Pandora Radio

I just uploaded the new Pandora app to my now working iPhone.

Pandora is simply amazing. My own, personal radio station? Now available anywhere I have a cell connection? Free?

Just in case my 1 1/2 days of iPhone music either finished playing or I get tired of Coldplay, I'll turn on Pandora. Perfect for my upcoming trip to Colorado.

The slow death of XM/Sirius has now begun.

It's Working

My digital life is now restored.

Herbert

This may take some time...


Reminds me of a song I sing to Aidan when he is totally out of control impatient...about Herbert the Snail:

"have patience, have patience. don’t be in such a hurry. when you get impatient, you only start to worry. remember, remember, that God is patient too. and think about the times when others have to wait for you."

If I Was Microsoft...

I would RUN, not walk, to my ad agency.

I would buy hundreds of30-sec. commercial slots to run over the next several days.

I would punch Steve Jobs in the gut with commercials showing how the failed rollout of the iPhone upgrades ruined business productivity. Remember how Vista was destroyed by the clever Apple ads?

Next, I would encourage my loyal customers to post MS-friendly comments on the iPhone failure article threads, like these:

Apple's iPhone 2.0 update is failing

Software problems bug Apple's launch of new iPhone

iPocalypse? iPhone Can't Be Activated In-Store

I might even encourage a loyal customer to buy a URL like http://ibrick.com/ to chronicle the debacle .

Failure to Communicate

Technology has failed me the past two days. Yesterday, Melissa's laptop settings all reset to blank defaults including her MS Outlook contacts and email, Firefox bookmarks, and even her desktop picture...which (if I say so myself) is a beautiful shot I took on my stream in Colorado. After hours of trying to restore it, and getting only half of it fixed, she woke up and turned it on to find everything as it originally was...

Apple failed me today. I woke up excited to upgrade my iPhone software to the new 2.0 version. Apparently, I wasn't the only one. It is July 11th, Apple's big roll-out for the 2nd Generation and v2.0 in 22 countries. Apparently, I'm not the only one now with a beautiful, but useless Apple iBrick.

From a services marketing perspective, the most disappointing part of this is when I called Apple to receive technical support. My hope was that I'd be able to just restore it to the previous version.

So I called.
Automated voice answers.
Informs me that I will be transferred to a service agent.
Informs me that none are available.
Tells me to call back later.
Hangs up.

Is that what Apple calls Customer Service? More like Customer Disservice.

AT&T's response:
"There seem to be worldwide issues with this syncing process and Apple is working on it right now," AT&T Wireless spokesman Mark Siegel told ABCNews.com. "What we're telling our customers in the stores is once we have activated their account, we're urging them to go home [me: ie. leave you alone] and try syncing it later on iTunes. ... Apple is working on this problem."

My Response for those in the US: "Don't bother. Wait until the Europeans sleep." Maybe the servers will open up by then.