Contacting Microsoft
Howard Brazee
free support, but I have not been able to find any way of getting that
support.
I have tried again and again to get somewhere on their web pages without
luck.
There are two things I want to talk to them about:
1. After I installed via my DvD over my Win NT installation, I can no
longer access my DvD. The driver tells me something is wrong, but every
time I reinstall it, or uninstall it and reboot, it returns the same -
not working.
2. I am supposed to get a rebate for upgrading from NT. After my
purchase, I discovered that this requires that I have a receipt or the
first page from my old worthless manual. I can't find either. Can I
simply send in my NT CD to get the rebate, or can they look me up in
their database?
I have looked here:
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/directory/phonepers.asp?sd=gn
Every time I try here:
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/onlinesr.asp?sd=gn
I get in a loop - I drill down web pages looking for the promised help
until I get back to where I started from.
They hide pretty well.
Jake
Jake
"Howard Brazee" <how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:3A00799F...@brazee.net...
Wally Bass
<jdil...@NOSPAM.concentric.net> wrote:
>Try 1-800-936-4900 and you should get warranty service.
The cover story of Business Week (as I recall) a few weeks back,
in an article titled "Why Service Stinks," indicates that you'll
probably get much worse or no real service at all unless the
vendor you are calling has reason to believe that you are (or
that you represent) a big spender. Apparently, virtually all
"customer service" organizations these days work actively to
categorize callers into big spender vs. small fry categories, and
in the later category, you get much less (if any) service,
including being placed in much larger (infinite?) phone queues.
I don't know if they use caller id and reverse phone directory
lookups to categorize calls, but if they don't now, I would bet
that its coming soon.
(And, of course, all of this data that they collect on us when
we browse the web is just for marketing, and is really harmless.
Rrrriiight!)
>"Howard Brazee" <how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
>news:3A00799F...@brazee.net...
>>They hide pretty well.
<rant>
They do indeed. I was also looking for a connection to a warm
body on the MS web site, and I thought it was a marvel how
various links made me think I was getting closer, when in fact,
every path was either a dead end, or ended up on some page that
told me that, after paying them a couple hundred bucks or more, I
would belong to some kind of service plan that would entitle me
to a talk to them concerning maybe a couple of "incidents" (to
probably hear only that "it's working as designed") (and which
service would expire in a year, whether or not I had utilized my
incident count). In my case, there was a broken link that I would
really have liked to traverse, but I couldn't even find a way to
report the broken link to a 'webmaster' type.
When you look at how the MS service organization is structured to
bring in (lots of) money, it is clear that Microsoft benefits
both from lousy documentation and from bugs in their products.
More and more, their products reflect that reality.
Unfortunately, we've moved a long way from the WordPerfect days,
where I can remember reading articles by the WP folks who said
that the reason that were committed to keeping their service free
was that doing so put pressure on them to improve their product
to the point were service was rarely necessary. Ah, but that is
when there was real competition in the office products market.
DOJ: please proceed in doing SOMETHING to/about these clowns.
Microsoft: sure, the issue is "DOJ vs the freedom to innovate."
Give me a break.
Robbing Fort Knox would probably be a pushover compared to
penetrating the "customer server" fortresses that are
constructed these days.
</rant>
Damn. Even that doesn't make me feel better.
Wally Bass
Howard Brazee
was the right thing to do. I got courteous and no hassle support. They
were having a lot of trouble with their e-mail systems though.
After working a couple of hours on my problem, they had me e-mail my
sysinfo, and they e-mailed (via various accounts) a program which can
give them more information. It hadn't arrived by this morning. At any
rate, they promised to call me back at 6:00 tonight. They also seem to
think I can get a proof of purchase for my NT 4 if I have registered,
but they were going to pass me to a service rep after they solved my
lost DvD problem. We never got around to it, but I will try tonight.
I almost gave up after spending tens of hours trying to locate someone
who would listen. I'm glad I didn't and have high hopes that I will get
my system working.
Of course - maybe they don't design their web sites to make things
difficult on purpose. The other day I tried to buy something over from
Global Computer Supplies' web site. I found the product I wanted, but
gave up when it wanted my personal information - it would demand that I
enter my state, but the data entry box for state would not display.
Certainly making it easy for me to spend money should be a priority, but
I finally gave up.
I was reading in Jim Rapoza's article in the October 9th eWEEK magazine
how bad the software is to do check out and purchase products. It is
easy to accept charge card numbers with spaces entered - but do they do
this simple code? (we read it with spaces in it)
I haven't seen a company which does web pages with a computer kiosk to
test the pages using modems and various software. I haven't seen a
company get typical customers to test their web pages.
With this amount of ignorance in applications designed to bring in money
- I guess I should attribute my results to incompetence instead of
malfeasance.
John Jordan
>When you look at how the MS service organization is structured to
>bring in (lots of) money, it is clear that Microsoft benefits
>both from lousy documentation and from bugs in their products.
>More and more, their products reflect that reality.
>Unfortunately, we've moved a long way from the WordPerfect days,
>where I can remember reading articles by the WP folks who said
>that the reason that were committed to keeping their service free
>was that doing so put pressure on them to improve their product
>to the point were service was rarely necessary. Ah, but that is
>when there was real competition in the office products market.
I remember well those days of WordPerfect free tech support, via
toll-free numbers even. And because of it, WordPerfect Corp. *owned*
the word processor market.
I remember once they installed a new telephone system to increase
their capacity. They turned it on one morning at 8 am and promptly
blew out the incoming 800 service for the entire state of Utah. At
their peak they employed hundreds of tech support people, all for just
one program.
Sad that no one thinks customer support is worth doing any more.
NOTICE: I don't publish my e-mail address. Post in the
newsgroup only.
Howard Brazee
Howard Brazee wrote:
> I called one of the "business users" toll free numbers last night. It
> was the right thing to do. I got courteous and no hassle support. They
> were having a lot of trouble with their e-mail systems though.
But they couldn't solve the problem. After two days, they said my IDE based
DvD didn't have any drivers and was incompatible with W2K.
So I installed a new copy of W2K in a different partition and it worked
fine. Same hardware as before. I have a lot of work ahead of me moving
everything over. The courteous Microsoft help didn't have a clue about what
was wrong.
They also said they would connect me with someone who would check to see if
they had me registered as a WNT 4 owner to get my rebate. But that
connection failed. I will call them again but I have very low expectations.