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American Airlines, YACTW (Yet Another Clue-Train-Wreck)

Jake McKee has flown over 415,000 miles on American. Platinum status. Uber-loyal. Has flown them when other options were cheaper, in the belief that at some point in the future when he needed flexibility, they’d be able to provide it.

Nope, they hosed him. Here’s how (letter reprinted from http://www.communityguy.com ):

“My name is Jake McKee. I’m a highly loyal AA member (#80E04C2) since 11/18/98. I’ve acquired 415,000 miles. My AA number is one of the few numbers other than my wife’s birthday and my social security number that I actually know by heart. I typically spend anywhere from $10K-$30K USD/year with AA. I travel all over North America, and have used AA to fly to Europe a number of times this year.

I’ve encourage many to fly AA, and skipped cheaper tickets. With my status, I believed that if I had problems AA would treat me right.

After a call to American to redeem miles for a ticket, I’ve decided that my loyalty has been clearly misplaced. The cause is outlined below:

I booked an award ticket, and was told by the rep that I could pay the fees up to the day of the flight without fees. I called in to settle the fees and was told there was an extra $50 charge becausee I was under 21 days. After talking to a supervisor (who knew my status), I was told the fee was required, regardless of what the orginal sales agent told me. The supervisor said that knowing my status, I should know the policies. I said “so basically you’re punishing me for having flown a lot with you”, she said “If you’d like to think about it that way”.

She made $50 off of me, she effectively lost tens of thousands of dollars. United Airlines has assured me that my status would transfer.

This letter is an offer to save my business. I will be blogging this experience at communityguy.com

Jake McKee”

He’s also running a contest over there. Place your bets on when/if AA will get back to him…

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Information Is Social

Outsell has just published their 2006 Information Industry Outlook report (free reg. req’d), which is chock-full of great findings on how individuals and enterprises are using information their day-to-day and business lives. One of the headlines that jumped out of the report: Information is Social and Peer-to-Peer. Outsell:

“Now, instead of looking ‘up’ to oracles, users are looking sideways – to peers and to social contexts on the Internet, where published information is instantly unveiled, vetted, praised, condemned, corrected, and altered through the ‘wisdom of the masses.'”

This subsection of the report goes on to note the following items as evidence:

  • The increasing reliance on colleagues and peers as a source of information
  • Blogs and other social publishing media are becoming a key resource for knowledge workers
  • The emergence of open models in scientific publishing
  • Instant verification (or refutation) of news and peer reaction to events
  • Credibility derives from scrutiny of peers
  • Youth are sharing and remixing information and will continue to do so (and adults do, too)
  • Information intermediaries are still relevant in order to relieve users from the information glut

The points above are from pp. 10-11 of the report, which runs about 30 pages.

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Google Blog Search Hack: Finding Inbound Links

Want to find inbound links to a blog via Google Blog Search? Preface the URL of your (or anyone’s) blog with link: — like this:

Googleblogsearchlinks

Try it yourself. It looks like you can also get the inbound link results as an RSS feed as well.

(Yes, I know links are only a surrogate for quality and that solutions are under development… )

UPDATE: Alert reader Nick W. points out that there are a number of other operators that are available in addition to link: . These operators are:

  • cache:
  • link:
  • related:
  • info:
  • define:
  • stocks:
  • site:
  • allintitle:
  • intitle:
  • allinurl:
  • inurl:

In addition, there are a number of new blog-specific operators:

  • inblogtitle:
  • inposttitle:
  • inpostauthor:
  • blogurl:

Many of these are not available from the advanced search page, but must be entered directly.

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Oracle Acquires Siebel, And Salesforce.Com Unveils New Strategy

Larry Ellison adds Siebel to his stable of acquisitions, and now (officially) goes head-to-head with his old protege Mark Benioff, who now heads Salesforce.com. The deal is for approximately $5.85 billion, or USD$10.66 per share.

What it means:

Siebel has been struggling to find its footing, and Oracle continues to look for ways to increase its footprint against SAP. This acquisition does both.

It gives Oracle a vault into the on-demand, Software As A Service (SaaS) space for CRM. Siebel’s acquisition of Upshot in November, 2003 gave it a credible entry into the market, and now Oracle may be able to put the muscle behind it that Siebel could not, to give the broadest challenge to Salesforce and NetSuite.

The timing of the announcement is interesting, and takes some of the air out of the sails that Salesforce is announcing their AppExchange market today (thanks Zoli). AppExchange is touted to be an “eBay for on-demand applications,” and has been launched at AppExchange.com. Instead of creating all the applications (a la SAP), or acquiring them (a la Oracle), Benioff aims to be the infrastructure upon which interconnected enterprise apps run.

First Skype and eBay, now these announcements. Something’s in the water today…

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