Death of Tivo, Horrible customer service that screws you over to maximize their revenue

We all use a DVR and for a while I had a Tivo DVR.  A year ago I cancelled the service when my family wanted to go back to Comcast.  But just this week I get a renewal notice for my cancelled service.

Looking up on my charge statement, Tivo had charged me for service in 2011 even though I cancelled.  I called Tivo, and they knew they had me and they refused to refund the charge.  They said the customer service person had kept my annual service alive so i could sell an active box.  How is this a cancellation of my service?

Going back and forth, Tivo tried to upsell me on another service for a monthly fee.

My question to them is "Why should I continue service with you when you take my money provide no service for a year?"  "How is canceling my service equate to charging me the annual fee so I can sell the box?"

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My next steps are to fire this off to the Better Business Bureau as my credit card company can't do anything for the charge given the age of it.

Watching this happen to myself, reminds me of other data center vendors who focus on maximizing their revenue and putting the client in the bind of having little choice but to eat the costs to fix the mistakes made by picking the wrong vendor.

In the same way that Tivo is a short timer with horrible customer service, there are some other vendors out there that will be falling off the map as they have no problem with horrible customer service.

It can be impossible to find this type of information disclosed anywhere, but if you know who to talk to you can find out what really works and what doesn't.  The data center vendors can benefit from people not wanting to air their dirty laundry.

My mistake:  I trusted a Tivo customer support to cancel my subscription when I told them to.  A charge showed up on my credit card three months later, and I neglected to audit my credit card statement for a charge I didn't expect.  Shame on me for trusting Tivo.

Is the Public Cloud a place of refuge from the infighting in Enterprise IT?

There are many reasons why the public could is popular.  MSNBC has a post on how executives hate their jobs just as much as lower level employees.

Execs are just like you: They don't like their jobs, either


By Allison Linn

If you feel stuck in a job you don’t like, maybe you can take comfort in the fact that the big boss may well be in the same boat.

A new global survey of business executives finds that less than half like their jobs, although most don’t plan on leaving.

The Path Forward, a survey of 3,900 business executives from around the world conducted by consulting firm Accenture, found that only 42 percent said they were satisfied with their jobs. That’s down slightly from 2010.

And, reading about the Power of Habits reminded of a possible reason for the displeasure.  The fact that some companies are a civil war.

Companies aren’t big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory.

Companies aren’t families. They’re potential battlefields in a civil war.

Then it hit me that the Data Center is the one place that all theses families (internal company teams) need to put their information.  What other place other than finance has the whole organization connecting.  The finance scenario is actually probably easier as it ultimately a money issue.  But, enterprise IT is very complex.

If you accept this difficulty of having everyone get along in enterprise IT which can be wearing and frustrating, then maybe people just want to escape the mental anguish and feuding between groups.  The lower costs and better service of a cloud environment like AWS could be the side benefits when the ultimate reason was the frustration dealing with central enterprise IT.  If you accept this as a potential reason for why users have gone to the public cloud, they are not going to be satisfied with a private cloud run by the central enterprise IT.

 

Data Centers as the Heart and Brain of a company, an outage is like a stroke

Data Centers are becoming more and more important for a companies survival.  The Data Center is define in Wikipedia as.

Data center

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An operation engineer overseeing a Network Operations Control Room of a data center.

A data center (or data centre or datacentre or datacenter) is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices.

In the past I have used the analogy of an information factory to explain how critical it is to operate data centers, but this definition is still too geeky for most.  As companies have learned during extended outages, they are paralyzed as if your brain and heart have stopped working.  Maybe a better analogy is to think of an outage as stroke where blood flow to the brain is cut off.

Definition

A stroke is the sudden death of brain cells in a localized area due to inadequate blood flow.

Description

A stroke occurs when blood flow is interrupted to part of the brain. Without blood to supply oxygen and nutrients and to remove waste products, brain cells quickly begin to die. Depending on the region of the brain affected, a stroke may cause paralysis, speech impairment, loss of memory and reasoning ability, coma, or death.
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I recently talked to a CEO of a start-up and her company suffered 2 1/2 days of down service during AWS major outage on the East Coast.  AWS comp'd her $700 for the downtime, but that's like paying people for the cost of keeping the body running during 2 1/2 days.  The outage was a paralysis for her business.  Lack of response is like being in a coma.  After a day or two you start to think of death.

Sounds scary.  It should a major data center is like a stroke.

Going back to wikipedia's definition of a data center.

IT operations are a crucial aspect of most organizational operations. One of the main concerns is business continuity; companies rely on their information systems to run their operations. If a system becomes unavailable, company operations may be impaired or stopped completely. It is necessary to provide a reliable infrastructure for IT operations, in order to minimize any chance of disruption. Information security is also a concern, and for this reason a data center has to offer a secure environment which minimizes the chances of a security breach. A data center must therefore keep high standards for assuring the integrity and functionality of its hosted computer environment. This is accomplished through redundancy of both fiber optic cables and power, which includes emergency backup power generation.

Does this sound more like a data center is heart and brain of a company?

When you discuss outages, it can change the minder by thinking of a stroke to the business.  You can be hyper paranoid and create SLAs that define high 9's of availability. Or recognize that outages are part of life.  How you cope with them and recover is key.  Early detection and fast response time limits the damage.

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Is it time for unbiased journalism to end, what happens if writers have opinions? More interesting news?

One of the classic rules of media journalism is being unbiased.  But is unbiased journalism real?

The Illusion of Unbiased Journalism

The title is not a misprint. There is no such thing as unbiased journalism, just like the term "political science" is an oxymoron. There is no quantitative scientific formula for winning an election, for the variable of the voter's mind is too inconsistent, and thus there is no such thing as unbiased journalism because of that same human factor.

GigaOm writes on the issues of Twitter and Journalism.

Twitter and journalism: It shouldn’t be that complicated

By  Nov. 8, 2011, 9:34am PT No Comments

The Associated Press caused a minor furore recently when the news-wire serviceupdated its social-media policy and forbid its writers from expressing any opinions on Twitter, including implied opinions caused by retweeting others. In the wake of that controversy, Jeff Sonderman at the Poynter Institute has suggested thatjournalists could use their own Twitter shorthand to prevent anyone from getting the wrong impression when a reporter retweets something. But as I’ve argued before, all we really have to do is admit that journalists of all kinds might have opinions, instead of trying to pretend that they don’t, or trying to force them not to.

Anyone who thinks journalists don't have a bias hasn't had a lengthy conversation with one in a bar.  Most have very strong opinions, but when they write for their job the "unbiased journalism" rules kick in.

I have lost the articles I found that discussed how part of what got unbiased journalism its start is when a newspaper became a monopoly in area news it was in its best interest to tell both sides of the story to maximize readership which then maximizes subscriptions and advertising.

But in this day, monopoly news is out.  People want to hear opinions.  And it is what they expect.  How many times have you read something expecting some good points and are disappointed there is no clear opinions.  I know many who have had media interviews spent a lot of time explaining their issues, and then when the article comes out their expert opinion is compared to a nobody, but a nobody who has the opposing view that allows the journalist to appear unbiased.

By pretending that their journalists don’t have opinions, when everyone knows that they do, mainstream media outlets are suggesting their viewers or readers are too stupid to figure out where the truth lies, or too thick to consider the facts of a story if the reporter happens to have retweeted someone or joined a Facebook page. Given that kind of treatment, many of those looking for news are likely to migrate to sources that admit they have views on events, rather than continue to be talked down to by newspapers and TV networks that pretend they are above that sort of thing.

GIgaOm highlights the power of Twitter.

But all that reinforces is how media entities like CNN are missing the point about social media, or seeing only the potential negatives instead of the positives. As journalism professor Robert Hernandez noted on Twitter:


Robert Hernandez
The thing is RT/Twitter/social media is working fine. It's traditionalists that don't get it and want to 'fix it,' aka control it.