Slow iPhone? It’s Your Fault For Using It So Much

September 3rd, 2009

There’s an annoying, knee-jerk habit of technology folks blaming problems on the end user. You can see it in this article documenting how AT&T’s network is overwhelmed by iPhone users who use their iPhones too much, causing slowdowns:

“They don’t even realize how much data they’re using,” said Gene Munster, a senior securities analyst with Piper Jaffray.

Owners of the iPhone 3GS, the newest model, “have probably increased their usage by about 100 percent,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst. “It’s faster so they are using it more on a daily basis.”

Mr. Sharma compares the problem to water flowing through a pipe. “It can only funnel so much at a given time,” he said. “It comes down to peak capacity loads, or spikes in data usage. That’s why you see these problems at conferences or in large cities with high concentration of iPhone users.”

“It’s been a challenging year for us,” said John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones,” he said. “There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

Since the data plan is advertised as unlimited, AT&T needs to build some freaking bigger pipes. They’re working on it, but every month paid feels like too much for what we’re getting.

Clue to technology officers and analysts: the end user doesn’t care about technical reasons why a product fails to work as promised. All us customers care about is whether the product or service works as advertised. “Why it doesn’t” just comes across as an excuse.

The article’s quote by disgruntled iPhone customer Sbicca pretty much sums it up:

“What good is having all those applications if you don’t have the speed to run them?” he said. “It’s not exactly rocket science here. It’s pretty standard stuff to be able to make a phone call.”

Yep, and after nearly two years, my in all other respects wonderful, 3G iPhone still has trouble making phone calls from my apartment. Separate from the data plan issue, but just as pathetic.

But There Is Good In The World

Meanwhile, Netflix does customer service right. There was an outage a few days ago affecting Xbox Watch Instantly customers. They apologized and refunded a portion of the monthly subscription fee, no questions asked. They’ve done this before when DVD deliveries were delayed.

We’re Sorry Your DVD Was Delayed

Dear Bond, As you may have heard, our shipping system was unexpectedly down for most of Monday. We should have shipped you a DVD but were unable to. Your DVD was shipped today, Tuesday, March 25th, instead. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. We will issue a 5% credit to your account in the next few days. You don’t need to do anything. The credit will be automatically applied to your next billing statement.

Netflix doesn’t get into some song and dance about being overwhelmed by DVD returns and how those gosh darned paying, movie watching customers with their unlimited accounts are watching too many movies. All the magic could be occurring in some rain forest warehouse with envelope elves for all I care. Netflix delivers. And when they screw up, they refund money, apologize, and explain later. Result: happy, satisfied customers that don’t bolt to Blockbuster.

AT&T could learn a thing or two from Netflix when it comes to customer service, that’s for sure. Or at least hire some elves.