

One correction

I think that it is important to clarify the title to bring in closer into alignment with reality: the only way customers do not matter is if they think they don't matter. Every time you buy music, buy a Microsoft product, buy oil, you are indicating that the way music, Microsoft, and oil companies treat consumers is acceptable.

Is there a way around this besides a general recommendation to *boycott* stuff? Sure:

1) Do not buy music or media, except from DRM-free stores that recognize your right to do what you want with the media (this leaves out Blu-Ray integrated DRM-disks).

2) Encourage media artists to adopt other modes of direct distribution (particularly if such methods involve donations to charity organizations).

3) Do not buy ANY Microsoft products. Use open source alternatives that recognize your rights as humans to do what you want, and not to be controlled and treated like a criminal. Apple products are similarly guilty (and DRM-infected)...if Jobs can get over his control-freak stage, maybe this could improve things.

4) Buy an electric car, and tell the oil industry to leave their $140/barrel oil in the ground where it belongs. For an example, have a look at ProjectBetterPlace(.org).

People do matter, as long as they are not brain washed into thinking that they do not.

bzzzztttt. wrong.

Theres a damn lot of hd-dvd bitterness left over here. Don't you freaks ever give up? I've been enjoying HD video for awhile now. Too bad you're so bitter, or you would be too.

way to solve enviromental problems

How many of you buy a BETA tape, millions, and then to garbage.

You name it development.. NOOO... it's Pollution.

If a company waste billions the customers pay for that.

The rule is to avoid these companies that usually waste money in crazy projects...like VAPORWARE or VANISHWARE.

About corporate antics

(1) OOXML in Office 2007 is NOT the same as the one being hammered by ISO. In fact, the 6,000+ pages has grown to approx 7,000+. (That's rivaling an encyclopedia in hard copy).

MS won't implement the ISO version of OOXML until the next version of Office. (at the very least)...So essentially, the Office 2007 version of OOXML is just as good as their old binary formats, as no one will adopt that version.

At the moment, OOXML (ISO version) is actually up in limbo. Its not officially a standard yet, due to 4 countries objecting the fast track.

If you were a developer, ask yourself this: Does Microsoft expect us to spend all that time reading this spec and fully implement it?

Let's face facts, OOXML is nothing but a mechanism used to protect one of Microsoft's key money makers: MS Office. That's the reason for its existence.

Its nothing to do with humanity as a whole and unifying an electronic document standard. Its about money...Protecting streams of it.

(2) Microsoft STILL has not learned from Vista.

They're treating the "Vista problem" as a PR one. Its an engineering problem. Period. You spend money fixing Vista instead of BS'ing people in a pathetic attempt to ram this shiny bit of turd down people's throats. The more you force it, the more we'll reject it.

From a consumer's perspective, there's no real value (despite the Marketing) in investing Vista. This is made more so by the fact of information about Windows 7 appearing on the web. (Why the heck do you want to invest in Vista if you know Windows 7 is on the way?).

Considering most people only use their PCs to surf the web, check email, type up a document, view Youtube, go on social networking sites, etc...Why do we need Windows? Other solutions can do the same job...Even at $0!

(3) The "interoperability" campaign is nothing but a farce of marketing.

Typically, when you think of interoperability, you'd assume everyone agrees on a universal standard without any hidden catches.

But no, MS's version of interoperability is really INTRAoperability. Meaning that they'll only play nice if you follow THEIR rules, protocols and specs. The key point here is that: They remain at fundamental control and they dictate the conditions. And if you want to allow commercialization of your implementation (based on their protocols), you have to pay for a license!

This is why you will see very few open source developers go near Microsoft. MS's CEO, Steve Ballmer, has made it clear that he wants open source people to develop on Windows. (What do you think we are, idiots? This will hurt Linux, BSD, etc.)

Companies like Microsoft are running on obsolete business models. Sure, they have accumulated all this wealth and resources, but its not infinite, and they will have to answer to their shareholders as the situation deteriorates.

What am I talking about?

The 21st century offers a new challenge to the business world. The fundamental paradigm is of challenge vs response. If they keep applying the old responses of past challenges into the present, they will keep failing. This is why businesses find it very hard to compete on a global market level.

Examples?

* RIAA and MPAA have let technology slip by.

Their complete incompetence and ignorance of technology is costing them dearly.

Now they scramble with draconian measures in order to try to stem the tide of P2P. (ie: DRM media, getting third-parties to hunt down P2P folks, legal action, endless supply of propaganda announcements, etc).

Seriously, multiple implementations of DRM? WTF?

* Microsoft and the Internet.

Had they taken advantage of this technology during its infancy, they would've taken the Internet as well! Now their Live Search has pretty much failed, and they're so desperate to acquire Yahoo.

* Microsoft and the EU.

Despite the large fine, nothing has really changed. All they've done is paid lip service to the EU and the public.

They are STILL using the same paradigm of the past. (The tactics may have changed, but the whole thing unravels as time goes by...Microsoft hasn't changed at a fundamental level).

Its obvious that the EU judge can see it. (Too bad most people don't).

* Sony and Microsoft: Console War.

Because of the marketing of these two companies, the world's forums, article/video feedback, etc are filled with idiotic fanboys from both sides.

Seriously folks, when you want to play something of interest, more often than not, you'll have to invest in both consoles. ie: PS3 for MGS4, Gran Turismo, Xbox360 for Halo3, Gears of War, etc.

I'm sorry, but this situation is unacceptable. I am so sick of this BS that I am NOT going to invest in ANY console. In fact, I've given up on gaming altogether.

No matter how hard businesses try, they still have yet to understand its their paradigm as being the problem. The old paradigm is one of control.

The 21st century isn't about control. Its about collaboration and relationships...The Internet is clear representation of that. Its about treating customers as people. (not sources of income).

Its about making good relationships with your customers, supplies, business clients, etc. Its about listening to people's concerns. This is how you get true loyalty. (So they'll stick with you if you occasionally stuff up).

But at the moment, its not like that. Dominant companies are trying to push things down people's throats. They're spending lots of money on bagging their competitors out and on BS marketing. They're outsourcing and the result is a serious drop in quality of goods and services. They're resorting to "controlling measures" like DRM.

ie: HDTV => I don't care!
Vista => No thanks! XP and Linux is fine.
Blu-ray => So?
PS3/Xbox360 => Whoopee do!
Tech support from India? => WTF?
DRM => I've stop watching movies, listening to music, and playing games. You don't control how I want to do things when I legitimately paid for them.

And you know what's really funny about all this?

When it comes down to the crunch, these multi-billion dollar industries are really nothing if we ignore them! Many people aren't aware of this, but they need us more than we need them!

Think about it. Look at the reasons they come up to get people to buy things. What if we brush them aside and ignore them? Their empires will fall.

We have the power, and the more people realise this, the more companies should fear us. But our responsibility as the consumer is that we cannot continue accepting any BS.

@shadders

Oh yes...Digital broadcasts on LCD tvs...the biggest step backwards in technology history.

Wish I still had my CRT telly, I couldnt believe how bad Freeview looked on a LCD. Its a shocking disgrace and a classic example of the tech folks not loking at the tech that was blatantly coming round the corner.

Wow, lots of anger here....

HD DVD has dried up in Midwest America, pretty much every other place on this side of the pond too. Its sad that the fight wasn't even a Beta/VHS issue, it was more like a VHS/VHS issue, just one was named different. In the grand scheme of things they were exactly alike, just slightly different internals. W/todays tech, they behaved no different, no advantage of one over the other. Blue Ray won as it was in the PS3 and had a better name. Period.

Even more sad is that while some of us realize the truth in this article, most of us will not take the time or effort to tell the many others about it so they can act on that which the few know to be the right thing to do.
And that will help none of us at all.

,ValentineS