07/08/2005
The unavoidable death of Time?
entry posted by Inquisitor at 19:52
(permalink).
edited on: 08/08/2005 3:37.
categories: Blogging
, Microcode
, Scumbags
The recent collapse of the Granville Technology Group has been compared by many to the MG Rover collapse, and in some ways they're similar - a large company, poorly managed to death - but it is, however, a unique situation. In the case of GTG, we have a company which seems to have aimed to alienate customers by deliberately selling them shoddy kit - something which even the Phoenix consortium would have baulked at - and then locking the customers in just to annoy them.
Time Computers, the brand used by GTG for most of its life, was never a particularly good company - it sold machines on the cheap through newspaper advertisements with cut-back components, overreaching software deals and financing agreements. It was, however, a profitable one - right to the point when its founder, Tahir Mohsan, not only became so rich he ended up on the Guardian's young Rich List, but became president of the Federation of Asian Businesses into the bargain; in fact, recently he was listed by the Manchester Evening News, on 31st May this year, as being worth £80m. What exactly happened between the point when they were able to buy the charred remains of Tiny back in 2002 (Tough It's Now Yours, according to computer-repair slang) and the bankruptcy of today?
Well, as we all know, they started pulling stunts. Before this time, they were only slightly worse than every other direct retailer; only using slightly worse components, with a tendency to overload software and charge for tech support. Firstly, they started charging extra for reload discs - so you had to pay GTG £60 if you even wanted to restore the computer to factory condition - even if the system had been damaged by a virus, Trojan or component failure. Insultingly, all the £60 CD-ROM did was unlock a partition hidden on the computer in the first place which contained the restore software; this was a stunt pulled by no other UK computer vendor. Most don't supply original Windows CDs (with the notable, and unusual exception of Dell), so the only recourse is to wipe the system back to factory condition using the restore discs - which come in the box. Time didn't do that, and this undoubtedly gained them a huge amount of adverse publicity; especially since they also had the most expensive technical support number in the UK computer industry, a £1/minute 090 monster, which considering that Dell use an 0870 seems to be outstandingly poor value.
I started to write about Time when the company pulled its most visible and outrageous stunt, in late 2003. They had taken a practice previously seen amongst US computer vendors (but not their European offshoots) of locking the system's modem so it could only dial particular telephone numbers, locked it to the numbers of their ISP offspring company - the still-running and must-avoid Supanet (Internexus Group) - and then for a time smugly told customers to go buy a USB modem if they wanted to dial their own ISP. The modem was always a standard Conexant HSF software modem - a piece of kit you can buy very cheaply online - and all that was ever locked down was the driver; the modem was not locked in hardware, it was entirely Time/Tiny's creation and definitely not the "optimisation" their PR people later tried to claim it was. This got me to put up my now-mostly-useless Time page - in its original form, just a somewhat vitriolic "10 Reasons Not To Buy From Time" list, which then quickly expanded as solutions to the locking problem started to come out, GTG found a way to lock the driver harder, and more solutions came through.
Later, Time put up a page containing software to unlock the modems, which I'm sure was due to Internet pressure; but it still required the user to create a Supanet account to access, if they weren't lucky enough to have a mate with a knowledge of what to do, and had several suspiciously unnecessary restrictions. These meant that if a user has one of the last Time PCs, they cannot unlock the modem using Time's software even if they find someone that's kept it - the unlocking software has a challenge-response protection which requires a key generated by Time's now-nonexistant website. (Plug: my Time page still has the registry-based unlocking method, despite pleas from GTG to remove it, which should hopefully still work.) It's almost like they wanted to give their customers one last screw.
I received many emails from Time employees during the page's existance, which were the main reasons it was kept up - the company was not only screwing customers, it was screwing its employees too. I also had the entertainment, on occasion, of GTG's Internet PR team showing up in the page comments (having followed the link from the pro-unionisation ITEF site) - now sadly lost by HaloScan, I promise you I didn't delete anything - making occasionally salient points about the page's vitriol but otherwise parroting a one-note "We didn't do it" song, easily disprovable with Romulus2 and Watchdog. I'll leave it to an ex-employee, posting recently, to give the gist of much of the commenting:
I am not sorry nor surprised to hear of the collapse of Granville Technology! I worked for the company for 2.1/2 years, 3 months in the Legal Dept, the rest of the time on the front line customer service team and the Supanet Dept.
In 40 years of employment,(I resigned voluntarily in January 2001) I have never worked for a worse company - it was difficult to decide who was treated worse: customers or staff. The management were abominable.
(Neil Foster, 31st July 2005, comments)
Many of the comments before this, now lost in HaloScan's black hole of doom, were in the same vein.
I made a comment on the 21st of April update that I hoped Time wouldn't become "the MG Rover of the British computer industry" as long as they fixed themselves. At this time, I really didn't know that Time were going to become the MG Rover of the UK computer industry - they'd been losing £2m a month since January and it's been suspected by some that they were insolvent even at the time I wrote it (they were taken down by defaulting on a HSBC loan, taking out their credit card facility for their High Street stores and killing off the company.) They'd sold a dodgy line of plasma screens under the Tiny brand name that had a lot of people very, very angry (AV Forums thread - I hope you don't need registration), they were pulling all the usual stunts, and people weren't taking the bait anymore. They'd finally started to run out of marks; but too late for many. And that's what's so sad about the demise: the fact that unless you bought using a credit card (which should always be done for >£100 purchases, but too many people don't realise this), you will have paid hundreds or even thousands of pounds for either hot air, or faulty kit, and there's nothing you can do about it except complain at somewhere like tinycon.com. It's the biggest shame of the entire affair - that the people most responsible for the death of GTG are those who will be least affected by the consequences. Isn't that just so sad?
[EDIT: Grammar and sentence construction corrected. *Sigh*.]