A recent case of a friends facebook account getting hacked inspired my latest posting to CloudAve’s blog. Check it out and let me know what your thoughts are on this case, and how Facebook could have handled things better.
Update: Read Mark’s own account of his Facebook hack on his own blog.
It has only been a couple of days playing with the Windows 7 public beta, but I have tears in my eyes. Tears of relief, that this debacle called Vista can finally be put down and out of its misery. Microsoft has finally hit it out of the park with this one!
What is different? Well, visually there is nothing really new to speak of, but I am finding the new taskbar style a lot better, and I like the thumbnail previews of open windows as you slide your mouse around the taskbar. As someone who has worn out the [Windows Key-D] combination on his keyboard, I love the fact that when you move the mouse to the lower right corner of the screen, ALL your open windows are made transparent so you can see the desktop background and your little applets etc.
The biggest change I see is the speed. Speed! Things are finally positively snappy around here. Click on anything and the windows blitz onto the screen. No staring at an hourglass or an empty frame for 10 seconds or so as I do now with Vista. Even opening My Network Places which used to take upwards of 20 seconds now happens near instantly. This finally feels like a Formula 1 racer zipping around the track, instead of an overloaded WWII Bedford truck chugging around a mud track.
It used to be with Vista, I would get an idea or inspiration, but by the time I tried opening Notepad, or a new Outlook email or any other simple program, 30 seconds or more would go past, and I would rapidly lose my train of thought, as the operating system took up all my time and attention, instead of doing what operating systems should do, which is get the heck out of the way and let me get on with my job!
My biggest question is – Why could they not achieve this with Vista in the first place? I mean, nothing has been taken out here. It is still the same underlying OS, but it runs rings around ‘original’ Vista. I tend to agree with Zoli Erdos that Microsoft should really be giving Windows7 to all current Vista owners and call it ‘Vista Final’. The letter of apology to every user would also be a nice touch, but I think we have a snowflake’s chance in hell of either two scenarios happening!
Welcome to 2009! Apologies for the slow rate of posting over the past couple of weeks, but several projects due before Christmas kept me ‘heads down’ in the programming cave for a while.
Well, the big news to start the year off is that Microsoft will be releasing the Windows 7 Beta out to the general public today. Being 12 hours ahead of the curve here makes it a tough wait, but I am hoping to get my hands on the Beta copy by the end of today. Once I do, I will definitely be blogging my experiences with this new OS on here. Everyone at the office here knows about my abject hatred for Vista, so they are hoping that my experiences with Win7 will be a lot less vocal.
You can try and be one of the first 2.5 million registrants for the public beta at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ although I have to warn you that you will have to stand in line behind me.
Here is another article on the upgrade, and here is a different take on the situation, with this correspondent hinting that Windows 7 should be marketed as the ‘final upgrade’ for Vista!
Update 11/01: After a 24 hour delay in geting the Beta due to ‘heavy load’ on the MS network, it is finally available to the general public. I have just finished downloading my copy and getting my keys and will report on my first impressions of Windows7 after I finish upgrading one of the office PC’s. Definitely a lot of bad press and reactions across the world at the perceived lack of preparedness on Microsoft’s behalf, although I think a lot of the frustration was due to the late hour!
Image by CCBImages via Flickr
Being a former commercial pilot now turned PC enthusiast, I enjoy ‘virtual flying’ on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator from time to time. Over the weekend, I was reading a magazine which gave a favourable review to an ‘add on’ aircraft for Flight Simulator. It was from a UK company, and it looked really nice so I thought that I would purchase this particular add on, which was around AU$45.
I noticed that this company had a website, and that their add on was available for purchase on their online store and immediately downloadable for instant ‘play’. Sounds great, so off I went to their website yesterday morning. Their home page actually had a large, eye catching banner promoting this new aircraft amongst all their offerings, with a ‘click here’ button for more details. Wonderful, I thought. This shouldn’t take me long at all!
Uh Oh, clicking the banner only took me to their main online catalogue with a bunch of unrelated stuff listed in front of me.
Mistake #1: If you are promoting a special in an ad or on your home page, at least link to that item’s detail page when users click the banner or ad.
I had to dig down the navigation menus on the left to see the product I wanted on a third level menu category. Interesting, when you consider that this vendor only had about 10 products to sell in total.
Mistake #2: Just because your online catalogue system allows you to have hierarchical product categorisation, it doesn’t mean you should always use it, especially if you only have a handful of products to begin with.
Now we were getting somewhere. I found the product I wanted, and added it to my shopping cart, then clicked the ‘checkout’ button. Very straightforward here and nothing out of the expected.
Next, I am asked to create an account on their web store to carry out the purchase. Why? This is probably the only thing I will ever buy from these people. I already have about a thousand accounts strewn over web sites all over cyberspace that I will probably never ever use again. Why do I need to create another?
Mistake #3: Don’t force your customers to have to create accounts on your site. Allow casual buyers to breeze through the purchasing process as quickly as possible.
Oh well, at least the form asking for details in order to create the account is not too long. As I am filling the information, and thinking of yet another password, I notice a lot of ads down the right hand side with some of their other products that they are trying to entice me to buy. Not a problem – I have nothing against upselling.
When I get to the bottom of the form, I notice a drop down asking me for my currency of choice. Seeing as all the pricing on the site was in UK Pounds Sterling, and given the recent currency fluctuations, I thought it would be nice to confirm my pricing in Australian Dollars. So I change the drop down. Immediately, the entire page resets to show me the ‘upsell’ items in Aussie Dollars. Aaaargh! The rest of the form that I painstakingly filled in has been reset!
Mistake #4: If you are going to have a form field that resets the page, either have it at the very top of the form, before the user has to enter anything, or else use some other AJAX style technology that can refresh parts of the page without ‘undoing’ all the customers other hard work.
Take 2 on the form – at least everything looks OK now, and I can see my purchase in AUD which is nice. I go to process the payment, and I am confronted with a stark MySQL database error message saying that there was an error on their payment processing gateway.
Mistake #5: If you are going to use a third party payment gateway, which 99% of online stores use – at least make sure the service is reliable.
Fortunately, when I went back and then reclicked the ‘Process Payment’ button again, it brought up the payment gateway window asking me to approve the purchase. However, when I clicked the ‘Approve’ button, I was immediately confronted with an error telling me that the currency I chose is not supported. Huh?
Mistake #6: For a seamless experience, make sure that the settings on your online shop are carried through to your payment gateway provider – in this case, making sure that they could accept the same currencies that you offered in your store.
So I go back and change the currency back to GBP, which of course then resets my entire form, forcing me to re-enter my details a third time. Things are beginning to get tedious, but I really want that plane! This time I can get through and approve the purchase. It is at this stage I notice that the credit card type that I normally reserve for online purchases is not accepted.
Mistake #7: Make sure that the credit card types your accept are shown clearly on your site – preferably even before the customer starts the buying process.
No biggie, I simply used another card type that I have and the payment gets accepted. I am immediately redirected to the download page on the vendor’s website. Things are starting to look up. I also immediately get an email from the payment gateway site with my serial number for the product. Hooray.
One download later, I install the package using my serial number. Almost trembling in anticipation, I fire up Flight Simulator, and Zounds! – my aircraft is there and waiting to be selected, so I (figuratively) jump in, strap on and fire up the engines and blast into the sky. But wait – what is this timer on the top of the screen counting down from 300 seconds? I find out 5 minutes later when the counter hits 0. It turns out that this add on pack has an anti piracy function built it. Apparently (when I read the README file afterwards – I mean, WHO reads the README file when you are installing? I don’t) I have to activate the product first using their activation utility.
Ok, I have no problem against protection of intellectual property and preventing software theft, so I launch their activation utility, which shows me my serial number I entered earlier, plus a secret hash code, and a space for me to enter in my new activation code, which apparently I will need to phone or email the vendor to get. Say again?
I look around the activation screen for a ’send email’ or ‘auto activation’ button, but cannot see one. There is a ‘help’ button and when I click this, I am advised that I should retype in the numbers into an email or take a screenshot of the activation screen and email to the vendor. What?? Hello! This is 2008. Surely you can send an email or activation request from the activation utility screen?? I mean, even Microsoft has been doing this for years.
No time. I hastily capture the screen and attach to an email and send off to the vendor. I figure that this is going to be a manual process on their part. It was only 10am Australian Central Standard time, which made it around 1am in the UK, so I was expecting to wait at least 7 hours for a response.
Mistake #8: If you are going to have an activation process on your software, make it as painless and as automatic as possible to avoid inconveniencing your customer, especially AFTER they have paid good money and bought your package.
Mistake #9: Don’t force everyone to work the same time zone as you. If you are going to have customers that are in a zone 12 hours different from you, set up interim procedures to ensure that they feel they are getting instantaneous service. A simple autoresponder would even go a long way to helping.
Sure enough, at about 8pm at night my time, about 10 hours later, I get a nice email from the vendor with my activation code. There is also a handy tip at the bottom of the email requesting that users of Windows Vista (which incidentally I was installing on) should visit an article on their support forums for some installation tips. Good pre-emptive strategy.
Only, when I click on the link for the article, I get a message saying that the article does not exist. What? Further investigation on my part reveals that I have to register as a member on their support forums to see any article at all. What? I am expected to create yet another user account on the net just to get support?? To cap it off, the user account I created on their online store does not work on the support forums.
Mistake #10: Don’t force your users to log in just to get support. This information should be ‘out there’ for everyone to see regardless of whether they are a customer of yours already or not. If you must make them register, at least do it for posting new topics. Don’t lock them out of reading existing articles. Sheesh!
Mistake #11: If you have to make people create an account to use your site, at least make it transparent across all areas of your site to avoid two or more usernames to get to different areas of your site. Abolish the account creation process for casual users who will only deal with you once.
So, finally, following the advice of the article, I manage to get my add on aircraft working properly on Flight Simulator X. I am certainly having fun with it, but looking back, this should have been a painless 10 minute experience, but instead had turned into a gruelling, painful 10 hour saga.
If you run an online shop, or are thinking of starting one up, please heed these mistakes. In my case, a great product and a great vendor was hampered by a less than ordinary experience – don’t let this happen to your customers.
Note: I dont claim to be perfect myself. Thinking about it, I make about half of the mistakes above on my own site and software products. Just goes to show that there is always room to reflect and improve!
Only a couple of weeks ago, I was lamenting the demise of iwantsandy, and was looking straight down the barrel of returning to my previous, disorganised life – but today, I hear that GMail have incorporated tasks into their service, which made me sit up and take notice.
Still early days yet (I literally heard about it on the blogsphere about 5 minutes ago) and I havent had the chance to totally test it out. But if I can email a task to my GMail account, and have it pop back to remind me later then I think I am at least part way to getting back some of the functionality that I miss with Sandy.
I will try and post more here as I become familiar with the new features.
Another fairly quiet, low key event today, is that Swedish company Ericsson has made a joint announcement with our local telecoms provider, Telstra which publicises the launch of their HSPA Evolution based wireless broadband service. This technology has a theoretical maximum speed of 21MBps!
Given the wide spread of our population on this huge island, a fast, effective broadband network is going to be one of the best things we could have to facilitate communication, education, and business here. I can’t wait for this new technology to be rolled out to the general public. From what I can gather, it runs on top of the existing NextG infrastructure, but will require new modems and adapters for your PC’s to be able to utilise the service.
Glad to see last week also that the government is rolling out high speed fibre optic internet connectivity to outlying regions of Australia, with residents of Nhulunbuy in Gove enjoying some of the fastest internet speeds in the country.
It looks like Australia has gone from being one of the laggards of the internet age, to a market leader…We certainly live in exciting times!
I have been talking a lot on here about having a dashboard to get a quick overview of your businesses key performance indicators. I never really thought about having a personal dashboard though, until now. I have come across a site called Pageonce, which will give you all your critical information such as your bank balances, favourite websites, social networking profiles (i.e. Facebook, MySpace) all on the one, easy to navigate screen.
Their service has been optimised for the iPhone, but they have a web interface for it as well. I must remember to grab my wife’s iPhone and create an account to give it a whirl…if she will let me.
I am always on the lookout for free or low cost web services that will help me (and my clients) to better organise their day, and to be more productive.
About a year ago, I stumbled upon a free service called ‘I Want Sandy’, which, in a nutshell, is an online virtual assistant. The way it works is, I can send Sandy an email asking her to remind me to do something or to remember any pertinent detail, and she would do it quickly and efficiently in the background.
For example, I could send her an email saying “Remind me to call Paul to arrange lunch next Thursday”, and lo and behold, next Thursday morning, I would get a friendly reminder email from Sandy to do just that. Sandy could also remember phone numbers, appointments and various other things. She had a Twitter interface so you could use it on your phone, and a Jott interface as well so you could even speak your requests to her. And all this came at NO cost!
Well, unfortunately Rael Dornfest, the creator of IWantSandy, is shutting down the service as of 8th December. That is less than 2 weeks away. Rael has been offered a job within Twitter, and they have absorbed all his IP in Sandy, and another web service that he offers.
This is a sad day for Web2.0 and SaaS in general.
Firstly, let me point out that I have nothing against Rael personally or professionally. He is obviously a brilliant designer and programmer, which is exemplified by the elegant and useful service that he built. The dismay that I feel is moreso in relation to the betrayal of trust that Rael has shown to his user base.
IWantSandy was always promoted as a ‘life changing’ tool, and an indispensable one at that. And judging by the comments on the IWansSandy support site, it certainly was so for many, many people. Unfortunately, the new owners, Twitter (yes, the people who regularly bring you the ‘fail whale‘), have not committed to keeping the service alive. In fact, there has been no definitive roadmap given by any party as to the IWantSandy service, other than that it will be permanently taken offline in a week and a bit.
The biggest problem I see here, is that the way this whole thing was handled has now tarnished any trust that the general community would have had in Web2.0 companies in general, especially the smaller, relatively ‘unknown’ ones. This whole saga is going to make it harder for other SaaS companies to convince their current and potential users to trust in them staying around for the long haul.
A lot of people are defending this decision, along the lines of “Well, it was a FREE service, so there is no commitment from the site owners to hang around losing money”. Ahem, I have to respectfully disagree there. I would have gladly paid for Sandy’s services (and judging by the comments on GetSatisfaction, so would many other users). I never saw any attempt by Rael to monetise his service or get revenue in other ways.
One could also argue that GMail is a free service – and what would the uproar be if Google said they were going to shut down GMail in two weeks? At least with online email, there are several other providers that you could turn to, but from what I can see, IWantSandy is a pretty unique service and no one else seems to offer the same sort of functionality (yet).
In my view you cannot promote a service as a useful, everyday tool, and then revoke all that functionality and convenience on a whim. People have already bought into the value that this tool gives them. To me personally, there was great value in the convenience and simple email interface of the system. This is value that I would have had no hesitation in paying real dollars for.
I cannot understand the business logic behind Twitter purchasing a standout excellent service with a loyal following, and an extremely strong, personal brand, (did you notice how I constantly refer to this service as ‘Sandy’ or ’she’? – I never do that with any other service I use) and then shelving it with really no idea what to do with it.
A hell of a lot of work has gone into building a persona and positive feel about this service, and I would really like to know why Rael didn’t just sell the IP to another Web2.0 company like Remember The Milk or 37signals, or even a new player on the block, who could have taken the service and kept it free, or monetised it – anything, rather than just ‘putting it down’.
But now I am afraid that Sandy has got the sack – another victim of the economic downturn…or was it corporate greed?
I’m going to miss her…
UPDATE 28/11: Looks like Rael has extended the deadline before he shuts the service down. Exact dates haven’t been given as yet.
UPDATE 29/11: More postings on the closure of IWS can be found here, here and here
The British government has just announced that the VAT rate in the country will drop from 17.5% to 15.0% in order to combat their worsening economy and hopefully kick start consumer spending.
The main problem is that they have only given local businesses about a weeks notice to make the changes.
Given that I was right in the trenches during the changeover to a Goods & Services tax here in Australia in 1999/2000, I can appreciate the implications of this. While a change in the tax rate will not be as drastic as a change in the whole underlying tax system, I have still seen too many software systems where the tax rate is ‘built in’ as a fixed constant and is not user editable.
Most reputable accounting systems will let the user just go to an options screen and change a ‘Tax Rate’ field or change a line in a tax data file somewhere, but users of old systems may not even know where to find these system option screens.
Here’s hoping that the Australian Govt. does not see the need to change out GST rate from 10%. Ben Kepes over at Cloud Avenue has an article on how online accounting systems will handle this change with far greater flexibility that traditional software systems.
I think that for most business owners, the visit to your tax accountant is on par with a trip to the dentist, or to your childs PTA meeting…
I am not sure what it is – but personally, I always get the worst feeling of dread before a visit, and am moody for a whole day before my appointment time.
It’s not that I really have anything to fear. All my accounts are currently up to date (unlike a few years ago – that is a whole other story that I might dissect on here another day).
Also, Angie, my tax accountant is one of the loveliest, smartest, gentlest people you can meet.
Come to think of it – I wouldn’t dread my appointments quite so much if she actually yelled at me every now and then.
I think I know what it is that causes me so much discomfort. It is just that Angie is so thorough in everything she does. She has that typical accountant’s implacable patience. She can ask me a simple question such as “And where did such and such a figure in this expense account come from?”, and then she will just sit back and wait…and wait…and wait. Until the sun turns into a cold, dark white dwarf.
The thing is, I know I cannot try and escape using my usual pathetic excuses. She is too darn clever for that. I mean, I am supposed to be an expert at this sort of thing aren’t I? I pretty much wrote most of the accounting systems I use, and the reports that I give to her, so I should be able to explain every last oddity to her shouldn’t I? Problem is, it is exactly under these sorts of conditions that my brain disengages and my mouth babbles incoherently for minutes on end.
Ah well, at least I provide tons of amusement for my wife, who accompanies me to most of these meetings. She cannot believe how I turn into a quivering mess under Angie’s cool stare. I think she is taking secret lessons on how to disarm me.
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