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Jean-Louis Gassée Column

Numbers and Feedback May 10, 2000 We've just announced that over a million copies of BeOS Personal edition have been downloaded since it became available on March 28. Also, a total of four million CDs have been inserted in magazines in Europe and Asia. We've arrived at these numbers by a rather conservative approach of using reports from well-known sites that provide such data on a regular basis, rather than estimating traffic from every site in the world that offers Personal Edition. As a result, e-mail traffic on info@be.com continues to be strong and polarized. I get a copy of every message sent to this address; it gives me a useful picture of what happens in the real world. One might think we'd hear only from BeOS users -- or would-be users -- struggling with drivers, configurations, partitions, installation problems, or strange, hard-to-reproduce incidents -- and so we do. Sometimes we can help and other times we face a painful situation where we don't have the driver for a peripheral or an interface card. The ugly side of the incredibly rich PC clone organ bank is that we don't have drivers for everything. Sometimes manufacturers are helpful, and sometimes we're left to our own devices, so to speak, and that can make users unhappy. Unhappy, but fortunately, understanding. Thanks for trying to help, is what most people say after we've attempted unsuccessfully to assist them in getting BeOS running on their hardware. At least that's the response about 99.9% of the time. As for the unusually expressive .1%, it's good for the soul to read what they have to say. Personally, it motivates me to be even more diplomatic when I request help from other tech support organizations. For all the customer service horror stories we hear, there are people out there who know both the science of the product and the art of customer relations. For example, when I was stumped trying to rebuild the hard disk in my Libretto after one too many installs, the factory CD image refused to load, protesting that I was targeting the "Wrong Machine." Within an hour of my Sunday morning cry for help on the Toshiba Compuserve forum, Mark Lieberman sent me a couple of DOS programs that took care of the problem. Mark is also called Doc, because he is a dental surgeon (like our own eminently ingenious handyman and company dentist, George Wong). Today, I was wrestling with the OED on CD-ROM, which installed but didn't run on my portable. Within the hour I got an e-mail reply and a fix from Robert Maloney at Oxford University Press tech support. This gives us a good standard for our own support efforts. Occasionally there is also an equally valuable counter- example. One manufacturer, name withheld, acknowledges your order and suggests you e-mail your queries to branddirecthelp@brandmail.something.com. Multiple queries to that address went unanswered, without even so much as a robotic acknowledgement. The product arrived and works well. I hope it never fails. It reminds me every day that I live in a glass house. I used the word "polarized" above. There are two sides to the flow of e-mail at info@be.com. One is the problems and complaints already mentioned. But we also get fairly enthusiastic feedback from BeOS users who take the time to cheer us up and share their happy experience with our product. Since no problem prompts their mail, these messages are even more appreciated. Needless to say, the market's reception of the Free BeOS program is a great motivator for all of us at Be. We appreciate hearing the good and the bad -- both are useful in different ways. We wanted to promote our technology and have an opportunity to gauge reactions, and we got both on a scale that was larger than we'd anticipated.

Past Columns: March 7, 2001 Intemperance Makes the Suit Look Bad February 7, 2001 The Web Device of Choice at Home January 17, 2001 Transfer of Power December 6, 2000 One Step Closer November 15, 2000 Thoughts on Comdex 2000 November 1, 2000 Watching the Pendulum October 4, 2000 Plus çà change... September 6, 2000 Connected Appliances: A Field Report August 16, 2000 Sub-PC vs. Appliances July 12, 2000 The Victim Microsoft June 7, 2000 The Power of Words May 31, 2000 The First Be Shareholders Meeting May 24, 2000 Intellectual Property and Internet Appliances May 17, 2000 Spreading the Virus May 10, 2000 Numbers and Feedback May 3, 2000 Manufacturing Consent

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