Rants on Matt Thornton

Sorry not sorry Audible.

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 05:26:35 +0000

I cancelled my Audible subscription for actual reasons. With a tangent via my eminent theory of rational materiality.

I’ve been reluctant to subscribe to streaming entertainment services for a long time. There’s something fleeting about the nature of them that makes me undervalue them.

We subscribe to Amazon Prime - but only because of the delivery service. We subscribe to Apple One - but only because of the wider stuff it gives in terms of kids content, storage and so on. So far the only thing we’ve watched on AppleTV+ is The Bear (which is excellent, for the record) but clearly not making the most of our subscription.

Apple One Family - the fight; the experience; Apple Support?

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 19:46:37 +0000

Warning: this is an Apple-centric post. If you don’t care about Apple, then please do move along.

A major new-parent-in-the-21st-century concern is that of screen time, online services, and giving your kids access to stuff that you as a parent never had. YouTube is a great example - was literally not a thing when I was growing up and yet I’ve had to ban it in my household because my young kids were losing days and brain cells to it.

So close, yet ultimately... so far: Ikea.

Wed, 10 May 2023 05:26:35 +0000

Another story of an issue created (inadvertently) by me, which when presented with an opportunity to perform amazing customer service, the business smashed a big fat own goal.

We live in Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. We visit the mainland infrequently. We were recently refurbishing our children’s playroom and given the size of the job and the relatively few local options available to us, and despite it requiring a special visit, we felt that using IKEA to achieve the result would make sense.

In hindsight, Nespresso, you did OK

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 05:26:35 +0000

Whichever side of the ‘is pod coffee evil?’ fence you sit on, it is nevertheless incredibly convenient. We’ve been Nespresso customers for 10+ years and it has (well, had) always been a pretty flawless experience. A decent online / app experience to order from; orders would arrive within a day or two, well packaged and as expected. And at around 30p a cup for decent enough coffee, it makes sense for us.

Warehouse move

Until in March 2023, when Nespresso botched a warehouse move. By all accounts all things just went to shit. Nespresso have never (as far as I have found) spoken about the motivation to move warehouse, but one assumes it was cost. Whether this included a change in an outsourcing model, distributor or even possibly shipping/courier, who knows.

Garmin - really doesn't care.

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 22:46:37 +0000

This is possibly one of the most disappointing tech business rants I’ve had to write because I’ve always genuinely liked Garmin as a company. Their products are generally (a) very well built and (b) work really well, it didn’t seem too much of a stretch to extend that to the company. I’ve had a load of Garmin products over the years… satnavs (including, for a time, a backup camera!), car head units with Garmin GPS built-in, a variety of sportwatches in preference to Apple Watch¹, cycle GPS and assorted accessories.

eBay - apology please. I'll wait. Maybe.

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 22:46:37 +0000

Whilst some big tech businesses are very much imploding publically in a high profile ball of flames (I’m looking at you Twitter and Ticketmaster) for so blatantly not caring about being evil, it would be easy to overlook some others who are doing exactly that, but just a bit more discretely. Except when you anger them, of course.

I could be talking about any number of tech companies and not even just generally - because more than one has behaved badly recently. Maybe I’ll write about Garmin another day because today I have my sights set on eBay.

Algorithms Are Shit - Carvana, Amazon

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 12:46:37 +0000

I’ve talked in the past about my cynicism of so-called “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” and so on.

That’s not because I doubt the technology, but because of the way it is marketed. The technology is powerful, but it is not what people think it is (or want it to be.)

Lightbulb

And then a short while ago, this Tweet¹ from @MarkStockley appeared in my timeline:

YouTube is offering me ads for Gantt charts.

After showing me 9 million Grammarly ads and me not buying Grammarly it’s decided I might not buy Grammarly, so it’s moved on to selling me the singular representation of everything wrong with modern work.

What is this approach to marketing? Blinds Direct

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 09:46:37 +0000

I am not a marketing expert. Or even a marketing, um, “average”. I’m not a marketing person at all.

Well not willingly. Or knowingly. Or acceptingly.

I mean, I’ve done some… sales… in my life. Bits and bobs… this and that. Made some cash along the way. Mostly through honesty and doing what I said and just delivering stuff.

But. I am a consumer. In fact, my approach to sales and marketing is almost entirely predicated on the experiences I’ve had as a victim of marketing techniques; I know full well what annoys me and so my approach to sales and marketing is mostly just endeavouring to not repeat those same mistakes and do stuff that I know would annoy me. Simplistic.

If this is the future of challenger finance, maybe it really is time for crypto. Starling Bank

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 05:26:35 +0000

A walk-through of the frustrations of operating with modern finance operations like Starling Bank. To be clear - it will never be time for crypto…

I have blogged in the past at the frustrations of trying to deal with large organisations. Several years ago, I was moaning about how much I hate ’no-reply’ from addresses in comms with BA as the example. And before that, I talked about what happens when you let your systems run your comms, like TripAdvisor does.

Why I hate no-reply / unmonitored inboxes: British Airways

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 09:17:12 +0000

You know the story. You get an email from miscellaneous business that’s trying to coax you in to buying / clicking / agreeing to / on something. You look at the email. You have an issue.

You -gasp- reply to the email. And instantly a response back is received -

This is an unmonitored inbox. If you wish to contact us, please do so via our website.

Or some variant on the above.

This is hands-down one of the laziest, most-irritating behaviours these companies can have.

Dear TripAdvisor, your systems have gone rogue

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 20:27:47 +0000

What happens when you let machine learning type automated systems run your consumer communications.

Review sites need little in the way of introduction about their popularity or indeed importance to the fabric of the modern Internet. The majority of my online shopping is done on Amazon or eBay and the review / rating mechanisms on each of those (of both the product and the supplier) are invaluable in making a decision. Of course with any user-submitted content, as a consumer you need to know how to read a review - learning how to separate the fake / troll-y tat from the genuine is a bizarre new modern skill.

Everything wrong with 'boutique hotels'

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 15:24:32 +0000

“Jolyon’s at No.10” in Cardiff is everything that’s wrong with ‘boutique hotels’.

There, I’ve said it. Apologies if this sounds like a splenetic, unwarranted rant… and, honestly, it’s not aimed directly at Jolyon’s… the stay itself was fine (other than a few issues as noted later) and the staff were good and attentive. This is aimed more generally at the concept of a boutique hotel, but it just so happens that it was my stay at Jolyon’s that prompted this. Perhaps if they didn’t advertise as being boutique, I wouldn’t be referencing them. But they do, so here we are.

Reporting a product bug to Microsoft

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:08:14 +0000

I needed to update our installation of SQL Server 2008 to include Integration Services so that maintenance plans would run. I have local admin privilege on the machine, but as with most Microsoft related installation tasks, you routinely get so far through the process and you’re hit with the SeSecurityPrivilege error - that is, you don’t have some permission or other. The installation process goes wrong and you have to cancel out of the whole process in order to restart it with an account that has the privilege.