Here's a tale of how not to do customer service, or write commercial software, or to do business generally.

Back in December, I downloaded a copy of H&R Block's Tax Cut Deluxe for Mac OS X. I figured this was a win–I've used Tax Cut for my returns for the past 5 years, and now I could do it on the Mac, instead of rebuilding all of my return data in a new package. Well, a few things happened along the way–a drive crash, a Powerbook getting pulled off a desk by a cat, the usual–and I didn't get to import my last year's return data until last week.

Which was when I found out I couldn't. The interface was there to do it, and it pulled up a file list, but I couldn't select the file to import. It was like they just hadn't gotten around to writing that module or something.

In fact, that was exactly what it was. I called tech support, and the poor sap on the other end said, “That's the first thing Mac users complain about.”

“So is it getting fixed?” I asked. ” Is there a workaround?”

“Nope,” was his reply.

So I called customer service. And they told me that I was S-O-L; they didn't do exchanges and had a strict 30-day return policy. That was all.

I got them to let me talk to a manager, and mentioned that this particular absence of feature wasn't documented anywhere , and that there was no mention of this particular bug on the tech support site. I mentioned the word, “fraud.”

So they gave me a refund.

Now I'm stuck–I guess I have to run out and buy the damn PC version of TaxCut again. But next year, TaxCut gets the axe.

Dvorak bashes web services. Peter Coffee quotes Gosling bashing web services. Does Dvorak think humming along with Gosling gives him credibility? I dunno. But I think Mr. Dvorak is just being contrarian to be contrarian, to raise hackles, to get links, to inspire flames.  After all, that's what a columnist lives for; I should know, I am one.

But a good columnist finds the conflict in the truth.  And truth is, I suspect, that Dvorak doesn't know a web service from a hole in the ground. His prattling on about big vendors in the WS-I “drinking club”  ignores the basic facts:

1) There are already web services being used to make money –they just happen to be mostly behind firewalls. 

2) There are for-profit software products in vertical markets that use web services now–and they're working without WS-I or any other alleged standards drinking club.

3)Web services? My hands are soaking in it.