Published: March 4, 2006 - 10:16am
I really shouldn’t complain; the traffic here is really not that bad in our city of about three or four hundred thousand. I think, though, that growing up in small towns has permanently heightened my awareness of crowds. There is a particular street a few miles from NetworkStreaming’s offices that connects the interstate with the mall. During December, it is invariably clogged with hoards of cheerful yet mindless holiday shoppers. It has been a long-held theory of mine that the more people you crowd together, the more their behavior resembles that of cows. They herd in the same direction regardless of whether that is where they want to go, they get in lines without knowing what is at the end, they panic and start running into each other…the similarities are endless. I try not to go to the mall during the holidays; the cowness is overwhelming.
The problem is exponentially worse in place like Boston and Los Angeles where the traffic is not isolated to a single area. Getting around becomes an act of facing down inner fears and summoning the will to live when all hope is lost. There are always going to be reasons to get out, but there are getting to be a lot of reasons to stay in as well.
Some of NetworkStreaming’s customers have bought our SupportDesk product based almost solely on a personal commitment to not go out in traffic any longer. Who could blame them; enough is enough. Until teleportation goes mainstream, getting out and about is going to have its problems. Remote support, remote anything for that matter, is one solution.
I think that one of the reasons e-commerce is expanding is as a direct result of traffic. Once you get used to shopping from your easy chair, it’s hard to go back.
The same is true of the support community, particularly for systems integrators and IT consulting companies. No allowances in service level have been made as the roads get more and more clogged. For NetworkStreaming’s founder, the two or three hours had to be spent in transit to and from customer sites each day, not time that could be billed. Using remote support helps in two ways: On the one hand, the support professional doesn’t have to travel onsite to service a customer, and on the other, one more car is off the road. Two worthy goals.
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