Marketing Begins At Home

The upgrade from hell - Windows 7

Its quite fashionable to bash Microsoft and normally I don't but in this case it is so easy. My wife has Vista on her machine, and when I got a new PC with Windows 7 it was so much better that I persuaded her to give it a try.

Problem 1 - Buying the software. She took 5 days to persuade Microsoft to give her a download location and send the disc out. We still don't have the disc, but yesterday I decided to give the download a try.

Problem 2 - Downloading the software. Yes we may not have the fastest BT connection in the world, but it took over 2 hours to download.

Problem 3 - Installing the software. This took over four hours to install and tied up the machine for an entire afternoon.

Problem 4 - Updates. The software that I downloaded required 51 updates. That means that Microsoft deliberately allowed me to download a significantly out of date piece of software. Because I had to remove my wireless driver (incompatible with Windows 7) I couldn't do this at the time the software was installed.

Problem 5 - failure to update. So far we have spend over 2 hours trying to get the software updates to download and install correctly. 

If I really costed my time correctly, it would have been cheaper and better to trash the current PC and go uy a new one with Windows 7 installed. Except then, I would have had to install all the applications on this PC all over again.

Shame on you Microsoft for creating such a poor experience and for not warning people BEFORE they buy that it is likely to take days. 

Last minute update - elapsed time of 17 hours (with a night's sleep included) and the computer appears to be working now. Phew. My credibility as the tech support manager for my household is in shreds, but it is finally working.

Silly Amazon Marketers

Amazon are a great organisation and I love their service. But their marketing people need to wake up.

I just bought two wonderful Kindles from the UK store. I paid £149 each for the 3G enabled ones. I should add that I also have been a UK resident for years, even though the email address I use for this stuff started in America.

So why p%$*s me off by sending me a promotional email for a US Kindle at $139????? I can do the conversion math between the two. It was so different, I had a further look. Turns out that I am comparing apples with oranges, because the $139 US model is the wifi only one. 

So because I bothered to do a little more fact checking I didn't feel that I had paid twice as much for my Kindle in the UK as my cousins in the USA did. 

You still charged me £15 or $25 for the privilege of being a UK resident. I don't feel so good about your brand now. 

But why put me through all that? Why send promo emails about your AMERICAN store to a BRITISH customer who has just BOUGHT two Kindles? All you do is p*&^s me off.