You are correct – I should cut the technical support people some slack. They were courteous and tried to be helpful and I think that they were doing the best that they could. Besides, this is not a technical support issue, this is a management issue. Here you have Barnes and Noble, the largest brick and mortar book seller in the United States, under attack by a monster from the Amazon and you come out with an awesome eReader that beats the pants off of the monster’s product (which looks like something from the 80’s), but many of their customers can’t get it to connect to the internet. So what do they do? They tell their customers that this is a problem with their home network. B&N needs to remember something that they teach you the first day at business school – the customer is always right! Toyota understands that. They officially apologized for the acceleration problem in their vehicles and re-called them all for retrofitting, even though they knew the problem wasn’t with their cars, a fact that was later proven in an exhaustive NASA study. B&N can’t tell people that this Nook Color connectivity issue is their problem. This is a problem with Nook Color! After all, absolutely every other wireless device in my home connects just fine to our network including our laptops, our blu ray player, our X-Box, our Wii, and even our DS Lite. Also, guests have no problem connecting their laptops to our network when given the password. So how can the problem be with OUR router? I read where many other customers said the same thing.
These eReaders are the future of book selling, but you aren’t going to be selling many eBooks if your customers can’t connect to the internet with their device. When researching this issue, I read pages and pages of complaints made by people with the same issues I was having…and those are just the ones who bothered to write. Can you imagine how many more were having the same issues, but didn’t write? If the CEO of B&N wants to keep his job he needs to get on the phone with the head of the Nook Color technical department TODAY, and tell him to get this connectivity issue resolved. His next call needs to be to his technical support manager telling him that he wants these technical support issues resolved properly. There is no reason why the technical support people can’t browse Google, just like I did, to try and find solutions. I realize there are a lot of different routers out there, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I’ve given them the connection solution for the NETGEAR wnr 1000 wireless router, next they can trouble shoot Linksys, then D-link, etc.
