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As a business owner, I would always wish that my customers or users would email me feedback regardless whether I asked for it. It’s nice to hear when you are doing things well, and its great (though not pleasant) to hear when you screw up. Screwing up allows you to fix things, and more often than not, your customers will thank you.

As such, I do stupid things, like wait on hold to make silly requests – like when Comcast didn’t offer CNBC, or Red Zone, or a whole host of other channels to subscribers in Cambridge, I called to request it (and waited for 30 minutes).  Lo-and-behold, 4 months later Comcast added these stations. Do I really believe that my feedback spurred the change? No. Do I believe that enough people called to complain? Yes, and that’s why I do these things – the marginal utility of my call.

That’s why I just sent an email to Sprint to request that they start carrying the Nexus One. They’ll probably ignore my one email, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll get enough requests to realize they have an opportunity. Maybe they’ll understand that the reason they’ve been bleeding so many customers is because to-date, they’ve offered an inferior product with no competitive advantage.  They are a me too player, which lags in innovation…so far.

If Sprint is serious about winning their customers back, that means leapfrogging their competition: actually deploying a 4G network instead of over-promising and under-delivering, and also deploying only top of the line handsets which could handle this network, handsets currently only found on ATT or Verizon or T-Mobile. High end used to be the bread and butter of Nextel before Sprint watered it down with crap…so I have hope that maybe, just maybe, Sprint will find its way.