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Cloud Engineer virtualisation

Think global act local – vmware survey

vmware surveyI’m not an angry person but some things can certainly irritate the heck out of me. Today it is survey forms. It’s not concept of filling in a survey – I don’t mind doing that sometimes, especially if I have a particularly good or bad experience.

I should explain:

I just downloaded VMware  player for my laptop. I got the usual message “this may take several minutes” and for once it did take several minutes – usually the installation is quite quick regardless of the message. Coincidentally a survey from VMware popped up on the screen as I was wondering whether o believe the message and go off and do something else in the meantime.

I started to fill in the survey, it was a simple one, and fortunately for VMware the installation  finished just as I came to the bit about rating the experience. I didn’t really have anything bad to say. They warned me it might take some time and it did.

What annoyed me though was the fact that when it came to selecting my country of residence the name at the top of the list was the good ole United States of Americay. Now hear this VMware. It doesn’t do anything for me having the USA as the first name on the list. It just it just makes me irritated to think that you, an American company think it is more important for your countrymen to have life made easier for them but not anyone else.

Either they need to have every country in alphabetical order or, more cleverly, their survey system could recognize the country in which the survey was being completed and push that one to the top. It isn’t difficult.

If you want to be a global company you need to change your culture accordingly. Simples.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

3 replies on “Think global act local – vmware survey”

Agreed – It’s always been one of my bugbears and I believe it’s lazy programming. It’s simple to list the country you are in (based on your IP address) at the top of the list with all other countries following. Maybe if more US companies did their user acceptance testing outside their own boarders they would pick up on this.

While slightly annoying, this is one of those things that’s not worth getting all het up about. In the example above, the USA appears above Afghanistan while the rest of the countries appear in the correct alphabetical order. While it may be easy to code your origin via IP address this is not a given depending on various factors such as VPN, proxy sites, DNS manipulation, etc. It maybe VMware decided from their statistics that a large percentage of the traffic originates in the USA and coded this for convenience. However, we all know American’s can be insular (they call it patriotic!) and look after themselves first. Perhaps all us non-American’s should fight back and put our respective countries at the top of the list first! At the end of the day, in your example, you’re getting something for free and being slightly annoyed is a small price to pay. I’m more annoyed right now with my sluggish Sky broadband!!!

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