Technology Futures

"VoIP's gonna be huge." That's what the Register headline says, and the article goes on to say that the traditional telcos are running scared--that telco VoIP offerings are being rolled out because the companies fear that if they don't, VoIP upstarts will steal all their voice business.

The article goes on to say that advanced services--IP TV, gaming, video on demand, home security, etc.--will be where the real profits are in the future. Voice telephony will be just one of many broadband services, and the telcos have to adjust or die.

In a perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a Federal campaign reform law has created confusion about whether or not it applies to blogs, which are normally written by just one or perhaps a handful of people.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) officials don't even agree on what is correct. Some commissioners think bloggers and Internet campaigning generally are exempt, and others disagree.

Strictly interpreted, any time a blogger discussed politics, it would potentially generate paperwork and FEC reports, and taking political ads on a blog site would trigger more reporting.

Since bloggers generally don't make a full time living from their blogs, and most do it as a no-income or low-income sideline, any reporting requirements at all would force them to avoid any discussion of politics, abridging their right to free speech.

Xerox has the world's worst customer service, largely because they have the world's worst IT infrastructure.

I've been trying for two days to get a toner cartridge for my printer/copier (which is a terrific piece of equipment). But Xerox has a maze of disconnected phone and Web services that don't work with each other or with the company's internal customer tracking and billing systems.

One example of utter insanity: I can access my account online, which shows a balance of zero (I don't owe any money). But when I call to order a toner cartridge, I have a "credit lock" on my account and the order can't be processed. The person I am talking to has no idea why. He just shunts me over to billing, where after navigating phone mail hell for a while, I'm told by the voicemail system to hang up and try again. Nice.

More utter insanity: I went online a few days ago to pay my bill, and I could not pay online because my account was "locked." No one knew why. In this day and age, you have to wonder about a company that refuses to take payments online.

When I finally got to someone on the phone who could actually take a credit card payment, they told me it would take "two days" for the billing system to process the payment. Huh? I can pay someone in Belgium for something and they get the money in their bank account about fifteen seconds after I hit the Submit button on my Web browser. But a high technology company can't move bits around any faster than two days?

But wait--there's more. I have a service agreement that includes supplies, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to order prepaid supplies online. You would think they would try to drive transaction costs as low as possible, but no, they apparently like high service costs AND annoying customers with toll free numbers that don't work and voicemail systems that never get you to the right person.

This is an IT department failure of the highest order. Xerox is losing millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars a year from these systems. The IT department has hijacked the entire company, saddling it with expensive and ineffective systems that drive away customers.

Even sadder: it is obvious no one in the company has ever tried to use its own customer service systems.

Update (2/21/06)
Two people from Xerox contacted me and asked if I was continuing to have problems--I have not. They said my postings had triggered an internal review of their customer service procedures and they were working to try to ensure that I or any other customer did not have this kind of experience again.

Good for them.

I'm delighted with the copier-printer I have. It cost more than the cheap laser printers you can buy in OffficeMax for a few hundred dollars, but it has been worth every penny. It prints and copies reliably, never jams, and I can get it fixed if something breaks. I'd much rather buy from a company that is willing to say, "Boy, we screwed up but we want to try to fix things," than a company that will not acknowledge that, or worse, that you can't even contact for help (I bought the Xerox printer after having horrible experiences with a Samsung printer).

Will my next printer be a Xerox? Yes--the quality and reliability, the ability to get the machine repaired, along with a company anxious to do better makes it a no-brainer.

The tech world is abuzz with the announcement by Google that they are:

1) Rolling out a national fiber backbone

2) Offering Google Secure Access WiFi services

Throw a rock and you'll hit someone with an opinion, but on SlashDot, which usually has pretty sharp insight into these things, the consensus is as follows:

1) Google's network initiatives will allow it to know even more about its customers, making advertising on Google even more valuable (and it is the advertising that is paying the bills).

2) The phone companies are in deep trouble. Google just rolled out GoogleTalk, a voice application that could quickly become full-fledged VoIP, and you needs lot of bandwidth to handle lots of phone calls. Hence the national fiber backbone. Google will be able to quickly build a large customer base and throw all the hardware resources needed at it to keep service quality high. Look for college students to start dropping cellphone service first.

3) But how do you replace cellphones with fiber? Well, you need a WiFi and/or WiMax wireless network to do so. Which Google has started testing. Just like Sprint and MCI did in the early days of competitive long distance, Google will cherry pick key markets and grab big gobs of customers--think college campuses and college towns, downtown metro areas, etc.

4) Google will also use its massive network to continually provide new and improved Web applications to piggyback on its email, mapping, and newsgroup services. Eventually, Google will rollout a net-centric desktop OS replacement for free, killing Windows.

Who loses? From a community perspective, rural communities are not likely to see free or low cost Google services anytime soon, because the markets are not big enough.

As I have written before, I am very cautious about Google and any other "free" service providers (e.g. Yahoo!, MSN, etc.). You give your privacy away, and lose ownership of your own data. Yahoo! just handed over emails to the Chinese government that resulted in a ten year jail sentence for someone who was writing about freedom in China (or the lack of it).

We need to be very cautious about any company that offers "free" services and exposes us to privacy and free speech problems.