News
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Why Hasbro doesn’t deserve customer loyalty
The whole kerfuffle around Hasbro forcing Facebook to shut down Scrabulous is making me examine all my toy purchases, and I’m committed to avoiding Hasbro products for the long run. (And for those of you who know that I buy gifts on a regular basis for some 7 grandkids, a niece and a new nephew, that adds up to some serious purchasing). Let me explain.
Hasbro has owned the Scrabble brand for years, and over the years, their consecutive product managers have shown that they don’t get how seriously Scrabble players take their game. They’ve successively trivialized and ignored the dictionaries, tried to “cutisie” it up (can you imagine changing chess pieces to pop culture figurines, or changing the rules for how checkmate works? this is the magnitude of change they proposed, which you can read about in Work Freak by Stefan Fatsis). So it didn’t surprise me that they underestimated the popularity of the players wanting to play online.
A lot of little sites offer Scrabble online, but what seems to be threatening to Hasbro is a couple of entrepreneurial brothers who created Scrabulous. Because it was on FaceBook, the application was heavily used, and allowed FaceBook members to play with their friends around the world.
It’s not like Scrabulous built an application after Hasbro provided an already excellent service to their user base; instead, the brothers behind Scrabulous saw a gap and filled it. (Ironically, it’s the principal behind American entrepreneurship so their actions are quite ironic.) So what went wrong? Hasbro dragged their feet, and didn’t service their customers for the longest time. And then when they say that the gap had been filled by some entrepreneurs, then they stepped in and shut them down. Even then, Hasbro still doesn’t get it. You can’t play with friends outside of your country (with the exception of Canada and the US, I believe - see the comments in the link for more on this). And if you live in North America, you can’t access Scrabulous at all - you’re stuck with the inferior Hasbro version. It feels like being in a relationship with a rather neglectful partner; they annoy you so much that you just want them to move out and inflict their arrogance on some other unsuspecting victim.
If Hasbro is concerned about their intellectual property, they should have worked with the Scrabulous folks to do something collaboratively that would benefit both of the companies. Instead, they’re alienated lots of users who associate their tactics with the heavy-handedness of Homeland Security. I wonder if they’ll try to justify their actions with the trite old excuse (see the BC Ferries post from last week) - why not, nothing else seems to make sense from a user point of view. They’re doing what’s best for their internal needs, at the expense of their potential, now alienated, customers. And in an environment where everything is on the Web and available at a click of a mouse, it’s easy to make friend - and enemies - in mass quantities, very fast.
On a personal note, I’ve gained more time, as I no longer have a reason to go to FaceBook every day. My 350 average will probably decline, but, well, those are the breaks. This is one customer who, on principle, can’t bring myself to engage with Hasbro.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
I may never travel to the U.S.A. with my laptop again
After reading the Reuters news item about how the U.S. has decided that any travelers’ laptop is fair game to be seized, I figure that it’s not worth it to travel into the U.S. with a laptop. I may not be in the group that gets racially profiled, or even in the peripheral group, but I have that weird experience of being that person who falls within the “other 5%”. That can be where 95% of people show symptoms of a disease, and I’m in the 5% that doesn’t show the regular symptoms, so I get really sick before the doctor properly diagnoses. I’m in the 5% of people whose technology acts up and no one can figure out how to fix it - I have spent hours with various HTC, Telus, and Geek Squad members over the past month, and still can’t get my phone to sync with my computer, and now my computer won’t recognize my CD drive, either. If there’s a defective 1-in-a-thousand of a particular product, I’ll end up buying that one off the shelf. I cannot think what type of business hell I’d sink into if my laptop were to be snatched by our Big Brother south of the 49th parallel. My contacts, my email, my work ... never mind that I have an online backup and so on - they’d have all my passwords, my configurations, all those things that are so painful when you have to set up a new computer.
The only problem would be conference presentations. I’ve been waiting for the day when I could travel across the border, stick my USB drive into the projector, and present - without the need to drag my laptop along with me. (Yes, I know the arguments against using PowerPoint for everything, but last time I didn’t have slides, the audience became confused and gave me bad reviews for that very reason.) I hope that day comes very soon. Meanwhile, this is yet another incentive to make sure that any flights to Europe make connections through a Canadian airport. Too bad, because I just found a great Cathay-Pacific flight that goes direct from Vancouver to New York. But is the risk of losing all my business data worth the few hours of lovely comfort if I’m stressed about losing my data upon arrival? Nah, not so much.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Happiness is genetic - go figure
Went to work out today for the first time since falling down the stairs. Hurt like hell, but didn’t want to leave it too long. When I came home, stiff and sore, I came up from the underground parking and saw a half-dozen robins hopping about the yard, pulling worms out. They paused when they saw me, cocked their heads to see if I was a threat or a passing phenomenon, and resumed their foraging for wriggling protein. It made me happy - spring is imminent.
Speaking of happy - I just read that British and Australian researchers have shown that half the differences in happiness are genetic, based on studies done on twins. Common genes result in personality traits that predispose people to happiness. Does that mean that certain miserable people I know will always remain so?
I wonder if they’ll ever find the tacky gene. If they do, I could certainly get behind certain pragmatic uses for genetic testing.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
The descent of Canadian media: when shoes trump budget announcements
Usually I like Pete McMartin’s columns in the Vancouver Sun, but this past week, his sense of judgment was way off, and I really had to wonder if poor old Pete’s sense of dollar value had calcified somewhere in the last decade, or if he just didn’t have a clue about the reality of women’s fashions. For my non-Canadian readers, a little context first. There is a quaint Canadian tradition whereby on the day that a new budget gets unveiled, the Finance Minister wears new shoes. For years, Finance Minister after Finance Minister would show the smooth bottom of his (always a him) new, generally black loafers, to the media. Now, we have Carole Taylor, former chair of the CBC and now the Provincial Liberal Party Finance Minister for British Columbia. By virtue of being neither a him, nor dowdy, she seems to be targeted for her footwear choices, at the cost of obscuring whatever is going on in the provincial budget.
At this week’s budget unveiling, Taylor chose to wear a pair of Fluevog Teapot Darjeelings. Green for economic prosperity and environmental responsibility. Fluevog as a Canadian company, and a choice that shows her to . A good choice, I thought. What is interesting is to see Pete McMartin falling victim to what I think of as American tabloid mentality – an entire column devoted to what he perceives as Carole Taylor’s inappropriate shoe choice. He mentions several times that he is spitting up wine reading about her shoes because they supposedly cost $249. (I checked the Fluevog site, and they’re currently on sale for $149, but I digress.) He had suggested she buy something from one of the local big box stores, something less pricey, something pedestrian, to use his words. Well, there are a few bones I have to pick with his argument, starting with the price.
Any of the shoes I’ve seen in the big box stores have been questionable-quality leather, imported from China, and likely made in a sweatshop there (Fluevogs are made in fair-wage facilities in western Europe). They have no support for the mature female foot, and women that buy them usually do so because they follow fashion trends, and intend to get rid of them after a season. Smart adult shoppers invest in good quality shoes (because I need orthotics, I favour Naot shoes, also around the $200 mark) that will last us more than a year.
So I don’t think the price of Taylor’s shoes was outrageous for a woman of her standing. If she’d worn $49 pumps from Payless, there would no doubt have been a hue and cry from the female reporters about how incredibly tackily she was dressed. I can see the column now: Taylor can’t even afford decent shoes on her salary – prediction of economic gloom in the province? And one doesn’t have to be middle class to have a pair of Fluevogs. When I think of the Fluevog wearers I know, they’re often students who invest in a good pair of fashionable yet comfortable shoes as a fashion statement, instead of having a half-dozen pair of cheap shoes that fall apart after a season’s wear.
And Pete, where were all your columns on the cost of the shoes the previous Finance Ministers wore? Now, it’s been a long time since I dated guys, but the my last relationship was with someone in that socio-economic range, and I know what he paid for shoes, back in the 1980s, and it was at par with women’s shoes, even back then. Just because they were boring black loafers that you couldn’t identify closely enough to look up the prices of on a website, don’t think that the previous Finance Ministers were shlumping around in $49 specials, either. But we never found out, because oh gosh, you were talking about their budgets instead of their shoes.
It’s often a lose-lose-lose proposition for any woman in the public eye. No matter what Taylor would wear, she would get slammed by someone. That’s the way it has always worked. Distract the public by commenting on their wardrobe. If not that, pick on their hair or make-up. If that doesn’t work, go for the weight. Claiming they lost or gained a few pounds will get them every time. It’s also ironic that Pete McMartin disparages the shoes as “exactly like the kind of indestructible footwear middle-aged tap-dancing instructors wear in class” - obviously out of touch with the last decade of fashion, there, Pete - which suggests to me that he’d rather have seen her in something more feminine, yet last year, I believe he slammed her for ultra-feminine Guccis she wore the year before.
I suppose I expected more – in fact, way more – from Pete McMartin, as he’s one of the columnists I actually like. This time, though, I think he’s out of touch with the double-standard that women have to live by. (For example, I dry-clean a woman’s shirt, it costs me 30% more than to dry-clean a man’s shirt. I buy a pair of running shoes in the women’s department, it costs me way more than those same shoes in the boy’s department – never mind that trainers, trainers, are well over $100 if you want any kind of support in them. And I suspect that even at that price, they’re manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, as well; try to find a pair that isn’t. But I digress.) Heck, if I were allowed to wear heels, I would buy a pair of Teapot Darjeelings, too.
And my advice to Carole Taylor? Next year, get a pair of men’s black loafers, preferably similar to those worn by previous Finance Ministers. The journalists will still comment on your shoes, but they’ll also have to figure out how to justify why they didn’t complain about the shoes of your predecessors Gary Collins and Colin Hansen. Actually, Fluevog has a pair that looks a lot like what your male counterparts probably wear, without media mention. They’re called Capitalist T.S.E., and cost only $295.