

Beware of blind elitism - beshrkayali
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/07/14/beware-of-blind-elitism/

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einhverfr
I agree this is an issue in the tech world and it leads to dumbing of things
down.

When I first got into business, before I really fell into accounting software,
I was using tech support services as an opening (I lived in a rural town of
3000 year-round residents). I started getting a number of elderly clients who
had trouble with computers and no more luck than the rest of us calling Dell
for help. So of course you get to know these people, and wow..... I had a
customer who was getting alzheimers, but used to manage telephone and network
cabling at Boeing, and another who was a former crossbar switch technician at
AT&T. Wow, I've heard about crossbar switches but was confused about how they
worked. Naturally my business has moved on, and some of these wonderful people
have passed away, but it was an incredibly enriching experience.

Many of these people were smart and technologically savvy. I found with a
little attention to detail I could set up the computer for the Alzheimer's
sufferer so that she could figure out how to do what she needed to do without
having to learn it. And the other crossbar switch technician? well... he
quickly became one of my favorite customers. He used his computer more than
many people half his age, and when he wasn't on the computer he was in the
wood shop. Amazing man. And to think I got to know him because Dell didn't
consider his blue screens might be heat related (he had a broken heat sink
retention assembly).

I have spent most of my life in rural parts of the country. Flyover country as
they call it. Most of the stereotypes are just plain wrong. Rural areas I have
lived in, for example, don't tend to have political ideologies resembling the
sort of conservatism that can come out of big cities in part because with
fewer people around, there tends to be less of a heavy trend towards rugged
individualism. And I don't think it's just where I lived. I think about the
Bank of North Dakota, and it occurs to me that the county where I normally
live used to have a tax-funded no-fare bus system until big city conservatives
told us we couldn't do that.

All the things you don't think there are in the country-side, there are.

The danger here obviously is that a lot of tech talk regarding product
development is slanted towards a market that _doesn't exist._ It's why I
always say "work with the customer, understand their use cases, and work with
them to make the interface easy." Customers are wonderful people if you listen
to them.

~~~
tomjen3
Not supporting the few customers who have problems like that (and which can't
be solved by an outsourced script) may be more expensive that what Dell can
expect to make from each customer.

So it may be prudent from their side.

~~~
einhverfr
That's not my problem with the way they handled it. Orville was on the phone
with them for an hour while they tried to troubleshoot Windows. Finally he
gave up and called me. I told him to turn off the computer and wait for me and
explained I was concerned about heat.

I opened up the case and found little broken pieces of plastic inside, and
called Dell back, and spent half an hour trying to order the part.....

The problem I have with the way they handled it is simple: head can damage
computer chips, and when you have a system which is bluescreening on boot, you
really need to check out heat problems before you start troubleshooting the
software. I was surprised that after hour of constantly being powered on and
off without an attached heat sink, it still worked after getting the part
replaced...... But it did. They could have fried his computer and never knew
they did it.

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marcusf
It's fantastic irony that my iPhone 4S gets this message on a page about not
being elitist:

"If you want to ensure the best experience, please install a browser that was
developed after 2009."

~~~
benihana
Why the hell can't that guy's website support browsers developed _before_
2009? It's all text. Is that crazy italic on link hover ( _great_ bit of
usability, that) not supported by pre-HTML5 browsers?

Maybe it's not blind elitism, maybe it's forethought elitism.

~~~
ineedtosleep
Meh. It's not that big of a deal. You can still see the content and the
content is done logically so there aren't any crazy layout issues in
plaintext.

Also, this seems to be happening because of his breakpoint at width <= 1024px
I believe. Confirmed this on both Chrome dev and Firefox Aurora.

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ukgent2
funny I go to the website and get Access Denied

The owner of this website (www.tnl.net) has banned your access based on your
browser's signature

Seems he does not like browsers that strip all their headers. Is this an
Ironic joke that I am not getting?

~~~
tristan_louis
Can you send me a screenshot. That may have to do with my CDN but I want to
look into it as this is not something I had planned for.

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wpietri
Great article. In particular, I like the story about the CEO meeting with a
customer every day and then following up.

If you run a real-world business like a restaurant or a corner store, you
can't help but soak up details about the customer experience. But running
virtual businesses it's easy to have no idea what's going on. (Indeed, a lot
of people _want_ to have no idea what's going on; look at the million suckers
seeking "passive income" internet businesses.)

Once you have the skill of talking to strangers, talking with customers is
surprisingly easy. Most people love to talk about themselves and their
experiences, especially if it lets them feel helpful. That's one of the things
I think the Lean Startup folks have right: the sooner you start talking with
potential customers, the more likely you are to build something that serves
them well.

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zerostar07
Contrary to what you may think from reading HN, most entrepreneurs are not
elitists of this kind. My most popular gig was games for housewives.

