Fully responsive, preview site for Microsoft. Beautifully done.
Via Washington Post:
Microsoft will make a $300 million investment in the subsidiary for an approximately 17.6 percent stake. Barnes & Noble will own about 82.4 percent of the subsidiary, which has yet to be named. The companies say the subsidiary will help to speed the transition to e-reading. Barnes & Noble sells the Nook e-reader. The Nook app will make Barnes & Noble’s catalog of e-books, magazines and newspapers available to Windows customers.
Guess the Microsoft – Barnes & Noble lawsuits are history?
I had blogged previously about the Microsoft Retail Experience. It appears that Microsoft has decided that David Porter will join the company as corporate vice president of Retail Stores. He will lead Microsoft’s efforts to create a better PC and Microsoft retail purchase experience for consumers worldwide through the development and opening of the company’s own retail stores.
If you own a Blackberry, Google has introduced one more reason to switch to Gmail by way of their Google Sync tool. In addition to Google Sync’s ability to keep your mobile devices in sync with Google Calendar, a new feature now available is the ability to synchronize contacts between the BlackBerry and Google contacts. This improvement offers automatic, two-way synchronization between your BlackBerry’s built-in address book and your Google Apps contacts. From Google Maps to Google Contacts, it truly is helpful to have a central repository of contact information and this is making it harder for someone who has switched to Gmail to consider moving back to another service provider.
So, even though Microsoft has shared contacts with Hotmail, Xbox and the Zune, there’s still places like the Blackberry or Windows Live Maps where access to Windows Live contact information would be very helpful, and the lack of such a service from Microsoft makes it harder to continue justify using their services.
Would you visit the Microsoft Retail Experience Center?
If you’re going to rebuild a company’s customer service reputation and customer experience, good foundations to start building on include transparency, accountability and brutal, yet humbling honesty. Kudos to the Comcast team for starting down this path.
We’re holding ourselves accountable and we are working hard to make real improvements across the board. While it will take us some time, we can and will do better than this.
Source: A Public Apology to Conal O’Rourke.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Leo Widrich, from Buffer, on Bad Customer Service Support
While at a conference recently, a vendor was using a Twitter activated vending machine from Innovative Vending Solutions.
Each Twitter-activated vending machine incorporates a touch-screen interface to display the instructions to the consumer. The consumer is prompted to “tweet” a specific #hashtag to a dedicated @handle from their mobile device. Once the consumer tweets the @ and #, a product is immediately dispensed from the machine. Apparently, the machine utilizes a unique hashtag that is specific to the machine, so you have to be standing directly in front of the machine in order to utilize this functionality.