Josh Chalifour’s Comments

• Oct 20th, 2010 @ 4:55pm

  Still Bad Customer Service (as JC)

  on Broken Monitor Still Under Warranty, But Samsung Won't Fix It, Because You Don't Live In Canada
  This is an interesting issue considering how many large companies do business globally. Even if technically, the two Samsungs are different business entities, the Samsung internal structure is irrelevant to the consumer.
  
  If a company is going to use its brand, its technology, marketing, partner networks, etc. to its advantage in selling products/services, then it needs to treat customers with the same united face that it presented when selling them the product in the first place.
  
  If I buy a Samsung product, I'm buying Samsung not Sony. I should be able to expect that Samsung will honor my purchase uniformly, wherever I am. I wouldn't expect Sony to honor it because Sony is obviously a different company--but Sumsung is Samsung.
  
  This is an example of poor customer service.
• Mar 22nd, 2010 @ 6:04am

  Just One Problem with E-mails as Evidence

  on People Realizing That Viacom's Filings Take YouTube Quotes Totally Out Of Context
  Having been involved in a lawsuit where internal e-mails were used as damning evidence in the case, I can see how easy it is to have these messages totally misrepresented.
  
  Companies involved in lawsuits now, must during the early discovery period, collect massive quantities of documentation from years of saved up e-mails, which the lawyers then use in their cases. This is a huge huge problem because of the nature of e-mail.
  
  Without even getting into the reliability of who actually wrote what, these messages are way too easy to be taken out of context and thus have their meanings represented to non-participants (anyone outside the original conversation) in a way that's simply wrong. The example in this article illustrates this.
  
  Writing an e-mail often tends to seemlessly refer to conversations, activities, and other background context that is outside of anything stated within the e-mail. It just gets worse when there are back-and-forth e-mail threads, where sometimes a whole thread is captured, other times only portions of it are sent to various participants, and they can even respond without knowing the full context, thus sending the e-mail discussion down a different path.
  
  So e-mail archives are like semi-permanent records of things that occured but they're simultaneously very unreliable as records because they do not capture any of the "real world" context in which they occurred. And that context is frequently day-to-day trivia in people's memories so it's lost of faulty when lawyers try to resurrect it after a few years.
  
  This is a reason why some companies implement mandatory e-mail destruction policies after a period of time. It's not that there's anything a company necessarily wishes to hide, but rather completely innocent conversations can be perverted into unintended meanings. Too bad that justice systems are able to be gamed like the example in this article shows.