Month: August 2005

Dell customer rating plunges, Apple leads pack

People are starting to complain about the quality of Dell's customer service, although not its products. In this recent study, Dell's customer satisfaction is no simply on par with other PC vendors, while Apple has shot to the top of the consumer satisfaction list.

U.S. consumers lambasted Dell Inc. for poor customer service in a survey conducted last quarter, sending the world's largest PC vendor into a virtual tie with the rest of the PC market behind the industry-leading efforts of Apple Computer Inc.

For the second year in a row, Apple received the best rating from PC buyers in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), said David Van Amburg, general manager of the ACSI. The University of Michigan compiles the ACSI in numerous product categories by randomly calling U.S. residents and surveying their buying habits, he said. Apple received a score of 81, compared to an industry average score of 74, in results released Tuesday. The Cupertino, California, company's focus on product innovation and customer service has won it a cadre of famously loyal customers unlike any other PC vendor, Van Amburg said. Apple also received a score of 81 in 2004. Dell, on the other hand, earned a score of 74, down from a score of 79 the previous year.

Read full article: Study: Dell customer rating plunges, Apple leads pack

IDC: IT Growth Healthy Through 2009

It's not quite as nice as the days of double-digit growt, but worldwide IT spending is showing a healthy, steady growth that will be sustained through 2009, IDC predicted Tuesday.

Worldwide IT spending will grow at a compound annual rate of 5.9 percent through the end of 2009 to reach $1.34 trillion, up from $1.06 trillion this year, said Anne Songtao Lu, program manager for IDC's Worldwide Vertical Markets research service. "From an IT industry perspective it's quite good," she said. "There's no longer the double-digit growth they saw before 2000, but this growth rate, for a lot of quite mature technologies, is very healthy."

Read full article at InfoWorld

JBoss Woos Commercial App Server Users

JBoss, the open source J2EE server, is making commercial inroads: 

JBoss on Tuesday will boost efforts to lure users of commercial application servers to its open source alternative. The JBoss Migration Program being unveiled features an assessment to define a migration strategy, an implementation program, and a subscription to the JBoss Application Server. The implementation program could involve partners such as Hewlett-Packard.

Read more at InfoWorld

Invoicing with PayPal

PayPal's Invoicing service lets you easily send professional business invoices via email. You can:

  •  Send an invoice for goods or services
  •  Provide detailed line items by specifying quantity, unit price, item description, shipping details, tax, and currency
  •  Generate automatically calculated totals
  •  Simply fill out the invoice, review, and send
  •  Save up to 10 invoices as templates for future use
  •  Use PayPal's Invoicing Templates to prefill invoice fields

Currently it does not (as far as I can tell) support recurring invoices, which is the only drawback that I can see at this point.

PHP: Boon or Bane?

PHP remains popular, so much so that vendors are either adding tool support for this language, or fighting against it, touting their alternative wares such as Java or Visual Studio. 

If Java developers are indeed picking-up PHP because - like almost anything else it seems - it is simpler to use than Java, then it will hit the marketing wall of Sun, BEA Systems, Borland, IBM and Oracle who either deliver serious Java development tools or application servers. On C , PHP must largely contend with Microsoft's Goliath-like Visual Studio. Idle curiosity could have accounted for the PHP spike EDC identified two years ago as large numbers of developers planned to evaluate or adopt PHP. When it came to using PHP, though, that's where developers probably turned to their familiar tools. While adoption may be slowing, PHP is not going away. With an estimated 2.5m PHP developers and web sites going up on a daily basis that have been built using PHP, the language is firmly ensconced in computing's landscape. The only question seems to be: how deep can PHP go in business computing?

Read more at The Register.

Send SMS Messages using Google & Firefox

Want to send an alert to someone in a meeting when you know they can't conveniently answer a phone call? Send an SMS message. 

Google Send to Phone for Firefox is an extension that enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone. For example, you might text message yourself a phone number, an address, or directions that you find on the Web.

Get the plugin here: Google Send to Phone for Firefox

Disable Flash Popups in FireFox

Just when I was beginning to think my FireFox popup blocker was broken, Pete Bevin pointed out that some clever sites are getting around the Firefox default settings by launching popups from Flash. The good news is you can hack FireFox to prevent these new-fangled popups. To do this:

Fortunately, you can get around it:

  1. Type about:config in the Firefox location bar.
  2. Right-click on the page and select 'New' and then 'Integer'.
  3. Name this new setting privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
  4. Set the value of this new setting to '2'.

Original article at petebevin.com

 

16 Reasons Managers Can’t Get Employees to Perform

Having trouble with employee productivity? Read this article:

It's frustrating, isn't it? You define tasks that you need your subordinate(s) to do, provide them the resources they need, and send them on their way to get it done. You wait. You notice it's not getting done. You wait some more. It still isn't getting done. You call in your subordinates and inquire about the task. You get an ambiguous answer. You send the employees back out to perform the task. You wait even more. It still doesn't get done. What's going on here? According to Ferdinand Fournies, author of Why Employees Don't Do What They're Supposed To Do and What To Do About It, there are 16 specific reasons why.

Full Text: 16 Reasons Managers Can't Get Employees to Perform

 

Spirited Away

This very cool mini-app for Mac OS X will help clean up your open windows without you needing to do anything! 

Spirited Away is very simple utility for MacOSX. You just start it up and let it run in the background. Spirited Away checks each running application's activity, and if an application isn't active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away 🙂

I am playing with the settings, but right now setting it to hide unused apps after three minutes seems about right for me. 

Get it here: SpiritedAway