Can I actively encourage consumers to avoid PC World?

20 minutes ago I was angry, but I'm over it now.

You'll recall me debating whether to buy a Nokia N800. Having now decided to do so, I was happy to discover that PC World now stock it. That was my mistake, and i'm over that too.

You see, having steered clear of PC World's high prices on anything that isn't an actual PC over the past ten years or so, i'd forgotten about the incompetence and lack of customer focus (that I feel I received today - just in case). In my post I refer to three main players:

1) Guy working in Fosse Park Leicester store on Sunday who said the display model would be working if I came back tomorrow. This guy isn't important, but he did kick the whole thing off by implying the same thing that eventually caused the mess.

2) Guy working in Fosse Park Leicester store on Monday who told me that I could get the item at the web price in any store, but it was out of stock there, in stock across town.

3) The manager of the St Georges Leicester store on Monday who didn't even consider making any kind of exception for me following no 2's mistake that caused me a wasted 5 mile trip across town in the rush hour.

I'll forgive the tech desk girl because she just had to handle the mess made by no.2, although if she saw me on fire I'd not expect much, and she shrugged off corporate responsibility faster than you could utter "that's the Fosse Park store" as if it excused anything. Note to big company - if you trade under one large brand, act like it. If your sister store across town makes a stupid mistake, at very least apologise. That's called damage control, and can if well exercised lead to customer retention.

The policy that screwed my retail experience sort of makes sense. If stock less than three, no web reserve. No web reserve, no web price. This is going to work better for some products than others, and it's only going to hurt them where the N800 is concerned, but this isn't my problem or what annoyed me. What did is that no. 2 was well aware of the stock level at St Georges, well aware that I was looking for the web price, and I would assume he knew that I wasn't going to be able to get it in line with their policy, yet he gave me no indication that I wouldn't be able to buy at the web price across town, as turned out to be the case.

Across town, the manager didn't manage anything where I was concerned, but its hard to know whether he had any power to. I suspect the manager of a PC World at 6:30pm might not be that high on the food chain. Perhaps they're warned not to make any decisions.

Note to big company #2 - Half an hour ago you almost sold a product currently in low demand and potentially warmed up a fairly apathetic customer (that may eventually also want to buy a mid-range laptop) for doing anything as half decent as stocking a rare product in the first place. For the sake of £30 / inability to delegate customer relations to store managers / inability to train staff on policy (delete as appropriate) you soured me beyond any hope of return to your entire chain, and you won't be selling me an N800 on any other day regardless of stock or price.

My only regret - trying to leave via the store entrance. That looked pretty stupid, but I still have my money. Somebody else, probably Misco, will get that. PC World, you get nothing, you lose, good day sir!

Facebook - The Tide is Turning

This weekend, Calacanis and Scoble are dualing on what boils down to a "Fad or the Future" debate. Both continue to write on the topic ignoring the very real fact that the majority of users of the service don't have anything like the same experience as theirs, by virtue of most of us not being Internet famous.

I'm falling on the "Fad" side. Far from an early adopter, I've been using Facebook for just a few months, but it has changed beyond recognition in that time. Signal to noise is definitely becoming annoyingly skewed, and it's due to these new applications!

Let's for brevity ignore so many applications being valueless, and that these tend to be the type that even mostly well-meaning people choose to propagate. In fact, let's not ignore that. People are happy to send Zombie invites to masses of people - it's harmless fun. They actually seem less willing to invite friends to well thought out and dare I say, useful applications, perhaps for fear of being geek-labeled?

Back to the point. I'm invited into these pockets of activity with little idea of what to expect from them. Today I agreed to a quick quiz that a friend had invited me to take. After the quiz, the normal "who to invite" screen appeared. After deselecting-all (which should really be a one-click operation, or better yet the default), the experience ends with one more button offering to assist me with inviting more friends, and that, as they say, is it. I have absolutely no idea what I gained from taking this quiz. Had I known I wouldn't even get some kind of analysis, I wouldn't have bothered. Waste of my time!

Not long ago it appeared that Facebook may end up being ruined by a ramping up of the ad. model, but before this has even become an issue it's being ruined by these applications. The only intent of many of these applications appears to be to spread virally, gain a large userbase, then perhaps then try to find a quick way to make some money on each user.

It's boring, it's transparent (the bad kind) and it's getting in the way of the presentation of the interesting data about people I know. Today, what I assume is Facebook themselves are polling users on the usefulness of the invite process for the applications. At the time of voting, the "No's" have it. What they choose to do with this information might be interesting, and hopefully piss off the whining application spawners who feel entitled (wrongly) to their viral marketing tool that is Facebook.

(Not A) Simpsons Movie Review

No review here - I haven't got out to see it yet, but felt I might see what the media was making of it. Everyones favorite search engine returns Channel 4's page as top hit tonight (that said, it crawls so quickly now who knows what will be top tomorrow). I link to this only to make my point - how by anyone's definition is this a review???

I fail to remember the last time Channel 4 managed to impress me in any way. Pathetic, for what was once just about the only channel I ever watched.

Richard Luck - "Review" has a very specific meaning, and I think you know this. I see no evidence in this article that you've even seen the film.

I think I'll stop looking and reserve judgment until I've seen the film at this point. I'm in the fortunate position unlike most long-time Simpsons fans of still enjoying at least some of the new shows, so the prospect of this doesn't fill me with the dread many would say it should.

Not my most coherant post.. To summarise, Channel 4 a shadow of former self, Channel 4 website incorrectly labels articles scraped together from minor interviews as review, and I need to see this movie.

Facebook - World Collide

Does anybody else find themselves double taking every time they check their Facebook feed and see two friends from unrelated portions of their life listed as if jointly partaking in an event, such as

"Elaine Keene and May Brussels added the My Aquarium application."

It always briefly flashes through my mind before I fully read it that somehow these people that have never met have embarked upon some kind of a relationship. Of course, that would perhaps be one of the key purposes of networks such as these, but in my circles at least, it doesn't ever seem to happen for real.. just for that split second in my mind.

Migrating to Google Apps

So, on learning that Google's "Apps for your Domain" (GAFYD) is actually free (as in beer) up to a point, I decided to give it a go. The reason - gradually breaking free (as in.. oh never mind) of my lock-in to Virgin Media (ntlworld), having held an email address with them for five years in the face of their never-ending bullshit. They just last month sent me two emails to tell me we'll now be paying 25p a minute for broadband support calls, which naturally most of us with a clue will only ever need when they screw up.

Anyway, GAFYD..

Problems I have with this service itself are minimal - it works exactly as its supposed to. It would be nice if the whole thing could appear transparently hosted on my domain so I can avoid my works filter on the gmail.com domain, but I can see how that might be difficult for them to achieve. Some problems:

Google Reader not in the package - Some people think they're logging in using GAFYD - i'm not seeing it. Looking at the URL's for the actual Apps versions of GMail and Calendar tells me they're not the same versions. Most of the standard Google web applications simply aren't ready to accept GAFYD logins.

Working Calendar Widget for Start Page - It seems openly acknowledged that the standard calender widget doesn't show any entries. Attempts to install a newer version give the entries only if you go through the process of logging right into the calendar, defeating the point.

Working Calendar Widget for Google Desktop - I finally upgraded to a large wide LCD and decided to use the sidebar built into Desktop, but its Calendar widget only supports, yep, standard Google accounts.

EDIT: Bullshit, sorry. I later found that gadget versions of Gmail and Calendar quite happily work from the Desktop sidebar with an Apps account. Excellent!

These seem to be the kind of problems that Google gradually gets around to solving, but if anybody has any tips to get any of these problems solved more quickly, speak up!