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Helping UPS

I think UPS needs help finding my place, so I’ve printed a map for them:

ups map

They obviously don’t have a map and are trying to deliver my package from Amazon by way of Sacramento, or perhaps a nice coastal trip up to Seattle and back.  That’s the only logical explanation for them to schedule delivery for June 22nd, when the package arrived in San Pablo on June 17th.

Now, with my map they know I’m only 41 miles away.  And I feel good, having saved them all that extra gas.  🙂

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I Stole the HTC Incredible for $99. OMG.

Wow, talk about luck, apparently I caught a discount that barely existed for hours.  I’ve long waited for a decent smartphone available @ Verizon, be it the iPhone, Nexus One or whatever else … so raving reviews of the HTC Incredible certainly did not leave me cold. Still somewhat hesitating, I started to look for deals.  Verizon offers the new superphone for $199 with a two-year contract, but I’ve quickly quickly found some outlets selling it for $149. Then it occurred to me I should check my new default shopping destination, Amazon.  Bingo!

htc 99

I could not resist the $99 price, so I quickly ordered it.  This morning I wondered why people are saying Amazon sells it for $149 … a quick check on the pricing:

htc 149

Wow – was the $99 an introductory promotion ( not that they needed it, the first shipment sold out in hours), or an honest mistake by Amazon?  I don’t know, but am certainly happy that I grabbed it while it lasted 🙂

Now, if only HTC had a better name for it: saying HTC Droid Incredible is quite a mouthful – compared to the elegant simplicity (simple elegance?) of just saying iPHone.  Perhaps they should follow this advice:

If you have the audacity to name your new smartphone Incredible, it had darn well better live up to its name. Based on the reviews from CNET, LAPTOP magazine, PC Magazine, and PC World, the new HTC Droid Incredible does just that. In fact, the Android 2.1-based Verizon phone ($200 with two-year contract) could just as well be named Awesome. Stupefying. Maybe even OMG.

OMG.  I like it.  Now, please, Holy Amazon, just ship it soon.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Amazon is Female ( No Surprise) and Has a Name

Other than pimping Amazon, she also owns a Mexican Wholesale company and a football team in Texas – at least that’s what new Social CRM plugin Rapportive tells me:

Amazon

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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Brand vs. Quality. Which Would You Pay For?

Time to re-evaluate just what we consider “good brands” vs. junk.

I could not resist the summer back-to-school discounts and upgraded two laptops – one of them is already making funny noises. Tired already?   It’s an HP.  Perhaps just a co-incidence –  but my desktop monster, just two years old has long been pretending it was a turbine – at least in terms of the unhealthy hard disk whining it makes.  Oh, it’s an HP, too.  Noticed it while under warranty, but did not have any desire to deal with HP Support again. So be it.

Of course I had not seen this report before those purchases.  Yes, shocking as it is, every fourth HP laptop fails within three years.

malfunctionrate

That’s awful.  My personal experience prior to the recent purchases has been a lot better.  I can’t possibly recall how many computers I’ve had since the mid-80’s, but not one of them died on me. They slowly became obsolete – like the trusted old Sony after 7 years or so.

But there’s another name worth paying attention to: Asus.  They had been manufacturing component for PC makers, but were not exactly a household name until they emerged out of nowhere riding the netbook-wave.  And wow – look at the stats: the formerly no-name “cheap Chinese” (actually Taiwanese) laptops have become #1 in reliability. So just who has a better brand now?  Or: would you rather pay for brand or quality?

win7packsOh, before I forget.. as they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s one of the three Windows 7 Upgrade packages waiting to be installed.

Amazon mailed the retail version in proper packaging on October 22nd, Win& Launch Day.
Sony took their time, they were 3 weeks late, but it still came in a decent plastic box.
HP?  Over a month late, 2 DVD’s stuck in one paper sleeve.  Reminds me of the tech-savvy admin assistant from the mid-80s who happily reported she overcame the technical difficulties, and finally managed to stick the 5.25” floppy disk in the drive.  Too bad it already had one inside.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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Amazon, the World’s Default Shopping Destination (or is it Zamazon now?)

Capture Recently I wrote about PaaS by Amazon – an no, as much as we like thinking of Amazon as the the key Cloud Computing infrastructure provider, it wasn’t about Platform as a Service.  It was about Pasta as a Service.  Yes, I am buying Al Dente Carba-Nada as a subscription.

After all, before it become the uber-cloud-provider, Amazon started in retail – actually, as the company that revolutionized retail forever.

Do you know how many product search / comparison engines there are today?   I don’t.   A few years ago if I wanted to find something online, I probably used those comparison engines – then a funny thing happened.  I noticed that I would end up @ Amazon – direct or via a Marketplace vendor – anyway. Might as well stop wasting time…  nowadays I will still research major electronics, but for less than $100 purchases I will simply jump to Amazon.  They do not always have the best price, but often enough, and the convenience of shopping from a trusted source, safe delivery and excellent service (no-questions-asked refund when my netbook developed a problem)  makes it a no-brainer.

We’re also converting our real-world shopping to Amazon: would you spend a few hours driving around looking for a stupid little spare part, or just order it online, even if shipping makes it a few bucks more expensive?  (i.e. is two hours of your time worth $5?)  I’m clearly not the only one: the UPS truck, formerly rarely seen in residential areas makes its stops in my street every day now.  But back to Amazon, here’s a trick to save on shipping: a lot of products are eligible for Free Super Saver shipping when you spent $25. How many times did you search for a penny-item to buy when your total came to $24.19?   Add the non-immediate purchases to your “shopping list”, then bundle them with a larger purchase next time.

Another option to get free delivery and shave off an additional 15%: Subscribe and Save.  Who would have thought one day we’d be subscribing to groceries?   But it makes sense when it comes to regularly consumed items. I have subscriptions for tea,  sunscreen and several other products that are not easy to find in regular stores, I am using regularly, and the subscription price is favorable @ Amazon.  Subscription does not mean hard commitment: you can adjust the frequency of delivery, skip individual shipments, request immediate shipment and even cancel without any penalty (phone companies better pay attention!).

In short, Amazon has become my default vendor by good price and convenience.  With a few exceptions, and shoes were on of them – until today.  Zappos is (has been?) arguably the world’s best online source to buy shoes.

But it’s not primarily a shoe-seller.  It’s the Ultimate Customer Service company.  Shopping at Zappos means a few things:

  • best price (or close to it)
  • easy sizing
  • crowdsourced feedback
  • painless, no-hassles, free returns (two-way postage included)

In other words not only they have the largest inventory of shoes (the choice is actually overwhelming) they invented the formula for risk free, convenient shopping  – why even get in the car and go to shoe stores?

Well, now it’s all part of Amazon in a transaction just shy of $1 Billion.  Zappos CEO Toni Hsieh assured his employees and customers he would continue to run Zappos as it is.   I believe him – for now, since once again, Zappos is all about service.  They have a better model than Amazon, and would quickly lose customers if Amazon fully integrated them, applying their own (otherwise outstanding, just not Zappos-level) return policies.  And it’s not like there’s nowhere else to run: my personal favorite has been ShoeBuy, which may be a Zappos copy-cat, but it perfected the art: same service principles, and often slightly lower prices.

If Zappos blinks and becomes too Amazon-ized, ShoeBuy will thrive.  Otherwise they better watch out.  And oh..hm… I don’t want to be in the shoes (pun intended) of many current shoe-sellers on Amazon.

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(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Accessorize Your Algorithm, Amazon :-)

I think this email promo I’ve just received from Amazon after purchasing the replacement filters (first item shown) speaks for itself.  I guess if I had bought a kitchen sink or some furniture, they would offer a house as accessory.smile_regular

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Amazon’s PaaS with a Twist

If you think this is yet-another post on Platform as a Service, you’re wrong.   I’ll be talking about much simpler things here:

  • PaaS – Pasta as a Service
  • TaaS – Tea as a Service
  • GaaS – Groceries as a Service

No kidding.  Well, maybe a bit, but this is about real business – also the focus of a recent article by Fortune: Amazon’s next revolution, discussing the early days as Earth’s Biggest Bookstore, then moving on to other businesses, and now Kindle-izing our reading habits while revolutionizing the publishing industry.

So let’s talk about retail, from the consumers’ point of view, examining how Amazon changed our shopping habits and is on the way to becoming the default vendor for just about everything we buy.

Read on

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Amazon’s New Wine Business Already Obsolete

Amazon will soon start selling wine, reports the Financial Times.   Too bad it’s based on an obsolete model: physically shipping bulky goods.  It’s like shipping boxed software, when it’s available on the Net.  Or bulky books when it’s available on Amazon’s very own Kindle.

It’s time Amazon entered the 21st Century, the age of Waas: Wine as a Service.

(Watch the video here in case the embedded player does not work in your feed.)

 

Related posts: TechCrunch

 

 

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You Can’t Compare Technorati to Amazon

It’s rare that I get into a public debate with a fellow Enterprise Irregular, but today is the day:

Michael Krigsman at ZDNet’s Project Failures cites the stellar response by Technorati as exemplary customer communication at a time of system failure that Amazon should learn from.

True, Amazon did not shine (that’s an understatement) when S3 went down earlier today. I’m sure Amazon will work on not only improving infrastructure, but communication – like Salesforce.com did after their major outage, establishing an Health Monitor, reminds us Lassy Dignan at ZDNet.

True, Technorati was exceptionally forthcoming in that particular incident – but the emphasis is on exceptionally, which is why I would not set them as role model for quite a while. Infrastructure problems have been the constant state of affairs for Technorati for years, the Technorati Monster is still at large, and most of these problems have been swiped under the carpet. In fact when they recently removed old posts from their online index without any notification, they explicitly stated they hoped most users wouldn’t notice.

I salute Technorati on their new approach to transparency, if it holds – but they are very, very far from being a role model.smile_sad

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The Dawn of SaaS-on-SaaS – Even While Amazon S3 is Down.

TechMeme is great in threading together relevant posts, but is largely based (so I think…) on direct linking, so of course it could not auto-detect the ironic relationship between:

Phil quotes Greg Olsen, CTO of Coghead, a web-based development platform which moved its servers to the Amazon infrastructure recently:

“As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves”

“The move to SaaS applications built on SaaS is a much more profound shift than the move from on-premise applications to SaaS applications …”

“Ironically, some of the first victims of this new economy may be some pioneers of the software-as-a-service movement. Today, many established SaaS application providers are applying much more of their precious focus and capital to infrastructure issues than newer competitors that are aggressively utilizing service-based infrastructure … the build-it-all-ourselves SaaS application vendor … will ultimately end up as [an] anachronism.”

Today’s Amazon outage appears to rebuff Phil and Greg’s point. Reality check: this is the first time Amazon S3 went down, and it’s already back up. Salesforce.com had its fair share of outages, so did other SaaS providers, and so did just about any in-house systems companies run their own installed software on. I’m a big believer in focus, specialization and I trust the few mega-cloud companies that will emerge can maintain a more robust infrastructure than we could all do individually. (So yes, if it’s not obvious, I do buy into Nick Carr’s Big Switch concept.)

Another approach is to look at where value can be added: the consensus view from a quick Enterprise Irregulars chat is that infrastructure will be commoditized faster (or it already is) than software, where there is a lot more room for innovation by new and – thanks to outsourced infrastructure – smaller players.

And if acronyms were not ugly enough already, here’s to entering the age of SaaS-on-SaaS. smile_shades

Update: What better confirmation of my point than today’s rumors about EMC hosting  SAP’s system  – I assume it’s Business ByDesign, the new On-Demand offering for the SMB market. (Side-note: I’ll be traveling and be time and Internet-challenged for the next three weeks, but SAP’s BDD is one of the subjects I will come back, as it seems to be largely misunderstood. Oh, and I just love the fact how Mozy, my favorite online backup service is often referred to in the EMC story).

 

Related posts (on the Amazon outage): Rough Type, mathewingram.com/work, LinkFog, Data Center Knowledge, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, Moonwatcher, Project Failures, SmoothSpan Blog, Enterprise Anti-Matter.