Ro Parra is senior vice president for Dell's Home and Small Business Group. Today on the Direct2dell blog, he wrote about Dell's Response to Wall Street Journal Article: "Some of you may have seen yesterday's story that appeared in the Wall Street...

I was thinking about a recent post on how to complain (and get results) , and took a jaunt over to Peter Davidson's blog, which I like. I remember that, with a nod to a past post from Josh Ledgard , that Peter wrote some time ago on his BeConnected blog...

Over the weekend I talked about From the Expert Zone: Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender. A quick visit during a meeting this morning, looking at the Xbox site, showed this connection point on how to... See this link as this page provides more...

Last week, CNET News reported that Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, said that their effort to provide current, popular shows has been a success, saying that “free, ad-supported shows are attracting a younger audience that's...

In InfoWorld Daily today there's a TechWatch post from Mike Barton (in TechWatch ) on the Windows Live QnA service, and more on "a hard look into whether Windows Live is the real deal or not." Included is a link to Oliver Rist's artycle on Windows Live...

Sean blogs yesterday about Top 10 Tips for Buying a New Car (and in under 3 hours door to door). Considering that buying a car is one of the most expensive purchases people make next to homes, this is a great primer for those of you about to take advantage...

We have a section on Microsoft site that provides an overview on our reliability efforts through our Trustworthy computing effort (aka TwC). We work closely with the group on several efforts (most recently this summer on the Engineering Excellence/Trustworthy...

MikeNash Nash presented an on-demand webcast for the Small Business Summit this past March, and presented a session on "Is Your Business at Risk? Tools To Use." ( View the webcast here. ) "The bad news is there is a lot of bad stuff out there: Malware...

Scoble wrote yesterday that " if I were a product planner, I’d be hanging out at Apple stores ." "If I were planning a new Web product I’d send teams of people to Apple stores all over the world to do market research and just hang out in the stores...

Talk about being slow to the game... you know you missed the press release when your eight year old calls you and asks "hey, what's this thing that I found on Windows Live?" When you search for a business on Windows Live Local , click on the business...

Got a call this weekend from friends who finally took the plunge and brought home a new Xbox 360 . They already have a Media Center PC and they wanted to know how to configure their new game machine as a Media Center Extender . My response: why read...

Alfred Thompson blogged today about this "how to" video on YouTube (nod of thanks to Alex's blog ) that goes through how to make a movie with Windows Movie Maker 2 (aka MM2). It's amazing what you can accomplish with this simple, free app. I use other...

I got a kick out of this interview -- Canada's Killer of Major Labels in Wired -- with Nettwerk's Terry McBride. His whole approach of letting the equivalent of influencer customers play with Nettwerk's bands original ProTools files and audio recordings...

As was widely reported, the International Astronomical Union voted to remove Pluto's designation as a planet in the solar system. Now, it's considered a " Dwarf planet ." Note that the IAU has not updated their official page page on the topic of Pluto...

A few months ago I was lamenting and thinking of an easy-to-use, online storage in the cloud service: "Give me a file share in the cloud where I can regularly back up critical files (photos, email and contacts) off-site... and make the files (or at least...

I'm turning off the comments on my blog for the weekend do to a slew of inappropriate comments.

A few months ago I wrote about Paul English's IVR Cheat Sheet, which is a great resource for getting to a live person when you're seemingly stuck in an automated operator call system. "IVR" means interactive voice response, those core of those automated...

In this month's Fast Company, there's an article with comedian Lewis Black and his experiences as a customer, illustrating the good and the (all too often) bad. In the article, he offers the Rage Curve, an analysis of "what drives people nuts about automated...

A few months ago I talked about how residents in Hong Kong can find 1 Gigabit residential internet access for about four times what we see in the States , about 200Mbps for around $40. Now in Japan, Martyn Williams reported in Networkworld recently...

I received a note this summer regarding my post on digital music sales earlier this year: they noted that the IFPI's CEO and Chairman IFPI, John Kennedy, said that... "as an industry, (record companies) spend more on research and development than...

Leave it to boingboing to bring us a post on Rick Mercer's CBC special, "Talking to Americans ." Rick is one of Canada's great satirists, and his show is the highest rated comedy special in Canadian television history, reaching 2.7 million viewers in...

I received a notice that the LifeCam VX-3000 should arrive today. I ordered the VX-3000 as I don't think that I need the 5MP camera feature , but I may find that I'm wrong. I have heard a couple of people running into configuration problems related...

From Mobilityguru on Tom's HW Guide, an interesting collection of Customer Tech Support Stories (Part one). "An overwhelming number of you responded to Barry Gerber's request for tech-support stories. In the first part of what will likely be a long...

News.com reported today that the the University of Michigan released their latest update to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is "a uniform and independent measure of household consumption experience." According to the News article on ACSI...

We often talk about the importance of eating our own dogfood . See this article from News.Com on "Managing desktops the Microsoft way," which describes the effort Microsoft took on to manage desktop PCs at Energizer . Steve Ballmer discussed the effort...