Diamond Mind Email Newsletter

September 14, 2004
Written by Tom Tippett

Welcome to the fifth edition of the Diamond Mind email newsletter for the year 2004. Through these newsletters, we will try to keep you up to date on the latest product and technical information about the Diamond Mind Baseball game, related player disks, and our ongoing baseball research efforts. Back issues are available on our web site.

Topics for this issue:

Moving the Diamond Mind offices
Business reply mail
Diamond Mind forum coming soon

Moving the Diamond Mind offices

There's a French-language saying that goes "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." In English, we know it as "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

Effective September 15th, the Diamond Mind offices are moving from Lexington, Massachusetts to Beaverton, Oregon. That's a big change for those of us who work at Diamond Mind, but most of the ways you interact with us will stay the same. Our commitment to top-flight customer service will continue to be as strong as ever, and we're not making any major changes in how we do business.

Our toll-free number (800-400-4803) will remain the same and will simply be redirected to ring in Beaverton instead of Lexington.

We will have a new fax number: (503) 531-4006.

If you wish to order or correspond with us by mail, our new address is:

Diamond Mind, Inc.
16055 SW Walker Rd #433
Beaverton OR 97006-4942

Our web site and web store are independent of where our offices are located, so they won't change in any way.

The new office will be staffed from 9am to 5pm Pacific time, Monday through Friday. As always, you can expect prompt, courteous attention to your questions about the product, orders you wish to place, and technical support questions during these hours.

After nine years of asking our west coast customers to remember that we're on Eastern time, our east coast customers will be asked to remember that we'll be operating on Pacific time. That's not necessarily bad news for our east coast customers because it will be easier for many of you to place orders, ask questions, and get technical support outside of your work hours.

Because we will need to reprint all of our stationery, this is a good time to make another change we've been contemplating for some time. Our primary email address has long been an AOL account, and while we've been very happy with the quality of AOL's service, it will be easier for us to serve you with the following new email addresses, each of which is earmarked for a specific purpose and directed to the person best able to respond:

To place an order, track the status of an order, or ask questions about the product before ordering: info@diamond-mind.com

For technical support: support@diamond-mind.com

To request product enhancements: features@diamond-mind.com

To suggest changes in the game's play-by-play commentary: pbp@diamond-mind.com

You can also use the forms on our web site to suggest enhancements to the game or the play-by-play commentary.

If you have stored the old address (DiamondMnd@aol.com) in your address book, please make the change now. We'll continue to monitor the old address for a while, but you'll get better service if you start using the new addresses right away.

Why the change in location? Why now? And why Beaverton?

We're making the change in part because we believe our customers will be better served if I (Tom) spend less time on day-to-day operations and more time on software development and player ratings. I'll continue to live and work in Lexington, but with the operations in another location, I'll be able to focus on technical work with a minimum of interruptions.

We're doing this now because Carol Baran, who has so ably handled your questions, orders, and other customer service needs for nine years, has decided to return to school to pursue a Masters degree in Architecture.

And we've chosen Beaverton because we felt it was best to have the technical support and customer service activities in the same location. We have always had a developer and technical support engineer in Beaverton in the person of Luke Kraemer, so it made sense to consolidate the rest of our operations there.

Joining Luke in the new office will be Pat Morgan, who brings a variety of skills and a great personality that will allow her to carry on the tradition of high-quality service that Carol provided since the day we opened.

As we usher in a new period in the company's history, I want to take a moment to thank Carol for the service she has provided to the company and our customers for the past nine years. Diamond Mind would not have developed such a positive reputation without her ability to handle a wide variety of duties and situations with professionalism, intelligence, humor, and a genuine commitment to customer service.

We will miss Carol, and we wish her the best as she pursues her new career. Her last day was September 3rd, but if any of you would like to send her a message, feel free to reply to this address. We'll make sure your comments reach her.

Business reply mail

We recently decided to stop including postage-paid reply envelopes in our mailings. With the use of our web store continuing to grow, very few people are taking advantage of these envelopes today. In fact, if you add up all of the postage saved by customers who used these envelopes in the past year, it comes to less than $80. For every dollar spent providing this service, we saved customers less than a nickel. That's wasteful, and we can help more of you if we spend that money in other ways.

Diamond Mind forum coming soon

We're happy to announce that we plan to launch an online forum for Diamond Mind customers in the coming weeks.

This forum will provide you with the opportunity to discuss your Diamond Mind Baseball experiences with other owners of the game and with Diamond Mind employees.

Separate discussion boards will be set up for company announcements, technical support, matching leagues with managers, finding NetPlay opponents, sharing replay results and great games, discussing Diamond Mind's research articles, and other topics as needed.