The world wide zzzzzzz

It's interesting then that MSN's PR mandarins chose to begin their press release with this sentence: "Britain is bored with hearing overblown claims about the internet, according to new research for MSN.co.uk, the UK's most popular website."

No hype there then.

Anyway, the survey found that 62 per cent of Britons believe the phrase 'dot-com' is overused, and 66 per cent are tired of hearing the success stories of twentysomething dot-com millionaires (jealousy is such an unattractive emotion).

Apparently, most people are bored with internet hype because they no longer need convincing about the wonders of using the web (although they clearly need to be told how to use it better. In particular the workings of browsers. Then all those lucky IE users would be able to change their default home page from MSN to something really useful. Like silicon.com. Or something.)

But you'll be pleased (or worried) to know that the net is still less of a turn-off than politics. William Hague was found in the same survey to be the most boring politician (he got 63 per cent of the vote, a novel feeling for a Tory), followed by Tony Blair (48 per cent, so he's still very boring despite a minority of the population voting for him), and Charles Kennedy (36 per cent. The other 64 per cent didn't know who he was).

Boring? How can a beer-swilling baldy, a sweat-soaked spin meister and a dope-loving ginger bloke be boring? (NB: by dope loving, we mean that Mr Kennedy is interested in having an open debate about the decriminalisation of the possession of cannabis, in case Ann Widdecombe gets the wrong idea and threatens to fine us £100 for acknowledging its existence. Or something.)

That sinking feeling...

Sorry about that digression. Back to the wonderful world of IT. We in the UK are certainly bored of EDS winning huge government outsourcing contracts. But in America, they do things much bigger.

The US Navy Marine Corps awarded a contract to EDS this week - but this was no ordinary deal. It's the most expensive IT project in the US government's history.

The Navy will pay $4.1bn over five years for a rather large intranet, with an optional three year extension which brings the total value within a whisker of $7bn.

EDS and its partners will install and maintain voice, video and data services for 360,000 users on board ships, and at 300 bases throughout the US, Cuba, Guam, Iceland and Puerto Rico.

Dick Brown, CEO of EDS, described the contract as a "great triumph for EDS, the Navy Marine Corps and the American tax payer".

Just as big a triumph for the US tax payer as the Inland Revenue contract has been for the UK tax payer, perhaps? We shall see.

On a related note, Brian Davis, chief executive of financial services firm Nationwide, spoke at TMA2000 earlier in the week, and said that he dislikes outsourcing. "Our products are our technology. Outsourcing means giving up our biggest competitive advantage," he said.

Some words

Jamba, the online gaming site, recently sent out an interesting email to its users. The subject header read "some subject", and the body of the mail contained two simple words: "some text".

Jamba endearingly followed that up with this message. "You will probably have received an email saying 'some text'. Sorry - we accidentally sent this to you. We aim to improve the Jamba email service, but next time, we'll let you know about it through a formal letter."

That's a bit old media, but somehow rather sweet. Long live the postman (and woman).

Is ecommerce e-pants?

We get a fair few emails at silicon.com from frustrated users of various ecommerce sites, complaining that their orders have failed to turn up on time (or, indeed, at all). The biggest bone of contention is the tendency of the company in question to send out standard email responses to very specific inquiries (otherwise known as shoddy customer service). We all know fulfillment can be a tricky business. But not listening to your customers is unforgivable.

We heard of one instance involving letsbuyit.com, which wasn't that remarkable - apart from the response we got when we called them up on behalf of one of our readers.

Letsbuyit's UK country manager, Tracy Mawson, said: "We wait and source goods after a co-buy has finished. But our supplier in Germany let us down. Our order reached the supplier on 31 August, but the goods still haven't left their warehouse."

So that explains why the goods didn't turn up. But why didn't they respond adequately to the four increasingly desperate emails our reader sent the company?

Ms Mawson admitted that he "must have slipped through the net".

Which is an interesting turn of phrase. Letsbuyit has apologised profusely and offered compensation and all that. But please don't inundate us with complaints like this. You're reading the Weekly Round-Up, not watching the winking Anne Robinson on Watchdog.

After this little incident, we decided to test the seemingly unrealistic claim of another online retailer, Urbanfetch (http://www.urbanfetch.co.uk ). It guarantees that it will deliver any order made in central London within one hour. Sounds too good to be true. So we ordered a CD (Duke Ellington, in cased you're interested. Jazz. Nice). Half an hour passed. Three quarters of an hour. Fifty minutes... and then, five minutes before the deadline, a motorcycle courier walked into our reception clutching his precious package.

So well done Urbanfetch. (Editors' note: literally minutes after this was written, we got a call from Urbanfetch telling us they were closing all their B2C operations. It seems they were able to get the CD to us so quickly because no one else was ordering anything. This is proof positive that getting praise in the Round-Up is the kiss of death. So we'll stick to puerile mickey-taking from now on.)

And in that spirit, well done to Boxman, the online CD ordering service, which has filed for bankruptcy. Its CEO, Tony Salter, is hoping for an eleventh-hour backer to rescue it - in light of which, he may regret saying these words to an FT reporter: "I never believed in B2C... the barriers to entry are low and B2C companies have a tendency to drive margins to zero and marketing costs to infinity."

And so, while Salter waits for the whitest of white knights, the Round-Up will be off to find a few more high-tech damsels in distress.

Until next Friday, remember what my mum always told me: only boring people find things boring.