A MATTER OF TRUST by Michael S. Malone
I’m writing this column from table #3 at Peet’s Coffee in Cupertino, California.
Why am I here, instead of working from my own home office two miles away? Therein lies a story.
Simply put, my Comcast cable service crashed yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m. That not only means my Internet access is down on all five of our family computers, but my cable television is down as well. In fact, the only service still working in our house in the landline phone – and that’s only because, when Comcast offered that service as well, my wife replied, “I don’t trust you people not to screw that up as well. I need something in this house I can depend on to work right.”
And, in fact, she used that phone to call Comcast to report the outage. And I took off for Peet’s to file this column.
How annoyed am I at this loss of service – a service I depend upon to make my living? A little bit less than load-the-Winchester angry, but a whole lot more than kids-having-a-drunken-party-next-door pissed off. The cable TV I can live without – though it makes the kids a little more bored and truculent than usual – but that’s because I spend more time these days on the Internet than television.
But the loss of my wireless router – and thus my Internet connection – has got me wandering about in a Lear-like confused rage. This is my livelihood, my entertainment, my connection to the bigger world. I can’t get my emails, I can’t research my story, I can’t find out what’s going on out there.
Okay, but I’m actually angrier than the loss of those things would predict. After all, I can go into any Starbucks, Peet’s, or even Mickey D’s these days and find a wireless hot spot. And Comcast promises to come out tomorrow – hey, thanks! – to find out what’s wrong.
No, I think the real source of my anger is what can best be described as a betrayal of trust. There is no greater source of anger in this world than just that sort of violation. Open the newspaper or turn on the news (as if I could right now) on any given day and probably half of the stories involve just such a betrayal: adultery, breaches of contract, anger at politicians, blown drug deals, embezzlement, child molestations, angry consumers, etc., etc. Seen from this perspective, it sometimes seems that almost every form of human friction devolves into some kind of betrayal of perceived trust.
What is surprising about this is that, despite the fact that we live in a largely scientific, empirical world – one in which natural scientists, sociologists and economists have come up with yardsticks and equations to measure and quantify almost every type of human behavior – we really have no common and accepted measure for trust. And, it follows, because we lack that measure, we have no precise way of knowing when that trust changes, when it fails, or what the consequences will be of that failure.
Not that there haven’t been attempts. A few years back I wrote a book with the Swedish economist, Leif Edvinsson, entitled “Intellectual Capital.” The impetus for the book was the growing realization in the business and financial communities that we really had no idea what anything was worth anymore. That is to say, we had all of the traditional accounting measures: inventories, capital equipment, etc. But the gap between that sum and what the stock market seemed to believe the company was actually worth was growing by the day. For example, how could Intel, which at the time had about $20 billion in revenues, be worth more than the entire U.S. automobile industry?
“…and then seek to impose it on the entire population as the Right Thing To Do.”
Progressives are bewildered by the anger of the unwashed masses. They perceive themselves as warm, benevolent—and extremely well educated. How can there be any moral and intelligent opposition? It is obvious therefore that all dissenters must be scum of the Earth. Such individuals must be minimally marginalized, if not outright censored.
Barack Obama and his allies want to be helpful even if you prefer to be left alone. You obviously don’t know what is good for you. Your reluctance proves that you are incapable of making the right decisions.
Great post. One minor nitpick…
“xBox [sic] 360, a superior game player, falling behind Nintendo and Sega?”
Behind Sega? Don’t think so chief.
r.reagan 1980
I think you have picked the wrong scapegoat here.
You say you count on your internet service to make your living, but are torqued off when the consumer-grade service you have goes down.
If you really make your living with it, you need a professional-grade ISP. Yup, they cost more, but they have higher reliability.
If you hire a wedding photographer you expect the guy to show up with professional equipment, not a point & shoot digital camera.
Comcast has provided you with exactly what they contracted for — household internet service. If you choose to take the chance on your livelihood being compromised by a normal glitch, then you are the problem, not Comcast.
A note on the XBox 360. It hasn’t fallen behind, it has essentially cornered the market for serious gamers. The XBox’s dominance of the media centre and naescent online movie/TV rental market are also major strengths.
Nintendo has seen the massive success of the Wii based on appealing to non-gamers. They’ve ignored the traditional market and sold party games for non-gamers. There’s tons of Wii’s out there, but few have more than a couple games.
The Sony PS3 essentially has no gaming market. It’s really just a Blu-Ray player that is proven future-proof. Sony’s prediliction towards updating the Blu-Ray spec and obsoleting older players has made the PS3 with its ability to take much larger software updates than the firmware-based players the only really viable Blu-Ray player. It’s also one of the cheapest. But they don’t sell many games for it.
If you look at game sales, the XBox dominates although the Wii does sell more individual units of a much smaller list of games.
Imagine what you’d have to put up with if you lived in a rural area. No cable TV. No cable internet or DSL. Basically you’re stuck with dial up or paying close to a $600 (when it’s said and done) for satellite (which you then can’t actually use, because it’s got a very tight cap, only a couple hundred megabytes a day).
I actually had wireless 3G broadband from Verizon, but it basically just stopped working a few months ago. Call them up, they give me a different story each time, finally they just said I’m not in their service area and just hung up. Nevermind that 2 year contract I signed. (And it also has a very tight cap)
Anyway, I also don’t have those wireless hotspots you speak of. Closest one is a library 20 miles away (which won’t even let me join, unless I pay $60 a year, since I’m not in their area)
Just a little validation for your wife – great decision not allowing Comcast to provide your home phone service. I did and it was the worst two months I’ve ever spent: 40 hours of Comcast repairmen in my house and at least that much time on the phone (cell) as the phone didn’t work with the CC service…
Great article, good take, hopefully we will all continue with our skepticism, just might save the Republic.
I’m with you on the general societal trust issues, but I can’t say the same thing with the Comcast issues. Since you “depend upon” the Comcast service in order to make your living, I presume that you looked into their terms of service to make sure that their response times would meet your requirements. I further presume that since the service is critical to your livelihood, that you spent the extra money to wire your home with Comcast’s “Business Class” priority service.
That said, if you really depend so heavily on having an internet connection to sustain your livelihood that you can’t tolerate an overnight internet outage, I’m surprised that you don’t have an alternate connection, like a DSL broadband line, to your home. I work from home, and getting both DSL broadband from the phone company and cable broadband from the cable company is the best way to ensure that I’m always up and running. If it’s your business — take it seriously, and plan accordingly.
Trust, may be nothing more than the expectation level of quality. And, most consumers over the age of 50 bemoan the lack of quality nowadays. Microsoft, the American auto industry, etc. are perfect examples. For those of us who remember the quality of the ATT phone system, its all a betrayal.
I live in the same area. Comcast would have various intermittent outages for no apparent reason and as I work from home quite a bit, I kicked them to the curb. I got the competing service from AT&T (Uverse) but I also kept the landline phone rather than having VoIP bundled into the service. One benefit of that service is that dialup access is included so in case you are traveling or the cable goes out, you can still use a dialup modem (built in to my laptop) and at least move important email traffic.
Judging from the results from my wireless network search, many of may neighbors have kicked Comcast to the curb, too. And Comcast closed the Cupertino office last fall so I still haven’t got around to driving all the way to Los Gatos to turn in the boxes.
Good luck.
It would be bad enough if the One Best Way always really was the One Best Way. Unfortunately, it often isn’t.
This attitude amongst progressives that they’re smarter and more well meaning than we are explains the frequent use of “Shut up!” as an argument. For example, we have the threats to revive the Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine”, the demonization of tea partyers and healthcare protestors, a boycott of Whole Foods spurred by the CEO’s unspeakable crime of writing an op-ed that presented alternatives to Obamacare, and now there’s a campaign at the Huffingpaintfumespost to get municipal governments to force local cable operators to stop offering the Fox News Channel. Those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
Cloud computing, and particularly Google’s proposed cloud-based operating system will never be successful until internet service providers learn to, well, provide internet service.
This is why I’ve stuck with Pac Bell/SBC/AT&T. It’s a bit slower than the top speed of a cable net, but I haven’t had an Internet outage since a squirrel chewed through my phone line just outside the external jack. Also, they seem to have far fewer issues with their IT than Comcast (DNS crapola, etc).
I get some sort of intermittent Internet hiccough every couple of months, and it usually lasts a few minutes at most.
OTOH, my mom has Comcast, and they’re down at least once a month for one reason or another…
I’ve just had a similar reaction after reading Rich’s Lowry’s piece, Stupid America. It’s not just the indignation at how dumb they think we all are, but the absolute irresponsibility of people who have been placed in positions of trust of the highest sort. It’s like calling 911 to report your home is on fire and having the Three Stooges show up, Barry, Harry and Nancy.
Probably meant Sony. Sega doesn’t make consoles anymore since 2001.
I have kept my land line with the local telephone company because I feared the same thing — all communication down without a way to call emergency services. Spreading it out seems safer.
Isn’t that why our Founding Fathers figured out separation of powers? (Something that all three branches in today’s federal govt. love to ignore.) How can we possibly trust them when they won’t follow their own [expletive deleted] rules? This isn’t a country of, by, or for the people anymore.
CBS had an interesting story tonight about a man who was a proven business failure and who has started his own taxi service to which patrons pay what they consider FAIR. There is absolutely no guarantee that anyone will pay him anything. One paid him with a nearly worthless cd. So far he has earned more than the established rates for taxi service in his area. I owe this man for the discussion about trust that it caused me to have with my son, who was also watching the segment.
Trust but verify. And have a backup plan. I live on an island where the power grid is somewhat sparse. There was an incident recently that took the power down, and took the telephone service with it for about eight hours. Five minutes to crank the generator up, and I was back in business – my Comcast internet worked fine, and so did my VOIP phone. I wasn’t aware until later that my neighbors were without phone service. I don’t assume that the power company can provide power all of the time in this kind of environment. I didn’t feel betrayed; I knew that they had good people on it.
Here’s where I’ll cut the power company more slack than this administration – they never promised 100% availability. They never oversold. This is why I won’t cut this administration the same slack; they are overselling. In fact, they’re lying freely.
Trusting never was wise, and is less wise as time goes by. And don’t wonder why the Israelis seem so stubborn sometimes. They trusted, and paid dearly. They’re just plain out of trust. It’s all gone. There’s no more left. So they don’t trust, but they are prepared.
I can relate.
Not to mention that if (and when) you cancel their service, they IMMEDIATELY wipe all of your email accounts before you get a chance to download anything you had stored there. Make sure you do that first!
I have Comcast now, it used to be Time-Warner. Where they have earned my distrust is in telling lies about outages.
You know, it’s not their fault if somebody else knocks down their cables or digs and cuts one. Tell me so, I’ll be patient while it’s repaired.
Heck, I’ll even be patient if they tell me they don’t really know what’s causing the outage but they are trying to find out. I’m not an unreasonable person.
What I hate is when they tell me that it must be my fault or the fault of my equipment and they will send somebody out in 4 or 5 days to diagnose the problem.
Though I like to play an ignorant boob on the internet, I really am capable of diagnosing problems at my end. And when it’s the modem… well, I just want a new one. Part of what I pay Comcast every month is for a working modem and I’m really not willing to wait 1/2 week or more for them to come replace it.
I don’t trust them and I don’t mind saying so.
Been there, done that. I have phone, tv, and internet service with Comcast. It has been down twice this month, once for 4 days. I work out of my house and like you had to seek out the nearest coffee house with wifi. I called to complain and the customer service person offered to refund my $20 for my trouble. That’s right, twenty big ones. That really made me mad, so I wrote an email to Customer Service letting them know I was a soon-to-be former customer. I had barely pressed “send” when I received a phone call from a higher up apologizing and offering to refund the entire month. Now, that was more like it, but if I lose service again for days on end, I’m gone.
Been there, done that. I have phone, tv, and internet service with Comcast. It has been down twice this month, once for 4 days. I work out of my house and like you had to seek out the nearest coffee house with wifi. I called to complain and the customer service person offered to refund me $20 for my trouble. That’s right, twenty big ones! That really made me mad, so I wrote an email to Customer Service letting them know I was a soon-to-be former customer. I had barely pressed “send” when I received a phone call from a higher up apologizing and offering to refund the entire month. Now, that was more like it, but if I lose service again for days on end, I’m gone.
Aren’t you getting just a little bit bent out of shape over this? Making a mountain out of a molehill? You’re going to get someone to come out within 24 hours… that’s pretty good response (and I am not a Comcast fan).
I also think you’re stretching the ‘trust’ thing here. Apple isn’t selling lots of iPhones and iPods over trust, they’re selling them because Apple really understands how to design a product that appeals to customers. The Mac certainly isn’t a best-seller; people buy PCs and Windows in far larger numbers. Is that because people trust Microsoft more than Apple? If so, why aren’t WinMo phones selling better? Perhaps because Microsoft didn’t create a compelling user experience.
People buy for a variety of reasons… price, perception of quality, or product appeal. It all comes down to the fact that people buy something only when the value of owning that something outweighs the value of the money being asked for that item. BTW, the Xbox360 is selling pretty durn well… especially at its new lower price.
Enjoy that latte, Michael, and perhaps enjoy this classic:
Klein, Daniel B. B.,How Trust Is Achieved in Free Markets. Cata Policy Report, Vol. XIX, No. 6, November/December 1997. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=473442 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.473442
You’re going with Comcast and expecting service?
lol
Ok. Isn’t that like voting for The Chosen One and expecting a check to you personally out of the stimulus?
From near Philly (Comcast HQ), 2 corrections:
1. Comcast doesn’t just know about its monopoly, it works hard to protect that status.
2. Comcast isn’t much of a service provider.
The only people I know who chose Comcast among multiple options are Comcast employees.
Some true Comcast stories of varying amusement:
1. I had to call Comcast a dozen times to activate my digital cable boxes. 10 of those calls were to request repairmen. Each time, Comcast reps claimed a local service outage blocked the signal, even though internet and analog TV worked fine. The repairmen couldn’t come at night, and I couldn’t flex my work schedule for a week. When they finally came, they simply replaced the digital cable boxes — problem solved.
2. In the early 2000s, Comcast sent a friend in South Philly converter boxes for basic cable TV. Objecting to the monthly fee, she tried to return them. The Comcast agent and manager both accused her of stealing cable, refusing to believe that cable-ready TVs (at the time, 20-year-old technology) didn’t require converters. Then the manager tried to sell her an upgrade package.
3. A friend in suburban Philly once had a Comcast repairman fall off a ladder and onto the roof of my friend’s car, leaving an easily-recognized butt dent. Comcast paid for the damages, but still … A butt dent.
Honestly, sometimes I wonder how Comcast got so big if I’m the only one who has never had a real problem with them. (Well a couple of minor ones, easily resolved within the first couple of weeks of installation.)
I had Comcast cable and TV, AT&T VOIP (hangover from years of other AT&T service) & a landline for nine years.
Then, for other reasons entirely, my wife decided to go At&T U-verse (she records and watches way more tv than I, so I think that was the reason), so we have.
In a couple of months no problems, but the web service (which a very nice young lady in our kitchen kept insisting was “all fibre-optic” even though she admitted that plain old copper co-ax would be plugged into our tv and wireless router) is just about unnoticeably slower, and I have a little problem with one computer running Vista on a minimal amount of RAM (which never happened with Comcast).
I don’t trust any of them, so I troubleshoot on my own as much as possible and try to keep trouble away. That helps, I think.
In fact, I read the contracts very carefully and hold them to them, just as I expect to be held to my end.
Oh, and the Comcast website truly sucked. I never used it. The only time I needed it I had to go to their office with a picture ID just to get my password, which since I never used it I had forgotten it.
Ah, well.
just have comcast for the tv. Had to call the guy out when there was no picture on a couple of channels, and the remote got slow. Turns out it is a bad signal. Comcast is a cable TV company. They don’t understand reliablity is important. You can lose cable TV, and no one dies. Lose your phone, and it can easily be life or death.
We are going to be in a world of hurt when we have a major earthquake. Back when Ma bell ran the whole thing, reliability was a major issue for them. They didn’t have to compete on price, & they could justify higher costs to pay for the universal access, and reliable phones. Now, the phone you buy is just good enough, and they have cut the redundancy. PG &E, the same.
We have been lucky. The law of averages says that over the past 30 years, a major American City should have been hit by a large quake. Loma Prieta doesn’t count. It was centered in Santa Cruz County. We still are working on a fix for the bay bridge.
There are critical pieces of equipment that will take six months to replace. They don’t have them in reserve, since it cuts into the profit margin.
We have to figure how to make reliability pay. Otherwise it is just sand piles waiting to fail. What happens to the U.S. and world economy if Seattle & Portland go off the grid for a year?
You make a living through and with your single-point-of-failure broadband connectivity? Read that sentence again. Ponder it. Now read on.
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I make my living sort of the same way, pretty much. As does my tele-commuting travel agent wife.
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Except …I not only have Comcast. I also have a DSL subscription. Two. Because I cannot be without connectivity. If one service has a problem, my fail-over router automatically (or almost as easily and quickly, manually) switches to the other service.
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And actually, I have an unlimited data access plan through my cellular provider, and a phone that will let me “tether” my laptop (or desktop, as far as that goes), I have a third fallback …in case all else fails. (Or if I’m onsite out in the middle of somewhere, and need to google something, I have recourse.)
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Yes, I pay more then you do (maybe, ONLY maybe …and fwiw, I probably earn far less than you do).
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…but I ain’t sittin’ disconsolately at Starbucks, bemoaning my own lack of foresight, either. And I ain’t gonna be.
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Because I follow an old, old rule handed down amongst craftsman: you buy the very best tools of your trade that you can.
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Single-point-of-failure, or fail-over. The choice is yours.
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As usual, a reference to tech brings out people’s inner geek. Blech!
The subject is trust. Let me tell you about trust. The Presidency is all about trust. When the President loses people’s trust, they are miserable about it. When he has their trust, they’re happier. The trust/distrust paradigm engenders these feelings, rather than following them.
This was Reagan’s great strength. He inspired trust. Many are too young to have lived through those days and felt it. Those who can, remember back. Did the days not feel brighter somehow, because you felt you were in good hands with the President?
Think of Bush. He lost the public trust, and there was this angst in the country even before the economy went south.
We can criticize the President all we like, but we know that he has access to info we don’t have. It really comes down to trust. Obama has already lost people’s trust.
Obama’s Cabinet appointments were just plain bad. The Stimulus was a huge mistake, as it was clearly a political payoff bill. The apology tour was offensive. Allowing Pelosi to set the tone. Having Congress craft all the legislation. The confused messaging. Having too many pressers without saying anything new or really framing the issue. (For tips on how this is done, see Palin’s “Death Panels”.) Spending, spending, spending. It all looks like sheer incompetence, which is what the knock on him during the campaign was: inexperience.
Thus, the mood in the country is very bad. There is a sense of desperation from both sides. His supporters are seeing their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip away. The Middle and Right are desperate from fear of the coming train wreck. There is no trust… and Obama is clearly flailing in desperation, himself.
Here is an example of a complete breakdown of trust that happened to a friend today. She has a TracFone prepaid cell phone. Seems she bought 900 minutes in the middle of July to discover this morning that they were all gone and she had hardly used the thing. She checked her phone and had about 85 minutes worth of calls, she had been billed for more than 10 times that. She called them, got the call center in India … they eventually credited her back the minutes. Then she made another call. Talked for 29 minutes. Discovered that 69 minutes were deducted.
In the meantime while she is on hold waiting for Samir to figure out whatever is going on, she does a little googling and finds page after page of the same thing happening to other people. TracFone apparently overbills, if you catch them, they will give you back the minutes. I guess that is how they can get away with being so cheap.
They steal from the other guy and pass the savings on to you.
“Why is the xBox 360, a superior game player, falling behind Nintendo and Sega? Because gamers don’t trust Microsoft to continue delivering the best games.”
Sega’s last system was the Dreamcast. It was launched on 9/9/99 and a few years later ceased to be supported by Sega. Sega now exclusively does software which mainly consists of putting out Sonic games that run the gamut from mediocre to deplorable.
I would like to formally welcome you to the 21st century.
The style for the Microsoft game console is “Xbox 360.”
I spotted several other missing words throughout this column, leading me to two possible conclusions: You have an editor and he/she is crummy; or, you don’t have an editor.
Either way, you’ve lost a little bit of my trust.
I’ve had internet service from different vendors and there were problems occasionally with all of them at one point or another – even the dialup. So you should understand, expect, plan for the fact that there will be outages.
Therefore, you should have a cheap dailup internet access for when your high speed goes out. This especially true for people who’s livelihood depends on internet access. There are some (10 hrs /month) free services and some $10/month for 200 hours. The dialup service might also be useful if you travel but you have to check first to make sure you can log in outside your home area.
If your livelihood depends internet access, $10-$20/month for a “backup” dialup service is cheap.
sonic.net – never betrayed my trust in almost a decade. the best ISP in the Silicon Valley and surrounding area.
It doesn’t much help in the trust department that Obama ran on cutting taxes and cutting spending. Bush made mistakes. Oddly he said the same thing about Iraq that Clinton did, for this the left claimed he lied. Obama, though, lied from the getgo. The American people will forgive a lot of mistakes before they finally throw you to the curb. Lies? Not so much. The Obama Administration needs a miracle to survive and I suspect the good Lord may just be busy.
Before Comcast acquired TCI Cablevision’s assets in San Jose, my bill for Expanded Basic (eighty channels) was in the range of about $35 a month. After the acquisition, over the period of what seemed like two years at the most, Comcast repeatedly increased the rate until I was paying a wee bit under $60 for the same eighty channel Expanded Basic service. When I finally was ready to spring for broadband access, SBC got the nod. Never had a problem, and SBC charged less. I now live in a Verizon service area, and I went with their DSL service, which has been every bit as reliable and inexpensive as SBC.
For TV entertainment, I went with a small dish (DirecTV) and wonder of wonders, I now have access to more channels but pay less than what I was being charged for Expanded Basic.
It will be a cold day in hell before I become a Comcast customer again.
Right on target Mr. Malone, it’s trust that has been damaged by many in leadership in many areas. Trust must be earned and diligently protected for once lost it is extremely difficult to recover. The Palin effect that so energized many during the election as well as the attacks against her was due to the trust that she seemed to imbue in many much like the great Ronald Reagan. Notice how the left has relentlessly attacked SP as well as RR except when they try to compare BO to RR….I think they have we-weed one time too many!
There is no greater source of anger in this world than just that sort of violation. Open the newspaper or turn on the news (as if I could right now) on any given day and probably half of the stories involve just such a betrayal: adultery, breaches of contract, anger at politicians, blown drug deals, embezzlement, child molestations, angry consumers, etc.
Dude, are you serious? You’re comparing your internet connection going down with child molestations? Embezzlement? Drug deals?
Are you completely without a shred of perspective?
You sit at home interacting with a browser application and then seethe when forced to get up, leave your house and go …. well, somewhere?
Frankly, people like you are a big part of the reason I would never live in California again.
Something sad is happening to America.
You know, when I trust I generally do it on the basis of experience. I agree with Marc Malone at #28. I trusted Ronald Reagan because he was consistent and his character was always the same. He was a man who inspired trust to start with and who showed in both victory and defeat that he was a worthy and honorable individual.
I remember watching him on television in the debates with Carter praying he would do well because I trusted him in a way that Carter’s mistakes and failures as President had forever precluded my doing for him.
I knew Clinton was a lying criminal from the first time I saw Gennifer Flowers. The number of people who seemed to find no problem with trusting Bill Clinton constantly amazed me. I always wondered how they could possibly trust a man who had clearly, beyond any shadow of a doubt, demonstrated that he hadn’t the slightest notion of integrity. I got to the point where I could not watch the man on television. I’ve always hated to have people lie to my face, and that man didn’t know how to tell the truth, not that he ever wanted to.
Now we’ve got Obama. Same thing. He’s a liar, plain and simple, and the MSM backs him to the hilt on it. I’ve come to the point where if the article originates in WaPo, LAT, ChiTrib, NYT, ABC, NBC, or CBS, I simply won’t look at it. They support and sustain people whose agenda absolutely requires blatant dishonesty because they could have no hope of getting that agenda passed if they were truthful about it.
My trust for anyone in the MSM or the Democrat Party is nonexistent. Actually, it’s worse than that. If they claim something, I almost automatically assume the opposite must be true. The idea of giving Obama and his coterie of criminals any more power than they have truly frightens me. I can see nothing but evil results from doing so.
Consequently, I write my Representatives and Senators on a regular basis to tell them that they’re being watched and judged by a person who ALWAYS votes and who usually contributes to the political campaigns of people I approve of. Maybe it’s not much, but if they know they’re under observation due to a lack of trust in them, maybe they’ll give at least some consideration to the idea of being honest.
Psychometricians measure trust all the time using survey instruments. These are statistically validated, using the same techniques that are used for scientific research in psychology, sociology, etc. They’re not always perfect, but they do a pretty good job, especially in aggregate. I know economists prefer to use behavioral data, but that’s fraught with its own problems (also, things like customer satisfaction ratings are themselves questionnaire-based– and research has shown that satisfaction and trust are distinct from one another). Replacing a good survey with a bad proxy just because it feels more “sciencey” isn’t good science.
It turns out that trust works differently in different contexts. Fundamental to it are two key dimensions: 1) Competence: Do I trust that you could help me if you wanted to? and 2) Beneficence: Do I trust that you want to help me?
When I first heard their “comcastic” pitch, I thought it was a parody– it’s way too close to “craptastic”, which is far more descriptive. Comcast fails at both competence and beneficence, which is why they’re so hated. Then they go and compound it through disruptive technical policies (like breaking the DNS error system), pushy and arrogant marketing, and constant lobbying to extend their monopoly.
Agree with several of the above posters, that if continuous connectevity is that important to you, you should be paying for “five nines” reliability or have a backup plan. Probably both. Complex systems sometimes break.
I have had, but don’t currently have Comcast (Optimum area) but our phone/internet/TV reliability has been fine, with both companies. It occasionally hiccups, but very brief. And being aware that in some emergency having 911 service out could be a catastrophe…we have cell phones. Redundancy.
Fellow Pajamas author Richard Fernandez has written several times about design margin (and the lack there of) in many modern systems, including political/governmental. I recommend them. Much better than throwing a hissy fit because you weren’t prepared for the inevitable.
I very much appreciated this post. It’s posts like this that have totally and permanently captured me away from the drive-by media. I don’t trust them for anything anymore. Now, I turn to the blogs that I trust.
You’re correct. It is all about trust I don’t trust Obama and his ilk to do anything except destroy this country. It won’t happen on my watch. Obama has no clue about what Americans who believe in the Constitution have waiting for him. That, you can trust!
Columns grousing about internet outages prompt the same reaction from me as do columns about travel horrors: *yawn* I would love to read one of this genre that surprises me and relates how wonderful is the other 99% of our lives when things work out and what a pleasant example we can be when we take adversity with good will and grace. But alas, this column runs to form.
I notice that Comcast may crash when it rains a lot.
One time I didn’t believe the customer service person telling me that I should check for loose connections. I had a loose cable.
I learned after repeated disconnects how to reboot my modem. But then, one smart CS tech told me to reboot my wireless router first. I do that now. Easier than dealing with modems.
And I have to give credit to Comcast techs: most of them do try to fix things, it’s the few substandard ones who make you mad.
I get the distinct impression that Michael S. Malone and many of the commenters live in the boonies. My own family resides in a high-density area of Houston, Texas—and rarely do we ever experience any trouble whatsoever. Comcast has always been fairly prompt if I requested a service call. The company also has an office a few miles from my front door where I can hassle free obtain a new router. Could this be a specifically a California problem? Texas appears to be a far better run state. Californians seem to make a mess of everything. Let’s be blunt. The blue states are in a free fall. They are in deep doo-doo.
The most interesting point in the article is the degree of trust implied by voluntarily adopting a single supplier for anything life-critical. Particularly when that adoption requires you to permanently destroy all the other options. That is really beyond trust – its faith.
Think about how people would respond to a proposal to have a single FedFarm, planting a single “best” strain of wheat. Whether your kids eat next year depends on the judgment of a couple of anonymous bureaucrats in FedFarm Crop Planning.
Its really kind of funny, in a sad way – for the people on the left with their diversity fetish, the idea of single payer, or single anything, should be anathema.
Monopolies provide poor service, little innovation, and give you NO CHOICE. A good model here for that to expect is large urban schools – Detroit, LA, DC, etc.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Comcast stinks; there are websites devoted to spreading the word.
I concur with the folks who said you need business-class service, though. I did tech support for another mega-com corporation’s DSL service, and if you called the residential folks (us) you would spend fifteen minutes on hold before we had fourteen (and a half) minutes to help you before we started getting in trouble. I seem to remember we said we’d try to get service back in 48 hours. When I got guys who called us by accident and needed the business support folks, a warm transfer (to their publicly-advertised number) meant I got to hear about two seconds of their hold music and greeting before talking to a live person. From what I understood from those reps, that extra $40 or so per month produces remarkable results.
And I commend your wife for the phone decision. Bundling means sacrificing a lot of security for a little bit of a discount and convenience, and in a weird “Ben Franklin was so right” way, you end out getting no security, no convenience, and no discount. This would be a reason not to have the government in charge of more than we absolutely need it to be in charge of, come to think of it.
The Mac certainly isn’t a best-seller; people buy PCs and Windows in far larger numbers. Is that because people trust Microsoft more than Apple?
Actually, people went with Microsoft for a variety of reasons, and trust probably was never on the list. Price, compatibility, for me it was that Windows was much more customizable and flexible than Mac, at least the pre-OS X ones (Steve Jobs basically decided how you were going to perform a task, and that was it). Regarding trust, look at the backlash from Vista – Microsoft singlehandedly doubled Mac’s market share with that debacle. As for myself, I have purchased my last computer running any MS OS, no matter how much less Win7 sucks than Vista did.
Never freakin’ again. I am currently evaluating a half dozen Linux distributions to choose which one or two I will go with (I expect to select one for PC and laptop use, and maybe another one for running my server). Right now I can’t see any way for MS to get me back, and I have been using Win NT since ’94, after having evaluated it agianst OS/2 and the then infant Linux.
I will avoid letting out my inner geek ^_^ and try to focus your thesis a bit more:
A critical issue when it comes to trust is culture.
A lot of people trust Apple when Jobs is running it because he’s established a culture of “insanely great” (or the like).
My circumstances and requirements don’t allow or require me to buy cable + telco redundancy so the one I choose is based on which culture I trust more. Not the one that in times past would find which cable repeater went bad by sticking pins in a map after each outage report from a customer but the one that was absolutely serious about providing a true 5 9s voice service (I worked with 5EES types when I worked for Lucent in 2001, they were deadly serious about that).
And therefore those of us who study history don’t trust the programs of progressives. It’s human nature to not admit mistakes and to try to reinforce failure, progressives are hardly alone in being like this, the problem comes from their “one right way” method of designing systems without redundancy. E.g. public schools while doing their best to suppress alternatives like religious based ones and home schooling.
And you’re absolutely right about Team Obama: too much of their strategy depends on trust, especially their health care program, and it is failing in large part because they’ve demonstrated they are anything but trustworthy.
Mr. Malone is a typical information age adolescent personality who has somehow forgotten that the digital (virtual) world is ultimately reliant on the physical (real) world. Physical systems periodically fail. Mr. Malone needs to grow up and learn how to improvise, adapt and overcome.
Sega??
Look on the bright side; You had a column idea drop in your lap, you got out of the house for a few hours, a trusted local business not only took you in but it fed you a hot beverage and provided free wifi access in an oak trimmed setting. In return they received free advertising and weren’t requied to brew anything but the swill they usually foist off on their customers.
I am going to piggyback off of curlyDave here.
You are complaining about Comcast yet you mention that it is the router that is down. So have you hooked up a PC for a moment to the RJ45 on the back of the cable modem and see if there is a connection? If there is then you are complaining about hardware not service. Oh and my God don’t tell me you ‘rent’ the equipment.
Get a sprint satellite card, never goes down, fast and cheap.
Betrayal is an imbedded genetic “trigger” for anger, so we can protect ourselves, and stay alive. It’s that simple. Reed.
True story:
I recently dropped Comcast and ATT landlines in favor of UVerse. It cut my bill down from $320 for cable, phone and internet to $240 a month.
After deciding that UVerse sucks, I switched back to Comcast. Now it’s going to be $159 a month.
Still wondering about that.
Comcast, for their part, promptly postponed my installation date, blaming AT&T. That’s the Comcast I know.
David Thomson: I get the distinct impression that Michael S. Malone and many of the commenters live in the boonies.
Michael S. Malone: I’m writing this column from table #3 at Peet’s Coffee in Cupertino, California. In the first line of the article.
Dude, read much?
David Thomson: Could this be a specifically a California problem?
This is not a California problem. It’s not even a problem. What it is is a Michael S Malone problem.
Malone’s internet service went out for a day. A day! And presto-changeo, Jonny-on-the-spot, Comcast is morally equivalent to pedophiles and Malone is off writing books on trust.
Please.
Stop me before I hurl.
We have triple-play through comcast [thank goodness we all have our own cell-phones]. The phone situation was the worst because they *DO* sell your phone number to telemarketers IMMEDIATELY.
Comcast has gone down a few times but I have to admit they’ve been up 99.9% of the time and we have terrible winter wind storms here up on the hill which cause massive power outtages in our neighborhood but our emergency power generator covers that now.
As others have mentioned, I’d check to make sure it isn’t the actual wireless router that is having problems. I usually tinker like mad before calling for customer service because I hate waiting around for someone else to fix things. lol
power outtages = power ‘outages’
Gah.
“What they inevitably fail to appreciate (because they are Utopians) is that they are demanding from the populace almost infinite Trust in matters of life and death – something most sensible adults will, wisely, never give — while at the same time stripping away every other alternative. This is guaranteed to create fear, a sense of helplessness . . . and ultimately, anger.” Beautifully written. Folks, this is about trust not Comcast. Comcast is merely the vehicle for a deeper commentary.
I have to agree with quite a few commenters liike CurlyDave. If your living depends on your Internet connection, you’d have a different solution than betting on Comcast to be up 100% of the time. Not going to happen. My associates and I trade for a living, and absolutely require reliable Internet connections. Some have had T1 lines provisioned, which will cost you about $200/month. A cheaper solution is having two connections on different systems — one cable, one DSL. I personally have had connection problems with my Time Warner Cable. When it went out, it was out for hours. When my AT&T DSL goes down, it only takes a reboot of the modem. So I use the DSL for my main connection and Cable for my back-up. If one goes down, all you have to do is switch which modem is plugged into your wi-fi/router. Since you already have a phone line, you can get a high-speed DSL connection for only an additional $25-$30. If you’re making your living from the Internet, paying an additional $30/month seems like a no-brainer. Not doing it, just makes you look cheap.
“Michael S. Malone: I’m writing this column from table #3 at Peet’s Coffee in Cupertino, California. In the first line of the article.”
Cupertino, California has a population of roughly 50,000 people. That’s the boonies in comparison to Houston, Texas! We consider that to be a small suburb.
“This is not a California problem.”
California is a blue state. It is in deep trouble partly because of its powerful unions—and overall cultural impoverishment. I am not aware of any serious studies done on the subject, and I am certainly no Joel Kotkin. Still, this question is quite legitimate: is incompetence becoming the norm in all of the areas dominated by Democratic and “moderate” Republican politicians? Have most of the good technicians already left California? Are you now left with only the second and third best? How much are Comcast techies paid? Is it really worth it to remain in the state? I would think that moving to someplace like Nevada might be very enticing.
All I have to say is thank god we’ve allowed telecommunications companies to act as monopolies in certain regions for every single telecommunications function that exists. Because its obvious that’s really working out.
Trust, lack of trust, and indifference are ALWAYS empirically reflected in the charts! The charts are a blueprint of human psychology and how “we” vote. Follow the charts and you follow the TRUST… or live in denial like those who look at the declining Gallup TRUST chart of Barrack Obama and consider him to be accomplishing his goals.
You have to remember that our POTS phone services are still coasting on infrastructure investments made under the old Bell System. It was a regulated monopoly, with a guaranteed rate of return. And, although everyone complained about The Phone Company, it was probably one of the most trusted entities in the nation. Does anyone remember lifting a receiver and NOT getting dialtone? Of course you don’t, because it essentially NEVER happened.
I worked for Bell Labs, before the First Divestiture (1/1/84). When deciding what to deploy, the priorities were (1) safety, (2) reliability, and (3) cost. (In that order!!) And the resulting infrastructure was approximately as reliable as gravity.
Cable networks were built under a completely different economic mode. And different priorities led to different deployment decisions.
Ditto for the cellular carriers. (”Can you hear me now?”)
If we still had Ma Bell, I guarantee that nobody would have iPhones in 2009. But I also guarantee that, whatever primitive mobile devices we were carrying, they’d be approximately as reliable as gravity.
It’s a tradeoff. Personally, I like sexy new devices and services, and am willing to compromise a little on reliability to get them sooner. But we should realize that it is a tradeoff… and one made without the understanding nor the consent of the ratepayers from the early 1980s.
As a lot of the legacy POTS equipment reaches end-of-life, telcos are replacing it with VOIP systems comparable to Vonage or Skype. Cheaper, yes. But they’re not going to work when a hurricane drops the phone wires onto your lawn and Florida Power is out for a week.
The problem isn’t so much that someone’s cable went out. When you have providers doing “triple play” connectivity … your television cable, your internet, and your telephone communications, there should be a warning to the public that the service is not as reliable as what they had been used to for those services.
When I was young the TV came by antenna on your roof and the phone by a direct wire to a telephone office with backup power and a phone which worked when a storm took the electricity out.
With these new services, people are going to be completely cut off in an emergency (storm, earthquake, whatever).
In the “old days” if a power line went down, it was possible to fire up a generator and get news and information on your TV. And there is a good chance your phone might still work, too. Today that would be impossible. How many people even have a landline phone that will work with the power out?
As the array of services expands, the reliability of these services decline. And as you put more services on one single infrastructure, you naturally lose more when that single infrastructure breaks. You can replace the power line with a generator. You can replace TV with broadcast if you have an antenna. You can still buy a phone that doesn’t need to be plugged in. I suggest people consider having alternative means of “staying connected” and being able to get emergency information in case of an emergency. I will never part with my land line phone wire. That is probably the most reliable service that I have. I don’t want to lose 911 service when the power goes out.
The Xbox 360 has a failure rate of over 50% The PS3 (and Wii) have failure rates much lower than that. Such a high failure rate is a failure of trust—a pertinent note to the article at hand. But beyond that, the PS3 has a *lot* of gaming content and the best games are at least as advanced in graphics and game play as the 360. Especially with the PS3 price drop, you get a gaming platform that *and* it is a BluRay player to boot. Both the PS3 and Xbox have exclusives, but many Xbox exclusives have been ported to the PS3, despite firm assertions by companies that they could only be had (for all time) on an Xbox. That influenced decisions and was a breach of trust as well.
I lived in Spokane when Comcast purchased the AT&T network and really, their service was great! There were outages occasionally and I never had a phone tech tell me that it was my fault (that would have been a BAD day for that tech) or that ‘something MUST be wrong with your computer’.
I always used to see the satellite TV ads that would blast cable companies service and wondered how they got away with it.
Then I moved to the Tri-Cities in Washington, and got Charter cable. Oh-boy, talk about awful service. I can’t wait to get moved into my new home so that I can get Direct TV (no southern exposure in the current rental home)and work my way out of the cesspool that is being a Charter ‘customer’. These people deserve to lose money…
It ain’t trust, it’s a Service Level Agreement. And you don’t have one. Because Comcast doesn’t offer one. Well, they do, but it’s called ‘best effort’.
Perhaps if so much depends on it, you’ll ask for a Service Level Agreement, specifying how much downtime you will tolerate, and how much compensation they’ll offer for that downtime.
And when they quit laughing, you’ll realize that trust never entered into it – unless it was your naivete.
David Thomsen/61:
“Cupertino, California has a population of roughly 50,000 people. That’s the boonies in comparison to Houston, Texas!”
Google map it. We’ll wait.
Back? Good.
Cupertino is for all practical purposes a 50K population neighborhood in a 4M+ population urban agglomeration. Near the southern end of an urban area ranging south from San Francisco/Oakland on both sides of the bay.
You can *get* to the boonies by driving about a half hour from there, but for being in the boonies, Cupertino ain’t.
“All I have to say is thank god we’ve allowed telecommunications companies to act as monopolies in certain regions for every single telecommunications function that exists. Because its obvious that’s really working out.”
I see. You support monopolies when it’s something as unimportant as health care, but are against them when it’s something so important as the maintaining the capacity to troll forums. Your mind is a marvel of consistency.
This is why I roll my eyes whenever someone says that “cloud computing” is the future of computers. I just graduated from school. Even the combination of the Comcast internet I had at my apartment, and the school network, I didn’t have enough confidence in my ability to access the internet at any time I’d need to. I’d never feel confident enough to have my vital software accessible only online.
“Google map it. We’ll wait.
Back? Good.”
Fair enough. Cupertino may not be in the boonies. Oh well, I guess I now know why I flunked geography. But you have ignored my next question: Is California falling apart? Are the modestly paid Comcast techies the best in the business? Has the cost of living gone up to the point where the first rate employees have already moved out of the Golden State? Who can still afford to remain in California other than the very wealthy and the welfare recipients? Can a middle class family make it? How many would move out tomorrow if they could get a decent price for their house?
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
A cheaper solution is having two connections on different systems — one cable, one DSL
Sometime in the last couple of years I read a great article in Readers’ Digest regarding a rural elderly couple who depended on Comcast for
for emergency communication in the event one of them needed assistance for transport in illness or injury. Comcast assured them their phone would be reliable. The emergency came and Comcast was “down”. When she was able to get to town, the woman went to the Comcast office with a hammer and hammered every computer she could reach at the counter. TRUE. She was given a fine for destroying property. HOWEVER, THAT DID NOT DAMPEN HER SATISFACTION HAVING COMMUNICATED HER RAGE AT COMCAST!
Guys, this article isn’t about Comcast. It’s about trust. Comcast’s failure is simply a springboard for discussion.
A society built around honor, duty, and the responsibility to tell the truth is a far better society than one built around, “What can I get out of this?” or “There is no ultimate truth, so it doesn’t matter much what I do or say, does it?”
There is moral capital associated with a society. If the only thing that prevents the average person from breaking into your home and stealing your stuff–and maybe killing you because you get in the way–is the prospect that you might kill him, or the police might send him to jail–that’s a barbarous society. When that point is reached, you have exhausted the moral capital of a society.
If the only reason that you pay your credit card bill is because it would be inconvenient to not have access to a credit card company, and this becomes widespread–you have exhausted the moral capital of a society.
If the only reason that we elect a particular leader is because he’s going to steal from someone else and give us what we want, then there’s nothing to prevent a more clever politician from doing the same to us, by giving the right speeches to bamboozle a majority. A political system built largely on that has exhausted its moral capital.
Don’t get me wrong: there have always been crooks, scoundrels, and thugs in American society. But as this goes from 0.1% to 10% of a society, it becomes completely unlivable. In 1950, few Americans felt much of a need to carry a handgun with them. Quite a few do today. And it is at least partly because we seem to have exhausted the moral capital of this society.
Just like financial capital, building up a reserve of moral capital is expensive. And the scum that define our entertainment industry have contributed heavily to looting our society’s moral capital.