T-mobile just made a bad move. They sent out a notice (unfortunately, I don’t have mine handy at the moment, otherwise I would scan it in here) saying that they will be raising their incoming and outgoing text message rates from $0.15 per message to $0.20 per message.

I don’t have an SMS plan on my T-mobile account — basically because it annoys me that carriers charge so much for text messaging. It is the cheapest part of their service and they rake in the money with it. TechCrunch had an post about this as well.

Well, since I am under a contract with T-Mo, but they changed the rates on me, I called them up and told them I would like to terminate my contract with T-Mo since if they want to increase my rate, then I should have the option to cancel my contract. The customer service rep directed me to their cancellation/retention department. There I spoke with the agent and she informed me that I have until August 18th to change carriers. As long as I change carriers by August 18th and transfer my numbers over to a new service by that date, then I would not be assessed the early termination fee!

So for any other folks out there on a T-Mo contract, the SMS rate change may be your ticket to get out of the T-Mo contract and switch to an iPhone (or anything else) you may want to. I hate AT&T just as much as anyone can, but since Apple extended their exclusivity on the iPhone, I guess Mr. Jobs leaves me no other choice but to give in to AT&T if I want to get with the times.

Anyhow, your mileage may wary on getting out of your T-Mo contract, but feel free to post in the comments and let me and others know how it goes. I’ll update this post depending on my experience soon.

Update: The cancellation worked successfully. An early termination fee was assessed and I had to call up T-Mobile once again to complain about it and then they took it off.

Recently I purchased a brand new copy of QuickBooks Pro 2007, since I figured with the new Vista, it’s better to get the most recent version as opposed to even attempting to install the older versions that I already had. I bought the retail package from the Stanford Bookstore on 06/15/2007.

I came home and installed it. First, Quickbooks Pro 2007 requires about 730 MB of disk space — kinds of excessive for an accounting package! Anyway, the installation proceeded smoothly. Then I proceeded to launch the program from the icon on the desktop. “Loading Quickbooks…” — a good sign. Then up came the splash screen, immediately followed by “This program has stopped responding” and then it shut down. And so it started…

I searched the web for solutions to the problem. The posts on the Quickbooks forum by “Community_Guru_Brian” seemed to suggest that you have to uninstall and then do a clean install after removing all the Intuit folders. Did that. No luck.

Some other posts suggested that it was a permissions issue and that I should try running as Administrator. Did that. No go. Another post suggested running “reboot.bat” to fix permissions. Did that. No go. Unfortunately, I was doing this on a Friday evening and so when I called Intuit support, of course, the support call was answered by someone with a distinct Indian accent, but with an americanized name. The support person insisted that in order to get support I would first have to “register” my version of Quickbooks and start the free 30-day support. I indicated that I did not want to start the free 30 day support clock by registering yet and all I want to do is get the product installed to at least be able to try it out first. Well, she said that in that case I would not be eligible for any help from Intuit. I asked for a supervisor and was put on hold indefinitely. Ultimately, I hung up after no one came back on the line.

Over the weekend, I continued to troll through the Intuit forums to try and find the solution to the problem. Tried everything, but no result. Must have spent a good 6-7 hours on this over the weekend, not counting the time spent on Friday (another 2-3 hours).

On Monday, I finally bit the bullet, called back in, “registered” for the free 30 day support and spoke to Jyoti in the Intuit call center in New Delhi. I indicated to her that I had already tried several things, but she insisted that I try them again. So we went through the same process all over again. Anything she would look up and suggest, I had already tried before. After over an hour and a half on the phone she finally gave up and said that this will need to be “escalated” and that she would need to first get permission etc. Anyhow, she said she would call me back the following day. We set a time for 1:00 PM Pacific — which I explained to her was 1:30 AM in New Delhi, but she agreed.

The following day, I didn’t get a call back at 1:00 PM. Finally I got a voicemail at 5:30 PM saying that the matter had been escalated and scheduled for a call back.

The next day I got a call back from David from Intuit support. He suggested that I try downloading the FULL release (330 MB) off the web and then reinstall. He said he would call back in 1/2 hour after I was done downloading.

About 2 hours later, I get a call from James in Tucson, AZ. By this point, I had uninstalled, cleaned folders and started to re-install. BTW, even the “full release” on Intuit’s website is not quite right. It is supposed to be R7, but is actually R6. And so even after installing a fresh download, you have to download an additional web patch (95 MB) and install that to supposedly get up to the latest version which is R7 as of this writing.

Another couple of hours on the phone with James (1 hour and 37 minutes is what I counted) which included booting in Safe-Mode, turning of all startup applications and services, then re-installing. Removing and re-installing .NET 1.1. etc etc.

NOTHING worked. The symptoms are all the same — QuickBooks would still crash before launching.

James was stumped and said he would discuss this in their team meeting and call me back the following day. Scheduled a call back for 9:30 AM. Of course, the next day, no one called at 9:30 AM or anytime close. Someone finally called and left a message in the afternoon, when I happened to be out of the office.

The next morning, it is now June 22nd and 9:15 AM — I called back in to figure out when I should expect a call back. The person I spoke to “Abby” who sounded quite clueless, said that they would have to “re-escalate” in order to schedule a callback! When I finally explained the whole thing yet again, she schedule a call back for the same day. As of noon, there has been no call from Intuit. Even when they do call, I wonder what resolution they will have to offer.

At a meta level, the quality of customer support and even more so the quality of the product from a company as large as Intuit is really quite astonishingly poor. There is no concept of true troubleshooting. Their agents work of scripts and knowledge-bases (like most companies these days) which turns there more into non-thinking automatons than into human beings who can think and analyze a problem.

I’m very close to calling their bluff on their 60-day money-back guarantee and at least recouping the cost of the retail box, though I doubt that will do anything to recover the countless hours I have spent with a poor product and even poorer customer support and will still leave me without a solution for what I was trying to do in the first place — setup the accounting for a new company!

Update: The problem continued for well over two months. I actually had three Intuit engineers from Mountain View visit me at home because they had reports of this problem occurring for other users but had been unable to replicate it in the lab. With no resolution at hand, Intuit then offered to buy my computer from me since they wanted to take it back to their lab to analyze it further. I explained to them that building a new computer and getting back up and running would cost me a couple of days of downtime and I doubt they could afford/want to compensate me for that. Instead I told them to please take their broken software back and just refund me my cost. I was still on the loosing end of this deal though since I’d already invested well over a weeks worth of time in helping Intuit debug their broken software. I have since reosrted to using Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 — which has it’s own issues, but at least it installs and runs!

I’ve been using Gallery 1.x for a while. When I found Gallery 1.x I was thrilled as it was the first web based album software that really met the needs of what I was looking for. I installed it and liked it so much that I donated to help its future development. And I can say today that I am so happy to see what the developers of Gallery have done with it. Gallery 2.0 is truly amazing. Really well done. Smooth install. Good documentation. Great UI. And just overall smooth. It is the best example of a truly valuable opensource development effort.

Kudos and a big thanks to all the developers!