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| Jul Sep |
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Over in Slate, Daniel Gross has this to say about blogger Jeff Jarvis's now-celebrated chronicle of "Dell Hell":
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Dell had the bad luck to tick off a very powerful blogger. The company is justly known for its fantastic customer service. But any time you engage in tens of millions of customer contacts, there are bound to be errors. It was Dell's misfortune that one of those errors affected a person with a huge megaphone, blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis' blow-by-blow account of his Dell hell has become an Internet phenomenon. |
Sorry, I don't buy it. Set aside the idea that Dell is "justly known" for great service. Known to whom? This sounds like boilerplate from an analyst's report or the company's own marketing literature. I've never bought a Dell computer. But in my circles and reading -- an admittedly totally subjective smattering of hearsay, but what else does "known for" mean? -- Dell is known for being a giant corporation that hands over its customer service to bored, ill-treated, underpaid people desperate to move on to better jobs.
Still, that's not really the point. Maybe you have a circle of friends who have all had peachy-keen customer-support experiences with their Dell boxes. The point is, Jarvis's experience was not a fluke; if it had been, his tale would never have made waves.
Gross is wrong because what gave Jarvis's complaint wasn't the size of the blogger's megaphone -- it was the chord of recognition his message struck with his readers. If Jarvis started bitching about Dell and his experience really represented a statistically insignificant lapse in an otherwise exemplary service record, then Jarvis's readers would have stepped in and said, "Jeff, stop whining, it's too bad you had a bad experience but we all love Dell! Dell's done great by us!"
Instead, a lot of people read Jarvis's account and said, "You know, that sounds familiar."
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Opera, the Web browser I've happily used for the last five years or so, is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. (It's just a couple months older than Salon!)
If Firefox had been around back in 2000 I'd probably have adopted it, but Mozilla, back then, wasn't ready for prime time, Internet Explorer was a joke, and Opera was great. It offered deep and wide configurability, and tabbed browsing at a time when most people hadn't even heard of it. It's always been super-speedy. Since my mode of work often involves keeping open multiple windows each of which might contain a dozen or more open tabs, it's long been important to me that the browser keep a good record of those open windows -- so that, in the event that some other application crashes (Opera almost never does) or the machine freezes up, I can return to my universe of open tabs. Opera still does the best job with this -- to get Firefox to do the same thing, you have to add a special extension.
I'm sure the tide of open source will eventually carry Firefox beyond where Opera is today. But there's something to be celebrated about a small Norwegian software company that sticks to its guns, stares down the giants and keeps improving its product. Opera is normally free if you're willing to see some ads on the screen, or you can pay a reasonably low fee to make the ads go away, but today, the company's giving away free registration codes.
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