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Joel Spolsky’s latest article on Joel on Software not only follows one of the “How to write headlines that get attention” rules that have been making the rounds at Techmeme these days, but it lists some lessons that he says he learned during the early days of Fog Creek Software, when he did tech support:

1. Fix everything two ways. “Almost every tech support problem has two solutions. The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution: a way to prevent this particular problem from ever happening again.”
2. Suggest blowing out the dust. Sometimes, a suggestion to do something that may seem obvious won’t be carried out by the customer, who’ll indignantly refuse to do so because “it’s so obvious”. “Instead of telling them to check a setting, tell them to change the setting and then change it back ‘just to make sure that the software writes out its settings.'”
3. Make customers into fans. “When customers have a problem and you fix it, they’re actually going to be even more satisfied than if they never had a problem in the first place.”
4. Take the blame. Sometimes the best way to make a customer’s anger disappear is to say “it’s my fault”.
5. Memorize awkward phrases. “It’s easy to get caught up in the emotional heat of the moment when someone is complaining. The solution is to memorize some key phrases, and practice saying them, so that when you need to say them, you can forget your testosterone and make a customer happy. ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault.’ ‘I’m sorry, I can’t accept your money. The meal’s on me.’ ‘That’s terrible, please tell me what happened so I can make sure it never happens again.’
6. Practice puppetry. “There is only one way to survive angry customers emotionally: you have to realize that they’re not angry at you; they’re angry at your business, and you just happen to be a convenient representative of that business. And since they’re treating you like a puppet, an iconic stand-in for the real business, you need to treat yourself as a puppet, too. Pretend you’re a puppeteer. The customer is yelling at the puppet. They’re not yelling at you. They’re angry with the puppet. Your job is to figure out, ‘gosh, what can I make the puppet say that will make this person a happy customer?'”
7. Greed will get you nowhere. “I know of software companies who are very explicit on their web site that you are not entitled to a refund under any circumstances, but the truth is, if you call them up, they will eventually return your money because they know that if they don’t, your credit card company will. This is the worst of both worlds. You end up refunding the money anyway, and you don’t get to give potential customers the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, so they hesitate before buying. Or they don’t buy at all.”
8. Give customer service people a career path. “Many qualified people get bored with front line customer service, and I’m OK with that. To compensate for this, I don’t hire people into those positions without an explicit career path. Here at Fog Creek, customer support is just the first year of a three-year management training program that includes a master’s degree in technology management at Columbia University. This allows us to get ambitious, smart geeks on a terrific career path talking to customers and solving their problems. We end up paying quite a bit more than average for these positions (especially when you consider $25,000 a year in tuition), but we get far more value out of them, too.”

With the US Congress’ 2005 ruling that daylight savings time should start three weeks earlier and end one week later taking place this year, DST has become the new Y2K. Apple just pushed out a system update that includes adjustments for these changes. I’ll let ITWorld give you the boring text; I’ll give you a pretty picture instead:

Oh, yeah — there’s also a security update, as well as a Java update. Mind you, I already got my Java update — it’s called Ruby.

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In true slacker fashion, I’ve held off announcing that I’m on vacation until its second-last weekday. I’ve been on holiday in the San Francisco Bay Area since Monday evening and won’t be back to work until Tuesday. Still, you can’t keep a nerd from checking his email and his blogs every now and again, even during some personal downtime.

Here’s something from Reddit that shoud make you snicker: it’s a thread from the comp.is.ms-windows.misc newsgroup from February 1997 in which the posters discuss whether or not computers will someday need gigabytes of RAM.

The most notable comments come from one Scott Nudds, who had a reputation for being one of the less-pleasant denizens of Usenet (quite a distinction, as he was up against a lot of pretty stiff competition). In the thread, he made several arguments to support his belief that most computers will never have more than hundreds of megabytes of RAM, ranging from the practical limits of exponential growth:

And how many more years before the count of bits is equivalent to the
number of silicon atoms in earths crust?

To the law of diminishing returns:

Storing a digital video library in RAM for instant access would require
tetrabytes of RAM. Just because you can invision some lame use for
gigabytes of RAM does not make it practical or even desirable to use
memory in such a way.
Past a few megabytes, the only thing more RAM gives you is faster random access to code and data than would otherwise be obtained with virtual memory.

As I said earlier, once you get past 50-100 megabytes of RAM, virtual memory makes more sense. I expect 200 megabytes will be the limit for most users. People who like to fake photographs will probably want several times this amount. The rest will be virtual.

Nudds had a rep for being a troll, loving argument for its own sake, but it actually does sound like he believed his assertions in this thread.

Ten years later, I’m the owner of two machines with over a gig of RAM. There’s “The Taint”, the Acer Ferrari laptop running Vista with just shy of 2 gigs of RAM, and my main axe, my trusty old 12″ G4 Powerbook with just slightly less…

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• The discussion thread, as seen in Google Groups
• Discussion about this thread on Reddit

Things are getting hot around OpenID. First Microsoft announces that CardSpace will “interoperate” with OpenID (I only airquote because the commitment is pretty vague right now, but it seems like goodness), and now AOL has given all their screen name users an OpenID URI.

Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/<sn>.

Where <sn> is your AOL screen name.

That’s 60MM or so newly-active OpenIDs in one fell swoop. Granted, most AOL and AIM users wouldn’t know what to do with their newly-minted OpenIDs, but it’s nice to see the infrastructure there for when the concept’s mature enough to start to take popular root.

Source: AOL and OpenID: Where we are

Robin Bloor seems pretty convinced that Omnifone’s MusicStation service and software for mobile devices has got Apple’s number in the digital music market.

He relies on two main arguments to make his case. First, Omnifone’s software is flexible enough to work on hundreds of millions of existing handsets. Given that the company is striking deals with many carriers around the world, it will have a built-in potential market many times the size of Apple’s iPod and iPhone user base put together.

Fine. I buy that as a potential edge for Omnifone. Where Bloor and I part company, though, is on his second argument:

A big reason why the Music industry is backing Omnifone is the music by subscription model it operates. The idea is that you pay a regular subscription charge as part of your phone bill and you can have “all you can eat” in terms of music. (The initial roll out will offer 1.2 million songs). The music companies tend to think like this: With iTunes the average user buys around 20 tracks a year—equivalent to maybe 2 or 3 CDs and generating $20 in revenue. With a subscription model at, say, $3.50 per month, the revenues per person will above $40 (twice as much).

All Omnifone has to do now, to establish itself as the other player in the music market, is to roll out the service (rollouts have already taken place in South Africa and Norway).

This assumes that the people paying the money (ie, you and me) are interested in an OTA subscription service for music. I have my doubts. If subscription was such a winner, surely we’d see some pretty impressive numbers for the Windows Media-based subscription services that already exist, and target the much more mature digital audio player market? Yes, I know subscription has its fans, but the dollars don’t lie—people prefer iPods, downloads, and ripping.

Source: IT-Analysis.com – Robin Bloor – Is Apple’s iTunes Monopoly About To Die?

 The answer, apparently, is “yes,” at least according to this post by an attendee at New Zealand Foo Camp (aka Baa Camp):

Firefox3 is going to deliver support for offline applications.

Why is this important? Because when you go offline you will still be able to interact with your applications. So in a webmail scenario, read your mail, write drafts. Web Calendars would work.

More importantly imagine the opportunity for Line of Business Applications. The Browser really does become the Operating System – with persistent storage.

This will allows richer SaaS applications and goes some what towards eliminating the offline scenario issue of web based applications. This makes Web apps even more compelling.

Plenty of people have pointed out that this kind of thing is already possible using the Dojo offline toolkit (for example). That just highlights the power of Firefox as the client-side platform of choice for developers.

Plugins and third-party toolkits are fine, but until it’s built into Firefox, it won’t be broadly adopted.

Source: Rod Drury > Firefox3: Web Apps Game changer (via R/WW)

A company appropriately named “Wizmark” is taking urinal cakes into the 21st century. They’ve gone beyond “your logo here” paradichlorobenzene blocks and have ones that feature lenticular images (images that change depending on the angle at which you look at them) and ones that play sound files or animations whenever the motions or actions of a “user” are detected.

Wizmark has signed a “first of its kind” deal with the cable channel CMT (Country Music Telelvision) to place their cakes in urinals at bars, concert halls and universities to promote its Outlaws TV series.

There’s more in this Register article. My favourite parts of the article are the quotes, such as this one from James Hitchcock, CMT’s Vice President of Marketing, who seems a bit too enthusiastic about marketing via urinal cake:

The new interactive urinal communicator from Wizmark enables CMT to target a very captive and vulnerable audience . . .,” said James Hitchcock, vice president of marketing at CMT.

The social protocols of the use of a urinal — the unwritten rule not to look left or right — guarantees undivided and undistracted visual attention along with the concurrent audio delivery of the ‘Don’t miss OUTLAWS on CMT’ tune-in message. This new marketing tool is unexpected, unapologetic and good humored.

Another gem comes from Dr. Richard Deutsch, holder of patent 6,640,350, the patent for Wizmark’s interactive urinal cakes. He may be the first person to wax philosophical about urinal cakes (or at least the first person to do so on the record):

Beginning with early attempts at writing one’s name in the snow, there has already been an element of recreation associated with urination for men.

If Wizmark’s marketing team plays their cards right, they could probably make a mint from the upcoming 2008 presidential elections. Or perhaps the Nintendo Wii.

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