Category: consumer

Ignoring your customers

The new Facebook design has picked up lots of critics with nearly 800,000 users giving it the thumbs down.

However Dare Obasanjo claims Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg doesn’t care. Apparently Mark’s view is “the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers“.

That’s true – Steve jobs ignored the howls of protest when Apple dropped support for floppy disks and the Apple Desktop Bus which left millions of Mac users stranded with obsolete equipment.

Even more famously, Henry Ford told customers they could have any colour Model T they liked as long as it was black.

Both were right and the customers followed them, although not without some grumbling.

So you can succeed by knowing your customers needs better than they know them, but it’s a risky ask as Microsoft found with Windows Vista, Ford with the Edsel and Coca-Cola with New Coke.

Time will tell if Mark Zuckerburg’s right. It’s a high risk strategy though.

Dell’s $70 netbook bundle

Vodafone’s $70 a month bundled laptop deal sees them joining Optus and Telstra in offering these plans. To date, there’s been almost zero uptake with these products as the dealers don’t seem to know or care about them.

Let’s see if Vodafone and Dell can do a better job of marketing these packages.

For consumers, it would pay to shop around on these deals as Vodafone currently offer the 5Gb data plan with a free modem for $39 per month.

Over a 24-month period (which is what we’ll have to assume the plan is without any further information) then the package costs $1,680. If we subtract the data component of $936 (24*39) that “free” netbook will cost $744.

Not bad, based upon Dell’s list price of $699 that’s a 3.2% APR, but you can be sure Dell and other netbook vendors will have better deals on their computers next month.

It always pays to do the sums closely before committing to these contracts.

Will the iPhone see Australians embrace mobile Internet?

Reports the iPhone has triggered a rise in mobile Internet use in the US raises an interesting question on its effects on the Australian market.

Early this year Three Mobile touted their own report which found Australians were reluctant to do surfing the net on their phones due to the risk of copping a monster bill.

Sadly this belief is quite fair when you see some plans charging up to $3,000 a Gb if you go over a 5Mb monthly allowance.

While Optus has sweetened their plans slightly by offering better usage allowances on their iPhone plans, all the providers have done little to improve their mobile phone data offerings.

This stingy attitude to data by the Australian mobile operators is going to continue to cramp the growth in the Australian mobile Internet market.

Until one of the players drops their restrictive plans and outrageous excess use charges Australians will quite rightly shy away from embracing mobile web surfing.

The Sydney Apple Store

Apple’s new store in central Sydney is certainly impressive. Ron Johnston’s opening speech mentioned how it’s their second biggest store after London and has the largest plate glass windows in the world.

Sydney Apple Store interiorThe plate glass windows are the key to how this store works. It showcases Apple’s products beautifully and invites passers by to step inside and play with system.

That openness extends to the fact you can play with the systems. One of the things that’s always frustrated me with computer stores is that they don’t display what the systems are capable of. The Apple store does.

Also notable is the stock display; there’s no stack ’em high clutter that’s typical of many computer stores. The stock is laid out beautifully and takes advantage of the space.

The attention to detail is reflected in the staff as well. They are friendly, trained and knowledgeable. Again this differs from most computer stores where the staff are commission driven part timers.

All of this gives the store an atmosphere of restrained competence. These products that don’t need a hard sell.

Sydney Apple Store Genius BarOn the top floor is one of Apple’s masterstrokes: The Genius bar. It was mentioned that this is the biggest Genius Bar of any Apple store but I’m not sure about this. Once again, the geniuses were well trained and presented.

One impression I did have was this area was a bit spartan and I expect there’ll be more facilities like couches, water dispensers and possibly even a coffee vendor in this area for people waiting for their turn with trainers or geniuses. It could easily become a focal point for Mac fans to gather and simply talk Mac stuff.

Overall, the Apple Store is a very well thought out and set up operation, as it should be given Apple’s attention to detail and the fact this is the 215th Apple store.

It’s a great flagship for Apple’s Australian operations and is going to be very interesting to see the role the store plays in the iPhone release next month.

The Australian iPhone release

iphoneApple’s announcement the iPhone will be released in Australia through Optus and Vodafone sets the stage for a good fight in the mobile phone sector over the next twelve months.

Leaving Telstra out of the deal is going to put a lot of competitive pressure on the big T, but their advantages in brand name, market position and mobile coverage gives them plenty of scope to fight back.

Another interesting angle on this is the pricing. The $199 and $299 US dollar prices will probably translate to around half the price of the comparable Blackberry and a third of the Nokia smartphones. This is really going to make the incumbents sweat.

So we’re going to see some terrific deals over the next few months and the carriers and handset manufacturers jostle for space in the market.

If you’re looking at buying a mobile phone the best advice is to wait a month or two.

Telstra’s $0 plans

Telstra’s new bundled plans offering a free laptop with their wireless plans is a good move to improve take up of wireless Internet.

It’s surprising none of the providers haven’t offered these deals sooner given entry level laptops are cheaper than mobile phones and these plans have proved an resounding success in the mobile industry.

As with all these deals, the devil is in the small print. You may be getting a “free” laptop but the cost of the wireless broadband will easily make up for this. The total price of the plan over the 36 month contract is $3,564 which would buy you a lot of laptop.

36 months is a long contract and we can expect to see prices drop and better deals appear as the other companies respond.

Also, a $700 laptop is a pretty basic beast many business users will find doesn’t meet their needs.

Overall, this is an interesting deal that’s going to radically change the business market. However I’d recommend most users sit and wait to see what other deals become available.

TIO annual report

The Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman’s 2007 annual report is a less than proud moment for the Internet industry.

The headline is an 84% increase in complaints about ISP behaviour. But this is only part of the story, the details are even more disturbing.

The most notable jump was in complaints about excess data charges. This is only going to get worse as more people start using VoIP and downloading videos. It’s exacerbated by the swing towards ISPs counting uploads and downloads towards their download limits.

One item that jumps out of the report is the confirmation ISPs don’t keep proper records of conversations with customers. While the TIO points at smaller providers our experience is the bigger providers are not better.

The biggest increase was complaints about debt collection procedures where customers have been listed as defaulting on an Internet bill without any notice from the ISP. This probably relates to a couple of sizable and incompetent ISPs going broke late last year.

As we saw with the One.Tel liquidation, the record keeping of these companies is disgraceful and it’s highly unlikely they can prove any debt when challenged. Not that this stops them trying to recover what they claim is owed.

In the category of customer service, ISPs were by far the worst performer. The biggest category of complaint was inadequate or incorrect advice. This is barely surprising

Direct debit problems continue. Part of the problem here is with the banks who consider direct debit requests to be more important than their customers. The TIO points out this a breach of banking code of conduct.

Given ISPs can’t get their billing right and don’t give records it does appear that giving a direct debit authorisation to them is a risky thing to do.

This report is a wake up call to ISP and the entire IT industry. Things have to improve. Some of the areas we need to look at are;

  • better training
  • improved record keeping
  • proper QA and procedures, especially for escalating customer complaints
  • clearer and more concise bills

The silly thing is all of these would have positive return for ISPs. By providing better information to customers and staff, they will reduce costs and probably improve sales.

Anatomy of an Internet scam

We talk a lot about Internet scams, here’s a first hand account of how they work.

A clever little scam fell into our laps tonight. It’s the typical sort of trick that can fool anyone with an Internet connection, in this case it used Skype, but it could have been an email, a pop ad or pretty well anything any computer encounters while on the net. So we decide to follow this one to see how it works.

This was done on an a fully patched Windows XP computer running in Limited User Mode with Mozilla Firefox as the web browser. This is our preferred configuration for safe surfing.

Despite this, the computer was still fully backed up and we ran regular spyware and virus scans between each step. We strongly recommend never to click on any link, email or adverts you think might be suspicious.

The trap

You’re sitting at your computer when you notice a strange icon in the corner of your screen. It’s Skype, the Internet phone program, telling you there’s a Skype Chat message for you. The message comes from Security Center ® (Offline) Skype™ Chat and it warns WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION.

We should pause here to point out if you have Skype Chat enabled you will be getting messages popping up like this on a regular basis. We’ve discussed this problem on our July ABC Nightlife spot and we’ve added the solution to our IT Queries website. You should set Skype to only accept messages from your friends.

It’s also important to note here that this message looks official. Many people think that they are too clever to be caught by these scams. What they overlook is that while many scammers are dopes, some are very clever and this one will fool a lot of intelligent people.

Following the link

At the bottom of the message is a link directing you to “a patch” that will fix the problem. Click this and you are taken to a website called “Online Alert”

This website is allegedly owned by a Sergei Machorin of Moscow. We can safely bet that Sergei, if he exists, has no idea he’s the owner of this site.

Rather than downloading a patch, which would fix the problem, Online Alert starts a fake malware scan of the computer’s hard drive. After several minutes this will report your computer is infected with the following files.

  • Backdoor:Win32/NT Root
  • Backdoor: Win32/Sivuxa
  • Trojan.Caijing

All of these are fake. In fact, if you run the test on an Apple Mac you’ll get exactly the same result.It’ll even claim the c: drive is infected.

Of course, they aren’t telling you this for nothing, at the bottom of the page there is a button to “fix this problem”, so we clicked it.

The fix takes us to a page offering to download and install a cleaner program called Scan and Repair 2007 for a mere 19.95 USD. And here you are stuck.

If you choose just to close the screen you’ll find yourself locked in a loop where you can’t get out of the purchase screen until you kill the process or shut down Windows.

Naturally we didn’t pay the 19.95 and we just killed Firefox instead. Many people though would be worried about shutting down their computer with this thing still open.

The Result

This is a pretty garden variety scam and it could be a lot worse. This site could easily have tried to install something malicious. We tested this also on Internet Explorer and Firefox in a Limited User profile and there is no evidence of this scam trying to load spyware.

Overall it’s a fairly primitive little scam. The “online scan” is fairly simple. But to give credit to the scammers, the Skype warning, the webpages and the online scan are all quite convincing looking mock ups of a real thing.

Who falls for this?

Lots of people. The fact the warnings and websites look so convincing means that even experienced users can be fooled into clicking on links or thinking their computer is infected. There’s an idea that only stupid people fall for these tricks. This is not the case and even if it were, the numbers still make it attractive for the scammers.

Why do they do this?

The scammers receive a commission on every copy of Scan and Repair 2007 they sell. Given they’ve sent this warning out to millions of people they only need a tiny proportion to buy the product to make a tidy sum. It’s easy money for someone with the right skills.

The F-Prot’s Mikko Hypponen believes malware is the fastest growing sector of the IT industry. We agree and while this isn’t an example of true malware like a Trojan or virus, it still shows the profits that can be made with just a modest bit of effort.

We’ve found over the years that most people that fall for these scams are not stupid. The crooks who try this stuff are no fools and anyone who thinks they are smarter than the crooks is probably going to be caught out. All of us need to take care on the net.