I’ve been doing this for the majority of my adult life now, and its quite interesting to me that as time went on, even events that were out of my control seemed to start aligning with this time of the year for me. It’s amazing how many major events in my life has occurred within a week on either side of my birthday. I don’t think its a coincidence. Focusing on the goals and having a clear understanding of them, have to be the two biggest determining factors in reaching them. For me, the traditional New Year’s occasion of setting resolutions mean nothing because its based on some arbitrary changing of a calendar. Centering it on my birthday has made it more meaningful; more real, and I believe has made more of an inner impact on me that ultimately has helped me reach my goals. I’ve used my birthdays to achieve massive weight loss, change jobs, buy my first home, test for my black belt, buy and learn to shoot my first gun, buy and learn to ride a motorcycle, and so many other smaller goals. Even last year’s Rumble turned out to complete the week of my birthday and last year, one week before, I found out that my Martial Arts teacher of 16 years was retiring and I would no longer be training with him or attending his weekly classes.

My birthday has also been the one time I lost a job. It was a layoff of sorts; really just a contract not being renewed due to a new policy to phase out contractors, but it knocked the wind out of me. It was the first time I’d experienced that even when you’ve proven yourself invaluable as an employee, you can still lose your job, because ultimately its out of your hands, That was six years ago, and it set in motion a completely new way of thinking about my career and my direction. I made a lot of minor changes particularly on what I studied and how I used my spare time to advance my career and my personal branding. I recognized that my strengths and passions were in building products and services and not code, and began altering my entire focus.

Work
Now, six years later, I find myself in a similarly significant job change. For the last 2.5 years I’ve worked for IMM on the Miley Cyrus web sites. It’s been great working with a small intimate team, using Rails and working in the entertainment industry instead of B2C for only the second time since I began my career. But as Miley’s career changed, so did the fans, and I could see the writing on the wall that one day soon there would no longer be the money there to keep these sites running. Rather than to wait for that, I decided to be proactive. I was routinely turning down Rails projects due to my full time job and decided to transition from full time employee to working full time with my company Agile Nomads, providing Ruby on Rails and front end development services. It’s a risk for sure, and its both frightening and exciting. I’m already more than fully booked in September and 80% booked for October and will be working with some great clients to produce some awesome products.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay in this situation; we’ll see how it goes. I’m committed to building great products using Internet technologies and Ruby on Rails and assisting businesses with their product development goals, and for now I’ll do that as a freelance developer through Agile Nomads, and address each opportunity individually as it arises.

I plan to continue working to build PeepNote, and at this year’s Rails Rumble, will be working with a team full of great guys to launch a brand new startup that truly comes from my heart and connects with my highest passions.

Church
But this massive change in my career isn’t the only change in my life. After 25 years of attending the same church, where my dad has served as Pastor, the church was unable to continue and closed just two months ago. Now the search is on for a new home church. I’ve never not attended the same church with my parents and sister. Change indeed.

Home
On the heels of the church closing, and the decision (made a few months ago) to transition into working for myself full time, my family has decided to make another life altering change. It’s something we’ve talked about for years and years, sort of a bucket list dream, but with all that’s going on, we finally felt it was the right time; it was now or never; it was time to do it, or scratch it off the list forever. Looking over my list of what I wanted to accomplish by middle age, it is only 1 of 2 items left on the list. And so, we began our plans to sell or give away at least 50% of all we own, sell our home and move the entire family into an RV…full time. We love to travel and we firmly believe in giving our kids as many varying experiences as possible. As well, I want to be able to move around the country, working with startups and meeting like minded people in the startup community. We also want to ensure that each of us learns to live with less. It’s not that I’m against having material possessions, but if you aren’t careful they can own you. And we feel like we were on the brink of that, and were ready to take drastic measures to prevent it. It will also help accomplish my 2nd remaining middle age goal…having no debt except a home mortgage (RV in our case). It won’t be a short or quick journey. We have to prepare the house to put it on the market and then who knows how long it will take to sell. In the mean time, we are spending most our time selling things on craigslist or ebay, driving car loads to Salvation Army, and hauling some completely worthless junk to the curb. The adventure has already begun, and no matter how long it takes us to get there…we will.

And next birthday, hopefully I’ll be crossing that goal off, from my office in our fifth-wheel home, in some beautiful new part of the country…maybe next to the Chena River in Alaska, or a quiet harbor in Maine. I’ve been quite blessed to have been able to complete so many of my goals by this young an age, and though there aren’t many left on the list (created when I was in high school), I have no doubt as I move into this new segment of my life, that with new experiences and opportunities, new dreams will arise. I urge you to spend time setting your goals and being clear with yourself on what they are and what your passions are. I encourage you to stay focused on them and I truly hope you get to experience that wonderful sense of accomplishment by achieving them.

I’m only going to discuss one misconception in this post, if you want to hear more about the many issues of web development and putting a team together, come to the open Tampa Bay WaVE meeting on 9/20 – cohosted by TBTF’s Emerging Companies Network where I’ll be on a panel discussing how to avoid pitfalls in website development.

The most major disturbing trend I’ve observed is the sole reliance on hourly rate to determine overall project cost. In other words, a developer who charges $45/hour is far cheaper than one that charges $75 hour. Make sense right? If you paid for 10 hours of work, it costs you $750 vs $450. But if you calculate development costs that way you are leaving out the #1 most important factor in development: time.

It takes time to code anything, but if you think rates among developers have a wide varied range, you may have no idea just how wide the range is in productivity. It can be so extreme as to be almost unbelievable. There have been numerous studies over the years demonstrating this to be as much as 10:1 or even 100:1. In my 15 years in IT, I’ve observed this range in productivity to be extremely common. I’ve had many managers who actually double and triple development estimates depending on which of their developers they plan to assign the task to. It’s really not unlike typing. If you wanted to pay someone for data entry and paid for the hour, wouldn’t someone who types 120 words a minute be cheaper in the long run to hire than someone who types 30 WPM, even at 2 or 3x the rate?

“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” –Bill Gates

Consider then, that if you decided to hire the $45/hour developer and it takes them 40 hours to complete a task. The project took longer than you’d hoped, the software isn’t quite as fast as you would like, but its completed and you are quite pleased that it only cost $1,800. But what if you had hired a more experienced developer, one who is more a ‘Software Engineer’ than a programmer, and that person had completed the same project in 10 hours? At $75/hr (which is still a steal), your total cost would have been $750, and most likely perform better, be more stable, and be better able to be expanded and supported in the future. Or even if it had taken 20 hours, the total cost is still only $1,500 for very likely a better result.

If you aren’t convinced this issue exists, ask around. Talk to CEOs and Founders of startups and ask them for their early experiences of hiring developers and just how well it went for them. I’ve heard horror story upon horror story, and a good percentage of my projects over the last year have been to fix poorly written code written by teams that were hired on the cheap.

Sometimes the code is poorly written because those hired are unethical or believe themselves to be far better than they really are. Other times, its not that the person you hired is a bad person, its just that they haven’t yet put in the time on numerous projects in a wide ranging set of challenges to have gained the experience necessary to increase one’s productivity and quality. I’m not attempting to disparage any of them. Everyone must start somewhere, and everyone has or will. I’m speaking to owners, CTO, founders, and anyone in the position of deciding what rates to pay and what developers to hire to make them aware of the other side of the cost equation.

It’s a simple plan of action to help ensure you don’t pay more in the long run. When you ask for an hourly rate, recognize that you have only asked for half of the information needed to determine cost. You cannot decide to hire one person over another based on the rate. Make sure all your inquiries include both hourly rate and hours estimated. It’s the total project cost you have to calculate. And even with that, this simple calculation leaves out future costs of maintenance, likely hood of needing to hire someone more experienced in short notice to assist the cheaper developers when they are faced with an issue they can’t resolve, etc. I’ve heard so many stores in just the last month of estimates provided by the cheaper developers that in the end resulted in 3 – 4x the hours they originally estimated…and paid for.

I love seeing products come to completion. I love seeing a Founder’s vision realized. I know from experience its very exhilarating to see an idea from your head actually result in a finished working product. Equally, its so disheartening to hear of startups and companies unable to get their product to launch because of poor hirings, particularly when so many of them seem to have been entirely based on finding a low rate.

Here are a few questions to ask before hiring a contractor/freelancer to work on your project…in addition of course to asking for both an hourly rate AND an hourly estimate:

• How many projects of this size have you provided estimates for in the past? Can you provide contacts and recommendations from clients about those past sizings?
• What are you basing your sizings upon? What past projects provided similar functionality to my project?
• How many projects of this size have you completed in the past? Can you provide contacts and recommendations from those clients?
• How and when will you communicate to me if the time you originally estimated isn’t enough? How soon will I know?
• If the deadline is approaching and it doesn’t look like it will be reached, what is your strategy for increasing productivity and still meeting that deadline?

Nothing can ensure a perfect development process and no set of questions or advice will completely prevent hiring the wrong person or spending too much. But the more you know the better the decision you can make. So please, never let me again here the one and only question: ‘What’s your hourly rate?’ Ask for the rate, that’s fine, but follow up with some sample projects and ask how long they took. You might be quite surprised how fast some developers can complete projects.

Do you have any development horror stories and/or suggestions for dealing with these situations? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Movie Title
This should have been titled, ‘The Incomprehensibles’. I mean seriously: Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Rourke, Schwarzenegger? I had no idea what any of those guys were saying half the time. There should have been subtitles.

Surprise of the movie?
I went to see a long list of long time favorite action heros in action, and it turns out the one guy who I’d never even heard of before, Terry Crews, stole the show.

Filmography and Action Sequences
The filmography was poor all the way around. Very muddy and hard to follow. Poor editing, poor directing. But you go to this kind of movie for the action and yet the action sequences were shot as if needing to cover a bunch of really inexperienced action actors, or really old ones. That may be true for some of them, but I find it hard to believe that Jet, Couture, and Statham are tool old to do action. I think instead it was simply a very poor filming and editing job. They should have showcased the talents of these guys we love and not buried it.

Dialogue
I know, I know. There should be no expectation of dialogue in this movie all things considered, and yet even without any expectations, it failed to meet those. My guess is there was no script. They just ad-libbed the entire movie. Couldn’t understand them half the time and the other half I wished I couldn’t. Jokes that made no sense, dialogue that was completely pointless. Really hurt what could have been a far more enjoyable film.

Where was Rocky vs Ivan Drago?
I really thought we’d see these two go toe-to-toe in a classic alternate universe rematch, with the gloves off. What a missed opportunity.

Did I Miss Something?
I’m not sure if I missed something, but from minute one it felt like the directors expected that I’d already seen Expendables 1 – 9, and this was the 25 year reunion, with #10. There was no setup and it seemed to be about a group we were supposed to have long had a history with and now were watching them deal with old age.

As good as the cast was…
Not sure why Couture was cast (he’s my favorite UFC guy). He’s not a Hall of Fame action hero, and he really stood out like a sore thumb amongst the rest. They didn’t even use any of his skills.

Where was Chuck Norris? Couldn’t he have kicked someone’s butt for two minutes at least?

Bruce Willis was wasted. If all the guy is going to do is stand there in a suit, then he’s only there to pretend he’s in the movie. He should have been involved in the action.

Summary
In all, this movie seemed to be extremely low budget, and it felt as though that once they signed this cast, they phoned in the rest. But, I will say the final 30 minutes saved it from being a completed disappointment. I enjoyed Sly and Statham and Crews. The rest I could have lived without, even though I like so many of them.

PS
Does Eric Roberts age?

PPS
Now that Schwarzenegger looks as old as my grandfather he should probably stay out of movies.

The second part of the book deals with the management of Zappos, as Tony transitioned into running and growing a company. Here, he discusses how he built the now famous Zappos culture. He discusses this in detail, including many internal memos and company letters, and even including 24 pages of the company’s Core Values Document. I touched on this in my previous post The Zappos Culture Book. This is all very interesting, but since I’m more involved in the early startup days, it’s a bit beyond where I need to be. It was still helpful and I identified with many of the core values, and felt like I would be comfortable adopting the entire thing, as-is, for my own company, though with some personal changes here and there.

I do think that overall, the book could have been better with an editor reviewing and chopping out maybe 25%. For that reason I gave it 4/5 stars, compared with 5/5 for both Rework and Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It. If you remember, with Rework, between the next-to-last and final draft they cut the book in half, down to 27,000 words from 57,000. Delivering Happiness would have been better a bit shorter and more focused.

In this second part of the book, spanning sections 2 and 3, you will learn what it is that Tony believes are the only competitive advantages they have, “everything else can be copied”. You’ll read examples of how the company stood behind its culture and core values and how they developed what those would even be. Tony will discuss the number one driver of growth: customer service and word of mouth, and how that is more than a marketing scheme, but a way of life for the entire team at Zappos. Tony also discusses the importance and value they place on their call center, and how differently they handle that than most other companies, and how other companies can instill excellent customer service at their companies.

As I mentioned earlier you’ll be able to read the entire Core Values Document of the company with helpful example stories where they put it in practice and how it effected the people and the company. Tony will discuss his experience with beginning to speak publicly and how he changed his approach on how to prepare for speaking and how freeing the new approach was. He concludes with a discussion on the science and study of what happiness means and the frameworks of happiness.

I would summarize the entire book into one main theme: Do what you are passionate about, embrace your passions, and share them with others, focusing, in all you do, to make others happy in every opportunity, using all your skills, experiences and passions.

Remember to post a comment on any of my Zappos posts to be entered to win a free copy of the book. I’ll name the winner on Monday. You could share an idea, ask a question, share a related quote or experience as well.

Update:I’ll be shipping a copy of Delivering Happiness to the winner of the free book, Amber Weinberg. Thanks for reading Amber!

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. ~ George Bernard Shaw

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. ~ H.S. Truman

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. ~ Carlos Castaneda

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I look down through the clouds onto the homes, businesses, churches, and communities below, I think back to a woman waiting in the airport with me just an hour ago. She had been bumped from a previous flight, and while waiting at the airport, had received a call that her young son had been in a serious car accident while she was out of town. He was on his way to the hospital when I first overheard the situation. After a few minutes of nervous pacing, she received another phone call. I could not hear what was being said, but she collapsed in uncontrollable grief and sobbing. A friend finished the call for her, and several minutes after I heard the update: her son was unresponsive, and was being airlifted to a different hospital in a last attempt to save his life.

I missed my kids. I longed to hold them.

Surely every home spread about below me had some kind of problem, difficulty or stress facing it. Many of them probably facing multiple issues, from strained parent-child relationships, to crumbling marriages, to financial issues caused by poor money management or unfortunate circumstances in their work situations, to health issues for family, friends, and loved ones, and even devastating loss. It reminded me of the recent loss of my grandmother, my grandfather’s failing health, the closing this week of my families church for the last 20 years, a fire that burned the church down a few years ago (we rebuilt it), and even back to the tornado that destroyed our home back in ‘92. At some point in our lives, we all face many of these problems, but I wonder how often we remember to be thankful and appreciative during the times when we aren’t dealing with severe issues, and I wonder how empathetic we are to those going through them now, and more importantly how willing we are to help those dealing with an issue.

As I head home, I also have thoughts of the projects I’ll get back to work on and what direction I should take with several of them. I have new thoughts and ideas stirring in my mind, inspired by the speakers and conversations from the conference I attended. I can’t wait to take action, to have more conversations with my like minded friends and partners, and get back to doing what I love. But though I love what I do and I love working with some truly great people on some really exciting projects, I can never forget the big picture; the other things in life that matter, and I’m thankful for the little reminders in life that come along, often just in time.

I’ll never know what happened to that woman’s family, nor how the outcome will shape her family for generations to come. All I know is I prayed for her many times on the flight home. I felt her pain, and I used it to remind myself to really cherish the times I have with my children and my loved ones.

The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed with grief or stress from a situation you find yourself in, stop and get some perspective. Sit by a busy place, perhaps in a mall at a coffee shop, and watch the hundreds of people walking by and remember that each one of them is facing difficult times, at least at some point in life. Remind yourself you aren’t alone and your problems aren’t a unique curse on you. It’s just part of living life.

Then, find someone in need, and offer to comfort them, pray for them, or help them in some way that you can. Remind yourself of your blessings and enjoy them, guilt-free, while you have them. Gather your loved ones, and express your appreciation for them. Embrace what you have, while you have it, even in the face of difficult times. That’s all we can do in the end, because the troubles on our path ahead are out of our control. As scary as that is, we have only one choice: live each day to the fullest, love life, love others, give and serve in all we do, enjoy the fruits of our labor for as long as we have them, and handle trials and troubles with integrity, honesty, faith, and perseverance.

They invited all employees to submit 100 to 500 words describing what the Zappos culture means to them. They committed to using everyone’s contribution, unedited, even if it was a complaint. Management learned a lot from the book, and it is now published yearly and made available not only to prospective employees, but also to vendors, and even customers. In fact you can request a free copy of it, as I did over the weekend, by sending an email to ceo@zappos.com.

This middle section of the book, ‘Profits and Passion’, goes into a lot of detail on what that culture was, how they established it and why. Tony believes that in the end, the only competitive edge Zappos has over anyone is: Brand, Culture, and Pipeline. Everything else can be copied. The section goes on to give some great tips on creating culture in your company.

Don’t forget to leave a comment on this post or either of the other two Delivering Happiness posts (Discovering Happiness or Now This is Real Passion) in order to have a chance to win a free copy of the book.

Tony was only working for $25/year full time at Zappos. He had invested millions from the investment fund, Venture Frogs, that he’d started, to the point that there was no money left. He then began to invest money from his own personal funds but that began to run out. They had to layoff some employees and significantly cut the salaries of the others, but in order to make that work and still keep the employees, Tony put them up in his own loft without charging rent. He also began selling off the property he had purchased as an investment in order to put that money into Zappos and keep it going. He even listed his favorite loft at less than market value, and then dropped it by 40% in order to quickly turn it around, get the cash and keep Zappos going.

VC’s said it was a bad investment; naysayers said people won’t buy shoes online. The business plan, should someone have ever bothered to put one together, would not have indicated any of this was a good decision. But Tony believed in the idea, he believed in the team, and he believed in himself and he was willing to risk everything for his passion of building something. In the end, he decided to liquidate everything he had and have a “fire sale” in order to raise the final round of money to keep hope alive.

We all know how it worked out in the end, though I can’t wait to read more and learn how. This book will teach you lessons in commitment and following your dreams, as well as motivate you, so I highly recommend it…again. And don’t forget, leave a comment on this post or the last one, or the next one, for an opportunity to win your own copy.

1. Profits
2. Profits and Passion
3. Profits, Passion and Purpose

I completed the first section this morning and rather than wait until I finish the book later this week, I thought I’d begin today with my first impressions of this beginning section. The book is so full of things to talk about, that discussing them all in one blog post would be impossible anyway. So, I’m going to write a few posts throughout week to discuss more of the book and hopefully hear from you with your opinions on the subjects discussed here.

I’ve been a fan of Zappos since September of 2009, when I made my first order and had to exchange it. I wonder if I had become such a fan if I’d chosen the proper shoe size the first time through, because, though I was impressed with the mind-boggling shipping turn around it was really the customer service I received when exchanging the shoes that converted me to a life long member of the Zappos movement. I know it was only shoes I was buying, and yet the way I was taken care of, caused me to see the company as more than just a business. I won’t review that experience again, since I wrote about it here, but I will say that it was that experience and being contacted by Tony himself on Twitter due to my review, that my interest in Zappos and Tony himself began. I started paying attention to what Tony was saying on blogs, and at his speaking engagements. All that led to my interest in reading his book, and looking back, I’m so very happy that I ordered that first wrong size.

As I said above, Tony split the book into three sections. Having only read the first at this point, I can’t comment on the direction he takes in the other two sections, but for me, after reading the first, I have the impression that the title of the first section really should be, ‘Discovering Happiness’, because that is the focus of the first segment of his life’s experiences and it really builds toward his ability to ‘deliver happiness’ through his work at Zappos. Tony begins with his childhood entrepreneurial endeavors, which sounded so much like my life that I made an immediate connection with him. As he experiments with various jobs, including programming, and various opportunities, he discovers that his passion really lies in building things. Again, I could relate to this so well, as I’m sure many of you will, and often reading about a successful entrepreneur who goes through the same challenges and discoveries that you have, can really help you see your own life from a different perspective, and also helps you connect with his wisdom and experience better and apply that to your own situation.

Here are a few ideas and quotes that stood out to me from this first section. I’ll be giving away a free copy of the book at the end of the week to someone who has commented on one of my book related posts. So if any of these ideas and quotes stir your thinking, leave a thought in the comments below and you’ll be entered to win a free copy of the book.

• As I said, Tony spends the first part of the book chronicling his entrepreneur adventures as a child, from worm farms, to selling greeting cards, to button making. It shows his entrepreneur leanings as a kid. I doubt there are too many real entrepreneurs that don’t have a similar story. Those that don’t may be more of a small business owner, and less of a serial entrepreneur. There is a difference, and it’s an important difference to understand and be able to identify in yourself.
• In high school he tried to find creative ways around actually doing any hard work. He did the same while attending Harvard. (if that’s not an attribute of a true entrepreneur, I don’t know what is!)
• He said, “School-related activities aside, my biggest focus during high school was trying to figure out how I could make more money.”
• Discovered the power of crowdsourcing while attending Harvard and collecting and reselling study notes for college classes.
• Held various programming jobs, including working for Microsoft before graduating and going to work for Oracle.
• Tried doing freelance work for clients building web sites, but found out how unsatisfying that can be.
• Created LinkExchange and sold it for $265 million to Microsoft
• Burned out at LinkExchange because he still hadn’t identified what it was that truly made him happy
• Finally realized it was, “building stuff and being creative and inventive” that made him happy, along with, “Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose”. (This is so true in my own life, but love the way he states it and enjoyed watching him come to this realization, which is worth price of the book alone).
• Started an investment firm
• Discovered poker and realized the similarities between poker and business strategy. This part you can read online at the Delivering Happiness web site. Very interesting correlations, and once again, I could relate to it because I enjoy poker for the same reasons.
• From what he learned from poker he said, “one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in.” He goes on to say that it doesn’t matter how great your product is (in other words how great a poker player you are), if you choose the wrong market (ie. the wrong poker table), you’ll lose anyway.
• “Without conscious and deliberate effort, inertia always wins.”
• Discusses how Zappos got started, what his involvement was initially and how it changed to what it is now.

In all, though this first part is technically not yet about how Zappos became successful, it’s easy to see how Tony’s view points developed and what led him to lead Zappos in the way that he has, which led to the environment that formed the basis for all the success we see coming from the company.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest and sharing my observations and reading yours.

I have to wonder how many complaining customers are being impacted in any other way than saving $5 a month? I use my iPad a lot, probably way too much. While on a week’s vacation recently, I watched several TV shows (while working), over 3g. I was really impressed with how well it worked considering I was on 3g. I also surfed the web a bunch, kept up with my email and social networks. I downloaded apps, watched other video, and took a bunch of notes. The week before I did the same on a 3 day trip to Atlanta, and the week before that another 3 day trip to Sarasota, FL.

I keep my wifi turned OFF on the iPad, and use 3g even when wifi is available, because often the wifi my iPad picks up is actually worse (probably due to distance) than the 3g. In all, since I received my iPad over a month ago, I’ve used under 2 gigs of data. I also have no doubt that as time goes on, that monthly number will drop. I used it a ton when I first got it because it was new. I’ll never purchase as many apps in a month as I did this month. Usage will level off, and I certainly won’t always travel for half an entire month either. And if I did get close on data usage, I would start using wifi when available.

I think this is a perfect example of what I often tell clients and startups, that you must both listen to and ignore your customers all at the same time. The trick is knowing when to do each. And as always, observing your customers actual usage of your product provides far more info than asking them their opinion. There’s nothing wrong with asking of course. PeepNote is doing that right now with a survey (we are giving away a few Pro Plan year memberships in the process too), but you can’t assume that your customers are always right. I used to spend hours watching people use web sites in UI focus groups. Their behavior rarely ever matched up with what they thought their behavior was. We as humans simply aren’t always aware how inaccurate our perceptions can be when compared with reality, particularly when not in our area of expertise.

Customers can’t know where you are coming from, where you are going as a company/product/service, what your expenses are, what your limitations are, nor what you are actually seeing vs hearing. With AT & T, they saw the the majority of users didn’t need more than 2g a month, but that a tiny percentage where ruining it for everyone by using far more than the rest. So, instead of listening to your demands, they ignored you, and in the process, lowered your monthly bill, reduced strain on their network, and stopped forcing YOU to pay for someone else’s usage.

Consumers have to remember, that while a company needs to make its customers happy, it also has to make money. You can’t do one without the other. AT & T seems to have done the right thing here, and ignored the talk while observing the behavior. Hopefully for them, customers will see over the first few months, that there is no impact on them at all. Remember too, with this change came tethering, something consumers have been asking for, for years.

What do you think and how much data have you used on your iPad or iPhone over the last month?