Blogwell's

eBay's rude invitation

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eBay is asking me to a screening interview to determine if I qualify to give them feedback? If take the time to come down to their office, they should listen to my feedback.

I use eBay fairly often to buy used research equipment. I'm not a huge customer, but I've spent $50k already this year through eBay, of which they make 3% or so. That's $1500 of revenue for them. There are things I like and dislike about eBay and I think I could give them some good input that would grow their market. But I'm not going to make an appointment to go to an interview to find out whether I fucking qualify to give them feedback. And what does "research purposes only" mean? I can't imagine eBay is a topic for a scholarly treatise. They want to survey their customers to help them improve their product, and that's a good thing for a company to do, and I'd be willing to help if they asked nicely.

Probably they copied the style from a "subjects wanted" ad in Psychology Today ad, thinking they were being scientific. If you're doing an NSF-funded study on the social stigmata of premature hair loss, and you want to avoid a selection bias towards unemployed or homeless people who sign up for studies to pass the time and make a little money, that might be the best way to write the ad. But you can't talk to your customers like that.

 

Greenspan 3:16

As a Harvard alum and (small & indirect) investor in Facebook, I figured I should read Aaron Greenspan's book AUTHORITAS, subtitled "One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era". But it's pretty long, so I used Knuth's technique for literary analysis: take a slice through the book and analyzing selected sentences in detail. His calligraphed book 3:16 studies chapter 3, verse 16 of every book in the bible. (He chose those numbers because John 3:16 is a well-known verse and he wanted to make sure he got at least one good one.) Here is chapter 3, paragraph 16 in Brush Script MT Italic:

From a quick scan of the rest of the page I didn't find a definition of A.R.P., but did see that this is set in sixth grade. The paragraph uses digression to build suspense. Readers unconsciously assume that when the writer takes this long to get to the point, it's going to be big. Has Kennedy been assassinated? No, wrong time period. This was early 90s. O.J. Simpson not guilty? Cold fusion? The Pope pardons Galileo? What would make such an impact on him? It turns out, another teacher wanted help installing a computer, so he's excited that his reputation as a guy who knows about computers has spread. Since the teacher just announced to the class that he was going to be setting up a computer, his reputation has spread farther. It says on the book jacket that he started a computer repair business when he was 15, so I assume this is the beginnings of it.

Actually, he's not using digression to build suspense as much as to simply digress. We learn that he sat on the floor in sixth grade, that his class's teacher trusted them, that the phone cord was coiled and light brown. I don't remember the color of the phone cord in my sixth grade class, but I'm sure it wasn't formative to my career. It's fine to give some context, but do we really need this much?

To be fair, chapter 2 or 3 in an autobiography -- the "back to the beginning" chapter, is often like this. His is titled "A Hard Lesson". I theorize that most readers skim this chapter, and autobiographers know it so they load it up with digressions that the editor would excise anywhere else in the book. 

On to the first paragraph of page 316 (in Lucida Handwriting Italic):

In a way it's similar to the first 3:16, in that it serves to set the stage for a conversation but adds a lot of detail. The conversation led to his joining Facebook. What's alarming is that it's on page 316 of 333, he's just meeting the guy who introduced him to Facebook. It seems the vast majority of the book is about his education & computer repair company.

Page 31, .6 of the way down: (in Krungthep):

This happens to be just a few paragraphs below chapter 3, paragraph 16. It leads to a long story about how he tried to copy the software from someone else's computer but it wouldn't fit on a disk and on on. I guess I never understood the fascination of Windows system administration.

Page 31*6  (=186), first para (in Copperplate Gothic):

This comes at the end of a section separated from the next by a little Harvard shield. It foreshadows the next section when he catches his economics teacher in an algebra mistake which he devotes nearly 2 pages to explaining. He criticizes (Harvard) professor Neugeboren for drawing poorly and making algebra mistakes on the blackboard. He writes to the dean, and they get a substitute teacher for the rest of the year. The rest of the chapter is about him negotiating for higher grades by arguing about ambiguous exam questions. Justice is served, he proclaims at the end.

Being at Harvard makes young men and women feel important. They often become important as a result. Feeling the importance of one's own life gives people the courage to attempt great things, with good consequences on average. But some go past "important" into "entitled". He seems to be fairly self-aware, so I assume he gains some perspective later in the book.

OOB

Here's my actual out-of-the-box experience with the iPad:

My iPad arrived Apr 3 morning as promised, a Saturday. Sadly I wasn't in the office yet, so I had only a UPS "we missed you" sticker to play with all weekend.

Monday when I went into the office I opened the box, but it only showed the "Please sync me with iTunes" screen. It was cool that when you turned the iPad the diagram swiveled, but I couldn't show it off much to my coworkers.

When I finally got it home to sync with my iTunes, it didn't recognize it (nothing showed up in the iTunes window). Since iTunes has been nagging me to upgrade from 9.0 to 9.1, I did it (which took 30 minutes, required several password entries and a reboot) and it worked.

I wasn't sure if I should restore my iPhone's configuration onto it, or set it up as a new device. I opted for new. It cranked away, downloading videos & apps for about 3 hours. I think the time was mostly generating small version of my 12000 photo collection.

The next day I got to play with it, and it was lots of fun. But it wasn't the usual Apple out-of-box experience. I'd like to get iPads for my kids, but I worry they'll have a lot of trouble setting it up.

Warranties

"To prevent damage ... please remove the device from your pants pocket before sitting down"

-- HTC / Google Android phone packaging

In the late 80s, my family built a house in Canada for which we bought fancy nitrogen-filled double-pane insulating windows. Each window came with a big red sticker, somewhat hard to remove, proclaiming a 10-year warranty. The not-so-fine print also said the warranty was void if the window wasn't opened for 30 minutes every day.

Perhaps somewhere in Canada there's a dutiful person who actually opens his house to the wind, rain and snow for 30 minutes every day, and  arranges for a neighbor to do it when he's on vacation. But most people who buy either Android phones or that brand of window ignore the warnings and take their chances. 

Building reliable products is hard. At Anybots we're in the middle of this process. We're developing mobile telepresence robots that have to drive around offices and factories. We know people will throw them in the trunk of their car, pack them in luggage, drop them, kick them, crash them, drive them off curbs, spill coffee on them, and 1000 other abuses we haven't even thought of. We're doing our best to make them survive as much abuse as possible, but they're physical objects made of plastic and metal containing optics, electronics, and bearings. They can't survive everything. They won't be falling-anvil-proof.

Actually, places with falling anvils are a great application for telepresence robots. If you have to look around somewhere dangerous, you'd much rather risk a $10,000 robot than yourself. So we'll definitely have customers who drive them into lava fields or unstable mining tunnels or fires or chemical spills. There are military-grade robots costing $100,000+ that would survive more of these situations than ours, but we think 2 of our robots will outlive 1 military-grade robot. That is, for every 2 incidents that would destroy our robot, there'll be at least 1 that would destroy any robot.

So, some customers will use our robot in air-conditioned offices and some will drive them into burning toxic waste. How do we provide a warranty that makes sense for everyone? Robots that fail in office settings didn't meet reasonable customer expectations and we should replace them for free. A robot hit by an anvil or blown up by an IED or melted by flames has already provided fair value to the unharmed customer, and they should pay for the replacement. At either extreme, I think reasonable people will agree on what's fair. It gets trickier in the middle. 

A typical middle scenario will be a user who drives it between buildings in light rain. The robot should survive that sort of thing most of the time, but it's outside our spec and it may eventually fail. Depending on who that user is and how his company budget works, he may offer to pay for repairs or may try to claim warranty work. Auto makers have this problem all the time. People must bring in cars with blown engines caused by racing or never putting oil in, and the dealer has to decide whether to replace it under warranty. It can be an unpleasant, confrontational process that leaves bad feelings all around. I want to avoid that.

The current plan is to offer 3 levels of service contract for different uses: office, dirty environments, and hazardous environments. They'll be priced according to our estimated repair/replacement cost. I want to err on the side of being nice to customers, but we may occasionally have to insist that people upgrade to the next contract if, say, they send us back melted robots for replacement under the "office" service.

I'm open to other ideas that meet our goals. To state our goals explicitly, they are:
  1. Make customers happy by exceeding their expectations.
  2. Collect honest data about why robots fail. Don't force customers to cover up the real reason for failure.
  3. Don't lose large amounts of money on outlier customers.