Patrick's Rants

Nokia CEO under gun to justify Microsoft switch

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Investors have panned his shake-up strategy and employees are rankled. Now, Nokia Corp.’s Stephen Elop, the first non-Finn to lead the world’s largest maker of phones, is in a hurry to justify his decision to ditch the company’s smart-phone software in favor of a former employer’s, Microsoft.

He has a lot of ground to cover.

Nokia’s stock, which lost 14 percent after the Microsoft deal was announced Friday, fell by more than 5 percent Monday. Nokia employees showed their displeasure with the software switch on Friday, using flex time to head home en masse

Ok, so what do we take away from this quote from the Associated Press? First, that a former Microsoft executive has decided that Microsoft is the best development partner for his new company’s cell phone OS. Second, that the Finns don’t agree and came down with BSOD flu – they used flex time to shutter up the shop on a Friday afternoon like high schoolers getting “lost” on their way back to class from a pep rally.

Admittedly, Symbian is getting a little outdated. But it does what it’s supposed to do; hold your contacts and make phone calls. Of course, just everyone believes that “smart” phones are the wave of the future and what’s smarter than Windows? What indeed? Perhaps, the iPhone OS or Android.

Microsoft Corp. launched a new phone operating system, Windows Phone 7, late last year. Reviewers hailed it as big improvement over previous attempts, but so far it hasn’t made a dent in the dominance of Google’s Android software and Apple’s iPhone.

So the software is a big improvement over what Microsoft had before. Does that say more about how good it is now, or bad it was before?

Lastly, Microsoft is paying Nokia billions of dollars to switch to Windows Phone 7. That’s like walking onto a car lot and having the dealer ask you how much you want to take this car off his hands. Microsoft is a huge company. Their products are everywhere. Why should they have to pay a company to use their stuff? Maybe because it’s everywhere and people can see how “good” it is.

Nokia stock is back up, but it fell 14% on the initial announcement and another 5.8% on the following Monday. There’s a long road ahead, hopefully they can see clearly through the Windows.

Infoworld is hitting hard at Microsoft in a couple of recent articles. The first seems to be a pre-mortem over Microsoft’s top officers hitting the eject switch. I mean, it really seems like people are binging out of the company.

Infoworld’s next article, takes a closer look at Redmond’s recently reported profits. Make no mistake, Microsoft’s money moving shell game is all legal. But Woody Leonhard scratches a little bit of the glitter and glimmer off the top of the numbers to arrive at a less than pretty picture of the billions that Microsoft recently reported. At this rate they are not long for this world, maybe 20, 30 years. Cause – you know – they only have so much case.

I had a message from Best Buy on my answering machine when I got home from work. Danielle said had a resolution for me and she would drop me an email as well:

Good afternoon Patrick,

I hope this email finds you doing well. My name is Danielle, and I work in the Consumer Relations department at Best Buy corporate. Thank you for sending an email to us in regards to your Toshiba laptop and the restore disks. I was very disappointed to read about the lack of customer service you are receiving from Toshiba.

I would be happy to provide you with a resolution to your situation. I spoke with Agent Rodriguez at the Flagstaff, AZ store (#1084.) She told me if you can get the restore disks from Toshiba they will be able to reinstall your operating system at no additional charge. This is something that would need to be completed within 30 days of 10/18/2010.

>From what it sounded like in your email you sent, it will cost $24.95 to receive the restore disks from Toshiba. I would be happy to send you a $25 Best Buy gift card as a onetime exception and to make up for this charge. All you need to do is respond to this email with your correct mailing address, and I will get it sent out.

Again, I am very sorry about the experience you have had working with Toshiba. I hope this information provides you with a resolution. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to assist you.

Sincerely,

Danielle
Best Buy Consumer Relations
Case # ——–

And my reply:

Danielle,

I truly appreciate the quick reply both by phone and email. I would be
happy to accept your offer of a $25.00 gift card. I have ordered the
restore media in lieu of shipping my laptop to Toshiba. I feel much
better about placing this in your hands than in Toshiba’s.
My mailing address is: (You didn’t really think I’d blog it did you?)
Again, thank you for not only your quick reply but your generous offer.

Patrick

So next I just need to see if they hold up their end of the deal, but I’m already impressed.

Figuring that I wouldn’t get any satisfaction from Toshiba I fired off an email to Best Buy via their web form:

My wife and I have a Best Buy credit account and have purchased a number of items at Best Buy. One of our most recent purchases, a Toshiba Satelite laptop, has become an extremely disappointing purchase. About three weeks ago the hard drive died and I returned the laptop to Best Buy. Although it took longer that I expected, Best Buy replaced the hard drive under the manufacturer warranty. When trying to get the restore disks from Toshiba – as they no longer include them in the box – I was unable to get them to ship me a restore disk without charging me $24.95 to handle the disk. They will send me a box to send my laptop to Toshiba, reinstall the OS and ship my laptop back to me at no charge. Toshiba support apparently does not think that all of the shipping and labor is less expensive that spending a couple of bucks on priority mail postage. After clicking through the BBB logo on the Toshiba web site and reading complaint after complaint about Toshiba customer service I have to question my decision to send my laptop back to Toshiba for anything. I would much rather have the Geek Squad finish what they started with the replacement of my hard drive. What customer service center does not have a real second tier support? What company hires supervisors to only schedule the phone operators?
I understand that hardware sometimes fails, but to be treated with complete and utter contempt by Toshiba is unacceptable. As a single individual I don’t have much pull with Toshiba. I don’t even have much pull with Best Buy. As a company, I would expect Best Buy to assist its customers. To not at least attempt would imply approval of this unfriendly behavior towards your mutual customers. I hope to continue my relationship with Best Buy although I will not be purchasing any Toshiba products at Best Buy or any other store.
I look forward to your reply.

I looked for Toshiba stock information. It looks like they don’t qualify to trade on any of our exchanges except OTC. Not to be Xenophobic in this world economy, but this Japanese-centric company only hires people at their call centers to wring $25/pop out of their customers. My story is way too much like the complaints on the BBB web site. Let’s see if Best Buy steps up to the plate (they are publicly traded after all and no one wants bad publicity) In a day or so I will be looking to email the Japanese CEO of Toshiba – not that he’ll care – and if I don’t get any satisfaction it will probably mean a submission to the channel 12 problem solver team.

The laptop I purchased had a hard drive crash. We took it back to Best Buy – they replaced the hard drive. Toshiba wants $24.95 for “handling” to send me the restore disk. You know, restore disk as in what used to come in the box when you bought a computer. I’m not even asking for the unadulterated version that you can get in a retail box. Nope. Just a simple restore disk. I called Toshiba support to demand they send me a restore disk. I got nowhere. I asked for the next tier customer service. I got “Lacey”. Lacey would not send me the disk either, instead telling me how to order and pay for the disk. I asked for the call to be escalated and she told me that she was the highest person on the totem pole.

I told “Lacey” that if Toshiba is willing to send me an empty box, have it shipped back to them, pay a tech to install the OS and then pay to ship the laptop back to me (which they will do under the warranty), they can surely just drop the restore disk in the mail since that is clearly cheaper. Still no dice. I asked her if she realized how ridiculous that sounded. She answered that is their procedure. I stated simply, “of course you realize it, you chose not to answer the question.” I then asked to speak to her supervisor. She told me that her supervisor only makes her schedule and does not talk to customers. My reply, “do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?”

I’ve already steered one person away from Toshiba purchases. If I had read the BBB listing of negative reviews of Toshiba I would not have purchased this laptop. I have 3 IBM Thinkpad laptops that range in age from 10-15 years and none of these has ever had a hard drive problem. And they came with restore media. And I don’t know why I didn’t buy another IBM/Lenovo laptop. You can bet the next one will be.

I haven’t read Bob Cringely as much as I used to, but it’s nice to see that he somewhat agrees with me on social notworking He suggests downsizing your friends list and I can’t disagree with him. At least on here, there aren’t many commenters regardless of the number of readers so everything here is important. And everything on Bob’s blog is important to Bob and sometimes, such as here, important to our readers as well.

Another hard drive bites the dust. It looks like it’s been hanging around a while… the last drive that it looks like I replaced in my trusty dusty firewall was in 2005… can that be? Hmm. It’s possible I guess. It’s the main drive for my firewall. No Operating System, no internet access. No nothing. I pull out my trusty box of old hard drives and look for a promising candidate. A 2g drive!

Of course I skipped a step or two. First thing I did was pull the firewall off the shelf that it sits on above my head. When I pulled the cover off I noticed a note written in permanent marker warning me that this CD drive has intermittent read errors. Aha… that’s the problem. I hadn’t been able to get the firewall completely up to date with the latest version of NetBSD because the CD drive was crapped out. Now it’s time to pull the old drive out and put it in the “Quality Connections pile”.

The same shelf as the firewall holds a stack of CD drives. I try them one by one to find one that doesn’t keep ejecting (BIOS issue?) all on its own. Then to the aforementioned box of hard drives. While I’m browsing the aisles, I look for faster NICs – that whole cable internet thing chewing at the back of my mind. And yes, like any true geek, I have aisles of old computer crap. Or at least shelves. I pulled a couple of D-Link 10/100 NICs from the shelf. They are marked DFE-530TX and DFE-530TX+. I vaguely recall recovering them from (Windows) computers they failed in. Like the pack rat that I am, I kept them. I pulled the 10Base-T cards, 3 Com Etherlink III NICs from the firewall and replaced them with the 10/100 D-Links.

A quick install of NetBSD 5.0.2 and I was ready to start figuring out all of my now gone configurations. It has taken a day of futzing around just to get the home network back online, but I’m there. I now have to remember what all of my customizations were and how to recreate them. Maybe this time I’ll make a backup copy of the configuration files, or not. I only seem to have to perform the Lazarus trick every five years or so.

My interim boss just sent me 3 emails with attached documents. There was no message body. Just a single attachment per email. Then she sent me an instant message to tell me that she sent the emails. I won’t go into the content of the attached documents as I didn’t spend much time looking at them to compare them to existing documents. It is the rest of the comment that really has me scratching my head. She asked me to create a “web presence” that will indicate when a bus is running over 15 minutes late. I’m guessing, since she did not respond to my “WTF?” reply, that she told our incoming boss that this was easy to do. “Web presence”? That doesn’t sound like the interim boss. The new guy is supposed to be tech savvy. That sounds like a PHB or someone who really knows what it takes.

Even if I could find a widget that would do what I she wants, the underlying technology isn’t there. The buses would have to be equipped with some type of GPS unit. The unit would have to report and compare times to the routing software and determine when the routes are overdue. Unless of course, we just log into the web site every time a bus is running late and update the page. Oh wait, we run bussing from 4:00am to 7:00pm and I’m the only one with a login to that web page. I’m guessing that installing and configuring GPS units and then installing the tracking software – complete with connector software to talk to the routing software – will run $300.00 – $500.00 per bus. That would be roughly $25,000.00 to $50,000.00. I’m thinking that whoever thought up this idea did not take into consideration the costs to do this automatically nor did they take into consideration that I’m currently the only person who can update the Transportation website nor the fact that I work 11:00am to 7:00pm and I’ll be mufuggin damned if I’m getting up at 4:00am so little Johnny’s mom can see if a bus is running 15 minutes late to Johnny’s stop. I don’t usually say this, but they don’t pay me enough for that. They don’t even pay me enough to update it during my shift as, due to budget cuts, my office is the de facto receptionist. I don’t have, nor will I have time to update the damned thing when the phone is ringing off the hook.

The switch is done. We have cable internet, phone and tv. I would have been happy with just the phone and internet, but my wife insisted on tv too since it’s not that much more than just the phone and internet.
Observations so far:
I still see reruns even though the channels I’m seeing shows on reruns I’ve only had for about three weeks.
I had to fight with the cable modem to get onto the internet. I guess having ancient 10baseT NICs in the firewall don’t talk to the modem so well. Adding a four port Linksys 10/100 hub between the modem and the firewall fixed the connection. I might have to think about upgrading the network to gigabit and adding at least 100baseT cards to the firewall. The internet is much faster than it used to be.
I don’t like using the cable provider’s DNS servers. I’ll keep using my own, thanks.

I broke down and bought a Windows 7 laptop. I have some software that just won’t run on the Windows 2000 computer so I felt like it was necessary. We purchased a Toshiba satellite, a more or less middle of the line laptop with 4gigs of ram. Twice now the laptop would not let us log in because it was “Low on Resources” and would not allow a login for a “new” user. The first time I logged into my account which was still running. Just now, no one was logged in and only background programs were running. What the heck? I had to restart the laptop. I’m just curious what Windows 7 does, with the laptop cover closed that uses up all of the resources.