Cliff Saran’s FUD blog

On Saturday 27th of September at around noon I paid for an item eBay purchase I had just made using PayPal  "for instant payment". The payment was indeed instantly debited from my bank current. The seller got one of those messages from PayPal warning that it would only release the funds after 21 days or when I, the buyer, had given positive feedback.

This was unacceptable for the seller I was dealing with. He emailed me and said that PayPal/eBay had not made these conditions clear when he put the item on the auction site. "It's payment on buyer approval," he told me.

I tried to assure him that you do indeed get paid, usually as soon as the buyer has received the payment and leaves the positive feedback. But he had a point and suggested either I leave feedback first (which he admitted was pretty ludicrous), or we cancel the transaction or I pay in cash. As I mentioned in my previous post, we agreed that cash was the best solution, and in fact, I am very pleased with my purchase.

However, it has meant that he needed to issue me a refund through PayPal. The seller refunded me at around 6pm on Saturday 27th, following our email correspondence. The amount showed up in my account with a message stating that because the payment had been made through an instant bank transfer it would take seven to nine days for the money to be available in my PayPal account.

That was on the 27th. The money was finally back in my PayPal account, on the 9th October, 12 days after I had been refunded (eight working days). It is now going to take a further five working days before the money gets to my bank.

My bank account should be credited with the refund on October 16 (ie five working days from October 10th ). Let's think about this - it's taken PayPal over 18 days since the refund was issued by the seller. Is that acceptable in this age of electronic banking and instant bank transfer? Let's face it, the refund could have arrived quicker if it was sent by carrier pigeon.

I have noticed that sellers who use PayPal on eBay are now asking  for positive eBay feedback from the buyer before they send the item out. This is because PayPal appears to have a new policy. Basically, it  prevents you from withdrawing the funds for 21 days unless the buyer leaves positive eBay feedback.

As I mentioned in my previous posting, I have sold a couple of items in the last few weeks. This payment delay has happened twice. The feedback mechanism works on goodwill: users only leave feedback if they had a genuine experience they want to share with other buyers. If people only leave feedback in order for the seller to ship them an item then the feedback mechanism is nonsense.

Now two weeks ago, after I had made an eBay purchse and paid in full via PayPal, the seller explained his situation, which I sympathised with. He suggested three options: Either I leave positive feedback first; or he cancel the auction or I pay in cash.

We decided cash was the best option (I wanted the product). The seller refunded my transaction in full, we met and I exchanged cash for my purchase. When I finally met the seller it occurred to me how utterly useless PayPal is at mirroring the way people do business. The seller seemed a genuinely nice person: I certainly trusted him enough to part with the cash.

It looks like PayPal has gone bonkers. It has Buyer Protection, so why is there a need for this additional barrier, which prevents legitimate users from getting timely access to their funds. I'm sure  PayPal's policy contravenes UK banking legislation.  I can't see how much of a dent this will make on its efforts to combat organised crime. Such behaviour only hurts the little people, like you and me.

There is a real opportunity for someone to develop a better payment system, one that uses real people to make risk assessments, rather than the idiotic one used at PayPal which appear to rely on seemingly random assumptions about fraudulent transactions, that have no bearing on the way business is conducted in the real world.

I've had several PayPal moments over the last few days. Here's the first. Having sold a few items on eBay, PayPal informed me by email:

PayPal is required by law to comply with European Union Anti-Money Laundering regulations to collect information from customers when they receive more than the set limit in total payments. Please log into your account, go to the Account Overview page, and follow the instructions there about how to provide the required information. These steps need to be completed as soon as possible to comply with this regulation.

 Ok, so I went on the website which then stated:

In the past 12 months, you have received £650.00 GBP or more into your PayPal account.

This means you are on your way to approaching the £1,700.00 GBP annual receiving limit. This limit is put in place to allow us to comply with our applicable Anti-Money Laundering regulations.

If you do reach the annual receiving limit of £1,700.00 GBP you will no longer be able to withdraw or send money, fund transactions or close your account until you complete certain steps to lift your limit.

It is simple to complete the steps to lift your limit

Guess what...it's not simple. Try as I might I could not get the PayPal website to recognise that I was not a company,  just an individual, and so there was no date when the company was established.

Needless to say, it didn't let me complete the form without completing the date field for when the company was established. After several minutes of shouting expletives to arguably the world's worst automated voice response system, I finally got through to a PayPal agent. He wasn't particularly helpful, and could not explain why the seeming arbitrary amount of £650 had flagged my account. Anyway, after a bit of a heated debate, he explained how to fill in the offending date field. FYI: you can use the date you set up your PayPal account (but why oh why doesn't it say that on the bloody website?).

Now let's put this in perspective. PayPal issued the email alert to me when my account hit 38% of the supposed £1700 limit for compliance with anti-money laundering legislation. That does seem a somewhat overzealous risk assessment, so much so that I have quickly looked up PayPal's anti-money laundering compliance on Google. What I have found is most interesting.

This article relates to the case of a company called Vortex Centrum, which received a similar PayPal email after its account was credited by £4,500. According to this article, there is nothing in EU, UK or Irish law that places any additional due diligence burden in relation to payments which, in aggregate, reach £4,500. The author states: Whilst PayPal is free to set any trigger figure it wishes, it is completely false to suggest that that figure is set by any law.

I think PayPal has failed on several counts here. The anti-money laundering alert email seems somewhat arbitrary; there is no detailed explanation of why the customer has been targeted nor a link to the appropriate legisation; the PayPal web form for verifying the customer only reflects certain types of business user and its automated voice response system at its call centre defies logic and puts too many barriers in the way to prevent you from speaking to an agent, when you have a legitimate query.

Have you had a PayPal experience? Please get in touch.

I often get asked "What laptop should I buy". I usually try not to give a techie answer, but I often throw a question back: "What do you want to do with it?"

 

More often that not people want a general purpose machine that is light, easy to carry around, has good battery life and as much power as they could every need!

 

Of course, it's not yet possible to build such hardware that is both light and powerful, and has incredible battery life, and a massive hard disc and an amazing display. Personally, I accept this compromise: some machines are better for people who like something for less computationally strenuous tasks like email, word processing, web and form-based applications; other machines are better suited to watching DVDs, playing games and doing PowerPoint presentations, while others fit in the middle.

 

It's this middle ground that needs the most innovation: design compromises, balancing power, weight and battery life. I have yet to come across a perfect laptop. Today's general purpose machines fail on ergonomics or outright performance. Who wants to carry around 2 KG of laptop every day?

Paul Maritz appears to be giving his old employer a bit of a beating this week at VMWorld. I used to speak to Paul when he headed up the Windows Server team at Microsoft - and like many MS peops, he was clearly passionate about the product and he believed he could make a difference. I think it's fair to say that he did...
 
Maritz oversaw Microsoft's attack on NetWare and Unix in the server market and the datacentre.  The VMWare virtual data center operating system announced this week lat VMWorld looks like Maritz' attempt to put VMWare at the heart of data centre computing.
 
Simply put, if everything in the datacentre runs a hypervisor, there's no need to worry about OS upgrades. Windows, Unix and Linux will still exist - but users don't need to worry so much about security and upgrading because everything is happening in a virtualised environment.

The availability of Microsoft's Hyper-V technology will mean that every business running Windows Server 2008 will be able to use virtualisation, without needing to purchase any additional software.
 
Admin staff simply tick a box when installing Windows, and the Microsoft Hypervisor is enabled. Clearly deploying virtual server environments is not that simple, but the fact that it is now part of the Windows OS means that many people can give it a go. And it is likely that more people will use virtualisation through Hyper-V to run several server applications on a single physical server - in other words, Hyper-V will make it easy for people to consolidate servers.
 
This makes Microsoft a dominant force in the hypervisor market, even though Hyper-V is only at version 1. It means VMWare will need to show people how to move beyond server consolidation with its ESX Server hypervisor - to enable workloads to move seamlessly between virtual machines.
 
VMWare will inevitably come under pressure but it  is the market leader, with a mature sophisticated hypervisor geared towards  serious enterprise deployments. I think the loser will be Citrix XenServer, which offers a cheaper alternative to ESX Server.
 
Citrix has spent years battling with Microsoft on the desktop where its MetaFrame product offers an up-market alternative to the Terminal Services software that ships with Windows Server. It looks like it will now be battling to retain users as Microsoft enters the hypervisor market. Some experts think Citrix will go back to its roots, and focus on desktop virtualisation, an emerging area of IT, closely related to the work Citrix has done with Metaframe

.

 

 

I'm keen to look at the features in details, having looked at the basic productivity gains promised by Microsoft.

Today I spoke to Cian Weeresinghe, eBay Uk's marketing manager, about how the auction site was planning to make the most of what IE8 has to offer. eBay has developed three applications with Microsoft for IE8.

The first is an IE8 web slice,which allows web users  to keep track of things that interest them, using the Favourites menu bar. On eBay's  IE8 site (ie8.ebay.co.uk) users can click on a button that runs a PHP script, which sets up such a web slice. eBay uses it to enable eBay users to keep track of any activity on an item they are interested in purchasing. Within the Favourites menu bar, the web slice turns the item's descriptive text bold if there is any activity, like when someone bids.

IE8's Visual Search function works when you select eBay as one of your search engine. The browser allows you then to search for items for sale on eBay.

The other neat feature is IE8's Accelerator menu. So if we are searcging for a gadget or an iPod and the web page contains the word gadget or iPod, you can click on a menu listing items for sale on eBay that match "gadget" or "iPod"

I spoke to Microsoft earlier today about the beta 2 release of Internet Explorer, which can now be downloaded. Here are three features MS says will make web browsing faster and more intuitive:

1. Faster web browsing - MS says it has spent hours in usability labs videoing users to see what they do when web browsing. In IE8 it has attempted to  automate the common tasks people do. I often use Streetmap to get a map and figure out directions for a meeting. In IE8, when I right mouse click on the address, MS' accelerator web service brings up a list of options, one of which can be set to take the address from the my current web page and pass it on to my mapping service - Streetmap.
2. Quicker URLs - While in IE7,  when you type in a partial URL, you are presented with a list of recent sites, MS now checks a partial URL name based on recent sites, History and Favourites. Any part of the URL can be keyed in.
3. Visual Search - This works if you have opted to download an Open Search Description File from a supported site like eBay, Amazon or the New York Times. These web sites and others that use OSDF present images and text in the search preview window as you type in a search term.

I downloaded the IE8 beta 2 earlier. It eventually installed on my PC, after Windows update had downlaoded all those Windows XP patches I had avoided installing.It seems to run OK. I was hoping to write my blog entry using it. But there's a bug somewhere becuase the Moveable Type engine wasn't playing game, I I used Firefox instead. Oh well IE8 is a beta. I'm hoping to have acloser look at these features over the next few postings.

Microsoft and Novell have made a big splash about their Linux interoperability agreement from 2006.  So far it's worth $100 million over the last two years and there are about 100 customers including the likes of Walmart among others.

 

Sounds good? I beg to differ. $100m is Steve Balmer's loose change. MS probably spends more on its campus canteens per year than this.

 

Microsoft's CTO  meets Novell every six months. I guess that must show a real commitment to Linux interoperability.. I wonder how often MS senior execs meet HP or Intel - they probably don't leave it six months to catch-up.

 

Microsoft says customers are asking for Linux/Windows interoperability, and its investment in the alliance with Novell demonstrates its commitment to helping customers run Linux and Windows in their data centres. Get real. It's a tiny percentage of its annual revenue.

I recently came across an interesting posting on software quality from Bola Rotibi, principal analyst at Macehiter Ward-Dutton. In the posting Bola draws an analogy between "good enough software" and a one-star hotel. It's all about managing our expectations, according to Bola:

 

A one star hotel probably offers adequate and "good enough" services for those on a budget. But this would not be sufficient for five-star luxury seekers. The key, though, is that customers of each know what they are getting for their money and whether it is fit for their purpose. There is a quantifiable means of grading what is delivered and matching that to what is expected.

At the moment commercial software ships with a huge disclaimer which frees the software maker from any legal obligation to build software that "works". I am not aware of any other industry where a company is allowed to ship shoddy products. I think Bola has a good idea here, in terms of hotel ratings for software. Perhaps we need some kind of standard for "good enough" software and a rating system, which informs buyers what they are getting.