computers should be less friendly

With all the trouble in the banking industry nowadays you’d think your mega banking conglomerate would be willing to seek advice and differentiators from anywhere. You’d also be horribly wrong.

I’ve been a Bank of America customer for a long time and have even gotten other people to switch over because I think their online banking is the best in the business. So, today I was looking around for a particular feature and couldn’t find it. After searching through their FAQs I decided that the feature just didn’t exist. So, being the helpful customer I am, I went to go send them a suggestion. I was going to tell them where they should put it, how it could work, how useful it would be and how it would make their site better. Basically, a solid gold use case they could drop into their product backlog ASAP. The “Contact Us” link was nice and easy to find and on that page was a link to “Bank of America’s Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy”, which reads:

Bank of America and its associates do not accept or consider unsolicited ideas, including ideas for new or improved products, processes or technologies, product enhancements, advertising and marketing campaigns, promotions or new product names. Please do not send any original materials, suggestions or other items.

-Source

Ouch, well, so much for listening to your users and working with them to create a better product. I get the need to protect your IP but go have a talk with the executives at Procter & Gamble who completely changed their R&D model to get more innovation from the outside. “Today, more than 35 percent of our new products in market have elements that originated from outside P&G, up from about 15 percent in 2000″, according to a March 2006 article by The Harvard Business Review. I am sure this number has grown just look at their huge web presence for external innovations called, P&G Connect + Develop. Time to get on the Train, BofA

As many of you know my girlfriend has been attending law school for the past year and as many of you don’t know she was applying to transfer to other schools around the country.  We recently found out she was accepted at Georgetown Law, which means we need to head down to D.C for at least the next few years.  For her this is a truly amazing opportunity to attend one of the best law schools in the country, for me it’s just going to be a fun ride checking out a new city — which incidentally we know nothing about!  I’ve lived my entire life in the Northeast so this will certainly be an adventure.

However, exciting it is to move to a new city I will certainly miss being in the NY area and so close to many of closest friends.  I will remain at the same numbers which you all have and of course will try and continue to post here at least as infrequently has I have till this point.

If anyone is ever down in DC make sure to drop and line so we can meet up.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the Office of the Presidency.”

Where has this type of spirit gone in our nation?  Is it dead or just sleeping waiting for the right time to reemerge?  It makes me sad I wasn’t around to see the US in it’s glory days, just in it’s seeming twilight, although this is a ray of hope:

Phoenix lander descends to Martian surface, shot from MRO