Note: This column represents the opinions
of the writer and as such, is not purported as fact
At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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After all the bitching we've heard about Telecom's JetStart DSL service
of late, it was rather refreshing to hear that users of the service got
some (unofficial) compensation over the weekend.
According to emails received from several JetStart users, something
went awry with Telecom's DSL service which meant that users of the
cheaper "flat-rate" service were effectively getting bandwidth and speeds
normally reserved for users of the more expensive (and metered) JetStream
offering.
It seems that those JetStart users who became aware of the fact were not
slow to take advantage of the significantly increased bandwidth available
to them.
Unfortunately for those benefiting from the slip-up, Telecom spotted the
problem and acted fairly quickly to restore things to normal.
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The tricky thing was however, that in order to return those now lightning-fast
JetStart users to their former sloth-like speeds, Telecom had to first
kick them offline -- too bad if you were just nearing the end of a large
file download with no way to restart where you left off.
The luckiest JetStart users were reportedly able to exploit the foul-up
for several hours before being "bumped" back to normal.
I guess the question we should be asking now is: Why does it take Telecom
so very, very long (we're talking *months* for the micro-outage complaints) to
fix DSL problems when they work in Telecom's favour, yet when a fault works
in the customer's favour the response and resolution time is measured in just
a few hours?
When The Coffee Hits The Fan
It looks as if Microsoft's lawyers will be working overtime during coming
months, as the list of legal actions brought against the software giant continues
to grow.
First up we had the US Department of Justice and a number of individual states
firing legal salvos over the company's anti-competitive behaviour, then
AOL Time Warner decided to have a go itself through a separate prosecution.
Now we have Sun unleashing its own band of corporate sharks on poor old Bill's
boys amidst fears that .Net will soon become yet another area where Microsoft
establishes a powerful defacto monopoly at the expense of other players in
the field.
As a user of the technologies currently being fought and sued over, I can't
help but wonder how much better off we'd all be if just a small part of the
money spent on feeding the sharks was actually used to improve the products
involved.
If Microsoft's lawyers were replaced by people highly skilled in the design
and implementation of secure software systems then I suspect everyone would
be a whole lot better off. Likewise if AOL Time Warner spent more time
fixing the bugs in recent Netscape versions and focused on building a browser
that was leaner, meaner and more efficient then perhaps they'd have a greater
share of the market.
As for Sun -- well Java is a wonderful thing and has been well accepted by
business as a great tool for building inter/intra Net based systems -- but
they've been notoriously slow to fix some irritating bugs and could, in my
opinion, do a whole lot better.
It's a shame that these companies don't realise that, at the end of the day,
consumers just want quality products at reasonable prices.
My suggestion is that we get Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, and whoever is heading
AOL Time Warner all together in a room, throw in some knives and sticks, then
let them go to it for half an hour.
Or, if you find the prospect of such violence to be too horrific, why not
just line them up before Judge Judy
and let her tweak their noses for them?
It'll save a fortune on legal fees and
allow the boys at the coal-face to get on with producing some decent software.
Have your say.
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