If you have to lie, lie with numbers. Almost no one catches a 'numbers lie'. Bernie Madoff thrived for years in spite of totally unsupported numbers lies.

On the other hand, what people and companies do speaks volumes--truthful volumes.

I just fixed an HP laserprinter (for friends). In googling the model number, it became very apparent that HP has a huge problem with this model (among many other of their product offerings). Some companies with dozens of these machines have seen a quarter to a third of them go down because of a soldering problem on the electronics. HP's response?

Crickets chirping. For a few hundred, they'll sell you a replacement board with exactly the same fundamental flaw.

[This isn't really relevant to my point, but you can often fix flakey motherboards and other electronics by baking them in the oven at 350 degrees for eight minutes...].

My son's HP laptop has its second dead motherboard in two years.

Sell HP.

Google is yet another example of a company that rose to success on the strength of one product and can't seem to make anything else work. They want to be Black & Decker, but they are fast becoming indistinguishable from Microsoft.

And now, ta-da, comes Google Buzz, announced yesterday, and I swear to God I just want to start screaming. What is it? Apparently it is Gmail on steroids. Basically, Google has copied stuff that people do on Facebook and Twitter and added them to Gmail, so that now my e-mail can become another place where I can network socially with my social network of people I don’t really even know. I can (but won't) share pictures and status updates with people in my Gmail contacts list, and they can (and, sadly, will, unless I can prevent them) start doing the same to me. Google's promo video, complete with the requisite cutesy drawings and happy music and groovy-guy voice-over, was intended to make it all sound perfectly simple but instead had me reaching for the Xanax. Good grief.

...

That is the biggest problem with Buzz—it was invented not for us but for Google. So now, because Google feels threatened, we have yet another thing to learn, which won’t be easy because Google is basically a world where nerd engineers get turned loose in a Montessori preschool, and they have no idea about user interface design and, frankly, they don’t care.



Its the difference between a marketing company and a production company. For all its gee-whiz technology, Google is a car company--looking for ways to leverage its 'parts' inventory across multiple platforms.

Sell Google.

My 83 year old father-in-law needed a new computer. The laptop I gave him a few years ago finally gave up the ghost. In large part due to my wife's experience with her Apple MacBook, he bought an iMac. I set it up for him, which amounted to taking it out of the box, plugging it in and searching for the artfully concealed on/off button.

It is a dazzling machine--so much so that I'm heading over to the Apple store this week to buy one for myself.

Impressive as the product is, I think we were more impressed with the customer service. I strongly urged my father-in-law to buy Apple Care and he did. He had occasion to use it almost immediately as the printer driver didn't appear to be talking to the non-Apple printer. I told him to call Apple, and he described the experience as the most pleasant and effective customer support experience he every had. They fixed his problem in short order.

In my book, if you can help an 83 year old man get his printer going, you are DA BOMB!

Buy Apple.