I’ve had a couple of days now to absorb what’s really going on, and what’s going to happen, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: I won’t change. I’ve been reading a lot of articles and comments from all over and there are a lot of pessimists out there. No one believed we could do what we’ve done, but we’re doing it.

One of Zappos’ core values is to embrace and drive change, but I won’t change the way I personally do business.
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I promise (and I’m sure others will join me) to continue to be open and honest in my day to day dealing with vendors, suppliers and customers. I won’t change how I treat my vendors as friends, not adversaries. I won’t change the way I’ll talk to customers, and I will continue to cherish every opportunity I get to service them.
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Three thoughts on why it won’t happen.

1. Amazon is just as customer focused as we are, they wouldn’t be this successful otherwise.

2. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life now at Zappos, and the way we treat people is ingrained. I remember when vendors wouldn’t talk to us, and we had to be super nice to them. We don’t have to be super nice anymore, but we still are. Because it’s the right thing to do.

3. If Zapazon makes me change in what I feel is a negative way, I will probably just walk away, ending an almost 10 year relationship with Zappos.

I’m look forward to being part of the Amazon family.

Jeff Bezos mentioned in his video that he had a sales ringer, we had one too. It would make a ka-ching! sound of a cash register, and a goose would light up (the goose laid an egg!). It would go off every 10 or 15 minutes back then. We also turned it off when it got annoying. See, we already have another thing in common. Those were fun filled days, and so will be days ahead of us.

Fast forward, first impressions, it ran hot, battery went fast, initial apps were cool. I tried to setup the Zappos Exchange server on it, but didn’t work since we have pin policy enabled for EAS. Unfortunately, the error messages were not very forthcoming. Hit “Update” on a whim, and there was a 2 week old 68MB OS update waiting. (WHY!?) Ended up setting it up with IMAP so I could get my mail. Calendar goes in via Google Sync with Exchange from my desktop at the office, then OTA from Google to the Pre.

IMAP works, they promise a fix for Exchange in 60 days. I believe them. Gotta root for the hometown folks. (I grew up in Sunnyvale).

Sync with iTunes worked as advertised (a hack?). Music and video worked, obviously not the DRM laced stuff. Would Apple eventually block the Pre? Turning away potential iTunes download revenue in favor of hardware(iPod/iPhone) revenue? I wouldn’t. The more downloads they sell, the more money they make.

On the battery, actually runs pretty well when I’m not constantly screwing around on it. MicroUSB chargers and adapters are easy to come by. I bought a couple of adapters to use the blackberry charger (MiniUSB->MicroUSB) for 60 cents, and a car charger (originally for Motorola RAZR2) for around $4.

So instead of paying $30 for a car charger at the Sprint Store, $25 for another wall charger. There I was, $10 later with 2 wall chargers (attached to my old miniUSB chargers) and a car charger so I can play Pandora in the car. They don’t work 100% though, have to plug it in slow-like for some reason for the Pre to go into “charge” mode. Strange.

I have gone 24 hours without needing to charge though, maybe 15 minutes of light email reading, and a few phone calls, so overall, the complaints about battery life I think are from people who spend way too much time on their phones and not enough time in reality.

Biggest gripe so far? Email delete button is too easy to hit, accidentally deleted a few emails before I could read them already. Need an option to confirm a delete.

Add it to your iGoogle page.. clickety here:

Well turns out, when we converted the SLES image to a virtual machine and then to a VMware Template, we didn’t set the image to SUSE Linux Enterprise 64-bit (it was set to “other Linux 64-bit”). Seems the vmware-tools should be smart enough to detect that it is sles, and adjust it accordingly?

Well, once set, everything is working as expected, but the magic working underneath is still that, magic. Docs don’t tell me much and I don’t have time to dig into it deeper.