By Dominique Trempont, Guest Author
A world that simply does not get “Magic” is high tech.
With the glaring exceptions of Apple, Logitech, Blackberry, Motorola and possibly HP recently, it is a screaming desert.
High tech does not understand brand, customer experience and design in general. Not even the beginning of a clue. It may be because it is a world of technical people, who think that good features and functions make the case for the company: Show them and they’ll come.
They don’t understand the role emotion and intuition plays in building a strong brand.
Microsoft keeps trying but does a terrible job at designing a customer experience that is even remotely satisfactory.
Buy a TabletPC notebook with Vista. Try to find products that work with it. I bought one, with a CD ROM/DVD reader from Lenovo: good laptop but no driver worked. I even bought a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 recently: no driver worked.
Nobody is responsible in the PC world, except the consumer who is trying to make this disjointed world work. To solve problems that he did not create. It is not surprising as the PC world was invented to satisfy enterprise clients, with huge IT staff to support them.
If you send an email to customer service at Microsoft, they email you back some sort of canned answer, that they confirm your issue, have no clue about the answer and, if you wish to get an answer, you have to pay for it (to solve their problems).
This is a terrible customer experience.
Microsoft was a hot brand. But if it keeps treating customers like trash, one day, Microsoft will fall by the way side and be replaced by Apple, who treats a customer like a king.