Potential

I have been thinking of what we might be able to achieve at Thinkbulbs. Here's one.

While taking a break from the grueling exam series, I came across a Dell ad for 1U servers - a whopping $862+ for a Celeron, 512MB RAM, 80G hard drive and 3-year basic enterprise support. As a DIYer, I simply cannot see the value in it. The basic enterprise support is not nice enough to justify the cost.

Well, one argument goes like this: Businesses don't have the manpower assembling and maintaining their own servers. By buying from Dell, you get a usable machine straight away with an all-in-one support package. But this does not include the cost of hosting and maintaining the services on the server. You still need to buy applications and server software to install on the machine, and you need someone to maintain it. Not cheap at all. So why not push the services out to a third party, like, say, Thinkbulbs? There is much potential for us to develop really great and *affordable* applications for small and medium businesses.

One aspect of businesses is particularly annoying - customer support. Even (maybe especially) for large companies. AT&T disappointed me so much yesterday when they told me I couldn't receive calls because of a "routing error" at some outsourced company, and that I would have to wait until they fix it. Uh... what kind of customer support is this? Today my friends told me that such incidents have occurred before, and apparently AT&T is taking no active steps to resolve the issue. I wonder what kind of customer support system they have. How can they not have found out this flaw already? Do they even review their service history at all? There is so much room for improvement.

Another aspect that strikes me as important is logistics. Last week I was at Bestbuy Milpitas looking for a particular LCD. The salesperson was absolutely sure there was no stock left, and I would have to wait for restocking. Undefeated, I tried my luck at another Bestbuy in Palo Alto, and guess what? They do have that LCD. Whether it is a logistics error or laziness on their staff's behalf, there is, again, much to improve for Bestbuy.

But then, these big companies are difficult to change. They often are too accustomed to their ways. Small and medium businesses are different. They can change. They have to, or they risk going out of business. We could help them out in maintaining their competitive edge.