Archive for January, 2009
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
In an effort to increase efficiency, Nielsen has removed the “Reply to All” button from Outook. From Techcrunch:
…Nielsen management, after years of research, has finally come up with an adequate solution to cluttered e-mail inboxes and inefficiency in office environments: control-deleting the reply-to-all button from the messaging software…
…In a memo, republished by Folio, Andrew Cawood, Chief Information Officer for Nielsen Company, writes that the measure will “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”…
But is this really the reason for the change?
…About half a year ago Mitchell Habib, Executive Vice President at Nielsen, managed to accidentally cc all Nielsen employees in a reportedly arrogant note to another employee, ending his e-mail with the now famous-in-certain-circles punch line “Who do you work for, and why do you think copying me on this is appropriate?”.
I suspect that particular blunder led to this strange situation.
Perhaps an e-mail etiquette class and paying more attention to what you’re doing would have been a more graceful solution. Though as was stated in some of the comments, I’ve seen the “Reply to All” button bring corporate mail servers to their knees on more than one occassional even leading to a termination in one case.
Posted in Randy Weber, conspiracy, corporate life, e-mail, humor, work | No Comments »
Friday, January 30th, 2009
As I said earlier, the Apple TV is a breeze to setup. I’ve since loaded all of my music onto it. It took forever to load 65GB of tunes via Wi-Fi. But it’s done and it looks and sounds great. It operates pretty much just like Front Row on my Mac mini. So it’s a keeper. I’ve disconnected my mini from the TV and taken it downstairs to the office where it will replace my ancient mini-ITX project PC. My next step is to load my photos onto the Apple TV. Then I’m going to try out Boxee.
Posted in Apple, Randy Weber, gadgets, personal, reviews, video | No Comments »
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
I’m setting up my new Apple TV today to replace my Mac mini in my entertainment center. So far, it’s been a breeze to get it connected to my mini and to get it on my wireless network. I’ll let you know more once it’s all set up.
Posted in Apple, Randy Weber, gadgets, personal, reviews, video | No Comments »
Monday, January 19th, 2009
Great German food and great live Jazz. You can read my review on Yelp.
Posted in Alameda, Randy Weber, local, music, restaurants, reviews | No Comments »
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
We talked about excellent customer service on 1/17. Here’s the flip-side.
We all make mistakes but doing things that are plainly unethical, that’s different. I found this on CrunchGear. Here’s what happened:
A site called The Daily Background found evidence that Belkin Bizdev guy, Michael Bayard, is paying folks 65 cents to write good things about Belkin routers.
Here’s Belkin’s response (also from CrunchGear):
We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.
We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.
I wouldn’t say that they fixed the problem. Yeah, they got rid of the reviews but they didn’t mention firing the employee (which I think should be a given for something this stupid and blatantly unethical), nor did they mention refunds for customers that may have purchased the products based on the false reviews.
The moral of the story – be careful what you do on the Internet.
Posted in Belkin, Internet biz, amazon.com, customer service, ethics, gadgets, marketing, pr, reviews | No Comments »
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
Why do people go to work at Google? Why do they stay at Google? Why do they leave Google? Here’s an interesting take on this from former Google employees allegedly taken from a private Google Group set up by Google to understand why people leave. Posted on TechCrunch.
Here are the recurring themes:
- excessively long hiring process
- below market pay
- poor management
- decreasing benefits
But it wasn’t all bad. Many former Googlers chimed in about having a good experience.
I know both current and former Googlers that fall on both side – some love it, some hate it.
It’s long, but an interesting read.
Posted in Internet biz, google | No Comments »
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you admit it, apologize for it, and fix it. This is a great example from Hulu on doing just that found at 37signals:
This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.
Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…
Well done.
Posted in Hulu, Internet biz, customer service, leadership, marketing, pr, video | No Comments »
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
This little tidbit adds some color to my earlier comments on Google products that make money and how many of their products are “also-ran’s.” This comes from Search Engine Land:
Google’s announced they’re closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of an already continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor.
Ouch! At least they know when it’s time to pull the plug.
Posted in Internet biz, google, product management | No Comments »
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
OK, I get it. Data centers use a lot of energy. Google has a lot of data centers. The energy they use is allocated across the searches performed. So what am I supposed to do about this? The Times Online which published this story was pretty short on answers. Thanks for nothing…and the guilt trip.
Posted in Randy Weber, World Wide Weber, environment, google, search, worldwideweber | No Comments »
Friday, January 9th, 2009
From Silicon Alley Insider:
After holding steady for most of 2008, Yahoo’s share of all search engine advertisers dropped like a rock in October, November and December — plummeting from 30.4% to 19.4% at the end of Q4, according to search marketing firm AdGooroo.
How do you explain this? Everyone else is gaining share and they’re losing it. This is very sad to see. I’ve always liked Yahoo!
Posted in Microsoft, Randy Weber, World Wide Weber, advertising, google, search, worldwideweber, yahoo | No Comments »
