150 Million (Source: Engadget)

So I imagine, like me, many of you are buying your new iPhones today or at least waiting with bated breath for the New World of the iOS 4.0.

Last week, I followed the WWDC keynote, and despite all the gadget and gizmo talk, there was one thing that stuck in my head. In fact, it haunted me as nothing has since I first wrote the business plan for Pegasus News in 2004:

150 million credit cards on file from people using iTunes and/or the App Store (and now the iBooks Store). 150 Million.

As Steve Jobs said, “We have 150 million accounts — we think it’s the biggest on the web. We’re number one.”

Interestingly, he then segued into a discussion of iAds, but there was no connection.

As someone who has been obsessed with transactional ad models for the better part of this decade, this presented both a tragedy and an opportunity. That night, after mulling the problem while floating in the pool with the pups, I toddled inside and fired off an email to sjobs@apple.com:

From Mike Orren <mike@mikeorren.com>

reply-to mike@mikeorren.com

to sjobs@apple.com

date Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 8:49 PM

subject The half (of iAds) that’s wasted

mailed-by mikeorren.com

hide details Jun 7 (7 days ago)

Steve:

Congrats on launching another product I MUST have.

You can’t meet a group of ad folks without hearing the quote from legendary retailer John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

My sole disappointment in your new offerings is that you have a golden opportunity to solve that paradox and are, for now, ignoring it.

Yes, iAds suck less than regular ads. I appreciate that, as that’s a goal I’ve focused on in my business for several years.

But at a million-dollar minimum, you’re missing most of the local market. AND you have 150 million credit card accounts from people who would love to save money transacting with local businesses.

Do you want to provide a marginally better experience for major brand advertising? Or do you (and your developer community) want a piece of 150 million cups of coffee, shirts, bowls of spaghetti, etc.?

As someone who has focused my life on local commerce, I can tell you that the future of local is transactions. And no one is better positioned to change the world by helping small business than Apple is.

By then, I was drinking wine on the couch with April, which meant a tacit commitment that I was in the no-work zone. But I couldn’t help myself. I banged out a reply on my iPhone:

from Mike Orren <mike@mikeorren.com>

to Steve Jobs <sjobs@apple.com>

date Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:04 PM

subject Re: The half (of iAds) that’s wasted

mailed-by mikeorren.com

I’d launch a parallel iAds program focused on SMBs. It would be a lite, self-serve, but easily prefabbed version of iAds. It would target based on geo- and/or relevance data from apps– only offers that we know are relevant and therefore wanted. It would fill every piece of inventory not claimed by Big Brands.

Revenue from a % of deals bought through the iAds store (which doesn’t exist today, but would be better than Adsense with about a month’s worth of effort).

I’d use local relevance data across all local and nonlocal apps to solve the last mile problem that has plagued and tantalized local publishers since the first low-baud modem.

The big point is this: You have more credit card numbers than anyone. How are you going to use them to make it easy for me to buy locally? The fact that you have my info and with two clicks I can buy makes me more likely to purchase apps and music. Why not enchiladas and coulattes?

iTunes.

AppStore.

iAds.

DealStore.

Every ad a wanted ad*, or damn close to it. If that’s not world-changing, I don’t know what is.

* quoting Jeff Jarvis, but pushing a Platonic ideal that any publisher, Apple included, should be seeking.

—————–

Mike Orren

Sent from my mobile

The next day, I thought some followup was warranted:

Mike Orren <mike@mikeorren.com>

reply-to mike@mikeorren.com

to Steve Jobs <sjobs@apple.com>

date Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 9:19 AM

subject Re: The half (of iAds) that’s wasted

mailed-by mikeorren.com

hide details Jun 8 (7 days ago)

One more thing:

Here’s some scenarios of what I have in mind:

Sally owns an Italian restaurant in East Dallas. She had a party booked for tonight, with a prix fixe menu and now is stuck with more lasagna then she sells in a week. She logs into her iAds account, where she’s previously uploaded her logo and menu and a more general special. She replaces that with a one-night deal of all-you-can eat lasagna, salad and desert for $5. Everyone who logs into a location based app within 5 miles and with iAds enabled gets pushed the opportunity to buy the deal through the iAds store with their iAccount that is used for apps and songs too. Everyone who buys shows their phone with a unique code that Sally can enter on an iPhone or laptop to verify the purchase. Apple takes its cut and pays Sally the difference. She’s out nothing up front. Then, she reverts to her usual 10% for iAds customers. The customers may share a rating of the business or special in-app.

Even better: iTunes Genius knows I listen to a lot of Willie Nelson. People who like Willie also like Rodney Crowell. I have none of his music. Rodney’s playing at The Granada Theater in Dallas. Day of show the theater opens up the 50 remaining tickets for 80% off. (At this point, it’s perishable inventory and they’re happy to get another bar tab in the door.) iAds pushes me an offer for the show and takes the lion’s share. Or, offers me the ticket free with the purchase of a Rodney Crowell album through iTunes.

Maybe I’m playing a bowling game on my iPhone– I can get an offer from a local bowling alley, encouraging me to bring the game into real life again bought through iAds. If there’s no local bowling alley on board, then show me the Toy Story 3 ad again.

At higher levels of integration, an Angie’s List app could not only recommend a local plumber, but allow me to take advantage of a special from one of the recommended plumbers, again transacted through iAds.

The possibilities are staggering. And you already have the engine to easily sell to your users and deliver a cut to the publisher (or retail outlet).

The point is ths: The local ad market is moving to a transactional model, but it is extremely fragmented. No one else will deliver the kind of experience Apple does (and therefore a high enough sellthrough). And almost no one else is positioned to scale with that many credit card holders conditioned to buy with two clicks. Almost no one has enough scale such that the offers can be “bought not sold.” This is what Google and the other ad networks want to do through the phone, but they aren’t nearly as well positioned to transact.

And, most importantly, you can make people’s lives richer by connecting them with local businesses and getting them to go out to do and see things would have otherwise missed.

And wouldn’t it be amazing if the iAds provided enough value and savings over a year to pay for your phone?

Unfortunately, I never heard back. In the meantime, I’ve had more time to think on this, and while I can debate whether or not it’s a good idea for Apple to have as much power as I propose, the undeniable case is that they can. From the dawn of the InterWebs, through AdWords, to Groupon, and towards the future– we are moving closer and closer to a transactional model that is about moving perishable inventory by putting deals in front of the right engaged people at the right time.

The big hole in most of these sorts of business models, as was the big hole in the plan, cribbed from my 2004 bizplan draft, in my final email to Steve is this — you have to have a tremendous number of people (read: credit card numbers) ready to transact with a click or two. Apple is the only media company delivering ads who has that, at this scale.

I don’t know what they’re thinking about in Cupertino today. Maybe it’s how many physical devices they can sell. But I don’t think that is, or should be, the endgame. I’d hope they’re thinking different. Because no one has ever had the opportunity we they face now.

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Like a kid with a new toy

For the last couple months, I’ve taken great pride in pontificating that Apple had finally created a product in which I had zero interest. I sneered that the iPad was either a mere giant iPhone sans phone or a primary computer for digital idiots.

I am typing this entry on my new iPad, purchased Saturday and already my favorite gadget ever. I’ll explain the tremendous potential and impact it has, despite a couple serious-but-fixable flaws, but I suppose I should first explain why I changed my mind and made the purchase in the first place.

While I still partially chalk this up to a global conspiracy that makes me crave Apple products fortnightly, a lot of my change of heart came from reading reviewers who lauded the iPad’s use as a simple reader for Instapaper. I don’t like reading long articles on my computer at a desk, and despite my insistance that you could read just fine on a iPhone, I had literally hundreds of articles backlogged– primarily because the truth is that reading and constantly scrolling on a 3 x 4 inch screen sucks. Add the half-dozen Kindle books I’d bought thinking I read them on the iPhone or laptop to the resolution to blog more here, and I felt I had my rationale…So why am I so high on the iPad?:

• It is screaming fast. You never realize how much time you wait for a digital device to perform a task until you see it done faster. The processor works so quickly, I sometimes think it’s ahead of my intent. Even the autosuggest on Google search in Safari seems to presage my wishes before I know them myself. I can do many tasks on it far faster and more efficiently than on my laptop.
• It is a new level of gorgeous. Apple is, if anything, the master of interface and UI. Everything is exceedingly well thought-out and transition animations are sci-fi sexy. But it’s more than smart design– particularly in landscape mode, many of the interfaces innovate far beyond a size-shift, making me wish that desktop designers would recast their apps. (Mail.app is a prime example.)
• Typing sucks less than you would think. Maybe it’s because my touch-typing has always been less than proper, but I don’t really have any issues with the keyboard — it’s far better typing than on a phone and a little tougher than a physical keyboard.
• It renders most apps unnecessary. Flash aside, it has a pretty much fully functional version of Safari. It makes you realize that most apps are just designed to deliver a lighter mobile browser experience and only exist because mobile browsers are comparatively weak. Facebook app? Nowhere near as good as Facebook.com. Bank of America app? Quicken? WordPress? Same story. And I can’t work up much agitas over App Store censorship when anybody can build a website. (And by the way, in four days of heavy use, I’ve not yet missed Flash.)
• The apps that are needed are pushing the envelope. I’m universally more satisfied with the apps I use daily on the iPad compared to the iPhone. From NetNewsWire‘s desktop-competitive RSS reader to Dropbox — these are really good, really functional programs that don’t skimp on functionality because they don’t need to do so.
• It is of the cloud. For the first time ever, I bought the smallest available disk space. On WiFi, it’s amazingly fast to stream video on apps like Netflix and ABC TV. Hell- it pulls in video much faster than my Xbox360. Pandora works great. The NPR app is amazingly good and fast. After a couple days’ hiccups, Google Apps work pretty well.
• It encourages creation. I now give no credence to those who decry it as a fat, lazy, couch-potato device that discourages creation. As any 19th Century romantic poet will tell you, consumption and creativity go hand in hand. Experiencing art, technology, literature are all incentives to creation. I’ve read and written more in the last few days than I have in some months.

Is it a perfect device? Of course not. Although most of my complaints (especially backgrounding, lack of folders and file transfer) look to be rectified in the 4.0 software coming next month, there are still annoyances. However, I see hope in those, as they’re all solvable under the new Spirit jailbreak. Tethering is a good example of an issue in this category. Yeah, it sucks that AT&T and Apple haven’t worked this out, but the hardware is well capable and the market or enterprising hackers will provide. I’m disappointed at the lame pixelated doubling of old iPad apps. It’s an inelegant and very un-Apple solution, and something I imagine will work out over time.

I’m an unabashed Apple fanboy, but I’ve never enjoyed one of their products this much this quickly, especially a version 1. I’m getting more done and enjoying it. I’m using my laptop less, sitting in more comfortable chairs and spending more time outdoors. To me, that’s a huge win.

(NB: While I wrote most of this on the iPad, I did go back and add some of the links via my Macbook after the fact.)

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16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.

First, some context. On average, I:

• Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
• Send more than 300 emails a week
• Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
• Follow 700 Twitter users
• Manage four Twitter accounts
• Keep up with 350 Facebook friends
• Manage a Facebook page
• Have 15 meetings a week that have to be coordinated with other people
• Take 20 phone calls per week
• Have about a dozen topics that I feel like I have to be expert on at all times
• And run a large local website

And somehow, I finally feel like I have control of it all. I trust my system and nothing seems to slip through the cracks.

Before I detail my system(s), a few caveats: First, this system is simple to follow, but was by no means simple to create. It is a Rube Goldberg amalgamation of dozens of products, services and processes.  It has come through years of trial-and-error. It is not for everyone, and may well only be for me. Also, the exact description below is somewhat dependent on my usage of a Mac and an iPhone. I assume there are equivalents on other platforms, but that’s not my problem. The point is not to be comprehensive for all people, but to give a view on some tools that, jointly and severally, might help you.

In each area, I’ll cover the basic tools and processes used — most of which are free and all of which, when critical, are easily available. I do use a few things that require a jailbroken iPhone, but they’re all bonus. The System would work without them.

Search:

Search is absolutely critical to my system. That means I don’t worry a lot about spending time filing things in folders or moving them about between devices. I can pretty well count on Apple’s Spotlight or the search in my email client to find everything I need quickly. The technology is great, and I’ve become expert at coming up with the few unique words I need to find 3-4 items among which to peg the thing I’m looking for. (Bonus hint: Use Spotlight in a Finder window, rather than the magnifier at top right of screen.) If your computer doesn’t do search well, you’re screwed.

I’ve also just found a new iPhone app, reMail ($4.99), that manages to search across your entire IMAP email archive, not just the few messages sitting in iPhone mail. So I have most of my search capabilities with or without my laptop.

Email:

Tools used: Gmail (Google Apps) (free), IMAP (free), POP (free), Postbox ($39.95)

I have seven email accounts. Five just redirect to other active accounts — they are addresses I’ve used over the years that I don’t want to let go, like my original Gmail address and my alumni.duke.edu lifetime email. So there are two primary addys: Business and personal. Both are run through Google Apps.

My work email is IMAP, meaning that the folders and read statuses sync between all devices where I might view the account. I’ve kept my personal email POP, partly out of laziness, but partly to keep it simple.

I have one hard-and-fast rule when it comes to my work email. NOTHING stays in the inbox. Ever. When I get an email, one of four things happens:

• I delete after skimming / reading / replying
• I move to a folder called “Triage” to handle later
• I make it a to-do in Omnifocus (see below)
• I archive for later search

Nothing stays in the inbox for more than an instant after I check it, whether on computer or iPhone. Respond-delete-todo-triage. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I find the vigorous system isn’t as essential for my personal email account, but it wouldn’t take much to make me switch from POP to IMAP if the traffic increased.

Postbox is my email client, but everything I describe here is doable in Apple Mail or in Outlook on the PC or Gmail, or any other client. I simply use Postbox because of some of its aesthetic features and integration with other apps. I got it at a discount as a beta tester, and am not sure I’d pay full price for it versus using Apple’s native Mail app.

A couple times a day on my laptop, I go through my “uber-Triage” folder, which is everything in work Triage plus everything in the personal inbox. What I can respond to or otherwise act on and delete immediately, I do. What I can’t, I make an Omnifocus task for, copying the email into the OF notes, and delete or archive the email.

I don’t keep other folders, but I do tag a very small subset of my emails to improve search capabilities. That generally means a special tag on travel confirmations (air, hotel, etc.); receipts; and one or two email-intensive current projects, like hiring for a specific position. Otherwise, I exclusively count on search to find old and relevant emails.

RSS feeds:

Tools used: Google Reader (free); NetNewsWire (Mac and iPhone) (ad-supported versions free); recommended if using Google Reader without a  software client- Helvetireader (free); Instapaper (free on Mac; free lite version on iPhone, but $4.99 pro version recommended)

The key tool here is Google Reader, which manages subscriptions to many sites, supports folders for different subscriptions, and most importantly allows you to keep everything in sync across multiple devices. Really, it’s the only necessary tool for the job. However, I tested out NetNewsWire a couple months back and it has a few bonus features that make it worthwhile. However, what you’re getting there is interface, as NetNewsWire syncs with Google Reader to manage subscriptions. (I should note that the mobile web version of Google Reader is quite excellent. It’s only narrowly beaten by NetNewsWire.)

Categories of feeds

I have two classes of subscription: Things I’m generally interested in personally, and things I have to follow to execute the local water-cooler news “Outbursts” on Pegasus News. I keep each subscription in folders by category.

When I’m working on Outbursts, I go straight to that folder, look at the items and either post or bypass quickly.

Otherwise, when I have some time– often while eating lunch or a snack in the office, I scan through the chronological latest items. Most, I jump past quickly, barely scanning. If there is an item I want to act on, but it isn’t immediate, I “star” or “flag” it. Then, when I have time– often while drinking coffee on Sunday, I deal with it. This would apply to music sites that have things I want to download or tech sites with new software to try out.

Lengthier items I want to read at my leisure, I send to Instapaper, which downloads a text-only version to my iPhone. I read those at my leisure.

Items I feel I must act on that I can’t do so immediately, I email to myself, and they go into the Triage system.

On the iPhone, I’m reading more at leisure– often if April is watching TV I don’t care for or while I’m on the toilet. (Oh, don’t judge me. Like you don’t use your smartphone on the toilet, you filthy monkey.) I attack a specific folder, avoiding Outbursts, which I want to act on from my computer. Ditto for “art,” which includes feeds from which I copy photos that often go on the screensaver on our TV. This, by the way, is one of the reasons NetNewsWire is gold for Mac users. One of its Control-Click choices is “send to iPhoto.” I manage my TV media with AppleTV, so that’s all pretty seamless. This is also my modus operandi for reading archived Instapaper items.

Calendar:

Tools used: BusyCal Mac ($40), iCal (free), Google Calendar (free), MobileMe ($99/year), Tungle (free)

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a long list of tools — and frankly, if I wanted to go back and cull a couple I could, but I don’t want to tempt fate. Because I finally have a completely seamless, no-look, count on it completely calendar, regardless of where I am or what device I’m on.

BusyMac is a nicety and I wouldn’t have bought it if I didn’t get an advance-sale price of $40. You could use iCal or Outlook and get most of the same features.

MobileMe may seem pricy, but its other features like lost iPhone tracking and file sharing help. For me, the clincher is that MobileMe is the most seamless way to sync my iPhone and Laptop in terms of calendar. I make a change to one, and the other is updated wirelessly and almost instantly.

Tungle is my real secret weapon. It’s a web service for scheduling appointments with folks outside your domain and for letting people see your free/busy without details and use that to suggest meetings with you. It makes it like seem like the whole world is on one big Exchange server and makes scheduling meetings with multiple busy people a cinch. (Good sign of a great web service– even though accepting an invite doesn’t require registration, almost everyone I send a meeting invitation winds up joining.) For the first couple weeks, I found myself cross-referencing it and my main calendar to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but eventually I learned to trust it. It always updates all my calendars, without any muss or fuss.

Google Calendar is an extra because of my one quibble with Tungle. For some reason, their early Mac software wouldn’t sync my calendar. The workaround was to sync through a Google Calendar, which was a one-time setup. They may have fixed their software by now, but I don’t see any gain to mucking with it since this system works. And yeah, I know a lot of people swear by the native Google Calendar, but I still like my mail and calendar in a client program, so this system works for me.

Getting Things Done:

Tools used: Omnifocus (Mac $80; iPhone $19.99)

I bought these products in early days when they were cheaper, but I’d happily pay full price now. All my To-Dos, big and small go into Omnifocus. It has way more features than I need, but I’ve yet to find another app with all the features I want. It uses MobileMe to sync between my laptop and iPhone and puts alarms into my calendar for anything due. Various bookmarklets and keyboard shortcuts make it super-easy to enter anything in either environment. Whether it’s to pick up dry cleaning on the way home or to execute a 10-part marketing program on the job, Omnifocus is where it goes. The big key is to give everything — no matter how mundane — a due date. When that date passes, it’s either done; assigned to another date; or deleted because it no longer seems important.

Social Networks:

Tools used: Facebook (Web and iPhone, free); Twitter (free); Seesmic Desktop (Adobe Air, free); Tweetie 2 iPhone ($2.99); qTweet (iPhone jailbreak, free); LinkedIn (free); Boxcar (iPhone, $.99)

To maintain sanity, I have to look at social networks as a fun extra and not a requirement. Sometimes I go a week without looking at Facebook. And I learned the hard way that you can’t treat Twitter like an RSS feed, where you expect to read everything. It’s about serendipity– with time to kill, I always find something neat, but outside of direct messages and @replies, it’s all gravy.

Although there are exceptions from before I got my system down, I only accept Facebook invites from real friends and people who I’ve gone to school with. For me FB is purely social and purely entertainment and keeping up with old friends. I religiously ignore all other friend requests and invites to be a fan of anything.

Twitter, I use more for business and industry contacts and, frankly, to brand myself and my business. More of my messages there are biz related, although I sprinkle in some personal and musical — the latter two generally get crossposted to FaceBook.

LinkedIn I find less and less useful day-to-day, but great in specific situations. I’ll take almost any invite that isn’t pure spam. I generally don’t use it, but when looking for employees or a friendly introduction to a business contact, it’s priceless.

There are bazillions of social networking apps, and I’ve tried most of them, but I always come back to Seesmic and Tweetie. On the computer, Seesmic is great for managing multiple accounts and I can post any update to some or all of my personal FB and Twitter as well as my six business accounts. Tweetie 2 is the best iPhone Twitter client, but there are lots of good ones. (Note that I’m disgruntled with Tweetie’s handling of the new-style retweets, so they’re on notice.) qTweet is a nice extra but nonessential– it allows me to pull a dropdown window from any iPhone app and post an update to Twitter and/or FB. Boxcar is a nice extra that sends a push notification to my iPhone when I get an @ reply or DM on Twitter.

When engaging with other folks Twitter updates, I send things I want to read at leisure to Instapaper and email myself links to things I want to take action on, if I can’t do so immediately. So a long article gets Instapapered; a blog post with songs to download or a hot story I want to pick up on PegNews gets emailed and then handled through my email triage system.

Declaring bankruptcy:

There are times when things get out of control, even with a system. Maybe you’re really busy actually doing things at work rather than managing information. Or you get sick or go on vacation. In any case, you have to be willing to occasionally declare informational bankruptcy, particularly with RSS feeds and occasionally with email. That means hitting that “mark all as read” or “delete all” button and getting on with life. It’s a drastic measure, but somewhat liberating. Because I’ve had a particularly busy spate at work, I’ve declared RSS bankruptcy a couple times in the past month. That means scanning folders that I know matter and then hitting “mark all read.” I’ve only declared email bankruptcy a couple times ever — in those cases, I put up a blog post and social network updates warning folks.

This is the system that works for me. What works for you? Share your favorite tools and tricks in the comments.

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Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliion's gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)

I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this post into a therapy session over the myriad problems I’ve had with AT&T over the past month. Specific situations will crop up organically in the descriptions below, but instead of a chronological chapter-and-verse story, I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned about AT&T and its processes. Suffice to say that my AT&T DSL was functioning poorly, and dissatisfied with the efforts to fix it (and lusty for more bandwidth), I switched to U-verse about four weeks ago. However the U-verse hadn’t worked for a full day since install. Then I had activation issues with my new iPhone 3GS on release day.

In many of these points I’m going to offer an example from my Apple experience as a counterpoint — not because the companies are exactly comparable, but rather because I’ve recently reflected on Apple experiences that left me feeling the opposite of how my AT&T experiences did.

• There is no consistency, synergy or knowledge share between divisions: I’ve been dealing with the folks at AT&T Internet; U-verse; and Wireless. Wireless has native speakers on the line; the other two don’t. A critical problem on our line that broke my DSL (and caused me to look into U-verse) was not communicated between Internet and U-verse, and was further ignored by the U-verse installer when I alerted him. The Wireless hotline automated menu is easy to find a person to talk to — the U-verse one generally has me screaming before I’m three options in because its voice recognition is appallingly bad. Because the experiences with different groups are so disparate, it’s hard to form a notion of the “AT&T brand.”
• The level of training / knowledge exchange is appallingly low: When trying to get phone support in activating my new iPhone, the veteran rep (who was doing her level best to help me) admitted that she had never held an iPhone in her hand. Turns out that neither her supervisor nor any of the reps around her had done so either. This is a flagship product and a major launch date, mind you. She wound up taking notes from what I’d told her I was seeing so that she could better help other callers. This actually carried over to line guys working on my U-verse. When they came to open the switch box, they asked what speed internet I had. I told them I had the top U-verse package. They still didn’t know what the promised speed was with that package, and told me they had never been shown the packages available.
• Insincere appreciation of customer and employee: We’ve all heard similar tripe before whether it’s “We know you have a choice when you fly” or “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for being an AT&T customer.” (In reality it’s “Dammit, you have a choice when you fly so we have to pretend to give a damn how your trip was” or “I am now emotionlessly reading a line in the script that I have to say in the unlikely case a trainer is listening in.)But perhaps the most mind-blowing part of my AT&T experience was when the third U-verse rep who came to my house — the one who actually solved the problem with our install — made his call in to HQ on speakerphone so I could hear it too. After about ten minutes of back-and-forth matrixspeak and disbelief from the on-site rep at what the phone guy was seeing on our line, it was time for them to end the conversation. And at the end, the guy on the phone closed by saying to the rep in my house: “I want you to know that you are a valued AT&T employee and we appreciate your efforts today.”Now I generally consider incoherent strings of profanity the refuge of those who are either linguistic weaklings or have suffered a brain short circuit. So:

  What the fuck!? What the FUCKING fuck?! They have to rattle off the same insincere bullshit to each other, just as they do with the hapless fucking customers? No wonder so many of the people I talked to sounded as pissed at AT&T as I was. And who can they mean the shit they say to me when they know that their colleagues are horsewhipped into saying the same to them? I was completely gobstopped at this point, thinking I’d slipped into some Orwell-inspired episode of The Outer Limits.

  This brings us to another really key point…

• Get off the script!: While I’m sure that the OCD maniac who conceived the idea of customer service scripts meant well, they invariably lead to frustration and inefficiency. During my U-verse troubles, every call was a reset to ground zero of the problem. It wasted my time (already reset the box 100 times, thanks); wasted the company’s time; and kept us from getting to the real solution. Meantime, on my visit to the Apple Store, they went off-script immediately and y’know what?: They solved my problem.
• Treat employees with real respect: It’s clear from the faux inter-company appreciation script that AT&T doesn’t have a ton of respect for its employees, or at least their intelligence. Meantime, while I was in the Apple store, I saw no less than three organic displays of a appreciation for employees. In one case, an employee showed the manager her purse on the way out, in what looked like a standard procedure. She was waved off with an “I trust you” followed by “Great work today.” That same manager was complimented by her manager when my problem was resolved.
  
  
• People come through when companies don’t. But it doesn’t scale: For all of my carping about AT&T, I dealt with some great people during my trevails — well-meaning people who went as far as they could within a broken system to help. The shame of it is that they represented maybe 20% of the people I talked to. Does that mean 8/10 customers get the run-around?
  
  
• My time is valuable: None of the AT&T reps who heard my dismay when they wanted to schedule (yet another) visit to my house seemed to understand that we have jobs at which we earn the money to pay AT&T. When I’d bristle at that solution, the attitude was clearly one of “Hey, we’re not charging you to send someone to your house, so you should be thrilled.” (That is, except for the first visit that they told me they would charge me an undisclosable amount for if they determined in their sole judgment the problem wasn’t their fault.) When I have to take vacation from work to let you in for the fourth time in two weeks, I’m not being done a favor.
  
  
• Don’t let lousy service ruin a great product: I love the iPhone. It is my favorite piece of technology ever, and I loves me some technology. U-verse, when working properly, is far faster than any internet service I’ve ever had and provides a great TV interface and high value in terms of the channels for the price. That said, by the end of these dramas, I was well on the way to kicking AT&T – my second highest monthly bill after the mortgage – to the curb. The minute the iPhone is available on another carrier and Verizon FIOS is available in my hood, I’m a free agent. That’s a shame, because I switched from Sprint to AT&T and from DirecTV to U-verse because of the strength of these products. They had a chance to win me over and FAILed.

So what does all of this have to do with GM? Well, former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre is the new Chairman of the post-bailout company. And I have to assume that many of AT&T’s problems were born or nurtured under his watch. And just when GM needs visionary reinvention most, it gets a CEO that comes from a company that might well just be a decade behind GM, making similar decisions in the early throes of a death spiral, substituting ubiquity and distribution for service and innovation.

I’ll also confess that my take on his ability to change GM is colored by my experience interviewing him for a laudatory publication some years back — Despite the fact that this was for a Business Hall of Fame honor, he and his staff were arrogant, bullying and generally unpleasant as hell. I can’t imagine that doesn’t trickle down.

First, AT&T was unable to deliver on promises it made about the wait for new iPhone buyers to activate the devices. How was the situation made good? By Apple giving them an iTunes gift certificate.

Then, Mythbuster Adam Savage found his service cut off because of a bogus $11,000 roaming charge. His experience sounded remarkably similar to mine up to the point he starting Twittering about it to his 50,000 followers. I recommend following his Tweets in addition to the linked interview for the juicy parts of the story. The best one:

AT&T guy on the phone with me:” apparently you’ve got enough Twitter followers to get our attention.” me: “50,000″. Him: “wow”.

Image lifted from The Iphone Blog

Yes, I can probably be classified as an Apple fanboy. But if you know me, you know my allegiance doesn’t come easy. For my purposes, Apple produces the best computer and phone technology available. But there are lots of companies that produce good technology — It is my human interactions with Apple that make me a loyalist. My experience in buying the new 3G S Iphone is one of, if not the most memorable I’ve had:So we all know that Apple did an exclusive devil’s deal with AT&T, who will be the counterpoint part II in this series on customer service at scale. (For that reason, I’ll be shortcutting some of the AT&T story here, and will link to the second post in the series when it is published.) I had three iPhone lines with AT&T: Two (the one for my wife and the one our sales reps use to demo our iPhone App) were due for the originally announced upgrade pricing. Mine was not, although after I preordered, AT&T revised its policy, making it eligible. At any rate, I ordered 3G S phones on the eligible accounts, planning to port one to my line, something AT&T had publicly said was kosher.

The two iPhones arrived via FedEx yesterday, and when I plugged mine in it was, unsurprisingly, tied to the sales phone line and not mine. I called AT&T to resolve, and although they had no business issue with what I was doing, after almost 90 minutes on the phone, they were unable to successfully assign one of the SIM cards in my possession to the new phone. They directed me to an AT&T retail store.

I should note that my line transfer scheme was not that unusual– something many were doing, as indicated in Apple support forums. It was also completely avoidable, as AT&T had changed its policy in the short term between my order and the product release, making it unnecessary, but unavoidable, post-order.

After nearly an hour wait at the AT&T store, the rep there almost smugly told me that all I needed was a new sim card, which he provided post-haste. He assured me it would work, but said that if it didn’t, my only recourse would be with Apple. I left hopeful, as my existing phone stopped working as soon as he activated my new SIM, something that hadn’t happened while on the phone with AT&T.

But, on returning to my office and trying to activate, it was still tied to the wrong number.

I went online and saw that the first Genius Bar appointment available at a local Apple Store was three days away. I gritted my teeth and went down to the store to wait.

I arrived to find that they were not taking anyone for the Genius Bar so they could focus on iPhone sales. Although the lines were shorter than last year, there were about twenty people waiting at 5 PM; five cops guarding the door; and a full store.

I explained my issue to one of the employees running the line, noting that waiting the whole weekend without cell service or access to my iPhone apps was not a good solution (compounded by the fact that my AT&T U-verse service was down, leaving me with no home phone). A manager overheard me, pulled me aside and started trying to solve the problem.

I should note that in addition to the iPhones in my hand, I was carrying my MacBook — not as any kind of explicit “I’m a great Apple customer” chest-thump, but as an opportunity to get work done while waiting in any lines that materialized. Still, it may have impacted the manager’s reaction. It should have.

From the start, the manager made clear that following standard decision paths, they couldn’t help me. I had bought the phone online and protocol was to return online purchases to Apple.com rather than the retail store. And the problem was really AT&T’s problem, although Apple could solve it by starting over with a new phone.

Still, she walked me to the back of the store and made an attempt to scan a return on my packing slip for the new phone. No dice.

She asked where I bought my old 3G phone. When I told her that I’d bought it at an Apple Store, she went to the computers and tried to find it in their system. Wasn’t there.

Still, she didn’t give up. She asked enough questions to make me remember that the physical unit I had was given to me at the Apple Store as a no-questions-asked replacement when the phone I bought had a malfunction (something that I’ve found is unique to Apple as regards technology replacements). She looked it up and found it in their system.

So, what she did was take my 3G phone as a return, replacing it with a 3G S. This wasn’t easy– she managed it through machinations that included creating a gift card in the value of the phone return. While she was working on that, I chatted with several of the staffers who thought based on where I was sitting that I was an undercover cop. Regardless, it was clear that despite a long and stressful day, all of them were in good spirits and maintaining high energy.

After setting up the new phone, she patiently waited while I plugged it in to my laptop to confirm that the right number was recognized. When it worked, she jumped up and down with a smile and high-fived me.

I started the day with a new iPhone 3G S and an old iPhone 3G. Because of the specific solution she improvised and tested along the way, I left with two new iPhone 3G S units. I asked was she sure she wanted to do that. She smiled, winked and shrugged: “My goal is to get your phone working and that’s the only way I can do it right now. And I’m sorry you’ve had such a hard time. It’s OK.”

I was in the store less than a half an hour.

Now you might dismiss this as an example of a single great manager, or even as an employee going renegade. But this is just the most recent and most dramatic example of what I’ve seen consistently from Apple: They may make bad deals with AT&T; they may have an opaque and frustrating app development approval process — but at the end of the day, every Apple employee I have ever encountered has taken the attitude that job one is taking care of the customer, and fast. No matter what. Even if the solution required isn’t in the handbook.

And, as I mentioned at the outset, Apple makes great products. Yesterday was an opportunity for me to forget that due to frustration with activation. Instead, I’m enjoying my lightning-fast new iPhone and am rededicated to doing business with a company that for years, has always gone out of its way to take care of me. I realize that may not be purely magnanimous — I hope it’s not. It’s just good business.