TescoDigital: Fail – The Full (Long) Story

Yesterday I mentioned that my purchasing efforts with TescoDigital over the last few days have been anything but satisfactory.  I gave them the whole day to continue corresponding (which up until my last email at 11am they had been very quick to respond) but nothing so to the world I lay bare the story to do with what you will…

Tue 10th

Email marketing about the new Lily Allen album being available for only £3.97 to download.  Perfect especially in light of i) my already having waited for just this release (don’t judge me) and ii) my new found love of buying music digitally.

09:48 Wed 11th

Followed link in email and signed up for yet another store account (can you believe TescoDigital requires a separate account to Tesco.com?), dutifully downloaded their own branded music download manager (same as Amazons methinks) and handed over the credit card details.

Download manager sparked to life and promptly complained that the download server couldn’t be found.

The infrastructure engineer in me did the usual checks; cables, firewalls; conflicting software, DNS resolution, port sniffing.  Nothing the server was nowhere to be found so a quick email to customer services was in order.

c10:20 Wed 11th

Had a quick snigger at the default subject titles thinking this the most apt and filled out a form just letting them know the error message and asked for a response.

10:47 Wed 11th

A wonderful stock response was forthcoming.  Basically it was the usual “here’s what we say you need, we won’t actually read what you have already written about the problem but could you please tell us everything about your system and restate the problem?”

Having worked with helpdesks in the past I can well understand this approach – it can weed out the silly and repetitive nonsense which takes up so much time.  BUT maybe just maybe on that original contact form if they’d asked for say i) a level of expertise and ii) confirmation that I’d already tried everything they were about to suggest the user experience might have been a little better, the process a little smoother.

Anyway, a quick response just answering those questions as required and…

13:45 Wed 11th

I’m very sorry that you weren’t able to connect to the Tesco Digital website. It is temporarily unavailable as we were doing some essential maintenance and upgrade work on the servers/Tesco Download Manager. This has taken a little longer than we had originally planned. I would advise you to try again later on this evening, please try to redownload from your order history.

Okay so they were having problems.  So why not fess up at the outset and save me some effort!

08:48 Thur 12th

So I waited until the this morning to give them plenty of time to solve their server issues. But, now the TescoDigital don’t seem to know who I am.  What I found strange was that I had actually re-downloaded the stub from their website in my order history.

Needless to say another email to Wayne Hansen (TescoDigital Customer Service Manager) pointing out that something was still broken.

09:47 Thur 12th

Again, I’m sorry to advise this error message was due to the system problems we had on our Tesco.com website yesterday.
I’ve updated your Tesco Digital account to delete this error message, please try to redownload your music tracks from your order history and this should resolve your issue.

So again I try and now the error heads into DRM territory.  Oh deary me.  Now I only chose to use TescoDigital because it quite clearly says it doesn’t apply DRM to it’s MP3 downloads.  Further whilst it does say that you can only download the files so many times and that remaining attempt are indicated on the order page I could find no indication of that usage count. More to the point I have only been downloading the stubs when and as directed by TescoDigital.

Needless to say another email requesting that Wayne actually confirms the problem is resolved before telling me to try again.

10:45 Thurs 13th

And then it happened.  TescoDigital actually failed.  Why do I  think the fail is now and not when the process broke down earlier?  Easy – technical faults happen, it’s a fact of life and I accept that, especially when the provider can be seen to be responsive and attempting to solve the issue.  The fail here was in Wayne’s response;

After 11 emails TescoDigital decide to ditch the purchase rather than fix the problem – despite it being of their own making.  I did respond to Wayne suggesting that as I actually still wanted the album perhaps TescoDigital should just get on with it, but 24  hours later no response so…

13:28 Friday 13th

I’ve just bought the same album from AmazonUK for 97 pence less thanks Tesco with no hassles at all.  Your loss.

HP’s Printer Ink “DRM”

Everyone’s familiar with how the recording industry back in the day decided that DVD’s should be locked to a particular part of the globe to enforce, well who knows what.

Then the games industry had a crack at it and Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft locked down their games consoles to only allow games bought in the same region as the console to work.

Needless to say these barriers have long since been destroyed by a community of free minded individuals determined to rid the world of Digital Rights Management.  Whilst DRM still exists in music (although Apple have finally gotten the message and moved away), DVD/BluRay and games it is obvious that the industry is wising up to the rising tide of unaccepting users.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the printer industry – or at least Hewlett Packard.

Our recent move from NZ to the UK meant we brought our all in one printer with us, and on advice rather sensibly removing the installed cartridges as they would clog over the months in shipping/storage.

Last week I stuck in the four brand new inks (HP 02′s) shipped with the printer, and a couple of new inks (HP 363′s) bought from/through Amazon.

No joy,  the printer bitched and moaned about being configured only to accept “02 cartridges.”  Some digging around revealed that HP region locks printers to stop one buying ink in other regions (where it may be cheaper) and using it!!!

DRM for ink!

An email from HP support states that in the Autumn of 2004 they implemented a programme “to enable customization of printers and supplies products to better meet specific local customer needs.”

Now the printer didn’t come with a note saying one couldn’t do this, the new 363 cartridges are clearly marked as being for the printer in question.  Quite how enforcing regionalisation of ink cartridges enables HP to better meet needs I am unsure.

Once I finally found a way around the 60p a minute “out of warranty” call centre and spoke to a technician it sounded like some progress was being made.  First an offer of a new printer swapout sounded great until it was established  the machine was out of warranty.

Next they offered to re-programme the printer to UK settings.  But to do so I needed to have i) a full set of NZ 02 cartridges AND ii) a full set of UK 363 cartridges.

I pointed out that I had neither, and couldn’t buy 02′s in the UK due to HP’s embargos on retailers.

So for now I am sitting here with a printer filled with new but incompatible cartridges waiting on a call back from HP to say they will either supply both sets or find another workaround.

For a company that makes it’s money on selling ink not the hardware I wonder just how much they value my continued purchasing of genuine HP ink?

UPDATE:

Another 3 calls with HP tech support and they have agreed to send out new UK 363 cartridges to replace those HP02′s I purchased in NZ.  Just for good measure I visited Cartridge World and their refill process includes a new chip on the actual ink cartridge which fools the printer into thinking the refill is a 363 – so double score.

Rumour: Apple About to Launch DRM Free Tunes

And after a couple of days posting about how great Amazon’s DRM free service is, a flippant comment that iTunes should head this way to, and this rumour hits the feeds today.

Basically Apple are rumoured to be offering up DRM tracks from EMI at first from today (9th Dec) under the iTunes Plus service and is currently negotiating with a few of the other big names for more.

I wait and see.  It would be a very very significant move and at the moment I’m not at all sure how Apple could make the move without severely crippling revenue streams but hey I don’t own any Apple shares – fingers are well crossed.