Author Archives: Elia Freedman

Seeing Bubbles

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We have put two bubbles behind us over the last seven years, the web/tech bubble that took out both Internet 1.0 and set mobile computing back five years, and real estate/easy capital bubble that sent all our house prices into the tank.

But we are an irrationally exuberant society. So in its place must form a new bubble, a new fad, if you will. And while I am not particularly happy about identifying this one, as I think it’s a very good thing, it is starting to feel like a bubble.

What bubble, you ask? Well, this one’s a color… green.

The green movement bubble is starting to get out of hand. There are funds developing simply for green technology. There are retail stores devoted only to green products. There are companies popping up everywhere to take advantage of your guilt.

To be honest, this one makes me sad. It has been a long time coming that we, as a country, focused on sustainable living. I have been saying for years that our priorities around gasoline consumption should be considered a national security threat and we should be funding a move off that standard. When I was in college 12 years ago I wrote a paper saying $3/gallon gasoline would be the tipping point. I was close. It looks like $4/gallon will be it (12 years of inflation?).

But retail stores? How do you compete when everyone else has green clothing in their stores, too? And tech funds devoted to planting trees for every mile driven all funded out of personal guilt? I think it’s difficult to sustain.

Don’t get me wrong — it will be a good ride for a while. And great things will come of it. The tech bubble ushered in an era that made shopping easier and music digital and company marketing more manageable and trackable. Infinity Softworks wouldn’t exist if the only place to buy software was in retail. And the housing bubble increased home ownership substantially and made credit affordable to a lot of people that couldn’t get credit before.

Here’s hoping we get lots of excellent advancements before this green bubble pops.

Doing The Right Thing

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If you didn’t catch this amazing story about the softball player who injured her knee after hitting her first career home run, check it out. She was so excited when she reached first that she missed the bag and ripped her ACL when she tried to stop. She couldn’t walk let alone run the bases and, as rules go, her own team couldn’t help. So two players from the opposing team, a team that was fighting for their playoff lives, picked her up and carried her around the bases. Home run!

Too often, it is easy to do what is expedient and not what’s right. Too often, it’s easy to do what benefits me no matter the impact on them.

Business, like sports, is a lot like this. It can be us win and them lose. It would have been easy for the opposing team to leave her there with a single. Hey, that’s the breaks after all. That’s how the game is played. No one said anything when the ump missed the call at second. What goes around comes around.

Except what goes around comes around in both directions. I can only guess how much good mojo these two opposing players picked up with that one. And I can only hope that my two young girls grow up to be the kinds of people who would pick an opposing player up and carry her around the bases.

Email Is Not Communication

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I was once fired via email.

On my first day of college after transferring to Pacific University here in Oregon, I decided I needed a new computer. So I went down to the campus store and found a woman struggling mightily with managing the store. She was all alone and the orders were just pouring in. I thought here is a situation where my business abilities and organizational skills could help, so I volunteered.

Over the next couple of weeks, everything calmed down and between the two of us, everyone got their computers and the phones got answered. Over time, the store started looking like a financial success for the University and I got to pitch the Finance Provost (CFO) the financials of the “company” and show why it should get further funding.

Success! We did and it got me work study and got us an additional full-time employee.

Well, everything went well for a while and then I started to sense a disconnect between me and the woman I worked for. While we had been friendly before, she now barely talked to me.

And that’s when the email came in that, because of the extra money and this new employee, my services were no longer needed.

While I was upset, it taught me a very valuable lesson. When I really want to communicate with someone I better do it face to face, even when it would seem email is easier. See: email isn’t communication. It’s me telling someone else and then them telling me something back. Communication is about feeding off each other to come to a mutual understanding.

So when I read this post over at 37Signals this morning, it reminded me of this story. As Osmo Wiio points out, in any communication there are multiple ways to interpret it. This only gets worse when you can’t see the communicator at the same time.

Summing Up Economic Woe

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I was going to write today about the mortgage mess, the credit crunch, various government rebates and hand-outs, but decided that this sign summed things up for me better (found here, here and here):

Maybe we actually get what we deserve. After all, if some of us are too dumb to do a Google or Wikipedia search before re-writing history, why should we expect that people would understand the concept of interest and time value of money, why should we expect that people would understand that you can’t perpetually finance homes when you only have to pay interest, and why should we expect companies to actually manage risk when that is what they are in the business to do.

Tech Support: Key Indicator of Company Success

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I hate lousy tech support. At Infinity Softworks, we work really hard to provide fast, prompt responses that solve the customer’s problem. So when I experience bad tech support somewhere else, it is really glaring.

I have been using Yahoo! Mail for years for my personal email. Lately, a bunch of my regular emails have been redirected to the Spam folder. Mind you, it is all kinds of mail, stuff like personal emails from friends as well as newsletters from companies that used to go to my inbox and now to my spam folder. On top of that, Yahoo’s spam filtering software ignores me. When I say a message isn’t spam, it always throws the next message from the same person and email address back in the spam folder. Annoying!

So I finally emailed Yahoo! to tell them that this is going on and see if they had any suggestions. This is the response I got less than 24 hours later:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care. We like to provide you with fast, efficient support. And the best way to get straight to your issue (and to get it resolved!) is to start from a topic in Yahoo! Mail Help that’s similar to the problem you’re experiencing.

So, please take a moment to browse Yahoo! Mail Help for a question like yours:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/

If the answer doesn’t clear up the issue, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Contact Us” to open a form where you can write to us about what’s going on. Please be detailed and give us as much information as you can about your issue.

Thanks! With your help, we can get Yahoo! Mail working for you as quickly as possible.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail.

Regards,

(name removed to protect the guilty)
Yahoo! Customer Care

Now, I’m a smart guy and know how to use the web. If I had found an answer on their site, I probably would have tried it first and told them I tried it. And it’s not like they knew there was a solution to the problem otherwise they would have directed me right to it.

This gives me a key piece of insight into Yahoo’s struggles. I find companies that give good technical support do well and those that don’t are either on the rocks or about to be. Yahoo used to give good support. Dell, too, used to be one of those companies with great support until about four years ago, right before the company started struggling. A trend? I think so.

So here’s my hint for understanding whether a company is worth buying from or not. Next time you want to know whether a product or service is worth it, send support an email message. Not sales, who are programmed to give you answers so they can get your money, but support, the folks who you will interact with once the company has less motivation to help you. Do you get a response in a reasonable amount of time? Do you get an answer to your question? Is the response kind and courteous? If it is all of these things, no matter what the question, then that company is worth working with.

If they can’t do this bare minimum in two tries or less, move on.

[Note: I sent a response back to Yahoo! asking them to try again. The second time I got an answer back on the issue, one that would solve the problem. As I mentioned above, I usually give a company a mulligan on the first one. After all, everyone has a bad day every once in a while.]