One of the great things about the web is the ease of communication, the ease of access it allows people to resources. Not just piles of data on Wikipedia but access to people and companies.
It has made customer service incredibly easy to do and yet so many organisations still do it badly. Some will complain that they are limited by budgetary constraints but customer service on the web is not just easy, it’s cheap.
I regularly take to twitter with my customer service issues and questions and its great when you get some dialogue and a question answered. It makes a huge difference to your perception of a brand and how much does it cost to set up a twitter account? Nothing. Ok admittedly you have to get someone to manage it but the setup cost is nothing.

But good customer service doesn’t start and end with twitter, so here are my major online customer service gripes and I’ll start with twitter.

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It wasn’t from Santa but over the festive period my coveting of shiny Apple things was satisfied with an iPad. I’ve wanted to get one for a while, not least as a great tool for me to take things around with me in work. I knew I’d use it at home as well and it’s turned out to be brilliant, but it’s certainly lead to some questioning of the value of my full work set up.

I’ve found I use the iPad all of the time at home and my MacBook that I use for work has been turned on only for work, oh and to transfer some DVDs onto my iPad. Now I couldn’t do without a laptop, the iPad isn’t a complete substitute, graphics work, coding etc aren’t really suited to the iPad, my typing speed is so much better with a physical keyboard – I know I could get a bluetooth one for the iPad. There isn’t any proper file structure so doing web work for sites could prove a bit problematic.

I lease my main work machine and it’s got just over a year to go on it, prior to that last year I have the option to upgrade the machine and extend the lease or just continue to the end of the lease at which point I own the machine outright. I’d always assumed I would continue to upgrade and keep abreast of the laptop market however the arrival of the iPad means I’m using it less and less and find it hard to justify the cost of having a top end machine. I rarely do anything too demanding graphically and the occasional frustrations with anything creative suite are just that – occasional. Can I really justify keeping a high end machine just to mostly edit some HTML and occasionally open Fireworks or InDesign? I’m not sure I can – when I was doing everything on my laptop and hauling it around with me I could say yes and if I did website work full time then maybe, but not anymore.

Which means there’s a good chance I might consider a switch back away from Apple, for one big reason, cost, but a few other smallers ones as well.
The other option to mitigate cost is of course is to keep behind the curve and buy second hand MacBooks as other people go after the new bright shiny stuff.
I did consider going for the Nexus 7 prior to getting the iPad, and I was very close to actually buying it. The main reasons I didn’t were that I wasn’t 100% convinced the screen size was right for me, some stuff for the day job was iPad only and lastly my budgetary constraints became a little less restrictive. However I was excited by the Nexus and had really warmed to the little machine. As much as enjoy using Apple’s ecosystem I’m not 100% married to it, yes I have an iPhone, iPad and MacBook, so I’m well and truly in there – we’re seriously dating maybe – but ironically it’s the iPad that has kind of led me to a point where I can see myself walking away from Apple again.

Still we will see where the market is when I come to change my laptop, I imagine I will now have this one until it dies, and whilst I may stick with Apple one thing I’m sure off is that in the absence of a big windfall I really can’t justify the outlay for buying a new top end machine anymore, it simply isn’t needed.