Cook’s Collaborative Edge

A Ms. Delgado calls - from Seidenbergs NY office team - she’s
customer relations but in a different physical office. New Jersey has a similar office. A friend has submitted my case there. He reads me an email of the bureaucratic reply. Laughable.

I am calling to tell you that your son’s problems have been taken care
of and that as Tamy Tarabola told you we have looked into the door to
door selling issue.
It “has been taken care of.”

Me: who TRG the company or the single salesman?

She: the salesman.

Me: What happened? What does “taken care of” mean?

She: I can’t divulge that.

Me: This is not a single salesman issue - verizons agents have been
selling illegally in bordentown without permits.

She: i can only address what happened to your son.

Me: Well how about the larger issue? How about Ewing in 2007 and
2008 without permits there either?

She: Ewing?

Me: yes Ewing.

She: Well I will let the people responsible know. I will send them an
email.

Me: how about putting me directly in touch with them?

She: I can’t do that. But your son’s problem has been taken care of.

Me - No there is a BIGGER problem here - you are selling door to door
in 2 NJ communities illegally and likely in other townships as well -
I want you to obey the law and quite dissembling and get me to someone
in authority

She: I can’t do that sir

Me: Goodbye

So there you have it. Verizon’s FIOS is an information service. Tom
Alibone tells me that means that NJ authorities have NO means - save
the state attorney generals office to deal with this disregard of
local law and these shoddy sales practices. The State BPU has
authority over copper - wireline service…. none over FiOS. So these
renegades are free to hire god knows who and unleash them on working
class NJ communities where one by one they strip people of the
wireline phones with contracts that at best are deceptive and land
them in limbo where a very very basic service is now deregulated and
where the customer is powerless.

My son did not let them take out the copper and yet his copper
regulated service is now gone. And people like Senator Doria in the
NJ legislature couldn’t care less.

Dealing with Verizon is like dealing with a Soviet ministry…. one
of the local circles of hell where you will be endlessly passed around
from apparatchik to apparatchik.

Is there any one out there who would put up a mechanism for collecting
stories of FioS sales in NJ?

This need to be taken to the Philly TV stations.

Do these people have a clue how they look to the rest of us?

How frustrating when Verizon, the gold standard of American incumbents has in FiOS Internet an excellent product but then driven by the greed of the bean counters, takes a devil may care attitude to sell at any cost this much is possible because the only thing that matters is that quarterly bottom line keep the executives paid in the shareholders happy.

I have been a 10 meg by two meg Fios Internet customer since October 19 and once they managed to bill me properly, the service’s been excellent and I am quite satisfied. Indeed earlier today I watched real-time streams of the Olympic opening ceremonies from German TV and captured images almost 6” x 10” that were the most stunningly clear and large I have ever seen from Internet protocol TV streaming on my large Apple monitor.

OK the praise is finished. Now the brickbats. In door to door selling in New Jersey at least in two townships that I have identified and so far — they are the only two that I have actually spoken to the proper authorities, — is selling Fios triple play door-to-door via the sales agents, presumably on commission, and who in Bordentown NJ and Ewing NJ have been selling in the case of Ewing for over a year without legally required peddlers licenses. (The licenses presumably will give dissatisfied customer a place to go when they are mistreated.)

On the basis of my 42-year-old son’s experience, these d2d peddlers oversell, overpromise, fill out the forms sloppily, do not sign the blank where their name is supposed to be filled in, do not have the customer initial at the point of every charge as agreeing and as the contract specifies is mandatory – this is but a short list of the problems.

The contract itself is a Verizon FiOS document, clearly marked as New Jersey sales order form. The only indication on the document that the order taker is not a Verizon employee is one that phrase at the bottom that states “D2D agent” must have customer initial. A jpeg is available below.

The contract is a murky mass of bundled agreements and extras and packages added on to packages such that it would take a Teletruth agent like Tom Allibone of New Jersey going through it line by line over a 75 minutes on the phone with me to figure out what was going on.

And even then on the back, in fine print, you read under the heading bundle service agreement: “bundled customers must sign the bundle service agreement online at www.Verizon.net/fiosbundleterms within 30 days after installation of services. If the agreement is not accepted within this time frame, bundled discounts will not appear. Standard retail prices will apply.” So there is another time bomb waiting to blow up in the faces of Verizon customers.

The very last line of page one says to the unfortunate customer: please call 888-553-1555 with questions. I did call this number and it turned out to be a general Verizon number that dumps me in to a menu of general consumer choices that I decided not to waste my time on.

Shuck off Responsibility to an Outside Vendor and then don’t audit that vendor with care

What Verizon has done is hire an outside vendor called TRG – apparently one of several vendors to sign up hundreds of kids eager for sales commissions and set the hordes loose on the doors of towns where the FiOS is available.

When the bill comes to my son, he finds that the services given as 90 day free promotions are billed for - contrary to the written contract. A $30 installation fee that is specifically marked on the contract as free is also billed for. And two in-house outlets at $55 each for a total of $110 are billed for when they weren’t not ordered or installed.

My son did, fortunately demand some identification from the agent who signed “Todd” and left a 724-987-3031 phone number. Calling the number, the person who answered presumably eight TRG employee and probably following a script said “I’m sorry sir it was a misunderstanding we cannot give you those discounts but I will offer you $10 a month off for the life of the contract” - — this is a $117 basic contract with $48 a month of extras. With a rate for the two year version of 117 versus 112 for the one-year version and a virtual promise that rates will be raised at the end of 24 months! BTW I called the number and got an answering machine, left a message and never received a callback.

My son said: this is a contract I have it in writing you are telling me that you will not abide by this contract? The answer was the same. Demanding a supervisor, my son still received the same answer. This was a misunderstanding the paperwork you have does not matter and the only thing we can do is offer you a $10 a month discount. My son by this point was angry and he said I don’t want any of these services turn them off all of them. (He also said I want my phone restored to copper. That is impossible sir. No you are wrong it is possible… I did not let them rip the copper out. No you are mistaken sir it is not possible to go back to copper.

When Service Restored it is Wrong Service

They said okay we will disconnect and on Monday, July 28 his television, telephone, and Internet service were disconnected. He told me that I did remember Dad, you said not under any circumstances to let them rip out the copper. The copper is still there And so late Monday having had to go out and buy a prepaid cell phone he started calling Verizon to try to get his COPPER service restored.

It turned out that on Tuesday the 29th someone entered into the system in order to restore his FiOS service. NOTE - FiOS not copper. At the end of the week he still had no phone service and his cell phone was basically unreachable.

I began doing what I could including calling 212 number I was given last fall when verizon messed up my FiOS billing This is the number of an office that turns out to be called Verizon Executive Customer Relations in New York City. Nice people but turned out to be worse than useless. Last Monday a woman named Tammy said: oh yes Gordon Cook I remember your son - same name right? - called us this morning and we are helping him out and we absolutely are connecting him with the person who can rectify this problem. The next morning I called back after my son told me know he did not call them on Monday. “I last talked to them either Thursday or Friday,” he said.

So Stacey told me she would get someone who can help and left me hanging on a blank line for 15 minutes! When in disgust I hung up and redialed, Stacy answered again apologized and said I will bring someone to the phone immediately. After s 90 second wait a Miss Mitchell appeared who said I will look up the records on 609-882-2572 since I understand that this is the disconnected number. I immediately said: no no no. Too late she was gone. After another five minutes – fuming by now – I gave up and hung up. The number she quoted me was MY NUMBER not my son’s. When I called back again I got a recorded “all our agents are busy” answer. Worse than useless - not what you would call competent.

My son was experiencing the same thing with his pay by minute cell phone – calling being placed on hold for hours in being transferred from pillar to post with everything from promises fix to we can’t find records, to what is your name and how do I get back to you, to sorry that information is not available.

When Drowning Call Your Verizon VP for help if you are lucky enough to know one

In desperation and knowing the Vice President of Federal Relations in Washington DC, I contacted him, and got through to him directly - since of course I had this direct phone number and I am happy to report that he transferred my problem to someone who actually did something.

The next morning I get a phone call from a Joe Parisi when Boston who is ordering the Bordentown Central office to get on the situation and get service restored. By mid-afternoon lo and behold he had a working telephone. But by early evening we found out in another call with Joe that it was a Fios telephone and presumably $50 a month plus $15-$20 in extra taxes and fees rather than a copper plain-vanilla no extras phone that my son had ordered on July 28 29th that should have build out at $19.55 a month. Poor Joe was not happy when he found out that the FiOS retention people had not heard that copper was desired and took a solid week to reinstall the unwanted FiOS service. And now that FiOS was back it was not what was wanted.

And yesterday I found out that after a session with the FiOS retention squad my son had agreed to FiOS phone service and Fios Internet service and no television and $20 off on the life of the contract plus a promise that he would not be billed $30 for installation, that there would be no billing for the extra calls and the bogus $110 bill for sockets that were not installed would be removed.

Enter the Director of FiOS D2D sales NJ

Now yesterday at my request Joe had Tammy Dietz who is a Verizon full-time employee in charge of door to door sales of FiOS in New Jersey called me. I went over what happened in some detail with Tammy who was a very nice, professional, but somewhat defensive lady. She assured me that this was an exceptional aberration and that one salesperson must’ve strayed outside of the territory and sold in Bordentown where he should not and assured me that he would be promptly fired.

She also assured me that they worked meticulously with every outside vendor including TRG to let them know that they must never sell in a New Jersey township without full complete proper and legal peddlers licenses. Almost every township in New Jersey has this requirement and praise be it generally keeps door-to-door salesman from bothering us.

But as I explained to Tammy at least since mid-June door-to-door salesman had been selling in Bordentown and were apparently continuing to sell because the police department told me that I was the second person on that very day to call with a complaint about a Fios sale and explained that she could not remember the last time she issued a peddler’s license for Bordentown.

Tammy said she’d look into this and get back to me. So far I haven’t heard from her. Why am I not surprised? Well for one reason I called my own township – Ewing and spoke to be a responsible person in the clerk’s office who told me that Verizon had applied in June of this year for peddlers permits but did not yet have a valid permits and would not for another week or 10 days. Were they permitted in Ewing Township in 2007? Absolutely not came the reply.

Well I can state from my own direct knowledge that from some point in 2006 throughout 2007 Verizon door-to-door salespeople were selling on my street and indeed probably the majority of home owners on the street have purchased some kind of FiOS services. How many problems in how many complaints? I don’t know - finding out has not been and should not be my full-time occupation. One immediate neighbor was sold a triple play two months ago and I need to ask you whether it was buying mail or door to door. He told me he was satisfied. They were knocking on my door last summer and all I remember is that they were coming from a company with headquarters in New Brunswick. Now most New Jersey residents including myself very likely do not realize that they are protected by peddlers laws from these kinds of sales intrusions. Folk by and large don’t realize that if they want the pesetering to stop they should call their local government.

These peddlers laws it turns out are there for very good reason. Because it also turns out that, if you have a problem with this very complex highly confusingly presented triple play service that does include the very basic and vital wireline aspect of your communication with the outside world, you may well find out, as did my son, that if you are billed for something you did not agree to you are out of luck and getting someone at Verizon to do something on your behalf is almost impossible.

I mean what are you supposed to do if you do not know a Verizon vice president? The New Jersey legislature rolled over and played dead for Verizon and the spring of 2006. The New Jersey Board of public utilities is not enforcing anything anymore. Under the Republican free-market way of life, consumer advocate regulatory help has been disbanded. So here we are vulnerable and largely helpless when one part of a Fortune 50 company with a good technical product somehow capitulates to its marketing arm for a shoddy non verizon supplier who with every reason to over sell is able — by being just a verizon agent — to treat the customer as sucker and when they don’t bother to register with local authorities you have plenty of opportunity for problems to arise and no reasonable way for customers to satisfy those problems.

It goes out ignoring the law in at least two instances Bordentown and Ewing of which I am aware and does the hard sell. It is too bad because as my wife said Verizon has a decent product and people would buy it without them stooping to this kind of selling.

Meanwhile you can find JPEG’s of my son’s contract page 1 here and page 2 here and the appropriate page of his first bill here. I would hope the JPEG’s of the contract would be passed around to help people understand the difficulties into which they may be getting. Because once getting in getting out is not easy.

Customers - go away

Are you thinking you can identify the appropriate decision-makers in Verizon? Good luck. Apparently the person in charge of FiOS New Jersey is named Tammy Deitz.. And there is someone named Joe Parisi in Boston whom I must say did a conscientious and professional job. But an e-mail address for either - no. A listing of the companies they employ other than TRG? No! Anyone responsible for ensuring that their contractors obey New Jersey State laws? No. Anyone responsible for deciding in what townships they do door-to-door campaigns? No. Anyone in Verizon monirtoring any of this? If so I can’t find them. I called the Mayor’s Office in Princeton yesterday. Not surprisingly an extremely wealthy Princeton they are not going door to door and are selling by mail only. This is what they ought to do.

But again someone there should realize this is the sad story that does result when they do make the investment to bring fiber to the home and then destroy the goodwill that might result from that investment with the kind of behavior I have outlined and with stonewalling that makes it virtually impossible for any mistreated customer to get any kind of justice. Unless they know a Verizon vice president. Now why do I think there is an incentive to oversell, and over bill and have no recourse for your customer to follow? I would love to know how many give up and pay the higher amount because they have not the time or strength to fight.

from Michel Bauwens to my Economics of IP networks list today:

Dear All,

I’ve been enjoying the latest exchanges about the mentalities of bureaucratic and corporate leaders, having been in similar environments before.

As you perhaps know, I have been more and more interested in the age of the transition to feudalism, where the Roman leadership similarly could not understand the new christian mentality

I think there is an important issue here: do distributed modes really outperform the centralized/decentralized modalities. If this is indeed so, then I suggest that we introduce a new concept: Peak Hierarchy, which I’m using as an analogy with peak oil,

Cook”s Edge: the first linbk goes to an outstanding u-tube video of Michel talking in Rome in front of the Colesseum.

I haven’t paid attention to Telco 2.0 in about 7 or 8 months. For shame!

If you have not looked at the output of Martin Geddes and crew its high time. What I have written about BT fits into the framework they are building - a very rich framework that goes way beyond just one company.

Today’s installment is here

and at the very beginning of the above is a link to the previous installment The first paragraphs of THIS link follow.

Two-sided markets: what are they?

This is the first of a series of articles celebrating two years of Telco 2.0 blogging, and focused on our favourite hot topic, two-sided markets. In this first article we’ll be going into some depth exploring what two-sided markets are. (For a shorter high-level introduction, look here). Later, we’ll explore why they matter, and how these ideas can be applied to the telecoms industry. By opening up their platform we believe there is about a $350bn/year opportunity in a decade’s time, as telcos transform into logistics businesses for digital supply chains.

A sizable chunk of that opportunity is in the form of two-sided markets. [Read the above Telco 2.0 link from last November and you will see how it (building from the kinds of discussions we are having) makes HUGE sense.]

The bottom line is this: Two-sided market theory tells us about how platforms work economically. There are many such ‘platforms’ from operating systems to stock exchanges to nightclubs. The theory models the pricing and demand for certain types of platform services which involve interactions between two distinct groups. Specifically, it studies the allocation of prices for using platform services between those two sides, where typically one side is a ‘seller’ and the other a ‘buyer’. The platform typically attracts one side by giving away services below cost (or free) to attract the less price-sensitive users on the other side.

Telcos are busy creating platforms at the moment to open up their networks and other OSS/BSS assets, but the assumed business model tends to be one-sided: we’re buying an IMS/SDP/NGN platform so we can launch new services. We think there will be a significant shift towards 2-sided market models in telecoms — with the telco as a facilitating platform for a much broader range of interactions between consumers and businesses. This will seriously disrupt current market structures and pricing for broadband and voice/messaging. (Video is already enmeshed in a 2-sided structure based on advertising revenue.) So it’s worth being clued up on what’s going on.

A new discipline

The study of two-sided markets is relatively new — with most research done in the past 8 years or so. Aspects of them, within specific industries, have been examined in isolation for several decades (e.g. trading hubs, phone networks). More recently, there was an insight that several apparently different kinds of platforms shared common features. These platforms supported different kinds of interaction, which are not mutually exclusive:

* matching users from two groups to enable them to transact (e.g. a job search site).
* building audiences by assembling content and services to attract viewers or users (e.g. Google search, telephony system).
* collectively managing knowledge bases (e.g. Wikipedia).
* forms of demand co-ordination or cost sharing (e.g. credit card network, operating system), and may be combinations of the above.

COOK’S Edge: Thinking about this I observe that Cisco is flying high while Motorola is crashing. Could it be that Cisco has figured out two side markets while Motorola has not? This is my conclusion after thinking about what follows.

If telecom is also best positioned as logistics businesses for digital supply chains, then its role as INFRASTRUCTURE to enable two side markets is critical. (Note my cisco analogy is likely not pure as, while it sells good products, its perhaps overly broad approach yields in some cases sales solutions where the customer winds up with products that while part of the Cisco family still may not be as cost effective as newer alternatives,)

Explore the Telco 2.0 blog. There is a lot of wisdom to be found there.

This morning’s mail brought news of a 3 minute 45 second video clip of very candid and very outstanding remarks from Vint Cerf. Vint says very clearly what needs to be said and what needs to be grasped and acted on by the new president and congress next year. The clip was captured, blogged and up loaded to YouTube by Tom Foremski proprietor of IMHO for ZDNet.

Foremski writes: ” I spoke with Vint Cerf at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay. I asked him about net neutrality and the problems created by Telcos in trying to own the gateways to the Internet. Here is the video, the quality is very high contrast because of the lighting but the content is fascinating. Mr Cerf talks about how he was misquoted on the subject of net neutrality and offers a solution to the current issues around broadband Internet.”

My observation is that in my opinion it is not the lighting that is unusual but rather the camera angle. It looks like Foremski is seated with his camera pointed up. The camera is looking at Vint’s chin. If Tom were seated one would expect that Vint would look down at him every now and then. Vint does look in a direction where you would expect him to look if Tom were standing talking to him. A friend actually pointed this out to me.

Consequently I sent Vint an email: “you knew you were being recorded - surely? I hope: in any case the good deed is done…. thank you sir.”

Vint replied with permission to quote: “While I was not told that my informal conversation over cocktails was being recorded, and I am not happy about that, I believe that the points made are worth consideration and serious discussion”

I agree completely with Vint’s response. I have spent a few minutes trying to find a contact for Tom to offer him an opportunity to respond. I have been unable to find out how to promptly reach him.

My opinion is that it is very unfortunate that Vint didn’t know he was on camera. However I hope that good will come of this because what he did say is correct and needs to be said loud and clear from every street corner in the land.

Here is my transcript of Vint’s remarks

“My candid opinion of Verizon? I don’t know if you followed the network neutrality debates but those guys were misquoting me in full-page ads in the Washington Post, so I have very little warm feeling about those guys. When MCI was being sold into Verizon . . . [COOK Report: There is a break in the recording here and, in what is on YouTube, Vint does not finish the sentence.] Vint continues:

In the places where there is a strong regulatory control, it seems to be working. Although if you are watching the UK the BT guys are making the same kinds of arguments that Verizon ATT and the cable companies are making. Basically it’s like little kids throwing a tantrum - I am not going to build this system unless you give me three scoops of ice cream and a pony.

My reaction to this is quite negative. It is harmful to the national interest to behave in this way. Because this is serious infrastructure. It is very much like the road system and I have been ridiculed for suggesting that it be treated like the road system.

“Oh you want the government to take over.”

No. What I really want is a split in the regulatory framework for Internet service. I want to see a reintroduction of common carrier responsibilities. I want to see a horizontal treatment of regulation. I want to see the broadband providers split into two parts either literally or at least from the accounting point of view. I want wholesale broadband service to be required. I want them not to be able to interfere with anyone’s applications. I want them to charge themselves the same for their access as they charge everyone else.. All of those things. And they will say well we won’t build any more fiber.

I am not an economist and I do not know what the right reactions are other than to say we have to derive incentives that will cause these companies to behave differently or to create an incentive for a competitor to put in facilities that will compete with them.

We need to take away their monopoly management because what we did in the United States is to say okay we will not control you anymore because you are providing Internet access as an information service which is unregulated and in so doing we destroyed the common carrier rule and that we essentially told them do anything you want to. It is your investment and you can do anything you want with the higher-level applications and we don’t care because we think deregulation is wonderful. And frankly that’s [garbage] especially when we have a set of incumbents. If you have a tabula rasa - you remember the telephone system from the 1920s? There were dozens of them and that was bad too because you had to know which telephone company your friend was on. . . .

So we have to have a set of rules that makes sense out of attempts to build multiple infrastructure and in the absence of this we have to make it a privilege to build the infrastructure. There has to be a reasonable rate of return, but there cannot be a confiscatory rate of return and it can’t be abused by allowing people to throttle competitors.”

Here is a recent example of some of the very smart thinking that happens regularly on my Economics of IP Networks mail list. On July 21 Jaap wrote with regard to the NY Times article linked below:

Dear Gordon, Jan and Bill,

Yes, I read the article in CaNet below and also the expansion of it in the New York Times “Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry” The point is that this development of the appearance of ‘Internet Centric Devices’ involves more relevant issues that converge and will interlink into a forcefull motion, than only ‘energy efficiency’ and ‘continuity of storage’ for end users.

As Kevin Werbach points out often in his Super Nova conferences and I have described in 2005 in my paper about Telecom in Transition http://www.vantill.dds.nl/transitions.html the movement of intelligent functions in ICT is a bifurcation: left towards the user devices (networked) AND right towards more central services at colo-server farms. As David S. Isenberg pointed out in 1997 this leads to a vacuum in the network services “the STUPID NETWORK” between these two ends, much to the chagrin of the then hopefull telco industry.

What now is happening is that the leftside (in horizontal valuechain terms) trend towards ever smarter PCs software and hardware is disrupted too. Functions are moving leftward into smaller & less costly Netbooks/Smartphones/Net-Tops AND rightward intowards even bigger “online SAAS services for processing and storage lile Google Docs etc. Much to the chagrin of PC softwaremaker Microsoft and the makers of PC’s like Dell. In my opinion the dektop PC is taken apart in the appearing vacuum by this trend into a “STUPID PC”. The presetation and user interface is improved ( ie iPhone 3G) but through fast telecom& networking the storage and processing is moved elsewhere where cooperation and other functions can be non-personal again. This is a disruptive innovation and unstoppable worldwide.

Several issues converge and interlink to bring the trend about:
* The introduction of NETWORKED Smartphones like iPhone, better special devices like TomTom and Linux based Net-Tops. So there is much more behind these than only the gadgets the press describes.
* New and faster access- (3G, 4G and Fttx) and fiber optic backbone networks—–> making the location of central ICT hardware and processors unimportant; yes there should be upgrades made and obstacles removed here soon to meet demand;
* Demand for low power consumption of mobiles and netbooks AND more energy efficient colo’s for processing and storage;
* The more central facilities will be built distributed in the form of ‘Clouds’ (aka Grids) of computer centres;
* SAAS, including central SW development and flexible upgrading of business rules etc for the evolving business processes of corporations;
* telecom operators moving into IT services (not upward but to the right in my value chain models);
* the urgent need for faster and better cooperation in projects (aka collaboration in the USA) for value creation (~ N !);
* Hyperconnected Global 2.0 Middle Class workforces arising where you would not have expect them.

I have no doubt that Kevin Werbach will bring up these issues at his next Super Nova conference and hope that the “Networked Stupid PC” slogan will catch on :-)) And oh yes it has all the right attributes of a disruptive innovation as described by Christensen: - Industry sectors totally taken by surprise (see the articles mentioned above) - Disbelief ( only for 30- to 90-minute experiences) / less good than PC’s/ “only for second computer” - users can do it themselves allready through a browser (like with Google Docs and Apps) / only need a subset of functions - new markets will open which where underserved until now.

Faites vos Jeux !!

Jaap van Till

Cook’s Edge: Jaap is professor of Telecommunications & Networks
at the HAN University of Applied Science, NL

He is also responsible for a Master in Telecommunication Management (MSTM) course

The August issue offers an exhaustive examination of the development of changes n wireless technology and spectrum licensing from 2003 to mid 2008. Peter Ecclesine explains the development of increasingly sophisticated global spectrum regulation that is opening spectrum in excess of 3 gHz to innovative use.The interview forecasts likely developments over the next five years and closes with a look at Cisco’s announcement of Motion. Also March 17 to June 17 Symposium discussion. Click here to read the Executive Summary, Contents and Contributors to a 62 page August 2008 issue.

July is a special issue on the first seven years of Taiwan’s innovative National Digital Archive Program. It includes interviews conducted on site in April with four of the principals and explains how the program, that is the most cross disciplianry in the world, has not yet solved the IPR issues necessary to give it long term sustainability. Click here for the Executive Summary and Contents to a 59 page July 2008 issue.

The cowardly democrats have capitulated.

As a friend wrote: And here’s Glenn Greenwald with the latest - including a direct response to the “yeah but right after 9/11…” argument…

And yes its is the immunity for the telco’s that is especially inexcusable. And quite depressing to see that Obama threw in the towel - as my friend said about apple - too bad to see this from the company that is the gold standard - so its too bad that the gold standard for our next president does this.

As Dewayne Hendriks points out

DOMESTIC SPYING QUIETLY GOES ON

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy. These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity. The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns. Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency. “There’s virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn’t in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance,” said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. “We’re operating in a brave new world.”

I received several comments that made it clear that I failed to adequately describe what happened.

I wanted to achieve a copy of my boot drive from the Macpro to the drive of the Macbook pro. I connected as per what I thought were the instructions. I did use migration assistant. I FAILED to disconnect external firewire and USB drives. This caused me to wind up with a laptop that did not match my current desktop on the mac pro - my main machine.

Matt J wrote: To be honest, the people on the lines are not prepared for someone who might have direct copies of month-old user accounts on a separate disk so I can understand why this would happen. Most people who would have installed multiple disks would also have a little more knowledge in the workings of the system. But there’s always exceptions and it’s cool to be exceptional.

I reply - no this is not the case. The drive in bay two of my four bay Macpro is a drive that I clone maybe every 6 or 8 weeks… after a month it is quite out of date. I merely wanted the data - all the data - os - account settings - everything transferred from bay one (the boot drive of the Macpro) transferred intact to the new laptop…. about 80 gig of data.

The machine did not do this and gave me a functioning Macbook pro that looked like my Macpro had looked maybe six weeks earlier.

Scott Schukert said: First, it sounds like you’re complaining that the desktop pattern of the cloned machine doesn’t match the original; then it sounds like you’ve inadvertently cloned the wrong drive.

I reply - yes. But I did not clone the wrong drive. Migration assistant is supposed to clone the drive that the source machine is booted from. Yes?

I repeated the same process three different times alone with reinstalls of the OS as i made repeated calls to apple and did what i was told.

AFTER the fact I began to recall that years earlier one of the FIRST things that the response person would ask is do you have any external devices plugged into your source machine? Over two days and perhaps six calls NO ONE ever asked me this question.

Scott misunderstood my remark about the Apple store… I actually did not go there, thank god.

Scott concluded: Kudos on determining that you had to disable some of the extra drives. That’s the SECOND thing i would have tried.

He is correct and if i had reached him I would have been saved much time and grief…. this however is a question that could have been asked and answeredvia phone.

I had comments about rudeness to support staff - again not clear writing on my part. The incident happened in mid March…. the giving the caller a piece of my mind happened in late June and that was only AFTER the second unsolicited call from Apple trying to SELL me Apple care — something that i did not want. I have it on my main machine. I take my chances on the laptop because i do not use it that much.

Eytan commented: I would say shame on you for not reading the prompt about which drive your new computer was about to transfer data from.

I did read very carefully - the transfer was from the boot drive in bay one.

Slothrop commented: You tried to transfer your data but you don’t explain if you used Apple’s Setup Assistant program to transfer stuff, or if you just tried to copy it over. If Apple couldn’t help you make Setup Assistant work, that’s a legitimate gripe.

I was using the target disk migration assistant.

Finally a couple of folk comment that it was unrealistic to expect Apple to have a data base of user problems.

Here i am curious becasue after many years of new machines and quite a few calls, I sure had the impression that with every case that was more than a simple “abc ” being given a case number that there was some kind of cataloging that gave the OS engineering staff feedback.

False?

And of course the problem turned out to be SO elementary that I am amazed that apparently it was not part of a basic flow chart used to guide the support staff.

Apple brags about its knowledge base yet no one ever pointed me there…. (i have no idea if there is a “problems with target disk mode transfer” document.)