The Job Search

The job search has ended and thanks to the many people who have helped. It’s been an interesting excercise in learning how to use social tools to achieve a specific goal. Here’s how I did it:

As longtime readers of this site may know, I am a tad obssessive about keeping my address book up to date. Over the year, it’s grown and now has about 1600 people in it. When I started this search, there were over 1700 people in my address book but, after doing an email blast, I had to prune it as I could not find information about the missing folks.

With over 1600 emails out, I also combined a blog entry, used twitter, facebook, linkedin, and friendfeed to alert people to my job availability. Those efforts paid off as I ended up getting over 600 emails relating to my job search, talked to 82 prospective employers, followed up through second and third rounds of interviews with about a dozen companies and ended up with four serious offers. This all happened over the course of less than 60 days and I am now happily employed again.

So I’m sure you’re now wondering who and what.

To answer that question, I must first go back to a previous entry and revise some of my earlier thoughts. When I first left HSBC, it was over the belief that all banks were equally impacted by the mortgage crisis. It was also based on the belief that regulatory controls had left all banks in a state of near paralysis. However, I must now say that judging a whole industry based on a single example, no matter how powerful a player that example is in a particular market, can lead to a number of flawed assumptions.

At the same time, one of the thing I’ve been thinking about a fair amount since I left HSBC is the nature of transactional data and how the type of experience one acquires in the finance world easily translates to other online effort. As a result, it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the fun that finance provides, as far as building complex technical solution.

Yet, building purely based on specifications other people have put together is something that I’ve always found limiting. I wanted to be more involved in the discussions around strategic positioning and product development and these discussions seem to have moved largely outside of the control of IT departments. Increasingly, the information technology department is concerned with building based on a set of specification in which they have had little strategic input. It explains some of the disconnect I felt in my last year at HSBC and also explained where I wanted to take my career. It wasn’t a fully conscious decision until I put it under the microscope and figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

As I stated time and time again when talking to people over the last few months, I bring three types of capabilities to the table: I’m a strong internet strategist, a strong technologist, and a decent international IT project manager. Those are the three skills I bring to any organization, listed in order of preference.

When researching the market, I figured that this meant I ought to find a job where I could help shape the internet strategy of a company and/or of internet-based products for that company.

As a result of many discussions, and based on my background in both Internet and exposure to the financial sector, one job became more attractive than the others in front of me so I took it.

I am now Vice-President, Product Management for the Global Transaction Group at Deutsche Bank. The news started filtering out over facebook and linkedin when I updated my profiles there but I had not come out and stated on TNL.net so here we are. As always, activities on TNL.net continue to reflect my own opinion and are not related in any way shape or form with my employer. They don’t tell me what to say here and I do not speak on their behalf on this site.

But wait there’s more!

Of course, one of the downside (or maybe upside) of being between jobs is that one finds ways to start getting involved in new projects. And for me, that new project is Extra 15. It’s very stealth right now and I’m working on the coding at night but I can tell you that it’s very fun to get my hands on code again. Beyond the regular job and the demands of regular life, that project is where I’ll be concentrating some of my energy for the next few months so updates on TNL.net may continue to be light.

So there you have it. Another update on what I’m up to. I’ll have more soon….

The Job Search

I am reasonably optimistic in terms of job prospects. The silver lining on this cloud, if there is one, is that this has helped me spend a little more time thinking about what I want to do and I’ve come to the realization that, at the end of the day, I’m not tied to one industry or another but I do want to be involved with internet strategy.

As I’m zeroing in on that focus, it appears that opportunities actually abound in that space and that I provide 3 different capabilities: an ability, as a net native, to translate business objectives into actionable internet strategies, an ability to work as a translator between business and IT (as I speak both languages) and a big strength in my ability to manage projects from inception to closure (thanks to HSBC’s superb training in that arena).

Thanks to everyone who’s been helping. It’s been really heart-warming to see how helpful the community can be when you reach out. I was a little anxious when I sent out a blast message to everyone I know but I’ve now learned how kind people are and how random contacts with complete strangers can turn into something more wonderful.

Please keep sending good vibes as I’m not yet out of the woods on this front and am keeping my fingers crossed for potential job offer letters to come my way soon.

Web 2.0 Expo New York

Web 2.0 Expo is coming to New York! I’m one of the advisors for this great conference so I’d appreciate your help. The call for paper is now open and I think we can get a conference that will rival San Francisco’s. As one of the other advisors said in a recent discussion, “this is a town that ships software, not betas”. We have a tremendous start-up scene here in New York so let’s fly the local colors and highlight some of the cool stuff that’s being done here.

Writing

I’m also starting to return to writing. I have to admit that, for the past year, I had been a little remiss in doing some proper writing. I now want to make sure that I’m carving some time out to continue pursuing that. I think what happened was a little of a writing burnout, considering how much energy I expanded in 2005-2006 (really the big writing years as far as this blog is concerned) and I had to let a number of ideas germinate.

At the same time, I found that there were so many excellent voices with original content that I thought I couldn’t not really compete for mindshare considering the high quality of works by people like Jeremiah Owyang, John Gruber, Fred Wilson, Michael Parekh, Allen Stern, etc… and the teams blogging at ReadWriteWeb, PaidContent, TechDirt, Alley Insider, O’Reilly Radar, etc… (this is, by no mean, an exhaustive list as I currently read about 300 feeds) Oftentime, other people would cover a lot of what I was thinking about and thus I felt that my voice or thoughts would not add anything to the conversation.

What  I’ve learned in the last couple of weeks, though, is that a lot of people want me to say what’s on my mind and do believe that I have something to contribute even though I’m not so sure that’s the case. So I’m starting to get back on the horse and develop a better handle on some stuff. I’ll start posting to the blog again when I feel that the posts I currently have in draft form are better baked.

So that’s about it in terms of update. Once again, please go and submit something good for Web 2.0 Expo NYC and see you all very soon.

The potential merger has long been rumored and there are many reasons for which it could actually make a lot of sense for both companies. A question, though, remains as to who the winners and losers are in that deal. Topline, it’s clear that Microsoft and Yahoo benefit from this and clear that it doesn’t benefit Google. But who else?

Let’s look at the deal and try to figure it outs

Winners

OpenID: Only a few days ago, Yahoo announced support for OpenID, a system that allows users to use their yahoo credentials as a way to login to other services. Surprisingly, this was the goal of Microsoft Passport (now knows as Windows Live ID), almost a decade ago. A pairing between Microsoft and Yahoo could represent a major win for OpenID, especially if the partnership extends Yahoo’s commitment to Windows. One could see OpenID being incorporated with Active Directory in the future, leaving any non-openID provider in a lurch.

AT&T: Yahoo has a partnership with AT&T for IPTV. Combine that with the recent acquisition of Maven Networks, the IPTV efforts Microsoft has taken, and its relationship with MSNBC and there’s added strength provided to AT&T’s foray into the television space.

AOL: Many people would put AOL in the loser category but I think this partnership makes it a potential acquisition target for Google now, which means that Time-Warner could try to get a premium and spin-off a property they’ve had a hard time managing.

Losers

Advertising Agencies: It was only a few weeks ago that I joined GroupM. At the time, my feeling was that someone needed to build a counter-balance to Google’s power in the online space and, since any online pairing seemed unlikely, large ad buyers were the only ones that could provide that counter-balance. Now that Microsoft and Yahoo are providing that counter-balance, advertisers are going to be squeezed not by one but two giants. With two players representing more than 75 percent of all possible ad buys, the online companies will dictate terms to ad agencies and not the other way around. That window of opportunity appears to be closing for ad agencies.

However, a large enough online ad buyer could, if they standardized their platform and streamlined it to make single aggregated buys (for example, tell Google or Microsoft/Yahoo! that you will buy XX% percent of their ad inventory next quarter if they discount the rates by YY% compared to the competition) but ad agencies do not yet have enough streamlined data to be able to build risk models around such large scale purchases.

Ask.com:  Unfortunately, IAC does not have any major partnership with the larger players in the market. It’s fight to stay in the search game appears to be an uphill struggle from now on. There doesn’t seem to be that many strategic options relating to the changing dynamics of their portion of the market.

News Corp.: A combined Yahoo/Microsoft partnership would own roughly 40 percent of the overall market for finance-related online news (according to Hitwise, Yahoo finance is just shy of 30% of the market and MSN money represents a bit over 10% ). This will have an impact on the likes of MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal online. Furthermore, the coupling of Microsoft’s desktop money client with Yahoo’s strength in the online finance news space will be hard to defeat.

Any email provider: Microsoft/Yahoo will have almost 80 percent of the webmail market (Gmail comes in second with 6 percent). This means that any company that is trying to provide this as a standalone service will have to follow whatever direction the new entity takes.

Web 2.0 companies: With one less buyer in the market, that makes it more difficult to sell at a rick premium.

I’m sure there are many others I’m missing. Feel free to comment in the discussion thread.

At the time, however, I did not expect things to turn as they just did: I’ve been laid off as I was told that a strategic decision was made by GroupM to get rid of its project management office. With no project management office, there is no need for a project management office director and so, I’m back on the job market.

The shock is still very fresh and I have to admit that I haven’t fully absorbed the blow. My boss was telling me that he was happy with the progress I was making. I was told my work was excellent; and then this.

It’s a sad fact that large corporations do not look at the impact of their decisions on people and so I’m now faced with something I’m not used to: an uncertain future, with unknown prospects.

So I’ve dusted up my resume and I’m starting to pass it around.I’ve also updated my Linkedin profile and sent a twitter message out to my “followers”. I’m wondering if there’s any other “social network” related things I ought to do.

I will entertain any opportunity in the New York area (I do not plan to relocate) and, to sum them up, my skills encompass a wide variety of areas from project management (following some of the models established by PMI and applying them with a practitioner’s eye to what works and doesn’t, both on a local implementation or on a global one), technology (it appears, based on recent experience, that I have a deeper understanding of technologies relating to the internet than a lot of my peers), and strategy (readers of my blog are familiar with some of my strategic positioning)

Based on this, I think that I could easily fit into executive roles in software development, program (or portfolio) management, and product management.

I hope you will all be able to help me in my search for a new position. If you hear anything, drop me a note and thanks in advance for your help.

As was the case for the previous part, I have only edited the content for formatting sake.

Q: Let’s switch gear to the unit replacement program: The Palm website seems to have difficulties recognizing existing accounts. Part of the frustration of my own experience was that, having bought a device from the Palm website in early 2007, I was unable to get to the information online because the site did not recognize the email address I used to register (even though I have some emails sent by palm to that email address). This resulted in my being unable to get the exact date of my purchase. When I talked to the customer service representative, I was told that we could not move forward with any replacement without that information. Considering the device hadn’t been in the marketplace for a year, I thought that it would be considered under warranty no matter what. Why is it that customers still need to provide a purchase date for devices that are less than a year old?

A: They shouldn’t have to, you are right. Unfortunately, since we primarily sell through the carrier channel, determination of an in-warranty vs. out-of-warranty device is not a perfect science. Our practice is to systematically derive the purchase date from the manufacture date, based on the serial number.

We have very reliable data on how long a product takes to move through distribution and sales channels that helps us ensure we offer all of our customers a minimum of 12 month warranty, as stated in our contract with the customer (i.e. the warranty). If an agent believes the product may fall outside of the 12 month period, we request proof-of-purchase (POP), which is not unusual in the consumer electronics industry. That being said, an agent must use their best judgment and always handle these discussions in a professional and courteous manner with the customer.

To better serve our customers, we’re currently exploring instituting a policy that will not require agents to check purchase dates for products that have been newly released (i.e. less than a year old). This should help eliminate unnecessary questioning and allow our agents to proceed directly to getting a customer’s issue resolved.

Q: If customers are not able to supply a date, why is it that there is no way for a call center operator to look up information for devices bought from Palm’s online store?

A: We do aspire to have all of our customers’ transactional information available to our service agents. However, this is not the case for a variety of reasons. First, there is some information that will never be available or kept; carrier sales information and information protected by privacy laws, for instance. But, for the rest, specifically any transactional information Palm is exposed to and legally able to maintain, we are making huge investments in a CRM program that is bringing this information all together in a master customer database. Just this past year, we integrated most of our direct sales transactions (e.g. from our online store) into our service application, loading both customers and assets. As for Tristan’s case, unfortunately the purchase last winter was prior to this integration going into effect, so the purchase record was not there.

Q: Forced to supply a date, I gave a date at random in order to push the call further. I was then told that it was the exact date of my purchase (a dubious claim at best since the date happened to be, after I checked, before the date of the press release announcing the release of the Treo 680). When I contested the possibility of this being the date at a later time, I was told that you are tracking devices dates by serial numbers. If that’s the case, why is that information not being used initially? (It’s generally easier to find a device’s serial number than its purchase date since the serial number (and incidentally, IMEI) is on the device)

A: I suspect that in this case, and what is probably routine behavior by agents, is to request the date of purchase from the customer, and to take their word for it — which is the proper thing to do. Now when a customer is not confident about the purchase date or does not have any recollection, then an agent is going to check out the serial number to get a good idea of the purchase timing — it’s only then that we are going to call into question the warranty, and perhaps seek proof of purchase.

Q: Vendors like Apple and RIM track their device purchase date by IMEI. Why isn’t Palm doing the same? And if it is, why isn’t that information available to call center personnel?

A: IMEI and ESN are two industry relevant codes for mobile devices. The serial number is a Palm-specific number generated at time of manufacture. Because it is consistent across all Palm products — where it is not for IMEI and ESN — we tend to rely on serial numbers as our default tracking method.

Q: The retail price for an unlocked Treo 680 is $379, the street price for an unlocked Treo 680 is around $250. In either of those cases, the device would come with a one year warranty. The replacement price for a Treo 680 is $199. Why is the replacement price so high?

A: The primary drivers of repair and replacement cost are parts and labor, and hence can’t be directly compared to the product. The wireless industry subsidizes phone purchase prices, making the total cost much lower than the actual cost of hardware and labor.

Q: Looking at the prices listed on your site, it appears that all your phones have the same replacement price ($169 by web, $199 by phone) However, prices for the unlocked devices listed in the Palm store range from $379 (for an unlocked Treo 680) to $669 (for an Alltel Treo 700p). Does that mean that the repair cost for all units is the same? Why isn’t there variable pricing on the repair costs?

A: The actual cost of repair may vary across units, but this variance is much less than you’d think. The process steps that all units go through for diagnostics, component replacement, cosmetic refurbishment, and logistics are identical. The only real difference is the value of the parts required for a given repair.

While variable pricing seems like the best thing for the customer, we actually provide fixed pricing to deliver a better customer experience. This is because we want to quote a price upfront and quickly process the replacement without having to come back to the customer and explain that their fix was different or more costly than what was expected at the outset. This would create unnecessary tension and delays when a customer needs their phone back to them in working order as soon as possible. We don’t really know what parts will be required until we open the device, and a call center agent would not be able to accurately estimate the costs.

Q: A year ago, the replacement cost for a Palm 600 was $100 (I unfortunately broke 4 screens on Palm 600s through the years so I’m familiar with that price). Today, such a replacement would cost $169. Why the price increase?

A: As products get older, our cost to service that product normally increases. It reflects the growing cost of acquiring parts, maintaining inventory, expertise and training for repair events that become more and more infrequent.

Q: Apple has made it a practice to sell special contracts (called AppleCare) on their devices that provide extended warranty. This includes selling AppleCare for iPhones (for $69). The program includes replacement of defective units at no extra charge and extends warranty from 1 year to 2 years. Why isn’t Palm offering a similar program?

A: With the first line of smartphone product support at multiple carriers, including warranty processing, an extended warranty program has been a challenge for Palm to offer — mostly because of channel complexities. We are presently working through the challenges that have made this difficult, and hope to offer this service feature to our smartphone consumers in the future.

Apple has a unique relationship with AT&T that may make these programs a bit easier to provide.

At the time, I figured that this was a nice and convenient answer that really acted as more of a way to stonewall me. So it was with great surprise that I was contacted with a follow-up by John Moses, the VP of customer relations worldwide for Palm.

Not only did John apologize for my own experience but he was considerate enough to provide me with a lot of answers to questions I asked (and, in a closing to my encounter with Palm, he also provided me with a replacement unit for my Treo 680). While my faith in Palm hasn’t been restored yet, I think there is a lot to ponder in the questions and answers John provided me. Because there is a lot to digest, I am breaking this Q&A into two parts: The first one, which follows, addresses general issues around customer support and around my own experience. The second part talks about the unit replacement program and some of the decisions made there.

So without further ado, here is the Q&A, which is not edited in any way, save for light formatting to increase readability .

Q: First of all, thanks for taking the time to do this interview and alleviate some of the fears people may have after I posted my experience with Palm. The Treo 680 has been out for about a year now. As the head of Customer Relations, have you seen particularly high levels of calls relating to it as opposed to other palm devices?

A: Because of a special program we implemented and highly marketed this past year called 1-800 Free Setup Help, we have had a higher volume of calls related to the Treo 680. This Palm sponsored program — where we have also gained the support of our major carrier partners — encourages customers to call us at no charge within the first 90 days of purchase for dedicated device setup assistance. The results have been highly encouraging and we are continuing to evaluate additional programs that increase the number of interactions we have with customers so they get more out of their device.

We also strongly recommend that customers take advantage of the Treo 680 software updaters, as they do make a noticeable improvement to the performance of our devices. Customers can find these
on our website.

Q: It is my understanding that Palm works largely on second line of support for mobile phone companies they have partnerships with and works as first line of support for unlocked devices they sell. As a result, I would suspect that the number of calls for unlocked devices is probably higher. Is that the case?

A: You are right that for the majority of our phones — all of those sold through the carrier channel — we are the second level of support. Our carrier partners have extensive support capabilities and are interested in maintaining a connection with their subscriber customers — and we respect that. As a general rule, these customers are encouraged to begin support with their wireless service provider, and they will in turn escalate to us at Palm if the issue warrants additional device expertise.

There are exceptions to this, however, and customers frequently contact us directly; this most often is because they are taking advantage of our special programs including our Free Setup Help, which I mentioned before, or our MyPalm Membership, where customers can receive special benefits including a dedicated member assistance line.

For those customers who have bought unlocked devices directly from us on our website or in our stores, we certainly are committed to be their first line of support. In terms of call volume, we receive more for carrier-locked devices than unlocked ones, partly because there are just more sold, but equally so because we have a close relationship with our carrier partners which involves regular collaboration and warm transfers.

Q: Are calls for unlocked devices routed to different call centers than calls for locked (or carrier specific) devices? If that’s the case, could you explain some of the logic behind it?

A: No, support for both types of devices is provided by the same call centers, and with the same agents. Our support agents are trained on all Palm products and all customers are treated the same.

Q: Palm recently started to move phone support to a pay model (I believe it’s $19.95 per call unless it results in an exchange). Does Palm look to its phone support as a potential profit center?

A: First, customers transferred from a wireless carrier or a call with a basic inquiry will not be charged. Also, if a call results in a repair or if an agent cannot solve the issue, we would waive the fee.

Palm has always charged for phone-based technical support beyond 90 days of purchase, based on our standard support policy and warranty — this is standard industry practice for many consumer electronics manufacturers. We have just reduced (in December) the cost of post 90-day technical support (from $25 to $14.95), and when we do charge customers, the funds are used to subsidize the costs of the support infrastructure we provide.

Palm regards the relationship with its customers and support specifically, as an investment in the future, not as a profit center. We try to make Palm support valuable and affordable to customers by offering various options, including several options that are free of charge (e.g. Online Chat).

Q: Has reaction among customers to the move of phone support to a pay model been negative or positive?

A: As I mentioned before, Palm has always charged for certain phone-based support services. We have seen a positive response to our new “Expert” pay services, which certainly is evidence that customers don’t mind paying a fee for a service that they deem important and that is well executed.

Q: The level of expectations for a service one pays for is generally different than the level of expectation for something that is free. What has Palm done to ensure that the experience around paid calls is better than the previous (free) experience for customers?

A: Palm still provides many free service options, so a customer is never forced to pay for support. We also strive for and expect the best level of service for both types of calls — paid and free — as the same customer may experience both types of support options during the time they own their product and we want their interactions to always be consistent and of the highest quality.

Q: I am sure there are studies about user satisfaction across the industry as a whole. Do you have information about Palm’s standing, compared to its competitors, in terms of customer experience? Is it better? Worse? What are the main issues around it and what is Palm doing to address them?

A: I can tell you that our case satisfaction scores — those scores that rate the quality of the support given by an agent for a given service request — is either at the top or very close to the top of any comparative set you will find for true technical support on complex consumer electronics. Of course we always believe we can do better.

We have a number of teams that continually analyze everything from call center activity, to web searches, to satisfaction surveys in order to find ways we can support our customers more effectively. Thankfully, our customers take the time to give us feedback, and we take that very seriously, and we listen and apply it.

Q: Has Palm outsourced its call centers or are the overseas call center employees also Palm employees?

A: Yes, we have chosen to outsource and offshore a majority of our technical support. The technical aptitude and average tenure of the agent pools we use offshore are very high. We also supplement offshore service with onshore escalations (which should have been leveraged by the agents in your case). Interestingly, our customer and case satisfaction data over the past year show that the actual difference between our onshore and offshore agent service is marginal — a fraction of a point — so we believe that we are not compromising quality in any real way.

Q: What kind of training does a Palm call center employee customarily receive?

A: All of our agents get an average of three weeks of classroom training per year. This includes technical support training, operating system (Palm OS and WinMo) training, language and cultural skills training, customer service skills training, new product training, product refresher training, and Palm systems, procedure, and policy training. In addition, agents regularly receive intensive one-on-one coaching and mentoring using call recordings, quality monitoring and customer satisfaction surveys.

Q: In my own experience, as well as in other experiences documented online, it appears there have been many instances of Palm call center employees lying to customers. Just for the record, though I suspect the answer will be no, are Palm call center employees asked to lie to customers?

A: We invest a lot of time and energy in providing official scripts, bulletins, knowledge bases, and training that help agents to respond swiftly, professionally, and accurately to the myriad of consumer inquiries that they face each day. They are also encouraged to use our hierarchy of support to escalate calls and questions when they are not informed or positioned to answer — so there is no reason an agent should provide inaccurate information at any time.

In your case, the agent lost control of the conversation, and things were said that shouldn’t have been. These types of cases result in an investigation, and oftentimes interviews with those agents or managers involved.

Q: What would happen to an employee that is found to have lied to a customer?

A: We conduct an investigation — perhaps reading call notes, listening to calls if they’ve been recorded, interviewing agents, and so forth — to get a better idea of what really transpired. We would then follow our established guidelines for discipline, performance improvement, or dismissal.

Q: Also for the record, though I also suspect the answer will be no, does Palm CEO Ed Colligan take call center calls?

A: Ed is one of the most passionate and participatory executives you will ever come across. While I don’t believe he has ever taken a technical support call per se, he certainly will contact a customer directly, and does so all the time. He has a dedicated voicemail box where he receives customer messages that I don’t even have access to. He routinely is responding to not just voicemails but emails, faxes, and letters that come across his desk. And Ed knows the names of these customers, and he looks to me for status updates on how we have handled these cases and whether or not we have restored their trust in the Palm brand. He is zealous about this — and so am I.

I was first walked through the script by employee C13763, who balked when I told her that I didn’t know the exact date of purchase of my device. Having purchased the device from the palm US store, I thought they could look that up but I discovered that it wasn’t the case. Keeping her on the line while I tried to login in the store, I discovered that palm no longer had any trace of any accounts of mine on their site. With 4 palm devices bought over the last 3 years, I was surprised by that fact, especially after checking the address on the welcome email (palm has a tradition of sending you a welcome note to their world every time you buy another device) and asking for a password to be reset for the email address I had received emails at from Palm.

But at that point, I could say it was all basically my fault for not keeping good records. I asked for forgiveness and gave a date based on my rough rememberance. It was around the end of the year and the Treo 680 has been introduced at a show in New York only a few days before. So I looked up the rough timeline (device introduced late November 2006 and released around December 2006) and gave a date (January 1, 2007). I knew the date was wrong as I had gotten the device later than that but figured I needed to give them a date that was within the range of warranty and on the outside of the date I bought the device.

After doing so, I was told that I needed to do a hard reset (I had already walked through that) and indulged the call center person (I figure they get enough abuse as is). That, of course, did not solve the problem since it was a hardware issue (speaker blown off due to the fact that the volume setting on the palm, if set too high blows off the speakers and the fact that the volume setting buttons do not lock with the rest of the buttons on the device, ensuring that any type of shaking in pockets or bags will ensure that your volume is either set to the top or bottom setting most of the time). After another 15 minutes of walking through the scenario, I was told that the replacement unit would cost me $299.

$299 would not be much of an issue, with one possible exception: the retail price for a brand new, unlocked, Treo 680 is $379. The street price ranges from $200 to $300. A new unit comes with a one year warranty on all parts. A replacement unit does not.

The message this sends to customers is that once you’re a customer, you’re hooked and therefore the company is going to try to milk any profit it can out of you. As a shareholder, I thought this was the wrong message so I asked employee C13763 to transfer me to her superior. After some going back and forth, I was finally transfered to employee C11329, a “senior technician” to whom I referred my case number (case number 1-511-464-84488) before continuing the discussion.

I first voiced my concern about the fact that there was a problem in terms of locating sales data from their own servers. Since I had bought the device from Palm’s website and I had given my serial number while on the previous call, I thought it odd that they could not locate the date of purchase of the device (especially since they consider it such vital data for customer service) . I was told that since my device was sold on January 1, 2007, the date I had given only a few minutes earlier to the previous call center person, it was out of warranty. I’m writing this on December 27, 2007 and, the last time I checked, a one year warranty generally extends 365 days from the date of purchase. My concern as a shareholder now turned to anger and frustration. With 3 other broken palm devices in front of me (2 of them my own fault so I won’t even bother talking to Palm about those), I thought that I could be considered a solid customer. But now I was told that warranties were not real and paying $199 (a drop in price of $100 in only a few minutes since talking to the previous person) was going to solve my problem. In the past, broken devices were repaired for $100 so this was getting closer to reality but I wanted to talk to someone more senior about two problems: first, it seemed that one can give any date and it won’t be checked (or maybe it will) and two, if it is checked, warranty terms do not apply for a full year.

So I asked employee C11329 to be transfered to her manager. She told me she was the most senior person at Palm. I asked her again politely to transfer me to her manager. She told me she had none. I asked to be transfered to the person that was reviewing her work, giving her assignments, etc.. I was told she had none. I told her I felt that was odd as, apart from the chairman and CEO, I didn’t know of anyone in a company not having a manager. She told me she was the CEO.

For a second, I paused. “You’re the CEO of Palm, Inc.?” I asked again, not really believing what I was hearing. “Yes, I am” she replied, now with a defiant tone. “So you’re telling me you’re Ed Colligan?” I asked. “I am the CEO and that’s all you need to know.”

Well, turns out I was now in a very odd situation. I had been at several industry events where Ed Colligan spoke (including a number of product launches from Palm) and, as far as my memory was concerned, his voice was neither feminine nor did it sound south-Asian in its inflection. My memory might have been playing games on me but I was pretty sure I was not talking to the CEO of Palm.

“Do you mind if I start recording this call? I’d like to get your answer to my question about being CEO on an audio record as I’m having a hard time believing it” I asked. The first part of this question is a standard I was taught in journalism school: if you’re going to record a call, first ask if it’s OK to do so. Laws applying to phone taping are a complex mess of regulations with little overlap between different jurisdictions: however, if both parties to a conversation agree to the taping of that conversation, it is generally recognized as OK to do so.

Obviously, I was dealing with someone who knew (or guessed) that I would not legally be allowed to record the conversation so she replied that “no, that would be illegal”. I was stuck so I asked her to transfer me to her manager again. She said no. I asked again with the same result. After another 15 minutes of back and forth, I finally figured that she being CEO, she could transfer me to anyone in the company so I asked to be transfered to the company’s general counsel. The call dropped. I let the line run for another few minutes figuring that maybe it was taking time for the transfer to occur but no, the line went dead.

After a few hours, I realized that while my experience had been horrible, I may have found a great story: PALM, the stock, is not doing so hot. Palm, the company is having its own issues, as are Palm the devices. In the past, the saving grace in all this was that the customer support was very good and decent. So the question is whether tech support (or other forms of horrible customer interactions) could be the straw that breaks Palm’s back. I called Palm’s PR agency to ask some questions about this but most of the people are on vacation. One of their agency’s PR people told me that she’d pass the message on so we’ll see what happens.

On a personal note, I’m joining the many others who are abandoning palm the device. I am also, like Mary Hodder, regretting all the recommendations I made. I’m now shopping for another device and would welcome any recommendation. I also wouldn’t mind getting some information about how other people feel about tech support not only at Palm but also at other unlocked devices sellers. Is unlocked a category of the market that most vendors dismiss, reserving their best services for 3rd party mobile providers and is it something that might change in the future? I don’t know but what I do know is that I am now part of the group of people who must say: “Don’t ever buy a Palm device.”

I was recently describing my update process to David Strom, after he had posted an entry on his blog about how poor the contact management system in Gmail was, and I hit upon a realization: A lot of the work that goes into keeping all that information up to date seems to be something that ought to be more suited to some level of automation. Why is it that there is no real linkage between my address book, different email systems, social networks, IM systems, Skype (and other voice over IP solutions) and my mobile phone? Each of those appears to live in a silo, unable to offer me a full view of the people I know.

While Plaxo does a good job of synchronizing metadata about people (What I would consider as rank, name, and serial number ie. the basics like physical address, IM address, phone, and email), it has yet to evolve into a solution that would give me a full view of the relationships I have.

I also played with a number of CRM packages like SugarCRM but ultimately, they fail because their view is completely sales-centric, with the idea of people being largely seen as members of a company and sales prospects to be closed. I am not much of a salesperson (unless you consider pushing new ideas on people a type of sale, which arguably it is) but my view of the world is much richer than that. I don’t want to think of people as buyers.

However, the concepts of grouping information in CRMs is somewhat attractive. What I want is a view of my relationship with people that would group:

• The basic type of address book information available in my address book and/or on my PDA and/or phone.
• The rich email discussions I have had with said people
• The similarly rich IM discussions I have had.
• SMS or MMS discussions synched from my phone.
• Social Networks interactions
• Feeds for the person (to things like their blog, their last.fm account, etc…)
• Trackbacks and other blog related discussions.

The interesting thing is that each of this information is available in a digitized fashion but there is no centralized point that allows me to see said information about Joe Smith.

Why is that?

So I’d like to suggest the creation of a new class of software called the “Personal Relationship Manager” or PRM. The purpose of a PRM would be to help you manage your life instead of trying to manage sales.

Basic Personal Relationship Manager

Of course, people are going to say that this product or that product solves my existing problem. In order to get those people to think before they push their solution, let me describe in details what I want:

Contact Information

• Integration of my address book across different email services: the contact part of this is largely completed by Plaxo as they have managed to integrate and aggregate the address book from a number of services. They need to provide an interface to integrate others but they seem closer than anyone else on this.
• Integration of my address book across different IM services: top line, the following would be needed from day one: AIM, MSN IM, Yahoo IM, Google IM, ICQ, and Jabber. I should not have to reenter information for each.
• Integration of my address book across different social networks: this is getting trickier as most of the popular social networks look to that type of data as owned by them. However, an ideal PRM would integrate and aggregate the information my friends give on a social network into a single view.
• Integration of my address book and mobile and VOIP solutions: Caller ID on my VoIP solutions like Skype, Vonage, etc… and on my mobile phone should be integrated into a contact view. Today, my Treo asks me if I want to create a new contact or add a number to a contact if it’s not in my address book already. I want that type of feature across all voice communication solution.

Conversations and Status

• Integration of Email conversations across all email services I use: At minimum, this should allow to bring IMAP and POP into my PRM.
• Integration of IM conversations across all IM services I use: Most IM services now have an archival feature. That should be presented as part of a user view.
• Integration of Social Network Status and related messages across all socially-aware applications: From social network status to Last.FM music, from WeSabe to Twitter, my friends are updating information in a variety of services. I should have a dedicated news feed for each individual view.
• Integration of SMS/MMS history: SMS and MMS sent to my mobile phone should be integrated into the overview of people.
• Possible Integration of Voicemail and audio messages: At a later time, integrating those into the package would be a nice to have.

Input

• The PRM should manage relationships across social network: This ought not be aggressive but the system should check when people I know join a particular network I’m on. If it finds a match, it ought to tell me that it did and, based on my settings, either ask for a linkage automatically, or ask me to approve/deny asking for such linkage.
• The PRM could (not should) become a single point of entry for broadcast messages. For example, if I change jobs (as I did recently), I would update that system with the job change status in a single location and it would update that information across all the touch points where I have entered that information.
• The PRM could (not should) be a single entry point for status broadcast. At the very least, it should allow me to set which system ought to be integrated via simple rules similar to filtering (for example, I could say “If I update Service X, also update Service Y and Service Z.”

Programming Bits

• Low change footprint: A new application should not force me to change everything I already use. Instead, it should work with the applications I already use. This is probably the hardest thing in developing the application I’m highlighting as it will have to integrate with other services/software via some kind of service oriented architecture but not take over their basic features.
• Fully addressable via API: The PRM, if built successfully, would become central to managing relationships. As a result, it could become the source of data that applications could be built on. Because much of the data is personal, a strong set of security and access controls would need to be in place in order to ensure that only the data people in my PRM want to distribute is distributable. On the other hand, the data should be formatted in such a consistent way that developers could build applications that integrate with the PRM.
• Online/Offline addressable: Knock me off the network and I should still be able to have access to some of the data. Put me back on the network and I should be able to resync it all with the most up to date information.
• Decentralized: People tend to prefer having their contact info in the hands of more than one providers as they feel that type of information is largely personal. A PRM solution would thus have to be in a mode that can be federated so no single entity is in full control of the data.

So the purpose of the system, once built, would be to give me a view of my friends/contacts/etc… that is consolidated. It would probably provide me with a high level contact overview (listing all the ways to get in touch with someone), and then allow me to drill on the different conversations I’ve had with the person across a variety of systems (Email, IM, phone, social nets) as well as give me an overview of what they’ve been up to thanks to a status message and socially aware apps screen. And it would have to do all that without me changing any of the systems I’m currently using. It’s a tall order but it’s one that, if satisfied, could easily become the central way for people to manage their relationship.

If your product does indeed satisfy all those requirements, you may have made a sale. And if you have an interest in developing a PRM, I’ll be happy to be an alpha tester.

Update (December 9th): Sad News. Marc died today. Rest in peace, Marc. You will be missed.

Background

“People are concerned about your blog.” In the hushed world of banking, this was a clear sign that I was in trouble. People didn’t like my blog and it could become a career issue. At issue was the fact that I had an identity outside of the corporation and people were worried that what I was talking about on my site would be associated with the corporation in spite of my specifically mentioning that all opinions on this site are my own.So I was left with a couple of options: be quiet and keep progressing my career or find a place that would be more friendly to my blogging. I tried the former but, as more and more stories popped up, I found it harder and harder to be quiet. I wanted to comment, I wanted to write but I had to balance that against the idea of being gainfully employed in what was an otherwise good job.At the same time, I was getting a little antsy. I wasn’t happy with the workload. I was also thinking that I needed a change of scenery since I’d been at the firm for a long (in my view) time. I didn’t want to become a lifer and my options in terms of career growth were to move to London or Hong Kong, both open options but neither really appetizing to me. I wanted to stay in New York and I wanted out of finance. The goal became to restore a good work/life balance, to continue being creative and to be given enough flexibility in terms of what I could do in my private life.So I started putting out feelers to see if there were ways for me to gracefully get out and find something more in line with my media background.Why did I want to go back to media?In order to answer this, I have to give newer readers a little background about me. I’ve been involved in the media space since the early 90s and in the internet commercial media space since pretty much its inception. It is, and has always been my first love.

Why I went into finance

When I went to the banking side of the world, the attraction was two-fold:

• one, I wanted to learn more about money flow and how money moved around the world once you had sent it to a credit card clearinghouse.
• two, I wanted to work on large scale global project because they seemed much more challenging and therefore more interesting.

Along the way, I learned a whole lot of things. Six years in the financial world taught me how to properly manage global projects in a widely distributed environment. They also made me more understanding of the need for strong project management, the issues around regulations and a lot of legal stuff that I was aware of but had never experienced first-hand.All said, it was a great learning experience that made me a stronger project manager and allowed me to really understand how large organizations work and how to work within them. It also allowed me to mature as a manager. I have to admit that when I joined the bank, I may have been a good startup guy but I was not equipped with the proper skills to work in an organization with hundreds of thousands of people. Through a mix of great mentoring, amazing educational opportunities and lots of hands-on experience, the bank allowed me to acquire skills few people have.In this process, I also learned that transaction flows were actually relatively simple to understand, once you had properly dissected them and it gave me a couple of insights as to the nature of money (more on that soon).Fast-forward to today and there are a number of things on the horizon that gave me pause about the future of banking:

• Regulatory constraints have made banks hyper-conservative: this makes it very difficult to try to do anything innovative within the context of a large financial organization. The innovators generally tend to be smaller more agile players who don’t have as much to lose initially.
• The mortgage crisis is just the beginning: In talking with people who trade financial instruments, it is becoming clear that no one really understands the magnitude of the current financial crisis. People know it’s bad and expect it to get much much worse but no one has any idea as to how bad.
• Transactions are easy to understand but much of the innovation in finance is actually coming from non-financial actors. Margins on money transfers are dropping as regulatory costs are increasing and competition is increasing. At the same time, the real value of transactions is not in the transactions themselves but in the metadata associated with the transactions.

So looking at all this, I had to balance whether I wanted to stay in banking or do something else. That was the easy decision. The tough one was figuring out what something else would be.

Back to Media

I had options: with a second Internet renaissance looming, it seems that I could pretty much go to any startups. And, in putting out feelers, it was interesting to see how many were interested. What they were interested in were my ability to understand large scale projects, my strong project management background, and my understanding of large scale transactional systems.As they highlighted those facts to me, it became clear that the banking experience was a great entree in any area. So I had to choose.Fortunately, I also had a good background in media and the recent changes seem to line up with my thinking and skills:

• Media is increasingly becoming about transaction. For example, if one looks at the recent success of Google (an advertising company with a side business in search) and Facebook (and advertising company with a side business in lead management), it is clear that media is all about facilitating more and more and smaller and smaller transactions.
• Couple the previous point with the fact that most media is moving to the models that were established by the internet (or revenue is being siphoned from those media to the internet directly, as we’re seeing with newspapers) and it is clear that marketplaces will exist to mediate relationships between buyers and sellers.
• Large media companies could manage this change but they are still beholden to the formats they have stakes in. We’re seeing that with the music industry still thinking it sells plastic CDs instead of of its content, the movie industry thinking the same and the print industry being wedded to its printers.
• Because of that, the change will have to come from an industry that is not weighted down by a particular distribution medium.
• Traditionally, the industry that sells messaging and figures out distribution is the advertising industry. Media buying is the arm of that industry that is most likely to enact (and therefore profit) from the change. Large media buyers are uniquely positioned to help their customers present their message in a more effective fashion across media and, due to the unique expertise they are accruing across media are also the best ones to understand where the market opportunity may lie.

So with all that, let me get to the real announcement relating to all this:

I HAVE LEFT HSBC AND WILL BE JOINING GROUPM ON DECEMBER 3rd. 

Who is GroupM? What will you do there?

GroupM is the media investment arm of WPP, one of the (if not the) largest advertising groups in the world. In other words, it’s exactly the place to be if you believe in and are interested in the kind of change I highlighted above.Thanks to the great formation that HSBC has given me, I will be joining groupm as the project management office director for the company. In that capacity, I will head the company’s PMO and will work on a number of really interesting initiatives. Based on my discussions with the people there, I’m very excited about the opportunity and it also looks like I’m joining a pretty amazing team of very smart people (I hope I can help insure that the average smarts are not lowered by my presence).Also, I’ve worked closely with my new manager and the folks in H.R. to ensure that special provisions have been made relating to my blogging. The terms are fair to both sides and it will ensure that I can basically start blogging again in my spare time. However, I suspect that a lot of my blogging will go to more discussions of the changing nature of finance and money. The reason I had not written about that in the past is that, due to my working in a financial institution, I steered clear of anything that would relate to that world. But I did learn a lot about it and, more importantly, I did develop a few theories about it that I have not seen written about in too many other places. Now that I’m freer to blog, I think I can start writing more about it.At the same time, I might be more careful in my writing about advertising since that’s the world I’m moving back into. People hire me as much for my insights into a particular industry as for my other skills and I want to make sure that the keener ones are kept as a proprietary advantage to any employer.

Conclusion and Thank Yous

So there you have it. I’m moving to groupm; I’m leaving HSBC.However, before I close this out, I’d like to add a few thank yous to the people I have worked with at HSBC:

• First, I’d like to thank Kevin Newman and Raymond Cheng for giving me the initial opportunity. While both of them have moved to other parts of the organization, they were instrumental in bringing me on board and they are responsible for my initially joining and then staying on much longer than I had initially thought I would. Mark Martinelli also provided a fantastic guiding hand and a tremendous amount of sponsorship that probably ensured I’d stay on for an even longer period.
• I was also blessed with having to deal with a great management team. Over the years, mentoring by Rob Mian, Fred Hoysted, Gene Lavis, Bill McCloskey, and Mark Hibbard helped me better understand my own strengths and weaknesses and become a much more effective manager.
• I was also very lucky to deal with understanding internal customers like Larry Campbell, Daniel Hallac, Ian Haynes, Chris Walsh, Michael Artley, Joe Garner, Jeffrey Hughes, Bahvya Shah, Julie Lakha, Matt Dooley, Joe Garner, Julian Soper, Bev McArthur, Megan Heinze, Tom Cannon and Verity Coe.
• Internal friends worked hard to help me shape the best approach to problem resolution and, while it is hard to get every single name recognized, I’d like to also thank Satinder Sadhar, Simon Cox, Stewart Nacht, Kelly Hair, Fernanda Cabas, David Ruiz, Serge Besch, Vadim Permakoff, Venkat Lakshminarayanan, Aditya Kommaraju, Rajnish Jain, Amichai Lichtenstein, Stuart Bain, Pedro Crespo, Celia Bradley, Sarah Carroll, Sreenivas Duggiraala, Ainsley Rattray,and many others… It’s amazing that I could actually do all this off the top of my head and a testament to the amount of really great people working at HSBC these days…
• In 6 years, there are countless others I’ve interacted with who have made me a much better person. They’ve seen me grow as an individual and as a manager, they’ve forgiven some of my mistakes and they’ve taught me important skills. I will miss one and all but, at the same time, I’m excited about the new challenges coming ahead.

So looking back, it’s been a fantastic time at HSBC and I assume that it will be even better at groupm. There we have it, the big secret is out. I’m looking forward to the new challenge and I’m sure the new job will keep me very challenged and very busy but, at the same time, I’m also thrilled to be able to say that the blog will get more lively: I’m back baby and this time, I’m gonna stick around….

• Adoption precedes monetization
• Lots of customers is a greater barrier to entry than lots of intellectual property
• A business’ brand is its greatest asset in driving sales
• Lower barriers to evaluating and using your product
• Sell customer value, not vendor value
• Most businesses aren’t widgets businesses
• Product use should breed re-use and further sharing
• A collective product best serves a collective market
• Invest in service and your product, not sales
• Transparency breeds trust, and trust breeds revenue
• People make a business

An interesting list which challenges a lot of thinking. Worth a read. (Hat tip to Sam Ruby for this.)

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light – an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

If true, this is one of the most important scientific achievements of our time. The implications as far as communications are staggering as it would make high speed network change in ways we have yet to understand. Most telecom networks based on fiber optics are limited by the speed of light so theoretically, if one can go faster than that, networks could increase in speed even further…

She was wearing a Mayan dress, the traditional attire of indigenous people in central America, and the hotels response was also traditional: throw her out.

Staff at Cancuns five-star Hotel Coral Beach appear to have assumed this was another street vendor or beggar, so without asking questions they ordered her to leave. Except the woman was Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel peace prizewinner, Unesco goodwill ambassador, Guatemalan presidential candidate and figurehead for indigenous rights.

Oh, the irony….

The only Roman emperors sceptre to have been found has gone on public display in Rome for the first time.The sceptre, which is topped by a blue orb that represents the earth, was discovered at the end of last year and is believed to have been held by Emperor Maxentius, who ruled for six years until 312AD.

The amazing thing to me is that it had a blue orb representing the earth in 312AD. Considering that it took a while after that for people to believe in that idea again, it’s pretty wild to see that ancient romans considered the earth as a globe.

Recordings that claim to stimulate baby brain development may actually slow vocabulary development in infants if they are overused, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
For every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants aged 8 to 16 months understood an average of six to eight fewer words than babies who did not watch them.

A good study that highlights something I suspected for a long time…