Amy Wohl's Opinions

Freedom of Choice

Whenever someone tells me there is no choice of software in the Office or Groupware category I assume they are sadly underinformed.  Actually there is a dizzying choice once you get beyong market leaders like MS Office 2007 in the Office category and MS Exchange/SharePoint and IBM/Lotus Notes/Domino in the Groupware category.  Some are from big, well-known companies; others are, no doubt, from a few programmers in a back bedroom.  Nevertheless, some of them have attracted substantial followings, both on traditional (behind the firewall) platforms and in the cloud.

Today, an article on ZDNet took me to http://www.fileheap.com/software/groupware_software.html where I discovered piles of downloadable groupware, some free, some at a (low) fee.  Often, fee-paid products were available for a free trial.  Of course, free office software is everywhere, from IBM's downloadable Symphony suite to on-line offerings from Google and Zoho.  An extensive listing of Web 2.0 Office software, courtesy of Ismael Ghalimi, can be found at http://itredux.com/office-20/database/. 

This is a different view of what's available, of course.  It may not be suitable for the biggest companies who want formal support or proof of years of working with large enterprises.  Nevertheless, it is a fertile place to observe what is happening and what is possible.

There's Nothing Like Customer Service

Like many of you, I buy as much as possible on the web, particularly when favorite merchants offer free shipping and expedited delivery as part of the deal.  Of course, I have my favorites, based more on what they sell than on how great their service is, although I suspect both influence my buying decisions.

When I'm giving speeches about marketing to my software vendor clients, I often use examples from other industries to try to explain how important customer service can be in creating loyalty.  That can be hard with clients who think that a community forum and the offer of an occasional email should be good enough.

In the past, I've often used Nordstrom's as an example of legendary customer service.  They've been known to open a store to find clothes for an executive whose suitcase was swallowed up by the airlines and had an important 9 a.m. presentation or to rush an entire evening outfit, complete with undies and shoes to the hotel room of a guest who didn't know she was going to need one to accept an award.  I've had my own Nordstrom's experiences, too, usually involving their super service at Christmas time.

But today I want to laud a web merchant, Zappo's, who I already liked for its great selection and great attitude -- send anything back within a year for a full refund.  There are many stories (some right on their site) about customers who buy multiple sizes of a shoe they want too try and send back the ones that don't fit.  Today I bought a pair of boots (it's 1 degree outside with the wind chill and I had to scrape a coatiing of ice off my car yesterday to go to a Christmas party) and ordered them sent.  I assumed they'd come tomorrow -- Zappo's normally offers free next day delivery.  But when I get my confirmation notice it said delivery would occur within four or five business days.  With a sad face, I called the customer service number on the email.  Within 30 seconds (I looked at the clock), I was talking to a real person.  He explained that they had suspended next day shipping for the holidays.  He thought I'd get the boots by Wednesday, but because I had called they'd send them by next day delivery without the $25 that they were charging during the holidays. 

Now you know how pleased I was.  I've always liked Zappo's for their wide selection and good prices, but now I will go there first for their customer service!

Web merchants have been very clever in using the tools at their disposal -- centralized inventory, computerization, telephone-based customer service, and overnight or two-day shipping to be at least as appealing as the store in the mall.  Perhaps more appealing when you have to bundle up two kids or clear off an icy car before you can leave the house.  To say nothing of the fact that I shopped in four stores in less than 30 minutes this morning, bought something in each, and have all of it arriving in my home or at its intended recipients without my having to leave my computer.  Now if I could just feel the fabric/leather and taste the food . . .

Gadgetmania

Christmas seems a good time to reflect on just how many gadgets we seem to collect and which ones actually stick.  I have an embarrassing number of gadgets that hang out in the corners of my house (especially in the corners of my office), with little red faces, and lots of dust.  They either never really got used at all or turned out to be too hard to use, not useful enough, or too easy to be subsumbed into something else I liked better.

I seem to have a real problem with phones.  I think I'm up to something like my 15th phone (which isn't a shocking number, considering I started out very early).  The shocking thing is how many of them occurred in the last three years.  After I had used a Palm for quite a while, I convinced myself it was time to move over to a Blackberry.  I've had three Blackberries so far.  I lost two.  I think they lost themselves, ashamed that I only used them as phones because I could never get their email function hooked up to my Exchange mail server (and that was with a lot of expensive consulting applied).  The last one I gave up on after we couldn't get it to stay alive more than an hour at a time and AT&T couldn't remember that as a business customer they couldn't service me from a consumer store (very confused, these guys).

I moved over to an LG phone and Verizon.  Mistake.  I should have just bought the i-Phone I craved but I didn't want to continue with AT&T and T-Mobile has horrible coverage in my area.  I haven't decided what I'm doing next.  In the meantime, my LG phone usually works (the first battery died in a few months, nysteriously) and I like the little pull-out keyboard.

Then there is my Kindle.  It's addictive.  I keep putting off telling you about it because I want to be sure I can tell you exactly how I feel  The truth is I LOVE IT!!!  Yes, it has its flaws, mainly the physical design of the box, which makes it hard to hold without accidentally making pages turn unintentionally.  You have to train yourself to hold it just so.  But other than that -- and the fact that you can't read it in the dark (as on a red-eye flight) without an additional light source -- I'm seduced and addicted.  That's because I can carry lots of books around with me (I typically read 3 or 4 at a time) and download more without being tethered to a PC.  People ask me about it all the time.  Yes, it's too expensive.  Yes, the downloads (typically $9.99 for new books, but sometimes more) are still too much, especially because you can't share them or pass them on.  But it's a great pricing model, much better than previous book pricing models. 

Well, there is a way to share, I hear.  I haven't tried it out yet.  If you have more than one Kindle (I have two because I thought I lost mine and I couldn't live without it, so I bought another one), I understand you can access the books on your bookshelf from both Kindles.  This could mean that a husband and wife or two colleagues, etc., etc. could share books.  I haven't checked this out yet so I'm not sure it works.  I'll let you know.

And then, of course, there are the PC's, especially the laptops (and now those mini-laptops, the netbooks).  I have three laptops and a netbook and I'm thinking about another laptop -- a new Mac.  Maybe it doesn't count if it's a replacement?  I'm not counting all the old stuff we don't use any more.  Too many to count.  Boxes full. 

And the i-Pods (and their kin) -- we have a few but I don't use them very much because I'm too lazy to rip my hundreds of CD's to download them and too cheap to buy another copy of each song, ready to play.  Besides, my eclectic tastes include lots of classical music and opera and I suspect that's a bit harder to buy by the song.  So I have another set of gadgets -- CD players of varied fidelities and then, of course, DVD players, TV's (HD and older), and even an ancient Laser player which we keep meaning to toss.

But we can't toss the VHS player because we have hundreds of tapes we recorded of classic movies and music performances, everything from rock to opera.  I guess if I were very ambitious, I'd hire a high school student to be my media valet and transfer everything from old media to new media.

While he's at it, he can move our thousands of film photos that pre-date our digital cameras (oh, yes, we have four of those, all different generations, of course), onto digital, so that they would be accessible for creating albums, montages, or whatever it is people do with them nowadays.  We mainly attach our digital photos to emails for sharing or have them printed (professionally) for framing.  I know -- so Luddite.

Every Christmas and every CES brings more things to consider and changes the costs and priorities.  Remember when thumb drives were expensive?  I remember buying a 32MB drive for $79.  I bought a 1Gb drive in Staples for $10 last week.  The vendors who hand them out at every briefing, pre-loaded with presentations, like candy, must be paying even less.  Even inexpensive devices like small appliances and toys can now have processors, memory and substantial storage and keep their low price tags, enabling substantial voice recognition and putting them on the way to low-end AI so expect lots more robots under the Christmas Tree.  Maybe one of them will write blogs -- or at least speak sooothingly to blog writers.