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Why Isn’t There a Pay-As-You-Go Internet Fax Service?

Posted on March 14, 2007 ·

The title pretty much says it all, and frankly, how is this possible in 2007 is beyond me.  

I’ve had a trusted old eFax service for perhaps a decade, never gave it a lot of thought.  However, now that Fred Wilson is asking for advice, I thought I’d do a quick research.  Voila!  Here’s a comparison matrix of 10 Internet fax services by Top Ten Reviews:

What’s wrong here?  There’s not a single offer tailored for individual users.  I’m sure a busy VC like Fred has enough fax traffic to justify the $10 or so that most of these services charge: there are term sheets, legal documents..etc. (Although I certainly hope EchoSign would obliterate the fax machine soon.) 

As a consumer, the grand total of faxes I receive in a year is perhaps 1-2, and I don’t send more than 5 per year.   $10 is not a huge amount, but why would I pay a monthly subscription optimized for 1-200 pages monthly traffic? 

The free version of eFax (btw, how could the granddaddy of Internet fax services escape the comparison?) allows free inbound services, but no sending at all.   I don’t expect free sending, but why can’t I pay per use, only for the pages I send?  Sure, I would not bring a huge business volume, but there are tens of millions just like me: occasional users, sending a few faxes a year. Charge me triple price, but don’t force me into a subscription deal!  Then I could kiss goodbye to the modem and phone cable.

phone

Update (313):  There is an interesting comment-exchange re. the economnics below.  And some good news: EchoSign will soon have doc-to-fax functionality.  Of course what I meant above by EchoSign obliterating fax machines was wider acceptance of electronically signed documents and eliminating the need for faxed copies at all.

 

Filed Under: Business, Customer Service, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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Medieval Tech Support

Posted on March 8, 2007 ·

Should the embedded video not play, watch it here.  

(hat tip: Christopher Carfi)

Filed Under: Customer Service, Humor ·
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Leave Your Dumb Speaker Agency

Posted on January 10, 2007 ·

Excerpt from the email I’ve just received:

“From the Desk of Jordan Steinberg

I’m looking to see if your group has a need for Keynote Speakers and/or Entertainment for your upcoming meetings or events.

My office books professional speakers and entertainers for Citigroup, California Assn of Realtors, Kraft Foods, National Safety Council, American Nurses Association, Abbott Labs, NH/VT Fairs, National PTA, Federal Housing Authority, Power Auto Group, Major League Baseball, UCLA, SHRM, Colorado Assn of School Execs, American Assn of Pediatrics and 3,500 other clients.

The Speaker Agency represents 5,000 of North America’s top speakers and entertainers. We have top people in all categories and budget ranges. Just let me know your dates, needs and budgets and I will find you perfect fits. “

The email came with thumbnail photos of several featured speakers.  Out of respect for their privacy, I’m not showing the pic, but I have a piece of advice to them:  leave this agency.

I’m not looking for any speakers, and even if I were, they would not be from this background.  I don’t think the Speaker Agency knows that I am NOT Fortune 1000.  Their email is not only spam, it’s just plain dumb – does not reflect well on the speakers they represent, IMHO. smile_angry

 

Filed Under: Business, Customer Service, Marketing / PR, Social Networking ·
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The New York Times’s Foolproof Way of Alienating Readers

Posted on November 27, 2006 ·

Nobody likes surveys, but sometimes we care enough to do them.  But who in their right mind wants to be interrupted in the middle of an an article, flipping between pages?   That’s what the NYT is forcing, rather aggressively: articles are broken up to small pages, then clicking on “Next” brings up the survey, instead of page 2 of my story.

How many times do I have to say no? Apparently the NYT decided to ignore readers’ wish to opt out:

Click the “Yes, I’ll take the Survey” button at right to begin — you will not be recruited for this survey again after that. If you opt not to participate, click the “No Thanks, Take Me to My Destination” button. You won’t be recruited for the survey again for 24 hours.

The ONLY way to get rid of the annoyance is to say YES, otherwise they will keep on bothering you every single day.  That’s ridiculously aggressive.  The New York Times sure knows how to alienate readers.smile_angry

 

Filed Under: Customer Service, Marketing / PR, Misc ·
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Wal-Mart is Off-Mart Today

Posted on November 24, 2006 ·

“SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The Web site of leading retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. was offline or otherwise “unusable” for much of Friday, which is the busiest shopping day of the year, according to an Internet performance-tracking company.

Those that managed to gain access to the site had to wait up to 30 seconds for search results and even longer to complete a purchase, according to Ben Rushlo, a senior director at Keynote Systems, which monitors Web-site performance.

A message on the company’s site blamed the problems on “high traffic volume.”

Not expecting hight traffic volume on Black Friday?  Give me a break … this is pathetic.

Update (11/26):  News.com’s report just hit Techmeme.

 

Filed Under: Customer Service, Misc ·
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Losers of the Google / JotSpot Deal

Posted on November 2, 2006 ·

(Updated)
In my longer analysis of the JotSpot sale to Google I listed a group of JotSpot customers who may feel disadvantaged by the deal: those who’d rather pay to have their data at a company whose pure business model is charging for services than enjoy free service by Google whose primary business model requires dissecting/analyzing their data left and right.

I also pointed out that several competitors are offering deals to migrate these customers to their platform free or at a discount. Socialtext and Atlassian were the first to come forward with their offers, but since the previous post I heard about Central Desktop, (update: see correction in this comment by Central Desktop’s CEO), ProjectForum and I’m sure there are others. (Clearly, the wiki market is growing and sadly, I don’t know all the players). Jerry Bowles and Tom Raftery wrote more on the subject.

We all seem to have missed a point here: there is a group of customers for whom migration is not optional but a necessity: participants in the JotSpot Wiki Server beta program. Like I’ve said before, as much as I am a SaaS believer, it is not a religion, apparently the feedback from most customers is that they want their wiki behind the firewall – JotSpot’s response was the Wiki Server edition. These customers now have a rude awakening: JotSpot notified them that they would discontinue the beta program. Current customers have the right to continue using the product for the remainder of the 90-day beta period (what’s the point? smile_omg) but there is no support, no migration plan – game over, bad luck. smile_angry Of course JotSpot had the right to do this, these were not paying customers (yet), and a beta is a beta, after all. But a beta program is a mutual effort, and especially early on requires a lot of time and effort from the customers, so it’s clear that these customers may feel let down. While most competitive migration offers are hosted solutions, it’s this specific “betrayed” group that Atlassian goes after: they offer migration help and discounted rates on Confluence, their behind-the-firewall enterprise wiki. So let down or not, these customers may eventually be better off on a more mature, robust enterprise platform.

As a sidenote, this is the second time that JotSpot drops a product benefiting a competitor: when they discontinued JotBox, Socialtext reaped the benefits by moving those customers to their Appliance. Update: Please read the comment exchange below for correction by JotSpot.

Update (11/29): two post on how the deal affected JotSpot partners and customers:
JotSpot Got the Goldmine. Its Partners and Customers Got the Shaft.
The JotSpot Google Merger

Update (11/30) the above post, The JotSpot Google Merger is now deleted, supposedly under pressure by … (?) Read the story on TechCrunch.

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Customer Service, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Wikis as Intranet + Extranet

Posted on October 22, 2006 ·

I’ve written about how wikis can become *the* Intranet, that is not only easy to access but easy to edit by everyone, in the organization. Instead of a one-way communication channel for Management to talk (down) to employees, the wiki becomes a living, breathing, participatory communication platform.

Now there’s a new case study of how a a customer of Atlassian’s Confluence wiki is using it for customer communication, by building their entire Extranet on Confluence.

The wiki has become the Intranet+Extranet.

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Customer Service, Enterprise Software, Software, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , ,
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Customer Service 2.0?

Posted on October 22, 2006 ·

Debbie Landa’s rant of the month:

“Customer Service 2.0 uhm, NOT

Here’s my rant of the month. It seems like everyone is trying to get on the office 2.0 train. Clearly, any developer with some code know-how can make a product but, “servicing” the product is the challenge.

I will openly stand up and say that i’d pay a fee for a product that offers phone support. When a product that you’ve been using breaks, it sucks when you can’t get help. You’re stuck with all your documents or info in random spots and there’s nothing you can do until someone responds.

ok, i’m talking about Google, yes the dearly loved Google that i have praised for acquiring writely, our collaboration tool of choice. Google, meet customer service 2.0….yup, that’s what i’m saying. (You’d make millions if you actually had someone we could call) Why can’t we call you? Why don’t you respond to our silly forms that we spend so much time filling out…why oh why are you making us so crazy. I hate to complain, but it’s been three days and still no reply….. “

I feel the pain … been there, done that.  As a user, I completely agree.  But let’t look at reality, it’ simply not economically feasible to offer phone support to millions of free users.  Support is costly and somebody has to pay for it.

That said, there are companies that excel in supporting their free product, but guess what, their name does not start with G* … not even with Y* … a good example is Z*.   As in Zoho.  I am using several of their products: they all have a “feedback” feature built right in the menu bar.  Typical response time is hours or less; I’ve had 10 minutes, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced more than 2-3 hours.  I seriously doubt you can ask for more with free products.

 

Filed Under: Business, Customer Service ·
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Vista Startup Sound – Blind Ignorance

Posted on August 24, 2006 ·

(Updated)
Vista beta testers mad about forced startup sound – reported Robert Scoble yesterday.  What several testers observed was that the Windows startup sign can not be turned off.   Naive me, this is how I tried to calm down the “mad users” in a comment:

“Oh, for God’s sake it can’t possibly be by design… It’s a beta, and with Microsoft’s so-called stable products being so buggy, what do you expect? Just be happy it doesn’t force an automatic reboot every 30 minutes :-)“

Yeah, right. Today the story continues, as Robert interviewed  “Steve Ball, group program manager for the Windows Audio Video Excellence team (basically, the team that builds the stuff that plays audio and video in Windows).”   Wow, thank God they have an entire team for that!  But it gets better: they hired famous guitarist Robert Fripp for the job.  Geez, just give me a machine that boots fast and doesn’t crash, I’ll get my music on my own! yell

And here’s the best part from Steve Ball:

“This will be a non-customizable sound, and that’s been part of the plan for Windows Vista for many months, he said.
However, the plan might change and Steve Ball is reading all the feedback, both on blogs, and in the newsgroups for beta testers, and his team is considering all of this stuff and still has not made final decisions (although they’ve spent a lot of time already arguing this stuff out and are heading down a path of making this a non-customizable sound that can’t be turned off, just like the Xbox has today).

“Why the hell would you want to do this in the first place?” he told me is a common question.”

Wow. If he really can’t think of a reason, how about  this:  has it ever occurred to anyone that some of us Microsoft-slaves might just wake up in the wee hours and want to work (i.e. turn on the computer) without waking up the family?

I am fuming… this is yet another case of product-focused thinking ignoring users. cry

Update (8/24):  Here’s another scenario, from a comment to Scoble’s blog:

“I really hope this isn’t true. If it is, we’ll never deploy Windows Vista in a clinical environment or care setting. We currently have Windows 2000 PCs running in very sensitive care environments that need constant reboots — if the system is forcing the startup sound to play, regardless of other settings, that could be very disruptive to a care environment without us have to take unnecessary steps to mitigate the noise. Microsoft, _think_ about your users not yourselves!”

Another commenter sums it up perfectly:

“Microsoft is still doing what Microsoft does best, telling their customers that Microsoft owns their computer and not them.”

Better yet, just watch this video.

Also read Silence is Golden by Michael Parekh.

Update (9/23): Microsoft listens, after all, says Scoble.  They are making the sound optional.

 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Customer Service, Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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AOL Heads Roll: I Wish All My Predictions Came True This Fast

Posted on August 21, 2006 ·

The AOL Clusterfuck (pardon my French, I couldn’t resist quoting Mike) became a significant milestone for my blog.  All I did was browse around on a Sunday afternoon, when everybody else (i.e. sane people) was probably outdoors.  I sensed something big, and as such, my piece, AOL Just Did the Unthinkable – Boycott AOL? was one of the first (the second, to be exact) to report the AOL fiasco.

It got on TechMeme, Reddit and a number of secondary aggregators – that lazy Sunday evening saw 3,5K visitors , and Monday about 11K.  (That free bandwidth upgrade from BlogHarbor came just in time, thanks, John). I got quoted in mainstream publications, even in the #1 newsportal in Hungary, and received a voicemail from a WSJ journalist.  The reader-invasion dropped since then, and settled at double what I had before.  What can I say… it still was a cl*** (OK, I am not gonna repeat it), but hey, thank you, AOL.

As for the prediction, here’s a quote from my original piece:

“Update #1 (8/6): I’m going out on a limb here with this prediction: as they realize the magnitude of what they did (or if they don’t, due to the PR nightmare) AOL will apologize, the fingerpointing starts and heads will roll. They will remove the download link. Not before anyone who wanted the data will have obtained it though.”

Let’s see:

  • Apology happened the day after
  • Download link was removed the same day, within hours
  • Heads are rolling now

Now that its’ proven I have the magic power, I need to be careful what I predict next: something to do with my career, financial status, marital status… ?  Oh, well, predicting is a lot of work 🙂

Update (8/21):  Enterprise 2.0 is deleted from Wikipedia, but Clusterfuck has an entry. What the f..  cluster:-)

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Customer Service, Humor, Technology ·
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