Rude, rude, rude!

[Brian Morrison]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000 07:26:00 -0700 (PDT), Bill Wood wrote:

>We should have the goodness to sit down, shut up, and wait for
>the deadline before bitching and whining. We probably won't
>like it, but let's wait and see what the man has to say.

You are right Bill, but since the 'timeline' was first mooted in March
(or was it February?) and it is now the last day of the month when a
statement was promised, it feels like it is rather close to the wire.

We all hope that BSW will breathe new life into PMMail, and they still
could do so, but if nothing has appeared in another 24 hours that's
another broken promise on just letting us know let alone actually
delivering on the promise.

Just to give an example somewhere else, my ISP promised to allow people
to sign up for a new unmetered calls deal before the end of August. We
all knew that the announcement would need to be made earlier than start
of service to give people time to enter the new access numbers (you
really don't want to know about UK telecoms at this level!) and sign up
for the ISP's 24/7 access arrangements (the default is for off-peak
access only, which suits many people). Today, on the last day of the
month in which the service was to be made available, they have
announced that they need to put in more capacity still to avoid
everything falling over instantly as everyone connects and stays logged
on from the word go.  Some additional capacity is already in place, it
takes a tie up between the ISP and British Telecom to do this because
of the way that the traffic is routed off the main voice trunk links
onto dedicated IP backbones and so the actual launch of service will be
on October 9th.

So, the service will actually be about six weeks later than their
original announcement's latest date. This is provoking a lot of protest
already, and all because their customer management should have been
better. I don't see the PMMail situation any differently. It's bad to
be late with the right announcement, it's even worse to be late with
the wrong one.

-- 
Brian Morrison                                  bdm@fenrir.demon.co.uk
              do you know how far this has gone?
               just how damaged have I become?
                                      'Even Deeper' by Nine Inch Nails