VMWare Fusion Support: @vmwarefusion

I love having the option of sending out a tweet to a vendor to make a minor gripe, to see if and how they respond. It usually ends well. I complain about what I believe is a bug, the vendor’s designated tweeter responds, we have a little conversation, the issue ends up being operator error on my part, and life goes on.

Twitter presents a completely non-disruptive option for low-grade but surprisingly high-touch customer support. And think about it… a public tech support call. That’s a bit of risk on the part of the vendor. Good on ya @vmwarefusion !

TD Insurance: Meh.

In contrast to Apple’s surprise & delight approach to customer service, we have TD Insurance.

I just recently bought a Toyota Yaris and one of the point-of-purchase options is to get security engraving, which for me provides little peace-of-mind but does provide a ~$250 discount on car insurance over 5 years. So we signed up for that.

However, it turns out that the engraving service that our dealer uses is not on the approved list on the TD side, so that was just money thrown out the freshly engraved window as far as I’m concerned. Now a helpful TD chap sympathized with the misstep, and said he’d try to get us the discount at least for year 1 (about ~$40) just to make us feel better. As for the discount over subsequent years, we would have to consider re-engraving with an approved vendor.

Nice gesture… bordering on surprise and delight. Given that the company in question is an insurance company, I’ll at least give them surprise.

Well, said helpful TD chap called back today. Unfortunately, he sincerely lamented, his request to do this nice thing for us was kiboshed by an ‘analyst’ who scoured the paperwork and determined that we were told of our engraving vendor’s ineligibility prior to having actually had the car engraved. Because of this, the nice gesture had to be withdrawn. Ixnay on the enerosityjay. Never mind the fact that this window-of-opportunity occurred outside business hours. OK, so we may have had an opportunity to place phone calls and cause a dramatic scene just as the would-be engraver approached our vehicle with his… well with whatever it is one engraves with.

The only bone I was thrown was that if I had the forensic wherewithal to re-construct the scene and demonstrate a timetable that proved that the damage indeed had already effectively been done… that I could submit it to the analyst for reconsideration.

Meh.

This started out as an unsolicited nice gesture, and a minor one at that, but one that resonated pretty well for me given that it’s source was a frickin’ insurance company. Sadly, a soulless pencil-pushing analyst (perhaps a thoroughly decent person outside business hours) determined that it didn’t add up, and reversed the goodwill that had otherwise been generated at low cost.

Apple Customer Support: Surprise & Delight

I suppose Apple is taking a page out of W’s shock and awe strategy, but ran it through the Apple PR machine and rebranded it surprise & delight. I have an aging MacBook Pro which has had battery troubles for some time. If you unplugged the power cord, the battery, otherwise displaying 100% charge, would within minutes crap out and the machine was down.

After 18+ months of inaction on my part, and soon after the machine went to my wife as a hand-me-down, she took initiative and confirmed that the Extended Care was still valid, and then booked a date with a genius.

The short story is that she got a new battery.

The full story is that the genius tested the battery, determined that it had simply lost its ability to keep a charge, which happens after 300 or so cycles or less if you don’t let it fully drain. So in effect, it was up to us to spend ~150 bucks on a new battery as the issue surfaced from normal use.

Except that instead, the genius—independently, it seems, without having to escalate for managerial approval—decided to surprise and delight my wife by giving her a new battery anyway. He just decided to throw us a bone. I bone I’m still chewing, several days after the fact.

A snapshot of the support ticket.

You’d be right to call out the fact that the battery was a bit of a lemon, having degraded to the point of unusability after only about a 100 recharges, and that hell yeah Apple should replace the battery. But the fine print suggests that they don’t have to. But they did anyway.

Compare this against my experience with TD Insurance.

Toyota—Customer Loyalty and Consumer Advocacy

Driving my Toyota Matrix to work today—a 2007 model that is not part of the massive recall underway—I was keeping my ninja skills engaged in the unlikely event of gas-pedal stickage. Now it’s standard transmission, so I’m pretty sure that if anything like that were to happen I could do a simple clutch-in, shift to neutral, and brake to safety. Then I heard that they’ve uncovered a brake problem in the Prius. Assuming it’s only a matter of time before finding out that my Matrix is as defective as the rest of them, my worst-case scenario now is less brake-to-safety than drift-to-safety. Maybe using parked cars to slow me down.

Then it occurred to me that there are lots of Toyotas on the road, and some of them are right behind me. With dodgy gas pedals. And it was then that the Toyota logo and its brand had manifestly changed. Suddenly, all these Toyotas, which used to be stainless-steel eggs wrapped around sensible car-buyers motivated by safety and responsibility, were potential time-bombs driven by customers whose expectations and assumptions were massively betrayed.

Truth is, I’m not really all that worried about this problem. My wife is convinced she has experienced gas-pedal stickage. I’ve been driving the car much more than her lately and I’ve not noticed anything.

For me, I’m thinking more about how this situation might influence an upcoming purchase decision. A second car looms on the horizon, and the Matrix, in year 3 of a 5-year lease, might be up for an early renewal. I’ve always loved Toyota, and I was pretty much assuming that in both cases we’d stick with Toyota.

So should I operate with a World According to Garp mentality (‘what are the chances of another massive recall?’) and keep the faith? Should I seriously consider another brand? And either way, should I shift from loyal customer to consumer advocate and research my options for refunds or class-action litigation?

In the end I think I’m think it’s time to leverage Toyota’s postion of weakness. I don’t believe they’re in a death-spiral, I suspect they by and large remain company that will more often that not release quality cars. They’ll certainly be focusing on restoring that brand perception with very real initiatives and results. That said, I suppose the 2010 line may be one that’s worth passing on. Let Toyota get its shizzle together then get out of the Matrix lease a year early with a 2011 Venza or something.

And in the mean time, in the next few months when it’s time to get that second car (my commute-mobile)… maybe I can use this Toyota situation to justify the purchase of a Cooper S as a “safety-first” purchase decision.

ReelDirector—Video editing on the iPhone

ReelDirector by Nexvio, $7.99 on the App Store (Canada)

Recommended only for the 3GS. Older iPhones/iPods will run it but only for editing sequences of stills, and only the recent iPod Touch with a headset (as opposed to just headphones) will support voice-over.

So yesterday a tweet flew by about a video editing app on the iPhone. In the business of video editing software development myself, and having spent some spare cycles imagining an iPhone version of iMovie, I just had to check it out.

Nexvio has three iPhone apps for the editing hobbyist:

• Slowmo does basic timewarps (no interframe blending or motion estimation of course)
• ReelMoments enables time-lapse photography, and stitches together a video for you
• ReelDirector is an app to edit movie sequences from videos and photos from your iPhone’s Camera Roll

I didn’t bother with Slowmo, and ReelMoments is fun, but ReelDirector is not only quite a decent app, it’s a reasonably significant event in the video editing world as far as I’m concerned.

With the iPhone 3GS you can, out of the box, shoot a video, trim its head and tail, and then upload to YouTube without breaking a sweat. This is great if you happen to capture a short, continuous moment of interest that’s worthy (the bar is low here) of a presence on the internet.

Add ReelDirector to the mix, and you can move to storytelling. These are exciting times when you are able to shoot, cut, finish, and publish a movie on-the-go using a single handheld device.

I’m not a professional editor. I know a lot about video editing software (from web services, to consumer software, all the way up to $500K DI finishing systems). I’m also an active video editing hobbyist and a huge fan of iMovie. So as much as I don’t pretend to be a master of the craft, I can certainly put any video editing system through the ringer and get a good feel for its design and function.

Using ReelDirector, after about 30 minutes of work while I was also cooking dinner I put together this video using only my iPhone.

The Low-Down
ReelDirector can only access video from your Camera Roll, so don’t think you can sync movies to your iPhone and edit from there. ReelDirector is geared for the shoot-and-cut crowd not the mashup crowd. We’re talking about the hobbyist, the vigilante journalist, the mobile videographer. No doubt some sort of porn site will spawn from this.

• Set up a project. You create a project, set properties which include an optional title slate, end slate/credits, and default transition and duration. Easy-peasy. Taking a page out of iMovie, there’s not too much flexibility in terms of title styles, but you’ve got bread-and-butter coverage. The selection of transitions is pretty good, but again, don’t go looking for massive levels of customization. This is Duplo, not Lego. Certainly not Mechano.

• Add video to the timeline. Select videos from the Camera Roll (you can trim them on the way in—head/tail are preserved—and/or trim after adding them to the timeline), and photos (all synced photos, not just camera roll photos in this case).

• Add audio to the timeline. Drop in a music track and record voice-over on-the-fly. The V-O feature is great, and you can record V-O over a music bed, though I only managed to get the left side to pick up. Might have overlooked something there. Furthermore…

  The music (or whatever audio file) workflow is not so hot. Nexvio acknowledges as much. You can’t hook directly into your iTunes library, instead, there’s this imaginative but clunky method where you get your iPhone on the same WiFi network as a laptop/desktop, then point the laptop’s web browser to an IP address, then use a file upload mechanism to get the files into a ReelDirector audio library. It works, but is the one chink in the storytelling-on-the-go philosophy in that if you don’t have the right audio already imported and you’re nowhere near a WiFi network, you’re not going to be able to get that Cyndi Lauper track that’s already on your iPhone into the mix. Let’s hope they improve this in an update soon.

• Add spit-and-polish. Although laying down sources is easy and smooth, working with timeline segments, trimming, adding transitions, and so on, is a little trickier. It’s not terribly hard to figure out what to do—the UI design is really pretty good. But the experience suffers from the fact that you can’t ever get a representative preview of the edited sequence. You can play each segment independently, but to see the transitions, feel the beats between cuts, and hear multitrack audio over video, you have to exit the timeline editor and render the entire movie.

  Now I respect that there are technical reasons for this, limitations of the device. All things considered, Nexvio has done a good job with a device that isn’t quite ready to support a compelling video editing experience. Bold of Nexvio to put this out there, and I think there will be some (many?) hobbyists and others like me who will be willing to bear with some klunk because the over-arching ability to go from concept-to-published-movie using a phone is groundbreaking.

• Render the movie. Rendering is fast enough, given that most projects in this environment will be short enough. My ~2 minute movie took about 2 minutes to render. Because of the lack of in-timeline render preview, I did have to go in and out of the editorial workspace about 5 times and re-render until I worked out some kinks. When I was eventually satisfied I saved the rendered result to the Camera Roll and used the built-in YouTube publish option to move it online.

Some screenshots:

Now what?

If I put away my professional interest in this product, and suppress my early-adopter/hobbyist enthusiasm for it… what am I left with if I distill, as much as possible, the voice-of-the-customer?

One thing about editing is that it adds some time to the process. You’ll easily spend 10 times your project’s duration in the editing phase. Another thing is that editing is storytelling, and not everyone is a storyteller, and therefore has much interest in shooting to edit and then, worse, actually editing. The consumer mobile video capture experience is and will always be (he said, boldly) primarily a shoot-and-post. The built-in 3GS trim option is enough.

For someone like me who shoots to edit, ReelDirector won’t change my habits much. I need more or less uninterrupted time to edit, and in general I’d sooner wait until I could fire up the laptop, sync the 3GS video footage to iPhoto, then use iMovie to cut-and-publish. iMovie is still a vastly superior editorial workspace.

ReelDirector is required only if I need to edit and post on the go, and I’m honestly not sure how often I’ll find myself in that situation. If I witness and capture an event that needs to get online ASAP, I’ll probably just shoot-and-post. So as impressed as I am with the product, I suspect it’ll sit there, idle, unless I make a conscious decision to use it for a project in spite of taking a few workflow hits, just, ’cause, you know, it’s cool.

There may be some valid use-cases. With this solution independent vigilante journalists have everything they need to capture, edit, add V-O and basic titles to make something that doesn’t just bear in/out witness but actually reports a story. In that case, shoot-edit-and-post on-the-go is a requirement. But I’d like to see that use-case proven in the field—at this point I just give it a maybe. And beyond that, I’m just not sure where the sweet-spot is, or flip-side, what’s missing from the product to make it a legitimate solution.

For industry peeps and hobbyists, I’d still recommend buying it if only to try it out and think seriously about what it means to have video editing on a mobile device. At $7.99 (Canada) it’s a pretty easy purchase decision, and a good price to get a taste and feel for what is a significant milestone in the video editing world.

Bell and Billing: Sorcery

I’ve got the triple-play with Bell. I remember the initial offer (many years ago) was all three services (phone, internet, satellite) for $89.99. And yet by dint of dark magic (even after several attempts by my wife, bless her soul, to purge our account of useless features and ersatz value-adds), the bill never comes in under $150.

The would-be easy-to-view One-Bill™ online view is insanity itself… with it’s endless list of items, recurring credits, licensing fees, and system access fees. To this day I can’t make heads or tails of it. I am precariously close to dumping the land line and the satellite TV. I am precariously closer to jumping ship to Videotron—except I don’t expect the situation to be any better there.

Over Christmas I’m going to dig deep, spend lots of time on the phone with a Bell customer service rep, and see if I can’t enter the new year with an arrangement that at the very least is predictable and comprehensible.

Like the NHL owners of 2004, I want cost-certainty. If I’m actually pleased with the pricing, that’ll be a bonus.

Happy DropBox Customer

File this under “well, duh…”.

Just after I nominated DropBox as best web app of 2009 (Crunchies), I was thinking about mobility, and how it used to refer to handheld devices, primarily phones. But now it’s more about data mobility.

With DropBox for example, I set up the root DropBox folder on my laptop and it syncs that data up to the cloud everytime I make a change. I install the DropBox client on the Mac Mini, on my laptop’s Windows partition, and whatever other computer I use. I have an iPhone client too. So the data follows me either becuase it resides on a portable/mobile device, or (if e.g., the airline loses my checked-in laptop/device) it follows me via the cloud to the replacement laptop/device.

I don’t miss a beat. So that makes me happy.

Apple Customer Service: Nice!

I’m effectively an Apple fan-boy. I like to think I judge their products and services objectively, but when I look at the total after-tax income that goes from me directly to the Cupertino coffers, I’m not sure my credibility holds up so well. So be it. So there’s disclosure taken care of.

The latest Apple purchase is the Snow Leopard OS 10.6 upgrade. I perform the upgrade on the Mac Mini and it is, as is usually the case, a painless experience. Next up is my laptop… and here is where I have some troubles:

1. After post-installation restart, the Setup Assistant shows up playing that outer space fly-through and that hip music—generally something you see when you set up a new computer. Marginally alarming, especially as this did not happen on the Mac Mini. I just close the Setup Assistant…
2. …only to see four dialogs about font conflicts needing resolving. I resolve said conflicts.
3. Next, I launch Firefox. No internet connection. I am on the wireless network, but the connection stops there, not making it through to the interweb. Hmmmph. The Mac Mini is connected to the interweb—but it’s via ethernet to the router. So I connect my laptop similarly—no dice. I then check my wife’s laptop (still on Leopard 10.5.8 and it is connected over WIFI to the interweb no problem. Hmmph.
4. Lastly, for poops and giggles I launch Pages and it never fully initialized. Eegads. (In the end this one was a red herring—I was just impatient.)

So I figure the installation choked somewhere. I restore a 10.5.8 backup via Time Machine (I’m a big fan of Time Machine). Everything works fine.

So next up is a second attempt at installing Snow Leopard. Exactly the same result. I cruise the interweb, search for comparable reports, and find out that at least one other person has experienced these issues, and according to him/her everything was peachy after a full erase and fresh install. Ick. Not going to do that.

So I head to Apple’s Support pages, thinking this is going to end up with a phone call, long waits, conversations about Apple Care or Protection Plan or whatever, and escalation to some manager because hell no I’m not paying some $30 one-time fee or whatever.

But I see on this page that there’s an option to submit a technical issue and have an Apple representative call me at a scheduled time to resolve the issue. Holy crap! I follow the steps and can you believe that on Sunday at 8:45AM in the morning there’s a scheduled slot open for a call-back @ 9:15. Done.

9:15—The phone rings. Alas. It is a machine. I mean, if it had been a human, a human with a profoundly calming voice, I think I may have wet myself. But it was a machine, telling me that my call was open but that I’d have to wait a bit before a representative would open it.

9:22—Amanda, she of profoundly calming voice, gets on the line. She asks me for a minute while she reviews the problem description I entered when I had requested the call. Next thing I know I’m being talked through some reasonably simple network diagnostic steps, a few configuration changes, and presto, I’m online. I was not asked to go through a myriad of troubleshooting 101 checks that I had done independently, the Apple Care conversation never happened, no escalations—it all just worked out fine. I’m even pretty sure Amanda had the hots for me.

Shudder. Now I realize that in then end this issue I had was relatively minor, obviously a known issue in their knowledge base, and had the issue been more serious I could have had a much longer and possibly frustrating experience… but when I look back on what I went through from first encountering the problem to its resolution, I’m a little gobsmacked at how profoundly awesome the experience was.

The significant differences from comparable experiences I’ve had in the past:

• I found the phone number on the website without having to dig and get through front-line, self-help force fields.
• I was able to have Apple call me at a scheduled time convenient for me by choosing from a selection of open timeslots.
• I was prompted to choose some filters and enter a problem description so the call could be funneled to someone with the appropriate technical expertise.
• The call came in as promised, on time, admittedly initially machine-aided with some (7 minutes) of wait-time before human contact.

All of this customer-centric upside is great, but if you look at its impact on the entire customer support process—and if I assume that it has a comparable effect for most incoming issues—it must significantly reduce the operation overhead and cost for Apple as well. So fan-boy or not, I don’t think I need to tell you how I like them apples.