I wasn’t planning on starting the new year with a complaint, but allow me to vent about Yahoo’s horrible customer support. I’ve been using Yahoo Music to load songs onto my iriver MP3 player. Until it stopped working last week. I followed all the instructions about re-acquiring DRM licenses and resetting various things. Nothing worked (though I ended up cursing once again the idiocy of copy-protection that punishes paying customers with this kind of nonsense – it’s enough to make me want to pirate music). Finally, I decided to contact tech support. They make you fill out a long form listing all the details of what went wrong. At the end I hit send and got an error message telling me to enable ActiveX. Since I’m using Firefox, this makes no sense. So I switched over to IE, reluctantly installed their Active X control, filled out the form again, hit send and the ActiveX thingy started scanning my computer – I assume to gather information to send back to their support (an explanation would have been nice). Then after a while it stopped and told me it failed to gather all the required info. So now what! Am I supposed to contact support for the broken support form? Apparently this hideous piece of support software is made by a company called Kana. What a mess. As a former Yahoo employee this kind of stuff makes me cringe.
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Hi, I'm Toni Schneider. I blog about my life in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
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To add insult to injury, Yahoo makes my day even worse: While re-booting my PC various times trying to get the Music thing to work, Yahoo Messenger took the opportunity to “auto-update” itself. While doing that, it added the Yahoo toolbar to both IE and Firefox – WITHOUT asking persmission. What a bummer.
Kana seems to offer a nice service
I think Yahoo have to reconsider their customers rather than to consider that they are acquired definitively
I went Apple iPod iTunes on Win XP Pro with the new Shuffle and Shure E3C Earbuds http://farm1.static.flickr.com/145/347235634_bd9aa11582_m.jpg; no muss, no fuss. It’s nice, small, runs fast, easy, no messing around, and lots of good personal listening without messing around with ActiveX controls and stuff like that.
Stuart
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