Thanks to the advancement of the Web, it is possible for anyone to share their experience with the corporate world – be it positive or negative. Many of my posts in the past have focused on the positive, but sadly it is time to turn the table.

Last week, we received the monthly cable/Internet statement, but this time something was different. Cogeco, a Canadian telecommunications firm, had charged us $31.50 for exceeding our bandwidth limit by 40.74GB in October of this year. I scrambled to the Internet usage section of the Cogeco Web portal to see that the statement did match their records. What was more interesting was that the usage did not fit our bandwidth patterns. For instance, in August of ’09 we used 37GB with 31GB in September, 100GB in October and 50GB in November.

Today Nintendo released an new portable game console, the Nintendo DSi. Nintendo is well-known for introducing three iterations of their portable consoles – we had the Gameboy, Gameboy Colour and Gameboy Pocket followed by Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Advance SP, and Gameboy Micro – all leading the way to the Nintendo DS generation of systems. The original Nintendo DS was launched in the fall of 2004 with the Nintendo DS Lite appearing in 2006 with a smaller design and better battery life. Now, in 2009, we have the Nintendo DSi – a much more feature-rich portable, but at a higher cost. The DSi has been introduced at a price of $200 CAD while the DS Lite will remain at $140 CAD, where it has been for some time – are the new features worthy of the extra $60 and what has provoked Nintendo to choose this price point?

Play time: A year ago you had a brilliant idea for a new product, let’s just call it a widget. After much market analysis and product development your widget was released to the public. Perhaps it was released to great fanfare – perhaps disappointment. Either outcome lends itself to analysis about what is good and what is bad with the product. After all, every great product must have something missing, for at least someone, and every great disappointment hopefully had something right.

To determine the hits and the misses of a given product, including services, many companies will employ user groups, product testers, and feedback forms. These are all fine, but the Web offers managers a wealth of free feedback from customers across the globe – feedback that can help a company evolve a product to match user demands and expectations. Some companies, such as Dell, offer forums that allow users and employees to help each other through problems. Scouring these forums will yield both the good and the bad of specific products, but this takes a lot of digging and cross-communication. Now, how about using online stores, product review sites and even Twitter to collect product feedback? I will touch on how each of these three methods can help product managers collect feedback at no cost to the company other than time.