Monday, January 12, 2009

Yet Another "Cell Phone Companies Suck" moment

As you might have gathered from recent posts,  Mrs S and I have the itch for new smart phones.  But every time we're ready to upgrade, the cell phone provider manages to talk us out of it by being really really annoying in some way.

Blackberry Storm / Verizon:  the Verizon store managed to talk us out of upgrading to Blackberry Storm b/c the salesman was intrusive and rude.  (Described here)

iPhone / AT&T: the AT&T store utterly ignored us, even when we wanted attention, thus no iPhone for us.     In contrast, the Apple Store was really nice and helpful, which made us reconsider.  We were almost ready to sign up, but AT&T requires a 2 year contract.

G1 / T-Mobile: Loved the phone, but T-Mobile also requires a 2 year contract.

if either AT&T or T-Mobile had offerred a 1-year contract, we would already be a customer.

Listen up Phone Companies -- Smart Phone technology moves fast.  The customers who want to buy the top-of-the-line smart phones realize that whatever phone they get will be obsolete in a year.    I don't want to be locked in for two years.   Two years for a cell phone product cycle is like five years for computers.  I understand that you discount the up-front price of the phone b/c you expect to make it up in the two year service fee.  Fine.   I'll happily pay the extra money up-front for the phone for a 1-year contract.    Just give me that option.

2 comments:

  1. How twisted is it that a company would rather have no revenue, than a year of revenue?

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  2. It might be because they hire people who have no history in sales and then give them absolutely no authority to deal.

    ReplyDelete