contempt for the consumer

That's right. The RIAA lawyers are claiming you cannot legally copy for your own use music you bought and paid for. Via Elisa Camahort, I returned from the holidays to read this:

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

Maybe I'm just unique, but I feel that it's this kind of hostility and contempt for the consumer that is doing in the music business.

Elisa writes:

Let me tell you how many CDs I own: somewhere between 1000 and 1500.

Let me tell you how many hours out of the day I listen to my music (my every-single-song-was-legally-acquired music) via my iPod or computer: at least 10 hours a day in my car, at work and at home.

Let me tell you how many of my CDs I would listen to if not for my iPod: probably very VERY few. Even a multi-CD player would be too inconvenient to rely on during the work day. I like being able to turn on Shuffle on my computer or iPod and have music all day without thinking about it or messing with it. Pre-iPod I did not listen to CDs at work ever. I did listen to CDs in my car, but tended to have the same 6 CDs in there for weeks without changing them.

Let me tell you how that would affect my music-buying habits: It would greatly diminish them. I would forget about artists I liked, I would fall into a musical rut, instead of maintaining the really quite broad musical taste I have. And broad taste leads to broad music-buying habits. iTunes has already massively increased my music-buying habits by being so simple and so immediate. By exposing me to more music. And by making it easy for a constant variety of music to accompany my life most of my waking hours.

So, here's what the RIAA is just begging me to do: Never buy another physical CD, ever.

Radiohead just might be onto something.

Well here I sit, fooled yet again by Comcast.

I was very excited to get the TiVo Series 3 DVR. This is my first TiVo ever. And about time! Or it would be, if it weren't for the absolutely horrid and appallingly incompetent "customer support" of Comcast.

We received the TiVo unit last week. Comcast was supposed to come Sunday morning, "between 8 and 10." They did not show. The tech claimed that nobody was home. I was sitting here all that time.

So they rescheduled for Monday afternoon. The tech came ... but with only one card, even though any full activation of TiVo requires two cards so you can watch and record different programs simultaneously. Not only that, he couldn't get even the one card to work. He left, saying he would return the next day with two cards and, hopefully, a way to get the central office to activate them properly.

And so today I left work over 3 hours early to sit here and wait for Comcast to come and do what they were supposed to do Sunday.

Nobody showed up. I called and was told he was coming. Nobody showed up. Calling again, they said that he reported the job as done. He never showed up!!

So Comcast is now supposedly looking into it and will call me back. But so far they are 10 min late in calling back, and with this track record, I don't expect any call.

So my question is this: Is Comcast deliberately slow-tracking all TiVo activations in order to promote their own competing DVR?

Oh, that reminds me: Comcast has been charging for having a DVR, even though it's just an ordinary HDTV unit.

[update: TechDirt has picked up the story.]

[update 2: Now the Washington Post and the normally quick-on-the-uptake Valleywag have picked up on it, too. Will this story get the attention of consumers? How much will Verizon Wireless customers appreciate this new "service"?]

Via Slashdot, we see that Verizon Wireless is planning on sharing their subscribers' private calling information.

What?

Two of us just received a notice from Verizon Wireless about CPNI. CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information: our call records, essentially. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.)

Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”

But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”

I don't believe I've received this notice yet. I've been squeamish about using Verizon to start with, given their opposition to things ranging from Net Neutrality to municipal wi-fi initiatives, but their coverage area has beaten all others, in my experience so far.

Yet I'll be damned if I want to have myself and those people I have called, or who have called me, end up on some phone spam list.

The fact that they treat this as an "opt out" rather than an "opt in" is also telling of their own corporate values.

And maybe opting out of Verizon Wireless' spam plan won't do anything anyway:

"If you do not want us to collect, transmit or use such information about you for the above purposes, you should not use the services; by using the services, you expressly authorize us to use your information for these purposes."

My subscription ends on Halloween. Time to look to alternatives, I think. Too bad for us that they all pretty much stink.

While I was laying in bed last night, I found myself questioning my post yesterday and the attitudes reflected in Joe the Peacock's mocking of what appears to be a rather clueless potential client.

He seems to have struck a nerve, judging by Joe's forums:

Yes let us hear the douchebag please!

I think Joe's got to have at least a little bit of masochist in him to be a consultant, especially an Internet consultant. Sir Geek and I did it for several years and listening to the clients blather on about what they think they want/need is enough to make your brain explode.

Freaking hysterical.

Okay, at first reading of Joe's rant, I confess I did laugh a little. It certainly was outrageous enough to inspire me to post a link.

But to publicly share such mean-spirited attitudes towards potential clients strikes me as rather sad, and what I would consider unprofessional. Now maybe the person on the other end of the line was a jerk. I certainly have encountered my share of jerks.

But Joe mocks this "potential client" for his (?) ignorance.

We in web and software development live in a world that is scarcely understood by most of the people who use what we produce. That's all the more true in the corner of that world where I spend my time: open source, which is a community-of-a-commons concept that seems to elude even the majority of folks in Silicon Valley (who are much more attached to that other source, "outsource"). Quite often we are in the business of educating and enlightening the client, sometimes seemingly as much as we are developing for the client. It comes with the territory. After all, clients come to us, in large part, because we are knowledgeable in things which they are not.

Hello?

Jerks have what's coming to them, imho. But calling someone a "dipshit" for simple ignorance? That's ignorance.

I suppose it's natural that such cynical attitudes will bleed into all areas of business, even this "new economy" we're all a part of that's supposed to, you know, change (read: "improve") the way business is conducted in the world. People are people, and cynical contempt is all-too-common a human attitude. Just don't count me among its willing practitioners.

Then again, Joe is a writer so maybe it's all just fiction. If so, never mind. I'll just walk slowly away from the computer and sit down for another viewing of Office Space.

It doesn't take a "genius" to know that there is something seriously wrong with my MacBook Pro. When you can't hold a wi-fi connection and get the gray screen of death two or more times a day, you pretty much have a worthless piece of junk taking up space.

I took it into the Apple Store on Twenty-Ninth Street and was greeted by a guy dressed more for playing ultimate frisbee than for working pretty much any kind of retail. I told him about the problems I was having and he snorted -- this was a familiar problem, apparently.

He walks me up to a computer "to make an appointment." Apparently nowadays you cannot have a problem with your Mac unless you have an appointment. Those of us with unscheduled failures can just twist in the wind.

After having to type in my contact information, he navigates to a screen and says, "You can have an appointment tomorrow."

"I need an appointment to have a problem taken care of?" I asked.

"You have to wait just like everyone else you see here," he said with a sneer, waving his hand at some 10 or 15 people all having problems looked at by "geniuses."

"Why can't I just drop the thing off and the tech department can deal with it when they can?"

"You have to be here."

"Why?"

"So they can know what the problem is."

Whatever.

I have never had to have an appointment to drop something off to a repair shop. I may have had to wait to get it fixed, but I've never had anyone tell me, in effect, "Take your problem away from here! Begone!"

Some years ago, home insurance companies were found to be deliberately shuffling adjusters so that people making claims would have to see several adjusters -- starting over each time -- before even getting a settlement offer. Presumably this was done because the companies wanted to delay as long as possible having to pay out money they owed to their clients.

Is this Apple's approach? Spread out how many people can actually have computer problems addressed in a given day, so that they don't have to deal with the crappy hardware they're using in their devices?

We have three other MacBook Pros in the office, and two of them are experiencing the same gray screen of death and wi-fi connection problems. (The guy with the functional MacBook Pro had at his previous job another one with the same gray screen of death problem.) Obviously this is something of a pandemic that should require a recall, not sending people with problems out into the street with no acknowledgment of anything.

Do you need an appointment to buy a computer? Don't be silly!

Oh, and I was going to buy a screen while I was there. Funny how treating the customer with contempt has an effect on sales.

So says Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business and US sales for Sony BMG. That's right, the company that betrayed such contempt for the consumer by deliberately infecting its music CDs with its Rootkit, before stopping when it faced major PR and legal backlash, still has plenty of contempt for the consumer.

The article on the Forbes website -- itself littered with interstitial and numerous pop-up ads that make you just want to hurry back and experience more -- covers how music industry executives are fretting over life in the digital age.

“No intellectual property business is going to cross the digital divide without figuring out how to protect its content and to ensure that transactions are associated with the acquisition of content,’’ Nash said. “The music industry simply has to solve the content security problem or risk the obsolescence of its business model.’’

So says Warner's senior vice president of digital strategy and business development. In other words, the world must conform to their business model, not the other way around.

At issue is that people who buy and download music might do what they have been able to do for decades: copy it and share it, which is something you still can do if you buy a CD.

Says MacDailyNews:

The horse left the barn decades ago when the music industry opened the doors wide and began selling billions of Compact Discs without DRM. Hence, most of the music sold today is already without DRM and, we can get any new release for free - just like being in a college dorm - on the day of release via P2P. Don't steal music.

Lastly, it doesn't matter what the music labels' agendas are, the only agenda that really matters is Steve Jobs' - and his seems focused like a laser on DRM-free music sales.

DRM-free music is already here via CDs and P2P. There is no logical reason to try to restrict legal online downloads with DRM - all you are doing is turning people towards pirating music and/or turning them off from using legal online stores like Apple's iTunes Store.

It never fails to amazes us how some people in the music industry don't understand the absolute basics of their business model.

We're all criminals. Especially those of us in college. That seems to be the message from the executives. How's that for "business development" strategy?

Recently my longest-used website statistics service, StatCounter, posted a boast about how they turned away big advertisers who wanted to embed spyware cookies into the StatCounter tracking code. They also hinted that another big web stats company did not say no, and is planting spyware into their clients' websites on behalf of undisclosed advertisers.

You install StatCounter to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Yikes.

Commenters weren't so coy. And neither were other bloggers.

Although SiteMeter has some really useful tools and information, I value your privacy and I will not tolerate this sort of behavior, therefore I’ve removed it completely from the site. I will now be switching to Google Analytics for stats and don’t expect any more problems of this nature. After all Google is known to be one of the most non-evil businesses there is and that is just perfect for The Best in Life.

troubled diva:

After five and a half happy years of stats-watching, I have just ditched SiteMeter from this site.

The reason? The SiteMeter Javascript has started serving calls to specificclick.net, which attempts to place site-tracking cookies (a.k.a. spyware) on your machine. Not only is this Bad and Wrong - it's also Dead Slow and A Bit Crap Really. Especially if you're still using Internet Explorer, which has been noticeably slow in loading this site for quite a while now.

Suburban Hen:

So, if you aren't sure if your provider has your best interests at heart and that bothers you, switch. I realise this isn't appealing to those who are a bit attached to that number at the bottom (side, top, centre...WHATEVER) of their web page, but quite frankly, surreptitious loading of cookies onto peoples computers to drag more money out of our arses is not that appealing either.

Just sayin'.

As it turns out, the specificclick cookie set by SiteMeter "tracks browsing activity." Seems innocuous enough, until you consider that it's tracking all browsing activity, not just clicks on that site where the cookie is set. Meaning they know where you bank, what discussion forums you visit, what, ahem, other websites you might be viewing on the sly.

In a comment on The Best Things in Life: Free, west writes of an email he received from SiteMeter, which proclaimed:

Over the next few months we will be rolling out enhancements to our service that will offer you more information about your users like their other content interests and demographics (a la Quantcast).

I don't know about you, but to me that sounds like, well, spying.

I ran a test: Cleared all my cookies on Opera, which I hardly ever use, and visited my business website. Sure enough, StatCounter is clean: one single cookie, which they use to track visitor behavior on your own site.

Google Analytics, however, is especially sneaky: It sets four cookies and pretends they are set by the site itself. One of these cookies doesn't expire until 2036! Another expires in ... 1969.

I have no idea what Google is doing with these cookies. It seems rather sneaky to mask them as belonging to the site owner, though I suppose that arguably can make their stats more meaningful, as presumably quite a few people set their browsers to block the setting of all cookies except for those originating from the visited site itself.

As for SiteMeter, I can't say I cared for their service in the first place. I had tried them years ago, but never stuck. Needless to say, I won't be going back any time soon. Where things stand with SiteMeter's spyware policy now, I'm not sure. Shane offers this update:

Two and a half weeks after StatCounter broke the story and it began to spread across the web, SiteMeter has begun to respond to the issue both in the comments of my post and at much greater length in the comments on Eric Odem’s.

Despite that, though, I can still not find not find the official response they say is on their own blog, nor have they directly addressed many of the specific issues that people have reported. I hate that because I have a feeling they really haven’t done anything wrong, but their damage control isn’t helping them at all.

Michael Sync has a helpful public service kind of post for those not all that familiar with cookies or how to deal with them.

Meanwhile, I'm glad I've been using StatCounter.

Actually, I'm surprised this is only starting now.

Get ready for the inbox on your phone to fill up faster. From fast-food chains to carmakers to consumer goods manufacturers and sports franchises, more and more companies are adopting text messaging as a way to target consumers on the move.

That's right. Once again, international corporations are looking for new ways to invade your space and push their sales pitches into your face.

No web 2.0 for these folks. No viral marketing, no sirree.

Consultant Frederick Newell says companies using text messaging should move carefully because of privacy concerns and must get customers' permission first.

Like they got your permission to show 15 minutes of advertisments for consumer products and tv shows at the beginning of theatrical films.

SmartReply, the Irvine, Calif.-based marketing firm involved in the Meijer campaign, said consumers need not fear a bombardment of unwanted messages from the burgeoning industry.

"Mobile marketing has the power of e-mail but we've learned from the mistakes of e-mail in that the mobile channel is regulated from the beginning in terms of spam," said Mike Romano, the company's executive vice president of business development.

Call me a cynic, but I'll believe it when I don't see it.

I read with relief that Apple has bailed on plans to go with tech support based in India. As Jobs explains:

In late May, Apple dismissed most of the 30 new hires at its subsidiary in Bangalore. (A handful working in sales and marketing will stay on.) Spokesman Steve Dowling would say only that Apple had "reevaluated our plans" and decided to provide support from other countries. Another source familiar with the situation, though, says the decision was cost-driven. "India isn't as inexpensive as it used to be," the source says. "The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong." Apple feels it "can do [such work] more efficiently elsewhere."

Here is where I should confess that my relief, as a Mac owner and, since 2002, semi-evangelist, comes not from Jobs' business rationale but from my own rather underwhelming experiences with India-based support.

Whether it's been Travelocity or United or Linksys or Dell or a number of other conglomerates, I've been left feeling consistently dissatisfied, disrespected, dismissed, denigrated and generally unappreciated by their "foreign" liaisons. (Travelocity and United couldn't care less about my itinerary glitch, Dell gave me the runaround more times than I care to admit [and at the end I had to pay for the privilege] and a Linksys rep actually attempted to blame a failing Linksys router on the fact that I was using a Mac. [I ended up futzing through and finding my own solution: manually re-setting the router's IP range].

I know I'm treading on some liberal taboos here. A reactionary reading of this post might place me square in the realm of being racist -- which is anything but descriptive. Perhaps that's why nobody every says the emperor has no clothes when it comes to foreign-based customer service.

Despite what people might assume, I don't consider it a race issue -- I consider it a cultural issue -- a corporate culture issue.

Here's the question: Do Indian support firms have any actual authority to provide meaningful customer service? More significantly, do any customer service departments for major corporations have any meaningful capability to really take care of their customers?

Last year, when I had some fairly persistent problems with my old 17" iMac, which went through no fewer than six midplane assemblies in one year, an understanding US-based customer service rep actually gave me a free upgrade of my Final Cut Pro suite to the then-current FCP 4.5 HD version. That counted for a lot, because I was incredibly frustrated with the (let's face it) crappy hardware components Apple was using in some of its machines, and their little concession to me bought a lot of goodwill on my part. At least they cared about me as a customer. And what did it cost them, in the end, to give away this upgrade? (In fact, I just upgraded again to FCP Studio, so they kept me on the paying upgrade path.)

I have to wonder: Would a wage earner in Bangalore have any authority to do this?

Certainly other tech support challenges can arise over the phone, such as ability to speak clear English -- but that's something that can happen within the US, even with native speakers -- and, for the most part, I've not run into that particular problem all that often.

But I do feel like I am attempting to speak across the divide. When corporations outsource their customer service to foreign lands, there's an implicit statement there that they really just don't want to deal with you. "Talk to the hand," they are in effect saying by sending customers to sub-contracted companies that can only say "no," and never "yes."

In other words, the attitude ingrained in corporate culture that the customer is a problem to be contained and managed -- this is the real problem.

Is there more to it? Police departments learned that you can't ignore culture when it comes to community relations -- and thus effectiveness within communities -- and have, over the past decade or two, instituted more community-based patrols and recruited from the communities they "serve and protect." Could it be time that corporations all over the world realize that the best customer service comes from the customer's own culture?

I don't know. But first they have to realize that customers are not problems but resources -- for money, for product/service feedback, for insight into new opportunities. Does anyone really know of any Fortune 500 companies that do that? Lately it seems "they" are more interested in service of process rather than service of the customer.

On the current nefarious Sony anti-piracy outrage, a column in The Inquirer (UK) by Marc Ninthly highlights what I think is the biggest issue here:

My big problem is that we are not being told about these things. Decisions about the software we run on our systems – the ones we saved hard for, or stole from some drunk yuppie last night – are being made, and implemented without our consent. Now, some legal smart arse will undoubtedly point out that it was all outlined quite clearly in Section 3, paragraph 17, addendum III b of the user contract but let’s be realistic, who the hell reads that all of that mumbo jumbo in the first place? Most real people don’t and when it comes to products from big brands, I often don’t. It’s not just that it’s mind-numbingly boring, but that it’s written in a way to make it impenetrable to normal folk.

One could say that it’s been embedded with an Anti-Interest rootkit that prevents you from reading more than a few paragraphs before you start questioning your own existence. The only way to stop it is to press the ‘Accept’ button. Consumers allocate a certain amount of trust to household name companies when they buy one of their products. We figure, maybe naively, that forking out that extra bit of cash for a real CD instead of some cheapo knock-off at a car boot sale, entitles us to a certain level of quality and protection. Not so. We have now gone from being valued customers to potential criminals. That’s it in a nutshell.

And, he points out, the ultimate consequence of Sony's treatment of its customers is that the customers will be more likely to go the illegal route and download pirated music -- Sony's customers will indeed become the "criminals" that Sony despises.

I'm reminded of a tenet of Eastern thought:

You tend to receive from life that upon which you focus. If you focus on bad things, then you tend to cultivate bad things in your life.

In other words, you reap what you sow. And the "why" is that your creativity is a powerful thing, and works in ways that you don't even realize. Put all your energy into positive endeavors and positive energy comes back to you.

Successful entrepreneurs know this -- they will be the first to tell you how once you commit to a venture, it's almost like doors are opened up before you and the universe conspires for your success. On the other hand, gloomy Murphys will tend to see the downside of any decision; they prove adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

In this sort of Zen-like way, we're seeing multinational megacorporations focusing on the negative, and therefore cultivating negative outcomes. Sony's corporate policies are being dominated by gloomy Murphys who see criminal intent in every customer. Meanwhile, whatever creative visionaries there might be in Sony's executive suites -- those who might see the new media developments as opportunities rather than threats -- seem to be having little or no impact on corporate decision-making.

The clichéd metaphor of corporate "dinosaur" seems especially apt in this context, for we see a large beast that is so angry that its feeding grounds are changing that its stomping out the food it has -- and seems to be too limited in intelligence to see the self-destructiveness of its actions.

That's not to say I'm predicting the fall of Sony over this. As entrenched as these corporations are in our global economy, it's pretty clear that they aren't going away any time soon.

But this does offer yet another clear indication that the market is changing in ways of which the megacorporations are not mentally, creatively or even lawyerly equipped to take advantage. Our economy is changing, and the old-time top-down hierarchical business models, where the consumer has little or no say in the vendor's business practices, are proving to be outmoded and, ultimately, counter-productive.

Sony is facing an expensive lesson in the new economics of the world. How many more lessons will it take, and how many other dinosaurs will have to suffer the same, before they join us rather than fight us?