I have a Kindle.

I have a Mac.

So, naturally when Amazon announced that there would be a “Kindle for Mac” application, I was excited. So excited, in fact, that I signed up to be notified by e-mail when the application would be available.

Yesterday, I read on the blogs that the much-awaiting “Kindle for Mac” Beta had been released. Naturally, I immediately downloaded and installed it.

Then I thought, “Hey, didn’t I sign up for an e-mail notification months ago?” I thought it was odd that Amazon wouldn’t have made good on their promise to let me know when they released the application. I looked through my Inbox for an old confirmation e-mail, but couldn’t find one. I was pretty sure I had signed up, but finally, I decided that I was misremembering.

To my surprise I got an e-mail today from Amazon telling me:

Since you requested to be notified about the new Kindle for Mac app, we are excited to tell you that it is now available for free download.

Amazon really missed an opportunity here. Clearly, I and presumably thousands of other people signed up for the notification, because we were interested in the software. However, Amazon notified us after the general press release to the rest of the world. Why have the sign-up in the first place if you’re not going to tell everyone the news until after it’s old news?

You might say that I downloaded the software anyway, so I should quit whining about it. But what if instead, Amazon let those of us who signed up know about “Kindle for Mac” the day before the general public? They had a chance to make us feel more connected and “inside” by saying, “Hey, we wanted to let you know, Kindle for Mac will be released tomorrow. Since you signed up for the e-mail notification, we’re giving you a sneak peek.” Even better, what if they gave us special codes to download the app … gasp … one day before everyone else?

How cool would that have been? Would that have affected my review of the app for the positive?

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My Review of Kindle for Mac

Kindle for Mac is thoroughly mediocre, with severely limited functionality. The only positive is that you can finally read your Kindle books on your Mac. However, you can’t zoom, annotate, or search any of your books. It’s actually less functional than a paper book.

My take: Amazon feels Apple breathing down its neck with iPad and is spending the bulk of its development budget on Kindle v3. Kindle for Mac is a total afterthought.

I use GoDaddy to host my websites and e-mail. I’ve used them for years and never had any complaints. Their tech support has always been excellent. So, this past weekend, I was shocked to get such poor support from them.

This is a nice contrast to my last post about my experience with folks in the Apple Store. They were competent and fixed my iPhone in record time, they just weren’t very nice or friendly. My experience with GoDaddy was quite the opposite.

I host several e-mail accounts with GoDaddy, and manage two of them using Mail on my Macintosh and iPhone. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a problem where I could only get outgoing mail to work from one or the other, but never from both. It was inconvenient, but simple enough to work around. Finally, the other night, I got fed up and decided to get to the bottom of things. It was late (I think around midnight) but GoDaddy has 24/7 tech support.

I didn’t wait on hold long at all. The woman who answered the phone was upbeat, friendly and pleasant. She didn’t have an answer for me, so she put me on hold to talk to an engineer. After several back-and-forths where she relayed irrelevant tidbits of information from the tier-two guy, she finally came back and said, “Yeah, that’s a known problem. It’s a problem with Apple Mail, it’s not on our end.”

I was incredulous. What kind of idiot did they take me for? If Apple couldn’t figure out SMTP (the dumbest protocol ever invented) they would be out of business. Maybe GoDaddy didn’t have the A-Team working at midnight, but I still wanted a real answer! Heck, I could haved speculated that it was Apple’s fault all by myself. The thing is, what I was trying to do was so simple, that it being Apple’s fault made absolutely no sense at all.

But the pleasant non-supporting support person was willing to leave it at that. She even had the brass to ask if I would mind if she sent a survey to me.

Sure. Why not? Whatever …

Knowing that the real problem was on GoDaddy’s side, I started poking around in the management settings for my e-mail hosting account. I notice a setting that controls how many e-mails per day I was allowed to send out. It was set to 250, which was 250 more than I was actually able to send. I reset that value to 0, and then reset it back to 250. After a few minutes, my mailbox was back up and running, and hey presto, I could send outgoing mail again!

In other words, as my friend Tony later said, I had to “jiggle the handle” to get it to work.

I was happy that I got the problem fixed, but pissed that GoDaddy was no help to me. Then I remembered the survey. Was the support person friendly? Yes. Knowledgable? Nope. How satisfied was I with the service? Not at all, and I told them why in detail.

I hit the Submit button and I got a popup that says something to the effect of, “You are about to send in negative feedback. Are you sure you want to do that?”

Yes, I was sure. So sure that if I could have, I would have made my review worse because of the inanity of the question. I’m sure if I gave them five stars in every category, it wouldn’t have prompted, “You are about to tell us how awesome we are. Are you sure you want to do that?” Can I go back and give you no stars?

I haven’t heard anything back from them about the survey, so I can only assume that it was either removed from the system for being negative, or was never read in the first place.

Some words of advice for GoDaddy:

• Make sure all your tech support people are top-notch. If you’re claiming 24/7 support, make sure you have the best people in place 24/7. If not, put the better people on the off-hours shift. From an IT perspective, if I need help 9-5, I need help. If I need at help at midnight, I REALLY need help.
• Train your people never to blame another vendor. It’s not helpful at all. If Apple products don’t work with your service, guess what? That’s up to you to work out with Apple. Leave your customers out of it.
• Have your people at least try. I do not believe that I am the only customer to ever have had this issue. My solution was the e-mail equivalent of rebooting my computer. That is literally the least they could have instructed me to do, and in this case, it would have been sufficient to fix my issue.
• If you get negative feedback, don’t try to prompt people not to submit it. Instead, read it, understand it, learn from it and respond to it.

So, I have my definitive answer. If I have to choose between competent and friendly, I will gladly pick competent every time.