Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

blog.joellehman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#31

Post by jal278 »

attempthrowaway wrote: post #24

I 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,…

Thanks for clarifying, I'll put this explanation in the post to make it more accurate. Interesting how an intuitive guess at the cause was so far off; the true cause was more insidious and historical. Inherited cruft from an acquisition.

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#32

Post by Duff »

false wrote: post #23
brudgers wrote: post #20

> "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?

They probably hired a company like Accenture/Deloitte/etc who flew in a small army of 30-40 people to align the customer enrollment process with some enterprise infrastructure standards.

Since you don't need 40 people and a couple of $700/hr partners to build a web form, they broadened the scope of the process to pick low hanging fruit or synergize paradigms.

That may make no sense to you, but I'm sure it sounded good at the 16th hole (and 4th cocktail) at the country club when the $700/hr partner was pitching it.

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#33

Post by Luyt »

joezydeco wrote: post #30
mscarborough wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Or the ultimate helpdesk answer: "Please reinstall Windows and try again."

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#34

Post by Kejistan »

brudgers wrote: post #29
ilamont wrote: post #16

How 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.

From my experience with their phone support I'll agree that it probably isn't expensive, but only because it seems to be chronically understaffed. Multi hour wait times appear to be the norm when dealing with AT&T.

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#35

Post by billybob »

brudgers wrote: post #28
mscarborough wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I don't quite follow you. You seem to be saying 1) AT&T is smart enough not to do things that aren't cost effective and 2) forcing people through the pain of getting a particular browser improves their experience later, or maybe their ad views on Yahoo. Is that right?

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#36

Post by terinjokes »

ori_b wrote: post #7
aohtsab wrote: post #5

A faster approach would be to spoof your user agent -- announce yourself as IE 8 on Windows XP.

That would work if they hadn't used ActiveX

I wonder if the form would have worked anyways. People bring work laptop home that IT might have configured to not use ActiveX

Though you're probably right, probably would have failed.

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#37

Post by billybob »

brudgers wrote: post #28
mscarborough wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I don't quite follow you. You seem to be saying that AT&T is smart enough not to do things that aren't cost effective, so there must be a reason for this.

I think that's overly generous. Aaron Patterson spoke at RailsConf. He said he works for AT&T, and to submit an expense report, he scans paper receipts to a PDF, emails that somewhere, which converts the PDF to a fax, which faxes it somewhere else to be converted back into a PDF.

That is clearly a stupid process. It's not there because AT&T has analyzed the business logic; it's there because a large, old business can accumulate layers of bureaucratic process more easily than a small, young one. There are more committees and more inertia. And maybe if you make billions, wasting thousands of dollars worth of employees' time doesn't make you sit up and take notice.

I'd guess this web form is a similar problem. If you have a 5-person company, everyone in the company hears customer feedback and maybe talks to customers personally. I doubt the CEO of AT&T even knows this form exists.

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#38

Post by koenigdavidmj »

pasbesoin wrote: post #13
soulinafishbowl wrote: post #9

There is (or was) a similar system profiler program that installs itself from Windstream's DSL service, and will not allow itself to be removed from a PC by any means I am aware of. Totally unacceptable on my machines that I purposefully kept perfectly clean!

It's not what you see, it's what you don't see. Comcast installation was/is similar -- done in my case during the course of the Comcast technician's visit. I got rid of their crap when I reimaged the machine. Didn't affect service in any perceptible manner. (It did get rid of their branding from the IE window title, though -- another useless annoyance.) If I have to go through similar, again, I'm going to do it in a…

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/176497

You can change the 'Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by Yoyodyne' string to whatever you want.

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#39

Post by pasbesoin »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #38
pasbesoin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not what you see, it's what you don't see. Comcast installation was/is similar -- done in my case during the course of the Comcast technician's visit. I got rid of their crap when I reimaged the machine. Didn't affect service in any perceptible manner. (It did get rid of their branding from the IE window title, though -- another useless annoyance.) If I have to go through similar, again, I'm going to do it in a…

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/176497 You can change the 'Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by Yoyodyne' string to whatever you want.

Yeah, I'm more bothered by the services their default process installs. They can monitor their modem, if they must. They can keep their nose out of my system. Though branding the IE windows title is just downright annoying, particularly for non-technical users. In addition to taking up space and being distracting, every screenshot they make carries it, like it or not.

People are reminded of you every month when they pay their bill, Comcast. Don't push it. /rhetoric

Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

#40

Post by sdkmvx »

I didn't run an ActiveX control. I did it from my Mac. Granted this isn't Chrome on Ubuntu, but I would be very curious to find out what would happen if you have Chrome on Ubuntu report it's user agent as Safari on Mac.

It would be even better if AT&T could somehow be convinced to run the same code that runs in normal browsers anytime the user agent isn't IE. Even better if they could somehow be convinced not to even run ActiveX in IE.

Post reply on HN