Why I'll never buy another Lincoln again...

This past July I bought myself a brand new 2015 Lincoln MKZ.  Great car I must say.  I got it with nearly all the options... Leather/heated everything (wheel, front & rear seats), air conditioned seats, sun roof, navigation... you get the idea. 

The car has all the bells and whistles one could ask for.  So why won’t I buy one again? 

Well it all boils down to one thing.  Customer Service. 

Going on 3 months, the car itself has been great.  My vehicle before the Lincoln MKZ was a Mercedes ML350.  Yes, I know not to compare the two vehicles for obvious reasons and I don’t plan on.  It’s the dealerships and service I’m going to focus on.   

Owning 2 Mercedes over 4 years, and a Lincoln for just 3 months I’ve already come to the conclusion I will not buy another Lincoln again – solely based on the service experience.

All the times I was in for service/repair with my Mercedes, I have not a single complaint about their level of customer service and commitment.  From the moment I pull in to the service department to the point I drive away with my car – I’m constantly getting a true luxury experience. Their service advisors make me feel like I matter on every visit and their techs do the same for my car.  The team always walks me over to the waiting area and ensures I’m comfortable while providing me a beverage.  The experience is designed to be stress free and comfortable.  All the staff handling your file know who you are and deal with you in a very personable & respectable manner.  This is several years after I’ve closed the deal with them in another part of the country.

At Lincoln, even though the sales reps promised me a similar experience – it’s actually been the complete opposite.   The car has been great – don’t get me wrong.  But the little things about their service experience is what’s eating away at me.

From the time I took delivery to the first scheduled service I’ve had 2 visits. Both disappointing.   My new car was delivered to me dirty from the inside and a scratch on the hood.  Both promised to be taken care of while providing me a loaner vehicle.  I figured it would be as simple as dropping off the car and picking it up when it’s ready. 

Now that you have the back story – here’s a point form version of what happened when I took the car in to Lincoln in comparison to my past visits at Mercedes. 

Lincoln	Mercedes
Pulling in to the Service Center – I can never find parking. I’ve had to park at the back of the dealership and walk all the way around.	I pull in to the service bay and they take the keys and car from me. I’ve never had to think about parking.
Service didn’t know I was supposed to receive a loaner vehicle. I had to go talk to sales for them to put me in a car.	The departments are always in sync. I’ve never had to remind them about the loaner vehicle as it’s always ready for me.
The loaner car provided was from their used car lot. Wasn’t a Lincoln.  It had a “Demo Sale” sticker on the windshield and a sales sticker on the rear window.  Not washed.  Empty gas tank with 21 KM’s remaining.   I felt embarrassed driving around in such a car.  When asked for another car, the answer was no.	Brand new demo vehicles with all the bells and whistles designed to make me want to stay in the loaner car more than mine.  It was something to brag about.
Picked up my car.  Washed and vacuumed but dust on the dash and doors even though it was specifically in for a cleaning.  Spoke to the sales manager again and his answer was – “this is the best I can do because that department doesn’t report in to me. Sorry.”	Never have had to ask for the car to be cleaned or vacuumed.  It was always given back to me looking as clean as it can.  There was a time they couldn’t wash it because their carwash was down.  They handed me a free car-wash voucher to the gas station next to the dealership.
Service Visit 2.  Got a rental as they were out of loaners when I arrived. Had to go to Enterprise to pick up the car which had a long wait (1hr).  Again not a Lincoln.  When I picked up my vehicle it wasn’t even washed or vacuumed.  Felt very disappointed when I got in to my car – a feeling I’ve never had to experience before.	See above.

You may think these things are very minor but I can’t help but compare the experiences every time. Mercedes has really set the bar high and the smallest things at Lincoln are starting to bother me.  When their sales team promised to provide me similar service to Mercedes – I shouldn’t have just taken their word for it.   Perhaps I should let one of their sales managers take my E350 in for service to experience what real customer service is all about. 

Bing grabs market share from Google over past year | Microsoft - CNET News

Though Google remains firmly on top of the search engine market, it's shed market share to Microsoft over the past year, according to data released last week by research firm Compete.

Looking at the overall search engine market from May 2010 to May 2011, Compete found that Google has lost close to 16 percent of its share, dropping to 63.6 percent from 73.9 percent. At the same time, Microsoft grew its share by 75 percent, jumping to 17 percent from 9.7 percent.

The other three search engines tracked--Yahoo, Ask, and AOL--grew only slighty over the past year, showing that most of Bing's gain has been at the expense of Google.

(Credit: Compete)

The number of search queries on each site also showed a gain for Microsoft, according to Compete. Google's query volume fell to 9.5 million in May, compared with 10.8 million a year ago, a 12.4 percent loss. The number of queries for Microsoft rose to 2.5 million last month from 1.4 million last May, an increase of 78 percent.

Looking at the number of actual Web site visitors, Google drew 138 million people to its site in May, compared with 162 million in May 2010, a drop of almost 15 percent. In contrast, Microsoft saw its visitors climb to 93 million last month, compared with 61 million in May of last year, a jump of 53 percent.

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Cost of Google - SEO article - Allan Pollett SEO

SEO Blog / Web Marketing Articles:

How much does Google cost? Is it really free?

Have you ever wondered how much it costs us to have Google? Confused by the question…you probably thought Google was free. This is a misconception. The truth is Google is not free because like every other search engine it crawls the web and indexes what it finds. Google is by far the largest and now with its release of the Caffeine update the fastest crawler. It has about 25 billion pages in its index and it crawls pages as frequently as daily to once every 2 weeks. So you are probably still wondering…where is the cost? Well when Google crawls a site it uses that site’s bandwidth. Web site hosting companies charge $2 to $5 for 1 gigabyte of file transfer or bandwidth. So if Google is using bandwidth then someone is paying for it.

Now let’s do some math…hmm…takes me back to my school days…

25 billion pages x 130k (average page size) x 5 (average times pages get indexed over a month) = (calculator time) = 16 million gigabytes per month
Cost = 16 million x $3.5 (average hosting cost for bandwidth) = $56 million per month or $672 million per year. This is just an approximate number and doesn’t include video indexing which would bring the number up a lot more.

So Google isn’t so free after all. However, on the bright side majority of sites rely on Google for their visitors so it is basically a cost associated with doing business on the web.

*Note a recent study by Charzinsk in 2010 states that the average web page size is 507k.
So based on that, the amount of bandwidth Google uses would be about $218.4 million per month or 2.6 billion dollars per year.

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Microsoft Hides Your Email Address via Hotmail Aliases | News & Opinion

February 3, 2011 07.43pm EST

Microsoft Hides Your Email Address via Hotmail Aliases

By Mark Hachman

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Microsoft said Thursday that it has enabled aliases on Hotmail accounts, allowing people to create temporary email addresses.

Users who create an alias can route emails to that alias to a separate folder, which can then be managed separately. For example, email sent to "markthereporter@hotmail.com" will be sent to a private folder that will be accessible from my main Hotmail account.

Beginning today, users can add up to five email aliases per year to each account, up to a maximum of fifteen.

So far, the alias feature is exclusive to Microsoft; Google hasn't added it to its Gmail mail system.

Microsoft positioned the alias feature as the email equivalent of a one-time credit card number that can be used on a dodgy shopping site. "Let's say you're in the market for a new car," Dharmesh Mehta wrote in a blog post. "There are a bunch of websites that will email you price quotes, sales alerts, etc. During your car search, these messages are helpful, but once you're done, they become clutter that can be difficult to stop. By using an alias on these websites instead of your main email address, you can avoid this. And when you're done, just turn the alias off, ensuring future unwanted messages that are sent to that alias don't land in your inbox."

Gmail does allow users to add a " " to their email addresses to create a sort of alias; addressing emails to "johnqpublic101 home@gmail.com" will route the email to the johnqpublic101 inbox, add indicative stars to them, or route them to the trash. But Mehta also argued that such methods are detectable, including by humans.

Hotmail also allows a user to access email stored in a non-Microsoft account, pulling the information via POP, rather than IMAP.

In December, Hotmail added sandboxing to its email accounts, which can protect the system from malicious scripts. The "Active Views" technology isolates JavaScript. Microsoft also added additional security verification technology, using cell phones and a trusted PC. All are followons to a revamped Hotmail client that Microsoft began rolling out last summer.

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Researchers turn USB cable into attack tool | InSecurity Complex - CNET News

George Mason researchers demonstrate how to take control of a laptop via a USB-connected smartphone at the Black Hat DC conference.

(Credit: Angelos Stavrou)

Two researchers have figured out a way to attack laptops and smartphones through an innocent-looking USB cable.

Angelos Stavrou, an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University, and student Zhaohui Wang wrote software that changes the functionality of the USB driver so that they could launch a surreptitious attack while someone is charging a smartphone or syncing data between a smartphone and a computer.

Basically, the exploit works by adding keyboard or mouse functionality to the connection so an attacker can then start typing commands or click the mouse in order to steal files, download additional malware, or do other things to take control of the computer, Stavrou told CNET in an interview. The exploit is enabled because the USB protocol can be used to connect any device to a computing platform without authentication, he said.

He and his partner were scheduled to demonstrate an attack at the Black Hat DC conference today.

The exploit software they wrote identifies what operating sysetm is running on the device the USB cable is connected to. On Macintosh and Windows machines, a message pops up saying the system has detected a new human interface device, but there is no easily recognizable way to halt the process, Stavrou said. The Mac pop-up can be quickly removed by an attacker with a command sent via the smartphone so the laptop owner may not even see it, while the Windows pop-up lasts only one or two seconds in the lower left corner, making that an ineffective warning too, he said.

Linux machines offer no warning, so users will have no idea that something out of the ordinary is happening, particularly since the regular keyboard and mouse continue to function normally during an attack, Stavrou said.

"The operating system should present a pop-up and ask if the user really wants to connect the device" and specify what type of device is being identified to the system, he said.

The researchers wrote the exploit for Android devices only at this point. "It can be done for iPhone, but we didn't do it yet," Stavrou said. "It can work on any computing device that uses USB," and it can work between two smartphones by connecting a USB cable between then, he said.

"Say your computer at home is compromised and you compromise your Android phone by connecting them," he said. "Then, whenever you connect the smartphone to another laptop or computing device I can take over that computer also, and then compromise other computers off that Android. It's a viral type of compromise using the USB cable."

The original compromise can happen by downloading the exploit from the Web or running an app that is compromised. The researchers have created exploit software to run on a computer, and an exploit to run on Android that is a modification of the Android operating system kernel. Scripts can then be written for the actual attack.

Antivirus software wouldn't necessarily stop this because it can't tell that the activities of the exploit are not controlled or sanctioned by the user, Stavrou said. "It's hard to separate good behavior from bad behavior when it comes from the keyboard," he said.

There's not much a person can do to protect against this at this time, according to Stavrou. The operating systems should have the capability for devices to inspect USB traffic and alert users about what exactly is happening over the connection and give them the option of refusing an action, he said.

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