How Not to Run a Business

I'm angry. It's 1:00 AM and I'm angry. I can't sleep, and the cause? The big three. It amazes me that I get so angry. It also amazes me the ways in which a company will spite its valued consumers.

First up, we have a pair of companies who have formed what might as well be known as an unholy alliance. I expect the wall of flame any day. I am, of course, talking about Apple and AT&T, and the infamous iPhone. With the 3G iPhones, AT&T is now not providing ANY text messages. First of all, providing text messages costs next to nothing. Second, with an iPhone specific data plan, which previously provided 200 text messages for the 2G iPhone, consumers must now pay $10/month more and sacrifice their text messages. Why?!?!? It's arbitrary. I know AT&T is now taking a hit on the iPhone due to subsidy. However, if they want to regain the costs, they might actually consider making THEIR CONSUMERS HAPPY, and maintaining that income. Even Microsoft wouldn't sacrifice this kind of backward compatibility. Apple probably also has something to do with it behind the scenes. You've seen the way they do business...

And then, as usual, there's Microsoft, which rounds out a bad evening. I was fuming from my iPhone/AT&T fiasco earlier this evening, and was looking forward to relaxing and taking out my frustrations on a bunch of zombies. So, I booted Windows 7, and suddenly my microphone no longer worked. Why? It worked before! The short answer is that I don't know, and what always seems to be the quickest solution is to reinstall Windows. I now have the release candidate installed. Let's hope that solves something. We'll see sometime soon.

We return to now. It's 1:00 AM, and I'm angry. Where does this leave me? I don't know. How do you resolve issues like these. I can solve the Microsoft problem, and it's the least of the three. I've installed Windows so many times that I'm numb to the experience now. But how do I obtain what I want from AT&T and Apple? How can you convince a huge company with a lot of customers that they should be treating their customers better? I leave you with this probably unsolvable conundrum, calmer somewhat now that I've shot frickin' lightning bolts from my hands.