Bailie.com

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.