Some of my past fades to black….
I spent the evening upgrading to Snow Leopard (more on that later), and came over to my blog to work on it, and it reported to me a couple of URLs had gone 404, so I went to check out the failures.
Turns out one of them was Apple’s former subscription page for the newsletters. Here is is, 2009, and it looks like they finally took it down.
There are a couple of pieces of history here that intertwine. One is that if you want to subscribe to something (like New Music Tuesday), while you can sign up for these subscriptions in various places, to manage the subscriptions you need to go to Apple’s MyInfo.
Originally, however, all of the subscriptions were managed in a separate database — because in part all of those systems were designed and built before MyInfo existed, and because integrating the data was an absolute bear. I started encouraging people at Apple to think about tying subscriptions into the customer records around 2003, but it wasn’t until 2005 that the first project actually got approved and implemented. The first pieces of the data set (New Music Tuesday subscriptions) actually didn’t migrate into the corporate customer database until something like a month or two before I left in 2006. (gads, it’s been that long, right? — it is. Three years, minus two weeks)
Some of the discussions on how to do this got — interesting. I had two or three meetings about integrating the subscription data where I showed them what my dataset was and how it needed to be integrated and what the size of the dataset was, and the usual reaction was they stopped requesting more meetings….
But it’s finally done, and the last vestige of the old subscriber management system I built is finally faded to black. Which is a good thing; the fewer places a customer needs to go to interact with a company, the better experience for the user, and I tended to argue strongly that everything that caused an Apple customer to come to the web site to “do something” should flow through MyInfo. That is, by the way, easier said than done. Apple still hasn’t fully integrated under MyInfo (for instance, ADC isn’t there) but it’s made good progress and I think the system’s matured nicely. To the team over there — well done.
Another interesting note here is that there are only two subscriptions available in MyInfo, and a quick search doesn’t show any independent subscription forms. The two left are New Music Tuesday and Apple eNews for Education. I’d heard that they had put Apple eNews on hiatus while they figured out what to do with it — and it looks like it’s been retired, which was something I started suggesting back in 2005. It also looks like good old QuickTime news is retired, which I was trying to get people to do away with as far back as 2004 because it was an absolute waste of electrons (unverified addresses, major hassles with the spam blackholes because of that, 15% bounce rates per issue, and response rates somewhere close to the temperature liquid helium forms…) — and the QuickTime marketing team was one of those that simply never got past the “what matters is how big the list is, not how well it performs”.
Nice to see someone finally figured it out and retired it.
It’s a bit sad that there is a little less of what I did left there — but it looks like it was done for all of the right reasons, and that’s great.
(some day I should describe some of the design I came up with to replace all of that email-based communication with one that allowed users to choose how content got sent to them: mobile, web, rss or email — on a per-topic basis, all by integrating everything into MyInfo and giving users a choice on a per-topic area on how they wanted it sent out: It was a plan to get everyone to stop thinking of content by how it was distributed, and start thinking of content as a data flow that users could self-prioritize to get however they wanted, all from a single control point. Now THAT was an absolute nightmare to implement, but the user experience would have been awesome…)
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