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This Thursday, August 13 from 10pm Tony Delroy and I will have a look at whats on offer for computer buyers.

We’ll be looking at the best deals, whether it’s worth waiting for Windows 7, the pros and cons of netbooks and how to get the most from cashback schemes.

If you’d like to listen, tune in your local ABC station or listen online at the Nightlife website.

We love listeners comments, questions and opinions so call in on 1300 800 222 and have your say.

You know you’re addicted to the Internet when you’re having a root canal drilled and you think “I wish I could use my iPhone”.

I’m not sure what I’d have Twittered about while under anasthetic, but I know it would have been interesting.

Image courtesy of Carolyn Schweitzer

Time Magazine looks at the end of the era of excess and asks “is it good for America”

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1887728-1,00.html

One of the telling quotes in the article is the line “This is the end of the world as we’ve known it. But it isn’t the end of the world.”

Indeed it is; the era of cheap credit is over. The way we do business, the way we run our private lives and the how we finance that way of life is going to change.

That doesn’t mean the world is ending and the sky is falling, but it does mean its time for fresh ideas.

Hat tip to Fred Wilson for the article

Keeping your customers waiting for you to do your job is bad business. With mobile communications there’s no reason for not keeping your customers in the loop.

They say it never rains, but it pours – and it never comes down heavier then when your clothes dryer breaks down.
 Ours broke down during a recent wet spell and a frantic call to the whitegoods repair centre resulted in an appointment time “between seven am and midday”.

Having run a service business for over a decade, I know scheduling field technicians is a challenge. No matter how good your telephone staff are, it’s impossible to estimate how long a tech is actually going to be on site.<

Most big companies overcome this with “appointment windows” where they give you a rough time frame of when to expect the service person to show up. You’re expected to hang around and wait for them to arrive.

Should slight inconveniences happen such as work, dropping kids off at school or even just not hearing the doorbell ring then tough luck, the tech drives off to the next job.

The bigger the company is, the worse this gets, there are legions of Pay TV and cable Internet customers who’ve wasted days waiting for technicians not to show up while post and courier contractors are possibly the worst for skipping past deliveries that have a hint of difficulty.

So I resigned myself to a morning of pottering around the house and the possibility of an irritated call at ten minutes past twelve to find out where the mechanic is.

As it turned out, I was the first call for the day. A polite, friendly and efficient service man arrived at the doorstep at exactly 7am. We now have a dryer working perfectly in time for a fortnight of sunny weather.

The mechanic was an excellent advertisement for the company and that’s why we use them.

But those well trained, courteous staff are let down by the company’s communications. A simple text or phone message could have kept me, head office and the field agent working together. Everyone would have been happier, the system more efficient and the business more profitable.

In this age of mobile communications there’s no real reason for the “service window” at all. It’s simply a symptom of businesses not prepared to use their tools to do a better job.

The business who are prepared to use these tools are the ones who will survive and prosper after this downturn passes. While the ones who expect their customers to sacrifice a day so they can show up at their convenience are as doomed as hairy mammoths once were.

There was anther pleasant surprise as the serviceman left a voucher for $100 off a new machine. Given dryers and washing machines are classic “deferrable purchases” as we discussed in an earlier column, this is a great way of getting customers to buy.

So it seems the marketing department is on the ball. Perhaps there is an argument for marketing people to run service teams.

 Thank You

These are two of the most powerful words in the English language.

A simple “thank you” or “thanks” can go a long way.

If someone’s done something good for you, take a minute to say thanks. They’ll appreciate it.

I’m currently at the National Speakers Association of Australia‘s annual conference and one thing that’s struck me is the almost total absence of Powerpoint.

With the exception of Glenn Capelli‘s wonderful presentation that bought together teaching, his childhood, presentation techniques, his grandmother, mentor and the Sputnick satellite there wasn’t one Powerpoint.

Glenn’s powerpoint certainly wasn’t the heading, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, corporate logo, next slide presentation we’ve become tired and jaded with.

Are we seeing the end of bullet point driven presentations?

Tonight I did my ABC Radio Nightlife spot on Twitter with Mark Pesce.

The callers were an interesting bunch and they showed the diversity of users – older people, Christian and cat lovers to name a few.

It just goes to show how dangerous it is to make assumptions about who uses technology.

Research In Motion’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie claims buggy software is the new reality.

It’s not. Rushing an incomplete or defective product to market simply meet some artificial management or stockmarket imposed deadline is the old thinking.

The IT industry got away with this while the market was immature and the credit boom meant embarrassing mistakes could be hidden under the rising tide.

In mobile phones the market is far too competitive. The poorly executed Storm sold 500,000 units is because Blackberry was using the better Verizon network rather than the patchy AT&T service the iPhone is tied to.

In Australia, the Storm sells at a substantial discount to the Bold or iPhone on the same networks simply because the market knows the Storm a substandard product.

This “nearly good enough” thinking from the tech sector is one of the reasons the world economy is in trouble now. It is really just contempt for the customer that has been common across many industries where fat, ever growning margins were assumed to go on forever.

If anything positive comes out of the Global Financial Crisis it will be the culture of mediocrity dies as big business becomes subject to the same pressures the rest of the economy has always lived with.

For the rest of us our products have to be 100%. We cannot afford to do anything less than delight our customers.

In a competitive market, if you are disappointing your customers with substandard products then your business won’t survive.

As usual, Sydney welcomed in the new year with a bang and we were lucky enough to be at Dawes Point to get a front row seat on the spectacle. A few of the better photos are on Flickr. 

It’s a long night when you have three young kids and the seven year old was well and truly over it when we got home at 2am.

Funnily, it turns out we were standing close by to one of Sydney’s well known food bloggers. Helen has her own photos of the evening on Grab Your Fork.