Verizon gives us another lesson in how to mislead the customer

Again, it's 2008. The bait and switch; the false promise; the misleading information; the obvious trickster tactics; do they even work anymore? Are they even worth it when there is this thing called blogging that is becoming more and more popular?

Then again, cable and phone companies have such a bad reputation that they probably think they can't really get any deeper into the gutter.

This is me finding out about FiOS - the Verizon very-high-speed internet service:

"Hmm, FiOS. Heard that before somewhere else, didn't know it was available. How fast is it? Really, that fast, omg! How much? What, are you joking, $40/month? For the cut-down version right? The whole enchilada? Wow!! Is it available in my area? You can check on the web? - me going to www.google.com, entering in "verizon FiOS" as a search, finding the FiOS "check area" site, entering in my address, waiting for some (pointless) graphics to scroll, and find out that...


First reaction: OMG it's available! Verizon, I love you!

Second reaction: Wait, what's that fine print?

Third reaction: new google search, "how to carpet bomb verizon headquarters"

I mean, come on? What deluded piece of marketing pulp decided that blurting out in loud red colors that Verizon High Speed (that's DSL, so it's worse than what I have now) is available after someone just searched for (life changing) FiOS? Which isn't available.

It's the marketing equivalent of shouting, "here, have this for free, NOT! - you lose!".

Brand commitment/affinity/love, whatever you want to call it, doesn't erode slowly. It's lost in an instant with pranks like this.

There is no excuse.

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Sweating the small stuff when conveying information

It's an absolute must to sweat the small stuff when conveying information - any information.

I just came across this from the Microsoft Performance Point site. It's a description of the different system requirements for the Performance Point product.

Try to figure out if the Planning Business Modeler and the Monitoring Server have the same hardware requirements? Impossible, right? Or at least extremely hard.

This is either multiple pages or an inventive dynamic page. It's not a long list of thin columns.

Yes it's only one page out of many, and yes, they are only system requirements. But it's the small stuff you have to sweat. This one pages speaks volumes as to how difficult the help system is probably going to be, or how difficult it will be to find help full-stop.

It's the extra 10% of effort to produce an easily readable page that counts. Without it the other 90% is wasted. Yes that sucks. But that's just how it is.

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You can't be serious?

I just had to mention this news story that popped up this morning. It looks like Kolcraft (makers of various baby gear) is pulling some of its playpens from the market. A 10 month old apparently choked himself to death while playing in one.

Now normally the odds of this sort of thing happening are low - these guys make baby products and are obviously interested in keeping them safe. In this case though, it's amazing this is the first incident. If you look at a picture of one of these playpens, it essentially has a noose hanging in its center!

In the picture below, imagine the strap on the top flipped over to hang into the pen when the top basket is removed (there was actually a picture of it hanging down on TV but I couldn't find one online).


It boggles the mind that the guy who designed this didn't think about the possible ramifications of a loose noose-like strap hanging in the middle of a baby's play area! They should have just labeled it the 'playpen of death' and had a pit of crocodiles to remove the lifeless body come as an accessory.

This is one of those cases where you can obviously see the problem with hindsight, but still fail to imagine, without hindsight, how the issue was missed.

It's the sort of thing I dread happening with our software product - some serious design flaw that is a major game-breaker. Of course, we won't be killing babies so the stakes are a bit lower.

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