Lonnie Knows Everything

First of all I want to acknowledge that I didn’t write the article, so I’m not going to copy and paste it here and pretend that I did .. the link to the original article can be found right here..

I did want to add to this experience however .. When the iPhone first came out, I signed up with AT&T because I had no choice.. I had about 4 months left on my contract with T-Mobile and so they charged me an early termination fee, I switched over to AT&T only to find their rates were NOWHERE near comparable.

A short time later, a jailbreak came out for the iPhone so I decided to cancel AT&T .. they charged me with a $200 early termination fee .. When I called T-Mobile, they treated me like royalty .. 

1. They allowed me back into my old contract despite having cancelled a couple of months earlier
2. They refunded my early termination fee
3. They refunded AT&T’s early termination fee ( amazing! ) 
4. They offered me unlimited minutes for being loyal, at the same rate as my 1500 minute plan
5. When I said I had an iPhone, they knew just how to provision my account

T-Mobile has been my provider for years and I wasn’t anxious to leave them for AT&T, so I was more than happy to return .. When I did, they took great care of me.

When I read this article on the consumerist, it wasn’t a surprise to me.

I was doing work for a client who sells items online, they had a custom made order management system and a custom integration into an online store..  the people who developed it for them, got out of that business and moved on .. 

One of their biggest requirements was multi-ship-to .. for gift orders to several people at once (they make candy) ..

After searching high and low for something that fit, we came to M.O.M and SiteLINK .. We requested the SQL version so we could have better access to migrate data into it.. They ended up giving us the foxpro version, which was awful .. they did not respond to us hardly at all for months until after our money back period was over, then they gladly replied.. 

After a chat with the CEO, we got them to give us the SQL version at a “discount” .. which translates to 15 thousand dollars, yep .. 15k for the switch to the SQL version of MOM, outrageous ..

So we get it going, and for the first few months we run into problem after problem after problem, but the dydacomp guys are fairly responsive.. albeit, not that helpful usually … the SiteLINK support guys are absolutely HORRIBLE, they usually don’t reply at all .. and when they do, they come off sounding pissed off or arrogant.

So this gets better… we had the unuseable foxpro version for a few months without being able to get ahold of dydacomp to correct the mistake, that time period where we had the unusable version counted against our support contract, much to our surprise and dismay..

Let me tell you, when your support runs out, it runs out hard… they won’t respond to you other than to say you’re support is up .. and what’s WORSE  than that is that the 15 thousand dollars you spent only gets you bug fixes/updates for that year ..  the 15 thousand dollars won’t allow you to go from 6.1 to 6.2 for example, I think that is unethical and I don’t mind saying, a touch of evil ..  if I spend 15 grand on a piece of software, I expect updates at LEAST through the 6.x life span.. fine, don’t give me 7.0 .. that I can understand.

So lets talk about the support contract… it’s over $6,000 for a single year of terrible support.. enough said

SAVE YOUR MONEY! they are not worth it.. they will rip you apart with fees, and the $6,000 support is worth about 10 cents..

Check out www.stoneedge.com .. I’ve not used it, but I hear good things…   and if for some ungodly reason you MUST use MOM, stay away from SiteLINK .. look into something like CommerceV3 ..  oh, and if you need support for MOM, outside of updates ofcourse… check out www.momhelpers.com … again, not used them but I hear good things..

Comments and personal experiences… are welcomed

Over a hundred new features are present for the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0, including  copy and paste as well as MMS (multimedia messaging). But the strange thing to me as a curious 1st gen iphone user is the fact that MMS is not available for us! it’s only available for 3G iPhones, and the remark that is most curious is that they proclaimed that the reason for this is that they are different hardware… excuse me?  my 1st gen jailbroken iPhone already does MMS via the SwirlyMMS app, so how does the fact that I have different hardware mean I can’t use the feature? clearly my phone is capable of doing it … we can upgrade to the new OS but a couple of the features are not going to be given to us…

In my humble opinion, MMS was excluded for 1st gen phones only to give you a reason to upgrade to a 3G phone..  and since I refuse to use AT&T and I refuse to switch to a 3G iPhone with horrible battery life, I may have finally been given reason to change to an android based alternative, which has included MMS from day one.

By now I’m sure at least some of you have heard about Microsoft’s new app called Songsmith, the idea behind this application is actually pretty interesting. Essentually, you sing along to a beat that is played in Songsmith, and once you’ve finished singing the program will generate the music for you!

The Songsmith software analyzes your voice and it automatically creates music that fits your tone changes and pauses, it really sounds nifty doesn’t it?

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