Category Archives: Technology (General)

Writings on technology that is not laptop or smartphone related.

MobileMe Could Make Me a Convert

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I honestly haven’t been paying that much attention. As we develop FastFigures as a web-based service rather than a native application, it has taken a lot of the pressure off when it comes to the hardware. What’s new and what’s different about the hardware gets munched down to a “what changed in the browser?” question instead.

So I wasn’t paying great attention to the iPhone announcements yesterday. But something did catch my eye: the announcement of MobileMe.

Here’s the bottom line: sort, search, modify, create and move contacts, calendars and emails and they show up on all your computers — Mac, Windows, web and iPhone — at the same time with all the same information without synchronizing anything. If you are familiar, this is what Exchange does in the enterprise. Of course, most of us aren’t in the enterprise so Exchange does us no good.

I have been dying for this solution. I love the web-based calendaring and emailing coupled with auto-sync locally. For my money, I could even care less if it shows up locally – just give me the web tools.

Apple’s price is $100 per year for a single person or $150 per year for a family of 4, basically $8 to $12 per month. It also comes with a place to store data files and photos.

There are shortcomings at this point, from what I could tell. What happened to Task syncing and notepad syncing, for instance? For that matter, what happened to tasks altogether? I still don’t see a Tasks application with the iPhone and nothing in the screen shots indicated it was integrated with the calendar, which is where it should be anyway.

So would MobileMe get me to switch to AT&T and buy an iPhone? It gets me closer. Fix the task list issues and it would make me reconsider.

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.]

Beating A Dead Horse: Mobile Web, Mobile Web, Mobile Web

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I am starting to see this message everywhere: mobile web development is the future. This time it is market analysis firm ABI Research:

“Ultimately, the long-term trend away from native applications to web-based applications means browser and web services engines will be increasingly important components in the mobile environment.”

Michael Mace has talked about it at length, I have mentioned this on more than one occasion. It’s happening.

Photoshop Online: Web Apps, More Proof!

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More proof that Internet-based applications are finally arriving: Adobe jumps in with a scaled down version of Photoshop. (Read the announcement at Information Week.)

This follows on the heals of Intuit’s release of Quicken Online in early March. I talked about this trend in December, 2007 (read the article). It is a very important trend. As I said then and will repeat now, as big companies move online, suddenly the entire web-world has an air of legitimacy.

I started writing software for Palm handhelds in 1997 and, as they reached what I thought was critical mass in 2000, I kept waiting for the big boys to come on board and write applications. Intuit never did — they outsourced. Microsoft did with Office products but only because of the OS play. I expected to see name-brand companies, both aimed at business and gaming, writing portable versions of their software. It never happened.

So when I start seeing Adobe and Intuit, two of the biggest names in the desktop world writing web applications, I know we are not too far from main-stream web-based applications. It gives credibility to all of us looking in that direction. And it shows that the web can be used for more than looking things up and social networking.

Apple: Ego and Elegance

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I have struggled lately with Apple. For one, I am completely intrigued by the company and their products. On the other, I am completely scared of them.

Before I explain this comment, let me tell you how Mac vested I am. Not much, actually. The only Apple equipment I currently own is an iPod, and at that their low priced Shuffle, which does the trick for me because I am deathly afraid of breaking the screen and this one doesn’t have an LCD display. I have owned two of these, the first and second generation models. The first did the trick but after a while didn’t function correctly. I am soon in the market for a new laptop, however, and am intrigued by the Macs.

Apple poses a strange juxtaposition for me, as I started to say before. For one, I am completely intrigued by the company. It’s hype is amazing. More importantly, though, its design and software is unbelievable. There are very few companies who do this well and, frankly, it is very hard to do. I have often thought about interesting consumer electronic products but it is such a difficult market for a start-up. Apple’s form and function is through the roof. It works well and is sexy as all get-out, a killer combination for consumer electronics companies.

On the other hand, Apple scares me. If the egos there are this big with 7% market share, what would it be like if they had Microsoft’s share? I hate to think of that beast.

I mentioned earlier that my first iPod stopped working correctly after a while. It would forget its shuffle spot if I turned it off, making me start at the top of the play list again. I found a number of references to the problem on the web and no fix, just work arounds. Nothing from Apple, though. No acknowledgment of the problem, no fix for it, nothing. The device wasn’t even a year old when it started happening. Apple’s response, which you can’t email them anyway without paying them, was buy version 2.

But here I am, knowing that Apple will treat me this way, and still looking at a laptop from them. Ugh… I must be crazy to help feed that ego!