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Technology Companies. We Hate You.
Weekend Mission: Buy a laptop for your mother who knows nothing of computers.
This story is crazy. But it's true.
- Best Buy Follies - Find a notebook you want for her at Best Buy. Wait 30 minutes while the salesguy chats up a cute girl who has no intention of buying anything. Show him what you want. Listen to 10-minute pitch for things you don't need. Best part? For 80 bucks the Geek Squad will remove all of the crap that comes pre-installed on the computer. So they charge me for the computer, then charge me to get rid of stuff that comes on the computer.
Listen to him talk up the machine, how sound and what a good choice I made. Seconds later, listen to the same guy tell you how these notebooks could crap out at any minute, and I'd better be sure to pay extra for the extended warranty. Leave with dignity still intact.
- Norton Noose - While at Best Buy, purchase Norton 360, top-of the-line edition. Come home. Install Norton on new notebook. At the same time, purchase a renewal for Norton on an old desktop nearby. The online purchase gets you Norton 360 Version 3.0. The out-of-the-box premium purchase at Best Buy gets you Norton 360 Version 2.0. Apply Live Update, hoping that the system will upgrade to the latest version. Nope. Because you bought the box copy, you get an old version of their software. They do not upgrade you to the latest version of their software the first time you activate your product! Upgrading is an additional cost. Use some profanity.
- Microsoft Molestation - Got a new system for a person who has never used computers before? Might be a good idea to image or backup the hard drive so, god forbid, they screw something up you can go back to square one. Hunt around on Vista Premium for the Backup and Restore applet. You know it has to be in there somewhere, right?
Wrong. Microsoft doesn't include backup and restore functionality for Vista Premium. Why would you ever need to backup a computer system, anyway? So you go online to purchase an imaging program. Chalk up an extra 50 bucks.
- Office Offal - Install Microsoft Office. What with Vista upgrades and Office upgrades, you're easily pushing 500MB or more in updates and patches that need to be applied. Wait around while necessary patches are installed.
- HughesNet Hassles - But wait! There's more! After a short while, HughesNet puts your account on restricted status. Seems like you've violated their "Fair Use Policy". Lookup what that means.
"Fair Use", in HughesNet terms, is anything over 200MB for a family in a single day. 200MB! That's freaking un-satisfactory! HughesNet is kind enough to explain that you should never need more than that unless you are running a web server, doing file sharing, downloading movies, or any other sort of subversive behavior. Mom and pop users should be just fine with 200MB. HughesNet is a lying sack of cow manure. And didn't it use to be 500MB, anyway?
- HughesNet Customer Service - So you call HughesNet. Two hours later, you find out that, yes, it used to be 500MB, but now, "fair" means 200MB. How about that business account you had last year with the 1.5GB daily limit? Oh sure, they still can do that -- for 700 bucks you can get a business account, with a 800MB cap per day.
"But we have a new satellite," the lady says, "it's really fast"
That's what you told me last year! What? Do you get new satellites every year? Or is "we have a new satellite" just a way to ease the pain of screwing your helpless customers out of more money for less service?
- Amazon is Awesome - Finally, order some videos and instructional materials for mom online. Amazon is point, click, badda boom, badda bing. You're done. Totally awesome.
- Shipping Silliness - Finish computer. Take it to the UPS store. While it takes $15 bucks for a tech company to ship the same computer to you, pay over $40 to ship it to mom. Welcome to "consumer" pricing.
Each of these, by themselves, are probably tolerable. Put together, however, and a troubling trend develops.
Technology companies: Sprint, HughesNet, Microsoft, Apple, BestBuy, etc, have you over a barrel. Most times they have locked out other competitors in their space and you're a trapped buyer. Don't want high-speed satellite internet and live in the boonies? What are you going to do, anyway? Use carrier pigeons and CDs? Don't want Vista and Office? What are your options? Teaching mom Linux? Good luck finding the "Video Professor Teaches Linux for new computer users" series.
As the economy gets worse, and as these monopolies gain more control, you'll see a lot more predatory pricing practices. Want to change service plans? You'll be forced to sign a new contract. More and more companies will do their best to get into a monthly billing arrangement where they can slowly suck you dry. Norton just isn't an anti-virus program anymore: it's a suite of tools that you pay a yearly fee for using. Everybody wants more and more money, and they want it on a regular basis -- not just one-time fees.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise that technology companies are so bad -- after all, they are far removed from the customer. They have a monopoly. It used to be Microsoft was the whipping boy here, but it's gotten that way in multiple sectors. If the directors of these companies had to face John Q. Public everyday and dish this stuff out, perhaps things would be different.
Perhaps.
Now I'm headed to a much better place, the airport. There's a lot better customer service there.
I like how you threw the obligatory "Sprint" mention in your rant, although I fail to see how they fit into your story. Maybe if you had a 3G card rather than HughesNet you'd be singing a different tune...? Sure, 5GB monthly cap, but only $59.99 rather than $189.99 for speeds comparable to HughesNet.
You can always use OpenOffice instead of MS Office.
There are a few things you can do.
1. I have bought two notebooks and a desktop from Dell in the last 18 months, and all have been loaded with Windows XP (two with Pro). If you have to deal with Vista, there are ways to remove the performance-degrading graphical dross. Oh, and buying on-line/by-phone enables you to get notebooks with non-glossy lcd panels (a big plus for me). I am pretty sure that HP/Compaq, Lenovo, and Toshiba have product lines that allow the same type of purchase as Dell: rule of thumb - avoid the consumer lines ... made for college students.
2. Use the freeware antivirus software. I use AntiVir and AVG, but Avast is also good enough. They all can be downloaded easily, and at least the ones that I use update flawlessly. And a bonus: both check your drive when you desire, not on daily boot-up as Symantec does, and the scans can be set to low priority where, I swear, Symantec's is high priority only. This alone will decrease your effective boot time significantly.
3. I don't know why your mom needs an office suite - mine doesn't use one. For email, use Mozilla Thunderbird, preferably in IMAP, and for writing notes use one of the freeware text editors or step up to AbiWord or even WordPad. Does she really need Excel or PowerPoint?
The use of Word for attaching notes to email is a pet peeve of mine. Just this week I received a Word attachment containing the single word Brazil: six characters. If typed as the email body, this note would have been sent as a single packet of perhaps 1500 bytes. But the Word document itself was 10000 bytes. A colossal waste of bandwidth by someone who didn't know any better.
3. When I have set up (and cleaned up) a new system, I clone the drive with a freeware program called Clonezilla. This will write a compressed image of the drive to a USB hard drive: my 160GB disks compressed to about 8-12GB sizes. If needed, you can restore the image from the USB drive easily: I use this software to image newly purchased groups of PCs at work.
There's nothing to be done about networking away from cities, but with a little planning the need for bandwidth can be minimized. If you live outside of town but work in town, you may be able to download the Windows' service packs and burn them to cd/dvd, or you can perhaps ask someone to do this for you (providing a list to save them time). I do this for acquaintances periodically myself.
Justin,
Actually I already have a Sprint card, which I use on my notebook. I've got basically dial-up speeds, since the local towers haven't been upgraded.
I like Sprint -- the part where they overcharge me, the part where I have no recourse. Try this one on for size http://redtape.msnbc.com/ I can also tell you about the time I asked for a second line for my corporate account -- and it took a dozen phone calls, six or seven hours of my time, and two weeks to accomplish. I've been Sprint customer for 4 or 5 years now. I like them, but "like" in this context is an extremely relative term.
Bandwidth providers are in a tough spot: they're basically out to sell you the least amount of bandwidth for the highest price they can get.
Thanks Gabe.
I might do that next time.
Awesome post Stephen, thanks.
You're the guy I should have spoken to before starting my weekend project!
Thanks for the information. I plan on lifting it and using it in the future as my own idea :)
So, I put my parents computers on Ubuntu. They've got firefox, thunderbird, openoffice - everything they need. If you partition the disk with one root partition and one home partition, you can always do a new install without harming their personal data, in case one of the OS upgrades doesn't go smoothly.
They get all the latest security updates and can apply them themselves, free. They get a freshly updated OS and suite of programs, tested to work together, every six months, free. When they plug in a digital camera, it prompts them through the upload process. YouTube works.
What can I say - I see no reason for the normal non-technical user to be paying for desktop software. If your hobby is gaming, composing music, photography - there is a case to be made, although often free software will do the job. But for email/web/office stuff, free software is not only adequate, it's qualitatively better.
Loved the post Daniel - classic 21st century tale - and it won't get any better anytime soon I fear.
Keep up the writing - loving it.
Thanks Kurt!
That was the easy part. This coming weekend is the hard part -- introducing mom to the world of computers and the internet.
Hey -- how hard could it be?
I'm sure the world wants to know how the introducing the computer world to your mom part came out!
Classic post Daniel ! It lists all the headache's I've been through at various time. How did it go introducing your mother to the internet ?
Hi Rajiv,
Let's just say that learning to use the computer is not very easy! Mom didn't know things like what's a mouse, how to point a mouse, how to click a button. I would say something like "Click the 'OK' button, mom" and she would start looking on the physical keyboard -- to her 'click a button' means there is a real, live button somewhere!
I was really amazed at all of the user interface conventions that we take for granted -- buttons, windows, taskbar, etc. I think it is going to take a while for mom to get up to speed.
So what we did was: create a step-by-step list for starting up the computer, logging on, connecting to the internet, checking her email, and shutting down. Then I had her practice it 3 times a day. (No slacking, mom!)
I think she understood those simple steps enough -- she is now able to check and read our email. Next step is to get her to watch the "Video Professor" "Learning Vista" series. I sure hope she will take the time to do this, but it's not going to be easy.