Caring as a business advantage

If you still didn't see the news about Vodafone having bought Cable and Wireless Worldwide, then, by all means, change your news provider into dinheirovivo (he he, that's publicity for the project I've built).

As a customer that is very happy with Vodafone's service in Portugal, I can only cheer for this aquisition. Of all my providers, Vodafone is the one that gives me less grief, less worries and a better quality of service, even if they (usually) aren't the cheapest. Prouding myself of being a good technician and not the cheapest (but I always try to be the one with the best ROI), I cheer every move for quality instead of mind numbing low cost.

But, Vodafone, if they plan on staying in that market, they have to learn to play by different rules and, right now, I can only qualify their overall experience as "better than the others" and, not exactly at the level I know they could and should be.

Welcome to the 4G networks, where you can access the internet at blazing speeds, your kids start to do great at school, your wife (husband, bf/gf/whatever) turns into the person of your dreams, your dog will learn manners, your boss a great person and, your bank account something that compares with some small nation's GDP.

Marketing on the side, 4G is a small hell of frustrations where coverage is small, price is outrageous, equipments aren't compatible and, if you have Vodafone, you get to enjoy that for a couple of days until you finally decide to put the 4g pen over your head in a 20º angle with the moon and 12º angle with Saturn (the place where you have a good coverage), only to see that you exausted the PUA on your limiteless connection and now are surfing the web at 0,1 bps (some exageration may be included here for argument sake).

When a provider that sells his service on the grounds of hassle free for their users has some shady limits that border any decency, that's bad (that they are even legal is just another sign of our legislator's intelligence and knowledge). That those limits on how much bandwidth you can consume in 1 month period are spent after a couple of days of work (email, ssh and stuff like that), youtube (while I work for some music), a few hours of a radio streaming (hey, my work includes a Radio Station) and the random crap we all do in our day of facebook, gplus, comic sites for the strip of the day, this is an outrageous situation that had, as it's primary consequence, me not being a Vodafone's 4G customer.

An organization that prides itself of a good customer service needs to do better than 3% over the other guy. It has to be really good

Clearly the ones who launched this service aren't thinking that 4G can be a landline replacement Internet connection (for non gamers). It isn't only a "oh crap, I'm away from home and I need to check my tomatoes on farmville" kind of emergency connection but, that sort of thinking should have happened way before the service had went public.

Marketing folks, I have absolutelly no probllem with initiatives like the fair trade, the "every time you buy from us, we plant a tree", or whatever but, before caring for the world, business, services and the development of our market as an all would be a lot better if you cared for your products, your users experience and your name first.

PS. Blogger is marking every single word I wrote as misspelled, till I can look at and solve this issue, I can't even proof read what I just wrote. So, now I know how I would write if I was in an old typewritter.

I'm a Vodafone, hear me purr

<disclamer> Any good financial advisor has to be rich. I'm not, If you're willing to take financial advices from a guy that spends way too much time around computers, then you're a fool.
But, there may be something interesting here so, by all means, keep on reading </disclamer>

I have a pretty good experience with 2 out of 3 of the communications providers in Portugal. Portugal Telecom (PT), now something close to being my employer (sort of but, let's try to keep this posts comparisons with War and Piece to a minimum please) and Vodafone to whom I am now (only) a customer with most of my communication related services being provided by them.

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about this post and I planned on saying that, if you're into buying stocks, Vodafone was going to be the big name on the list. I seriously don't believe PT to be able to keep any significant market share in the upcoming months or years. Now, I'm not so sure but, let's get back to that later (hopefully tomorrow).

Telecom companies need their IT. It's not a critical part of their business, it IS their business. It's no wonder that one the the most successful, bright and competent high level managers from PT is, at his core, a tech guy. This guy came up with several pretty cool ideas (in Portugal at least) like the filters for those annoying horns in Football matches, and a personal channel for each subscriber of PT's TV service and, he is (arguably) one of the biggest reasons for PT's market share in the TV market.

One would expect that, with such a cool example, the board of this company would try to build on that, well, what they did was slightly different.

PT is now on the end stages of a process where all it's outsourcers (namely, mostly everybody that works there) are now being forced into changing companies or being fired. That's a pretty bad situation as it is but, the new companies are presenting salaries of 800 euros to the people who move there, that includes all the work to be done in off hours (some restrictions probably apply) and 1 week per month of 24h / day in standby.

If you're wondering how high or low are salaries in Portugal, a call center operator that knows 1 foreign language can expect to get 700+ euros per month, have some skills in word or excel and that starts adding.

If anyone is reading this as a blame assignment, I have absolutely no idea if the high level management of that company even knows what's happening. I do believe that a process customer initiated to limit the number of suppliers (basically creating a monopoly) is a bad idea for the customer but, if they have any idea about what they're getting themselves into, well, your guess is as good as mine.

What it's clear to see is that when the vast majority of your IT staff is about to leave, then, you're going into some deep problems.

I guess it's obvious that the biggest IT employer in the country would try to take advantage of the crisis, that's natural but, when he positions himself at the same level of employer has a supermarket teller, that's more than pushing the bright people out, he his putting his critical systems in the hands of people who are willing to do an harder job than serving coffees for less money (McDonald's rejects?)

It is my firm belief that innovation inside PT is about to stop. So is the majority of their systems.

A story about peanuts

Those who know me, know that, up until recently, I was activelly looking for a job. the project I was doing failed, the big boss decided to outsource almost all the IT into 2 companies (yes, he split our IT and gave it away to 2 companies) and, I was about to see myself out of a job.

When Portugal Telecom (PT - the company that won half of the IT) saw that they had in the budget one guy to replace me and he would be responsible for 100+ weblogic intances, loads of UCMs, IBRs, Oracle SOA Suite and a few other products, they decided it would be better to keep me instead of hiring a full team for that job (if you were wondering who would get one guy for all that, I refer you to the first paragraph of this post where I say the project failed).

So, together with the outsourcing contract, PT got me in the deal. Having suffered a serios pay cut, I ended up better that most (those that got fired) and worst than some (the big boss family who kept their jobs).

So, with all this, what changed? Not much really. I'm still activelly looking for a new job. Obviously, the impending unemployment scenario in a country deep in recession is now gone but, the brain dead scenario is as close as ever.

It's amazing that Karl Marx really had some insight, as soon as one smells the scent of a recession, companies go crazy in limiting employees conditions and joy in their works. Not for any productivity gain but, because they can and, Like Scott Adams talked about, employees react by adjusting their real work effective compensation by working acordingly.

So, now, and for the first time in my life, I see myself in a company with time cards, without youtube access in the company's network (legal access anyway), with an aproved browser and email client for employees, hell, email quotas, we work in desks built like a call center (but without the noise reduction stuff in place, in an huge room with near 100 people in it.

2 monthes ago, I was doing an identity federation with social networks and now, I'm not allowed to access facebook. 2 Monthes ago, I was trying to implement a new revenue stream for one of the biggest media groups in Portugal, now, I was just told, as an example of innovation, that PT is starting a project that will use Lucene in a way to try this technology.

Well, I guess I'll never win the title of employee of the month here.

Let's see if I can integrate blogger with my linkedin account

I'm still in the process (meaning, I thought about it) of moving my google+ account to jaimec@jaimec.pt but, I thought I'd start with something easier, trying to make this post visible on my linkedin account.