Grasshoppermind

I have just received an update from my contact at Microsoft, who says that it’s likely that the Isle of Man will be added first as a County of the United Kingdom. Whilst technically this is inaccurate, it’s closer to our goal of being able to fill in address information on Microsoft sites accurately. Later they hope to be able to make changes to their systems to allow the Isle of Man to be entered as a separate country, although this will take a lot longer as there are a lot of sites and databases that will need to be changed. I’m impressed with how Microsoft have responded to this request so far, I’ll post again on this subject when we see the changes happen.

Oh Well, one week has already gone by since I emailed Microsoft, and there’s been no response. Not good so far. Microsoft’s SPAM filter probably ate it.

I’m trying to contact anyone in Microsoft who can help me to get the Isle of Man set up as a country on their website forms. Email addresses, telephone numbers, etc. all gratefully accepted.

UPDATE: I followed up my email with a phone call, (Microsoft don’t give out direct numbers, so I went via the switchboard) and I actually got through to a person, not their voicemail. They are investigating who within Microsoft can deal with this.

Today I came across a problem that people in the United Kingdom, or United States, or any large country for that matter would never come across.

I could not select my country, the Isle of Man when filling in a web form.

Now actually this is not unusual as there are very few websites that recognise the Isle of Man as a separate country. But on Microsoft’s site, and in particular on their Mystery Solved Licencing promotion the problem was exacerbated because I had to choose a county as part of my address. This effectively forced me to put in an inaccurate address - not good for me, or for their marketing database.

So I decided to see how agile a company the size of Microsoft could be, in answering and hopefully soving this problem.

So, today 2nd March 2006.
Found a phone number from their website (0870 60 10 100) and called their switchboard.
Very helpful, gave me another number which I rang. After a five minute delay I got through to someone who gave me the email address of the “person who deals with that promotion”. So far so good. So I sent an email explaining the situation and now we wait and see what happens next!

Let’s see how this goes over the next few days/weeks…