January 01, 1800

name two adjectives that one might use to describe a stunted intellect

Micro, soft

Originally published February 6, 2005

The other night, a friend showed me something very telling about a certain world's largest software company. A pinhead executive there recently distributed a survey to my permanent-status brethren. He wants to know how many employees own iPods. He then plunges straight into question-begging, scolding 'Softies who buy non-MS products. Although I was morbidly curious about his justifications for dictating how employees choose to spend their wages, I stopped there. After ten years of traversing the scum-laden petri dish that is the corporate culture, I have the rest of the memo memorized. It will assert that MS technologies are clearly superior due to their obvious non-inferiority and that customers, although always right, are unequivocally wrong. The memo will then prove these assertions by citing someone who quotes the memo. Slogans will be coined, posters will be printed and hung in the hallways, and 4.0s will be handed out, all without a single goddamned sale being made. Such is the nature of accomplishment there.

A few years ago, a slogan du jour was "delight the customer." We all had to huddle in our offices and somehow work that buzz phrase into our annual reviews, the scores for which were of course already submitted, but I digress. We had to specify how, precisely, we were delighting the customer, and since we were being evaluated on a curve, the delights we were concocting had damned well better be more salacious than our peers'. The slogan has long since passed into oblivion—going the way of the February bonus, merit raises, stock options, and motivated employees—but I'm resurrecting it here in order to demonstrate a crucial hypocrisy. I am an iPod owner. Like the overwhelming majority of iPod owners, I am thrilled with it. Every day I use it, I become more impressed by the thought that went into its elegant design. And I am a dream customer. If it died tomorrow, I'd shed a manly tear, have a tasteful little funeral, flush, and then sprint to the store to get on the waiting list for an even more expensive one. I am, in short, the quintessentially delighted customer of my employer's competitor. But are my experiences mined for a better understanding of the customers' wants and needs? Are they a handy catalyst for introspection and self-improvement? No, they are resented, berated, corrected, dismissed.

Here's a more personal tale. I know folks who work on Windows Media Player. We were discussing the Big 3 media clients (WMP, Real, QuickTime), and I told them that, as an average end-user surfing average Web media, my experience was that QuickTime and WMP are the most reliable of the three, in that order. Did they shake their heads sadly? No. Did they want the details? No. Did they politely thank me for my data, roll their eyes at some oversight on my part, and forget about it? No. Did they inform me that my experience was somehow not representative? No, no, of course not. They argued that my experience wasn't what I remember. Instead of listening to the customer, they sought to discredit what he said, even if it meant correcting his own memory. And I'm their friend. Imagine how little regard they have for you.

Correcting the customer's memory. Is there a better metaphor for arrogant incompetence? Well, maybe one.

Stock performance during the iPod line's brief lifetime

posted by john at 12:00 AM • permalink