Swiss frequent flyer Non-Status

I am flying Swiss almost regularly at least twice a week. The frequent flyer card is issued by the mother company, Lufthansa. This, although quite a reasonable status (Gold, the call it “Senator”) does almost not give me any benefits at all. Swiss simply ignores it for flights. In my Star Alliance profile I have as preference “Windows” Seat. I am booked on a flight tomorrow from Zurich to Malaga and Swiss has assigned me the seat 12E, a “Middle Seat”. The worst possible one. I am sure they will, like usually, patronizingly tell me a reason if I ask them why they are treating their best customers like shit. And not change anything about it.

 

Recent issue at Four Points by Sheraton Panoramahaus Dornbirn checkin

My recent checkin at the “Four Points by Sheraton Panoramahaus” in Dornbirn, Austria. The room I received looked like this when I opened the door:

The first thing that greeted me was a half-empty coke bottle

A bit of disarray everywhere.

The bed was not made either

I had someone coming up and looking at the room. Many apologies. I received another room one a few doors away (going down to reception and back up), including an upgrade to a junior suite. This is what the second room, the junior suite, looked like, when I opened the door.

 

The second room was not cleaned up either

At least there is some benefits to a junior suite – an emergency bed which seemed to have been used. And at least there were nobody still sleeping there, although it almost looked like it. Anyway, only at the third attempt I did finally receive a clean room, again junior suite, and a couple of beers for free by the front-desk manager who was helpful. Not really a four-star event. What aggravated me the most is that hotel management never bothered to follow up with me regarding that incident. I hope you are more lucky and will get a clean room at the Sheraton Panoramahaus in Dornbirn.

 

On the correlation between Quality and a “Send Feedback” function

Is it just me or is there a strong correlation between the function “Send Feedback” function and the quality of the product itself? Notably often at a high-quality site one finds an easily accessible “send feedback” link. Most of the time at a very prominent spot where it can be easily found. Notably, equally often, at a site where one would wish for such a function, it is not available at all. Just looking at Google products seems to confirm this hypothesis. Look at G+. Google Feedback is available from every single page, at a link in the bottom left corner. On Google Finance this feature is entirely absent. But not only this advanced feature but no kind of feedback is available. Similar Google Reader. No “Google Feedback” functionality, no simple feedback function, nothing. But I guess a team that needs to be told to enable a “close window” icon to somehow make obnoxious tool tips, service update message and other crap to disappear in a “don’t show me this again” style, such a team would not respond to explicit requests to add this either.

Google Reader "Tipps & Tricks". Why can you not make it go away as every sane site would?

My personal hypothesis on this correlation is that an “A” team thrives on user feedback, new ideas and challenges. A “B” team on contrast is overloaded and over-challenged as it stands. While the first team really looks forward to feedback the second team clearly does not. The second type team will patronizingly tell you there are some user forums where you can voice your frustration to fellow users. Or that they have thought about exactly what you have been requesting anyway and that “it” was not possible. Would be happy to hear otherwise but this is my experience. Seldom have I found a really good site with no feedback function and seldom a bad one with a good feedback section.

Cornèrcard Ripoff? – Flight Travel Insurance

I am asking myself if credit card issuer Cornèrcard seems to be trying to rip off their somewhat intelligence challenged customers with various “offerings”. One is their flight travel insurance program. Needless to state here the comparatively safety of airline travel over all other kinds of travel, including trains, cars and busses, thus raising the question if this is schemed to provide Cornèrcard with “easy money” . On top of a yearly insurance fee of CHF 45.- one has to to pay the flight ticket itself with their credit card to be covered, thus adding to the business. The scheme appears to be working since I continue to receive such letters for what must be at least twice a year for the past five years. Finally decided to put this online for amusement.

Cornèrcard Airline Flight Insurance Offering

Cornèrcard Airline Flight Insurance Offering

Oh, and they also have a debt default insurance plan, where you have to pay a fee so effectively Cornèrcard is insured against one defaulting at the debt owed to them, caused e.g. by losing a job or by a serious illness.

 

Google Finance and ISIN

What really sucks is that Google Finance ignores ISIN (International Securities Identification Number). What more, Google finance plays “stupid” in this respect, giving Microsoftish recommendations  to verify the spelling and try different keywords. I’d love it if they would add a recommendation like “if the problem persists, contact your administrator”.

Google Finance ISIN search result

Google Finance does not even recognize it’s own common stock for NASDAQ:GOOG (Google) ISIN US38259P5089. Perhaps it would be time to recommend to Google Finance a fairly decent search engine for assistance. Even the competitor Yahoo finance can do this.

SBB

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Swiss rail SBB generally have great service. Their IT however is an exception. Highly convoluted and complex vending terminals on which it is impossible to get tickets to locations outside of Switzerland. They have a mobile app but they are not able to send a receipt for a purchase so it is useless for travel. And it is also impossible to buy a ticket to locations outside of Switzerland. See error message screenshot below. Lines in front of the few sales clerks at train stations tend to be long. So the only real way of getting a ticket is on the train. But starting Dec 11. 2011 SBB is applying a surcharge of CHF 50.- for purchases on the train. It is one really huge mess.

Rant on Google geolocation for mobile WiFi hotspots

Google and others do an impressive job of providing geolocation information based on WiFi signals only, possibly aided by mobile phone cell tower information. WiFi geolocation is based on MAC address information of WiFi hotspots in sight.

While this works great with stationary WiFi hotspots there are issues with ever increasing numbers of mobile WiFi hotspots, including Google’s own Android “Wi-Fi Hotspot” feature turning ordinary cell phones into mobile hotspots.

If one happens to be connected to one of these “migratory/roaming” hotspots the geolocation algorithm is defunct and appears to put this device into whatever place it has been for a prolonged amount of time in recent history. This leads to that e.g. my location jumps back and forth between my actual location and a previous one, depending on if some other signals dominate and allow the current location to be correctly identified or only the WiFi hotspot signal is available, placing me into wherever this roaming hotspot happened to be over the past weeks.

Obvious solution: identify “roaming” MAC addresses and create a special case in geolocation algorithms for those. Do not determine current location based on historic locations of roaming MAC addresses only. In particular Android knows already the MAC address of its own cell phone. Do tell the Google algorithm this is not a trustable geolocation source based on the fact it is a mobile device.

Stretch target solution: provide an active “push notification” mechanism by which mobile devices (opt-in) can report their current location to geolocation algorithm sources in an anonymous way that does not allow tracking of the user/device but just provides correct correlation between MAC address and location. Then the algorithms would work again correctly that use the MAC address only for geolocation.

Too long…

 

Microsoft Office Google Cloud Connect rant

Google Cloud Connect is a great tool to sync Microsoft Office into Google. However the nerds do not seem to have figured out usefulness and user friendliness. Consistent with this situation is that there does not appear to be feedback option for Google Cloud Connect available to suggest improvements. Although technically it works great my plea: make it less “self important”:

  • Find a way to enable a function that it stays completely out of sight, unless explicitly opened/enabled. I hate to have to close the “Cloud Connect” “ribbon” above each document for each and every document each time it is opened to stay out of sight and not gobble up valuable screen space
  • If for no other reason perhaps not everybody wants to make it plain, that the documents edited at the moment are synchronized somewhere up into the “unsecure cloud”. There must be a “go into background and stay there” mode for not disturbing users
  • Make cloud connect stop bitching about a lost network. A lost network connection is a standard mode of operations for mobile users and clearly not an error. Deal with this operating mode gracefully.  Do show decent visual feedback but like grey fields which used to be green, perhaps a bit slow motion spinning to show trying to re-connect, or anything else signaling it is not synced right now. But damn no error messages!!!
  • And if there are error messages do code those such that they are not bugs. At least with latest versions of MS Office 2010 and Windows 7 the pesky error messages are sticking at random places on the screen in the foreground very hard to get rid of.

Google+ as business tool

From what it looks Google+ used perhaps not with a private account but with the professional package could become an increasingly valuable business tool. It seems to enable collaboration in a highly useful and simple way. Creating circles for projects, with clients, etc. give endless possibilities. Adding features over time to allow sharing of documents including likely real-time editing features this might just be wave done right this time. And likely most features of Google Wave can be baked in.

This could become a next generation Lotus Notes Business collaboration platform, but this time not 1980ies style but 21st century. In fact possibilities seem quite endless. Realtime chat, content sharing, co-editing… with all features of Google folding into this area.

New Google Layout – The Black Bar

There are very commonly known design guides around. One about colors. It seems that blue and green are the only valid colors. The nice bluish mobile phone icons below the search field make a beautiful UI. Not this ugly black annoying fat bar on top of the screen. Simply coloring it the same way as the blue icons would have gone a long way. Besides the light blue color is automatically associated with navigation / clickable links…

A UI “general” like Steve seems to be lacking at Google

Update: I start liking it. Perhaps the often quoted scientific approach at Google is not that bad after all.