Customers Question Tech Industry's Takeover Spree 156
crimeandpunishment writes:
"When it comes to the world's largest technology companies, is bigger better? Maybe for the companies, but maybe not for their customers. Tech companies, which have spent $350 billion buying other companies over the past few years, have marketed their acquisitions as beneficial for their customers, offering them a broader range of products, and making it easier for one-stop shopping. But changes in customer service may be offsetting any benefit. In the words of the chief information officer for a large association, 'When the smaller guys are gobbled up by bigger guys, in theory it's supposed to be better, but in our experience it's been worse.'"
Customer Support: not malice, it's bureaucracy (Score:4, Interesting)
This past week I had two very interesting customer service experiences -- interesting because of just how different they were.
I spent probably 5 to 7 hours on the phone with HP technical support last week, trying to get them to assist me with a problem we were having with a pair of ProLiant servers. I was shuffled around to multiple departments (and, judging by the various accents, I would say I was probably shuffled to multiple continents as well), each one telling me that the next guy was the right guy to talk to about our issue (which of course he wasn't). This was for a fairly simple question about the functionality of one of their server administration tools, that no one seemed equipped to answer.
Conversely, we also had a hard disk in a ProLiant server go bad. With the serial and part numbers in hand, I was able to get a replacement shipped within 10 minutes.
The two completely different experiences I had suggests to me that when companies get large, they get very good at handling the common support problems, like bad hard disks. They develop procedures that save both the company and the customer lots of time, and are relatively painless. But what's lost is the ability to handle the out-of-the-ordinary service needs that customers have; the company is just too big, and the support guy (let's be frank, in some call center in India*) just doesn't have the resources or the knowledge to handle the problem. This leads to a frustrating experience -- whereas in a small company, these things tend to be handled quickly, because the support guy can escalate easily.
*HP doesn't even try to hide that their support is outsourced to India. If you log-on to their professional support, you can tell right away by the names.
Re:Take over (Score:4, Interesting)
Though I feel your cynical view and agree it's probably the usual case, there is more than sufficient evidence to suggest that a genuine desire to please and benefit customers drives at least some businesses. They may be smaller, or only rare, but that's the same thing in nature. The trend would map to symbiosis where one organism relies on another cooperatively for mutual benefit. A balanced relationship between a corporation and its consumers forces this mutual benefit scenario as the corp needs the customers for income and the customers need (or at least think they need) the corp for some product or service. However, when the customers lose their alternative options, the failings of the corporation no longer have the same level of negative effect on the corp as they might have otherwise because said consumers have nowhere else to go.
Of course, this is why monopolies are bad. However, it's probably worth realizing that less-than-monopolies are also bad in exactly the same way. Good examples of this are Wal-mart, FedEx/UPS, and Google. All of these companies take their positions for granted and abuse them one way or another with little recourse as they have few if any general competitors. Though they may offer some good things like broad areas of service or one or two worthwhile operations, they generally pose a threat to any potential competition or even actively stifle it through business practices that only a monopoly could afford (like massive price undercuts or underpaid employees, questionable service, or invasion of privacy.)
Unfortunately, this situation is an eventuality of all capitalistic business pursuits. Either businesses will fizzle out and fail or they will grow, become part of or overtake other businesses to get into a monopoly position. It's unclear if there could ever truly be an amicable solution that prevented this.
Re:Take over (Score:3, Interesting)
Those selected companies did what they did to make money. They do not give a shit about me, or you. They care about profits. I find it insulting when they pretend they care. The only thing they care about is my money.
I am not trying suggesting that they should care about me.
wasn't always this way (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't until the late 80's IIRC, that the first software company takeover occurred: PR1ME Computer and MAI Basic4.
Up until then, software companies lived (and died) on their own. Though there was an awareness of takeovers in other industries, there was a pervasive sense that it would never happen in high tech. (At least at the companies I worked at.)
Then MAI Basic4 proposed a hostile takeover of the MUCH larger PR1ME Computer (where I was working at the time.). PR1ME took on a huge amount of debt to raise funds to buy out Bennet S. Lebow (sp?). Then followed several rounds of cost-cutting and layoffs.
I've survived several others since then. In every single case it had NO BENEFIT to the customer that I could see; it was ALL about corporate profits.
Yes, I know anecdote is not the singular of data, but thought I'd toss my first-hand experience into the discussion. (BTW this occurred not very long after Robert Morris unleashed the first internet worm; I was at PR1ME when that hit, too.)
Re:You can't have your cake and eat it too... (Score:1, Interesting)
Capitalism would be just fine if not for our ridiculous "corporate personhood" doctrine, the result of a few corrupt assholes in black robes called the "Supreme Court" getting paid off at just the right time [wikipedia.org].
The end result is the corporatist government of the US today - laws written by the corporations, for the corporations, Fuck The People. Our two-party system hasn't helped much either, if you look at each party, it's not a question of one party being corporatist and the other not, it's just which corporations the party in question is a stooge of. Both parties are beholden to the MafiAA/"entertainment" types, which is why copyright law is so fucked up. Both parties are beholden to Big Oil - sure the Democraps talk a good game to keep their sierra club/PETA/ecoterrorist types on board, but at the end of the day, do you really think they're going to do something that seriously causes trouble for the big oil corporations? I doubt it.
Illegal immigration? The Democraps are sure that the illegal immigrants are going to become their new core voting block, just like the blacks they've kept uneducated in ghettos for the past 40 years are today. The Rethuglicans, or at least most of their higher ranking members, salivate at illegal immigration as a way to keep wages down and prevent the middle class from growing. And if someone from either side happens to talk about illegal immigration sanely, well, watch what happens to them - just look what happened to Lou Dobbs getting bounced from CNN when they went on their "Mexico Uber Alles" kick, or the fact that Duncan Hunter got basically held off camera in the Rethuglican debates.
Take a look at the Obama campaign - especially when they deliberately cut off every bit of default identity detection on donations in order to deliberately enable donation fraud [newsweek.com] and refused to fix their deliberately broken process [firstthings.com]. Wonder where all that money was coming from, and what "interests" it supported? I don't [nytimes.com].
Re:Take over (Score:5, Interesting)
The company gives you a paycheck because without you (and their other employees of course), they wouldn't be in business very long.
They certainly don't pay you because they WANT to. They'd be much happier keeping their money if they could convince you to work for free. Salaries are a huge portion of most companies' costs.
Same with customers. Apple doesn't make iPods because they benefit you. They make iPods because you're willing to buy them (maybe not you specifically, but the more general "you're") and Apple gets money for it. If no one was willing to pay for an iPod, Apple certainly wouldn't continue making them. And flipping the coin, Apple would be quite as happy to sell you a rotten banana peel as they are to sell you an iPod. Apple only "cares" about what you in the sense that you won't give them money for things that you don't want. Caring about the customer is NOT an intrinsic property of a business, its a requirement for that business to be able to make money in a capitalist society where consumers have the option of not buying.
Even monopoly companies have to "care" about their customers in the sense of providing something of utility. A monopoly on rotten banana peels isn't going to generate a lot of income. Even without the option of purchasing from a competitor, the option of not buying at all is still available to consumers.
At least for most products. These arguments break down in the face of "necessary" products such as electricity, running water, food, etc. Now food isn't so bad because you generally have the option of multiple suppliers, and competition keeps things fair. No such competition exists for things like electricity and water (at least in most cities). For those products, you can neither decide to purchase from a competitor nor decide not to purchase at all. As an off-topic rant, this is the reason why I consider "privatizing" these sort of products to be a terribly bad idea -- all of the monopoly power of a public utility with none of the public oversight. Pretty much bad for everyone except the new CEO and whoever he paid off to make it happen.
Re:Take over (Score:4, Interesting)
No such competition exists for things like electricity and water (at least in most cities). For those products, you can neither decide to purchase from a competitor nor decide not to purchase at all.
Well, you can "kinda sorta" - you could build an outhouse in your backyard or a full septic tank in your backyard, provided your local building code allows it. You could install a rainwater collector, filtration system, or simply purchase what water you need from an alternate supplier (though at the cost per gallon, that's suicidal). You could, provided the groundwater quality in your area isn't shit and again that local building codes would allow it, even dig your own well and install your own pump.
You could install a gas/propane/etc generator, or solar cells and some battery storage, if you want to try to go without being "plugged in" to the electric grid, or you could even do without air conditioning and heat what you need to in your house with some other form of heating like a wood-burning stove or fireplace. You could your cooking on a propane or charcoal grill.
Of course, good luck managing to do this in any major city or if you have kids, unless you're Amish or Mennonite. Raise kids in that environment, and the local constabulary will be up your ass with "child welfare" authorities in tow, looking for any excuse they can manufacture to take your kids away and force you to pay up for local utilities...
Takeovers/tech takeovers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Software maintenance and development is Hard. Much ink has been spilled on the Best Practices of doing it; but a lot of firms are still just barely hanging on. Any disruption to their development process or roadmap can set them back months or years. Since, in many cases, the point of doing a tech acquisition is to offer a "total package" or a "solution" or a "suite" this means that, in addition to all the institutional and job-loss shakeups, you suddenly have two or more development teams, each bringing its own nasty legacy baggage to the party, trying to mash their products into some sort of "integrated solution".
At best, this is an evolutionary process. Over a period of time, they manage to evolve the products toward one another and eventually end up with something nice and coherent and refactored so forth. More commonly, major differences and glaring integration issues persist longer than the customer would like, and niggling little oddities persist for years. Sometimes, some mental giant decides to solve the hard problem of legacy by throwing one of the products away(generally the one that isn't his baby) and re-writing it from scratch in the idioms of the other product. Hello major feature and stability regressions...
We use Altiris some at work, and they were recently aquired by Symantec *scary background music plays* who has embarked on the "rewrite virtually from scratch" path. They have some sort of pie-in-the-sky vision of a "Symantec Total Endpoint Management Solution"; but, until they get that working, their support for the last pre-takeover version has gone to shit and the N+1 version has massive feature regressions, including stuff we use all the time, all over the place, and is thus unusable to us. Unless they get their act together fast, we may be forced to bail entirely. Win7 finally has something resembling adequate first-party imaging and deployment features, and there are other tools, including some OSS, for system inventory and remote control....
Re:Take over (Score:3, Interesting)
Which again has absolutely fuck-all to do with the question. When was the last time a company did something you like? I'd say it's more often than you'd like to admit, because it's not popular here to admit companies sometimes do things that benefit them that you like.
Re:Take over (Score:3, Interesting)
So why don't they do anything to reduce the chance of delays, such as not scheduling more flights than an airport can actually handle during a given period of time?