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Who is the Biggest Turkey?

By Ed Foster, Section Columns
Posted on Wed Nov 26, 2003 at 12:26:43 AM PDT

What better time than the day before Thanksgiving for a quick update on the GripeLog Hall of Shame? And, while we're at it, let's have a vote on which of these turkeys is the biggest one of all.

Recent patterns in the gripes I get from readers have mandated a little shuffling in my Hall of Shame rankings. Starting with the worst first, it now reads Dell, Microsoft, VeriSign, Intuit, Symantec, Network Associates, HP and Cisco. (For Hall of Shame purposes, I'm still treating VeriSign and Network Solutions as one entity until it becomes clear that NetSol really has been spun off.)

One company, Cisco, has been added to the list for the first time while Oracle has fallen off it. In ranking the Hall of Shame, I give very little weight to gripes from non-customers, so Oracle's attempt to acquire PeopleSoft wasn't enough to keep them on the list. And that's why SCO isn't on the list at all, even though that company has earned more ill will in the last few months than anyone I've ever seen. For more details on how the GripeLog Hall of Shame works and notes on what some of the current gripes are, please check the Hall of Shame page.

When I last updated the Hall of Shame, we tried a little experiment by running a poll on which of 20 major tech companies treats its customers best. The results were interesting, with IBM narrowly edging Apple as the winner. Adobe and Veritas did better than I expected, and even some Hall of Shame denizens like Dell, HP and Symantec got a lot of votes.

Which leads me to our next experiment. What happens when we take those same 20 companies and ask which one treats its customers the worst? No, it's not terribly scientific - and I'm not going to base the next Hall of Shame rankings on it. But I think it will provide some perspective, and a bit of fun. Which company will have the best ratio of "Hall of Fame" versus "Biggest Turkey" votes, and which will have the worst? Let's see.

And you'll have to forgive me, but there are no write-ins in our poll. My technical resources are limited, so we've got to work with what the free software solutions provide. But you can always include your comments about these or other turkeys by posting your comments at my website or writing me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com.

So who is the biggest turkey of them all? Please find the polling box on the right-hand side of this page and cast your vote. And a happy Turkey Day to you all.

--------------------

Post your comments about this column below or write me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com. To receive this column every week in my free e-mail newsletter, please go to my subscription page and follow the instructions to opt-in for the EdFoster mailing list.

< The "Yes, You Can Spam" Act of 2003 | Are Florida DMV Records For Sale? >

Who is the Biggest Turkey? | 15 comments (15 topical) | Post A Comment

HP - Customer Service[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#1)
by grolaw on Wed Nov 26, 2003 at 02:50:27 AM PDT

Since the merger my "printer" company has ignored defective ink & toner issues. I have a small legal office (2 attys + 1 paralegal) and the laserjet 4100 is the office workhorse wifi printer. I have a half a dozen Deskjet 1220csi printers throughout the office and of the three scanners the older scanjet 6300 with ADF has been a bear to get to work under OS X or XP.

I don't much care for buying ink and toner (toner ~$110/ea / ink @ $70 ea / color and $50/2 black) with a week left on the warranty. I recently put together a more than 15,000 page trial notebook / exhibit list and over the week that took I found two NEW toner carts. defective, had a couple of color carts. show full (opened that week) but both lost the yellow nozzles - and both showed the warranty would run on Nov 2. I filed the warranty claims with HP Customer care and had an auto response followed by a human - thereafter the $400 worth of bad product just dropped off the face of the earth as far as HP was concerned.

I ran three cartons of pre-punched paper through the 4100 without a hitch - till two spare toner carts failed.

I'd never seen this prior to the merger. Hell, they kept track of all the printers on my jet directs and kept a running inkjet page count - until late 02/early 03.

With a 2 year old laser with a 150,000 page / mo duty cycle (usually used less than 1/10th of that / mo) I don't expect these problems for at least 3 years!

[ Reply to This ]

HP Toner[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#2)
by Anonymous User on Wed Nov 26, 2003 at 11:32:36 AM PDT

I have an HP2100 laserjet and print about 18,000 pages a year. Many of the pages have photos with jet-black backgrounds, and sometimes they develop tiny white spots in the black. HP said that its toner cartidges are guaranteed forever, as long as there is toner left in it... just return it to your dealer. Twice I have returned them to Staples and have received brand new replacements!

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

HP - Customer Service[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#3)
by Anonymous User on Sat Nov 29, 2003 at 07:46:16 PM PDT

This sounds very similar to my plight.

In August, I bought a new Pavilion ze4220 (laptop). The battery was DOA and online tech support promised a new one would be shipped. To this date I have yet to receive the battery (90 days folks). I have pinged them on a number of occasions with responses of "we're having trouble getting stock" etc.

Regardless the resolution, they've completely burned any goodwill I've had. They'll never get any more of my business and will negatively influence any buying decision I'm asked to consult on.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Same problem[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#6)
by Anonymous User on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 12:52:54 PM PDT

I had the same issue with my HP laptop. It took about 3 months and many increasingly furious calls to their support lines to finally get something done. They kept passing the blame back to Best Buy, and Best Buy rightfully back to HP (it was 3 months old and therefore still under manufacturer warranty). Finally I lucked out and got a first tier staffer who not only cared but also had a brain on the phone; before passing me on to a supervisor at my request she insisted on taking my information down and said she'd look into it. Apparently she figured something out because the next day they overnighted my battery to me--and to top that she called me back to verify that I had gotten the battery. If I had gotten her first on the phone my experience with HP would have been completely different, and my opinion would as well. Keep on 'em to get your battery, but you're right, also keep in your mind what it is like to deal with them when you have a problem. It is usually no more difficult to buy a product from one vendor or another, so the level to compare is how you are treated after you have bought the product.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

re: Same problem[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#12)
by Anonymous User on Sun Dec 07, 2003 at 11:47:39 PM PDT

I did *finally* receive the battery. My original battery was part of a large batch of batteries that were bad (read a lot of return stories). Why was this 'ticket' floating around? Because the original morons failed to get a cc# to secure the return. My biggest gripe with this whole issue is that there was absolutely no follow-up. None. Even an automated system should have picked up on this issue.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Wow...[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#13)
by Anonymous User on Tue Dec 09, 2003 at 12:42:15 PM PDT

In my case, they got my CC# up front, but then HP said that they didn't want or need it, and explicitly did not want me to ship my bad battery back. The rep even said "We've been telling Best Buy to quit asking for credit card numbers for a while now".

Oh well... glad you got your battery.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Microsoft?[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#4)
by Mason on Mon Dec 01, 2003 at 09:05:23 PM PDT

I'm surprised Microsoft is at the top (28% as of now). Is this from experience or general anti-Microsoft sentiment? I don't think very highly of Microsoft, but I do think there are a hell of a lot more companies who treat their customers worse than Microsoft does...

[ Reply to This ]

Worse than M$?, please.[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#7)
by Anonymous User on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 01:12:54 PM PDT

I don't care if they kiss you A$$ after your purchase (no, they won't, it just wouldn't make any difference if they did), their monopolistic practices allow them to charge $200 for products that would be profitable at $80. Add to that the fact that from now on, you better be able to speak an Indian language when you call for support makes them #1 on my list for being a Grade A Turkey. --------------- �a know, for a country founded on genocide and slavery, we're not doin' too bad." DFS

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Microsoft?[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#8)
by Anonymous User on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 01:49:23 PM PDT

I'm not at all surprised to see Microsoft top the list. Microsoft was the first large company to plague the computing community with Product Activation. Though touted as an "anti-piracy" measure, this is really a sneak attack on legitimate, paying users of the company. In the near future, Microsoft will be able to force you to upgrade, at your cost, whether you want to or not, by simply refusing to "activate" your computer should you need to reinstall the operating system. Moreover, by making the software so buggy that you need to reinstall it frequently, they guarantee that this time will eventually come. The second runner-up also stumbled over the Product Activation greed pill. I suspect that if Product Activation was listed as a choice for a Turkey award, it would garner the highest majority of votes.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

"I told you so"[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#9)
by Reziac on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 10:23:28 PM PDT

I've been saying something to that effect ever since Activation first reared its ugly head. To my firsthand knowledge, M$ has been talking about "software by subscription" since the Win2K preview seminars in 1999. Activation makes forcing upgrades simple -- just refuse to reactivate the old product, or require a fee that makes upgrading seem the less expensive option over the long run. Much as some companies used to refuse to replace dead install diskettes (requiring instead that you buy an upgrade, or do without. So far the biggest turkey I know of for such forced upgrades is Intuit's Quickbooks.)

BTW, go read all the posts on Slashdot by "Alsee" (http://slashdot.org/~alsee -- all those comments attached to the Phoenix BIOS article) re the Trusted Computing initiative being implemented in hardware, in a way that makes breaking it impossible (for all practical purposes). Very, very scary, and relevant to topics such as activation and forced upgrades.

~REZ~
[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Re: Microsoft?[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#10)
by QuickSHADOWMAN on Wed Dec 03, 2003 at 12:36:21 AM PDT

All the years that I was a faithful Windows user, not once did they ever answer any e-mails that I sent them. That is 0 customer service. When a friend bought for me JBuilder 2 Professional Edition developers kit, my real trouble with Windows began.

When I tried to bring it up, so I could learn to develop in Java, Windows always crashed. I found out later that they tried to break Java, so it was no wonder. Up to that point, I was a faithful little minion of MS. But when they refused to answer any of my questions for solving the problem, I decided to look else where.

The place that took me in and showed me an alternative, and answers my questions was the Linux community. While I was learning Linux, I had a dual boot system for awhile. But the more I got familier with Linux, I was also regreting to have to go back into a unstable system that crashed on me daily, because Linux did not.

Yes I admit that I am now a Linux advocate, not becuase I fell into some Linux party line, but because MS was the one that drove me there, looking for answers and a solution for my problem. I wanted to be able to learn to develop in Java, but I needed a system that did not crash everytime I brought up the IDE.

I have found that there is so much freedom in Linux, you get to control your system and you do not have to be concerned over how many machines you run it on, for there is no, absolutly no activation code for it. No renewal licenses to deal with, and everything that I was able to do in Windows, I am able to do in Linux. And now I am 100% Windows free. I do not even miss it. Thank you MS for not answering my e-mails. I would have never made if you did.

Sincerely, Rich Aka: QuickSHADOWMAN 100% Windows Free, and loving it. M$, RIAA, MPAA, the leaders of all that is wrong with the Electronic Age. Lin
[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Tough Choice[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#5)
by Anonymous User on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 12:50:41 PM PDT

You made it a tough decision on who to vote against. A few miles from me, there is a turkey farm. Most of the 20 should be on that farm. But at least on the farm, they butcher almost all of them around Thanksgiving and the rest for Christmas.

[ Reply to This ]

Microsoft Support[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#11)
by Anonymous User on Wed Dec 03, 2003 at 06:47:07 AM PDT

I have had problems with MS support since my NT 4.0 days...... you buy a contract with X number of incidents becuase you are putting up new critical servers running a new ( at the time ) OS. The incidents expire after a year, no problem. Until they don't tell you they expired, and you need support at 2:00am because a server is down, and they tell you they expired, and that the only way you can get support is to give them a credit card number. And not having a company card, I had to pay for it.... happened to me 2 years in a row.

Hasn't happened since because I realized that:
A) MS support is bad, if it wasn't in technet, they didn't know about it.
B) MS support only knows how things are "supposed" to work - not how they actualy work, or how they don't work......
C) I can just use technet.
D) I have never purchased another contract ( 7 years running )

BUT, MS is taking a lot of the technet information off of the search page on their site, if you want it you have to pay.

ALSO, they have patches that you can't get without calling support and badgering them to give it to you for free since it's fixing a known bug, they will gladly charge you $245 for the call to get the patch.........

BUT, at the moment you can still find all the good MS support information by pointing google at the ms support site, since it's still there, just the MS search enging won't give it to you.

I'm sure that will go away soon.

This is where I rant about open source software.

Use it rather than MS. Don't fall for the 29 Billion dollar industry being wiped out propaganda MS is sending out. I'm sure if everyone switched to Linux and Open Office rather than windows and MS office, the economic benefits would FAR outweigh the damages. Unless your name is Bill Gates, you just got more money to invest in your business, for a long time. What is the 10 year cost of MS Software for a workstation ? You just saved that. I'm sure YOU can find better places to put that money than under Bill Gates mattress.....

I will give the Gates' kudos for giving away half their money this year, that is a wonderful thing for the people who benefit from it, no matter how the money was earned, it still helps the people who need it ( Nobel comes to mind, made his money making explosives that killed LOTS of people, but now it goes to good use around the world )

</rant>

[ Reply to This ]

new nomination[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#14)
by Anonymous User on Thu Dec 11, 2003 at 11:10:55 AM PDT

I would like to nominate the United States Congress for addition to this poll. If you view the CAN Spam Act as a defective product that will be unable to perform to spec, you can see that the addition of the Congress to this poll is eminently appropriate.

[ Reply to This ]

It does conform to spec![ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#15)
by byelen on Thu Dec 11, 2003 at 02:42:05 PM PDT

Unfortunately, it does conform to specs! This is a prime example where the specs were designed by "product management" without any input from "real world" users!

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

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