Category Archives: Web/Tech
Amazon And The Royal Mail: A Parable Of Customer Service
So I did what I said I’d do with my Christmas money. I put it all together and ordered an Amazon Kindle e-reader. I placed the order on 28th December. Amazon emailed me that day with the good news that they had dispatched it that very day. Not being in a desperate rush for it, I opted for their free Super Saver Delivery, and they said it would be with me by 5th January at the very latest. That is, yesterday.
Enter the Royal Mail, entrusted by Amazon to deliver the Kindle to me. No sign of it by today. All we do know is they are in the habit of leaving various packages on our doorstep without bothering to ring the doorbell. With no Kindle having appeared by today, the day after the deadline, I wondered what to do.
Amazon’s website asks you to check with your local delivery office that it isn’t waiting there. When I finally got through to them, I basically got the “No, guv, not possible, everything that comes in here goes out. Goodbye” response.
Ringing Amazon was totally different. Their representative apologised, and told me that if the Kindle hadn’t turned up by the 13th I could ring again and they could then treat it as a lost package. They would then send out a replacement and upgrade my delivery, free of charge.
Which company impressed me? I think you can guess. The Royal Mail employee disdainfully said, “Amazon shouldn’t have told you to ring us, they know there are delays.” Not our fault, no chance, we’re not even going to consider it, we won’t offer to check, no criticism of us is ever justified.
Amazon were quite different. That’s £109-worth of kit (well, £111 with the VAT increase this week) they are willing to replace, just like that. My one gripe is that they use a service like the Royal Mail where you can’t track a package. I’m seriously considering upgrading to their Amazon Prime service, although I feel too mean to pay the annual £49 fee. Maybe you get what you pay for.
An unwillingness to be self-reflective and accept criticism, as it seems was the Royal Mail’s attitude, is something we display as individuals as well as institutions. It can be because we fear the acid tongue of the critic, who may take advantage of our error and crush us. So we try to wriggle out, justify ourselves and defend the indefensible. I’m rather good at that. Maybe you are, too.
And while automatically accepting the criticism and trying to put something right may also not always be wise – it can be done for the sake of a quiet life – it may be more Christlike. He ‘took the blame’ and put things right for the human race, if not all creation. While some elements of Amazon’s business may not always be that moral, on this occasion it seems to me they were the more Christlike.
Knaphill Methodist Church And The Web
The bigger of my two new churches, Knaphill Methodist Church, has for some time had its own website. You can often find audio of recent sermons there. So if you go to the link above and click on ‘Latest Sermon or Talk‘, you will find my sermon from yesterday, and can hear how the text I posted here came out in real life. If you can stand the thought of hearing my voice, that is!
And as of today, the church also has its own Facebook page. Do pop over if you are on Facebook and ‘like’ us. We are likeable!
The Writing Industry And The Digital Revolution
We know the decimation of the music industry in the face of digitisation. A whole industry looked for a beach full of sand and buried its collective heads.
Thankfully, there are some signs that in the world of writing and publishing, there are some more visionary leaders. Take this Guardian interview with John Makinson, the head of Penguin books. He knows that devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad are changing the landscape, now that Amazon’s US operation sells more e-books than hardbacks. He envisages all sorts of added value content in ebooks. Steve Ballmer knows that Microsoft needs to play catch-up. What are the pros and cons? A few thoughts:
1. Carrying around 3500 books with you on one small device, such as you can with a Kindle, has to be amazingly appealing.
2. Being able to search a book, rather like you do a Word document or a PDF, must also be a terrific advantage.
3. There is a clear focus from Makinson and others on the core issue, which is the promotion of good writing, rather than holding up soon-to-be-outdated structures. See Clay Shirky’s recent thoughts about newspapers and jounalism: the question isn’t protecting papers with paywalls, it’s a concern for journalists. Hence why I refer to the writing industry, not the newspaper industry or the publishing industry, even if what we are talking about is new forms of publishing.
4. More negatively, will we take in less cognitively this way? It’s generally accepted that people absorb about 25% less information on a PC screen than on hard copy. Will the same be true for 6 inch screens, even with e-ink?
5. What about the financial implications for smaller publishers, given the cash flow problems of independent publishers or the well-documented difficulties of Christian bookshops and publishers? Will they simply have to persist with print while the rest of the world marches on, or will this finish them off?
What do you think?
What Shape Is The Digital Future?
Interesting piece by Andrew Marr in the BBC Magazine: A New Journalism On The Horizon. If digital means the end of cinemas and bookshops as well as record shops, along with the catastrophe facing the newspaper industry, what shape will the future take?
Marr being a journalist with a history in newspapers (he edited The Independent in the 1990s), he has an interesting slant on Rupert Murdoch’s paywall approach. If traffic to The Times sites has fallen by 90% since its introduction, is it viable? But is free content viable, either? Marr suggests an alternative way. Just pay for the content you’re interested in, not the whole lot. Effectively, you don’t pay for the whole newspaper, given that you might want the sport section but not the showbiz coverage.
If he is right, then while this might be the economic solution (cheap enough, but still creates revenue), is it not a further sign of digitalisation being the ally of consumerist individualism? The advent of personal MP3 players has made it harder to share an excitement about a new musical discovery than before. It is still possible, but it is slower and less easy to do so. Will this be the same with journalism?
Is Marr right? What do you think? Pete Phillips, if you’re reading, does CODEC have any thoughts on this?
Cleverness Is A Gift, Kindness Is A Choice
I never thought I’d be using Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, as an illustration of the difference between talents and character, between the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. But the graduation speech at Princeton University shown above is certainly an example. He might seem a surprising choice, given this recent article about Amazon’s ruthless business methods and this one about the effect of their low download prices on musicians, though. Surely the difficult decisions that individuals have to make in favour of kindness need also to be made corporately.
Yet sin will always be a problem. This is where it becomes more than an issue of choice: it is about needing to co-operate with the renewing power of the Holy Spirit in all areas of life. And that is not an instant thing. It is acquired with practice, as Tom Wright argues in Virtue Reborn. Bit by bit, we train ourselves to behave and react differently, until holiness becomes more of a habit. It takes time to acquire Christlike habits. Perhaps that is why Paul refers to ‘the fruit of the Spirit’: fruit doesn’t just appear, it takes time to grow.
Bezos’ speech above is only short and cannot cover all bases in twelve minutes. A longer exposition might explore a relationship between gifts and character, such as using gifts with character. It might also take on the thought that although gifts are given, we still need to work on crafting them. But whatever the failings of Amazon as a company, his call at the end of his speech to students to make a difference in the world with kindness is a welcome one. It might not be what we expected from a billionaire entrepreneur, but it is a breath of fresh air.
Filtering Information Overload On The Internet
How do you deal with the overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet? Do you spend too much time surfing or hunting down further information? Here are a couple of ideas I have found.
Firstly, here is a piece on some personal self-disciplines. As a Christian, I would substitute the references to Buddhist meditation with other approaches, but I find it a helpful article.
Secondly, there is a new tool available for sorting through the mass of tweets and updates on certain subjects. It’s called SwiftRiver, and the BBC has a report on it.
Do you find these helpful? What approaches do you take?
Emails In Envelopes
Is this an early April Fool’s joke? Note it was published yesterday, not today, but it sounds like an April Fool to me.
It reminds me of a true story from some years ago. At one of my churches, I persuaded the Church Council to put the church office on the Internet. This was dial-up days, by the way, with fears of large phone bills for connecting.
One day, a few weeks after the deed had been done, one of my colleagues said, “Dave, I have a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“Those emails. They come in envelopes. How do they do that?”
I paused for thought. What was he on about? Then I thought I realised.
“You mean the envelope icon next to the message?”
“No,” he said, “the emails come in actual envelopes. How does that happen?”
At which point I realised. The church administrator printed off all his emails and put them in envelopes for him.
The Domain Renewal Group Scam
I received a letter today which I am reporting to the Mailing Preference Service.It came from a company called the Domain Renewal Group. They have cheekily looked up who owns the domain for this website and written to me, expecting me to renew my domain with them. While they do talk about transferring it to them and thus stay just the right side of honesty, it is a cynical letter designed to get me to pay them, and take out ownership of other similar domains such as bigcircumstance.net and bigcircumstance.org.
Fortunately I am savvy enough to realise this is a scam and they won’t get away with it with me. However other people might be frightened into giving them money, thinking that otherwise they will lose their domains, when all they need to do is renew their registration with the company they have used up until now (in my case, WordPress). And why I should transfer to them when they cost twice the price of WordPress and I rely on the WordPress software – well, you tell me.
The company appears to be based in the USA but it came with a reply paid envelope that had a London address on it, and hence I am within my rights to report them to the MPS. I strongly suggest that anybody else in the UK who gets these letters and who is registered with the MPS also reports them. By not checking the MPS list of people who have opted out from direct mail they are breaking British law. Let’s put pressure on these cynical and unscrupulous companies.
