Posts filed under 'Businesses that Suck'
I’ve got a lot to say about Time Warner Cable of New York and New Jersey in the coming days and weeks. I’ll start you out with this screenshot of just the kind of slow speeds I’m getting on a regular basis. 150ms ping to the first hop isn’t infrequent, as well as 10% packet loss to the first hop as well…
At 3AM, I can get 19mbps download on that speed test (I pay for 20mbps Road Runner Extreme). Between 7pm and midnight? The speed tests sometimes show as high as 2mbps or so, but will vary from minute to minute down into the hundreds of kilobits per second. As you can see in the screenshot I included, I’m testing at 220kbps.
Road Runner has sent techs out twice. Both said that the signal looked fine, but one replaced the cable modem. Both said that a service call would be opened for the “plant” folks to do something. One, upon my geeky pleading (I poured on the victim bit… but it was genuine… the tech support line is 30 minutes on hold to have someone run me through the exact same steps: unplug the router, plug in a computer, disable the firewall, disable antivirus, run the speed test. “We have to send a tech out to you”. Lather, rinse, repeat.) mentioned “upgrades” which had been done quite a bit north of me, but hadn’t been done this far down yet. I inquired about the schedule, and he said that he hadn’t been told, even after asking.
Frustrated, I submitted a complaint with the City of New York’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Unfortunately, I was told that their influence about complaints about cable companies is limited to cable television issues, and not Internet access. But he did mention that they were aware of the node-splitting upgrade that Time Warner is performing on Manhattan.
Of course, node-splitting is a way to mitigate oversubscription problems. Too many users on one node, and the internet bandwidth to that node is saturated by the sheer traffic volume.
But if Time Warner has been planning node-splitting, they’ve known about capacity issues.
So why haven’t they offered in any of my multiple interactions with them to a) downgrade the level of service I’m subscribed to because they can’t honestly offer the service when peak time is so incredibly far from what they’ve sold me, b) offer to lower the pricing on my upgraded package until the upgrade happens (and tell me when it would), or c) at least OFFICIALLY ADMIT THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM.
I’ve got some thoughts about how I’ll proceed from here, and I’ll document what happens better and more real-time (this problem began in the fall and has gotten progressively worse).
But alas, it’s bedtime for now.
January 25th, 2008
Digital distribution of music.
The major record labels have fought it to protect the market for their CDs. They grudgingly signed deals with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, Napster, and Rhapsody, with each of those vendors supplying music with DRM. 4 of those 5 chose one vendor’s technology, the other went it alone.
The iTunes Music Store can certainly be called a success, whether that’s attributable to the store or the devices made to integrate seamlessly. The others? Not so much.
A site in Russia, allofmp3.com, sold non-DRMed music, claiming legitimacy through the protection of the laws of its country… some customers may have been assuaged by the cover of claims of legitimacy, but I certainly got the sense that the convenience, price, and quality were key, along with the fact that customers could compile their collections without worry about device compatibility or the prospect of having to fight to get what they bought when a DRM license file goes on walkabout.
Of course, allofmp3 got shut down eventually…
But it did show one thing — for whatever reason, people were actually paying (albeit far less than retail) for the music they were downloading. It may have been illegal, and everyone may have known that, but people paid rather than download from a P2P network. I guess that it’s impossible to tell how many did so because it became difficult or risky to acquire their tunes illicitly, but there was definitely a market for DRM-free music.
Enter Amazon, purveyor of everything from dog food to silk scarves, paperback best sellers to personal armored vehicles, bicycles to computer cycles…
No DRM, all MP3. No DRM means no need to customize the actual files (anyone know if they watermark? if not, their S3 platform is perfect for this). Amazon’s the master of the long tail — they made their reputation on having the largest selection of books.
I’ve seen a few claims about the size of the music libraries of the big players… I haven’t explored very much to compare music services against each other. I realize how trivial it is to inflate the song count with things nobody will ever buy, so song count by itself is quite irrelevant once you get to the “enough” stage. By the same token, though, bytes take up very little space. The disk throughput for the long tail doesn’t need to be anything special — if I’m downloading something I can’t find elsewhere, I’m not going to notice a few extra seconds spent to retrieve it, so it doesn’t need to be on “enterprise class” tier-1 storage. For that matter, since I have a checkout process involved in purchasing, that offers even more time to ready my download.
This is more of a rant than a question, but why aren’t the smaller labels all on top of this? I went looking for the Damien Rice song The Blower’s Daughter. I could find some Damien Rice, or other artists performing The Blower’s Daughter, but not his rendition of that song.
The song was in the 2004 movie Closer, went multiplatinum in Ireland, and I know that it got airplay in the US on mainstream stations.
Where is it?
It’s a song lots of people don’t know by name, but if you give it a listen over at damienrice.com (30 second preview), most of you will recognize it.
I guess I’m just frustrated, but I’m not looking for the magic of the internet to bring me Timbaland and Britney. I’m not looking for someone to magically divine what I want to hear, or to expose me to things I might buy. I’m talking about looking for a song the artist and title of which I know and which I’m not likely to find at the K-Mart across the street.
Isn’t *that* what was supposed to happen with the Internet? The digital age? The pocket-sized terabyte?
December 27th, 2007
I’ve just received a call at work from a company from which I’d downloaded some software to take a look at it. I’d forgotten downloading it, and it wasn’t really for anything but my own curiosity… though it’s for a product for which my employer already has the bases covered — we have a company-wide license for one vendor’s version, and we have licenses for a competing product for some specific cases.
The differences are mostly “flavor”-related — the major functionalities are the same for all three vendors (the two we have and the one who called).
I mentioned that I think that I’d been doing some investigating of options when it was time to renew one of the contracts with a vendor we’re already using… and the software (and more importantly, annual support) certainly isn’t cheap. After explaining our situation, the gentleman offered something which stuck in my craw as a bit of an ethics issue…
He said that the next time license/support renewals came around, that we should have them give a competitive bid which will be quite low (which makes sense if you’re trying to win business), but then he added that even if we had no intention of switching, he’d be happy to provide us a lowball quote with which to beat up the other guys — he’d be happy to have his competitor make less money even if we continued to use their product.
While I know that there are lots of “games” played in business, this one left me feeling icky. I think that it’s one thing to play games to save yourself money, playing games to hurt your competition… might just be another.
October 22nd, 2007
I got an e-mail from Pottery Barn today (don’t ask), with the subject line: “Bring all-natural beauty to the bed”
I knew it was from Pottery Barn because they were nice enough to make the display name for the e-mail state so.
I often have a business relationship with smaller firms who haven’t thought everything out, or don’t realize the impact… and who send out e-mails that just show up as “Frank” or “Chris”, and then use my first and last name in the subject line.
You know… the kind of stuff that’s indistinguishable from spam.
Regarding Pottery Barn’s e-mail list… I will assume that I somehow signed up for the mailings, so if I decide that I don’t want mail from them any more, I just tell them — I’d never flag it as spam.
But if Bob Jones from Jones Widgets sends me an e-mail that in Outlook tells me:
From: Bob Subject: Anthony Ortenzi, we have some great new products
or… even worse…
From: Bob Subject: %firstname% %lastname%, we have some great new products
What am I going to do? Manually flag it as spam. And if my spam filtering software does it’s job, I’m never going to see any e-mails from Bob Jones at Jones Widgets again.
With the consequences being what they are, if you’re sending out e-mails, first do a test run to another address of yours, and see that it looks like something you’d actually read… or at least not like something you’d reflexively block.
Don’t spend time and money trying to acquire customers or partners and then shoot yourself in the foot.
September 20th, 2007
I just saw this press release about The SCO Group’s imminent de-listing.
I certainly wouldn’t claim to be sad about it… I think that taking away the avenues for quasi-legitimate funding for SCO makes it harder for the puppet-masters behind the scenes to sneak them dough. And without dough, their flimsy legal claims can finally stop.
I hope Novell buys the scraps.
September 20th, 2007
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