I’ve been lusting after a great tablet device for a long time. The iPad has its faults, but it’s the first that really appeals to me. Bottom line: I can’t wait to get one.

Is it an entirely new category of device, as some have claimed? It’s true, of course, that it’s not much more than iPod Touch Jumbo. From a technical perspective, it’s cool, but not earthshaking.

From the perspective of how it will be used, however, I think it will create a new category. It is the most intimate merger yet of computing and consumer electronics.

A Clear View, Not a Short Distance

A dozen years ago, I wrote an editorial for Microprocessor Report about tablets being the future of news, and suggested that they would become common living-room appliances. As futurist Paul Saffo is fond of saying, never mistake a clear view for a short distance. My vision was clear, but the distance was a decade more than I anticipated.

My previous startup, PhotoTablet, was founded to build a tablet that would be a consumer’s digital photo world. For a variety of reasons, it wasn’t realistic, and PhotoTablet turned into Fotiva, a software company.

So it was with some interest that I’ve watched the emergence of the iPad. As usual with any major Apple introduction, it was way overhyped by some of the press, and it’s been attacked by many in ways that just miss the point.

An iPod Touch Jumbo is enough for me, and I expect it will be quite successful. I think this will be an excellent living-room device. It feels (or, I should say, it looks like it will feel) much friendlier than a notebook computer for reading the news while drinking my morning coffee, or to share photos while sitting on the couch, or to casually look something up on the web while away from my computer.

I expect it will also give eBook readers a run for their money. Will users choose a dedicated device without color or video but with a lower price, longer battery life, and possibly an easier-on-the-eyes display, over one with many uses and color video? My gut is that most will not, and that over time Apple will match or exceed the available libraries for the dedicated devices.

Not Without Its Limitations

It does have a number of limitations, of course, but as the first member of a family it looks pretty darn good.

The limitation that frustrates me the most is the lack of Flash support, which makes Apple’s claim that this is the best Web experience ever just wrong. Apple could surely put Flash on it if it wanted to. The lack of Flash support must, I believe, indicate some sort of pissing contest between the two companies. There is no shortage of bad blood between Apple and Adobe, and there is every appearance that Apple would like to see Flash die, though I don’t understand their motivations.

I don’t see this as a business device, or as something I would take traveling. If I’m going to take something this big, I’d take my MacBook. It is not just the lack of a keyboard and physical protection, but the lack of multitasking and rich applications. I would take it over to a friend’s house to share pictures, though.

The Long Road

No company could have built a device like this from scratch. Apple was able to do it by cleverly extending its product range over an extended period.

The iPod started out as nothing more than a slightly better MP3 player, which was catapulted to dominance by its iTunes integration and great marketing.

Then Apple added the ability to play tiny videos.

The big leap was merging with a phone and adding applications, which initially were proprietary Apple apps only. Apple would have had a very hard time jumping into the phone business if it were not for the iPod, which gave lots of people a strong reason to buy an iPhone independent of its quality as a phone.

Then Apple opened up the App Store, and the iPhone became the most important new computing platform since the Mac and Windows.

And now Apple is leveraging all of that design evolution, and the momentum of the iPhone, to create the first really exciting consumer tablet.

It’s the kind of strategy that few companies have ever been able to execute on so well.

Videos and Entertaining Criticism

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the official video, which is full of hyperbole but gives a good feel for the new apps:

Of all the spoofs and criticism, I found this to be the funniest:

The Fake Steve Jobs live blog from backstage also has some nice comic relief.

And the name, of course, opens Apple up to all sorts of ridicule. Most amazing is that people started the jokes years ago, before there even was such a product; this MadTV video is more than three years old:

Following a marathon effort, I’m delighted to announce that we’ve closed Webvanta’s Series A financing. It’s very exciting, and quite a relief, to have this behind us and to be able to really focus on growing the company in 2010.

Webvanta has been so different from my previous startup, Fotiva. We financed Fotiva (originally called PhotoTablet) in early 2000, in the final days of the bubble. We had nothing but a PowerPoint deck, yet we raised considerably more money than Webvanta has raised, and at a higher valuation. Times certainly have changed.

Fotiva existed for less than two years from conception to the sale to Adobe. In retrospect, it was amazingly quick, though it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Webvanta has already been in business for longer than Fotiva’s entire existence, and we just now closed the Series A. We’ve had our product on the market for several months, we have paying customers, and we’re well on our way to 2.0. And we’ve done all this on a fraction of the capital that Fotiva consumed.

By building the company more gradually, instead of being urged on by the VC-driven “get big fast” mentality, we’ve been able to explore market opportunities and evolve our product strategy more naturally. Keeping the company small has had its challenges, but it’s also been empowering.

We’re well set for great growth in 2010. I’m grateful to everyone who has played a part in making this possible: my family, which has endured a dramatic reduction in my income along with long work hours; my business partner, Christopher Haupt, who has done most of the real work of building our product; our board members, David Hehman and Greg Seal, who have been extraordinarily supportive; the angel investors who have provided the capital; and the designers and site owners who have been our pioneering customers. Thanks!

I’ve been a Mose Allison fan for more than 40 years. He’s now 82 and still playing clubs around the U.S. —this year, he performed on 75 days! With more than one performance on many days, that’s probably more than 100 live performances this year. I hope I have that kind of energy when I’m 82.

If you get a chance to go see him, don’t miss it. You may not get another chance. His schedule is posted at MoseAllison.net, though as of this writing there’s only one 2010 date listed.

We recently saw him at 19 Broadway in Fairfax. Here’s a clip of “You Are My Sunshine” from that performance.

The First Two Years: Conception

It was 10 years ago last week that the idea for PhotoTablet came to me—an Internet tablet that takes care of your pictures. The day that name came to mind, I bought the domain and started writing a business plan.

Four months later, I had quit my job, had $2 million in venture funding, and was building a team.

Another four months later, we realized that the tablet idea was not going to work (as a business), and we transformed into Fotiva—a PC software company.

Within a year, we were in discussions with Adobe about selling the business to them. We had the product nearly ready to take to market in the fall of 2001, but with venture funding in a serious drought, we didn’t have a lot of options.

Two years after conception of the idea, we completed the sale of the company to Adobe. In retrospect, it seems an incredibly short period, though it didn’t feel that way at the time.

Last month, Adobe laid off the last of the original Fotiva engineering team, marking the end of an era.

My Stint at Adobe

A year after the acquisition, the software we built at Fotiva debuted as Photoshop Album. After two more years, it was rolled into Photoshop Elements as the Organizer, where it lives on today in version 8.

In my first year at Adobe, I was focused on getting Fotiva’s software turned into a shipping product. After a year in product management, I moved into engineering, managing a small research team and doing technology acquisitions.

For five years, I tried to find or create a role at Adobe that I enjoyed, and I can’t say I ever really succeeded. Although there were some great times and lots of good people, my entrepreneurial spirit and Adobe’s big-company culture did not mesh well. In the fall of 2006, I left Adobe to focus on the Web—something that I found almost impossible to do at Adobe.

Adobe and the Web

From the start, the PhotoTablet/Fotiva vision was for software and an Internet service working in conjunction to deliver the complete product. After the acquisition, however, Adobe senior management was totally disinterested in the online aspect. After pushing on this issue on and off for a few years, I eventually got support for building an online photo service. A dozen people worked on it for nine months—and then Adobe decided not to fund its rollout.

Another year later, I tried again, and once again saw projects started and then canceled before shipping anything. About the time I left three years ago, yet another online effort was underway; I left because I had no confidence in the way it was being approached. This project too ended without shipping anything.

Finally, in 2008, Adobe delivered Photoshop.com. Aside from the “third time’s a charm” aspect, I think the reason Adobe was finally able to launch a photo service was that the driving force was the creation of a Flex showcase. Unfortunately, it was too late to make much of an impact.

Adobe had plenty of engineering folks with a passion for building web services for photography, and a few products have made it to market. But the heavy-weight process and infrastructure, combined with top management that is often unsupportive of web initiatives, has kept Adobe from being a significant player in the online photo world.

Team Shifts

As part of this web initiative that began in 2006, the Organizer code base that had its roots in Fotiva’s code was transferred to a team in India for future development. What remained of the engineering team that I had built, and which Adobe acquired, was redirected to work on Photoshop.com.

In some ways, this was a great opportunity for the team, but it also meant a loss of continuity in the Organizer development. The people who conceived and built multiple versions of the product were no longer responsible for it. The results have been predictably uninspiring, though whether this is due to the transfer to India or to an overall reduction in resources is hard to tell.

I no longer use Photoshop Elements Organizer, after leading its creation and importing more than 70,000 pictures. I just doesn’t perform well enough, and Lightroom is closer to my interests. (I use iPhoto for video clips, since Lightroom frustratingly doesn’t support them, but that’s another story.)

The Annual Purge

More years than not (since 2000), Adobe has conducted an annual purge of employees toward the end of the year. The past two years, this purge has been especially deep, driven no doubt by the sagging worldwide economy.

I understand the need to realign resources when strategies change. But the frequency and vigor with which Adobe rearranges and lays off people leaves a lot of casualties. Having worked there for five or ten years, produced consistently good work, and supported the company through previous transitions is not enough to keep your job when management shuffles priorities again.

I don’t want to get into the debate about the merits of offshore development, but it is a fact that almost all of the Fotiva engineers were eventually laid off, and their work moved to India.

The Power of a Small Company

Aside from my five years at Adobe, I’ve mostly run small companies. After leaving Adobe three years ago and starting Webvanta a year later, I’ve been struck again by the incredible efficiency advantage small companies have.

Two or three people, juggling half-a-dozen roles, can get more done than a team of ten at a big company like Adobe. The absence of the innovation antibodies that are an epidemic at Adobe is a huge boost, not to mention the elimination of most meetings.

But the most important difference of all is having the people with the ideas and passion be the same people making strategic decisions.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here, so I thought I’d at least give a brief update.

On September 8 we officially launched Webvanta, and that’s kept me swamped. It’s going great, with about 35 sites up now, about a dozen more that we’re involved in building, and a steady stream of designers signing up. There’s hundreds of user accounts and dozens of sites being built by folks we don’t even know—it’s a great feeling to see it taking off.

The level of activity has noticeably picked up in the last few weeks, and the custom development side of our business now has about a 6-week backlog.

We’ve launched our first ecommerce site (SimplySlater), and we’ll have another one launching within a week or two. We’re near completion of a large site for a local non-profit that is converting over from Drupal. This project has driven us to polish up a lot of loose ends with our information portal features, so many customers will benefit.

We also recently announced the Webvanta Design Contest—we’re giving away a MacBook Pro for the most innovative site built with Webvanta, plus three iPod Touches for the runners up. Please help us spread the word!

We've been building up a presence for Webvanta on Facebook. If you use Facebook, please click the Become a Fan button below to connect with us.

I’ve been working lately on creating a Facebook presence for my company, Webvanta. It’s been a somewhat painful experience. You can see the primitive results so far.

Facebook has “pages” for businesses, which are like profiles, but for non-humans. This seems like a good idea, but they’re missing some core features to support the way businesses work.

For example, it appears to be impossible to remove the person who originally created the page as an admin. So if someone creates your Facebook page and then leaves the company, well, too bad, they still have access to modify the page.

I’m not alone in this concern. There’s a discussion thread on this issue in their so-called help that has posts by 73 people, going back two and half months, all struggling with this problem. No one from Facebook has replied, and no one has proposed a fix.

There’s plenty of other ugly corners. When I try to change the profile image for the Webvanta page, for example, it takes me to the profile picture for my personal page.

Because we have less than 1,000 fans, we can’t get a vanity URL, so the URL for our page is the lovely http://www.facebook.com/pages/Webvanta/70984967800?v=wall&viewas=0. (For my personal page, I was able to get www.facebook.com/mzslater.)

Facebook clearly has lots of work left to do before they’re really ready for businesses. But with more than 200 million users, they have their hands full, and they’re riding a tidal wave, so I doubt they’re worrying about it too much. And, of course, there’s no way to actually contact anyone and get a question answered.

The platform is full of awkward bits like this, and I’d like to say that someone will step in and do a better job and displace them, but the reality is that they have reached critical mass in terms of user adoption, and the vast number of people on Facebook is going to make it very hard to displace. As a business, if you want to participate in social marketing, you need to go where the people are, so you really have no choice about whether to go elsewhere.

My request for Facebook: please charge me $100/year for having a business page, and use that money to provide appropriate features and a support line. Or take some of that $200 million you just got from the Russian investors and use it to provide better support.

I’ve recently been helping my sister put together an online store, using Volusion. It has been eye-opening how complex they make it and how clunky this system is. This is a product that is ripe for being replaced with something a lot cleaner.

We looked at Shopify as well, but their business model of taking a cut of the transaction was a turn-off. And there’s always Yahoo Stores, but they tend to be, well, ugly.

On the surface, an online store is pretty simple. We can build simple ones with Webvanta, using PayPal or another third-party shopping card, but it’s not a complete ecommerce solution. The tricky bits come when you need to deal with tax by county, shipping options, returns, out-of-stock items, fulfillment workflows, etc. In time, we’ll make Webvanta a good solution for this, probably by integrating an existing third-party solution.

Do you know of any great solutions for simple online stores, either complete sites or hosted shopping carts that we can integrate? I’d like to be able to refer people to something great.

And just in case you’re looking for some inexpensive and very cool outdoor furniture, check out the Classic Butterfly Chairs at SimplySlater.com.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Ignite Sebastopol, the first-ever local Ignite event. Started a couple years ago by O’Reilly Media, Ignite talks use an unusual, fast-paced format: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds so there’s no such thing as running over. It’s a challenging format but it sure keeps things moving. The event was packed, with more than 150 people at the Hopmonk Tavern.

Here’s the video, courtesy of Empire Report. The slides are available at slideshare, but they’re sort of dull without the talk track.

I was not an early adopter of social media, being of twice the optimum age. But in the past few months, I’ve become much more involved with it, and I now believe it is going to be central to the growth of my business.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for many years, and found it moderately useful as a sort of distributed address book and business contact list. But its role in my life was very small, and entirely limited to business contacts.

Three years ago, I started getting invitations from friends on Facebook, which I accepted but rarely did anything with it.

About a year ago, the pace of invitations I was getting climbed, and I put some work into my profile. I connected with a bunch of high-school friends I haven’t seen in 35 years. It has been fun, but odd, to get little glimpses into the life of these folks—some of them were a big part of my growing up. The odd part is that, for the most part, these are people I never would have had any contact with if it were not for an online social network, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever see them in person.

A few months ago, I started paying more attention to Facebook, motivated more by business than personal desires. I went through my address book and invited people to connect; and I scanned the contacts of my contact to find other people I knew. In the past 20 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of people, and Facebook has proven to be an easy way to reconnect, however tenuously, to many people who I would like to stay connected with but realistically I wasn’t likely to, out in the “real world”.

With a few days of effort, I increased my Facebook friends from 25 to 250. (If only I had started 10 years ago, I would have thousands of “friends”.)

And then, of course, there’s Twitter. I’ve had an account for a couple of years, but only used it occasionally, usually at conferences. Recently I’ve gotten more involved, though I’m still not a prolific twitterer. (More on Twitter in an upcoming past.)

I’m of the wrong generation for all of this to come naturally, despite being something of an early adopter. I’m just starting to get real value, both personal and business, out of social networks, and I still have more questions than answers. Among them:

• Do I maintain separate networks of personal friends and business friends?
• Can I get myself to post frequent thoughts and updates?
• Do I use Twitter, Facebook status, and LinkedIn updates in concert, or do different things with each?
• How do I filter out the stuff I really care about?

Separating Business and Personal Networks

One thing I’m still coming to grips with is the blending of my personal and business contacts. LinkedIn is almost all business, but Facebook and Twitter are a mix (especially Facebook).

The easiest thing to do was to give up on separating my personal and business networks. That’s what I’ve done so far, though I doubt that it’s the best strategy.

The question is, do both groups of people have the same interests? For the most part, I think not. There’s also an interesting twist added by mixing the two groups up, but ultimately I think I’ll separate out my family and close friends network, in one way or another.

Dealing with the Flood

One I had hundreds of contacts, and the social network news feeds became prominent, the next challenge has been dealing with the flood of status updates, tweets, and so forth. To read all of it, even without responding to anything, seems like it would take hours every day.

My solution, so far, has been to simply dip in an out when the mood strikes me. I’m sure I’m missing all sorts of interesting stuff, but I haven’t wanted to devote the time to sorting through all the cruft to get to the nuggets. Some kind of filtering seems like the only real solution.

The Instinct to Communicate

It takes a lot of time and energy to make effective (or even ineffective!) use of all these social networks, and in the early days of using them the energy in is a lot higher than the value coming out. I have no doubt about the long-term value, but it’s still hard to spend the time it takes to keep up with even one of my online social networks.

I’ve been blogging for three years and have never sustained anything like the frequency of posting that I aspire to. I have all sorts of articles running around in my head—the legacy, perhaps of a dozen years writing newsletters and magazine columns. But they take time to commit to bits. What you’re reading now is one that’s been rolling around inside for a couple of months and finally made it out, sitting in a cafe in Santa Rosa while I wait to pick up my daughter from ice skating.

I’d like to get up to at least one blog post a week. And to several tweets a day. It takes a big shift in mindset, though, to communicate this frequently and proactively—it’s an opportunity that didn’t exit prior to online social networks. We’ll see if I get there.

My Success Story

The biggest chunk of business value that I’ve ever gotten from these networks occurred a few weeks ago, when I was looking for a couple dozen web designers who I could interview and get feedback on our new product. I’d exhausted my direct network, and the step to cold calling is a big one.

So I used a LinkedIn question, in addition to a Facebook status update and a Tweet, and with a few days I had introductions to a few dozen people. Because these were introductions, and not cold calls, even though I had no prior direct contact with these people more than half of them have spent an hour with me in a web-based demo and phone discussion.

These networks were a fantastic resource for me. They allowed me to make a casual request of hundreds of people to whom I would have hesitated to email, and I got responses from a good scattering of them—and often not from the people I would have predicted, if I had to select a smaller number to contact.

Coming up in my next post: Twitter stories.

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Last Sunday, Amanda won first place in her group at the skating competition in Vacaville! Here’s the video—and below, some notes about copyright and YouTube.

It was an awesome performance, and I’m so proud of her.

Now, the YouTube bit: the song playing in the background is Witch Doctor by Alvin and the Chipmunks. When I uploaded the video to YouTube, it recognized the song (I did include Alvin in the title but didn’t identify the song), and sent me the following email:

Your video, Amanda’s Alvin and the Chipmunks ice skating routine, may have content that is owned or licensed by Razor & Tie.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

And when the video plays on YouTube, there’s an advertisement banner at the bottom, with links to buy the song from iTunes or Amazon.com. (Curiously, the ad does not appear on the embedded video above.) It’s sort of annoying, but compared with banning the video because it contains copyrighted content, it’s a great solution.

A question for the copyright experts out there: I assume the skating rink must have the right to use the music in the performance. Does this right not transfer to videos made of the performance? Of course, arguing this with Google would probably be futile, regardless of what’s true, unless one was willing to put a great deal of energy into it.

My favorite presentation from Web 2 Expo:

Read Tara’s blog at www.horsepigcow.com for more.

Her book The Whuffie Factor is due out April 21.

And if you’re curious about the origin of Whuffie, it comes from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

This is a trivia item for those with some curiosity about common legal agreements.

Why is it nearly universal in legal agreements that there’s a couple paragraphs in ALL CAPS that state that the product or service is offered “as is,” that the provider makes no representation that it is good for anything or will work as advertised, and that they are not liable if it causes you to lose your business, your spouse, or your right arm?

I can understand what drives the disclaimers in general, but I was curious about the specific language that is always used, and especially about the bizarre use of ALL CAPS. Is that supposed to make it somehow more forceful?

The Uniform Commercial Code

As it turns out, this all has its origin in something called the Uniform Commercial Code. Among other things, it states that:

“Unless excluded or modified, a warranty that the goods shall be merchantable is implied in a contract for their sale if the seller is a merchant with respect to goods of that kind.”

And:

“Where the seller at the time of contracting has reason to know any particular purpose for which the goods are required and that the buyer is relying on the seller’s skill or judgment to select or furnish suitable goods, there is unless excluded or modified under the next section an implied warranty that the goods shall be fit for such purpose.”

So that’s the reason for these paragraphs. Unless you explicitly disclaim it, your act of selling someone something can be taken as an implication that the thing you’re selling will actually meet the user’s needs. Heaven forbid!

SO WHY ALL CAPS?

OK, so now we understand what drives the disclaimer language, but what about the typography?

It turns out that comes from the U.C.C. as well. It specifies that any disclaimers must be “conspicuous,” and the code includes a formal definition of conspicuous:

“A term of clause is conspicuous when it is so written that a reasonable person against whom it is to operate ought to have noticed it. A printed heading in capitals (as: Non-Negotiable Bill of Lading) is conspicuous. Language in the body of a form is “conspicuous” if it is in larger or other contrasting type or color. But in a telegram any stated term is “conspicuous”. Whether a term or clause is “conspicuous” or not is for decision by the court.”

So to avoid the risk that a court might rule that a notice was not conspicuous, lawyers fall back on the unambiguous statement that “A printed heading in capitals is conspicuous” and just toss all the text into caps (since larger type or a contrasting color is typically not available in a contractual document).

So here we have it: a terrible typographic decision enshrined in the conventional wisdom of legal documents because it fits within the safe harbor defined by a widely used statute.

I’m going to take a radical chance and use bold for the disclaimers in our Webvanta terms of use.

I’ve had HP printers for a long, long time, since the earliest LaserJets. The latest is an all-in-one printer/fax/copier that we bought a few years ago. It is the last HP machine I will buy until I hear that they have completely revamped their service department.

A month or so ago, my wife’s PC’s hard drive starting acting up. I replaced the drive and decided to take this opportunity to “upgrade” the machine from Vista to Windows XP. For some reason, the XP install decided that the machine’s built-in memory card readers were drives C, D, E, F, and G, and the hard drive was H. By the time I noticed this, I had reinstalled a bunch of apps, and although it is an odd configuration, everything worked fine. I did a brief google search looking for an easy way to change the drive letters, and it appears that there’s no easy solution for changing the letter assigned to the boot drive. So I decided to leave it.

The only problem I’ve had is with the drivers for the HP all-in-one printer. HP’s installer appears to be hardwired to look for drive C, and the install fails. I tried various tricks, even putting in a memory card into “drive C” and trying to install from there, but nothing worked. After hours of frustration, I decided to call HP service. That was the beginning of the real frustration.

Turning “service” into sales

After navigating through a circuitous voice menu system and waiting on hold, I finally got to a live person. After providing my serial number, they told me that they would be glad to help me, but that it would cost $35 since the printer was out of warranty. I asked if I would have to pay the fee even if they couldn’t resolve my problem, and the “support” (really sales) rep assured me that they would connect me with an expert who would work with me until the problem was resolved. With some trepidation, I agreed to the charge.

They then transferred me to a woman who seemed to be starting over. She had no idea what my problem was, or that I had paid for the service call. After another 20 minutes, we got this worked out, and started in on the actual problem.

She then launched into a sales pitch for how for “just a few dollars more” than the $35 service call fee they would exchange my printer for a new model and refund the service call fee. I asked how many dollars. She ignored my question and kept on with a pitch for the new printer. After asking literally five times for the exact price, she finally gave it to me: $250. That’s more than a few dollars above $35 in my book, and the printer works just fine with the other computers on which the driver software will install.

I told her I didn’t want to do the exchange, but wanted to solve the problem. After a very brief discussion, she concluded that my printer was just too old, and wouldn’t work with the “new” drivers, and that was my problem. This is total BS—the issue had nothing to do with compatibility between the drivers and the printer, and the driver software on their site was dated 2007, just a year newer than the printer. The problem is their software’s brain-dead installer can’t deal with the hard drive being something other than C. Not only could she not propose a workaround, she couldn’t seem to even understand the problem. Some expert.

She launched back into the sales pitch for selling me a new printer. At this point I said I wanted to speak to a supervisor. She tried again to get me to buy a new printer. I said I wanted to talk to a supervisor. She said none was available then, but one would call me back tomorrow.

“We’ll call you back”—never

I waited three days, and no one called. Finally I called back, went through another 10 minutes of voice menu hell, and explained the situation once again to a live person, who once again was no help. I asked for a refund on the service call fee, since they weren’t able to help me, and she said she had no way to do that. I asked again to talk to a supervisor, and she said one would call back.

No one ever did. After a few more days, I contested the charge with the credit card company and bought an Epson printer to use with that computer. It just wasn’t worth any more time or grief trying to get that printer working with that computer.

HP’s service operation is broken. They don’t understand what they’re talking about. They don’t seem to care about solving your problem. They push expensive upgrades on you even after you’ve paid for a service call. And the policy for responding to requests to speak to a supervisor seems to be to say one will call you back, but no one ever does.

My first job out of college was working at HP. I used to have a great respect for the company. I’ve been loyal to their printers for 20 years. And because of their ineffective and irresponsible service operation, I am unlikely ever to buy another one.

Update—HP Follow-Up

After a couple weeks, I started getting phone calls from HP folks in the U.S. who were apologetic and eager to help. I believe these calls originated from a complaint email I sent in, but maybe this blog post had something to do with it too.

By this point, I had replaced the printer, and all I wanted was a refund of the service call fee, which they gladly provided. In fact, they called back repeatedly when I was slow to gather the information I needed to give them. These people were typical of the HP of old (albeit engaged in damage control). If I could have reached them when I asked to speak to a supervisor the first two times, all of these problems would have been avoided.

One of the HP people I spoke with acknowledged that my problem with “someone will call you back” and then no one ever does has been an issue with this call center.

So my conclusion: HP has a big problem, not at the core, but with the way they have offshored their support. The offshore support organization does not reflect the values or quality of service for which HP has been known for decades. Maybe a better-managed offshore operation could solve these issues. Or maybe the savings from sending support offshore are offset by less tangible, but very real, costs. One cost: I remain disinclined to buy an HP product in the future, because I don’t want to have to deal with this support organization.