From time to time I get various kinds of surveys in the post asking me to provide information as to my views on various issues. I tend not to answer most of them, and here is why.

Last year I wrote about the Illusion of Compromise. Marketers always seem to ask the right question to get the answer they want. This can be done by setting the mindset from the outset.

For example, if an opinion pollster were to ask you the question “Would you like the government to raise your taxes?”, there would be two obvious answers: Yes or No. (We’ll ignore the “I don’t know” for this purpose.) Most people will say “no” (at least as long as they feel the question would raise their own tax burden.)

On the basis of this question, we might get the following outcome:

           keep     raise
            |         |
            +-a-------+
           80         20

(where a is the average outcome)

This would suggest that most people were in favour of keeping taxes at the current level. In reality, if we asked the question in a more open way “What would you like the government to do about taxes?” we might see a very different answer:

lower      keep     raise
  |         |         |
  +---b-----+---------+
 70         10        20

(where b is the average outcome)

Now it becomes clear that whilst 20% of people might want higher taxes, the 80% that do not, are not necessarily of the view that they should stay the same–Some of them want lower taxes. In the first case, a compromise outcome may be a small increase in taxes, whilst in the latter it would be a moderate decrease.

As such, always be weary of opinion polls or surveys that come through in the post asking for your opinion on such matters.

Just over a year ago, we started seeing a huge deluge of anonymous posters making spam posts on the thinkbroadband forums, beyond a level which we could manually work around in a sensible way. We started looking at patterns of spam and fairly effectively prevented it using those patterns in a fairly simple detection algorithm looking as typical human versus computer behaviour. Even users on our forums spotted that spam often had the first ‘icon’ you could select to represent your post used even though it wasn’t the default one.

We tweaked the settings as the spam bots changed their style but for at least a couple of months we had quite a few get through which was annoying. When BBC News ran an article on reCAPTCHA I thought this would be ideal both to stop our spam problem and help decode old books. It provides an easy-to-use CAPTCHA solution which also has tools to help blind people get around them using audio tools.

This spam fighting tool also helps decipher old books since it shows two words, one of which it recognises. It doesn’t know what the other word says, so by solving the two words you prove that you’re human, and help digitise books by deciphering the other word.

It does present some words which are a little bit too difficult to read.. The one above isn’t too bad, but illustrates the potential problem. You can refresh it to another word pair of course.

My blog doesn’t receive that much spam but since my inbox is full enough as it is, cutting out every last one would be idea, so it’s now implemented on my blog too for comments, thanks to the plug-in for Wordpress.

If you send unsolicited e-mail, you are a real spammer. It’s not just the viagra touting people who cost us money!

We all hate spam. It clogs up our mailboxes, wastes our time in sorting what is and is not a legitimate e-mail and costs us money in wasted traffic and solutions to try and curb its increasing impingement into our lives.

I tend to report spam to the service providers who allow their networks to be used to relay spam or otherwise allow their network to be used by spammers. Recently one spammer (who’se identity I’ll keep off this blog in the hope they’ve now learned their lesson) got in touch with me about a comment I made on a website about their business (after their service provider shut down their service). The e-mail read:

Dear Seb

My name is [name removed] – Sales Manager at [company removed], I have seen you recent comments posted on a website with regards our marketing, may I ask would it of been more professional to have discussed them with us 1st rather than posting in public? We are a proper business that is finding our feet and your comments do not assist the business industry, I await your comments on this matter.

Best regards

[name removed]

To say I was surprised to see an e-mail from a spammer complaining at my criticism of their marketing tactics is an under statement. I certainly didn’t expect to be expected to explain why spam was bad, but in hope I might educate someone as to the errors of their ways, I duly obliged.

(more…)

My old television has been making weird noises for some time and finally last weekend it broke down completely (or to be more precise was doing things which made me afraid to plug it into the mains), so I decided to buy a new TV.

I went into a Comet store and chose a suitable TV. The silver version was £50 cheaper than the black one, so I decided to browse to their website on my Nokia E90 and see if it was a mistake. Although it was the correct price, I noticed that on the website the black version was available at the same price as the store label for the silver one.

I asked one of the sales assistants if they could sell it to me at the web price, to which they said no as they don’t price match their own website. They said however I could order it on the website and pick it up in store, so I asked if that meant I could place the order on my mobile phone, and then go to the till to pick it up, to which she said “yes.. if you can do that..”

So I did.. well.. actually the Comet website’s “collect from store” option wouldn’t work on my E90 browser, so I excused myself, went to my car, took out my laptop and 3G card, went online, reserved it and went to the till showing them my laptop screen confirmation of the order. It did say it could take up to an hour to go through, but they found it in the system and promptly sold me a TV for £50 less than it was advertised at. Great rate for 10 minutes work

Some of the items on Comet have higher online discounts.. For example a large Sony 1080p HD LCD TV has a £280 discount.. I had to settle for a less expensive model

I have come into journalism in a rather unusual way in the sense that I didn’t take a journalism degree or any other formalised training specific to the industry and neither did my colleagues. When ADSLguide.org.uk started (I’m supposed to call it thinkbroadband.com but I think “AG” has a ring to it :-p), we were just a bunch of techies who wanted to provide users information about ADSL services which were in their infancy at the time. Indeed we weren’t even forward looking enough to think that using a name with “ADSL” would potentially be seen to limit us in the future

The site grew fast and we became known as ‘the’ source of ADSL related information. We suddenly had the opportunity to talk to senior people in companies who wanted a piece on our front page (or indeed some who just wanted to help us grow as they valued the independent information we provided). I think at this stage, our site was seen more as a technical aggregation/discussion site rather than a source of news so we dealt almost exclusively with the technical and product people within broadband service providers.

Over time we grew more and started being asked by other journalists to provide information for them about broadband.. I think they liked the way we aren’t there to promote any particular provider (indeed at this point we were running our site on a borrowed old server from Jezzer at the bottom of my hosting company cabinet in Telehouse only seven years ago).. With this, we started becoming much more the centre of attention, probably Andrew (MrSaffron) in particular who was the public face of our news items (and still is to a great degree). This also began the time we started spending more time on research, talking to providers, etc.

At the beginning it was an eerie feeling walking into a room and someone saying “Oh you’re the people from ADSLguide!” as if we were some celebrity which they met for the first time. This kept being repeated a few times until eventually we had met quite a few people so they began to know us. We spent quite a bit of time explaining to everyone what we did, how and why so they understood how we preferred to work.

This leads me to my point, namely how PR people deal with journalists. I was reading a series of white paper by Daryl Wilcox Publishing on how to write press releases which reminded me of the frustrations I have in dealing with PR people, leading me to believe that we are not alone.. This problem is clearly something that has been around in the traditional press for some time.

To this end, here is some advice to anyone about sending us press release:

• We only want to receive broadband-related press releases, or those that affect companies which broadband users could be affected. If your product/service is a tool broadband users might use (e.g. video streaming), then this is entirely welcome.
• All press releases should be sent by e-mail (usually to the staff member(s) you’ve dealt with before, or via the team@ address on our About page. Bear in mind that sending the press release to every e-mail address you can find on our site is likely to result in it going into the spam folder.)
• We do not open attachments unless we have a good reason to do so. All PR text should be in the body of the e-mail. By all means send us a PDF or Word file that goes with it with the nice photos and formatting, but unless we find the text appealing it won’t get opened.
• We receive lots of press releases and only write up articles on very few. This doesn’t mean we’ve not read your release, but we aren’t a news wire.
• Focus on what makes your company/client special. Have they introduced a new price point, or done something innovative? This is especially more important to the small companies because we’re not going to broadcast to everyone you’ve just introduced a £1 discount for a few months.
• We will use quotes but rarely lots of them. They are usually there to support the text but equally they should add something.

General issues to consider for anyone who writes to us at thinkbroadband (since if you’re still reading this you probably care enough to listen):

• The thinkbroadband staff are not employed full time to read press releases, announcements or to promote your company. We all have other jobs to get on with and have limited time to devote to the website. This means we don’t really want to receive a phone call from your PR people asking “have you received our press release?” ten minutes after you sent it.
• We all work in diverse locations and not in one office so we rely heavily on e-mail. This doesn’t mean we don’t exist and don’t have phones, but we find it’s the most efficient way for us to work.
• We are not an extension of your marketing department – That is to say we will give our opinion about your services, even if it’s bad. We’re not an affiliate marketing site the primary focus of which is to drive users to the highest paying service providers.
• We try to respond to courteous e-mails about concerns over comments our users have posted on the site. When we receive such requests via lawyers (the usual kind of in-house, including “corporate security”) making claims of dubious merit, they won’t incite a positive reaction. Just because we don’t have huge offices doesn’t mean we remove content because you think it shouldn’t be public.
• If you want to tell us about something brilliant or innovative, get one of your ‘techies’ to talk to us.. Marketing jargon doesn’t get far with us and you’ll just end up looking silly if you don’t know the answers to our questions.

I hope to write something more permanent for the thinkbroadband site in the coming weeks but I hope that may be of interest to anyone in the meantime.

The European Commission has acted on the roaming charges charged by the mobile operators for calls when you’re abroad but very little discussion has centred on the data roaming charges which are even more extortionate.

Vodafone has been charging £4.25 (ex. VAT) per MB when roaming abroad on ‘partner’ networks and over £8.00/MB on non-partner networks, although I note that they now suggest all networks are at the lower rate.

Within the UK, the entry level Vodafone Mobile Broadband plan costs £25/month and includes 3GB (i.e. 3000MB) per month of usage (still subject to a fair usage policy). This is about £0.008 per MB), making international access about 500 times more expensive than UK data rates.

Vodafone has indeed appeared to have realised this is unsustainable (at one point I paid £10 to check my e-mail) and they have now launched a £95/month plan which includes 200MB abroad, a mere £0.475 per MB, only 60 times the cost of UK traffic (assuming it was all used abroad).
This is still far too expensive to properly use 3G abroad and sooner or later the mobile network operators will need to realise that this is hindering use whilst travelling, with many opting to use Wi-Fi networks where possible, whereas in the UK I would often use Vodafone’s 3G service instead as it’s low maintenance and less hassle. I also have a pay-as-you-go SIM card in one country I visit regularly, something that a few years ago couldn’t be used for GPRS/3G but now can. Also, the availability of 3G roaming agreements leaves a bit to be desired for.

I tend to be a very ‘hands on’ person when it comes to helping customers and I’d like to think my companies’ service levels are considered very high.. I’d use the word fanatical but I think Rackspace already use that term.

We have customers to use both our services and those of other providers be it co-location, servers, connectivity, e-mail, web hosting or something else and I’ve noticed two things:

1. When a customer joins us for the first time, and they have a problem with their server for example, they call us and ask whether we have a network problem (or “is the Internet down?” in laymen’s terms) to which the answer is usually “No. If we had a network problem, I’d hope we already knew about it before you :-p” (the smiley explains the tone). This happens a few times until they realise if there’s a problem, it’s probably not with our network.
2. When a customer has a problem with something that isn’t caused by us, if they think it even might be, they call us first, because we are ‘accessible’.. i.e. They can get through to us.. Other companies might not offer phone support, might charge premium rates for it or might just not give the right answer (or dare I even say, might claim it’s our problem). This gets annoying because it’s offloading the costs of their support on us (as it often takes us time to check it’s not actually us having the problem).

We have customers who truly understand the value of the service, and I find those are the ones who I even have to talk out of buying something I feel they don’t need. I like them because they listen to my advice (whether it gains or loses us revenue) when making decisions, and rather than always going for the lowest cost service, they welcome the list of options and then make an educated decision (and sometimes, that may be not to buy the service at all).

I have also found most sales enquiries we get are from customers who either don’t understand their own requirement (which is fine, we’re here to help) or, and this is very common, over-specify their requirement by a large factor (100% or more usually). If a customer insists on buying a service they don’t need, then so be it, who am I to complain? What concerns me is when other companies quote for the service they think the customer needs but pretend it’s what the customer actually asked for. We tend to explain to the customer why we think another solution is better (and often cheaper), but they feel they are getting less, when in fact they’re not wasting resources on services they don’t need.

The supplier-customer relationship is a two way process driven by supply and demand and the interaction between the two agents. It should not only be a customer-driven process.

The customer is not always right.

My workstation started acting oddly at the end of May signalling memory errors during boot-up. Obviously as a technically minded person I tested the memory, and as there was nothing I could find, I sent an e-mail to Dell. They replied, and as the problem hadn’t re-occurred I ignored it until last week, when my PC started rebooting all of a sudden without warning. After this happened a second time I was getting concerned.

I spoke with Dell Technical Support who asked me to through various bits of diagnosis. I had by this time swapped out half the memory at a time to make check it wasn’t anything simple. They were going to get me to re-seat the voltage regulator module (VRM) as this was one of the error codes displayed on the chassis during problems (Dell systems have green/orange lights with A B C D written on them to indicate what the problem is if the system can’t tell you on the monitor), but in the end they asked me “Do you know what a capacitor is?” which I found a bit odd. I replied “Well I’m not an electrician but yes I know what they look like”.

They asked me to see if the capacitors were ‘flat’ or bulging out. At first I looked at them and they looked normal, but then looking a bit more closely, I thought they were slightly rounded at the top:

This is what they should look like (from a system with a similar motherboard):

I felt a bit nervous saying categorically they were bulging out without comparing them to another system (the second picture) but the Dell engineer was very confident that the motherboard needed changing the following day. And indeed, following a very courteous visit by a Dell engineer, the problem has been fixed with the replacement motherboard.

The 3-year warranty will be running out in just over a couple of months, so a new system may be needed soon

There is a Wikipedia article on Capacitor Plague that explains this phenomenon (thanks John!)

Whether you are in a contract negotiation or you are trying to come to a consensus within a group as to a way forward, strategy & tactics often come into play, the so called ‘politics’ of human interaction which waste time but serve to make all the parties feel content (whether to themselves or their stakeholders) in having contributed to an outcome which is more favourable to them than it would otherwise have been.

From early on in life, the ability to compromise is very important in any aspect of life, whether it is the ability to share a toy with a friend, agreeing how to share a car between siblings, or haggling for a price in the market. There is however a side effect which I have over the years found frustrating that encourages strategically extreme views in order to achieve an outcome that is more advantageous to your position.

As a simple example, many traders will mark up the retail prices in the expectation that customers will haggle, and feel they are getting a bargain when they negotiate a discount. When you buy something at 50% off you feel like you’ve achieved something.
In negotiations between multiple parties it is strategically advantageous for each party to make their initial positions further extreme to ensure that the final ground for ‘compromise’ is not lost. Participants often adopt such positions naturally to defend their territory rather than thinking about the game theory behind it.

Let’s assume we have two people, A and B who have a range of views on a particular issue which can be scale from 1 to 10 across a line:

|--------------------A-------x-------B--------------------|

In the above example, the ‘middle ground’ (where presumably A and B will end up if both compromise to the same extent) is marked ‘x’. Now the incentive is for each one to start with a position which is more extreme than their actual desirable outcome.. If B does this (marked ‘B2′ below), the middle ground (after compromise) is marked ‘y’ below:

|--------------------A-------x----y----------B2-----------|

As you can see, the outcome ‘y’ is far closer to B’s original position as a result of B shifting its initial position to B2. Obviously if A moves their position to A2 (by adopting a more extreme position, we’re back to the central point of agreement being in the middle:

|-----------A2-------A-------x-------B-------B2-----------|

This is precisely the same model as haggling on a price if you imagine the scale from zero to infinity. Obviously knowing where true positions lie is part of the art of negotiation (or science as some will argue). Problems can also arise where A and B act differently. In some cultures, negotiation is expected whereas in others it is more of a taboo–If one party takes a more extreme position in preparation of compromising, they may feel the other who is holding out is not playing fair whilst they picked a starting position more tuned to their target outcome rather than strategically positioned to result in the outcome.

Things can be further complicated by bringing in a third party C (and D, E, F, G, etc.) who can influence the position.. If A or B have a greater degree of influence over these additional parties, it can fine tune the resulting compromise into one more aligned with the wishes of the said party.

This is one of the reasons why I don’t like sales people–It’s nothing personal.

I have been frustrated quite often about the inability of many individuals to understand the value of domain names. I’ve just had a discussion that went something along the lines of..

“I’ve just registered my domains with Company X because they allow me to use PayPal so I don’t have to give my credit card details to an unknown U.S. company”

I have intentionally left out the name of the company as this issue is not about the company (who I know nothing about) but about the perceptions of users as to the value of their domain. This particular user (who is very typical) feels uncomfortable giving their credit card details to an unknown company, yet they would trust the said company to manage their domain name. A well developed website is likely to be worth far more than the credit limit on many cards, and in any case credit card fraud costs are not directly borne by the victims.

Don’t assume that the domain cost (be it £1.99 or £99) is actually the same as the value of the domain, and treat it based on its value, not its initial cost.