Howard Mann is the latest blogger to turn on Dell: Dell's Flat World Leaves Me Flat!. I'll put this in the box with my post of yesterday about Internetters/Iomart, who also have that same line about "I can put you through to someone else but they'll only tell you the same thing as me." Maybe we can add Earl Mardle's post on Optus as well.

In contrast, I'd like to report on my recent experiences with Movable Type and BlogBridge. For my modestly-priced MT licence, I get a software package that seems to be regularly improved and updated. Plus online tech support that is fast and thorough. They just fixed a problem with dynamic publishing for me.

And BlogBridge is an open source aggregator. So it's completely free as well as rather clever (it supports online synchronisation of feeds so I can switch between laptop and desktop and maintain the read or unread status of the entries in my feeds). I had install problems and left them a comment, not really expecting too much response cos, hey, the stuff is free. I get a personal, enthusiastic and helpful email from Aleksey Gureev, one of the developers, who says "We love our product and wish our users to be completely happy, that's why we are always happy to get any feedback."

It's a bit like the phenomenon where cheap hotels have free wifi, and the fancy ones charge you $10 a day.

That old adage about getting what you pay for is starting to look a bit rickety these days. I sure hope we can move from this subbrand of capitalism (shall we call it "CombatCapitalism"?) towards this more generous version.

UPDATE In December 2005 my dispute with Internetters was resolved to my satisfaction. Credit where it's due, they have put things right now.