Thanks

Last year on Thanksgiving, i wrote a long post about being thankful.....This year, was going to skip it and just refer to last year's post, but last night, as I was packing up the car to head home from Thanksgiving dinner at my cousin's house, I captured a quick video which kind of summed up a piece of what I'm thankful for....

Blockbuster sucks too

Based on my experience with Blockbuster yesterday, I am now, more than ever, anxiously awaiting the point in time when I tell Luke, Sam and Madison about this quaint concept that used to exist where people actually needed to go to a store to rent movies.

I rented a couple of video games back in September, and returned them in their drop box about a week and a half later...Well within the allotted time they give you to hold onto a rental....

Yesterday, went in to rent Sam a game for the WII....The guy behind the counter, who happens to be the manager proceeded to hand me a copy of the last game i rented back in September, and said "you own this now". I was really confused. Apparently if you don't bring back the game within 40 days or so, you end up owning the game. No warning is provided, no email notification, just a charge to your credit card (in this case, about $65) for the 2 games that they say were returned late. The manager thought this was really funny - chuckling at times - as I voiced my concern. I would've thought it was pretty funny as well, had he mentioned any sort of desire to remedy the situation - which he didn't.

My belief, which I stated to the manager, is that they had a process issue with their drop box - I returned the games when they needed to be returned, but somehow they were misplaced once inside the store. This was confirmed partially when the store manager couldn't even locate the other game I had returned on the same day...He actually said that they had no record of it being returned.

I did receive a call from Susan Feldman the district manager for Blockbuster last night, and while she repeatedly scolded me for returning the games late - even as I restated to her what actually happened - a credit is to be issued to my account.

It really highlights a pretty major challenge for companies with dying business models and a proven inability to rise to the technological and organizational challenges of changing markets. How do you find motivated, customer focused staff to join your soon to be a cautionary tale operation? In this case, my expectations for service and product have been molded by Netflix...The antiquated use of technology and sub-par service at Blockbuster is just night and day from what I've received from Netflix.

So i'll be checking out Gamefly today to see if that better meets my expectations, and am pretty sure it couldn't be any worse than Blockbuster.

Verizon Sucks, I'll go with the iPhone

When I worked at Bloomberg about 10 years ago, I used to routinely work with staff from Verizon as part of my job, and always found the employees that I worked with there to be pretty rude, and not particularly focused on satisfying their customers...
10 years later, I visited Verizon to check out what I thought could be my next device, the Blackberry Storm, and found that not a whole lot has changed in the last 10 years.

My primary concern with the iPhone is the touch screen keyboard and how it might affect my ability to type emails. So when I went to try out the Storm, top of mind for me was the use of the keyboard for email. But Verizon would not allow the removal of the black piece of plastic that was attached to the Storm for security measures to be removed from the device so I could test out typing email. Instead, the 5 Verizon employees who were standing around chatting with each other, each provided their own ridiculous excuse as to why I wouldn't be able to fully demo the typing feature. The main sales guy from Verizon actually didn't even put down his own Blackberry throught this process - instead - he was texting or emailing while trying to answer my questions about the demo.

So I left Verizon, not having even gotten the chance to try out the Storm, but based on my interactions with Verizon, I'll go with the iPhone.

AppleTV vs. Tivo

I've owned Apple TV for about a year, and while it doesn't seem to have caught on in a big way, I am totally hooked. I recently finished the 1st two seasons of Mad Med, purchasing episodes directly from Itunes via Apple TV...(Someone asked me what time Mad Men is actually on, and I had no clue - guess that's what the term time-shifting means). While there are some options for opening up Apple TV to online content outside of Itunes (You can apparently view Hulu content with software from Boxee), you're pretty much reliant on Apple to determine what you can and can't see.

Next month, Tivo's integration with Netflix will go live presenting another promising solution for bringing a massive content library into your living room...From the Tivo newsletter

"Starting next month, all TiVo® HD customers* are going to fall in love with Netflix® all over again (it's even better the second time around!) when you can send more than 12,000 movie and TV episodes straight to your living room using just your TiVo remote ..."

While I'm looking forward to testing it out, I am not all that optimistic. I've been using both the Apple TV and Tivo interfaces to Youtube - and if Tivo's Netflix integration is as clumsy as their Youtube integration, I anticipate that I'll continue to be a loyal Apple TV fan. The Apple TV UI is so slick - making it easy to search for and find Youtube content, and navigate menus - and Tivo's is sluggish and slow, making it a real chore to use.

Advantage iPhone?

With the reviews coming in, looks like the iPhone will be the way i go...I'll probably try one out at Verizon, but the feedback on sluggish performance of touchscreen/menu navigation and email has me concerned about the storm...

Storm vs iPhone

Trying to decide on my next device, and think i've narrowed it down to iphone vs storm...interesting article here

Luke's Haircut

Took Luke to get a haircut...I think he cried more than he did during his circumcision....