The Big Think

Some screenshots of the upcoming “Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth”

Lord of the Rings RTS game screenshot.

A word about the new dictation feature just implemented in iPods. I will frequently have 4 hour meetings where I wish I could have recorded everything that was said. I’d be nice to just plop the iPod down with the mic, hit ‘record’ and forget about it. be able to reference the meeting later. It’d also be nice for those musical ideas I tend to get when I’m driving or when it’s inconvenient to stop and scratch things out on a napkin. I’ve called and left a message on my own cellphone, but that’s inelegant and bad recording quality. Hmm… if Apple keeps introducing neat features like this, I may have to get one. Or maybe a used one?

Okay, not a crash per-se, but some real Mail frustrations.
Last night my Mail application started acting up. It just gave me the spinning beach ball whenever I opened it and I couldn’t download mail or read anything. Just had to force-quit. Today I called Apple (I’m still under my 90 day AppleCare period) and got the most ridiculous runaround I’ve ever gotten. The first guy (Dante) kept telling me to ‘Hold on a second”. In the span of 10 minutes, this was 90% of what he said. It was very obvious that he was new and didn’t have a clue. I politely told him that it seemed like his computer was having problems and could I please have another rep? He put me back in the queue.

Rep #2 was named Mike. I told him that Dante had been having some problems and re-explained my Mail problem to him. He said he’d do his best to help me. Well, 20 minutes later (after he had had me confirm all the things Dante had just asked me to do), Mike put me on hold for about 10 minutes. He finally came back and started telling me how to fix the problem. The only thing was that he had some odd pauses while he was talking, and when I would ask a question there would be another pause before he would answer. If I listened really carefully I could hear another party speaking in the background and then Mike parroting back what he was told.

It quickly became apparent that Mike was a trainee and his trainer was helping him answer the questions. Okay, I thought, I understand that this is necessary if you want to train people. I stuck with it for several minutes until it just became too painfully, hilariously awkward: question, pause, answer. question, pause, answer. I was almost laughing. I eventually said “listen, Mike, it would be really helpful if I could just speak to your trainer directly instead of going through an intermediary.”

Long pause…

(”he can hear me?!?”)

“Yup, I sure can”

longer pause……….

[me trying to keep from laughing]

Me: “hello?”

Mike: “hang on a second”

About 3 minutes later Andy-the-trainer got on the line. He took about 10 minutes to fix the problem. He was fantastically informed, knew the ins and outs of the OS. Knew just what to do to fix the problem, and even gave me advice on what to do next time it happens (!?). I ended the call by saying “Listen, Andy, I appreciate the fact that you have to train your newbie phone tech people, but the help I got from you is what would make me pay $250 for continuing AppleCare service.”
“Right on”, he said.

Overall, I wasn’t very impressed with the first two “tech help” people. Andy was great.

The downside of this is that I lost a lot of my mail configuration info and have to go dig it up again to get my mail working. Oh, and I have to reimport a bunch of mail and recreate about 30 rules I painstakingly created a few months ago when I set Mail up for the second time.
And I lost about 2 hours of my day when I should have been working on other stuff.

*sigh*

Apple Computer today announced its iTunes for Windows. Some interesting facts:

- Exclusive partnership with AOL and Apple.
- Wanted to sell 1 million songs in the first 6 months, but sold 1 million in the first week. Reset goal to 10 milllion in 6 months, but reached it in 4 months. Now… want to sell 100 million songs in a year - by April 2004.
- Over 200 indie lables represented
- iTunes Market share - 70% last week of all legal downloads
- 600,000 songs a week
- 13 million songs downloaded from iTMS so far
- Marketshare of iPod is 31% - #1.
- 336,000 iPods sold in this last Quarter.

Congrats Apple!

Apple Computer announced its financial results today. Good news all around. What especially caught my eye:

Apple’s retail stores had a strong quarter, Anderson said, with revenue of $193 million and their first quarter in the black, with a profit of $1 million

We heard an awful lot of crowing a few years ago from the nay-sayers crowd about how Apple’s retail stores would never turn a profit. A million isn’t a billion, but a profit is a profit. And this means that, bottom line, the stores are a GREAT thing. Especially since such a high percentage of retail store sales go to first time Mac buyers.

As a stockholder, I’m very pleased with the results. Now, Mr. Jobs, can we get some of that .08/share profit? I mean, we DO share in the risk, why not spread the rewards around a bit?