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I received an advertisement email from Microsoft today about Office Live Basics. They were offering a custom domain name, website hosting, and email account. I thought it was a bit interesting to see Microsoft getting into this so I decided to sign up and check it out. Well after I went through the first two screens of registration they asked for a credit card. That always sends red flags up for me. But they were nice enough to provide a link that explained why they were asking for a credit card:





If you don’t want to click the picture to the left then the short story is they are wanting to keep their stuff out of the hands of evil people (phishing and such) and also want to provide convenience for their customers so when the free time ends they can just use the credit card supplied for billing.


Wait a minute here. I thought this was free. Is this free or not? Is this a trial or not? How frustrating it is to engage in registering for something free and then find out it’s really not free at all.


This reminds me of discussions Bill and I had about what we could offer for free. We came up with the idea of offering free custom logos. We considered keeping the rights to the logo and letting the customer use them for free, but decided against that. It seems if something is free it should be free, you give it away. If it’s not free then call it what it is! Why is this concept so hard for people?

For the past week, Bill and I have received a bunch of spam on YouTube relating to Hot Brazilian girls. Normally with spam we just ignore it and go on, but something seems to be up with YouTube. I posted a comment on a someone’s video three days ago, plus a comment on my own video to see if it would show up and neither have ever appeared anywhere. Did the Brazilian girls take over operations at YouTube?

We buy our bread from Lisa, but most of our groceries at Wal-Mart — we want the custom made bread and the just good enough groceries. And sometimes we want what we want Right Now!

We got great quality, low cost logo shirts from Queensboro Shirt Company, but it took months. We got great quality, low cost logo caps from OMD Embroidery, and it took just days.

We got beautiful Flickr MiniCards from Moo, but it took weeks, and we got beautiful cards from Overnight Prints, and it took just days.

The moral of the story is that you can deliver a top quality product or service, but if somebody can deliver a comparable product or service faster, you lose. And that is when Process Design makes a difference.