<After Gavin after Julie>
This would be exactly my tact. HP must be removed from its "comfort
zone" of NOT marketing the HPe3000. I hope that the effect would be to
"awaken a sleeping giant" and correct HP's course when its comes to
expectations from its long time customers. I have come to depend on quality
from HP(in MPE/iX) and I do not intend to give it up lightly. The more "open
letters" the better..!
Eric Sand
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> Julie writes:
> > The idea of my first post was to address the concerns that the
> > e3000 wasn't getting enough publicity. Making a card for Carly
> > is fine, but that still doesn't alert others outside HP (besides,
> > I thought the "contact HP's executives" idea had already been
> > tried to no avail?).
>
> I think Julie is right, and I think it's important to recognize that it's
> not actually Carly that a magazine advertisement would be targeted at.
>
> Back in the good old days, if your local HP representatives managed to
> annoy
> you mortally, you always had that magic silver bullet, i.e. calling
> Bill/Dave (or John, or whomever was CEO that year) and complaining.
>
> This wasn't something you could get away with very often, but for those
> who
> were eventually driven to do it, it always would get immediate results.
> You
> usually didn't get to speak to the CEO, but you might have a nice chat
> with
> some random VP followed by an edict to the field to make you happy at any
> cost. Occasionally a couple dazed looking lab engineers would arrive by
> plane the next morning and wander around your computer room looking
> somewhat
> lost for a day or two.
>
> The "some customer called the CEO" event was always treated as an
> indication
> of a serious breakdown somewhere in the chain of command, and never failed
> to get a "lot" of people's attention.
>
> In a sense, this is what everyone is talking about trying to do today.
> People seem to feel that they have exhausted their options with HP (though
> in this case it's upper management that has you annoyed), so you're
> talking
> about complaining to higher authority.
>
> In this case, the higher authority is the shareholders, analysts, and
> journalists at large. The best way to complain to *them* is not to send a
> QueryCalc poster to Carly, but to run a full-page "open letter to Carly"
> in
> some national publication. The publication does not have to be computer
> related, and in fact the best choices would be things like The New York
> Times or the Wall Street Journal.
>
> If this was done then the corporate level of HP would suddenly find
> themselves having to answer questions from the press and analysts about
> why
> this group of HP customers felt that they needed to do this. It would
> definitely get Carly's attention :-)
>
> > I was talking to a friend today about the ad idea, and he suggested a
> > cheaper alternative: having the president of the user group (or anyone,
> > really) write a letter to the editor of INFOWORLD.
>
> Good luck. Like we're the first ones to think of calling a magazine
> editor
> and suggest that they write an article about what we think is interesting.
> They probably get 100 press releases / requests to be interviewed, etc.,
> each day.
>
> If we did come up with the money to do a full page "open letter" in a
> national publication, then in addition to annoying Carly it would almost
> certainly generate some calls from publications like Infoworld who will be
> interested in knowing what the whole story is.
>
> So, in my opinion, only a full page "open letter" in a national, well
> known
> publication is going to have any significant effect. Anything less can be
> ignored the same way that all other complaints seem to be. You certainly
> won't win any friends at HP by running such an ad, but you certainly will
> have an impact. Just the fact that the 3000 community has done such a
> thing
> when none of their other customers ever felt the need to do such a thing
> means that there is clearly something that needs to be fixed.
>
> G.
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