Amazon do you know who you are talking to?
Amazon.com has been a leader in Internet commerce since it’s launch in 1995. Since then with the exception of a few years when the “Internet Bubble” burst it’s march to Internet supremacy has been unquestioned. Today it is the largest online retailer in the world with Staples selling 1/4 as much a Bezos’ baby.
But along the way it might have gotten too big for itself. As evidence I would offer up my recent experience with my new Kindle. First let me tell you about the Kindle.
The Kindle is an amazing device. I thought I would have missed ”the feel” of a book in my hands. Missed the tactile experience of reading, not at all. Reading on the Kindle’s electronic ink screen is a joy. And as you are ready the technology of the Kindle disappears. You can download books directly to your Kindle, make notes and highlights and even share them with your friend through twitter and Facebook. I’ve read two books so far on it and I think I read faster on the Kindle than with the real thing. If you are a reader GET ONE TODAY .
When you are signing in to your Amazon account to buy it though you need to be VERY, VERY careful. As I would find out later… Amazon at some point stopped checking to see if your password is correct. Meaning that if you have an Amazon account with the email address test@kofacts.com and the password of abc123 and you enter the correct email address but a password of abc132 their system doesn’t say wrong password, it just creates a new account with the wrong password, fatfinger it again and you can end up with three amazon accounts all tied to the same email address but with completely different purchases, stored cards, and services.
I found out because I registered my Kindle and a gift card under one password and tied to link my iphone Kindle app under another and couldn’t understand why my books and store credit weren’t showing up on my iPhone. So I tried reregistering my Kindle and lost my purchases (no content on my Kindle) and gift card balance.
I had enough and eventually got to the point where I could have them call me. Which Josh did quickly, he was the one who explained that an account is any email address and password combination and this multiaccount situation can easily occur. It took him 25 minutes to find my purchases, push them back to my Kindle, close the duplicate accounts and ensure the balance of my gift card was found and made available to me.
I cannot believe that an eCommerce vendor that has been open for 15 years would allow this condition to occur. It would seem to me to be alot less problematic to tell someone when they entered a password incorrectly instead of creating a duplicate account. It might prevent some sales, I’ll give you that, but if you are going to start offerring online registration of devices and content then there should only be one version of my account. This is something that they need to fix.
Sync iPhone to Google Calendars
It seemed redudant to me to have a seperate Google Mobile application on my iPhone to see the calendar items from my Google Calendar when the iPhone has a perfectly fine calendar built in. (I would not go so far as it call it perfectly good.) But everytime I’d re-discover this problem, I’d go to iTunes and under the calendar options it repeatedly told me that “No Supported Calendar Application Could be Found”.
So, tonight when this issue again bubbled to the top of mind, I started searching for “What are the Best iPhone Calendar Apps” and “Sync iPhone and Google Calendar” and I came across this webpage:
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740
If you follow these directions and use “gmail” where they say to use “googlemail” it works perfectly. Now my Google Calendars automatically sync with my iPhone. And the best part is …it works for Contacts as well. Give it a try.
Where Are The Proud Geeks . . . .What Happened to You?
So let me get this straight . . . .the iPhone comes out and a small number of dedicated AppleFans proudly and very publicly shell out $599 for the product and now they’re bitching that Apple dropped the price to increase business. Isn’t this how technology works? Early adopters pay extraordinary prices so they can be the first one on the block to have the product. They typically then proceed to tell everyone what they bought and often how much they spent for it . . . .wait could that be why they are upset?
They spent so much time flashing their iPhone around to impress their fellow technophiles and now Apple has lowered the cost and their “exclusivity” or cache is lost. Many people instead of being impressed by their $599 purchase will instead take them for fools for spending so much so early.
So with one announcement from Apple they went from “well-off” connected technophiles to fools. I guess that would piss me off too. But whining about the price cut is not going to help your case, now it just makes you look desperate. If $200 is really going to make a difference to you then YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT THE iPHONE!
Hi, My name is Kris Kovacs and welcome to KoFacts my blog about everyday leadership, management, technology, politics, scouting and other fun stuff. I have a diverse background in financial services and information technology so the topics I cover tend to be applicable to business and IT. Thanks for stopping by. Please subscribe to my blog or bookmark it and visit often.
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