I was wrong. I got another, more personal email a week later.

And another – right after Nokia announced they were dropping MeeGo for Windows Phone 7. This was more than I could take. With that vote of no confidence, who would be crazy enough to invest in Intel’s non-existent platform? I responded:

I know you’re doing your job, but it’s not going to happen. Intel lost in mobile. Sorry. Putting my money behind horses who have a real chance. Thanks and good luck.

I put it out of my mind. Later that day, though, my persistent friend gave me one last push:

…If history repeats itself, it will be open architecture systems and industries that will eventually dominate. It’s only a question of when. ( I think soon.) Think of where the PC market was in the early days when there was still multiple proprietary solutions competing for the market space of the home computer user.  The IBM standard eventually dominated the larger market.

Even if I bought into this (I don’t), wouldn’t Android be the horse to bet on? It’s open. It’s actually in shipping products. It actually has users, right now, today.

I believe that history will repeat itself.

So, this guy, and by extension, Intel, believes that fate will grant Intel perpetual reign over all things computing, despite the fact that they can’t produce a mobile processor anyone wants to use in best-selling products? Despite the fact that they’re late to the party with their self-serving OS?  Despite the fact that MeeGo, by all accounts, kind of sucks?

Okay, I guess history is just going to repeat itself. Because they want it to. It’s like they’ve been reading The Secret or something.

This is a ground floor opportunity akin to purchasing a stock just before it goes up in value.

As if my bullshit detector weren’t already burying the needle.

Keep idly watching this space (open architecture mobile computing) and you will miss the train. Intel is leveraging all it’s 30 years of OEM relationships. The number of distribution channels contained in this network is going to be staggering. It’s not one store or one manufacturer.  This is the democratization of mobile computing.

I think the only one who has missed the train here is Intel. They’ve been idly watching mobile while ARM quietly cleans their clock.

Moreover, even Google has struggled to nail down successful, paid distribution. Intel thinks it can succeed by encouraging the creation of several channels? It’s like they don’t even bother studying what works and why. Apple is ruling the day by getting 100 million accounts all in one database and giving the keys for one-click buying to anyone who wants to come over. Several fragmented channels is not the way to match their power.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Translated: Intel is delusional and they’re paying me to repeat their fever dreams.

The mobile computer market is nearing a similar democratizing event horizon as the PC market did 25 years ago.  Throughout 2011 Intel chips will turn up in 35 tablets from 15 brands!

How many units are going to be sold of all these many tablets? 15 brands and 35 tablets? Really? Why not just two, really, really good ones? Sounds like a recipe for an instantly fragmented market from a hardware perspective, too.

He ended by encouraging me to hop on the phone with a program manager to learn more. I haven’t taken him up on it.

Now, many of us have been in an room listening to marketing spin a tale of bullshit (“narrative”) to share with outsiders. Maybe Intel knows it’s full of it, right? I’m not so sure. I think decades of being the Processor King has genuinely convinced them that their success is inevitable.

I think they’re wrong. The game has changed. They haven’t.

We’re profitable, and we’re looking to hire a smart all-around programmer as our first hire. It’s a cliche, but we want people who like tackling complicated problems.

…

Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus.

…we like people who don’t put themselves in a box. You should be comfortable thinking about the product as a whole, and how changes are going to impact the hundreds of thousands of people who use it regularly.

…

We’re profitable, make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every month, have a rapidly expanding user base, and napping is an encouraged part of our corporate culture.

…

Basically, you’ll get to be the first employee of a small successful startup, while getting a paycheck and equity, and feeling good about the impact you’re having on the world.

It’s so clear. I know what kind of person they’re looking for, I know what’s special about their company, I can start to picture what it would be like to work there. Without having to say much about their people or product, I can tell one thing right away: these are not bozos.

There are no buzzwords, no vague claims about the company, nothing unclear about the kind of person they’re looking for. These are the kind of people you would feel comfortable working with because they’re direct and human.

And hey, did you notice they’re profitable?

It’s a good pitch because within the confines of their stealth approach, it tells you everything you’d want to know without handwaving or hyperbole. For respecting your intelligence, it stands out. It builds confidence.

This is a rarity in tech companies. Other job postings are not so clear. Try this one:

The Front-End Architect will be a senior and leading member of the [Product name] development team and will be responsible for driving innovative consumer applications. The FE Architect will help make technology decisions, lead, design/architect, implement and mentor.

I just picked this one at random off of craigslist. It was the first one I clicked. How can you be both senior and leading? What does it mean to drive an innovative consumer app? What makes it innovative? What will they lead, what will they architect? Of course, it wouldn’t be a bullshit job posting without some poor bastard having to “implement” something.

These people have no idea what problem their hiring is supposed to solve.

Job postings are a great window into a company. They show you just how much clear thinking is demanded  along with how well people communicate. Those are two important factors for working with other people. What about more consciously public communications?

Let’s turn to the granddaddy of software development:

Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone

The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun

That’s a headline and sub-head from a press release. (Thanks, DF)

What the hell does any of it mean? What do users really want to do? Absent Robbie Bach and J. Allard, I don’t trust the word “fun” anywhere in a new product announcement from Microsoft, either. They probably mean an optional Comic Sans UI.

Maybe they’re going to clarify in the first paragraph. I’m just being a dick with their opener, I’m sure.

The goal for Microsoft’s latest smartphone is an ambitious one: to deliver a phone that truly integrates the things people really want to do, puts those things right in front of them, and either lets them get finished quickly or immerses them in the experience they were seeking.

I’m missing the ambition here. It sounds like their goal is to create a hierarchical mobile user experience optimized for short bursts of interaction.

Which is what everyone else does.

They haven’t described anything that sounds even remotely like a “fresh start for the smartphone.” What they’ve got is a fresh start for Windows Mobile that brings it up to par with the last three years of mobile OS evolution. By all accounts, they’ve succeeded.

Also, what the hell have they actually built?

The much more interesting story here would be owning the fact that they fell behind, then dug in deep, then, wonder of wonders, finally met a ship date. I’m sure it wasn’t a small undertaking. But they want to convince me they, unique among all companies, have rebooted the smartphone concept.

Contrast that with Google, who, the other day, genuinely unveiled a chunk of the future:

We have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.

Damn. Really?

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead.

Nothing vague about that. It sounds like something out of science fiction. You could call your mom, read that to her, and she’d understand exactly what’s going on, maybe even share your excitement.

Who inspires more confidence: the bullshitters or the straight-talkers? The problem with bullshitters is that they start convincing themselves that this is genuinely how people talk. They bullshit themselves. They lose the ability to communicate with any sort of clarity, making up for it in volume of words.

The best people respond to authentic communication. The best conversations form around genuine excitement from concrete performance. Clarity inspires confidence.

The big, suit-choked, sales-oriented, PR spinmonkey companies are a lost cause. There’s no reaching them. But you and me, we have a shot. Resist the siren song of saying words that mean nothing.

Look how much more powerful it is to be a real person.

“What if we committed to overhauling our culture so that the customer always, always, always came first in our processes and our perceptions? Then people would stop falling through the cracks and getting pissed off on the internet. And word of mouth would get even bigger for us!”

Everyone looked at me like I was an alien.

Sometimes it’s delivered with a sneer, other times exhaustion, and occasionally, there’s even contempt:

“That’s idealistic.”

Ideals, it seems, are academic contrivances that hinder How Real Business Gets Done.

I can’t escape my idealism. Sure, I’ve launched v1 before it was perfect, accepted a minor bug or two in a release, fine. But at no point have I ever sacrificed the core of the user experience to any other cause. User experience is the compass by which I judge every decision.

I configure my values this way because I’ve seen first hand how powerful it can be. Not just in software, in web applications, in innovative, industry-changing businesses…

But also: in dog grooming.

I got my idealism from my mom. Whatever town she’s in, she’s the best dog groomer there is. After years of working for stupid, short-sighted shops, she set her sights on a business of her own. With nothing more than a GED and her ideals, she renovated a space and got to work.

And thrived.

The biggest challenge to scaling her wildly successful business? Finding people who were skilled enough to match her quality of work or genuine love of animals. It was impossible.

My mom had two options: hire on people she knew weren’t up to her standards or stay the size she was. She wanted growth – who doesn’t? But she knew she couldn’t just hire crappy people. Her shop’s growing reputation was built entirely on her quality of work. People loved the idealism that inspired outrageous standards of hygiene for the facility. People whose dogs usually couldn’t stand going to the groomers suddenly lost their fear, because for the first time grooming meant being treated humanely.

Ideals had created differentiation. Bad people would destroy that progress. In the short term, yes, her bandwidth would increase and more dogs could come through the shop. In the long term? She’d be just another grooming shop with tepid business – or no business. The worst part of all, I know now: she wouldn’t be proud of her shop anymore.

So she chose secret option C: Open a grooming school.

In hindsight, of course, this is obvious. It wasn’t then. It was risky. It cost a lot of time and effort to get licensing to train. Putting together course materials and a curriculum is a very different skill set than grooming dogs. Shifting from spending all your time grooming to most of your time teaching? Very difficult.

But it worked.

The revenue from a steady stream of students smoothed out an otherwise highly cyclical business. The option to have dogs groomed by students opened the shop up to new clients who had been unable to afford the previous up-market rates. Constant oversight meant even inexperienced groomers were sweating the details and doing things right. Daily bandwidth increased dramatically with only a marginal impact on quality. Best of all, when a star pupil came through the program, they could be immediately recruited after they finished training.

There were hiccups – students could definitely botch their work at times, but the risk was baked into the price, so it didn’t harm reputation. Picky clients could opt out of the student work at the old rates, and many did. Overall, everyone was happy, including the many animal lovers who discovered how to make dogs part of their professional lives through grooming.

True to form, my mom found a way to have her cake and eat it, too: way more money without sacrificing the quality of her work.

None of this would have been possible had ideals not played a huge role in making decisions. Absent ideals, I’m not even sure she would have gone to work for herself.

I can’t escape my idealism. And I don’t want to. My ideals are a map to build trust, solve problems and, in some small way, make the world a better place. The only article of faith I have is that, with a bit of work, that map leads to success. And in the end, without my ideals, I couldn’t build software, or anything, and enjoy it.

There are limits. You can’t pay for a sandwich with a song. Idealism is not a business model. Idealism is a tool. It’s a fulcrum for making difficult decisions and your flashlight in the darkness of ambiguity. It helps you understand the success conditions for every move  you make.

I won’t stop putting the user first and neither should you. Next time someone dismisses your idealism, look very hard: an opportunity could be lurking across the bridge they won’t cross.

And I guess it’s true. I mean, consider:

There’s Blockbuster. Keeping a broad inventory is a lot of work and expense. It’s easier, and more favorable to revenue, to stock only the most popular stuff. Also, you can definitely make a ton of money by charging late fees.

Hmm. The only problem there is that Blockbuster just filed for bankruptcy.

Okay, okay, that’s fine. How about Comcast? Having installers permanently on the payroll is a pain in the ass – paid time off, benefits, training costs, ugh. Outsource that action, let someone else do the worrying instead. Sure, these techs won’t care about the company culture (such as it is), and since they get paid by the installation, they won’t care about conducting business in a way that leads to a long-term positive opinion of Comcast. There will be less oversight, so they might screw up in ways that are embarrassing. Time management could be challenging for these local outfits and people might be late for appointments… But – revenue!

I guess the wrinkle is that kind of thinking tarnished Comcast’s brand so severely, they had to change the name of their consumer service. Maybe customer perception had nothing to do with it – rebranding is fun and it can’t cost much, right? Any long-established brand would want to do it, eh? Maybe not so much.

Fine, how about Yahoo? They made a really great play – push the portal angle really hard, don’t focus too much on search. I mean, if search works too well, people won’t stay in the portal and then how can you monetize all these millions of eyeballs? Nah, display ads. That’s where it’s at. Sell banners by the boatload. Bulk up that ad sales team!

That only worked until the dot-com bust, though. Now Yahoo’s market capitalization is a tenth of its biggest competitor, Google.

So maybe dicking your users isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, assuming you want prosperity to continue more than the next few quarters.

What about being good to users? How does providing an outstanding user experience change things?

Turns out the iPad is the fastest-selling non-phone product. Despite the fact that, as shipped, the iPad couldn’t print, can’t use Flash, and doesn’t have a camera, people are buying it in droves. 4.5 million units sold in the first quarter it was available. Maybe “being hip” is suddenly important to the broad cross-section of consumers who are buying it, and they have been convinced that upwards of $500 is a fair price for the privilege. More likely, though, is that a focused, task-oriented, touch-based interaction scheme where no one nags you about software updates is more enjoyable and intuitive than a netbook.

Apple is one of the largest companies in the world. Their focus on the user is not limited to the iPad.

Then there’s Zappos. Their values include being good to everyone – customers, employees and vendors alike. Their website has been consistently great for exploring their inventory and making informed decisions about shoes before buying. High quality images, easy to use filtering, detail-packed user reviews, all of it conspires to make purchasing easy. When you get on the phone with their customer service folks, you’ll find people empowered to help without rushing you back off the phone. They’ve long refused to outsource any activity that’s core to their business, including customer service and their fulfillment operations. They want to make sure these user-facing elements of their business are air-tight. This isn’t cheap.

Neither is the billion dollars Amazon spent to buy Zappos last year.

Then there’s Google. Say what you want about their creepy ways, Google revolutionized search. They made it work extraordinarily well, made it focused and made it fast. They’ve invested huge amounts of money on infrastructure to make sure their service is as snappy as possible. Instead of display ads, which would have been the easy but user hostile approach to making money from their traffic, Google borrowed Overture’s Pay-Per-Click advertising model. Paid search ads are perhaps the only form of genuinely useful ads for the user. They can actually solve the problem of your search.

At their IPO, Google shares could be had for around $85, already a respectable price. Today, they fetch over $500.

Creating a good user experience is important. It builds goodwill between your company and your users, yes. But much more importantly, it compels you to make a better product. Constantly re-evaluating your product for the benefit of its users future proofs your business. Look at Netflix, busy obsoleting itself by pioneering living room streaming. When you care about doing things well, your business moves at pace that’s very difficult to overtake. You’re a moving target and your products become much harder to compete with.

So can you dick over your users to goose your revenues? Absolutely. There’s a lot of short term juice in alienating the people you need most. Unfortunately, money is an addicting, distracting force. Before you know it, you’ll be dependent on the cash your user hostile approach to product requires. Ask Yahoo.

Anyone playing the long term game should approach the problem differently. Do it right and you’ve got the potential for a billion dollar business. Even if you never get there, gushing praise from your users is a lot more fun, and profitable, than simmering rage.

They really, truly give a damn about something.

It’s important to calibrate what I mean about this. Being a stickler about Star Trek trivia, parts of speech or state capitals doesn’t count. Affinity for political knee-jerk doesn’t qualify, either.

Giving a damn is about sacrifice and investment. It’s paying with something precious in the service of something you really, truly value.

My favorite leaders, consistently, gave a damn about good leadership. Years ago, during my college internship, I’d stroll into my boss’s office, politely interrupt whatever the hell it was he was doing, and have a conversation. This guy was the director of the department, working on a Master’s degree on the side, and was the busiest guy I’d ever met. But as long as nothing was on fire, he’d give me half an hour to answer my questions about anything. I figured out much later that the reason he did this was that he gave a damn about leadership and helping people grow.

This isn’t something you can half ass. Either you really, trully give a damn about leadership – or you’re just another one of those bosses.

Leadership is a universal one, but this works with anything. I’d rather hire someone green who truly gives a damn about the work than someone with both experience and apathy. Many things can be taught – giving a damn is not one of them.

It goes beyond picking your team or picking your boss, though. The very best companies, large and small prove that they give a damn, too.

In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh explains that Zappos treats their customer service as a marketing expense to be padded instead of an operational expense to be reduced. It’s a very Keanu “whoa” moment when you ponder that. It flips everything around in your head – while being so entirely correct, you can’t imagine anything different. Organizationally, Zappos gives a damn about doing the right thing for people and backs this up with a significant investment.

Down the road from where I live, an immigrant family owns the best damned Chinese restaurant on earth. The food is consistently delicious, but it doesn’t end there. I’m greeted warmly, my picky custom orders are delivered with fastidious accuracy, and every meal is accompanied by a free appetizer or some on-the-house ice cream. These guys truly give a damn about creating an enjoyable restaurant.

If being a good boss is giving a damn about leadership and running a great business is giving a damn about customer service, what about great software?

Great software boils down to giving a damn about user experience. Take a look at your browser history. How much horseshit do you have going on in your digital life? Web applications take the cake for shameless apathy. When an exception turns up – when someone, miraculously, gives a damn about making their software work well, it’s a special moment.

Hipmunk is just such a miracle. Look at this homepage:

The text fields are huge, meaty, clearly-labeled things. Easy to find and click on. Instead of being relegated to a forgotten sidebar, the search activity itself is the focal point of the page. There are no distracting promotions or other crap you don’t care about. “You’re here to search for your flight, so let’s make it happen!” cries Hipmunk, grabbing you by the cheeks and shoving you into search land. Want to leave tomorrow? Type “tomorrow” into the date field.

For reference, let’s compare to another site.

Look at that shit!

From the two examples, which app gives more of a damn about helping you find your flight?

Travelocity can’t even be bothered to make their time of day dropdown fit the default selection.

Meanwhile: Hipmunk’s outstanding search results interface.

There is a sort option called agony. It’s the default. Hipmunk’s creators thought a moment and realized that lengthy flights and layovers are an important detail to make clear from the beginning. The layout lets you see a timeline for your flight date, letting you quickly understand when you’re leaving and when you’re arriving in local time. It’s also a great way to visually compare the lengths of multiple flights. These guys… well, you know what I’m going to say.

No matter what you’re doing, giving a damn matters. The things you do that you don’t give a damn about, I guarantee you’re doing poorly. You can’t give a damn about everything, but please, I beg you, find at least one thing.

And if you do give a damn: I cannot wait to meet you, work with you, be your customer or use your software.

I’ve hated Flash for the better part of five years, a bigotry mostly inspired by how poorly it has worked for me as an end-user. It’s even worse for people who need to maintain web sites in Flash, as I later learned professionally. An essential tool for any computer I use more than five minutes is Flashblock for Firefox or the outstanding ClickToFlash plugin for Safari.

Then it dawned on me: If I hate it this much, surely Adobe, who is responsible for maintaining it, must hate it even more. Surely no amount of money is worth this much pain, right? There must be another reason Adobe prolongs this shared internet misery.

Drawing equal parts inspiration from 2001, Terminator 2 and Babylon 5, I present to you: Flash is My Keeper.

The universal trial, of course, is money and I’m hardly exempt. There’s a sixty day delay between me making money from an iPhone app and Apple actually paying me. That leaves immediate, painful gaps in my cashflow.

The obvious solution to this is consulting — I’m privileged to know how to do a lot of things that are useful to people. Unfortunately, I’m still learning how to market, grow and manage that particular end of my business, so I’m painted into the most dread of corners: retail.

I live by the axiom that no honest man is too good for honest work. So while retail is often the dullest, most imagination free work you can do before hitting manual labor, that’s not the part that I hate most about my seasonal job.

No, the worst of it is this: I have to call my customers “guests.”

This is some of the most odious corporate newspeak bullshit in recent years. It has always irked me. Guest means a specific thing: certainly it implies hospitality, which may explain the intent, but it fails to properly convey the truth of the relationship between the store and the customer. Being the guest of another places the guest in the inferior position and the host in the superior position. While manners may require that hospitality be extended, being termed a guest in the final equation simply means that the customer does not belong there. It suggests they belong somewhere else.

This is the wrong view.

The customer is not a guest of the store. A successful retail experience means that the customer is at home in the store.

Somewhere, somehow, having “customers” became a distasteful condition for large corporations. This is unfortunate and I wish they would cut the crap. The truth is that there is honor in having customers. There is honor in upholding the sanctity of the customer relationship. Being a customer of a business means something very specific that no other English word can capture. Being a customer means being the lifeblood of a business. Being a customer means being the motive force behind a powerful organism that provides products, services, livelihoods and, ultimately, the basic existence of others. Being a customer is being part of a tradition that keeps babies nourished, families housed and people clothed.

That means something. Something potent. Something that must be continually venerated if we’re going to keep moving forward as rational people. Does any of this sound remotely like having a “guest” to you?

I’m proud to have customers. I’m proud to respect their importance to my business and their contribution to the fact that I’m not sleeping outside tonight. That is essential to my work ethic and it will never, ever change.

The end of my seasonal retail job can’t come fast enough. I’m not sure my teeth will survive the grinding required for me to get the word “guest” past my lips on every shift.

See the little movement lines, there on the left? They suggest the weird little dollar coin is moving from left to right. In western cultures (to whom the ad was targeted) left to right progression is associated with forward motion, while right to left progression signals backward motion. This something you’ll see in movies and comic strips if you’re looking for it. Here’s an example we all know and love:

The stylized arrow beside the word “Back” is pointing, appropriately, back, via a right-to-left perspective, while all of the letters in that word are also skewed right-to-left. The word “future,” conversely, is skewed left-to-right. It’s an instantly recognizable logo that succeeds by embodying its idea without whacking you over the head with it.

So look again:

Bing is talking about getting cash back, but illustrating their point by showing cash flowing away. This isn’t the economy to be talking about cash flowing away. I’m not sure that the dissonance this creates registers for most people but when it’s already unlikely that people will engage with your ad unit, the last thing you do is add subconscious resistance.

Yeah, it’s tiny, but the tiny things pile up into the enormous sand dunes that dog every last Microsoft endeavor with needless, unnecessary friction born of poor taste and obliviousness.

For more on this, enjoy a deconstruction of the hideous Bing logo.

Out of 20 images, 10 depict people either wearing a headset or holding a phone.

It’s a sad state of affairs: we’ve all come to think of customer service as this thing that kicks in when a company has screwed up.

That’s not the way it should be. True customer service comes from a passionate, proactive culture that embraces every opportunity to make the customer happy and loathes the idea of ever being a source of disappointment.

Regular readers will note that Netflix is a darling of mine. It’s with good reason: my personal relationship with Netflix is entirely positive. They provide me with a great product at a great price and have been consistently fervent in their interest to keep me happy as a customer. Beyond that, Netflix is a quintessential, recession-proof example of a company that spends its every second trying to make their customers as happy as possible. In a fascinating look at how a Netflix distribution center works, the Chicago Tribune revealed one of the most telling internal processes of all:

[VP of Communications Steve] Swasey, who drove in from Columbus, Ohio, where there is an even larger hub, pointed to a photocopy taped to the wall — a picture of Disc 4 of “Rescue Me” Season 4 alongside a sleeve that promised Disc 4 of “Rescue Me” Season 3. It’s a kind of Netflix perp walk. Some diligent associate caught the mistake before it shipped. “To me, I see it as a goose-bump moment,” Swasey said.

Sure, he’s the VP of communications. But the choice of words is so specifically visceral that you can’t doubt its authenticity. Not only does this organization care so much about their customers that they have real, living, breathing humans ensuring the discs match the sleeves, they even go so far as to nail potential customer disasters to the wall like trophies. They don’t know if you or I are enduring a TV cliffhanger that must be resolved with the very next disc of 24. They don’t know if you’re having a bunch of friends over to watch a specific episode of Rescue Me. All they know is that if you don’t get you exactly what you asked for, you’re going to be disappointed and they’ve failed. Right on up to the VP level, what might be seen as something quite small is enough to confer goosebumps.

That’s not an accident. That’s an organization spending a significant amount of time and effort on ensuring that its customers are its focus. Not after they’ve screwed up. Not after the customer is unhappy. They’re taking uncountable invisible steps to ensure the customer never has a reason to be disappointed in the first place.

The other modern paragon of customer service virtue is Zappos. True story:

My dress shoes were shot. Once upon a time I worked in an office and dress shoes were an integral part of a daily professional image. I needed new ones.

So I wandered around the mall with my girlfriend in search of something minimalist, comfortable and professional. I’m a picky bastard so after an hour, we’d discovered nothing quite my style. Finally, we found something perfect at Macy’s: simple, black leather, comfy as hell. After waiting about ten minutes for service, someone bothered to ask what I needed. When I requested my size in the shoes I’d found, I was told they were out of stock.

We left. I was about ready to resign myself to going barefoot the rest of my days when my girlfriend, a longtime fan, told me I needed to check Zappos. Sure enough, there were my shoes at a better price than Macy’s. At midnight, in around five minutes, I’d placed my order and with standard shipping expected to see my new shoes the next week. It was easier than shopping around, at least. I was happy enough with the whole experience.

Eleven hours later, my shoes had been delivered.

Let me say that again: eleven fucking hours.

This was eight months ago and I’m still a little speechless about this. My expectations were set so low by other online retailers, with their two days of processing and absurd charges for overnight delivery, nothing could have prepared me for the ridiculous, effortless haste Zappos showed in delivering what I’d ordered.

I’d never been unhappy with Zappos. I was already pleased with their prices, their solid website and their ever-present friendly tone. Behind the scenes, though, Zappos had spent countless effort, time, brainpower and what must be boatloads of money creating an infrastructure that can get a guy’s shoes delivered almost as quickly as he can choose them. Way the hell from Kentucky to anywhere in the country, no less. (This wasn’t a fluke, either – they reproduced their feat multiple times since)

This is behind-the-scenes, utterly invisible to the customer.

Your call center, if you need one, should be staffed with friendly, empowered people who answer quickly, work directly for your organization and give everything they can to address the needs of the customers they work with.

Then you should go further, giving everything in your soul to ensuring that most of your customers are so happy with what you give them, most don’t ever call you.

There are a laundry list of problems facing the growth of the App Store. I won’t bother to rehash them here. Let’s focus on the one that most thoroughly jeopardizes the future of developer businesses: Customer Service. Every other problem can be overcome or worked around but without the power of caring for your customers, your business has no reason to exist.

In an aside to a link last month, John Gruber muses:

I’m wondering how much of the problem is that the App Store is built on the foundation and framework of the iTunes Music Store, which was designed from the outset specifically as a venue for selling 99-cent downloads.

This is the most crucially important point: the iTunes Store was never designed to sell software. Among other things, Craig Hockenberry enumerates all the ways in which the App Store is hobbled by this historical truth. It’s a good, important post that you should read if you care about this kind of stuff. But it doesn’t address long-term outcomes related to customer service that will doom the developer community.

As an iPhone developer, I have no control over my storefront – Apple manages it for me, with basic data I provide. On the one hand, this is incredible news: access to a huge pool of customers, a complete distribution infrastructure and – best of all – I never have to worry about payment processing.

There’s just one issue: Apple doesn’t give a damn about my relationship with my customers.

Generous, attentive, impassioned customer service is an important piece of any successful business. My customers mean the world to me. Unfortunately, iTunes does not provide a clear, encouraging feedback channel.

User Reviews

When you’re selling music, user reviews are a simple tool. Much is subjective, but overall quality will be reflected in the reviews.

With software, the reviews have become more complicated. The most tantalizing way for a customer to speak out about software that is giving them problems is to write a review. And that’s what they do. Bug reports, feature requests and anything else that comes into their minds gets dumped into the reviews. And why not? The ability to write a review is prominently featured and uses a built-in, official form. It’s infinitely more seductive than leaving iTunes to write an email to the support contact. It’s also a venue provided by the same service that is taking the customer’s money, so it feels more intimately linked to their purchase than anything they can do on an external website or in their email client.

This is infuriating since the communication is strictly one-sided. There’s no way for the developer to follow up on these reviews to ask for more information. Without that information, acting on a bug report is often impossible. The worst part is that without dialogue, it’s impossible for the customer to learn more about their problem, discover workarounds and discover that there’s a living, breathing person who truly cares about the quality of the software they’ve just purchased.

Like it or not, the iTunes user review becomes the support form of last resort.

The Consequence

There are ways around this. Tap4Help is an interesting example, providing a built-in feedback and support request system. Developers, like Lucius Kwok, report some success explicitly declaring their email right in their application description with a call to action encouraging its use. I do this, too, but it doesn’t catch them all.

Why not? Nothing will ever come close to the power and authority of iTunes itself. I theorize that part of the reason so many customers prefer the review form to using a support email or link is that they know that iTunes will provide them satisfaction. No matter what, iTunes will show their review. They will be heard.

By keeping these customers so thoroughly at arm’s length, Apple retards the formation of relationships that will build developers’ business. I’ve turned angry emails into loyal customers through the power of honesty and genuine interest in customer issues. I’d desperately love to provide that dialogue for every customer, ever, but iTunes, under the current system, will continue to siphon off some portion of those opportunities into its black hole of customer reviews.

Having good conversations with your customers is as essential and non-negotiable as having an engine in your car. When Zappos tweets at me in thanks for my praise, I feel as though my relationship with the company has been further validated. When Netflix gives me complete and generous support when I have trouble with their service, I feel respect for them, since their conduct conveys respect for my business.

It’s all about how the customer feels. If you never get to talk with them, you’ll never get to impact that feeling.

Let’s Do It Better

This is not a hard problem to solve. If you happen to work on the iTunes Store infrastructure team, you may feel differently, but the company you work for is in the business of accomplishing the impossible on a fairly regular basis. My sympathy is limited.

Developer Review Replies

This is the easiest part. Let the developer reply to user reviews. This isn’t groundbreaking and I’m the eight thousandth developer to suggest it. So make it happen. The developer can join the conversation and solicit additional information so that bug reports that go into the reviews can actually be productive. Notify whomever left the review that they have a response via email. For bonus points, let the customer reply directly to that notification to reach the developer.

Feedback/Support Form

Let the user provide feedback or support requests through an official, iTunes-embedded form. Send the feedback to the developer via email, with an anonymized reply-to address, like craigslist uses, so Apple can cover their ass on privacy concerns. For bonus points, provide a rating for each application that states how responsive each developer is to requests sent via this form.

There is no step three. With those two provisions, an open dialogue has been created for anyone who bothers to seek one. Software, even for the iPhone, is not music. The one-sided echo-chamber conversation of the iTunes Music Store does not work in the App Store. With the two modest tools I’ve described, developers will have an infinitely easier time creating the relationships they need to build their business.

I’m not going to hold my breath. Hopefully Apple is working on this stuff, but in the meantime, I need to figure out better ways to put myself in easy reach of my customers.