I went to drop off a laptop with a cracked screen, and was told by an Apple Automaton that I needed to schedule an appointment (the earliest required me to come back in 4 hours) so that a technical rep guy (presumably a ‘genius’) could diagnose the problem (idiots… I knew what the problem was… the screen was cracked). The Apple Automaton kept repeating that I had to make an appointment, and used more time than it would take to fill out a work order. It got to the point that I thought I was dealing with the government.

Eventually the Apple Automaton cracked, went to one of the display Macs, filled out a few fields on a repair web page, printed off two copies, and that was it. No appointment was needed, and the Apple automaton could have saved a lot of time by doing this in the first place (and then he would have had some extra time to hypnotize the suckers, er, potential customers, shuffling about the store drooling over the newest iPhones).

I completely agree with Gopal and other posters — Apple has almost entirely forgotten who the customer is, i.e. who butters their bread. It certainly is advantageous to have a hypnotized culture tolerates any abuse that Apple unconsciously dishes out.

For the record, I was once an Apple fan, back in the days of the G4 (circa 2003), which I got for editing home movies. It was largely a pleasant experience.

Today my G4 is nearly dead (seizes up without warning). My PC’s that predate the G5 are still running nearly as well as they did when they were new.

The more unpleasant experience has been a G5 with one of the last Motorola chips. This computer ran so hot from the start that I could see bad things ahead. True to my expectations, components on the mother board started blowing up from the heat. Since the system was under “AppleCare” (sounds like news-speak from Orwell’s ‘1984′), Apple replaced the motherboard three or four times until we entered the new phase of “AppleDontCare”. The G5 is now a useless chunk of plastic and metal, and provides no computer-related functioning whatsoever. The irony is that Apple could have saved money by simply exchanging the G5 for an Intel-based version the first time the motherboard had to be replaced, since they knew I’d be back in a few months.

Anyway, things go up, and things go down. The days of sincere caring by the customer for Apple, and by Apple for the customer, is now over. It is now all only about sales and profits, and keeping the customers asleep for as long as possible.

On the other note, if a million people are going to ping your sales people, you could have any one of the following common problems:
1) Your website is not clear on what you offer that they have to call to talk to your sales people
2) They don’t know how much your product costs and also if there is group discounting if they buy multiple licenses.
3) Your product mix (if you have one) is confusing to them that they need to talk to a human being to figure it out.
4) They don’t know how to buy (those 3 in a million who wanted to buy ) – you are not offering self service that they have to call sales.

So just making your contact information is not going to solve your problem. Make sure that your website clearly communicates what you offer, how much it costs and how to buy. Implement an exhaustive FAQ maybe?

What a great way of looking at large tasks. I know that when I’m starting work on a new product or a large enhancement, all of the things that need to be done can seem almost un-doable. But, as you said, if you can break them up into what needs to be done this week then all of a sudden the impossible starts to look like it just might be possible…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental PM Blog
“Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager”
Subscribe to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter now: Click Here!

Or how ’bout: There’s Lies, Damns Lies, and then statistics…

By doing this, a BOND is created between the people, the radio station and the people for whom the fund is raised!

And say the next time the radio station would want to raise funds for something similar, because of the PERSONAL bond people have made with the radio station, summing p funds would be more EASY

Cheers!
Ganeshkumar