Outtakes

Everyone knows that the best part of a Jackie Chan movie is the credit crawl at the end, which displays the outtakes, or “bloopers,” from the production of the movie. With that in mind, we present you with some of the more memorable trivia we accumulated during our research:

Apple

During one of our phone calls to the Apple Store’s 800 number, the Apple staffer hung up on us. It was an accident, but it was one more event in the tortuous ordering process that could have sent other customers to buy Wintel.

What was especially ironic about the frustrating order process is that when the new Mac arrived, it was AWESOME. It still is awesome, definitely one of the best computers we’ve ever used. We predict that even more people will enjoy a G3 once Apple corrects the ease-of-use errors on its website.

Dell

Even after ordering a PC from the website, we still had to take a phone call from Dell staffers. Because of this, we have to be skeptical of Dell’s boasts about all the revenue the website is bringing in. If a Dell staffer still had to spend time with us, the website saved Dell little or no money on our transaction. If the website’s transactions carry as much overhead cost as transactions from other channels, why should anyone get excited about Dell’s online sales?

Amazon

We searched Amazon for one of our favorite literary characters, Travis McGee. Amazon returned a book we liked: “The World According to Travis McGee,” by R. Ackroyd. The only problem was this line on the book page:

Publication date: November 2011

We e-mailed Amazon congratulations on astounding foresight in the book industry ... and asked Amazon to notify us in 13 years when the book finally came out. Weeks later, when we checked the McGee book again, it showed a change:

Publication date: November 1911

Sure, Travis McGee didn’t come out in print until 1961 - but who’s counting?

Barnes & Noble

As noted above, the old design of BarnesandNoble.com had a major ease-of-use flaw that caused the site to delete our order. To clear up the problem, we called B&N’s 800 number. After describing our problem, we received what was at best a halfhearted apology from the staffer:

B&N staffer: Please understand that we’re a new operation, a new store online, and we’re still working out a lot of the kinks.
Mark Hurst: Amazon is also a pretty new store.
B&N staffer: Amazon has been around for six years.

Which leaves us wondering: Did Amazon come out sounding better or worse because of the staffer’s comment?

The Barnes & Noble website also gave us the most entertaining error message we came across. Ironically, it was generated when the “QuickSearch” feature took too long to return results. Amidst the geek jargon, the error message clearly lists Microsoft, for all customers to see, as an accomplice in the trouble.

Speaking of branding, we notice that the Web designers took pains to show the word “Error” in an extremely large font. It’s almost as if Barnes & Noble is proud to announce its programmers’ mistakes.

Eight Months Later, Another B&N Outtake

We checked Barnes and Noble in February 1999 and noticed a catchy new tag line for the store: “If we don’t have your book, nobody does.”

Imagine our surprise when we went to check out the current design of the page for Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte (see Barnes & Noble), and found that the book is no longer carried by barnesandnoble.com! Amazon.com does carry the book. What does that say about the new barnesandnoble.com tag line?

America Online

If you look closely at the screenshots in the America Online chapter, you’ll see that the Shopping Cart and Review Item screens did not reflect the 20 percent discount promised in the original promotion on the Shopping Channel. Here’s what happened next:

None of the final screens in the buying process noted the 20 percent discount.
The book arrived without an invoice, so we weren’t sure what we were billed.
When the credit card bill finally arrived, we verified that AOL did not grant the 20 percent discount as promised.
We sent an e-mail to AOL’s customer service to point out this obvious problem, and didn’t get a response.
Finally, several weeks after our order, we received a bulk e-mail from AOL (presumably sent to everyone who ordered the book), stating that the problem was “due to a systems error,” and that AOL would pay all charges for the book.

Because of its error, AOL gave the book for free to all its affected customers. Our hats go off to AOL. This is the kind of great customer service the Internet needs more of.

Microsoft Expedia

Here’s what we originally saw when we loaded the Expedia home page:

We congratulate the Expedia development team for building a site so popular that it needs to turn customers away - but the error message has to change. “HTTP/1.0” not only means nothing to customers, but it’s ugly and threatening. Geek jargon like this is a perfect invitation for customers to depart for a competing site.

CDnow

The Good Reports Bloated Graphic award goes to CDnow, which used 27 kilobytes to display the most useless piece of “art” we came across in our evaluations:

We waited several precious seconds for the CDnow New Age page to load, only to be bewildered by the mysterious graphic. It makes a great Rorschach test. What do you think it is?

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