Community is no longer you neighborhood. And business practices by global companies have got to start behaving that way. Jonathan Greene’s post about the difficulties he went through activating his iPhone and some of the associated challenges he seeing.
For example, he refers to issues with porting numbers between Cingular and AT&T’s merged platforms. He references a billing issue related to using a service called PayTrust.
None of these are new issues. I have friends who have been affected by the very same issues Jonathan highlights are at the very least a few years old. Instead of looking at how people are changing their “consumer behavior” and doing things differently because the online world has made it possible to have a bank account anywhere, a bill receiving service, multiple residences, phone numbers with area codes that don’t match up with the zipcode one resides in, etc.
It is time for global brands like AT&T who have in many ways fueled some of the exact new ways of doing business, can’t keep trying to have people behave in a 1.0 way, now that the net and connectivity has provided 2.0 options.