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RE: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft contact?

  • From: Ivan Groenewald
  • Date: Fri Feb 03 11:20:46 2006

Earlier, Valdis scribbled:
> There's also the deeper question:  Why do we let the situation persist?
Why do we tolerate the continued problems from unreachable companies? 
>(And yes, this *is* an operational issue - what did that 4 hours on the
phone cost your company's bottom line in wasted time?)


To a certain extent, it's simple economic logic. 
At the end of the day, I got my issue sorted and it cost me 4 hours of
billable time. It cost the other party 15 minutes of time. Why employ
another person full time to deal with queries or man an email desk, to save
*me* 3h45min? It makes economic sense for bigger companies not to, well,
"care". They aren't going to go away, you're not going to get in the way of
the big Google/MS/BigCorp(tm) engine with gripes on your blog, so why bother
spending more money on helping *you*?

It might sound very black and white, but I can tell you now that a lot of
these companies use that as a rationale even without thinking about it so
directly. 

The whole situation is unfortunate. It seems that basic business ethics are
going down the drain quicker and quicker.

Maybe companies should start programming AliceBots to deal with
technical/commonly asked queries via the LiveSupport button on their
website. (hey, that sounds like a business idea!) 
It would be time better spent than phoning someone's automated answering
box... imho

Regards,
Ivan

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
[email protected]
Sent: 03 February 2006 15:33
To: Ivan Groenewald
Cc: 'Gadi Evron'; 'n3td3v'; [email protected]
Subject: Re: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft contact? 

On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 06:04:57 GMT, Ivan Groenewald said:

> At the end of the day this is never going to stop. It's much easier
posting
> to Nanog than spending 4 hours on the phone trying to locate someone with
a
> clue in one of these big companies.

All it would take is for http://puck.nether.net to carry either the correct
contact info once it's been discovered, so it doesn't have to be
rediscovered
over and over, or a "Don't bother" entry(*) so people don't have to
re-discover
that there's no way to get there from here. 

There's also the deeper question:  Why do we let the situation persist?  Why
do
we tolerate the continued problems from unreachable companies? (And yes,
this *is*
an operational issue - what did that 4 hours on the phone cost your
company's
bottom line in wasted time?)

(*) And yes, I'm *FULLY* aware of at least the top 17 reasons why That Just
Won't Work, so don't bother posting a reply unless you've got a particularly
interesting number 18 - the *point* is that *IF* the info was listed, it
would
help solve the problem of wasting time trying to reach these companies.