I normally post about technology here.  Business.  Entrepreneurship.  Customer service certainly has a place.  Today gets a personal rant, with lessons applicable to the above.  The short story is that I meant to have flowers delivered on Monday to my wife, and only today found out that ProFlowers would not be able to fulfill the order because they had no local vendor.  For the tl;dr crowd, here are the key lessons:

1. Don’t take money before you can fulfill the contract – The mere fact that ProFlowers took my money without a way to fulfill my order is crazy.  The fact that all of my interactions with them since Monday indicated none of this makes it even worse.
2. Bad customer service will be cemented in search indexes – I let the woman know on the phone that the days of hanging up on an upset customer were done.  I am codifying this here.  I have set up a Facebook group.  I will request that my tweeps retweet this whole ProFlowers debacle.
3. If you are in the business of delivering happiness, deliver! – Having a scripted response for a call center makes sense.  However, the flowers I needed on Monday were to handle an issue on Monday.  With each passing day, the value of those flowers decreases quite a bit.  Flowers can bring joy, but lack of flowers can actually create problems.
4. Flowers are not harder than pizzas – It’s not like it was some crazy arrangement that was ordered.  Roses.  How hard it is to cut some flowers and get them delivered?  I was told that I was in a remote area.  I live 10 miles from the Microsoft campus.  Hardly remote.  The pizza guy can get here in 30 minutes, and they actually have to bake the thing.

The story begins on Monday morning.  I ordered flowers to be delivered because I have been working quite hard, and traveling quite a bit.  With yet another trip coming up for SxSW, I figured it would be a smart move to have the flowers delivered.

To their credit, 1-800-Flowers (the first site I visited) stated clearly that for the arrangement that I wanted, they could not deliver same day.  That’s what you should do.  Knowing that I wanted to try and get the flowers that day, I went to the next link in the search results.  Just a few minutes later the flowers were ordered.  I even paid the extra $5 to ensure that they would be delivered that day.

Sometime around 5pm on Monday, ProFlowers called to let me know that they would not be able to meet the delivery schedule.  They were nice about it, but it was a bit upsetting.  The only offer they made was to call my wife and apologize.  Given the flowers were supposed to be a surprise, that wouldn’t cut it.  I asked the best question you can ask (thanks Chemda) when dealing with unhelpful customer service people: “what do we do now?”  You have to commit to the WDWDN, and be silent.  It’s uncomfortable for everyone.  The woman eventually offered to upgrade the flower bouquet size.  Done.

Tuesday came and went.  I spent the whole day checking for delivery status.  I called into ProFlowers several times, each time they assured me that they would get the flowers delivered.  By the time I got home, around 10pm, they had not arrived.  What surprised me was that no one saw fit to call me as they had the day before.  Worse, throughout all of the conversations with the customer service reps, no one mentioned that they were having problems.  They kept telling me that the flowers were “out for delivery.”

When I called Tues night, the woman read me the exact same script they had been reading me all day.  “Can we call to apologize?”  That’s such a strange thing to offer.  I had to ask for something of monetary value.  Perhaps their customer base just takes it – feeling that it’s just flowers, and that the cost was low, so getting anything of value isn’t appropriate.  I asked, again, to get the next up-size on my bouquet.  At this point, I was at the super-ultra-mega size bouquet.

No surprise – Wed came and went.  No call from ProFlowers.  I traded emails with them all day.  They all had the same script:

What is involved in the “thorough investigation?”  Despite all of the back and forth, it wasn’t until this morning that the truth came out:

What’s nutty about this is that a) they again offer the apology letter, but b) insinuate that they can get the flowers delivered.  I called to verify, and only then did they indicate that they had no vendor to fulfill the order.  They absolutely knew this on Monday.  It’s impossible that they did not.  So they took my money, and agreed to a contract, without the ability to perform.

When I called this morning, the only thing that ProFlowers would say was “we’re sorry. We can call your wife.”  Ridiculous.  Only after venting on the poor CSR, did they offer me a $20 discount on a future order.  Why would I EVER do business with these guys with them again?  The worst part was, the woman basically said “sorry…have a nice day.”  That made me pop.  So I made today “make ProFlowers pay” day.  Bad customer service, especially of this level, should not be allowed to persist, especially from a company with such a high search index placement.

So there it is.  My poor wife the one who didn’t get nice flowers.  I will sort that out, but my ask to you – join the Facebook group “ProFlowers is Bad for Relationships.”  “Like” it.  Retweet my post.  I want this to run around the interwebs, and I want ProFlowers to feel a bit of the pain.  This is a different world we live in now, and the social graph should be able to hold bad vendors accountable.

Also, if anyone has a suggestion for the best florist in Seattle who can delver a long overdue bouquet to my wife, let me know.

What do you do when you have a large tradeshow presence to plan? Clearly you want to put your best foot forward.  If you are going to attend the Mobile World Congress, we’re talking about your absolute best foot forward.  Booth space isn’t cheap, and you have 50K people to impress.  Sadly, I feel that one company had a bit of a “lost in translation” moment when they planned their presence.

I am not sure, even now, I can tell you what CBoss does.  To the left is a logo grab from their website.  I think they have something to do with IT infrastructure, but I can’t be sure.  If, based on their show presence, I was asked to tell you what they did, I would say that they have invented a machine which manufactures women in vaguely futuristic or revealing clothing.  Though, I am not sure if they do it in hardware or software, so I’m not sure how excited I should be.

To make this point, allow me to share this photo.  You see, this booth was just across from the Microsoft booth, and it was quite loud.  At any given moment, there was anywhere from 3 to 7 women on stage.  Yes, stage.  It wasn’t clear if there was any meeting areas.  I did not see a single male working at the booth the whole time I was there.  In fact, the cynical person in me thinks that the company is completely fabricated, and the booth presence was constructed by Google in an effort to deflect attention from Windows Phone 7.  It seemed that every time our team was getting ready to do demos, CBoss cranked up the music.

Scantily clad women is bad.  Tacky.  Worse still is not even having an employee who has even a bare modicum of understanding of the subject matter presenting on stage.  Each time a presentation occurred, it was someone reading, badly and quietly, from a script.

Here’s where it get’s interesting.  The astute reader will note text on the backdrop of the stage.  I must admit, I was at Mobile World Congress for 3 whole days before I even noticed the text.  3 days.  The distraction factor was quite high.

What on Earth is that?  “CBoss presents the 55th product”?  Huh?  And how exactly do you use “network functionalities more efficient”?

My personal favorite: “Your Benefits in Post-Crisis Markets.”

If you are going to spend the money on a booth, and certainly the, erm, people talent to bring people to the booth, make sure people can understand what you do, especially if they are staring at your booth.

Apple released their iPad today and lead with this claim:

There are more than enough bloggers looking to give their opinions on the topic, so I will avoid that morass.  I want to reserve final judgment until I play with it, but I did come away feeling like this scene from History of the World was more appropriate.

I am going to go on record here and claim that 2010 will see the rapid and inexorable decline of the popularity of the Netbook.  I have been using a Netbook for more than 6 months, and using it with Windows 7.  I finally gave up on my Lenovo S10 with 2GB of RAM.

While there have been scores of articles breathlessly extolling the coming panacea brought to you by Netbooks, I am calling bullshit, and in fact going to make the claim that the Netbooks will suffer the same fate as the Razor scooter.  In fact, for the true nerds, let’s do a cast:

netbook = (2009)razorscooter;

For those of you too young to remember when the Razor first came on the hipster scene, it was back in the late 90s, and could easily be used as a sign of dot com excess.  Everyone, it seemed, had one of these things, and yet no one, it seemed, was actually riding them.  People carried them around, or you had them in offices (for what purpose I don’t know, but I do know I was scooting to a meeting for which I was late when I saw my future wife sitting in the lobby of my dot com job).  Everyone had to have one of these things.  Then, just as quickly as they appeared, they largely disappeared from that scene.  Sure, you still see them around, and they are certainly for sale, but there’s no flash there.  The cool factor was gone once the lack of utility settled in.

The same fate awaits the netbook.  Let’s start with the issues.  I don’t care what people say about the use cases, the screen resolution for me, is the single biggest limiting factor for netbooks.  I suppose you can blame Microsoft and the new Ribbon UI element, but screen real estate is at a super premium on these netbooks.  I found that there were Flash ads which were designed to be 600 pixels high, and because of toolbars and what not in my browser, the “close window” text for the ad was below the fold, and the ad scrolled with the page.  Ugh!

Second, the Atom processor is not a suitable option for productivity software.  If you do anything remotely resembling serious browsing (more than a few tabs open) or have Outlook + a large PST file, forget about bringing your computer out from sleepy time.  Anytime I opened my machine and Outlook went to synch, the pain and suffering was acute.  Even worse if you hadn’t opened the machine for a day or so and had a bunch of meeting reminders pop up.  I also found that if I had 2 Office apps open, the context switching was sometimes painful.

Lastly, and this is the one that really irks me, the battery life was awful.  For such a small machine, and wimpy processor, the default battery would last 2 hours at most.  Not even enough for 2 meetings without having to travel with the power brick.  I borrowed someone’s 6 cell battery, and that made it marginally more tolerable.  When you think about how long a batter on the new MacBook Pro 13” lasts, the 2 pound trade off for the MBP is well worth the extra 5 hours of battery life.  Plus the bigger screen.  Yes, it’s more expensive, but I think the $300 price point isn’t going to be enough once people use these machines more and more, and come to realize their many shortcomings.

Ultimately I believe people was smaller/lighter form factors, but will grow tired of the toy factor.  You can get a decent laptop for $600.  I am not sure what market space the netbook ultimately occupies.

I cannot even begin to understand the logic of this design decision.  When I got to my room at the Venetian, I was surprised by a couple of things.  First was the size.  It’s a business suite.  Second, the fact that the bed pulled out of the wall…in the corner.  That was a little off putting.  However, the clock is what made me angry.

The clock wasn’t plugged in, so that was the first order of business.  I tried for 10-15 minutes to figure out how to set it.  Being an engineer, I simply couldn’t admit defeat.  Ultimately, I was tired and called the front desk.  It turns out that this particular clock needs a screwdriver (a SCREWDRIVER) to set the time. You can set the alarm fine, but in order to set the time, you need to remove the bottom of the box.  WTF?  They offered to send up an engineer to set it, but knowing what  “truck roll” would cost, I couldn’t, in good conscience, do that.  I opted for the wake up call.

Wow.

I’ve been thinking about business models quite a bit lately.  Mostly because of the work I am doing on cloud services.  In fact, many of the conversations I have been having at our Worldwide Partner Conference over the last few days have specifically focused on cloud compute business models.  I am going to put this out there, and let the VCs be damned.  There’s a reason that “free” and “fail” both start with “f” and have four letters.  “Free” is my new four letter word.  A business model that is based on free is frail and bound to fail.

At some point, the tyranny of the free has to go away.  Mashable had a similar article just the other day.  37Signals hammers on this point constantly.  It’s real simple, as far as I am concerned.  Make something, sell it, make more, and then sell more.  It’s a nice virtuous cycle.  I have lost count of the number of partners with whom I have met this week who have multiple millions of dollars in revenue attached to coding (ISVs or custom application development).  Selling ads against your app requires scale.  Scale comes to a very small number of apps.  There’s a ton of software left to be written that will never be used by enough people to be ad supported.

I want to offer the following: The free movement is completely wrong minded.  I speak from personal experience on this one.  The company I just sold has software+services that are completely free.  In just 14 months, we signed up 150K users, but the app didn’t have an engagement model that supported high numbers of page views.  We listened to one very loud board member who insisted that we be free and never charged for the product.  In the end, we sold the company (for a good result), but we were on fumes.  Developers need to be paid, and they don’t accept page views.  Had we started charging from the outset, I suspect we would not have sold so soon.

In the next few weeks, I plan to have some posts on the business models that are out there and what probably makes sense around cloud compute, but we, as an industry, have to refocus on solving real problems, and charging money for those things.  The penny-gap is getting harder and harder to cross with so much downward pressure on pricing from people who are willing to give stuff away for free.