October 2005 - Posts
Companies pay big bucks to be advised on The Right Way to do things, and this is what their genius consultants come up with:
Hello. You have called...
No, really? I would never have guessed that lifting the handset and punching the numbers might one day lead to calling someone. Lucky we have consultants to advise us, huh? Telling me the glaringly obvious insults my intelligence. When it's an automated phone service that I have to use frequently, it's more than annoying. When I'm paying paying by the second to listen for the fifth time to your sing-song, you are placing your own lives in danger. Why not skip the BS? Instead of
Hello, you have reached the offices of Borkware, the friendly software company. Please listen to the following options and press the corresponding number to indicate your selection. If you know the option or extension you want, you can dial ahead at any time. Please note that calls may be monitored for training and quality control purposes. Please press 1 to be switched through to our customer service department operator...[more options]"
how about
Borkware. Press 1 for Customer Service...[more options]...Dial-ahead is supported. Check our website for dial-ahead sequences.
Other pearls of brilliance include things like this
Thank you for calling Borkware, the number-one specialist in bork management software.
Spare me the folly of marketroids. It is utterly meaningless to be thanked by a machine. Even when a live person speaks, it's still without meaning, because the idea isn't the speaker's. Worse, this transparent attempt at emotional manipulation could only work if I were thick as two short planks. So either Borkware thinks I'm thick as two short planks, or Borkware does not give a damn about me and is going through the motions out of habit. Either way, it's a customer relations disaster. Then there's the ever popular
[megacorp] values your call [blah blah] Please continue to hold.
Pity they don't value my time.
Another classic way to make something people want is to take a luxury and make it into a commodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. And it is a very rare product that can't be made dramatically cheaper if you try.
-- Paul Graham
Can't say I agree. Quite often, the reason that people choose to pay a lot for a luxury item is simply conspicuous consumption. When everyone can afford ice-cream, it ceases to be a sop to vanity. Instead it becomes tooth-rotting mush, and the erstwhile patrons of expensive ice-cream parlours abandon them in favour of personal trainers.
This happens to an extent in software selection process used by large corporations. Why would you pay $50K+ for BEA WebLogic when you can get similar performance and features from JBoss for free? It works like this:
- Dev team says: Get JBoss. It's just as good and they'll give us the source so we don't have to sit around praying every time it flakes. If you desperately need to unload $50K you could always give it to us.
- Manager thinks: Large corporations will cough up $50K for it. Large corporations are famously lousy, so if they're prepared to part with big moolah they must know there's something significantly better about it. Although I can't see anything better about it, there is no way in hell I am going to admit that I can't see the Emperor's new clothes. So therefore the desirability is ineffable and not to be questioned.
- Manager says to rich clients: You can have instant competitive advantage, just like [insert megacorp here]. You need only Have Faith in the F500 and Believe. We'll be passing around the collections plate shortly. The best part is your neighbours can't afford to buy it, which means you get to keep your advantage.
So they buy it. Of course, it doesn't stop there.
- Manager says to other clients: Behold, they have competitive advantage! If you do not repent, and I do mean toute suite, then surely will you be consigned to the flames of receivership. We'll be passing around the collections plate in a few minutes. FUD FUD FUD.
Followed by the inevitable...
- Manager says to dev team: We have to use WebLogic, our clients expect it.
...and the usual fantasy.
- Dev team brutally slays manager.
Icons don't work well for abstract entities. They're fine for concrete things. Files and folders and printers and suchlike are easy to depict...you just draw a little picture of them. Another way of looking at it is that nouns are easy to draw, whereas verbs are harder and adverbs are damn near impossible.