Validation: The Latest Trend - Part I

I first noticed the trend after a call to Microsoft's technical support center. My Windows Explorer browser wasn't functioning correctly. For the first ten minutes, the Technician handled my rather routine request for assistance, and the problem was promptly solved. Once corrected, the Tech I was speaking to then spent the the next seven point five minutes asking me if I was satisfied with the service rendered; How satisfied was I? Did he (the technician) perform to my satisfaction? Was there anything else I required? Finally, and most bizarrely, he asked if I was satisfied with this portion of the telephone call, and if not, would I like to speak to his supervisor?

Now, the tech was from India, and he identified himself as Bajnat, or somesuch. He was very polite, and it was a refreshing change from the universal practice of on-line support personnel from India Americanizing their names and passing themselves off as being just down the street, say, from Indianapolis, you'll pardon the pun. In that "Indian As American" scenario - played out countless times in the past five years as American corporations moved their support staff offshore - Bajnat would become Barry, or perhaps Bob.

Now, given that even the most innocent of deception irritates the hell out of me, I was happy to be talking to Baj with at least the prospect of that being his real name, and the sing-songy eloquence of most Indian folk is music to my ears. Pretty quickly though, the post service call effort to garner affirmation got tiresome, and then irksome. My profuse thanks and reassurances that his service had been excellent weren't enough. The questions kept coming, all different, but all a variation on the same theme: had he and Microsoft served me well?

So, how to explain this trend towards relentless groping and verbal frottage by corporations of their customers? I think there's numerous causes; here's the first of them:

1) Overcompensation by monopolistic purveyors of overpriced crap - such as Microsoft and Comcast:

In this instance, I discovered that the browsing problems I was experiencing went away after Explorer was "reset to its factory settings". Translation: he wiped out the Google Toolbar features I had loaded onto my browser, thus depriving me of Desktop access to G-Mail, YouTube and the sundry other goodies Google made available to me. This isn't the first time I've noted Microsoft's nefarious and monopolistic business practices, and they've practically made a hobby over the years of disabling my computer when I used a competitor's products, be it Browser, anti-viral programs, video editing, Media Player, word processing, you name it.

If Microsoft has a competing product, they make damn sure through their Operating System that the competitor's products are hard to install, hard to operate, conflict with other and unrelated products, and can be blamed for sundry malfunctions of the system. It's a no-brainer for Microsoft, since most of their products - and all of their operating systems - are monumentally bad. Since their reputation couldn't sink any lower all on its own, they might as well sabotage those they perceive to be their competitors while they're at it.

That does leave them with the PR problem though, which in my mind explains the frantic efforts to secure my approval via endless pleading. This snivelling behavior is unseemly in a corporation that has ruthlessly and gleefully copied and then destroyed such worthy products as Lotus 123, WordPerfect and Netscape, and is busily working on Google, Yahoo and anybody else who stands in the way of their plans for World Domination.

After all, Dr. Evil didn't have a Customer Service department, much less a budget for PR. Why should Microsoft?