dnsworks

Yesterday I lost a few hours trying to figure out how to use my google apps email address as my openid account, because I don't use my gmail.com account. I give up, forget about openid and any website that requires me to use it.

Today I spent an hour and a half on the phone with AT&T Small business, for the 6th time in 2 years attempting to get access to my AT&T small business portal. I gave up and decided to leave AT&T.

Afterwards I spent an hour and a half trying to figure out how to get a business account from Verizon. I gave up and looked at Sprint. 30 seconds later I found http://bit.ly/cDQhU6

What's the deal? Is it that companies who sell to both b2b and b2c are inherently too disjointed to provide quality service to both? Or does sprint just care more about business accounts than AT&T or Verizon? It feels like every single time I try to use a vendor who sells to both I run into more friction than I'm comfortable with. 15 minute transactions often turn into hours of wild goose chases.

These sorts of inefficiencies just can't make business sense for anybody involved in the transaction. Every hour I waste on frustrations like these says to me that my vendors don't care if they waste my time or win/keep my business.

Have you ever noticed how much time you spend quitting Safari or Firefox? Just exiting the program. Sometimes it's immediately, sometimes it's 20 minutes, at least 50% of the time it's `kill -9 motherfucker.app`

Why? Let me throw down the gauntlet, I'll pay $10k tomorrow for an Apple web browser that will never fucking crash on me.

There must be a market of people, just like me, who are fed up with browsers, mail clients, and basically all desktop software because it's so unreliable and who are more than happy to pay a premium, even an outrageous premium, to stop screwing around with software and get back to our real work.

Tomorrow I could (theoretically) go out and spend $10k on a hand-crafted work of art guitar from a luthier, or $200k for a mostly handcrafted precision automobile. For $100k I can go into space, but for no amount of money can I buy software that doesn't make me want to throw my computer into the swimming pool.

Will we ever see a boutique market of consumer software that's written with stability and quality in mind? I don't care that my web browser can clean up my neighbor's dogshit and tell me which AS number the website I'm looking at is on (21844, by the way), I just want to get my work done.

I'm not really interested in why Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all suck. I know why, it's because all software sucks. I'm a consumer willing to pay money, lots of it, for a browser that doesn't suck. Build it and sell it to me.

After reading the article, "I Quit Hacker News" yesterday, I'm curious, has anybody written a webapp to embed comments about a blog posting into your own blog's comment system?