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It's okay. It's all about branding. I have spent most of the last 24 hours trying to make computers work, and a good quarter of that time on the phone, mostly on hold, listening to bad music. (Curious... Does the band Chicago get royalties from music-on-hold people? Does Enya? I think I need some Clash to get them both out of my mind.) The record was Concentric's DSL support (I was off the Net most of the day, though it turned out not to be their fault). I waited about an hour and a half for that one to pick up the phone, during which my bladder was put to an extreme test. But the big problem was scanning. Apparently the Twain driver that had been working fine with Photoshop for a long time wasn't really compatible with the System 9.04 OS of my Mac G3. Suddenly I got Type 11 errors (crashes, basically) every time I tried to scan. After endless reboots and discarded prefs files and downloads and reinstalls and Norton scans and hard disk defragging and endless discussions with two levels of tech support, we discovered that this page should have said that the only driver software that really works with Sys 9.x is one sold by Silverfast. Clearly, Epson hadn't updated its driver page since August '98. Why? "We sold millions of those scanners (the ES-1200c), but we estimate there are only sixty thousand still in use." Hey, they still found a way to de-serve sixty kilocustomers with one neglect. So I downloaded the demo software from Silverfast. It works okay (though everything seems defaulted a little dark), but (as we see) it puts graffiti on every scan, making the scans useless unless you scan little pictures and do trial/error workarounds. Now get this: to buy this software, you fill out a form, including your credit card number, and they ship you the software on a disk. Why not unlock the software with a code, or something modern like that? I have no idea. Meanwhile, I need to do a pile of scans tonight, and work them all around this annoying blotch. And I paid an extra $20 to have the disk fedex'd the next business day. Arg. Quote of the Day
— Tom Matrullo, in the Cluetrain discussion list In fact, all conversation is fire Lawrence Lee of Tomalak's Realm just emailed the link to this great piece on flaming by Nick Matamas, who takes (or gives) it personally. The piece is titled "Why I flame: confessions of a corporate hatchet man." Here's what he says about PR's wasted fantasies about hosing down the less savory noises amidst the market's clamor:
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