So, you must have had IE6 or IE7? As much as I hate being forced to run any particular browser, one less machines running these old browsers is a good thing.
AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#22Why is the form asking for gender as a required field?
It's probably just a language thing, so the forms can say "him" or "her"? Edit: or in support calls, they sometimes accidentally say "sir" to a woman etc., this might help with that.
Or they are selling this info to a third party... I've heard of a story of a guy that used his British girlfriend's identity to sign up to one of your American internet (or cable) providers and than got a lot of spam for her, even though that's the only place he used her name.
(Yes, I know this sounds like an urban myth, but I can dig up where I heard it straight from the guy, he has a podcast).
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#23> "In short: a simple web-form system shouldn’t end up installing Internet Explorer 8 for you. I think it’s interesting particularly because no lean startup would ever ever do this in a million years, yet we aren’t particularly surprised when a big company is flushing dollars down the toilet in this way." I would hardly be surprised if doing it this way saves ATT millions of dollars. The default browser for Windows X…
Well, and how these reasoning justifies the need of ActiveX (the solely reason of IE8 installation) in order to fill in a web form?
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#24I work for AT&T. I have an obligation to inform you that what I say doesn't represent their official blahblah whatever. You should know this isn't an on-message marketing communique.
AT&T, the company that created Unix and C, could be said to no longer exist, or more correctly could be said to be a different company than the one now called by that name.
A little (abridged, simplified) history: AT&T, you may remember, sold its cell business to Cingular long ago. Bell Labs went to Lucent before that. Eventually, it even sold its residential phone business off. They backed out of a lot of markets and dropped the best R&D lab they could have had.
What is called AT&T now is actually SBC, a Baby Bell with a penchant for out-sourcing. SBC bought Cingular, AT&T, Pacific Bell, lots of other companies. Their AT&T purchase was motivated in part by the name: everyione has heard of AT&T.
SBC brought with them metric tons of bureaucracy, all running in IE. Disgusting. It's not just the external web interfaces. We have to deal with this BS internally, too. 1990s web interfaces that only work in IE (sometimes requiring 7, sometimes requiring 6) for every interaction with corporate. Taxes, mandatory training, time reporting, everything.
We have to grab a spare Windows machine or run a VM with XP in it. Most of the tech side of company knows and hates the whole thing. The impenatrable bureaucracy makes it impossible to find out who to complain to. There is no escape. The article is dead-on about what's wrong, and I know first-hand, because we have to eat that dog food weekly.
That said, it's a very cool place to work overall. For us, the consultant-generated tech is a dent in the Porsche. But for a customer trying to give you money? Even my mom doesn't use IE and she wouldn't understand the problem with ActiveX controls.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#25> "In short: a simple web-form system shouldn’t end up installing Internet Explorer 8 for you. I think it’s interesting particularly because no lean startup would ever ever do this in a million years, yet we aren’t particularly surprised when a big company is flushing dollars down the toilet in this way." I would hardly be surprised if doing it this way saves ATT millions of dollars. The default browser for Windows X…
Well, and how these reasoning justifies the need of ActiveX (the solely reason of IE8 installation) in order to fill in a web form?
I don't think the parent is trying to justify the overall ridiculousness of the process, merely explaining what their rationale would be for even going down the IE-only path in the first place.
I'm not sure if anyone can justify the need for ActiveX in this case.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#26> "In short: a simple web-form system shouldn’t end up installing Internet Explorer 8 for you. I think it’s interesting particularly because no lean startup would ever ever do this in a million years, yet we aren’t particularly surprised when a big company is flushing dollars down the toilet in this way." I would hardly be surprised if doing it this way saves ATT millions of dollars. The default browser for Windows X…
Well, and how these reasoning justifies the need of ActiveX (the solely reason of IE8 installation) in order to fill in a web form?
I suspect that ActiveX enabled browsers allows them to further reduce support costs, e.g. installing a 32 bit version of IE8 allows the Flash driver to be installed thereby reducing calls from grandpa whose new system came with a 64 bit version of Windows 7 and therefor uses the x64 version of IE by default - not to mention that ActiveX also allows ATT to install more powerful software on the customers browser for support and tracking purposes.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#27Rule #1 when calling AT&T DSL support: Always, ALWAYS say you're running Windows with IE. Lie. Fake it. Whatever. If you say anything else you'll derail your support. Your goal is to get through the level 1 did-you-plug-everything-in-lets-restart-your-machine gauntlet. That, or go to the forums at dslreports.com and hope you can contact a sympathetic AT&T engineer.
This seems to be a good rule for calling any cable/phone ISP.
The last time I mentioned using a Mac the support person ignored that I had already tried pinging certain gateways to check connectivity, and proceeded to condescendingly walk me through going to Applications->Utilities->Network Utility so that I could run ping from a tab there.
Of course I quit after 15 min of this, tried to access again in a couple hours, and it was just a network failure in my area, anyway. Geez.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, and how these reasoning justifies the need of ActiveX (the solely reason of IE8 installation) in order to fill in a web form?
I don't think the parent is trying to justify the overall ridiculousness of the process, merely explaining what their rationale would be for even going down the IE-only path in the first place. I'm not sure if anyone can justify the need for ActiveX in this case.
The assumption that ATT needs to do it, is like assuming that a website needs to use cookies - it doesn't follow the money. The article implies that this process costs ATT millions, whereas logic would make the continued existence of such a practice unlikely and analysis of ATT's cost and revenue structure would indicate that it probably has the opposite effect on their bottom line.
ATT's homepage for DSL customers is Yahoo, and it is heavily Flash dependent. The same logic that serves as part of the justification for Apple's iOS strategy underlies ATT's decision making - reducing options to reduce support costs and enhance user experience. It is better if Grandpa's introduction to the internet has everything working when he lands on your homepage for the first time.
Again, ATT knows their market segment.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#29How many people give up before reaching the form, and end up calling someone at AT&T for help? The costs must be enourmous.
ATT has a pretty good infrastructure for handling phone calls from customers - being that they are a phone company with more than 120 years of experience in doing so (founded 1885).
So it is probably not as expensive as one might think at first blush.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#30Rule #1 when calling AT&T DSL support: Always, ALWAYS say you're running Windows with IE. Lie. Fake it. Whatever. If you say anything else you'll derail your support. Your goal is to get through the level 1 did-you-plug-everything-in-lets-restart-your-machine gauntlet. That, or go to the forums at dslreports.com and hope you can contact a sympathetic AT&T engineer.
This seems to be a good rule for calling any cable/phone ISP. The last time I mentioned using a Mac the support person ignored that I had already tried pinging certain gateways to check connectivity, and proceeded to condescendingly walk me through going to Applications->Utilities->Network Utility so that I could run ping from a tab there. Of course I quit after 15 min of this, tried to access again in a couple hours…
I'll add Rule 1A: Never talk net-speak with tier-1 support.
"I've run some traceroutes and packets are getting lost at your router in Elmhurst. When I do get through, ping times are over 700 millseconds"
"Okay, sir, what I'm going to need you do to is close your browser and restart it"