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As for BT, well, would you just take a look at Fusion which was developed as Bluephone. In principle it’s a fine idea to have a mobile handset that can roam on to a Bluetooth wireless router (BT calls it your Home Hub) when you are within range, whereupon you move from a mobile tariff to a landline tariff. Except that BT wants to charge you a fortune for the privilege. You have to use BT ADSL so you pay a phone line rental plus an ADSL charge and then you pay for your calls on top and the rates are punitive, which is more or less exactly the opposite of VoIP.

Clearly BT is unable to offer a service that would save the customer money so it has limited the range of the Fusion Home Hub to a pathetic ten metres, which means that you could be on a mobile tariff when you were in your own house, let alone down the garden or in the garage. You can see why BT has taken this approach as a longer range – say 100 metres - would have allowed any Fusion phone to roam on to your home hub when it was within range, so it would be possible to imagine people driving through London roaming from one Home Hub to the next. As it stands Fusion is a very poor implementation that serves BT’s interests without offering anything to its long-suffering customers.

And so we come to Microsoft which has a couple of intriguing problems on its hands. Although home PC users have converted to Windows XP in their droves, over 50 per cent of workstations in the corporate environment still run Windows 2000. There is no incentive whatsoever to move to XP with its support for digital cameras, large hard drives, enhanced audio and a built in Firewall as these aren’t features for the work place but instead are complications.

Naturally Microsoft is unhappy that it has a large group of customers who are satisfied with their five year old software so it is busy trying to kill Windows 2000 by issuing one final rolled-up Service Pack before it pulls the plug on support. Presumably it wants its customers to migrate to Longhorn, when it arrives, if it works, should it have any benefits, despite the fact that Longhorn will definitely require corporates to upgrade their hardware. This seems like an odd way to retain your loyal customers but XP users are about to get a kick in the crotch as Microsoft shows its commitment to secure computing with Microsoft OneCare which has entered the Beta phase.

This is a support package that means you will have to pay Microsoft to fix the problems that are caused in software such as Windows and Office. Most of us suspect that Microsoft could fix many of its security problems by removing Internet Explorer from Windows, along with Windows Messenger, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player but Microsoft insists that they are all integral to Windows. The result is that Microsoft – a company which refuses to support Windows for the end user, but instead dumps the job on the PC builder - expects us to pay for it to fix the problems that it caused in the first place.

This contempt for the customer clearly hasn’t held Microsoft back, and the phone companies seem to do very well out of it too, so perhaps our perception of customer service needs more attention. If you give the customer what they want you end up with the Crazy Frog at the top of the charts for a month and Big Brother on TV, and surely that is as bad as it can possibly get.

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