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Google update - July 2007 »

Stompernet SIMPLE drops the 40 day bombshell

So we got up to day 40 of Stompernet SIMPLE yesterday and once again they dropped a bombshell. For our $97/month SIMPLE will continue with a WEEKLY update rather than the daily action item we’ve been used to.

Some of SIMPLE has been great. Some of it has been absolutely dire - never in the faculty itself but usually in the way things are communicated.

These people are marketers, but there seems to be little understanding that without setting people’s expectations properly; suddenly telling us not to expect what we’ve been receiving to date (which has holes all over the place) just doesn’t cut it.

Ed Dale made a comment on this blog a couple of weeks ago; I quote “We are going to be constantly improving SIMPLE - it’s a really important project to us” - Sorry Ed, communications need to be improved big time.

And I quote from Leslie Rohde’s day 40 message: “And of course, if you do run into problems, we’re still here” - sorry Leslie, but there are many questions asked in the forums that have not been responded to by the faculty. 

I’ll continue with SIMPLE for the time being, but once again I’m far from happy. I don’t know how they manage it, either I either love it or hate it, but I’m never indifferent to Stompernet SIMPLE.

PS. I’ve just received notification that my credit card has been billed for the next month of Stompernet SIMPLE. It is completely cynical of Stompernet to tell us about the changes that are happening the day before our cards get charged with no opportunity to cancel. Grrrrr.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 11:59 and is filed under internet, stompernet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Stompernet SIMPLE drops the 40 day bombshell”

  1. Ed Dale Says:
    July 9th, 2007 at 00:46

    Hi David,

    I suppose the meaning of a communication is in the ear of the receiver. We are moving to weekly updates - instead of daily action items - and we explained why on the call.

    Ed

  2. david Says:
    July 9th, 2007 at 09:27

    Hi Ed,

    Thanks for the response, absolutely right, there is plenty of room for the meaning of a message to be corrupted between transmission and reception; what YOU MEAN not be what I HEAR, something like this:

    Sender->encoding->message->noise->decoding->receiver->response

    Unfortunately I couldn’t listen to the call on Friday as Barcelona is just in the wrong timezone (midnight on a Friday just isn’t going to work for me). I will listen once the recording is available, which may of course go some (or all) the way to answering my criticisms.

    Perhaps if the call had been on Thursday (and been made available to download) then Friday wouldn’t have seemed like such a bombshell, but while enjoying my Friday night I checked email on my PDA (I know, very bad habit) and was enfuriated by the day 40 message.

    It seems very similar to the way in which the end of the first month was communicated and people were worried that they couldn’t cancel. Just not enough thought seems to have gone into it.

    Anyway, I don’t like to sound negative all the time about SIMPLE because so much of it is good.

    David

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