Day: April 10, 2005

Maybe it’s a true test of a book about the software industry to read it 11 years later. G. Paschal Zachary’s Showstopper! the breakneck race to create Windows NT and the next generation at Microsoft was published in 1994. The book strives to do for software development what Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine did for the personal computer (well, the minicomputer, just a few years before the personal computer). That’s not a bad target. This is a readable book, and while web development rarely achieves the complexity and time scale of client software, let alone operating systems, the themes of coalescing many people around delivering are universal… and not just in the hi-tech realm.

I started to pay closer attention to the software industry just as Windows NT was finally reaching the market. As the book documents, Windows NT was delayed and postponed many times. I was more familiar with the release of Chicago, which became Windows 95. I remember feeding many, many floppy disks into a machine to install an early beta of 95. Ouch. Since Showstopper talks about sending out CDs for some of its betas, I guess 95 was on floppies because it was aimed more at consumers. Anyway, Zachary’s history brought me back a decade and more quite easily.

The fascinating part of the book was the people. Not just that any compelling story is usually a human interest tale, but that the people in this book are names that still mean something in the industry today. The pivotal person is Dave Cutler (or Wikipedia entry). But beyond obvious folks (Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer), some of the names in Showstopper still play large roles in the tech world, whether at Microsoft or elsewhere. Examples include:

• Paul Maritz, who retired from Microsoft in 2000. As of 2002, he was an independent investory and director.
• Mark Lucovsky, who left Microsoft for Google in March 2005
• Probably lots of the others, whether I recognize their names now or not.

All of them are in this book from working on Windows NT sometime during the early 1990s. Makes for a great “where are they now?” follow-up, I would think.

I had a longer rant storing up about Cingular’s policies, but I just have to say… bleeehhhhhh!

Last week, I replaced the five-year-old candy bar Nokia with a Treo 650, in the process moving my AT&T account to Cingular, officially (my phone has reminded me for months that I’m on Cingular’s network). Despite signing up for another two years of service, despite being a customer for nine years, despite spending a good chunk of change on a new phone, despite signing up for unlimited data service, Cingular dinged me for an $18.00 “upgrade fee.” Hello?!?!?! I’ve been a customer for nine years. You bought the company for the customers, among other things — why annoy them and harass them? Especially when they are not the cheapest customers you have.

I complained to the store rep, I complained to the store manager, I complained to their customer service rep on the phone (while in the store)… all to no avail. The most aggravating part? Each time, all three people said they couldn’t do anything about the charge, and several times referred to those who made this (bad) decision as “they.” This is from people who WORK for Cingular. You can’t shuffle off responsibility to the invisible bad guys — you are the company, especially if you work in a store. I could have pursued the process online, but my situation seemed cumbersome enough that spending time with a person was likely to be more effective. I got little satisfaction. If my wife wasn’t already a Cingular customer, I would have moved my number.

After the upgrade fiasco, I figured I was in the story, I should combine our numbers into their family plan (same price, better minutes, with free calls between the numbers on the same line). How’s this for irony? The process involved my sales rep in the story spending 30 minutes on the phone talking to someone to wade through the process. It got done (with another $18 fee!), but… why bother having a store??!

Moral of the story: cellular customer service is still a quagmire, and I do believe there is a place for someone with reasonable rates to deliver a service that makes sense without beating up the customer. My time is worth something, and besides making me angry over $18, Cingular wasted 90 minutes of my life. I think a cellular company needs to hire Seth Godin and remind themselves that customers matter, and empowering employees to solve problems pays off.