Dan Weinreb’s blog

My Sony Vaio laptop has a touchpad that lets you control the mouse position.  There are two nice buttons on it to do click-left and click-right.  Unfortunately, if you touch the touchpad, even very lightly, it does a click-left.  More unfotunately, I seem to do this fairly frequently when I am touch-typing at high speed.  I’m still not precisely sure why, but I don’t care.

I want to disable the touch-the-touchpad features.

I looked all over for some way to control the touchpad, with no luck.  I tried downloading software from Sony that might have such a thing; no luck.

So I tried Sony eSupport.  My computer is not under warantee, but they say you can have 15 free minutes.  I asked to go into a chat session, and got into one very promptly.

It took a long while, but I finally got an answer: because I upgraded to Windows 7, there is no way to fix the problem.  I said, OK, just show me how to disable the whole touchpad; I’ll just use a mouse.

The service person said, yes, I will do that for you.

The service person then went into this long and complicated routine to be able to operate my machine remotely, which involved installing an app, installing a java applet, etc, etc.  She ran some “Omni PC Health” thing, which claimed that my computer was horribly screwed up, running at only 40% of its performance, and was infected with malware.  Then she started telling me (this is via chat) of the wonderful virtues of their paid support, and how it would rid me of all these terrible problems, fix my horrible (but entirely unspecified) malware problem, and so on.

In short, the purpose of Sony’s “free support” is to scare people into paying money to Sony.  This is fraudulent marketing.

There was a satisfaction survey at the end.  I explained all this (briefly) and told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves.  They should.

If any of you deal with the technology press, i.e. want them to publish stories on your stuff, you may know about the concept of a “press embargo”, where you send them info and say “don’t release this until X date”. Last night at a panel I found out some interesting info about this.

These used to exist and be widely used. They let a company manage the time at which it’s “big news” would come out, and it let reporters have some extra time to prepare their story and make it higher-quality without risking being out of date.

However, lately the whole thing has broken down. TechCrunch and the Wall St. Journal, in particular, have been undermining the “gentleman’s agreement” that made this work. A tech jouralist now has to assume that by following the embargo, he or she will end up being out of date (“scooped” is apparently not really a term-of-art any more). In general, journalists do not like them, and will not honor any that is more than one week out. They worry that someone else will discover the news and not have agreed to the embargo, or the news will leak some other way, or someone will just ignore the embargo. Also, some journalists now consider them just too problematic and too much trouble and ignore embargoed press releases entirely.

So, take this into account if you were thinking of doing an embargo’ed press release.

The panel session was called “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR”. It was at last night’s Web Innovator’s Group meeting, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA. The panelists were excellent.

Daily Grommet is a web site that tells you about one cool product every day. There’s a video showing all about it, as well as a written description, and you can click through if you want to buy it. Some of the products tend to be oriented towards women, but not all of them. The “product” also also sometimes a worthy charitable organization. Jules calls each product a grommet.

The company was founded by my friend, Jules Pieri. She and her team carefully test each product. In fact, Jules once recruited me to help test out a new kind of American caviar. (She provided champagne as well; it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.) The only other member of the team I’ve met so far is Nataly Kogan, the Chief Community Officer and a great entrepreneur as well. I’m looking forward to meeting the rest of the team; their office is very close to where I live.

I have bought four or five products through Daily Grommet, some as presents for my wife (shh, don’t tell her yet!) and friends, and some for myself. The coolest one I’ve bought so far is the “foodloop” Trussing Tool, which is like a reusable cable tie (sorry, I’m an engineer) that you can put around food, instead of using twine. I gave these to my wife, and my friends Ed and Scott, all of whom are experienced cooks, and they all liked them a lot. You can buy past grommets (click on “Past Grommets”).

If you know of any product that would make a good grommet, please send mail to them.

(Note: I have no financial interest in this company, nor any business ties at all. I just like it, and Jules is my friend.)

About twenty years ago, I read “The Regis Touch: New Marketing Strategies for Uncertain Times”, by Regis McKenna, now out of print. McKenna was a famous marketing expert who advised Apple Computer, Intel, and National Semiconductor.

I took away one big point from the book: “The difference between high-tech marketing and other marketing is that it’s so difficult and costly to try out and evaluate the product.” For example, if someone needs a database management system, they could try implementing their whole application in two different DBMS’s and compare which has better features and performance. But nobody can really do that, because it takes far too much time and effort.

Because of this, the success of a product is very dependent on word-of-mouth. The example in the book was: suppose you advertise and market your product to death. But then a bunch of high-tech decision makers are having breakfast together at some Silicon Valley restaurant, and one of them says “Oh, yeah, we tried Product X, but it worked badly and we replaced it.” Nobody else at that table will ever take a second look at Product X after that! Game over.

He was exaggerating slightly. If our prospect has heard a lot of good things about the product, then maybe hearing one negative report won’t be fatal. And it may depend a lot on whom he or she hears the story from.

The lesson is that in high-technology, you must be very careful to make your customers happy, and prevent that kind of bad word of mouth from happening. Don’t market and sell to customers from whom the product is inappropriate and who will inevitably be frustrated with it.

Most of the above applies to free or open software just as much as commercial software. In the commercial world, if you have a direct sales force, it’s pretty hard to stop them from trying to make their quota, if they’re simply given a commission on sales in the usual way. You may want to think about some other kind of incentive system.