Tom's Technology Take

2011-07-06T09:27:00.000-04:00

It’s been quiet here and at my other blog, Managing Business Problems. Sorry about that. When I joined Enterprise Strategy Group in April, they immediately gave me the opportunity to start a new blog, Marketing Information Technology. It’s been great. I can write about technology and marketing all in one place. I still will update Tom’s Technology Take from time to time, especially when I find some really cool technology. The more business-like musing will be found in my new home at ESG. While there check out the other awesome ESG blogs. Our analysts have great observations and insights.

The Tech Toy That Will Probably Cause My Divorce

2011-05-27T11:15:00.004-04:00

I’m late to the smartphone party. That’s okay. It’s only recently that I could justify buying one of these expensive gadgets, both professionally and personally. They also were a wee bit more expensive than I would have preferred. Also, let’s be honest, I’ve been burned by enough version 1.0 products to know not to do that with my phone. But the time was ripe.

My new baby is a Samsung Continuum Galaxy S. Sounds like a starship on Star Trek doesn’t it? I have yet to see a more melodramatic and pompous products name. It is the complete opposite of the simplicity of the iPhone name. That’s not surprising since it’s philosophy is pretty different too.

This is a good time to introduce Tom’s Law of Usability, Stability, and Flexibility. It states that usability and stability are inversely proportional to flexibility for IT and Electronics products. The Geek Corollary to that Law states “Geeks prize flexibility over usability and stability because, heck, we can figure it out, right?” You see this played out dramatically in the operating system market. On the far right is Mac OS X. It’s pretty, it’s easy, and you have one way of doing anything. That’s why you only have one button on your mouse – because that’s all you need and if you want more you are doing something wrong (dammit!). Mac’s are for people who say “I just want you to tell me how to do <fill in the blanks>!” This is true of all of Apple’s products. They excel at simplicity as long as you do things the way you are told.

Linux is on the other end of the spectrum. If you don’t have to drop to the command line a couple of times a day, then go get a Mac! Seriously, Linux users like the fact that their are ten ways to do something, each with varying degrees of difficulty. They like the fact that they have to edit a 57 page XML-based configuration file. Registries are for babies and the mentally incompetent. With Linux, you can remake you computer into your own image down to rewriting the kernel if you please – and who wouldn’t want to do that? Microsoft Windows lives in a space between the Linux and Mac worlds, trying to balance usability with flexibility and taking hard knocks for not achieving either. It’s not fair but neither is life.

This Law applies to my phone. It is based on Android, a Google Linux derivative. Compared to any other phone I have ever had, it has infinitely more settings, configurations, and options. In other words, it’s way cool! It’s not really even a phone. It’s a tiny computer that happens to make calls. I can customize it at least as good as my Windows and Linux computers. I can add software from anywhere (not just the Verizon app store) and even connect it to my home network. Heck, I have used it to get a remote desktop to a server on my LAN. It is just the neatest toy which is why my wife is starting to hate it. It’s only a matter of time before I will hear “Put that damn thing down when I’m trying to talk to you” or something like that.

But, just like a typical Linux computer it has it’s foibles. Ever so often it just locks up. No reason. It just seems to go home for the evening and hangs out a “We’re Closed” sign. There’s no reset button so I have to pull the battery, an action that requires opening up the case. I cringe every time I have to do that. It feels like something I shouldn’t be doing.

But this is truly a device for geeks. There are lots of ways to really screw this puppy up, not the least of which is misbehaving software. That’s its charm. You can customize this phone/tiny laptop to your heart’s content without getting permission from mother Apple.

Now, if only I can stop playing Angry Birds. That’s like game crack.

And I Yawn Again at NTAP

2011-03-11T13:51:00.000-05:00

There have been so many blogs written in just one day about the Network Appliance deal to buy the chunk of LSI called Engenio. Between Steve Duplessie at ESG, Greg Schultz of StorageIO, and Andrew Reichman of Forrester, I figured the deal was pretty much covered. This morning on Twitter I saw another half dozen links to blogs about it. With all this coverage you would think this was a game changer in the industry. It’s as if Google bought Microsoft.

I find myself bored by it.

While I like be a contrarian sometimes, that is not the case here. I don’t think it’s a bad deal. All the points have been made as to why it’s a good deal and I can’t dispute any of them. Controlling one’s technology is a good thing. Increasing gross margins on products is also a good thing. And you can’t complain about adding incremental revenue. All very good.

But not very great. Not very bold, not very exciting, not game changing, and certainly not transformative. It’s a boring move not a bold one.

Look, there are are only a few types of sustainable models for companies. They are:

Emerging – what every startup is. They don’t know what they will be when they grow up but that’s okay. This is where our most exciting technology comes from. Eventually, however, they will have to grow up and become something else or getting eaten but someone else.
Parts Supplier – you make parts for other people. Like headlights or NICs. Great work, especially if you spread it out amongst a lot of companies. The goal of a Xyratex. Qlogic, or an Atto for that matter is to be a supplier to as many people as possible and build something of an aftermarket for your components. Think Cummings (they make engines).
R&D Shop – companies that produce only intellectual property. You see this in Pharma and semiconductors but most computer tech companies want to control their R&D. If a big company sees something it likes in another company, they just buy it.
Outsourced Services – who doesn’t outsource call centers and manufacturing these days? Most of the services industry falls into this category. It’s the business process equivalent of a parts supplier.
Specialty Supplier – the big companies can’t make everything. High performance or special purpose products can’t be produced in enough volume for the big companies to be interested. We used to have more of these in the hardware industry. SGI was one and sort of still is. Alienware certainly was but was bought. Software is rife with specialty companies. Software can get away with it because they have almost no recurring costs. It’s all R&D and no inventory. What is important is that these companies have something that is very important to a small number of people but enough people to sustain the company. They are unique but have demand.
Conglomerate – a set of loosely related companies. Some are completely unrelated like GE (aircraft engines and broadcast media?). EMC looks more like a conglomerate than anything else. You can try and put a “Data Management” wrapper around them but RSA, EMC storage, Documentum, and VmWare are only loosely connected in the marketplace. Conglomerates manage companies or divisions like a portfolio. They diversify to guard against downturns. Storage is down? That’s okay because security is up and so on. Google is looking more like a conglomerate every day. And when the need growth they buy some other company in a different space than where they are now.
Solution Supplier – soup to nuts in a particular market. HP can provide you everything from mobile devices to laptops to storage to servers. Oracle and IBM can also provide you with almost a whole solution. For these companies, it’s a matter of defining your boundaries. Is is business hardware to business software like Oracle? Maybe it’s all software from infrastructure to desktops to game systems like Microsoft. It’s about delivering a complete end-user solution. When you need more growth, you push out the boundaries.

Then there are the odd ducks. The folks who sell directly but in a narrow non-unique space. They are too big and too old to be Emerging but sell direct rather than to other companies in their market. Not diverse enough to be a conglomerate, they don’t supply enough of the whole system solution to be considered a real solution supplier. And they don’t do anything special enough to be a specialty supplier. This is where I see NTAP now. Basically a one trick pony in a whole herd of mustangs.

NTAP was the specialty supplier when NAS was new. Now, all the solution suppliers and some conglomerates have NAS in their bag of tricks. It’s just not that special anymore. They might have superior technology (don’t know really) but they clearly are at a disadvantage when someone wants to buy a whole system. If I’m putting in a new application, I can buy most of my parts from Oracle, IBM, or HP. No one has everything (well, maybe IBM does) but their services divisions can help me to get whatever I need. Heck, even Dell is better positioned for the IT business.

For me to buy from NTAP, I have to only want storage. Just storage. Not servers, not infrastructure software, not desktops, and not mobile devices. If all I need is storage then they have to compete against the conglomerates and all the storage products that the conglomerates and systems suppliers have too. That’s not to say that NTAP is doomed. I believe all those other smart people that say they are a good company and this deal will help them. They can compete effectively in their niche. But their niche is not special enough anymore to drive people to them and them alone. It’s always a bake off for NTAP. They are no longer a specialty supplier but it’s not clear what they are anymore. What I don’t see with this deal is a growth plan. Incremental revenue is not about moving forward. It’s running in place. There is nothing in this deal that will really drive meaningful revenue growth or make them an HP or even an EMC.

LSI was smart here. They know where they are in the food chain. They supply parts. What they do is the computer tech equivalent of making headlights. A good solid business but not one where Engenio fit. They got money for it and can focus on making more of the type of parts they make best. Good move LSI.

What is unclear is what NTAP wants to become. If they stay where they are things will only get harder. If they keep patching the cracks with spackle the house won’t get any bigger or better. Maybe they should buy Brocade or merge with/get bought by Cisco. Doubling down in storage isn’t going to do the trick. To get meaningful growth they will need to do something a bit more risky and bold.

Shaking the Smartphone OS Cocktail

2011-02-14T12:35:00.000-05:00

The difference between a mélange and a mess is balance. A mélange mixes together disparate elements into a cohesive combination by carefully balancing each part in relation to the other parts. A mess, by contrast, has no balance. It’s a jumble of confusing elements that fight against each other. It’s why one bartender can make the perfect cocktail and another a horrible brew with the same ingredients.

The smartphone OS market right now is a mess not a mélange. Rather than a handful of operating systems that compliment each other we have too many that do the same thing and fight with each other. While this will eventually shake out, at the moment it is a confusing mess for the consumer.

I’m about to step up to a smartphone. It’s been a long time coming. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure what value these devices had. They had neither the software or power that I crave in a computer nor, in most cases, the sound quality I want in a phone. Both of those situations have changed. The devices and apps have become more powerful and hence, more useful. The sound quality has also increased dramatically. This is a great time to buy these devices too. Prices are dropping and data coverage expanding.

It’s the operating systems that are holding me back. There are too many of them to choose from. Smartphones are not like old school cell phones. In my old mobile phones the operating system really didn’t matter. The carrier and phone did but not the OS. Whether you bought a phone from Nokia, LG, Samsung, or Motorola, the features of the phone and phone company (flip or stick? service in the desert?) decide your experience.

No longer. Now, like a computer, you have to decide on an OS and boy are there a lot of them. Ticking off the major ones in my head I came up with Apple iOS, Android, WebOS, Windows 7 Mobile, and RIM’s BlackBerry 6 OS. That’s five major smartphone operating systems I can come up with using no research. All with incompatible apps, offered on different devices that have different features, on different carriers, and available in different countries. If I was starting from scratch, I would need a matrix of carriers (probably only the major ones like AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and Nextel), device manufacturers (the ones I’ve mentioned plus HTC and RIM) and five operating systems. All before I got to the features of the phone. At a minimum that’s a 4X6X5. For you math geeks that means as many as 120 combinations. Even if I eliminate some combinations as non-existent, such as Blackberry OS with anything but a RIM device, it’s still a big number before heading out to look at the phones that support my X by Y by Z combination.

Complicating matters is that smartphones are only one slice of the mobile pie. I have to take into account that I might want a pad device someday. That makes the OS choice even more important since I wouldn’t want more than one mobile OS with incompatible apps. It’s bad enough that my laptop and phone will have different applications and operating systems. No need to make it three different operating systems.

It wouldn’t be so bad if there were clear distinctions between any of these operating systems and their apps. Perhaps from the point of view of the folks who design them and the analysts who cover the mobile market there is. To consumers, however, it’s all the same. You have gestures, even if they are different. You have apps, even if they are different. You have buttons and some type of virtual keyboard, even if they are different. At best, ones choice is determined by whimsical personal preferences.

The thing is, the OS matters. Just like any other computer, the smartphone OS determines what applications are available for your platform. Which operating systems a software developer writes for depends less on technical details and much more on market share. My choices will be limited by which OS app developers think will provide them the most exposure in the market. Most software companies don’t want to develop for an operating system that won’t have much market share or be around very long.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to know this won’t continue. Sooner or later there will be a shakeout and half of these operating systems will disappear. Some won’t that should but will be marginalized like Windows CE. Others will become nothing more than user interfaces in much the same way Apple’s OS turned into UNIX under the covers but has kept its Apple GUI. Still others will disappear altogether.

The problem is guessing which ones will live and which will die. No one wants to buy a device that will have an obsolete and discontinued operating system. It’s like buying a Palm device anywhere between 2000 and 2005. If you knew then what we know now you wouldn’t have. I have a desk draw full of obsolete devices like my old Palm devices. They are, for all practical purposes, museum pieces.

I generally don’t like to make predictions (since they are frequently wrong) but here’s what I think will happen:

Apple iOS – keeps going. Apple simply doesn’t care about the wider market. That and the cognoscenti love their Apple crack.
Android – generous licensing will insure that it continues to evolve. It lives!
Windows 7 Mobile – another failed attempt. Sorry Microsoft. I actually like Vista and Windows 7 on the desktop. The mobile OS is too little too late. It dies. Microsoft money insures it dies slowly and painfully. Please Mt. Ballmer, do a deal with Google and move to Android while you still can.
WebOS – really? I get that HP paid good money for Palm but with all the other choices, why would I want this. The tablet market? And this from a company who’s last homegrown OS was HP/UX. It dies and HP switches to Android merging whatever is good about WebOS into it.
Blackberry OS – this is a tough one. RIM has an enormous and fanatical installed base but it’s slipping. They had the first viable smartphone-like device which helped get them established. At the time you had to rely on their closed system for email. Now, that’s a liability. I’ll bet that they quietly move to something else but with Blackberry extensions so the old guard can feel happy. My guess is that it will be Android too.

Given where the market is going, the basic mobile phone probably has only a few more generations before they are all smartphones. There will be basic versions for the cheap, the Luddite, and the burner phone market. Those will still be smartphones, just lobotomized ones.

In the meantime, there are too many choices and that will hurt the market. Consumers like simplicity. Until recently, mobile phones were fairly simple devices with a small number of functions. As long as the major bases were covered (make and receive calls, SMS, a couple of toys like tip calculators) you were fine. Now they are computing endpoints with all the same problems as a laptop. Too many operating systems makes it overly complicated. It can’t continue like this.

For the smartphone OS folks who I’ve just insulted remember this: This was the same situation in the personal computer/workstation market in 1990. You had DOS, Apple, dozens of UNIX flavors, CP/M in all of it’s variants, as well as proprietary workstation operating systems. Remember IRIS? Ask your kids (huh? what’s that?) and you will feel old. I loved developing for Apollo’s Domain OS but where is it now? Next to the VAX in the Smithsonian. The market demanded simplicity, leaving Microsoft with the lion’s share. It didn’t matter that DOS was inferior to UNIX or Domain OS. Microsoft still ate their lunch. That UNIX, Apple, and a few others still exist is no solace. They are niche players now, not majors. Windows and Linux make up the majority of the market by fulfilling different needs. They compliment each other.

Since I have to bet, I’m betting on Android. I’m locked into Verizon with no burning need to change which makes the decision easier. Choosing Android eliminates Apple and RIM devices too, further simplifying things. I almost don’t care what the phone is now. I’ll probably decide on price.

Public Clouds : An Unregulated Utility

2011-02-09T10:06:00.000-05:00

What is a utility? It’s a little like art or pornography – we know it when we see it.

Public cloud services such as backup services, photograph storage like Flickr, and email like Gmail are quickly becoming completely ingrained in the fabric of modern life. The Internet offers a host of free or low-cost services that we come to rely on for managing, storing, and sharing our data. In fact we have become as dependent on these services almost as much as phone, electricity, and energy services. To me that makes them data utilities but unregulated ones. And that’s dangerous.

In the past one of the defining elements of a utility was a sanctioned monopoly. There was only one gas company, only one phone company, and only one water company. If you didn’t like their service or their prices then tough! Back in the day, when our US Presidents were manly men who acted manly and had manly mustaches (such as Teddy Roosevelt), it was decided that this was a bad thing. These monopolies had the people by the… throat and that would not do. However, these were not just manly politicians. They were reasonably intelligent ones (and a few may have been receiving perfectly legal contributions from the utilities) who understood the importance of monopolies to early business development. So they struck a bargain. You get to keep your monopoly Mr. Phone Company President and we will regulate you and tell you what you can charge, what your service (i.e. product) will be like, and everyone will be happy. The people won’t get a royal screwing (we being Americans and not liking royal anything one bit) and the monopoly/utility will get unreasonable amounts of money. Bully for us!

Then, in an era of still manly Presidents (Yes sir Mr. Reagan sir!) but less manly politicians in general, things changed. Competition was the byword and deregulation become the way to do business like an American. Let the market, not big government, decide. However, deregulation does not mean no regulation. You see Mr. Cable Company CEO, you still need to pull wire through OUR towns. So we can tell you what to do. You still have a market share that is monopolistic? That means we can still regulate you so that we have no royal anything going on here in America. And this is why the cable company can’t raise rates when it wants to. What could be more un-American than making 500 channels of television unaffordable! Wars have been fought for less.

So what does this have to do with Public Cloud services. Even if you are enjoying the spirited economic history lesson (bully for you!) it is a reasonable question. You see, as we become more and more dependent on cloud services for functions that are important to our lives, they have us by the throats again. Do you want to see your photos disappear suddenly? Could you really live without Facebook? Not if you’re a 17 year old girl. Take away Facebook and their phones and you have a mental health crisis on your hands. Worse, if you are a small business that is using an online backup service or email from Google, Yahoo, etc. you rely on it to make your living. Don’t want that living to dry up so that you have to live in a cardboard box? Pay up! Mr. Roosevelt would not be amused.

This is only getting worse as smaller companies embrace cloud services for IT. Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and a host of other companies provide services that are critical to business. Worse, moving from one service to another is not trivial. Go ahead, try and change your email account, the one that all of your customers already have in their address books. It would become a symphony of missed opportunities.

Let’s take Mozy as an example. When they recently announced changes to their service plans, they did so as if it was just any old product – they just did it. Sure they risk losing customers especially amongst the geeky crowd. Clearly that isn’t bothering them too much. Why? Because changing is a pain and quite difficult for people who don’t know much about technology. For geeks like me, switching to another service isn’t all that hard. [Note: It was real easy for me personally because I didn’t use Mozy. Tried it years ago and didn’t much like it.] For the average American who got Mozy bundled with their new laptop, has no home infrastructure, and is scared stupid of losing their latest podcast about hipster living in New York City, switching is beyond them.

So Mozy, like lots of other cloud services, has nearly unlimited pricing power. They have their customers by the throat. For them, pouring costs into gaining new customers makes perfect sense. Worrying about losing them doesn’t. These people can’t really leave even if they want to. This is the modern definition of a utility. This is not to pick on Mozy (okay maybe a little) because there are lots of similar cloud services that have the same model. Herd in the cattle, pen them up, and do what you want to them.

Here’s what I think will happen. Nothing.

We do not live in an era of government officials with marvelous mustaches. They lack the moxie to stand up to a banking industry capable of bringing the entire world economy to its knees. Why would we expect them to even care about unregulated data utilities? That is, until they are forced to choose between losing their pictures of themselves with celebrities or paying through the nose to people who don’t contribute to their campaigns.

As consumers, what can we do. Be careful. Know the technology that you rely on enough to switch to a competitor. Build you own infrastructure and make the cloud secondary. All good ideas that enhance good ole American competition. It still won’t help when Facebook decides to start charging. Then you will have to man up and do without. Bully for you!

If I was a cloud service, I would starting looking at lobbyists and handing out contributions. You never know when a a member of the House Committee on Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will suddenly be faced with paying to share pictures of their grandkids. Then you will see just how manly our government can be.

Fun U.S. History fact: The last U.S. President to sport a fantastic mustache in office was President Taft. Mr. Obama, it’s time!

ARMed for a Takeover

2011-01-21T09:56:00.005-05:00

If I was Intel I would be worried. The hegemony of the Wintel empire is facing a threat like none before. And that threat is from ARM. ARM is not a multinational criminal organization (cue the James Bond music). It’s a processor. Actually it’s a processor core architecture used in a host of processors with a pedigree that goes back to 1983.
ARM processors are subversive. They have been used in small, low power devices forever. They lie under the radar of general purpose computing. ARM is found in the stuff that you don’t think of as computers such as mobile phones, network switches, game consoles, and GPS systems. These little devils are the processor of choice for smartphones everywhere. Android was designed for it. It lives in the Apple iPad. There might even be one in your Blu Ray video player. ARM is everywhere.
It’s only a matter of time before ARM sneaks into the Empire of Intel, snatching away bits of key real estate. We saw that with the first Netbooks. Why? How could this happen? Power! It’s all about power. ARM cores provide that almost mystical combination of processing power and low energy use. Just look at the iPad. Inside is an Apple A4 based on four ARM cores. It gives the device all the power it needs while allowing it to claim a battery life of 10 hours while using WI-FI. Sure, that longevity is not only because of the ARM processor but it certainly is a key factor.
None of this would matter if it weren’t for the fact that mobile devices are taking over. I don’t expect servers or desktops or even laptops to go away anytime soon. There are times you need more raw computing power. But much of the time you don’t. For most home uses, a low-end, Internet enabled device that moves around with you is just fine. Truth be told, a lot of business users would gladly ditch the expensive and heavy laptop in favor of something small and light but long on battery life. The movement to cloud computing makes this even more appealing.
So where does this leave Intel? In mortal danger. Intel finds themselves, for the first time in ages, with an entrenched enemy on it’s doorstep. They are in the position of having to displace a competitor instead of having someone trying to eat their scraps. In the past, they could rely on revenue in all high growth segments, be they servers, desktop, or laptops. Not now. ARM has infiltrated core Intel markets as mobile computing devices supplant laptops and low-end computers.
For those of us used to the seismic shifts in the computer industry, the ARM ascendance is a bit surprising. We notice the Googles and Microsofts, the Oracles and Apples more. Companies that burst on the scene with all the subtlety of a Mongol invasion. The fifth column tactics of the ARM processor was not as noticeable. That’s why it’s so dangerous to Intel. ARM may have taken their market from within, quietly. It’s much harder to fight a threat that sneaks up on you.
Intel will certainly fight back. They have the technology, size, and money to fight a protracted war. The strategy has to be different from what they are used to. They are the underdog now. Given that, Intel needs to be more aggressive and less complacent. My advice to Intel is “shock and awe”. Buy and build whatever is necessary to crush ARM before it is too late. Or, one morning, all the residents of the Empire of Intel will awake to find ARM processors everywhere and themselves friendless and forlorn.
The enemy is at the gates! To arms! Oh wait. Wrong rallying cry.

An Apple a Day

2011-01-20T14:34:00.005-05:00

All the insane attention that Apple gets turns me off. This is especially true of Steve Jobs. No other technology executive gets the type of hype as Jobs, not even Larry Ellison of Oracle. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t hate Apple. I just feel that they are a company not a religion.

That said, the frenzy of angst that emanates from the business and technology press over Steve Jobs’ illness feels a bit hysterical to me. Mr. Jobs is a visionary and a masterful marketeer. He is also just one person in a very large company. All the Cassandras that are predicting the end of life as we know it, simply because Steve is in poor health, don’t understand Apple. Apple is not Jobs. It is a company which, by definition, is a collection of people. A company that just announced outstanding results. A company with depth in their bench.

Apple is successful for a lot of reasons, not just because of it’s present CEO. It did fine without him for awhile when he was sick a couple of times before. Instead, Apple excels at designing, packaging, and branding technology that mostly exists already. Touch screens, music players, smartphones, and graphics workstations all existed before Apple came out with their version. The difference was that their version has so much panache that it could be positioned as a luxury item and not simply gear. None of that will change if Steve Jobs leaves, even if it’s permanent.

The Cult of Jobs does help the company of course. It adds to an already fanatical brand loyalty that is the envy of every company on the planet. But it’s only the cherry on top of the sundae, not the ice cream. The Culture of Apple is much stronger.

I admit that I hate technology driven by little more than decent design and awesome marketing. It seems shallow to me. But then again, I’m a computer geek. I view technology differently, in an almost minimalist and functional way. For most people, Apple products are much more exciting, much more fun, much more memorable than the average geek gadget. This is the success of Apple.

No matter what happens, the Culture of Apple not the Cult of Jobs will be the driving force in the company’s success. Personally, if I were Steve Jobs, I would retire. I would harness my considerable talent and hoard of money to get well again. I’d spend time with my family and enjoy life. Steve, you’ve earned it. You have already passed on your business DNA to others at Apple. It will do fine.

So consider this a get well card to Steve Jobs. It doesn’t matter if he ever comes back to Apple. Getting well is what matters.

Taking a WikiLeak

2010-12-03T10:20:00.010-05:00

I am fed up with otherwise responsible blogs and Internet news sites making a hero out of WikiLeaks. They are nothing more than irresponsible gossipers. What they do is is unethical, perhaps even illegal.

Let’s get three points out of the way first. One, while I think of myself as a a moderate, others would disagree. Yes, I’ve been called the “L” word. That’s Liberal for those of you who watch too much Showtime. I am a firm believer in the freedoms ensconced in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. So, this is not some neo-con, constitutional revisionist screed. Second, I’m a firm believer in personal responsibility. This is a core ethical principle. If you take a moral stand on something you have to take the consequences of that stand. All the great moral leaders have done this (think Gandhi or Martin Luther King). Finally, if you plan to do something that might be harmful to people, there had better be a great good. Otherwise, it’s just harm.

These last two points are central if you are to be a protester or whistle-blower. You have to accept that some bad things will happen to you. You could lose your job. You might get arrested. You might get beaten up. You might get killed. These are the risks that an agent of social change takes. Just ask Aung San Suu Kyi who has spent a big chunk of her adult life under house arrest for protesting the military government of Myanmar (previously Burma).

The second major aspect of legitimate protest is that its goal is something more than money or even individual good. There needs to be a greater good involved. You protest to restore or establish democracy, stop government abuses, end an unjust war, or make sure that schools teach all children equally. The goal of embarrassing a government or corporation through protest is not simply to embarrass them. Getting Union Carbide to take responsibility for the Bhopal disaster is a valid reason to take them into the court of public opinion. Obtaining equal civil rights for all of our citizens is a reason to break the law and ride at the front of the bus. Tweaking the government or a company just because you can is not reason enough to put people (including yourself) in danger or to subject them to ridicule.

And there lies my problem with WikiLeaks. They have been transformed into folk heroes for releasing classified documents from U.S. Embassies around the world. Some of what was said was indeed embarrassing. They depict the honest (as opposed to public) opinions of diplomats throughout the world. That communication back to Washington is part of their jobs. They need to let the State Department, intelligence agencies, and the President know what is really going on even when to say so publicly would be bad for diplomacy.

Determining whether releasing these documents is illegal is something I’ll leave up to the lawyers. What I am certain of, is that it is unethical. There is no greater good here. Do they hope to create a change in US foreign policy by embarrassing the United States government? If so, what policy? By distributing a broad array of documents, as opposed to a targeted set, it is unclear what policy they would want different. That dilution of purpose alone makes this ineffectual as an method for change. So, I don’t believe policy change is the goal. What I do believe WikiLeaks’ goal to be is simple publicity. Grandstanding. Poke the government in the eye and prove that you are important and powerful.

Which brings me to back my first criteria for ethical protest – taking responsibility. Has the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, stood up and said “I’ll go to jail to protect our right to know?” Nope. All we hear is whining about how they have sustained DDOS attacks or how Amazon doesn’t want to sully their servers with their bile. He has even avoided the European Arrest Warrant issued in the wake of accusations of rape and sexual harassment in Sweden. So much for taking responsibility.

What is sad is that WikiLeaks has done good in the past by acting in accordance with basic ethical principles. Yes, their releases on the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were damaging to the reputation of the U.S. military but they served a higher purpose. They exposed the types of abuses by our forces that can eat away at the heart of military units. It is okay to expose random killings of civilians, covered up friendly fire incidents, or other unethical conduct by military leaders. That’s how we keep our professional military from becoming brutal conquerors. That’s how we hold military leaders accountable to their own soldiers and the nation as whole. It’s what the military themselves should have done. In the end, it’s good for the military to have the bad apples exposed. It’s as if the folks at WikiLeaks have gotten so caught up in their own celebrity that they forgot what their original mission was.

And for those WikiLeaks apologists who talk about freedom of the press and speech, learn what that means. The founders of this great country knew that these were not absolute rights. They are meant to be exercised responsibly. That’s why we have valid defamation and libel laws. It’s why you can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Again, even if what they did was legal, that doesn’t make it right.

This latest round of exposés doesn’t meet the most basic criteria for ethical protest. It only hurts but does not help. Embarrassment for the sake of itself is a vice not a virtue. This is nothing less than the worst form of internet-based tabloid journalism. So, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange should stop whining that people are angry with them. They should stop complaining that they might be in legal trouble. It’s what happens when you put money ahead of ethics. Take you medicine and learn from it.

Novell Rides Off Into The Sunset

2010-11-22T17:13:00.001-05:00

The curtain comes down for yet another 80’s era pioneer. Novell is finally throwing in the hat (not a Red Hat mind you) and selling itself off to Attachmate for the ungodly sum of US$2.2B. There are a couple of interesting questions about this acquisition but first a moment of silence for an historic old ship that has run up on the shoals of competition. At one point they were as hot as Google. But like Sun and other companies of my youth they didn’t keep up and will soon be no more.

Why sell now? Because Novell is obviously not going anywhere. At one time they had the number two PC server operating system, have the number two server Linux and generally were number two in a many things. You can’t be number two without eventually ending up on someone’s shoe. So, if someone offers you enough money to float a missile cruiser, you take it. That’s being responsible. Or maybe the rent’s too damn high. (Caution: Sound is too damn high in this web site).

Why US$2.2B? Got me. I mean that’s not that much of a premium over Novell’s market cap but it’s a lot of money for a company that is a shade of its former self. Part of why that number is so high is because Microsoft (through CPTN Holdings LLC) dropped US$450M into the pot. They have a lot of cash. For them, this is like buying a pack of gum. Still, I have a hard time seeing this pay off for Attachmate. Unless it’s not about paying off for Attachmate per se. (I love foreshadowing…)

Who? Attachmate? I know what you mean. Who the heck are these guys that they can go out and buy Novell. That’s like Meritline (a purveyor of cheap Chinese electronics) buying Best Buy. Seems backwards. Attachmate has a product portfolio that looks like a hodgepodge of data center management products. The deal makes sense from a product point of view in that Novell has their own hodgepodge of data center tools and technology. So, depending on what stays with Attachmate and what goes to Microsoft, you will have a company with a huge collection of somewhat related technology. Combine them into certain combinations and you have a bunch of companies. The funny thing is that Attachmate is nearly as old as Novell but you don’t think of them like Novell. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

Attachmate is owned by a group of private equity groups. That, plus it’s product portfolio mélange, makes it look like a rollup. Rollups keep going by rolling up more companies and selling them off in combinations. It’s like cooking – a little of this, and a little of that, a pinch of something else and Voila! you have a dish you can sell to investors. That might be where the pay off is.

Why should we care? Really we shouldn’t but we do. Whenever a company with a history like Novell’s gets absorbed and turns into little more than a brand it’s sad. We really should if something bad happens next like SUSE Linux goes away, reducing competition in the Linux market. But really, I doubt that will happen and if it does there’s still OpenSuse, right? If you’re a Novell customer of course you care. You don’t know what these guys at Attachmate (or Microsoft) might do and that has to mess with your head. Otherwise, it’s not a game changing acquisition.

So, what does happen next? My guess is that they package up SUSE Linux with some other stuff and spin it off to investors or another company. If I’m the folks in Redmond I want the identity management IP. That would go along way to creating online services and backend software for trusted Internet environments. Attachmate absorbs the rest and moves on its merry way. Depending what it gets for the other pieces of Novell (like SUSE Linux and ZenWorks) and what it can combine with its own products and sell off, it might make money on this. This is not about product engineering. It’s about financial engineering. And in this type of financial engineering one plus one can equal three.

I wave my hat to Novell as it rides off into the sunset. We’ll miss you amigo.

What! No Virtual Booth Models?

2010-11-16T12:57:00.006-05:00

I’m “at” the Comdex Virtual event right now. It’s an unusual experience. This is not the first time I’ve participated in virtual trade shows as both an attendee and a speaker. It’s been awhile though and the experience is a bit different than it was in the past. It’s much more elaborate, more like a real conference. Unfortunately, some things are the same such as jumpy video.

I get virtual trade shows. Let’s face it, for a lot of attendees big trade shows are boondoggles. Expensive boondoggles. You have to pay to travel, pay for hotels and meals, and pay for the show. A lot of IT managers used to justify trade shows as part of employee education. That was true for some people but a lot of folks got too little “education” out of these industry confabs. Instead they got a lot of swag (the stuff they give away at booths). Marketing people even have a term for these folks. We call them trick-or-treaters. Besides junk to fill up their cubicles all that most attendees got were vendor pitches masquerading as seminars. Not a good use of limited budget dollars.

From the vendor point of view, you spend a big chunk of your marketing budget on booths and travel and came back with few qualified leads. Instead of customers with money, you waste your time on trick-or-treaters and folks too low on the totem pole to have any influence on spending. Trade shows in general have two business goals. First, spreading the word i.e. marketing. Branding, education, PR, positioning, and messaging are key activities at trade shows. In this regard, trade shows are generally successful. The press is at these events and people have little else to do but listen to your message. Unless the show is in Las Vegas. Then all bets are off. Get it? Bets? Okay we’ll move on.

The second big goal of trade shows, from a vendor perspective, is lead generation. No matter how you look at it, there are better ways to generate leads. Again, you have to pull some of your marketing and sales team out of the field so they can sift through lots of the trick-or-treater types to get a few decent leads. It’s not very efficient. To get anyone to talk to you at all, you have to sink a boatload of money into flashy booths, presentations, entertainment (magicians, comedians, etc.) and other diversions to cut through the white noise of the expo floor. That’s just to swipe the badge of someone unlikely to buy anything in the first place.

Virtual trade shows are intriguing because they are cheap for everyone. No flashy booths or expensive travel for vendors. For attendees it has the advantage of allowing you to do other things while “attending” (like your job) and it doesn’t take a big divot out of your budget. I can see it for education and messaging. I still don’t see it for lead generation.

I’m fascinated by how much effort has gone into making Comdex Virtual mimic the experience of a real trade show. There are keynotes, breakout sessions, virtual booths and a lobby with flashing advertisements. There’s even hospitality suites that you’re not allowed into without an invite. You get to feel the same pang of of disappointment you would experience walking past a real hospitality suite that you’re not invited into. Ah, the memories.

Despite advances in show design there are still a bunch of annoying quirks. Video is jumpy and makes every speaker sound like Max Headroom. If Hulu and YouTube could figure this out you’d think Comdex Virtual could. The slides for the keynote don’t change. It’s probably a stupid technical problem but it effects the experience. Some of the virtual booths have tiny PowerPoint presentations running. It’s like business for Smurfs. And just like Smurf signs you can’t read the slides. Folks like Microsoft and EMC figured that out and had video presentations. You can hear just fine no matter how tiny the talking head is.

What Comdex Virtual can’t reproduce is, for me, the most important aspect of a real show – running into people I know. A lot of business gets done when you happen upon colleagues and old friends. They try to do this with the VAR Bar - group chat room - but it doesn’t work. It is overpopulated with vendors and the text scrolls so fast that you can’t really see anything interesting. It is tough to search for someone you know (the virtual equivalent of scanning the room) because the application had the annoying habit of suddenly jumping to the top of the list. Besides, looking around a physical room is much faster than scrolling through more than 200 names and icons.

Comdex Virtual goes a long way to making virtual trade shows more enjoyable and interesting. The structure of the event, made to appear like a live event, provides familiar context. It is certainly easier on the budget. Still, it doesn’t allow for one of the most crucial parts of a trade event – human contact.

At least the food is better than it was at live Comdex. And I don’t have to wait for a cab back to my hotel. That’s something the original event could never deliver on.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

2010-10-28T15:47:00.011-04:00

Apps are changing the way we use computing devices in a number of ways. One significant effect of Apps is a return to the “right tool for the job” mentality in computing. For the past 20 years or so, computing has been based on a single platform for all. There were big versions (servers), little versions (notebooks), and an in-between size (developer workstations). Still, it basically was all same computer. For a brief while it looked like a specialty application platform might emerge (namely the PDA) but, alas, it stayed a relatively small market and merged into our phones.

The Cius, iPad, smartphones, and all things Android point to a different future for consumer and business computing. As these devices gain traction, the market will split into platforms that match the software they host. Tablets, smartphones, or hybrid devices like the Air will be the software platform of choice for mobile sales and marketing professionals. These users do not need, in fact have never needed, the full power of a PC. Most of their work consists of communications such as voice, email, video conferencing, and document sharing. Word processing needs are minimal. Most sales people do not right books on the road. They do need access to corporate applications such as CRM and ERP but only in a limited fashion. A bigger format device such as a tablet will give them better access to corporate applications and documents. A smartphone/pad device hybrid like Cius will provide what they need to get the job done.

Consumers will also like the tablet/smartphone device – one can argue they already do. Most home applications are pretty simple and, again, it’s about communication. Sharing pictures with Grandma, contacting the kids via SMS, and keeping up with Facebook. These are the typical uses for computer at home. That and entertainment like music, books, and movies. Except for hard core gamers people don’t need a full blown PC at home.

Where will the PC continue to dominate? Business for one. Web-enabled applications, even internally hosted ones, delivered via a PC device will be the most popular. This will do well for people in accounting, human resources, legal, and administration. It is likely to be a thin client but still more than a tablet running Apps. Developers for sure will need powerful workstations as will most technical folks. And we will only get the powerful Macs away from the graphic artists and video editing people by prying it from their cold dead hands.

The PC will not be going away anytime soon. It will have to share it’s space with a bunch of new devices. These devices will not just be smaller versions of the PC, like netbooks. They will be entirely new devices running different operating systems, using Apps instead of full applications and have very different purposes. The Internet and networking in general makes it possible to have a all sorts of devices work together. This, in turn, allows for devices tailors for different needs.

The era of the one-size-fits-all hardware and software is coming to a close.

There Is Something In The Air Tonight, Hold On.

2010-10-22T09:49:00.015-04:00

Apple’s new Macbook Air might well be the next step in the evolution of consumer and productivity software. Not revolution but certainly evolution. And I said software not hardware. The Air has been described as the spawn of the Mac and iPad. It certainly has elements of both such as solid state storage and a touch screen. Most importantly, it runs the same Apps from the Apple App store that the iPad does. The big step is the new Lion operating system, a hybrid of Mac OS X and iOS.

Software began to change when telecommunications providers started selling small bits of software for your phone. The idea of small, rich, clients with a big back-end has finally caught up to the wider software market. And this is not just an Apple thing. Google’s Chromium OS is slated to come out in the next few months and will have many similar characteristics. Even now there a lot of PC platform Apps, or at least software that fits the model. There is the bazillion widgets/gadgets made for the Microsoft Sidebar, Google Gadgets, and Yahoo’s Widgets¹ engines. These are trifles compared to the Evernote and Sobee applications which fit an App model more closely in that they run on the native client platform and do something useful yet are lightweight and web synced. Windows Live Writer, which I’m using to write this blog, is more App than traditional software.

Apps are different than traditional software or web-based software (SaaS) in a number of ways. They are generally small, rely on an extensive back-end system (if they do anything useful), and are tailored for a specific client platform. Apps are lightweight applications the way web-enabled are yet have a rich user experience normally associated with more heavyweight PC applications. The Apps for the iPhone, Android, Palm, and other smartphone platforms took the phone application to a higher level of functionality, creating software that was much more sophisticated. Much of it is still little more than a toy for your phone but that’s changing. The iPad cranked up the volume even more with full featured and full screen apps.

What Apple has done is take the phone/pad App mentality and moved it to a personal computer (PC) platform. There are some interesting ramifications to this:

Apps are smaller, originally designed to run on very low resourced devices. This puts more responsibility on the back-end to get things done. The positive aspect is that you can build PC type devices that are less expensive, faster, and have longer battery life.
They are sold through the Apple App store. There is a back to the future situation. In the very far past of the computer industry (before my time) you only bought software from the hardware vendor. When my Dad² wanted software for his IBM System 3, he bought it from IBM. Even if it was sold by a third party, IBM was involved in the purchase somehow. Microsoft and Intel screwed that up for the industry. With an open platform, anyone could make and sell software and you didn’t having to give a pound of flesh to the platform vendor. Apps return us (at least briefly) to the old model that was quite lucrative for platform vendors. Each mobile phone provider has it’s own store and likes it that way. It can’t stay that way but I’m sure the client platform providers³ will try.
Apps are cheap. Partly because they are subsidized by subscriptions and ads and partly because they don’t do anything, Apps sell like webware – for little or no money. This also must change but I think they will stay relatively less expensive than traditional client applications.
Most of the processing shifts to the bank-end infrastructure, cloud⁴ or internal, while user experience stays on the client platform. This sets it apart from webware and traditional client-based software.
Apps won’t muscle enterprise applications off the corporate desktop. They will, however, become an adjunct to enterprise applications. Not everyone needs all the functionality of massive applications that SAP or Oracle puts out. An employee needs a limited view of their PeopleSoft applications and a salesmen on the road needs more limited CRM functionality. Both might prefer a lightweight App that works on his notebook and mobile phone platforms.

Apps represents challenges to software vendors dependent on the old PC model. There is no way they will be able to avoid license or distribution fees to one or more platform vendors. Don’t think so? Just ask anyone who develops iPhone apps. The fees might be in the form of traditional licenses for required software or in having to use special tools that you need to buy from the platform vendor (such as a Mac). Once the App honeymoon is over, charges for listing in the App stores will become a way of life. At the moment platform vendors want to spread their platform around by having lots of software support. Since they control the distribution, eventually they will want to start charging substantial fees for listing Apps.

For Apps to be better than simple toys, software vendors will have to offer sophisticated back-end services. When your App is a word processor, you won’t be able to jam that onto the equivalent of an iPad with a keyboard. It will be much more like Google Docs or Zoho Writer. To be in the software industry will require that you have a data center of some sort. This is bad news for someone who just wants to write code but good news for cloud services providers. They will be the data center for the smaller App makers. Those GPS Apps that are the favorites of smartphone users require a lot of behind the scenes support. So will anything of any worth.

In the end, Apps mean shrinking software margins. One of the great things about software as a business is the margins. Unlike electronics and other hard goods, the cost of goods sold for software is incredibly low because there are no material costs. As an industry, we’ve even done away with much of the packaging. As even lower cost software becomes more prevalent and license and distribution fees to platform vendors go up, margins will get tighter.

Development costs are also likely to rise. No one platform vendor controls enough of the market in the same way that Wintel dominates the PC market. To be competitive you will have no choice but to write Apps and pay fees to multiple vendors. At least until one comes to clearly outpace the others. Apps also means that traditional partners and resellers might be caught out in the cold. You don’t buy Apps at Best Buy or from Ingram Micro. The retail and distribution part of this business is probably doomed. Just ask retailers who predominantly sell or sold music. Time to adapt or die⁵.

The one bright area will be infrastructure software. That will probably grow more than it would have normally. The distribution and license model for that segment of the software business won’t change either. Oracle knows this and is making sure it controls enough of the back-end framework to capitalize on the new reality. However, a lot of infrastructure will be “rented” through cloud computing services. Small ISVs are not going to build data centers but data centers will be built by someone. Frameworks for App computing will become big business too. Hopefully something akin to Java will emerge, allowing for multiplatform App development. This will be important to App developers as a means of reducing development costs.

Apps, until recently, were little more than an amuse bouche on your phone. With Apple’s announcement of the latest Macbook Air and Google’s Chromium in the wings (not to mention Android and Windows pad devices), that is about to change. The traditional model for software will change much more than it did with webware. If you’re an ISV, hold on. It’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Disclaimer: I use Evernote, Sobee (sometimes), Zoho Apps (especially their excellent CRM system), Microsoft Live Writer, and Google Docs. Now, they’re free to anyone but still, I thought I’d mention it because I mentioned them. On the other hand, I don’t use anything from Apple not even iTunes. It’s just the way it is.

Footnotes:

Yahoo Widgets used be be Konfabulator. I liked the old name better. It was sort of steampunk. Now it’s just a generic name.
Yes my Dad was a computer geek before he retired and my son is in school becoming a computer geek. We are thinking of starting a guild.
I noticed I used the terms “client platform provider” and “client platform” a bunch of times with out defining it. In this case, a client platform is whatever device the software runs on (PC, Mac, Smartphone, pad device, shoe phone), The provider is who you get it from such as Microsoft, Apple, or Verizon. There is some overlap there I admit. Really, it’s who you will be forced to buy Apps from or through.
Let’s not get into any “what is a cloud” arguments in the comments. When I say cloud here I mean an outside provider of virtualized computing resources. If it makes you happy to say IaaS be my guest.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin. Charlie really knew what he was talking about.

vFlowers for Ferelli

2010-10-07T16:48:00.006-04:00

Today I heard that long time technology journalist Mark Ferelli had passed away. I have known Mark for a long time (if 14 years is considered a long time) and always liked him. We didn’t always agree about technology but then again that doesn’t really matter. What matters is what type of person you are and on that we could agree. Mark was a great guy. When people leave us suddenly it often helps to tell those very personal stories that helps you remember what the person was like. So this is my “Mark” story.

At the time I met Mark I had just started to write publically. Public writing, such as articles, blogs, and books is different from private writing such as corporate white papers or datasheets. This type of writing has your name on it. People know that you do it and will draw conclusions about you from what you write. In other words, it’s scary as hell, especially in the beginning. That’s when you need encouragement and that’s what Mark gave me. He was that kind of guy.

He had seen something I wrote and thought it wasn’t horrible I guess. I think that because he told me to keep writing. He always found space in CTR for my articles and I doubt it was for a lack of material. Unlike a lot of editors I’ve worked with, he could give solid constructive feedback without making you feel like someone had just dropped an anvil on your head. He was that kind of guy.

When I wrote my book he was one of the outside editors. I found this type of writing incredibly stressful. You put a lot of effort into it and the editors tear it to shreds. They have to tear it apart if you want a good book but it’s not fun. So, when I got Mark’s feedback I dreaded looking at it. No need for dread. His comments were on target but gentle. I found myself nodding and saying to myself “Yeah. That makes sense. I should do that.” instead of having my blood pressure go through the roof. He was that kind of guy.

So if you didn’t have the pleasure of knowing or working with Mark, that’s too bad. You missed something. And now the whole industry will be missing one of the better people in it. Interestingly enough, it was computer technology that spread the word of Mark’s death. I heard it on Twitter of all places. I think Mark would have had a giggle about that. He was that kind of guy.

So Mark, here’s some virtual flowers for you from someone you encouraged along the way.

You are… and you want what?

2010-09-15T11:40:00.000-04:00

I’m Tom Petrocelli. I’m about to be an independent consultant (more on that in the future). If you want to know about me, my profile is available right here on-line. I write this blog because I like to write. I also admit that I like to pontificate and, on some level, hope it attracts some positive attention. There. Doesn’t that make things easier?

You would think it would be dogma by now that you owe any person you contact the courtesy of identifying yourself. Identify who you are, who you work for, and what you want to talk about. Yet, I’m constantly surprised how often this doesn’t happen. I can’t tell you how many times, in any given week, I’m contacted without any identification. Someone calls, asks for me (mangling my name of course), and starts talking. No “Hi, I’m Jim and I work for the League of Animal Lovers.” Not, “Hi, I’m Greg and I’m in sales at Acme Catapults. May I speak to Mr. Coyote please?” either.

Instead, they immediately ask for someone and start a pitch. Or even worse, they start asking questions. For example:

Caller: “Hi, is Tom there?”
Me: “Um. This is Tom. Can I help you?”
Caller: “Don’t you want to save money on your personal hygiene needs and help abused farm animals at the same time?”
Me: “What the ….?”

No introduction. No sense of context. Nothing. I’m supposed to sit and answer your questions when I don’t even know who you are? Doesn’t seem likely.

Now, if you think this is all the workings of some sleazy boiler room operation, think again. With the advent of the “Do Not Call” list, fewer and fewer of those type organizations are calling with high pressure pitches. Instead, these are not-for-profits, political organizations, and people who I might actually do business with and probably have already done business with. For example, I’ve gotten calls from various telecommunications companies that ask for me by name then start pounding out the questions. Just before writing this I had a call from my local political party. They forced me to ask three times who they were before they decided to tell me*. I almost hung up on them and I support them! I’ve even had some situations where I had to aggressively interrupt and demand that someone tell me who they were and what company they were from. In a few cases, the caller actually hung up rather then answer. Would I do business with these people? The answer is “Never!”

This type of behavior happens in a variety of contact situations, not just in cold calling. At trade shows and conferences, folks will practically leap out of the booth and ask questions or start pitching before they even say “hello”. You would think it would be harder with social media but a lot of people do the equivalent of it with blank profiles. In some cases it’s intentional (really bad) but a lot of the time it’s laziness. I summarily reject comments to my blog from people with blank profiles unless I know them personally. I can’t tell if they just forgot to fill it out or if it’s spam. Whether technique or lack of attention to detail, it has the same effect. No Id, no comment, no conversation, and no sale.

Sometimes, this is how the contact person is taught to behave. It seems counter productive to me. First off, if I don’t know who you are and what organization you are with, I have no context. That would seem important if you want to get good answers to your qualifying questions. The point of asking someone these questions is to qualify their need and see if they are someone you want to spend your time on. How can you do that if they don’t understand the questions they are answering? Worse than no data is bad data.

You also risk having the listener misunderstand your intentions. Let’s face it, it’s not the social norm to start a conversation without an introduction. To not identify who you are and what you want leads to a lack of trust. That works against the sale. Normally you won’t do things for people you don’t trust. And sales, politics, and charitable giving is about getting someone to do something for you. I don’t have to listen to your sales pitch. I don’t have to put your candidate’s sign on my lawn. And, I certainly don’t have to give you money unless I want to. Given all the people who are asking something from us, we tend to filter out those we don’t trust. Not saying who you are – and I mean right away – undermines your efforts to gain someone’s trust and get them to do what you want them to do.

Part of the reason some salespeople (and other callers/emailers/tweeters/etc.) do this is so that the person won’t say no or hang up. Get them talking and you’ll make the sale! That’s a load of … baloney. People are not stupid and will figure out pretty quickly that you are selling them something. They might be too polite to hang up or tell you to go pound salt, thereby wasting your time. That doesn’t help you accomplish your mission. Instead, build a bond, make them want to listen to what you have to say. That begins with them knowing who you are. And if they still don’t want to hear your pitch, so be it. Better that you move on to the next person than waste time on someone who will never buy or give or whatever you want them to do.

So identify yourself, your organizations, and your intentions first. Then we can talk. You might even get something from me that way.

* I’m aware that political parties are often required to make sure of who they are calling. But would it hurt to say “I’m Ted from the local <Name of Political Party> party. May I speak with Mr. Petrocelli?”

Sales and Promotions Mistakes – It Could Be An Opportunity…

2010-09-08T15:16:00.004-04:00

Two things happened this week that made me think about customer service and lost opportunities. The first event had to do with paper. I find the best customer service stories in the most mundane situations. Anyway, I was at OfficeMax and saw a wonderful deal. There was a stack of five ream cases of inkjet paper. On top of them was a sign that said that the paper was $8.99. $8.99 for five reams of inkjet paper is a great price. The ten ream case was something like $35. Wow! While it was a great price, it wasn’t an outlandish one. Not too good to be true just pretty darn good. When I got to the counter, it rang up $30. Wait. What? Turns out it was $8.99 a ream not a case. Someone was supposed to have taken out the individual reams and stacked them outside the cases. Perhaps it said $8.99 a ream but I’m not so sure. Even if this was the case the type was so small as to not be obvious. Taking them out of the cases and stacking them up was supposed to be the obvious part. I declined to buy it and found a good deal elsewhere.

The second event was the arrival of a $15 Best Buy gift card from Napster. Napster had run a promotion on Facebook wherein you friend them and posted something (favorite song or album maybe) and they would send you a 1GB portable music player. Apparently, the response was so huge to the promotion that they ran out of music players and sent gift cards instead.

Both of these situations have two things in common. First, the company appeared to advertise something they could not deliver on. Second, they could not deliver because of a mistake or miscalculation. Now, I don’t have a problem with mistakes. Stuff happens. A lot of folks want to hold a company’s feet to the fire over honest mistakes. Super travel columnist and ombudsmen Christopher Elliott has written a boatload (pun intended) of columns about airlines or hotels that accidently post the wrong price and have angry customers who want a ridiculous rate. His advice is often summed up as “don’t expect something that is so ridiculously cheap it can’t be right.” Reading his blog I always get the feeling that these folks aren’t just looking for a bargain. They know it’s a wrong price and want to take advantage of the company. Whatever the legalities of the situation are you don’t take advantage of someone, even an airline, that way.

What I found most intriguing was the different reactions from OfficeMax and Napster. In the first case, OfficeMax missed out on a great opportunity with a long time customer. When it was obvious that this was a mistake, I no longer had the expectation that they would honor the price on the stack. I know some people who would demand the $8.99 price, even going so far as accusing the store of a bait and switch. That’s not right. Honest mistakes happen and we need to accept that. What OfficeMax could have – should have - done was offer me something, anything. If they had offered, say, a 10% discount on the case I may have bought the paper. Even if I hadn’t, I would have felt that they made an effort to own my business. It’s about showing the love, not what you get. It’s very likely that the store manager and clerk didn’t have the authority to do more than say “Sorry”. Too bad. OfficeMax lost a chance to sell me something and gain a bunch of goodwill. They lost twice.

Napster on the other hand could have just said “Sorry, we ran out.” The promotion’s fine print likely said something akin to “while supplies last”. They clearly know something about goodwill though. Sure, the player was worth more than $15 retail. However, I really don’t need another one and most people signing up probably don’t either. I only wanted it because it was free. By sending me something, anything, for nothing, they sent the message that they really did want my business and I was more to them than a social media marketing opportunity. A perusal through the comments on the Napster Facebook page shows that this worked. While there were a few grumblers, most said “Thanks for the free gift card!” Napster turned a potential marketing mess into an opportunity to connect with potential customers and say “I care about how you feel about Napster! You matter to us. Sorry about the screw up.”

All too often, companies just want to assuage the feelings of upset customers by tossing out a false apology. For them, it’s about making the problem child go away. I had that happen at Best Buy recently. By the time I left the store I was furious at the obviously fake “we’re sorry” that the customer service representative kept spewing mechanically. Instead, mistakes can be a chance to tell customers that you value them. By proactively doing something positive when you make a mistake, you can signal that your customers matter to you. That builds a bond that is worth much more than the cost of doing something for the customer.

More than anything, just saying “sorry” is meaningless and annoying. You have to do something to demonstrate that you want to make things right. When you make a mistake, do more, say less, and have happier customers.

Hurd The News About HP? What Does The Oracle Tell Us?

2010-09-07T16:21:00.015-04:00

So, first Michael Hurd resigns as HP CEO because of minor accounting snafus related to his totally not sexually harassing a B-movie actress (snicker!). Then, Oracle hires him “allowing” one of the co-Presidents, Charles Phillips, to leave. Phillips apparently had his own public problems with a woman (snicker!) . Now, HP is suing Hurd because – now get this – they have a non-disclosure. Not a non-compete. An NDA. So HP is suing Hurd after they effectively forced him to resign over something he didn’t do with a woman because of something he has yet to do.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. The mind reels with questions here. Let’s choose a few major ones.

Are technology executives of such low moral fiber that they keep getting into trouble with women other than their wives?
Is Hurd just so good that Oracle is willing to deal with the inevitable lawsuits?
If so, was HP just that stupid for letting him go?
Can you really sue someone for something they might do but haven’t yet done?

Let’s tackle these in order. First off, I know a lot of technology executives. While some are ethically and morally challenged, as a class they don’t seem any worse than anyone else. I don’t mean no worse than other business executives. I mean no worse than the guy who delivers my mail or teaches my kids in school. Really, they are about the same as everyone else. Except politicians. Those folks don’t seem to know what ethics are at all. Oh, and Wall Street. Don’t get me started on Wall Street…

Next question - is Hurd just that good that he’s worth the trouble? Well, it’s possible that Oracle didn’t think he would be this much trouble. He didn’t, after all, have a non-compete. That still blows my mind but we’ll come back to that later. More likely, Larry Ellison just didn’t care. You see, Hurd has done some pretty remarkable things at HP. Mr. Ellison clearly thinks so, going so far as to send an email to the New York Times calling the HP board “idiots” for letting him go. That kind of tells me that he thinks Hurd is special.

The next question sort of answers itself. Given the mess HP made of Hurd’s departure it doesn’t look like they were doing the smart things. Really, didn’t they think they could deal with one aging actress who got hit on by an executive (if that even happened)? On the surface, it at least seems like cowardice. I’m willing to accept that there may be more to the story than is generally known. Maybe. Still, guys with Hurd’s track record are not exactly sitting around waiting for “The Call”. It does seem at least a little stupid.

Look at it this way: If they had tossed a tiny fraction of what they are going to spend on 3Par at the B-movie actress, this all could have gone away in an instant.

Finally, can they sue Hurd for not adhering to a non-disclosure when it hasn’t happened yet? A non-compete is different. The minute he took the job at Oracle he would have violated a non-compete. But he didn’t have a non-compete! I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. If you sell a bagel restaurant you sign a non-compete. This guy was CEO of a huge corporation. How did that one get through? But I digress (and rant a bit admittedly).

Hurd can’t violate the non-disclosure until he actually disclosures something and HP finds out about it. What would a court say here? “Mr Hurd is ordered not disclose trade secrets like he has already agreed to and has so far complied with”? Huh? He has to do something to harm them then they can go after him. What it looks like here is that the HP Board wanted but didn’t get a non-compete. I can’t believe they just forgot. Since they didn’t get the non-compete they want to make one out of the non-disclosure. It’s like legal alchemy. Take a base agreement and turn it into a golden one. The contract is what it is. It is not something else just because you want it to be.

Maybe the argument is that he can’t be an Oracle President and not disclose sensitive information. That’s a scary argument mostly because it assumes guilt. This suit assumes the inevitability of wrongdoing. Even if HP feels that Mr. Hurd has such low moral character that it’s likely he will disclosure something (see above) he still has to do the bad thing first. It’s not enough to say “we feel he might.”

This is not a trivial matter. Technology businesses cannot exist without confidentially. Everyone signs confidentiality agreements. Who will now if they can be turned into non-competes and other types of agreements by fiat. If you can be sued because you might do something but haven’t then would you sign an NDA? Will you enter into a confidentially agreement that is a non-compete in disguise? This has far reaching consequences in all aspects of business. Everyone signs non-disclosures when they go to work for a company, enter into partnerships, work with customers and vendors, etc. What if all of those magically turned into non-competes too? If you except the argument that you can’t work for someone else without disclosing trade secrets then you effectively do that and bind everyone to their current company. Like indentured servants only with cubicles.

So, the answer to the last question is “Yes. You can sue someone for something they haven’t yet done.” It doesn't mean you will win though. Hopefully HP won’t prevail. That would be devastating to all business.

And guys, stay away from the booth babes. You shouldn’t have them in the first place. They are insulting to men and women alike but clearly a minefield for the C-level executives. Protect your CEO. Don’t use booth babes.

What the…?

2010-08-27T10:39:00.007-04:00

Okay, the 3Par bidding has hit the $2B level. That’s nearly twice the opening bid of $1.1.5B. The first bid seemed high but the offers have now gone into the exosphere. For those who don’t remember their 8th grade science, that perilously close to being in orbit. It’s a place where there is practically no air. Get that? No air to breathe.

Considering that 3Par had revenue of US$168M in fiscal 2010 (resulting in a net loss by the way), HP is bidding almost 12 times last year’s revenue! That’s insanely high. Even at an accelerated growth rate, HP won’t make that back before I’m a grandfather. Trust me, that is a long time from now (or better be – you kids listening?). This bidding war has generated a lot of analysis, including mine. Theories range from Dell and HP vying for the number 2 spot in storage behind EMC ( I like that one) to HP’s Dave Donatello being on a mission from god. Okay, not a mission from god per se but the storage business equivalent. At these numbers, none of the theories including mine make any sense.

Look, 3Par is a great company with a lot going for it. It is also a company that would have eventually topped out like Brocade. It might have hit the $500M level but not much more. Selling out is the best thing that they can do for their stockholders. David Scott, 3Par’s CEO, has really done his job.

As it stands, it is hard to imagine HP or Dell seeing much return on this investment. The number’s are just too high. Here’s my theory: like at an auction, these companies are now just into the bidding. The original reasons for doing the deal are now tangential. It’s about winning. It’s about the emotion.

My advice to Dell, let HP take it. Let them spend huge amounts of money that could otherwise have gone into a new storage product. Use the money you have set aside for this purchase to buy someone else. It’s not like there aren’t a bunch of companies out there. Isilon, Compellent, Xiotech, they’re all independent right now. Heck, buy Data Robotics. They’re private and everyone seems to love their stuff. I know it’s not “enterprise” but you could probably sell a boatload of those Drobo arrays to the SOHO market and walk them up to the mid-range. You would certainly see your way to a ROI much faster.

These numbers just don’t make sense anymore.

Computer Industry Goes Zoom Zoom

2010-08-23T11:30:00.005-04:00

You would think that last week’s announcement that Dell was acquiring 3Par for US$1.15B was news enough. Ha! Intel then raised eyebrows by announcing the acquisition of McAfee for US$7.6B. Now, comes Monday morning and HP raises the stakes against Dell by sending in their own and bigger bid for 3Par. It’s nice to be loved. Somewhere in all this, Hitachi Data Systems announced that they had acquired the Intellectual Property and core engineering team of Parascale, a cloud software company. Too bad for them. What should have been a sweet announcement was lost in all the noise.

So, what the heck is going on here? On the one hand, this is actually not that surprising. Computer tech companies tend to throw off lots of cash so they have a lot sitting around for acquisitions. Most of these big companies can thus afford to buy expertise or market share. This is especially true when you are coming out from the bottom of the market. Best to build up the arsenal before the economy really picks up.

This is an industry with a tradition of letting smaller companies trail blaze new technology and markets then get their payoff from a big company. In the long run this is cheaper and less risky for big companies but profitable for small ones. More unusual are the Googles and Microsofts who start in a garage and end up a behemoth. That’s the myth of computer tech but not the reality. What is not a myth is that deal making gives folks like me something to talk about. So here’s the talking about part.

Intel-McAfee Makes for Secure Communications

The Intel-McAfee deal has a lot of pundits scratching their heads. It’s a lot of money for a company with a big consumer business. McAfee’s revenue would barely be a rounding error for Intel. In 2009 Intel’s revenue was 18.5 times McAfee’s (~US$35B vs. US$1.9B). $1.9B is nothing to sneeze at but it will be a long time before a McAfee revenue stream makes up for the money Intel paid for it. What McAfee has going for it is lots of core security technology. More importantly, it’s spread across all aspects of the digital world – web, mobile, desktop, and server. Combined with Intel hardware and chips and you have a much higher revenue generating business than McAfee alone. It’s like having your cereal with fruit and milk. It’s part of a complete breakfast. It also well positions Intel for the long term. This is an example of the Gestalt principle – the whole is way better than the sum of the parts. Besides, people said similar things about EMC’s RSA acquisition and that has worked out well for them, right?

3Par Bid Up by HP

I wasn’t that thrilled about Dell’s acquisition of 3Par, except insofar as it worked well for the 3Par folks (nice folks). I’m both more and less thrilled about the HP bid along the same lines. It’s better for 3Par financially, so I’m more thrilled. It’s makes less sense for HP though. Unlike Dell they have a coherent storage story, reputation and brand going back decades, as well as an extensive product line. Do they need 3Par? At least with Dell, 3Par would be a prominent part of the line up. They might have even kept their name, like Equalogic did. With HP, they will be absorbed. It’s hard to see what this deal adds to the HP product mix that they can’t get or build more cheaply. I doubt they need 3Par’s customer base really. Perhaps it’s just a way to keep Dell from becoming a serious competitor in storage. Perhaps. Generally, I don’t like this for HP but do for 3Par investors. It will be interesting to see how high this one gets bid up. There could be crazy amounts of money tossed around here.

HDS Goes Parascaling Up In The Clouds

The cloud is about software. It sells hardware but doesn’t exist without software. Parascale provides software that makes storage and servers into clouds. I don’t know enough about Parascale to say if it worked or was particularly good software. Assuming it worked just fine, then this is the kind of technology play that I like. It adds immediate value, helps move hardware, has broad, future potential in an emerging market, and is a deal that is easy to do. It’s kind of conservative but conservative often pays the bills.

Bye Bye to OpenSolaris

There were also a bunch of other, smaller announcements too. One that is significant was that Oracle will be dropping support for the OpenSolaris project. This is sad since there was a vibrant community around OpenSolaris. It was not, however, unexpected. Oracle has nothing to gain by supporting an open Unix product. In the end, this will be good for the Open Source community. There are already too many Linux and Unix projects and variants diluting the talent pool. Do we really need OpenSolaris and FreeBSD and OpenBSD and NetBSD and Darwin and so on and so on. Not really. So, while I understand how this bothers some people and generates a lot of “what else will Oracle kill?” questions (Don’t worry it won’t be Java or MySql. They generate revenue) it’s really for the better. Time to move on.

I must admit, all this activity is exciting. It’s rare that this industry gets a week like this. Deals are usually more evenly spaced out. It’s like NASCAR for computer geeks.

Piling on the Dell/3Par News

2010-08-18T11:18:00.004-04:00

Whenever some news comes out about an acquisition, everyone chimes in. It’s like kids playing little league football. Someone tackles the kid with the ball and all the other kids pile on. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that. I lied. Hey, if you can’t lie to yourself, who can you lie to?

But really, I follow the storage segment but don’t claim in-depth technical knowledge anymore. I’m too interested in technology and business strategy to dive into the deep technical details. I can make a thin provisioning joke but that doesn’t mean I have the kind of encyclopedic knowledge of the segment that folks like Marc Farley (of 3Par – ready to buy that boat?) or Chuck Hollis of EMC have. Sticking to what I know here are some thoughts.

Why it’s a good thing (in list form):

3Par would have eventually hit the wall. The hardware industry is a game of numbers. Big volume plus low cost equals great margins. You need market share and manufacturing prowess for that. A company the size of 3Par would have eventually gotten eaten alive by the big boys.Or faded into irrelevance. That would have been the slow death.
The deal provides a nice Return on Investment for 3Par investors. I like it when people make money in startups. It provides fuel for more startups and gives hope to the rest of us entrepreneurs. Now, if you all want to swing some of that cash my way…
I bet Dell really wants 3Par. 3Par could have gotten bought up by someone who just wanted them out of the way. That would have been sad for the industry. There is a better chance that some of what makes 3Par unique will continue to live on at Dell. It’s nice to be loved.
3Par employees can get great deals on Alienware computers. I’m just speculating but wouldn’t that be cool. Those babies are hot! If that’s not in the term sheet then amend that puppy now.

Why it’s not a good thing (also in list form):

US$1.15B is a lot of money. Dell is going to have to sell a lot of storage to make that back. That’s especially hard to do when the 3Par message has often been how you could buy less storage at a cheaper price to get the same functionality. I get the “less is more” messaging for a startup but you all have to make back a big pile of money now.
Dell’s bought a lot of storage companies but still doesn’t have a cohesive storage message. This is actually a good-not good thing. On the one hand, you don’t think of Dell as being in storage the way you do, say, HP or EMC. They’ve bought up a boatload of storage companies but it’s like Yatzee - all tossed in an incomprehensible pile. On the other hand the scrappy 3Par people are really good at new marketing. If they stick around (and Dell should make it worth their while to stick around) they could have a positive effect on Dell’s overall storage marketing. If they’re allowed to which brings us to…
They can’t use what makes 3Par special. People think that companies like 3Par are about technology. Not really. They are about ideas. The simple audacity of 3Par is part of what makes it successful. That rarely translates well in a big company. Just because Dell wants 3Par doesn’t mean they know what to do with them. The impact of the creative folks that have been driving the company will be diluted once they are just a cog in the Dell machinery.
On some level, this has to annoy EMC, Dell’s big storage partner. The more meat Dell adds to the storage stew, the less tasty it is for EMC. I keep wondering how long EMC will put up with this. Dell clearly wants to create a business that competes with EMC. An ugly breakup would be bad for Dell since EMC could probably crush them in the enterprise storage segment. My guess is that the only reason this has yet to happen is that Dell has not gotten it’s act together enough to really get in EMC’s way. Maybe this is what EMC needs to go buy a server company and finally become the full service provider that they should. Some of those Taiwanese computer companies have good SOHO servers that would fit in well with Iomega and Mozy. Just sayin’…

Ultimately, this is very good for 3Par, it’s investors, and many of it’s employees. Making honest money always is. Whether Dell gets it’s $1.15B out of the deal remains to be seen. They need to develop a simplified but cohesive product line. Better storage marketing would also help. 3Par people can help but will they be allowed to? Wish i knew.

The Magic of Magic Hat

2010-08-09T11:57:00.021-04:00

Magic Hat, for those who don’t know but should, makes beer. Really good beer. Beer lovers’ beer. Hoppy, complex, flavorful, and often wonderfully bitter. Not your garden variety swill here. Magic Hat is very good at making beer. They are also incredibly good at marketing and brand management. They have built their brand based on magic, Halloween, and Mardi Gras imagery with a hippy aesthetic. They carry that brand throughout everything they do. Cartons, labels, product names (such as the new Hex). Even the factory reflects their image of whimsical scariness.

The Sticker Licker!

On the factory tour (which is actually called the Artifactory) in South Burlington Vermont, they have massive signs that explain what all the machines and process steps are. They are not your typical bland signs though. For example, the labeling machine has been given the moniker “Sticker Licker”. All the signs, of course, reflect the corporate color palette. The tasting room is like none I’ve ever been in (and I’ve been in … a few). Ambient light is kind of orange and dim but not too dim to read. It’s weird and edgy without being threatening. The soundtrack is decidedly hippy with lots of Grateful Dead and Cream. The signage is, like their labels and cartons, in keeping with the overall look and feel of the product.


Everything about the tasting room screams the Magic Hat brand.

You might be asking yourself “What has this to do with technology?” That’s okay. Go ahead, I’m not insulted. I’ve not gone off the rails. In fact, it has everything to do with technology. Technology folks forget that technology is usually realized as a product. Products are bought and sold and how we manage to do that is important. The type of tight brand and product management that you see at Magic Hat is the same that you see at companies like Apple. Everything connects. They have a playbook and stick to it. Deviation from form is not a good thing. It confuses consumers and makes it hard for them to connect to your products.

I can still hear you out there saying “Well, we don’t make consumer products so this doesn’t apply.” What?! You have consumers too, no matter who you are. You might call them customers, clients, or fellow employees but someone is consuming the stuff you make. Branding matters to them for these reasons:

It provides a point of reference. When you see an HP computer you know it’s an HP because of it’s design elements. This is why monkeying around with your logo is a dangerous thing. Not just the logo either but colors, shapes, packaging, the whole tragedy.
It attracts people. Consumers need to know about what you have to offer. Branding helps cut through the white noise of the marketplace. It doesn’t matter if it’s the whimsy of a beer company or the messaging of an OEM tech company. Folks need a reason to listen to you. Your being there isn’t enough.
If coupled with great product, it builds loyalty. The ultimate goal of branding is to associate your product with some set of emotions that makes them want to keep in touch and consume more. And to tell all their friends too.

So much technology marketing is bland and gyrating, changing with every new model. Shifting branding causes confusion. Again, the technology master here is Apple. You can instantly recognize their products, logo, even color schemes. It changes over time but always in line with the overall branding. Their brand changes incrementally not radically.

Now, there are reasons for radical brand transformation. If the brand has gotten so stale it sends the wrong message, it may need a facelift. If something very bad has gotten connected with your current brand, then a reboot may be in order. Radical restarts of a brand without real need are usually disastrous. New Coke anyone? Didn’t think so. As the Magic Hat (and Apple) example shows, brand is not just a logo. It’s everything from the box it ships in to the design of the product to social media. It all has to come from the same source, from the same core.

So, tech companies have a lot to learn from how a small company like Magic Hat makes it’s presence known in a very competitive field. Take marketing beyond just a graphics manual and encompass all aspects of the company and products. At Magic Hat, even the guy pouring beer in the tasting room exuded the Magic Hat brand. That is the only way to attract and keep customers. That and awesome product. Don’t forget that. Magic Hat would be nothing if the beer was lousy. And their beer is anything but lousy.

Storm Clouds Approaching

2010-08-06T15:06:00.016-04:00

IT shops have gotten to the point where they have a good handle on managing servers, networks, and storage. Headway is being made toward managing their virtual equivalents. Now, we have to add cloud computing to the mix. Cloud management may be the next great pain in the neck for IT shops. At the moment, not enough folks are seriously deploying in the cloud for it to be a crisis. That will change as more IT professionals accept cloud computing as something they can use to manage that tricky balance between cost and performance.

There are two paths we can go down (but in the long run) there’s still time to screw things up¹. First, if cloud systems management is too difficult and the tools too primitive for too long, deployment to the cloud will be much slower and might even reverse. If, however, the benefits of the cloud are enough that deployment continues apace, sysadmins and programmers alike will find themselves wishing for someone to put them out of their misery. The sheer lack of tools will drive them to drink.

Cloud management is unlike other systems administration. Usually big chunks of an application, such as a service, are deployed to servers. With clouds, little bits of application, including individual and transient objects can be anywhere. Worse yet, individual objects might be parceled out to different clouds depending on their resource or security needs. It is possible to have different objects instantiated on different cloud services, public and private, which in turn execute them on different physical resources. Distribution on this scale can be very tough to deal with on conventional systems. No one is really sure how that will play out in a cloud.

The other big difference between clouds and other infrastructure, at least public clouds, is that you don’t necessarily have much visibility into the infrastructure. Managing applications that are not only distributed in a cloud but hidden behind a vendor’s veil of secrecy is like driving in a blinding snow storm. I don’t recommend it. There’s too much trust in the unseen and unknown.

How do you manage this type of environment? One approach is to build monitoring into the individual application objects. Daesin, an open source cloud API written for Java, allows this. Problem is that you have to build monitoring into your application objects and may be language dependant.

Standards will make a difference. The DMTF just announced an initiative for cloud monitoring called the Open Cloud Standards. DMTF management standards have spurred vendors to develop management products in the past. Open cloud interfaces such as Open Stack will also help since it will provide an open and standard platform for accessing clouds. These type of standards make it easier to develop software to manage cloud services. Right now, folks who develop cloud infrastructure software such as TwinStrata have to interact with nearly a dozen APIs from many different vendors. It’s basically a Tower of Babel which makes software development much more difficult. Development will become easier when there is a single or limited number of APIs to deal with. When development is easier more tools will become available.

So, if you truly be believe that clouds are the next big thing, the next SAN/NAS or the next J2EE or .Net, then you need to start worrying about how to manage them. Now.

1. My apologies to Led Zeppelin. Stairway to Heaven does not deserve that kind of abuse.

I’ve Seen An Elephant Fly

2010-07-18T18:19:00.011-04:00

Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, Apple proves that they are more clueless than even I imagined. In fact, I thought that since they had handled the crisis regarding their new product - the iPhone 4 - so poorly that they had already reached the depths of crisis management.

I admit it. I was wrong.

They have shown that they can go further, faster than anyone could have imagined. Only in the wrong direction. I’m impressed but not in a good way. Apple made three mistakes, real obvious ones at that. First, they used the term “Antennagate” during their press conference and then said they wouldn’t say it anymore. Too late! Not only is it out there now but it will be linked with Apple forever. It sounds petulant to say “Antennagate” then declare it off limits. Does Steve Jobs really think he has the ability to order the world not to use the term anymore? Instead, he validated a concise label, something easy to remember. If Apple wanted the word to go away, they should not have acknowledged it. It would have died out on it’s own. Now it will forever be linked to Apple.

Second, they offered their customers a sop. Instead of vowing to fix every iPhone with the problem, they are giving away a free case. Wow! How generous. The case will actually help reception but it’s clearly a cheap gesture not a grand one. That has not been lost on Apple fans. The company clearly isn’t showing them the love.

Finally, they went on to say this is a problem that all of their competitors have too. The reaction from the other smartphone manufacturers is what you’d expect. They laughed at Apple for trying to make this their issue. Besides, customers don’t buy the “they suck too” defense from a company that talks about the superiority of its products. When your kids come home from school with a bad grade and say “lots of other kids did bad too”, do you take that? No! Instead they get the well known parental refrain of “I don’t care what other kids did. I only care what you did.” Pointing out flaws in others, even if it’s true, does not relieve you of your responsibility. Apple customers know this. It’s time to drop the excuses and fix their relationship with their customers.

So, it only gets better. Apple keeps setting new lows for crisis management. Someone needs to get over there and pull them out of this infinite loop.

A Swift Kick In The Apple

2010-07-16T11:10:00.023-04:00

I’m not a great believer in schadenfreude. Finding joy in other people’s misery does not say something positive about me so I try not to engage in it. However, with some companies, it’s too tempting to ignore. Apple is one of those companies. In my opinion, they sell a lot of style over substance. Pretty much anyone who has developed for Apple environments such as the iPhone or Mac will attest to them being control freaks. They are the epitome of a closed system. Apple, and Apple alone, decides if your App gets to be in the App Store. They are not exactly forthcoming with the criteria for rejection either. At times it has appeared that they were rejecting apps from competitors for all the wrong reasons. They make Microsoft seem like Open Source.

So, it was with a bit of guilty glee that I have followed the latest iPhone 4 debacle. Why, because Apple approached it with their usual arrogance. Even though it was obvious to a first year Electrical Engineering major that there was a problem with the antenna, they denied it. It wasn’t the signal that was wrong, they said, it was how the software measured it. The first thought that came to mind was “So, it’s always had a lousy signal. Silly us. Thanks for pointing that out.”

Now, they are suggesting but not really admitting that they may have an antenna problem. Still, the reaction is slow. Everyone has to wait for a press conference starring Steve God… I mean Jobs. This is classic Apple. They think they can fix this with a marketing event. The arrogance is astounding.

Here's a quick lesson in Crisis Management 101. First, you admit that you may well have a problem, that your customers are not stupid rubes who don’t know how to hold a phone. You don’t blame partners and faceless engineers. Second, you investigate quickly and offer to replace the product if there is indeed a hardware problem. You let anyone return the product whether you can prove there is a problem or not. Most people won’t but it’s the kind of gesture customers appreciate. Finally, you fix or replace all the problem devices for free. Even if you take it on the chin financially in the short term, you will have built long term value and enhanced your brand. For a company dependant on brand, like Apple, this was an opportunity to build long term loyalty.

What you don’t do is deny that there is a problem before you’ve even investigated it. You don’t act like your customers are morons. Most importantly, you don’t tell everyone to shut and up and take what you give them. This type of attitude takes an opportunity to connect with customers and turns it into a lot fewer customers.

More than anything else, you check your ego at the door. You act humble, sorry for the pain that you caused your loyal and beloved customers. This seems to be something that Apple is genetically incapable of doing. You think they would have learned from the recent Toyota debacle. Silence is deadly here. Arrogance is even worse.

At one point in my career, I was on both sides of this type situation at once. Network boards that we had been shipping were failing. Most were caught by our manufacturing QA engineers. Those that weren’t we offered to take back from customers even if they hadn’t seen problems yet. The contract manufacturer tried to deny that there were problems at all. Then they tried to deny that they had anything to do with it even when we showed them the defects. Finally, we had to threaten to pull all of our business from them. Suddenly, they were willing to admit and rework all the boards. Needless to say, we weren’t looking to send them any new business. We no longer trusted them.

This is classic Apple. Too bad. They had an interesting opportunity to make their customers trust them, to grow loyalty, and turn a bad situation into a positive one. They’ve done the opposite. In the long term, this will haunt them.

Make ‘Em Laugh! But Be Careful…

2010-07-14T16:03:00.011-04:00

One of the best ways to gain attention is through humor. Comedy sticks in your brain. It releases endorphins which put you in a good mood triggered by what you are watching. Personally, I think Geico is the Master here. Besides the Gecko and Cave Men, they also have what I call “serious guy”. He tells you that Geico will save you 15% or more on your car insurance. To prove he’s not lying he asks “Was Abe Lincoln Honest?” This is followed by a hilarious fake film clip designed to look like it was from the Civil War. The one with the little piggy crying “wee wee wee” all the way home is equally memorable. Geico has a whole channel of these on YouTube. They are really entertaining and might save you 15% or more on your car insurance.

These ads work because the message is simple (save money on your insurance), are linked to iconic characters, and are genuinely funny. We are talking classic comedy here. The kind your kids and mom can appreciate. It helps you to link Geico to positive emotions. Ask anyone about Geico and they start to chuckle. The simple message sticks in you head. Even if you don’t know how much they claim to save you, you will recall that they save you money because it is linked to a positive emotional response.

You knew there was a gotcha here though. There are a lot of ways to take that positive feeling, turn it around 180 degrees, and trash your product message. Here’s my hit list of ways to turn funny into lost opportunity:

Use mean stereotypes. A recent Storwize video portrays a a storage administrator - an IT professional and presumably a customer - as an overweight, sweaty guy dressed in a white short sleeve shirt and tiny black tie. In other words, he’s Dilbert. He even gets abused by his data storage. A true loser. This has just got to insult IT people. And overweight people too. Lovely, a twofer. I did check with some sysadmins/IT pros I know about this. They were not amused.
Being ironic. As in hipster ironic not real irony. Advertising that is full of snarky, insider jokes never works. Inevitably, someone doesn’t get the joke. Tech advertising can be like this. You try to be funny but it comes across as geeky. It’s all the internal references and acronyms folks. It doesn’t play well with the people who have to write the checks or the end users. Now, reduce it to a twitter Tweet and you get a lot of “Huh?” reactions. If your ad is making a play on the word iSCSI, it will have a small audience.
Complex messages. Geico’s ads work (just like the Budweiser frogs) because the message is straightforward. Technology advertising tends to be a tad more complex. As in incomprehensible. How can you be funny when you jam several technical and business messages into 3 minutes? You can’t. Even if you start out funny, you are soon mired in Dullsville. Keep It Simple! When Dell ran a serious of ads full of colorful laptops being created to the song lollipop, it was cute, delightful, and humorous. It also got the message across that a laptop was a treat, something you enjoy and not just a tool. You ruin funny when you add complexity.
No message at all or no connection to the product. Lots of these abound, especially in print. No pictures or mention of a product. Something cute and funny that grabs our attention and then… nothing. You have to connect the good feelings that the humor gives you to something. Otherwise the arousal is lost in space.
Overdo it. One of the few places Geico blew it was when they overexposed the Cave Men. A whole TV show devoted to them was quite over the top. When you see or hear something repeatedly, you start to like it more. After a certain point, however, it gets overexposed and you begin to like it less. Psychologists have known about this behavior (called the Familiarity Principle) since the early 1960’s.

I like funny advertising. I love funny blogs, Tweets, songs and jingles, websites, Facebook posts, and videos. It gives me a good feeling which I then transfer to whatever it is someone is trying to sell. It might not close a sale but it puts the company on the list of “products to look at”.

A local company called Mighty Taco (awesome fast food by the way) has humorous placemats that often feature something local like the Queen City Roller Girls roller derby league. They also have a bunch of weird, quirky commercials that you only see late at night when it’s cheap. Even their website is funny. The message is simple - “Eat our food!” If you live anywhere near Buffalo, NY, the very mention of the name Mighty Taco makes you smile. That’s perfect advertising.

Only, now I’m hungry. Perhaps it worked too well.

Let’s Get Something Clear About Transparency

2010-07-06T16:46:00.003-04:00

I have noticed a lot of bloggers coming clean about how their blogs are influenced by who they work for. One of my favorite bloggers, Marc Farley (aka 3PARFarley) recently published his statement. To say I was not in the least surprised to find that 3PARFarley worked for 3PAR is a bit of an understatement. His tongue and cheek blog can be found at http://doiop.com/mfmotives

Never to let an opportunity go by to get some traction from the work of others, I wish to add my own transparency statement. Here it goes:

Unlike so many other bloggers, I can honestly say that my blog is not influenced by any company. That’s because I am not part of any company. It’s not what I would choose but it gives me the opportunity to say “No one tells me what to do (other than my wife)!” For the right money I’m willing to change all that. Not the part about the wife. I would never change that. Love ya honey.

I write what I write because I think it’s right. Or maybe because I’m a blowhard who likes to hear himself talk. Perhaps it’s so that I don’t have to find meaningful employment and can call myself a blogger instead. It could be a mental illness such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Who knows. Or it could be that the aliens tell me to write. Good thing they don’t tell me what to write because then this would be one big horrible lie. I couldn’t live with that.

I don’t like to admit this but this has not always been the case. Not the part about aliens silly. They’ve always been there. No, the company part. I have blogged for companies that I worked for and it surely influenced my personal blog. Not in the form of shilling for the company (that’s what corporate blogs are for) but in staying away from certain topics or companies so as not to offend someone who contributed to my livelihood. The unfortunate accident of my current situation frees me from that worry. I am now truly free to annoy anyone I choose… unless I’m interviewing with them. Then I have to wait until they stop calling back to use them as a piñata. Just kidding about the piñata part. No really. No worries. But next time get a non-disclosure…

My problem with transparency statements (mine and Marc’s excluded of course) is that they assume that we are all too stupid to figure out that most blogs are sponsored, paid for, or otherwise influenced by a corporation. Come on folks! What ISN’T manipulated by a company these days? Please don’t act like anyone is hiding something. Gosh, what was the giveaway? The corporate logo on the top of the page? How about the bio that starts with “I work for (insert company name here)”? I’m not cynical, just realistic. Even most of the so-called private blogs say things like “These views do not reflect the views of my company.” The heck they don’t. Let’s have someone lambast the CEO and see if the disclaimer saves his job. Of course it won’t so you stay away from certain topics. That’s influence. See the advertising on the blog? Do you think that comes without strings? Sorry but no. The first time you lose an advertiser because of what you write you learn quickly not to write that again. It might not even be conscience but it’s there all the same.

To the folks who cry about transparency and journalistic integrity I have this to say: This is not journalism. It’s commerce. Most blogs that don’t come out of a new agency are a form of advertising. I would make a Fox News joke now but I hear they have mean lawyers. Just kidding. I love you legal guys.

Most people get that. It doesn’t mean there isn’t value in what the blogger writes but it is, at least partly, marketing. If you can’t tell if someone is selling you something then assume they are. Even me. I’m not but it’s better that you assume I am if you aren’t sure. Trust me on that.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this pledge:

I’m not selling you anything but truth. I’ll NEVER sell you anything but truth. Remember that when I go to work for a big company. I’ll never change. Not even then. I’m just like that. You can take that to the bank.

At least for now.

Author’s Note: Ask about our convenient sponsorships. You too can reach a targeted audience of high worth individuals through blog ads. Inquire with the author. Reasonable rates.

Quick Comments on Comments

2010-07-01T15:09:00.003-04:00

For quite some time, a great number of people have told me that I should turn commenting back on for this blog. Some made it sound like I needed to turn commenting on. That the world would be destroyed in 2012 and it would be my fault for not turning on commenting. And the Mayans. Don't forget the Mayans and their stupid calendar.

But seriously, I listened and I responded. I turned the comments back on and guess what happened?

Nothing.

That’s right. Almost no comments. Talk about feeling unloved. Worse yet, many people didn’t even realize they were back on. What’s horrible about that is that I wrote a blog entry on it. That probably means that no one is reading my blog. Sigh…

It’s like having to come to terms with your mortality. It leaves you with a sense of your insignificance in the universe. This is the problem I see with commenting. You either are inundated with flaming chaff or deadening silence. The great democratic community of rational thought that Internet commenting was supposed to create has never really materialized. It didn’t happen when the action was on forums and news lists. It didn’t happen in AOL chat rooms. Other action happened in AOL chat rooms but we don’t need to go there.

I have a theory as to why this is. It has three parts.

People only want to have in depth conversations with people in person. Over the phone or even through IM, but not in an anonymous forum or comment page. It’s too impersonal.
Humans are social creatures who need real interactions with people they know. You want to know the people you interact with. We want to talk with Joe Smith not weirdtechguy25. A Twitter feed or a blog is a form of publishing. The one talking to the many. When it’s one to one or a small group like commenting is supposed to emulate, you want to know the people you are dealing with. Otherwise how can you judge what they are saying. The context is wrong.
The jerks, flamers, spammers, and other social misfits do not follow the rules of polite society. They are the Internet equivalent of the guy standing in the middle of Times Square shouting gibberish at his hand. We instinctively move away. When this happens in comment pages and forums, the rest of the population moves away from them and they are all that’s left. Yelling gibberish at their virtual hand. Not pretty. The meek may inherit the Earth but the weird will inherit the comment page.

This, by the way, shows the genius of Facebook. Whether Zuckerman and crew realized it at the time they had hit upon the real way we want to interact with people in cyberspace – just like we do in real life. We only want to converse and share pictures with people that we know and like. Not anonymous strangers but folks we know on some level. In that environment, not unlike in person, social pressures keep people from acting like asses. We don’t mind inviting a friend of a friend either. But someone has to vouch for them and their behavior.

So there you have the problem with comments and forums. Once you remove the need to adhere to social norms, once you eliminate the need to act like a civilized person, some number of people will revert back to animals. It’s like pulling the control rods out of the reactor. Soon or later, things get out of control and BOOM!

Here’s my solution (listening Blogger?) – let bloggers have to “friend” people before they can comment. Let us toss them if they act out of line. Don’t moderate the comments, moderate the people. Only let people into the party if they have an invitation.

With that in place, comments will be something worth having. Of course, that assumes that anyone is reading the blog in the first place. I can dream.

One quick note to my international readers. If you want to post comments, please do it in English. I know that is terribly provincial of me but if I can’t read something it is summarily dismissed. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. Thanks for understanding.

Comment This!

2010-06-22T13:53:00.005-04:00

I’ve engaged in a lot of discussion about comments on websites lately. I used to allow unmoderated comments on this site until the spammers forced me to change that. Then I had moderated comments. That changed when the flamers started. It took too much time to filter out the awful, off topic, and just plain stupid comments that people left. There was not enough spirited discussion and too much mean spiritedness.

Part of the problem is with Blogger. I’ve used Blogger for as long as I have had Tom’s Technology Take. I like a great many things about it. Most of all, I have tools for composing and uploading my writing to the platform. For example, I have a plugin for OpenOffice.org’s Writer that uploads directly to my blog. Lately, I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer and really like it. It too can interface with Blogger.

Where Blogger really falls down is in comment moderation. There is no good way to verify that people who comment are who they say they are. You can leave comments using only the flimsiest and false information. There is no attempt to verify more than an email address which can be fake too. Subsequently, I saw a lot of comments from spammers and flamers that traced back to nobody. Without accountability for their remarks, some rotten people feel that they can be as nasty as they like. I’m sorry folks but I believe in basic civility.

This has come up recently at my hometown newspaper, The Buffalo News. They have had rather loose commenting rules ever since they introduced comments, about a year ago. This has resulted in comments that were:

from political operatives not real people;
really nasty;
racist, sexist, and every other type of “ist” you can think of;
full of unverified claims that bordered on defamation and some that crossed the border.

This has led to a change in their commenting policy. They are not eliminating comments but now require a login with a real name and phone number. They have my support. The Buffalo News doesn’t want to cut off discussion or even criticism. They just want people to be civil and accountable. What cracks me up is the number of people who got all up in arms about not being able to anonymously flame people. Makes you wonder at the health of our civilization.

Margaret Sullivan, Managing Editor, in her article about the policy change makes a compelling case for commenting. She wrote:

“The aim of publishing reader comments, all along, has been to have a free-flowing discussion of stimulating and worthwhile ideas — something of a virtual village square. “

This is what is missing when you turn off commenting - the exchange of worthwhile ideas. It is sad that good discussion has been drowned out by the buzz of virtual mosquitoes who only want to suck the lifeblood from civil discourse.

So, I’m going to try an experiment. I will turn commenting back on. It will be moderated. It will require a Google account since the Registered Users option didn’t do the trick the first time. Comments that are nasty, off topic, or plain counterproductive will be summarily eliminated. Comments will not be axed because they are critical or because I disagree with them. I will, however, kill anything that is not civil.

It is time to stand up for proper behavior. The Internet does not give people a pass on decency or allow them to be awful. Even if, as the old New Yorker cartoon said, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog” you still have to act like a human being.

Author’s Note: I never publish two blogs in one day. I like to spread them out a bit. This was written but slated for publishing a week later. Wouldn’t you know it, someone asked again why I didn’t allow comments. It’s a sign maybe. Anyway, I have accelerated my schedule and am publishing this now as well as changing the commenting.

Broadcasters Throwing Away 70 Years Of Practice

2010-06-22T10:59:00.004-04:00

It amazes me that an entire industry, when faced with something a little bit new, can suddenly forget everything they have ever learned. TV broadcasters (who started as radio broadcasters) and their advertising agencies seem hell bent on tossing out every lesson from the past 70 years as they branch out into Internet media.

Case in point – CBS. CBS doesn’t participate in Hulu unlike every other major and quite a few minor networks. Instead, they go it alone. To me that just means cutting off an avenue of distribution. That’s like refusing to put out your old programs on VCR and then DVD.

That, however, is not where they really drop the ball. Their worst mistake is when they forget decades of advertising wisdom on CBS.com. What do they do? They run the same commercial at every break in the online program. Every time. Over and over and over again. That flies in the face of all that we know about how to advertise in a broadcast medium. After the first run, no one is paying attention. By the fourth run you’ve actually annoyed your potential customer into no longer being a potential customer. It is not enough that you remember an ad. You have to not hate it too. Otherwise, that irritation translates to the product. You remember the product alright but not in a good way. There is a reason that one spreads ads out over time. It guards against desensitization of the message.

CBS.com goes a step further and will play multiple instances of a commercials in a row. The same commercial. It’s not enough for them to blast the same ad at you three times during the course of a program. They have to give it to you three at a time. That takes you from irritated to numb. Numb to their message, numb to their value proposition and numb to the product. In other words, completely desensitized.

Make no mistake – online programming is still broadcast media. It’s delivered through the Internet but is no different from TV on-demand broadcasting in every other way. On-line broadcasters seem to forget this. They treat the Internet delivered program as something alien and deliver advertising in ways that they never would over the airways or cable. On TV, if you see a commercial run twice during one show, you assume it’s a mistake. Oops! For shows delivered via the Internet, it is the norm.

Broadcasters forget this again when they try to add false interactivity into the show. They don’t allow you to do obvious Internet actions like mouse over a character and have his or her bio popup. You can’t pause a show that has a product placement in it and get information about a product that interests you right there and then. Nope. Instead, they give a choice of what silly commercials (they call it an “experience”) you want to see again and again. Unfortunately, there is no “None” option available. Why not vary the product placements from showing to showing. For digital media that’s not that hard to do. TV Sports does it all the time. Next time you watch baseball on TV look behind the batter. The little sign changes and is localized. You could do that on a TV program with a billboard in the background for instance or change what’s playing on a TV set.

The behavior of CBS.com is probably the most egregious of the broadcasters but you see the same advertising patterns in all of them and on Hulu. They constantly run ads in ways that they never would on TV. Instead, they let opportunities go by for more interesting interactive behavior. Broadcasters don’t seem to know how to embrace the potential of Internet delivered shows while forgetting everything they know from 70 years of TV and radio broadcasting.

Broadcasters have to get this right and soon. The Internet is quickly becoming a major form of delivery for their products. Advertising is advertising. A commercial is a commercial. That doesn’t change because it’s delivered in packets instead of electromagnetic radiation. Sorry but the Internet did not change everything.

Whereby I Commit Heresy

2010-06-16T16:49:00.004-04:00

It is axiomatic that when you develop a product you listen to your customers. Throughout the development process, even before product conceptualization, you are talking to customers. You get their opinions, wants, desires, and hopefully needs. Most Product Requirements include something about the “Voice of the Customer”.

Although listening to customers is a good thing, if it is adhered to too strictly it can really screw up product development. That’s right, listening to customers can mess up your products. Heresy! See, I delivered on my promise.

Here’s how customers can tank your product.

Customers don’t know always know what they need. They more likely know what they want but not always what they need. When gathering data, customers will talk to you about features and technology but not business. Take servers. We keep making faster servers whose CPUs are mostly underutilized. One of the reasons that server virtualization has taken off is because server manufacturers built in too much capacity. They did that because their customers told them too. What customers needed was better application performance. They just assumed that meant a faster processor or more memory. Talking to customers about problems and behaviors yields a better response. It’s just harder to do.

Which brings us to the next problem – customers answer the question you ask of them. Asked if you want a faster server who won’t say yes. A lot of companies don’t dig in deep to find out what they plan to do with that extra performance. If you asked what is the biggest issue they have with applications and infrastructure you will likely get a different answer. Worse yet, sales and marketing people tend to introduce features into the conversation that customers never even thought about. How many times has someone suggested a feature to a customer, had the customer said they liked it, but then the same customer wouldn't buy it. It happens all the time.

Even if you understand what someone needs, that doesn’t mean they can pay for it. Years ago, when I was a product line manager, I was told repeatedly that my product line needed SGI drivers (it was that long ago). There were lots of customers who wanted it, need it even. When we queried those same customers as to how much they were willing to pay for those drivers, we got a different answer. To have listened to the “voice of the customer” would have committed us to an expensive development, test, and service effort for something that no one would pay for.

The biggest problem is dealing with conflicting needs. Unless you have an incredibly homogenous customerbase you will not find a clear picture of what everyone needs. Instead, you will get a fragmented view based on competing needs. How do you resolve these conflicts? Who do you listen to more? How do you make room for innovation? To put it simply, you can’t be all things to all people so compromises will have to be made. That can be difficult especially if you are just chasing features.

Here is where you see the effects of big customers. Big consumers of your products tend to dictate that their needs come first. Wal-Mart is famous for this in consumer goods as are large banks for IT. The problem is that they are not all of your customers and may not be where your growth is. By catering to a few powerful customers, you risk alienating other customers and making it difficult to break into other markets. You might also spend a lot of resources on features with narrow appeal. Even worse, large institutions tend to be conservative. Given too much credence they can stall innovation in your products leading to slow death for the company.

The overwhelming problem with listening to customers is that it isn’t enough. You have to understand their business and industry. Only then will you have enough context to figure out what they really need and what they are likely to need in the future. A great product anticipates future needs instead of simply meeting current known ones.

So listen to your customers. Just not too much.

How To Mess With Your Brand in One Easy Lesson

2010-06-10T10:30:00.005-04:00

I usually write about technology or the computer industry. It’s what I do. Every once in awhile though, I see such marketing idiocy in other industries that I can’t help mention it. Today was one of those days. According to the New York Times GM wants the people who work for the Chevrolet division to stop using the word “Chevy” in reference to their cars. It appears that they only want to use Chevrolet. That tips over from a simple “Huh?” to “What the…?”

Chevy is not just a nickname. It is an integral part of the brand and has been for longer than I’ve been alive. It’s not a ‘57 Chevrolet Bel-Air. It’s a ‘57 Chevy! No one calls the flagship pony car a Chevrolet Camaro. Everyone knows it as the Chevy Camaro. That is awesome branding. And Chevy rhymes with heavy as in heavy metal which makes us think of loud music and fast cars. That’s what men especially like in cars. Why mess with that?

The stated reason is (now get this) to build a stronger brand through consistency. Okay, I get it. Take away one of the most recognizable, most salient parts of your brand to make it stronger. Wait. I don’t get it because it makes no sense. Emerson was right when he said “ A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. It doesn’t get more foolish than this.

There are several reasons why customers attach a nickname to a company, product, or brand. They are:

The real names is long. This is why we don’t say “International Business Machines”. IBM is easier on the eyes and tongue.
The official name is lame and/or stupid. Really, there is a reason Apple doesn’t make everyone say Apple iPhone. It’s a great fruit but not a great name. The logo is iconic and the Mac and “i” branding are memorable. Apple was smart enough to stop stapling their real name in front of everything back in 1984.
The nickname better captures the brand. Great names capture something about the brand that speaks to the audience. What says total car awesomeness better, Chevrolet or Chevy?
The company or brand is named after a real person or persons. Often companies named after founders sound like a law firm. That’s okay if you happen to be a law firm. Otherwise, not so much.

HP is a great example of the power of a nickname over the official name. The real name (Hewlett-Packard Company) is long and sounds like a CPA firm. If they were to insist that everyone in the company call it Hewlett-Packard and never say HP, it would look downright silly. Those two letters represent the natural brevity and tendency to toss around acronyms that is part of the computer industry. The nickname “HP” has become a big part of the brand and hopefully they would never mess with that.

This is yet another indication of a company that has lost its way. Can you imagine Ford saying “Don’t let me catch you referring to the Mustang as a “‘Stang"? No. They’re not that stupid. They realize (I hope) that that kind of identity is like free extra cheese on your pizza. Viral brand identity is a precious gift so why screw with it.

What is ironic is that this is a company that has no problems with GM instead of General Motors. So, GM, hear me now – I will never buy a Chevrolet. I might, however, buy a Chevy. Especially if it’s a Chevy Camaro. Even better if it’s free.

What Am I Missing?

2010-06-08T16:38:00.003-04:00

So, I’m reading Facebook and see a posting from Starbucks. It tells me that I can download ten songs from iTunes on their dime. Okay. I’m not a fan of iTunes but I’ll take it for free. Then I made the supreme mistake – I looked at the comments. To begin with, I couldn’t imagine what the comments might be saying. A coffee company that you have chosen to hear from offers you free tunes. What more is there to say? You can say “Thank you”. That’s a bit vacuous but at least it’s appropriate. What else could there be?

I started paging through the 152 (that’s right! 152 and growing!) comments to see if there was a theme or some meme that I was missing. There were several as it turned out. They could be classified as:

Inane – comments like “I love Starbucks"!” and “yummy!” They don’t add much to the sum total of the knowledge of the human race but at least they are harmless. Besides, even Starbucks needs to hear the love from time to time.
Reasonable Complaints – mostly that people have a hard time downloading the songs or that they’re not available in Europe. These are okay too in that it’s good information. Doesn’t change the world but some marketing flunky at Starbucks will find it valuable.
Whining – folks who complain to hear themselves talk. I love the misspellings in these. It says something about the people writing these comments. If you are going to complain at least take the time to do it properly. And it’s not spelled “sux”.
The Haters - by far my favorite comments are the ones that say how much they hate Starbucks. Why would someone friend a company on Facebook if they hate them so much? It stretches credulity until it is paper thin.

This leads me to two thoughts. The first is that although social media is about creating community, it doesn’t always work out that way. Clearly, if you have people who friend you just to whine, complain, and say they hate you they have no real interest in belonging to a community. This is one of the biggest problems with social media for marketing purposes. Not everyone is interested in forming a positive community around your product. Quite a few just want to make themselves feel good by dumping hate on you. Unfortunately, social media is like a bug light for antisocial personalities.

The second thought was how difficult it is to control social media. This is yet another risk of social media that needs to be managed. Simply put, you can’t control your message and image the way you would in other media. All it takes is a bunch of complainers and haters to ruin whatever positive thing you are trying to accomplish. Give something away for free to gain a little brand loyalty? Some idiot who only means you ill ruins your effort. This is the same reason I no longer allow comments on this blog. Between the spammers and flamers it wasn’t a healthy conversation. At least with Facebook, it stays in the community of mostly good customers. On Twitter, it gets broadcast to the world. Ouch!

Social media opens up a whole can of risk that wasn’t there before. Part of that risk comes from the unprecedented access we give to our brand. Anyone with an ax to grind or who just wants to rain on everyone’s parade can mess with your message. The worst part of it is that you really can’t reply. If you get into a back and forth with a complainer you will turn off the people who are there for the right reasons. All you can do is hope that the inane and reasonable outnumber the whiners and stupids.

So, unless you already have a strong brand, solid message, and loyal customers, think twice about social media. You might not get what you want.

Risky Social Behaviors

2010-06-04T11:25:00.003-04:00

Management (the practice not the people) is, to a large extent, about risk avoidance. Managers spend a lot of their time managing risks. Through a combination of experience and knowledge, managers mitigate market, financial, technology, and legal risks in order to provide a positive outcome for their organization. That’s a big chunk of the job.

Given that, I’m amazed at how many managers and professionals don’t understand the risks of social media. Whenever I talk to managers about these risks I hear the same refrain – It’s new! Sorry, that’s no excuse. It is not an excuse because it is an electronic communication like any other. For risk management purposes, social media is no different than email or a website.

The legal risks of electronic communication are well known. They can roughly be summarized as risks associated with:

eDiscovery – why would anyone think that social media including Twitter or Facebook is not discoverable? If search results, websites and email are then so are these. The same rules apply including the FRCP in United States. Keep in mind that Electronic Communication is not defined as email but as electronic records of all sorts. This includes private accounts in the same way that private email accounts may be discoverable.
Privacy – people forget that a lot of social media, especially Blogs and Twitter, are public forums. You don’t have an expectation of privacy in an open forum. If you wouldn’t stand in a crowded room and shout it out, don’t Tweet it. The same goes for Facebook if you don’t set your privacy controls to kill. Leave them wide open and you are publishing to the world.
Defamation – public speech that is intended to harm is not protected speech in most countries. If you call someone a thief or a liar on Twitter you may as well have put up a billboard. Trash a competitor’s product in your blog? You had better be able to back up what you say.
Agreements – a recent story about a lawsuit that accused an ex-employee of using LinkedIn to solicit another employee to leave garnered a lot of attention. So what? Solicitation is solicitation. The media is irrelevant. Social media does not give you a pass on sticking to contracts and other agreements including non-competes.
Misrepresentation, Spam, Phishing etc. – again, the rules don’t change here. If you are NOT who or what you say you are or you are a scummy spammer you are acting legally or ethically by using Twitter or a Blog comment instead of email.

What is different is the ease of which one can fall into legal or ethical traps. We have been trained to think before we send the email. Social media with it’s quick, short, rapid fire bon mots encourages impulsive behavior. For the manager the real risk is that things can happen without people thinking about it. And these comments last for a long time. For the average corporate drone, the danger zone is in not remembering that these are not private communications. If you Tweet that your boss is an idiot, the boss can fire you it. It’s no different from taking out an ad in a newspaper. You are likely violating part of your employment agreement (folks, you really should read those before signing them) and giving cause to terminate you.

Use of social media does represent special marketing risks. Most of these risks are derived from a fundamental misunderstanding of social media – that it’s open. Twitter, for example, is a broadcast media. From a marketing perspective you can think of it like television and radio. Some obvious risks are:

Forgetting you are talking to the world – I got into this on Twitter some months back. I objected to the use of swearing on Tweets by my alma mater. I was concerned what it would say about my school when they write posts like that. Clearly, they forgot that they were not talking to just a small group of like minded people. Full disclosure: people who know me will tell you I can swear like a sailor, though never in business situations. The risk to my school’s brand was my complaint not the words themselves.
Not reaching for the shut off valve – legal risks aside, trashing competitors and individuals in public irritates people. Even worse is the back and forth that a lot of techies engage in. Sorry but no one wants to hear that. It’s one thing to point out your competitors shortcomings in person. It’s quite another to scream it all over the Internet. Playful poking is one thing as is thoughtful discussion. Trash-fests turn people off and make them stop listening.

Here’s a few tips and reminders to guide you through the social media forest.

Remember, it is eCommunication and media like any other. The same rules apply.
Do not assume privacy exists just because you want it to. If someone can see it, it’s in the open no matter what your intentions were.
Think before you Tweet or post.
You are publishing. Act like you are publishing even if it’s so you don’t annoy your friends.
Remember that you can be punished, socially or legally, for thinks you say. Social media is a form of saying.
Managers, be clear on what you expect and where the boundaries are. You can’t exert total control over your employees lives outside of work nor should you try. Just make sure they know how to keep private thoughts private.
become proficient with privacy controls and use them appropriately. Parents, this goes especially for your kids. School administrators do trawl around in Facebook for threats and inappropriate behavior.
No innuendos or in jokes. You lose the wider audience and annoy people. In the same vein, don’t trash talk.
Don’t mix personal and business communications. If you usually Tweet about your cat I will not expect to hear about your company’s new product. I might care about one or the other but probably not both in the same context. That means I’m not listening when I should.

Above all else remember that social media allows you to tap into a wide community of people. Don’t be a jerk and don't’ be creepy. People will treat it as if you acted like that in person. That can’t be good.

The Great Untruths

2010-05-28T12:34:00.006-04:00

There is a difference between a lie and an untruth. Neither is true but a lie is intentional. So, when I say that something is an untruth instead of a lie I am making a value judgment. The assumption is that someone did not tell the truth but didn’t know that it was not true. Instead, they were ignorant, got too excited/upset/scared or are parroting back what might be another untruth or lie.

A lot of products fail (and some fail dramatically) because of untruths. If an untruth slips in during a crucial phase of development a very bad decision will be made and bad product will emerge.

Here’s some of my favorites.

Everyone Wants This!

You hear this from sales and marketing people a lot. Someone comes back from a trade show or customer visits and hears about a feature that “everyone” wants. There are a couple of untruths rolled into one here.

First off, who is everyone? I can’t tell you how many times it turns out that “everyone” is one person. After hearing it one time, the sales and marketing team feels compelled to ask others about it. They usually get a “Sure. That sounds good” type response. It’s really a sample size of one with all other responses coming from a poisoned well.

More importantly, people often want a great many things that they aren’t willing to pay for. There is a difference between wanting something and needing it enough to turn over money out of a limited budget. This is why there are a lot more Ford Focuses on the road than Lamborghinis. Everyone wants a Lamborghinis, just not enough to pay for it.

Finally, customers don’t often know what they want or even need. Instead, they have problems that need solving. Asking a customer “Do you need this feature?” will get you to the untruth. Asking “What do you need to accomplish your goals” will get you to what they really need to do and might be willing to spend money on.

We Can Do That Too (Version 1)

Someone (Sales, Marketing, a customer perhaps) comes to the development team with a request in the middle of a project. This is commonly called scope creep. We’ve all seen it because it happens all the time. Sometimes, it’s no big deal. Other times it kills products. You can’t just add things without ramifications.

Scope creep kills products in two ways. One, it loads products up with a ton of features that make it bloated. In the end, by trying to please everyone you please no one. You also trash your margins.

Often when faced with these requests Engineering will say “Yes! We can add that.” This is an untruth. Technical folks are, by nature, builders, makers, and fixers. It’s in the DNA. Pride comes from the ability to create something that people will say “Awesome!” to. The last thing they want to say is “We can’t do that.” So they say yes but neglect to mention that they lack the resources or even the expertise to accomplish it. Look out for the techie that says “No problem. We can do that” without first doing some analysis. You will not find out until much later that they are trying to figure out how to do something that they simply cannot do.

We Can Do That Too (Version 2)

Another flavor of “We Can Do That Too” untruth is timeline reboot. Like the new Star Trek movie. If the technical team knows that they have the expertise and resources they will instantly say yes to a new request. Wonderful! However, what they don’t tell you is that they don’t have the time. You find that out when you sit down to review a project and realize that the technical team just assumed that the timelines were extended. The real request is “Can we add this without changing the timeline?” The untruth is saying yes to that knowing that is what is meant.

I can already hear the response – good project management will head this off at the pass. That assumes that the technical folks ever communicated the new timelines to the project manager. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen technical teams develop a new timeline in their heads and never mention it to anyone. Their intention was always to stick to the old timelines but when it becomes apparent they couldn’t they extended it and added a touch of collective amnesia.

Who hasn’t heard “The trade show is in two weeks?! How come no one told me that?” Of course you did but they need to save face. It’s about pride again.

We Can Fix This

About the worst thing that can happen in the middle of product development is the realization that something is terribly wrong. You hit a technical snag that was completely unexpected. Unfortunately, some problems are too big or costly to fix. But that’s not the bad part.

The great untruth is believing you can fix the unfixable. There are just some problems that are insurmountable and this is when you shut down the project. A lot of technical folks don’t know when something is unfixable. The assume that with enough time they will come up with a solution. Before you know it every last drop of resource in the company is engaged in trying to find a solution to an intractable problem. The idea of cutting one’s losses is rejected, more out of pride than anything else. This is when you have to swallow your pride and stop fooling yourself. Then you can find a real solution like buying the technology from someone who has figured it out. Or perhaps dropping the feature that wasn’t going to generate much revenue anyway.

I’ve seen this happen with businesses too. Some businesses face a problem they can’t handle no matter how much time, effort, or money they put into it. They destroy all the value in the business in a quixotic quest to find a way out. Sometimes, the only way out is by the door. What’s especially bad about this situation is that opportunities to scrape something out of the business by changing direction, selling the business or divesting of some it its assets are lost. Here’s to tilting at windmills.

Everyone Else Already Has This

I always leave my favorite to the last. This is by far my favorite untruth. To justify more resources, a new feature, or an accelerated timeline someone will declare that you are behind the curve and this is a feature that everyone already has.

The truth is more likely that they have only made announcements. They might even be working on it. It is even possible that one company has an early version of it. Rarely is there a critical feature that no one anticipated that everyone but you has. Everyone does not have this feature yet. Freaking out over it will only cause you pain.

This type of hysteria can derail a development effort. It results in a lot of time and money going into an early feature that no one is ready to deal with yet. Not you and not your customers. The trade off is almost always dropping something that your customers really do need for something that is new. Listening to competitor’s press releases can be dangerous to your product health.

I want to stress again that no one does these things on purpose. Pride and fear are at the root of these untruths. They are powerful emotions. When the emotions are genuine they can make nothing seem like something. It can even be hard to ask questions about the validity of untruths. The people uttering them believe them and will feel like they are being attacked if you question their perceptions.

If you suspect an untruth here’s a tip: ask for time to look into it. Don’t make a decision right away. Ask sales or marketing to generate a revenue estimate for the new feature or a competitive analysis so that you “can be prepared for launch.” Ask the technical team for a revised project plan so that you can better plan your launch. Let them discover their own untruth and they will be less likely to react emotionally.

Whatever it takes, don’t let the untruth guide you.

Building Castles in the Clouds

2010-05-17T11:09:00.009-04:00

Despite my best intentions, I keep having conversations about cloud computing. This probably means it's almost in the mainstream. As both of my faithful readers know, I've been a bit critical of cloud computing. Not so much the idea of cloud computing itself. It's more about everyone piling onto the concept even where it is inappropriate. I also find the discussion of private versus public clouds mostly irrelevant. That's a business decision related to how you want to cost out IT. It has nothing to do with technology.

Having had a bit of time to think about it, here's what I think it is and isn't about. In a nutshell:

It's about running enterprise applications, wholly or in part , somewhere out in the IT infrastructure. You don't care where so long as it's somewhere appropriate. From a software perspective, it means instantiating application objects but not caring where that happens so long as it meets the needs of the object.
It's about metered usage, either as a service or in-house. Paying for only what you use is very attractive.
It's about better application resource utilization. You save money when you don't overbuy. Another way to look at it is that you align resources to how critical something in the application space is.
It's about flexibility. Being able to run application objects anywhere in the infrastructure means less dependence on certain assets. Makes for better availability and more cost savings.
Public versus private cloud arguments are only valid or relevant when talking about how you pay for IT. If it is in your best interest to convert a CAPEX to a variable expense, by all means go for the public cloud. The same is true when thinking of personnel costs. You might not have the expertise to run a private cloud so you either hire or go outside. These are classic outsourcing decisions.
Often, a cloud uses a virtualized hardware environment (storage, servers, and networks). but it doesn't have to. The virtual application space is what matters. That's why we have middleware.

The last point is key. While virtualized servers and storage provide a great environment for running a cloud, it's not necessary. It's the middleware environment that matters. For example, a lot of what we think of as cloud computing is achievable using existing Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology. J2EE environments, such as JBOSS, perform all the tasks needed to build a cloud. It handles:

Persistence
Coherency
Distribution
Synchronization
Object Caching and Reuse

J2EE allows you to instantiate objects on any physical server running the J2EE application server. It doesn't matter if that server is virtual or not. While that might be a good idea, it's not necessary to make a cloud.

One look at Google's cloud SDK tells the story. You import a library of Java objects that interact with the Google cloud and voila! Your application objects are running in their cloud. You could conceivably run some objects in their cloud and others in-house. It's not that easy of course but pretty close. Google provides all the infrastructure that you need to instantiate and manage application objects elsewhere. How they do it is unimportant.

The ultimate cloud would be virtual everything of course. That way you get maximum alignment and utilization. Virtual servers using virtualized/federated storage, with middleware that provides a virtual application space would meet the needs of a cloud nicely.

But in the end, it's the software that counts. The application is what it is really all about.

Of iPads and Hamptons

2010-04-28T11:08:00.004-04:00

Last week I was on vacation with my family in Williamsburg, Virginia. I highly recommend it if you haven't been there. We stayed at a Hampton Inn which is usually considered a budget hotel. It was a fantastic hotel. I often stay at Hampton Inns because they have everything I want and need at a great price. Big rooms, comfy beds, a decent TV with 100 channels, and a free breakfast buffet. They also have attentive and super friendly service. They always seem to be be staffed with nice and helpful people.

Hampton Inn gets my business on a regular basis for one reason – they focus on things that are important to travelers and don't bother with needless frills. A well appointed business center is more important to me than a fancy lobby that I will never sit in. By focusing on what is of real value, they keep costs low and provide a great experience.

That got me thinking about the iPad. I know it sounds weird but I think about products a lot. I love the idea of the iPad. I have doodles in my notebook from five years ago for a tablet device like it. Yet, I've found little enthusiasm for it amongst regular folk (meaning non-geeks). Even hardcore Mac people who seem to be willing to buy every little thing that Steve Jobs comes up with aren't that interested. Why?

The typical answer I get is that they don't know what it is for. Some will point to their iPhone and say “I already have one and it makes phone calls too!” or “What is it? An eBook reader? Internet device? I already have a laptop.”

The problem with the iPad is not that it can only run one application at a time. That's certainly a problem but one that Apple will eventually fix. The big problem is that it isn't solving a big problem. It doesn't focus on what is important to people. The iPhone did. Apple understood that people wanted information wherever they were. The netbook concept was also successful by providing only Internet access (pretty much) and not trying to be a full blown laptop. eBook readers such as the Kindle or Nook are addressing the needs of voracious readers. They want to be able to carry ten books on a plane and still have it fit in their carry-on bag.

The iPad, in contrast, is neither fish nor fowl. It's an Internet device but with few advantages over a laptop or netbook. It's not exactly an eBook reader. Those have special displays to making reading easier over long periods of time. Traditional displays can be tough on the eyes when reading a book (I know. I tried it). As a media player, it is rather large to haul around just to listen to tunes.

All products must pass two tests. One is the “who cares?” test. Will anyone care enough to take a look at it? Does it grab your attention in some way? The second test, a more stringent one, is the “show me the money!” test. Will someone care enough plunk down their hard earned cash to buy one?

Apple's reputation and design aesthetics will almost always pass the first test. Pretty helps. Cool gizmo features like the giant touch screen will also help to get people to at least take a look. The second test can only be passed by providing enough consumers enough value for the right price. As far as the iPad goes, I'm not hearing the love out there.

I like the idea of the iPad. A small, lightweight, device that surfs the Internet, let's me check email, read eBooks, listen to music, and watch video on a screen that is big enough for my old eyes to see. Others don't share my enthusiasm. Perhaps the iPad tries to do too much. It does seem to want to compete with other devices that most people already have. Or perhaps it is simple too much money for something that doesn't replace a laptop or even an eBook reader.

For a great many people, the value is simply not there. Apple, in trying to create a trend, may have missed the most important aspect of product development – give people what they really want at a reasonable price and nothing more. Here, the value/price ratio appears to be way off. I'm hoping I'm completely wrong since the death of the iPad could set the entire tablet computing segment back.

Or maybe Steve Jobs should needs to stay at a Hampton Inn from time to time.

Tom's Plain Language License for Mere Mortals

2010-04-16T10:05:00.006-04:00

For the past few months I've been working sporadically on a piece of software. It's not a great looking bit of code but interesting none-the-less. It's a simple document management system called Document Locker that allows you store files in a repository (so you know where they are) and wrap some metadata around them. That's not the interesting part. What's neat is that you can define relationships between documents and see which is connected to which. This approach will be most helpful when organizing multi-part documents, scientific papers, and a software project.

Finally, the day is near that I am to release it into the wild, including source code. Roughly two weeks hence, Document Locker 0.5 (the first iteration) will be made available through www.techalignment.com. Part of preparing for the release is developing a license. All software needs a license to keep it from being misused and to protect the creator. This includes open source software. It never ceases to amaze me how little people realize that open source has a license.

I looked over all the major licenses such as Apache and GPLv3. All of the open source licenses I examined had the same problem – they are a mass of legal gobbly gook. I'm used to reading contracts and license agreements (which are a kind of contract) and they were still a tough slog for me. And long? As Sarah Palin would say “You betcha!” No sane person would subject themselves to reading these documents unless driven by necessity. It's like eating bugs. You would do it if you had to but not if there was an alternative.

The reason that even open source licenses are like this is because they are written by lawyers. Lawyers, like engineers, have their own technical language. They have their own concerns and worries and they think in a certain manner. The documents reflect this. I'm not saying it's a bad thing but for a great many uses this type of language obscures more than it illuminates.

When you get down to it, a license exists to create an agreement between people about rights. As the creator, I hold all the rights. You can do certain things with my creation but only those things that I allow. If you can't understand what I'm allowing you to do, how can you be expected to uphold your end of the agreement? You can't.

So, I set out to develop my own license. I'm pretty sure that a large number of lawyers would think I'm nuts just I would if lawyers wanted to write software. My goals were:

To make obvious what I was allowing a recipient to do.
To make obvious what they can't do.
To say so in plain language that anyone could understand.
Keep it short. Life's too short for long licenses.
I wanted to make a point about licenses.

The result was Tom's Plain Language License for Mere Mortals. It is as plain language as I could get. Unfortunately there is no getting away from referencing other, big, heavy, legalese licenses. Since I have to reference the Java and Neo licenses the reader is still struck with reviewing those licenses. Too bad. Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward and just a bit irreverent. Irreverent? That helps me to achieve goal number five and make the point that software licenses, even benign ones, are so complicated, so full of legal jargon, that they are useless as the basis for a relationship.

With Tom's Plain Language License for Mere Mortals you know where you stand. If you can't understand what you are agreeing to then you shouldn't be mucking about with software. Really.

If you are interested in a preview, you can check it out at www.techalignment.com/TomsPlainLanguageLicenseforMereMortals.pdf. Twitter comments (direct message please) or email them to me if you know my email.

Programmer's Religion

2010-04-09T15:25:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about programming languages. It occurred to me that I know quite a lot of them. Though I personally prefer Java, I've also written code in C++, C, Pascal, various assembly languages, HTML (a kind of language), Javascript, XML, SQL, and a variety of others professionally. For amateur projects, I've used PHP, PERL, VB (ick!), C#, and now Python. I even took a shot a LISP once. So, I don't have a lot of religion about what I program in. They all have strengths and weaknesses, good and bad.

So it came as no surprise when a very knowledgeable technologist asserted to me that a good programmer could write code in any language. As expected, I agreed. Being a polyglot programmer myself, it certainly seemed correct. At the time it did. But maybe...

Since then I've come to believe that you can write a program in just about anything but not write code professionally in more than a few. Modern coding requires more than just understanding computer languages. With the exception of a few outliers like LISP and SmallTalk, most computer languages fall into a handful of syntax groups. Java, C++, C#, PHP, and Javascript are so similar that it's hard to imagine any experienced programmer not getting the basics.

But only the basics. The problem lies in what it takes to be a productive programmer. Understanding how to program a computer or write in some language is less than half of what you need to know to do it professionally. Enterprise applications especially are built around entire frameworks and environments.

Take Java. There are several graphics built-in libraries such as AWT and Swing. It has a rich set of general collection objects with the ability to adapt them to any type of object using simple syntax. There are lots of utility, security, reflection, multi-threading, and database connection classes. That's not even getting into Enterprise JavaBeans (the middleware/SOA framework) or servlets which are used for web programming. Keeping up requires books, training, and on-line resources. You have to focus on staying current with changes and new additions.

This is where the difference lies. There is Java the language and Java the development environment. C++ is a language but C++ in the .Net environment is what you write code in. It's very difficult to focus on being expert enough to be a productive in more than one of these complex environment. This is why you see programmers with so much religion around their languages and environments. .Net people can be passionately pro-.Net. Java people can be Java bigots.

It's a natural side effect from all the effort that goes into being expert enough at something to do a good job with it. It's not that one environment is better or worse – all have their strengths and weaknesses. The demands of being productive in any particular environment require that you focus all of your attention on being good at one thing. You can switch languages and environments but it's like switching religion. It can be done but it's a process that will take time, effort, and will.

So, I take back what I've said in the past. A good programmer needs to have religion. Not religion in the sense of unquestioning zealotry. Religion as in a deep devotion to their craft and a singular focus on what they are doing.

Monkeys Flinging Poo

2010-03-22T14:43:00.010-04:00

As anyone who reads this blog (thanks to both of you) knows, I've taken up writing code again. It's a hobby to keep me busy while I look for my next great adventure. The act of writing code is an act of creation. You make something. Software is especially satisfying since, in a sense, you make something out of nothing. Feels kind of god-like in that way. You start with with nothing, say “let there be applications”, and it comes into being. I'll grant you, it's not as easy as that but neither was creation. The big band, stellar and planetary formation, and evolution all took energy.

At the same time, I've been watching various members of the software industry throw patent lawsuits at each other. It's a bit like watching monkeys in the zoo fling poo at each other. Mildly amusing until some of the poo escapes the confines of the cage and hits a spectator. All of a sudden, it's not so funny. Well, it is kind of funny but not for the one who gets hit with the poo.

All of this legal poo flinging just doesn't feel right to most people. Yes, we want our creations protected. If someone tries to steal my work, I would become an angry god and want to throw thunderbolts (and poo probably). On the other hand, what is being patented is ephemeral. There is still a lot of rancor over Amazon's One-Click patent. The idea of patenting the idea of a single click purchase seems absurd to most people. A lot of software patents are that absurd. The upshot for the software company is that they are expected to protect important assets but their own customers think they are greedy hatemongers when they do.

Worse of all is that customers get caught in the crossfire. They worry that they will lose their investment through no fault of their own. Will they have to change what is working for them in the future because of some crazy corporate rock throwing? In essence, they are afraid of being the spectator that gets hit when the monkeys go at each other.

Lawsuits are not good for companies either. In technology-based industries, even when you can claim victory in a lawsuit, it's almost always a Pyrrhic one. You don't so much win as lose less. Take Apple for instance. They are suing HTC for making a smartphone whose software, they feel, violates patents associated with the iPhone. It doesn't matter if, as a matter of law, they are right or wrong. The damage to their image is already done. Instead of appearing to be a technology company that wants to transform the world (“Think Different!”), they are revealed to be a company like any other - more concerned with money than with customers. Win or lose, they have already lost something. What did the Sun and NetApp lawsuits do besides make both look venial?

At the heart of the problem is the nature of software. It doesn't follow the same rules as other things that are awarded patents and copyrights. Software is not physical. You cannot hold it in your hand. Holding the a CD or DVD is not the same. It's like holding an empty glass and claiming your are really holding the air. A physicist might agree but everyone else will think you're being silly.

Software is not literature as much as we like to think of it as art. Digital music is still music and an ebook is still a book. Software is neither of these. It is a thing unto itself that follows it's own rules. Code is more than mere instructions but less than art.

Software represents a new type of intellectual property. We need to recognize that. Copyright law doesn't adequately protect the software creator which is why End User License Agreements stuffed into a PC game box read like the US Constitution. With the amendments and commentary. Patents don't work since there is no physical manifestation and software is hopelessly vague to define under patent law. Just read a couple of software patents and you will find yourself saying things like “ Well Duh!” and “We've been doing that for 20 years now!”

IP law, especially in the US, has struggled for two generations with software. How do we protect our creations when they are unlike any other creations? How do we set up rules that people can easily follow? Patent and Copyright wars are counter productive. We need guideposts that avoid these conflicts.

I propose a hybrid of copyrights and patents. Patent law gives a short term monopoly to someone who devises something unique. That uniqueness is the code base. For the software industry to keep moving apace, it needs to be a really short term. A year or so, not seven or ten. That's just enough to give a company a head start.

After that, it should be protected more like a copyrighted material. People shouldn't be able to just copy and distribute your product without permission. They can come up with something of their own but not take your product as their own. That forces them to invest something in their take on what you did. But not until you have time to grab a little market share.

I'll let the lawyers work out the details. They're good at that.

Like the aforementioned monkeys, the patent lawsuit winner is the one with less poo on them. They still end up with poo on them though. And no one wants to hang around and watch for fear of getting poo on themselves. In the end, you find yourself alone and covered in poo. Not the way to go.

Tiers of a Clown

2010-03-02T09:37:00.011-05:00

I've been following the debate about automated storage tiering with amused interest. The various marketing operatives of data storage companies (and a few C-Level folks to boot) are all lining up into one of two camps – tiering is necessary or tiering is unnecessary. There has been dueling animations (very clever) from The Storage Anarchist and 3Par's Marc Farley as well as commentary from a host of industry bigwigs. I love the animations but then again, I always loved cartoons.

Automated storage tiering or automated tiered storage (or data lifecycle management, or whatever else it used to be described as) is using different types of physical storage for different classes of data mostly to save money and maintain performance. The promise of storage tiering is that you can move less important, unchanging, or less frequently accessed data to cheaper slower, storage. You can keep the most important, frequently changing, and most accessed data in a really expensive array that combines high performance with heavy duty data protection features. For data that you don't need quite so often and doesn't change, you can move it to something slower and not as rigorous. And so on until you finally archive it to an archive system or deletion. This has been the bread and butter of folks like Compellent and has been picked up by most of the bigger storage companies since. The ultimate goal is high levels of efficiency in your data storage systems. The more important the data is the more resources it can consume. Less important data consumes fewer resources and balance in the universe is maintained.

A great example of where one might use tiered storage is with a check image. For a short while a check image has to be available to online customers and tellers immediately. Then it has to be stored for seven years and only moderately available. Then it is deleted. Chances are good that after 90 days you won't care to see the actual image so moving it to slower storage is not much of a burden but it saves money.

Three things about tiered storage that are important to consider. These considerations are what fuel the debate. First, automating it is tough. You have to get the software right or you lose data and have diminished efficiency. The second consideration is the ever dropping cost of storage. As data storage continues to become even more stupid cheap, it raises the question of whether you need to be all that efficient in the first place. If a high performance array is inexpensive then everything can have high performance storage without moving data around to a bunch of arrays. Finally, it's hard to decide what data belongs on what resource. Do I base it on age? Class of data? How do I decide what data is what class? These are not technical problems. They are business problems which are much harder to overcome. Wrangling with your organization is hard work. You have to put a lot of effort into deciding what goes where and hope that your vendor supports your criteria.

To me, the problem of storage tiering is that it is a good idea that can be tough to execute. It's like the old joke about teenage sex – everyone talks about it, no one really does it, those that do it don't do it well. I'm sure that lots of folks will say that they have products that allow folks to do this well. However, technology doesn't solve the organizational problem which makes it hard for folks to want to implement it. That doesn't effect the bread and butter customers that top tier storage companies (sorry – couldn't resist) who tend to be huge companies. They have the business process resources to pull it off. It might explain why automated storage tiering is not generating a huge following in mid-sized and smaller companies. They have other things to do with their limited resources then try and squeeze a bit more efficiency out of their storage system. The ROI for them is simply not big enough. Heck, many are still struggling with the blocking and tackling of doing backups and security.

So, where do I weigh in on this debate. I agree with both sides. If that sounds a bit weasel-like then sorry. For some companies there are mission critical applications that would benefit from an automated tiered storage system. For others, it's hard see how there would be benefit enough to warrant the time and effort. For me, the debate is a non-debate. It's not about whether automated storage tiers is beneficial or not. What matters is whether it's beneficial to you. If you think in terms of customers, instead of products and technology, it becomes clear. What applications do you have that need this approach? Does your organization need it at all? Can you decelerate the pace of your storage buying enough to justify the costs and time involved in implementing this? Will you be able to decide what data should go where and when?

In the end, it's a feature like all other features. If it has value for you then it's a winner. If it doesn't then find something that does. But watch the debate. It's quite entertaining.

HP and Cisco Square Off

2010-02-20T10:19:00.006-05:00

I love a good dust up in the computer industry. The latest WWF style bout comes to us courtesy of HP and Cisco. In one corner of the ring is Cisco who won't be renewing a system integrator contract with HP. In the other corner is HP who plans to bail from the Cisco Certified Channel and Global Service Alliance Partner programs.

Two giants of the industry beating on each other is so much better than David and Goliath match ups. Those make us feel sorry for the little guy and angry at the mean old big company beating down on the poor entrepreneur who's just trying to make the world a better place.

These bare knuckle brawls are both good and bad for the industry. First, it brings to light the farcical nature of big company alliances. Let's face it, they are marriages of convenience. These folks really want to be on top and there can only be one top dog. It's good that they occasionally remind us not to get too vested in them.

Competition is also good. It drives down prices and ratchets up innovation. When things get too cozy, the industry tends to stagnate. We need another round of wow! inducing products at woo hoo! low prices about now.

It is bad though for those caught in the wake of these two battleships as they try to sink each other. In this case, the indirect channel partners of both companies could become collateral damage. It may well become more difficult to integrate products from both companies and channel partner customers are not likely to want to pay extra for that added effort. It's not their problem that HP and Cisco went from lovers to bitter rivals practically overnight. There will be costs that someone has to absorb and the channel looks like the dry sponge here. Hopefully a hardware price war will ensue that give a little more margin to channel service providers.

This move is just one act in an ongoing drama in the computer industry. Over the past ten years we have seen the growth of the full service, full product line computer company. There are now only half a dozen (if that) companies that sell solutions to customers and they want to sell whole solutions. Servers, networking, storage, software, the whole system plus services. This is what is behind the Cisco Unified Computing initiative and HP's acquisition strategy. Everyone is trying to be IBM. Even software companies are getting into the act. Just look at Oracle and their purchase of Sun and other investments in hardware. It will get harder and harder for independent hardware companies to continue to exist unless they are making OEM equipment for one of the big, full service companies. A few will survive to provide niche products whose revenue stream is too small for the big guns to care about. A few others will get by on overservicing specialty markets. It's like grocery shopping. Most everyone buys from a big supermarket. Sure, you occasionally go out to the specialty market or “all local foods” shop but that's not for everyday purchases.

Next up: Exclusive channel partner programs. Want to sell our stuff? Then you can't sell anyone else's stuff. It's been done in the past and will likely happen again.

Into the Matrix with Neo

2010-02-17T16:25:00.007-05:00

Everyone needs a hobby. Lately, mine happens to be writing code. I used to be a software engineer so I used to code for a living. Over time two things happened. One, it ceased to be fun (that's why we call it work folks) and two I didn't need to do it anymore. As my career transitioned into management and then executive management, I rarely got my fingernails dirty with real coding projects.

What's good about that is that coding could become fun again. So a couple of months ago I decided to start on a new coding project. I had two goals – learn some new technology and do something at least marginally useful. That has led to my latest project, a document management system built on the idea of relationships between documents.

Most document management centers around classifying documents in some fashion. Whether you use a hierarchical category system or free form tagging schema, it's about putting documents in buckets. I wanted to add something else to the mix. Documents rarely stand on their own. They exist in relationship to other documents. Think social networking for your files.

Unlike people, documents don't know other documents nor do they care if another document is having lunch at Spot Coffee. Documents do belong to an ecosystem just like we humans do. They refer to other documents and are part of larger documents and collections of documents. They have their own relationships.

To model these relationships in more traditional databases is difficult. Using an SQL RDBMS you end up with a lot of cross reference tables and lots of Joins. It's not what SQL or relational databases were designed for. Instead, I decided to use a graphing database called Neo. Graphing databases organize data as a series of nodes connected by explicit relationships. This allows you to build applications that focus on finding like objects. For example, what documents are referenced by this one? Or, which are the child documents to this one? These questions are more easily answered by graphing database.

To date, Graphing databases are primarily used for social networking applications. That makes sense since managing data by relationships sits at the core of social networking. Graphing databases have a lot of other potential uses. They would be great for modeling workflows, simulations, and building ontologies, all hot areas of software.

Neo has a few warts. It's still only a release candidate so things are still changing. The recent most version, bringing Neo out of Beta and to an RC, changed the names of several basic objects. That forced me to go back and recode certain key sections of the application. The online documentation is good at documenting the API but light on how to make things work right. Figuring out the transaction model, even though it's pretty simple, required digging into the class level documentations and a bit of trial and error. Might be a book in there. Hmmm...

In the end, I won't have a commercial grade application. My GUI design skills are too poor to make it look and behave the way I want it to. However, once my pet project is done, the application will at least be useful. I will have learned something interesting and it will have been fun. What more can one want out of a hobby.

Nice. Not Thrilling But Nice.

2010-01-27T14:39:00.006-05:00

I'm a bit puzzled by the recent Cisco-NetApp-VMWare announcement. Besides wondering how VMWare was even allowed to sleep with EMC's enemy, its focus on multi-tenancy security has me a a bit confused. Not confused in the “what the heck are they talking about” way. More of the “So what do they have to do with it anyway” manner.

Multi-tenancy is the sharing of an application amongst different users who, if they had their way, would much rather not share the same air . I saw this in the IP management software and call center outsourcing businesses. In both cases, customers needed to be assured that their incredibly valuable and secret data could never be viewed by someone else. For the outsourced software services provider, such as Salesforce.com, this is a a pain in the neck. An understandable one but a pain none-the-less. To get the economies of scale outsourcers need to be profitable, it is best if you don't have to repeat yourself too much. Multiple instances of the same applications require more hardware, more software licenses, and more maintenance. In other words, more costs.

In most cases, if an application is designed correctly you can use a (logically) single application and database for everyone. That's the crux of the matter – if it's designed right. Bugs happen and there is the potential for data to be exposed to the wrong people. This is a rare occurrence but people worry about it anyway. Customers should worry about backup processes more since there is much more risk there. It's like worrying about getting hit by a meteor. It can happen but almost never does. Meanwhile, you don't worry about getting in your car and driving on the highway. Guess which one is more likely to get you killed.

This intense customer worry drives many outsourced service providers to either give almost no guarantees about security of data or physically segregate data on different servers running separate instances of the application. Virtualization helps a lot in that you can run reasonably secure instances of applications on the same hardware with little chance of bleed over. Everyone gets their own application space but not their own physical box which cuts down on hardware costs. It still doesn't solve the major problem - the need to reduce the number of instances of databases and applications. Repeating software is expensive and still a problem.

This brings me back to the “Huh?” look on my face. While it's nice to see Cisco, NetApp and VMWare working together to support a secure virtual environment, it doesn't solve the main problem of multi-tenancy. You can already virtualize the heck out of your environment to save on hardware costs. Great, but that's not what the people in multi-tenancy environments really need. They need to run one instance of their database and one instance of their application and be sure that any one customer can't see another's data. One application that can act like a dozen applications. They need virtualized applications.

These applications exist. I've designed and marketed a couple myself. The problem is that customers don't believe it. They feel that if data is in one place or accessed from the same application, then it is a hazardous environment. That's not true of course. Your bank is able to keep your records secure from other users even when accessed online. These applications can be built now. Virtualized hardware resources don't really impact that.

What the new triumvirate (or Axis of Evil depending on who you talk to) is developing is great stuff for hardware service providers wanting to sell virtual resources. It's good for IT departments looking to save on hardware costs through high utilization. It really doesn't solve the multi-tenancy problem any more than VMWare, NetApp, or Cisco products do alone. It's fundamentally an application software problem that needs to be solved by application software vendors. Multi-tenancy problems need to be solved by Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

Now that would be a mind blowing announcement.

Why All The Suits

2010-01-15T12:10:00.008-05:00

Looks like we have another patent infringement suit in the technology arena. The latest involves Kodak versus Apple and RIM. While I'm sure there are some interesting aspects to this (such as how Kodak has already prevailed against other smart phone manufacturers in similar suits) it is just one of many that have been launched over the past few years.

This started me thinking. In my (relative) youth, one hardly heard of patent infringement or any other type of intellectual property (IP) suits amongst computer tech companies. When it did occur, what stood out was how damaging they were to the companies that initiated them. The Crossroads suits against a number of Fibre Channel bridge manufacturers in the 90's sticks out in mind as an example. In the end, lots of damage but little reward.

So what's changed? Three things I think:

Computer and consumer technology have merged. What is a smart phone if not a hand held computer?
We are in the midst of a recession that is depressing R&D budgets. That makes it hard to create new technology.
The computer and electronics technology industries have grown up. What used to fit in a garage now fills many office parks worth of buildings worldwide.

These factors amount to a perfect storm from an IP point of view. Without the ability to generate significantly new technology, the value of existing technology becomes high enough that litigation is worth it. Also computer technology and electronics companies are running smack dab into the consumer electronics market. The rules are different in this arena. The collegial, cross-licensing culture of the computer industry does not exist here. Consumer business are based on smaller margins and control of markets. There is no “a rising tide lifts all boats” attitude here. It's more of a “my battleship will sink your battleship” mentality. IP is an effective weapon in maintaining these margins and markets.

Finally, the computer industry has grown up. Businesses that started in a garage are now the homes of captains of industry. They are no different from the steel or auto industries of bygone eras. They have shareholders who do not understand the gentlemen agreements that were typical in the industry. Collaborations that could be sealed with a handshake in the past now require lawyers, accountants, and 50 page agreements. A mature and aggressive IP policy comes with the territory. If you want to be a billion dollar business you have to act like one.

These factors practically insure that we will see more IP related suits. More patent infringement suits, more copyright infringement suits, more trademark infringement suits, and lots of IP problems with non-disclosure agreements and partnerships.

This situation brings to mind the great line that Sir Lawrence Olivier speaks in the movie Spartacus. He says “the problem with being a patrician is that sometimes you have to act like one.” This same problem exists for big companies, even computer technology ones. Sometimes you have to act like a big company and IP related lawsuits are part of the big company game.

Sometimes It's Just Stuff

2010-01-14T14:52:00.005-05:00

Guys like me and people who read this blog are the types of people who love our technology. Gee whiz gadgets, computers, software, and phones that shop for you are what get us out of bed in the morning. Every once in awhile though we are faced with the fact that all this technology is just stuff. Tools to good things with for sure but not people. Not what matters.

The earthquake in Haiti has killed an incredible amount of people. Parents and children. Brothers and sisters. Whole families and people who never had anyone to mourn them. It is a stark reminder of what matters. What really matters.

Doctors Without Borders is putting together a mission to help the poor souls who are still alive. They are sorely needed. Not only are there more injured people than anyone can reasonably count, most of the hospitals have been destroyed. These folks do the brave thing that most of us cannot - go there to help in a real way.

They are asking bloggers to post a link to raise awareness. Unfortunately, they do need stuff. Stuff like medicine, sutures and, horribly, body bags. They need cash folks. So do what you can.

Maybe this is a time to delay that phone upgrade you've been wanting or hold off on that new gadget. It's time to stop thinking about our stuff and instead think about giving these brave doctors the stuff they need to carry out their mission of mercy.

Think about it.

What's On My Mind

2010-01-11T13:52:00.007-05:00

A little career downtime can sometimes be a good thing. Whether your sabbatical is planned or, as in my case unexpected, it represents a rare opportunity to delve into new areas of interest. Academics and clergy do this regularly as a way of expanding their skills, working on projects that they can never get to, or simply as a way of recharging their psychological batteries. This is not an extended vacation or time to simply relax. Career downtime has to be used to expand your horizons.

Consistent with my beliefs about downtime, I've been using my current “sabbatical” to embark on areas of discovery that I previously hadn't time for. As my Twitter followers know, some of my time was used to explore the biotech industry. On the more geeky side I've been going back to my software roots to look at things that have fascinated me for a long time. Namely, how to manage unusual or difficult data stores in different ways.

More precisely I've been looking into:

Managing large unstructured data sets, a constant problem in certain industries;
Applications driven by relationships between entities more than their structure and;
How to make smaller applications by embedding data management into them.

This journey of discovery has led me to a number of software technologies that I find very interesting. Let me share with you what's on my mind these days.

Managing Metadata

One of the major bugaboos of the last decade or so has been dealing with the explosion of unstructured data. The simple solution is to wrap metadata around the real data. This descriptive information adds the machine manipulable context that unstructured information lacks. However, managing the metadata itself has become a big problem. Individual metadata is generally small and many data management tools, such as relational databases, are overkill. Implementing a full blown SQL database to manage metadata is like hunting deer with a tank. Expensive and more than you need to get the job done.

XML has helped but managing XML text files is difficult when there is a lot of them. You might need to open and close lots of small files constantly, straining a lot of file systems. The other option is to process one giant XML file which can be processor intensive and slow. Worse yet, these are decisions you have to live with and are hard to change once an application is underway. XML is not ideal for dealing with relationships between entities either.

Social Media Does Change Everything

Okay, I don't believe social media changes everything. What it does do is address the fact that humans are social creatures. We view the world as a series of relationships. Relationships between ourselves and the world around us, between each other, and between everything that makes up the world. The natural schema for a human is relationship based.

Computers don't always reflect that. They tend to be concerned with structures more than the quality of a relationship. This is one of the problems with SQL. It is damn hard to code reciprocal relationships, the strength of a relationship, and the ways entities may be interact. A good DBA can tell you how to do it but it gets complicated quickly especially when modeling real human type relationships.

Small Applications That Can Grow

Enterprise applications have gotten huge. Worse yet, they require boat loads of infrastructure. This is why enterprise applications developers always talk in stacks. LAMP stack, WAMP stack, .Net stack. Developers can declare that their apps aren't really as big as they are because they assume that a stack is in place.

There are a lot of negatives to relying on these stacks. For one, you are at the mercy of whoever is designing the pieces of the stack. Applications also use different versions of the programs that make up these stacks, leading to compatibility problems. Not to mention finding an application that you love on a stack you don't support.

The biggest problem with stack-based enterprise applications is that they are not compact and simple. They don't port to small systems and devices easily. Try implementing a single user version of most enterprise apps. Who is going to install and maintain an Apache web server for one or two people? Cloud businesses like this since they provide an alternative but not all applications lend themselves to the cloud.

What Am I Looking At?

In thinking about these issue, I have come across technologies that address some or all of these problems. I especially like embedded data management tools. I especially like Derby and SQLite, Lucene, and Neo. Derby and SQLite are open source or public domain RDBMS' that allow developers to embed a SQL database in an application. Derby has a server version as well, allowing applications to be small and compact or to scale up to large enterprise size. Derby is from the Apache Foundation and Java-based. This allows it to nicely integrate with Java applications and object mapping frameworks like Hibernate. SQLite is C++ based making it excellent for embedded applications and is extensively used by the Mozilla Foundation. Being a Java geek, I'm planing on spending more time with Derby.

Another Apache project, Lucene, embeds a search engine in an application. With Lucene, a developer is able to manage large amounts of unstructured text using methods familiar to everyone. Lucene also works well with other types of data management tools to add search functionality to all kinds kinds of data.

One the other technologies that Lucene works well with is Neo. Neo is a graphing or network database (there is debate as to what the difference is between the two). Graphing databases view data a bit differently than an RDBM. Data is stored as key-value pairs called properties in an interconnected network of nodes. Finding data is through it's relationships with other nodes. With Neo, information is stored and retrieved in a way that humans organize information, by it's relationship to other data. This fits in well when modeling people or other entities that rely on interactions with others. Some examples are biological ontologies, proteins, and documents. At the moment I'm experimenting with Neo and Document and Content Management.

While there are a lot of things that stink about career downtime, if used effectively it can be a transformative experience. Discovery of this type almost always leads to something good. If nothing else, it helps us to grow as professionals and people. It's also better than sitting around watching television.

Blessed Be The Makers

2010-01-07T14:17:00.003-05:00

The current recession is a tough one for sure. Not only is it the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression but the supposed recovery is looking to be a jobless one. In past recessions, lots of talented people were let loose on the marketplace with a few bucks of severance or buy out money in their pockets. Many of these creative people ran out and started companies. Others went and joined these new companies, which they would not have done in better times. Some of today's bellwether technology companies grew up in the midst of recession.

This is unlikely to happen this time around. With money so tight, funding a new business is a bigger challenge than it has been in the past. From banks to Venture Capitalists, the money is just not there and the requirements for funding are more stringent than ever before. The upshot of the lack of investment funding is that companies will need to fend for themselves much longer than they did in the past and not everyone has the stomach for that. Going without meaningful income while working like mad is hard to do. When you think you will do it for years, it can be downright disheartening.

There is a bright spot however. Bubbling up from the underground is a grassroots movement of people who like to build homegrown technology. Called Makers (and the related movement, Crafters), this is a DIY movement that celebrates homemade tech. Makers create electronic doo-dads from open source hardware like Arduino boards. They build funky mechanical devices. They blow stuff up and put it back together.

In my youth the computer industry was like this. Back in the day we were called Hackers until the term was co-opted by the bad guys. Many of these same hackers created software and hardware companies that still endure.

Like the Hackers before them, Makers do what they do for the sheer joy of it. They create devices to do interesting and sometimes silly things. Whereas launching a Christmas tree with rockets is kind of silly (and dangerous), other projects have real usefulness. For example, a cheap strobe algae bioreactor is serious stuff for biotech and alternative energy.

Makers know how to build product on a shoestring and have no wish for the pretensions of glitzy high tech companies. Instead, technology is reason enough itself. The simple fun of making something is what drives Makers.

Makers are also forming collectives to share resources and lab space. It is not hard to imagine these collectives turning into companies some day. Take a group of smart techie folks used to working with little money and stick them in one place. Before long you are bound to have a “Hey! I got an idea how we can make a few bucks” moment. There is some spill over into the software world too. Call it a resurgence of the old values. Groups of people with skills who are under or unemployed, writing code for giggles until one day – BAM! - the great idea emerges.

And these folks will have little use for the bankers who spurned them and cause so much economic misery. They will remember that they had to work at Best Buy because a bunch of greedy money people screwed things up. About the only people they will listen to will be the Angel investors because they've built something themselves. The Makers will drive hard bargains when they do take money since this is a labor of love not simply business. They will once again be an engine of growth in the technology market. Watch for it. It's already starting.

Blessed be the Makers for they will raise us out of the depths.

And We Like Sheep

2009-12-16T10:51:00.004-05:00

Back in the early 1990's I had the opportunity to see management guru Tom Peters several times. At one presentation, he talked about Saturn Motors and how they had discovered that a lot of cars are bought by women. He went on to say that they had devised a brilliant marketing and sales strategy for selling to women - “don't insult them!”

I was thinking about what Mr. Peters said while reading the defamation complaint that ZL Technologies has filed against analyst firm Gartner and analyst Carolyn DiCenzo. Several folks have already written summary and analysis about this suit, one of the better ones coming from Dave Kellogg of Mark Logic.

There are a lot of obvious problems with this suit. The claims of superior product by ZL are, to some degree, subjective. No one truly believes the metrics they get from vendors or the people vendors pay to report on them. The complaints about Gartner not wanting to reveal how it calculates its Magic Quadrant are also quite silly. Why would Gartner reveal its most treasured trade secrets to anybody?

What stands out for me is the assertion that the Magic Quadrant is so influential that it can seriously damage a product and company. That's absurd. To suggest that IT managers follow Gartner like sheep is insulting. And as Tom Peters reminds us, insulting customers is a terrible marketing strategy.

No responsible IT organization makes a decision regarding something as crucial as email archiving by relying on a Gartner report. Even assuming that you bother to pay for Gartner's services, it is but one data point in many and rarely the make or break one. Instead, most IT organizations, large and small, will develop matrices based on performance, price, features, service options, TCO, reliability, and a host of metrics important to the organization.

Being called a Niche player in the Magic Quadrant is unlikely to knock you out. Not having an extensive service network might. No one wants to find out that the field technicians can't get there when the system is down before the audit. Not having local sales people might push you to the bottom of the list. Companies don't want to wait on your next trip out to see the demo. For many customers, questions about your long term viability as a business are more likely to influence their decision than Gartner is.

No offense to Gartner but to suggest the level of influence that ZL claims they have is outright silly.

Part of the suit calls out Gartner's own claims of influence. That is also insulting. Doesn't ZL know that IT managers can separate marketing hype from real value? If they don't, then that might be a bigger part of their problem than Gartner's Magic Quadrant.

Shakespeare said it well in “ Julius Caesar”. Cassius tells Brutus that “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.” Sage advice from the Bard. If you are not so successful as you would like, don't blame the analysts. Don't blame your competitors. Certainly don't blame your customers for being stupid. Look to yourself and see what you could do differently.

And stop insulting your potential customers and find out why they are really not buying your products. Then you might be able to fix your problems rather than just whine about them.

Mozilla Thunders Ahead

2009-12-01T16:48:00.012-05:00

Warning: This is long. I'm in a gabby mood. But when you write about something so basic to everyday life as email, it's easy to get a bit verbose. As my friends will tell, I find it easier than most...

One of the problems with modern software applications is that they tend to be incredibly feature laden. That's a problem you say? Yes it is. Feature overload leads to a great many features never being used because you don't know what to do with them, don't know they exist, or are only useful to about 5% of the target market. Mozilla seems to have avoided that trap with the latest release of it's fabulous email client, Thunderbird. Most features are infinitely useful to a great many people.

At first blush, things don't appear to have changed much. For the most part, Thunderbird looks and acts pretty much the same. For an email program, thats a good thing. Productivity applications that you use all the time should not have major interface changes. No one wants to spend a week learning how to do something that was fine before. Just ask the legions of people who positively hate the Office 2007 interface. It doesn't matter if it's better. It is radically different enough to get in the way of getting the job done.

Instead, useful features should be added that enhance the usual experience. This exactly what Mozilla has done in all releases of Thunderbird. No jarring, radical changes to the user interface. Just enhancements that make things work a little bit better. Many of the UI changes are immediately recognizable since they are adapted from either Firefox or web-based email sites like Gmail. With email clients, usual and recognizable is what you want.

The GUI Got Better

For example, Thunderbird now supports tabs. A simple thing, putting tabs across the top, but really useful. Your calendar (assuming you have the Lightening extension, which of course you do because it only makes good sense) and tasks can live in their own tabs making navigation to them simple. Messages can also be opened in tabs allowing you to have multiple emails open in a neat space. No more having a dozen windows spewed all over your desktop. Everything is nice and neat.

In typical Mozilla fashion, you can turn off tabs and use Thunderbird in the old fashion way. This is important since it doesn't force a change in behavior. Users can choose to continue working the way the always have or easy in slowly. This is not a trivial matter when training budgets are under constant pressure. The ability to expose features slowly or only to power users is a great help.

Another useful GUI enhancement is the action buttons on the email itself. In the past (and in most email programs) when viewing email from the message pane, actions on an email such as Reply or Delete are initiated from a toolbar on the top of the window. While you can still do this in Thunderbird 3, you also have the most common action buttons right on the email message pane itself. This allows you to quickly review, read, and take action without your mouse flailing about like its rodent namesake stuck in a trap. You can choose a more minimalist toolbar at the top or keep the old one and the message pane buttons. It's the best of both worlds.

Organize, Search, See

The new T-Bird goes all out to bring better ways to find and view emails and RSS feeds. My favorite new feature is the summary list. If you select a group of email or RSS messages, a search engine type list is displayed in the message pane. It shows you the title and a snippet from the beginning of the message for each message selected. This gives you a Google-like view which helps you to skim through a big batch of messages.

This also works with the new global search capabilities. Searching for emails in earlier versions was a decidedly local affair. You could search through a folder from the search bar but had to go into the advanced search for anything else. Thunderbird now sports a global search bar similar to the Firefox one, including auto complete. It helps to search through the gobs of emails that pack rats like me accumulate. You can apply filters of various sorts after the fact, narrowing your results in much the way as a you would with an Internet search engine. This is a very powerful feature.

In Thunderbird 2, Mozilla introduced tags but they typically were underutilized. Most people still moved messages to complex folder structures. Tags allowed for better organization since you could dump messages into one folder and perform multi dimensional searches on them. I create virtual folders of saved search results that allow me to find messages based on a number of tags. Mozilla kicks it up a notch in this release by making it obvious what you are supposed to do. They have added an Archive button and matching folder. Now, when you want to save a message, you hit archive and it puts it in a folder based on the year. Combined with tags and the new search, looking through dozens of layers of folders is instantly as old fashioned as a rotary phone.

It's Like Having A Big Brother To Look Up To

A lot of great ideas besides tabs and search features have migrated over from Firefox. My two favorites are Weave and Personas. Weave synchronizes information between different instances of Firefox and now Thunderbird. If you have multiple computers, say a desktop and a netbook (or are like me and have more than two) this is a valuable feature indeed. Though there have been a number extensions that do this sort of thing, it is much better as a Mozilla project that gets updated regularly. I wasn't able to get it to work in Thunderbird 3 RC1 but if it works like it does in Firefox, I can't wait. My hope is that some day it becomes a core feature and not an extension.

Personas is also a neat feature from Firefox. It provides a way of skinning the GUI without going all out and writing XML and designing buttons. Pretty much anyone with the ability to create a JPEG can do this. Personas are kept in an online repository making it easy to share and change them. I think this signals the death knell for themes. Personas are more lightweight and portable. And now my browser and email can look the same. Sweeeeet!

Changes Under the Hood

There are also a number of changes to the core code. Like with the Firefox 3.0 upgrade, the memory footprint for Thunderbird has shrunk a bit. This is very good when you are dealing with a low memory devices like a netbook or an old PC. Or an old PC used as a netbook...

A lot of effort also went into IMAP improvements. For many Thunderbird users, that's not that important since they get their email from a POP server. More and more ISPs, however, are moving toward IMAP because it allows for better synchronization amongst different email clients on different machines. Gmail has an IMAP option and AOL requires it. It is also the best way (at the moment) for Thunderbird to interact with an Exchange server.

One somewhat geeky new feature that I'm not sure I like is the Activity Manager. It keeps a log of all the things you did on Thunderbird. On the one hand I can see it's potential for debugging and answering the question “Oh no! Did I delete that email? The one with the time for my job interview?” On the other hand, there is also the potential for eDiscovery problems since it can explicitly tell you that someone suddenly nuked 25 emails when there was a preservation order. Sometimes metadata and logging are not wanted.

And Yet All Is Not Perfect

There are a number of strange, ugly, and just plain wrong things about this new release. Hey! Nobody is perfect and Mozilla proves that in spades. First, the elephant in the room – no Microsoft Exchange support. I get that Mozilla and Microsoft don't get along. I also get that Mozilla may think they are not that interested in the big, bad corporate market (though I don't believe that for a second). But Exchange is so ubiquitous that you have to wonder why, after all this time, there is no support for it. Heck, my ISP offers it for five bucks a month! If Microsoft is the problem then they should remember that the real enemies are Google and Oracle and get over it. If Mozilla is the problem then they need to remember that email is serious business and get over it. In any event, when anyone puts together a list of why Thunderbird is not a real email contender, Exchange support is at the top of the list. They need to add it just to shut those people up.

Oddities abound, especially in the GUI. Some are inconsistencies that had to have come up during testing. For example, there is now an Outbox. Unsent emails used to sit in the Drafts folder. Perhaps this is another way to support offline work but it needlessly confuses the process of sending emails.

And why when you compose an email does it still open in a separate window? Other email messages open in a tab. Same goes for the address book. Inconsistencies like that confuse regular users and annoy the power users. Maybe that gets fixed in a later release.

Speaking of unusual behavior, why does the reply button on the message pane have a little selection arrow but only one selection, yet the reply all has one that shows reply all and reply? A bit redundant isn't it? What I do like is that the reply all button only shows up when there is more than one person to reply to. Nice touch.

Finally, whereas the search features are so much better than before, the page that is generated to show them is ugly as sin. We are talking about a page that looks like an amateur web site from 1994. Lots of functionality but no aesthetics.

Thunderbird 3 is still a release candidate but is really close to production grade. The GUI enhancements and search features make it a worthwhile upgrade. There are still a few unusual issues but those might be ironed out over time or someone will come up with extensions to deal with them. The enhancements are great and the complaints small. My kind of software!

Disclaimer: Like everyone else, I get Thunderbird for free. So while technically not a paid endorsement, it's best to mention it anyway. I don't want the FCC giving me grief. And it give me an excuse to be silly.

Take Your Hands Off My Hard Drive You Damn Filthy Ape!

2009-11-23T13:12:00.005-05:00

If this is the future of computing, then I want out now.

Not something that I would typically say is it? I've had just about enough of the run to the cloud. The latest shove out the door is the announcement of Google Chrome OS. The name says it all. The entire OS will act like – basically be – a browser. No local applications. No local storage. While I'm confident that they will figure out how to cache data when you are disconnected (they do it now with Google Gears) it will still be completely dependent on the on-line applications and storage.

Am I the only one who gets what's wrong with this. Let's start with complete dependence on a service provider. We finally can choose broadband services from the cable people or the phone people or the cell phone people. Yet now we are supposed to become drones to Google. What happens if I don't like Google applications or have a problem with them holding on to my data? It's not like moving the data will be easy, if even possible.

And how comfortable are you with Google having sensitive data like a trade secret or the name of your doctor. That's what we are talking about here. Handing your personal or critical data to another company. Are we all confident that they are up to the task.

Can we talk availability? How many times in the last year has Gmail been out for some reason? Too many for anyone that isn't a casual user. So this probably isn't about the corporate folks but more on that later.

Do you mind tossing out all of your applications? That's what Chrome OS is all about. With Chrome OS, Google may well be able to control who you can get applications from. Like Google or their partners. So many people whine about how Microsoft dominates their lives. Okay. There are alternatives that don't require that you hand over your precious data to some company. Free ones at that. The proper reaction is not to hand over the keys to the kingdom to Google. Microsoft may own the application space but they don't own your data.

What worries me most is their approach to rolling out the software. So far, they are only releasing source code that is optimized for solid state devices. That reveals their strategy. Make this an OS that predominantly comes with consumer products. That way the great masses don't realize what they are buying into. Ooh. Look grandma! Cheap netbook/phone/blender doo hickeys. Sorry, but the “no local, persistent storage” aspect of this gives me the willies. Google wants our data and I'm not sure for what purpose.

So, call me a Luddite but I don't like what I see so far. Blindly handing over your data in exchange for a cheap device seems like a bad trade off for me. I'm not against cloud applications – in a controlled corporate data center. I am against people unwittingly handing over data to a faceless corporation with no guarantees. It's the dependency I despise.

The other night I envisioned a new Mac commercial in 2011. The first character is the slacker Mac guy (who never appears to have a job – just saying). The second is the boring PC guy who at least looks dependable. Finally, the Google Chrome guy who is a shadowy figure, dark, mysterious, and somewhat unsettling. As soon as the Mac guy starts to say something about the Chrome guy, the shadow reaches out and engulfs him. The last sound from slacker Mac is his muffled scream. The PC guy cries and wets himself.

And in the distance there is disembodied laughter. An eerie voice intones “Don't be evil” followed by maniacal cackling. Dissolve to black.

Sudo You?

2009-11-12T08:41:00.006-05:00

Whenever I write about patents, trademarks, and copyrights, I'm always careful to state two things up front. First, I'm not a lawyer. It is quite possible that I am missing some part of law that makes my opinion invalid. I try to understand the technical underpinnings of the patents and see what it means to the computer industry and economy at large. I'm not trying to be an attorney.

Second, I am completely in favor of intellectual property protection. I am not one of those folks who believes that patents are evil and that all software should be open source. The fact of the matter is, intellectual property protections provide motive to continue to innovate. They protect the small inventor from having their life's work pulled out from under them by a deep pocketed company. Same goes for copyright and trademark protections. History shows that if people can't benefit from their work, they'll do something else and we all lose out on the richness of life.

Patents are monopolies granted to an inventor in exchange for adding to the useful knowledge of the world. Without them, the world would be full of virtually permanent monopolies as inventors strive to keep inventions secret rather than disclose them. It is also well understood that without the time based monopoly, many inventors would not recoup their investment in innovation and wouldn't bother inventing in the first place. When it costs nearly US$800 million to develop a new drug, patent monopolies are the only way to recoup the costs and make a profit.

That's why I took it with a grain of salt when I saw the initial commentary on the new Microsoft Patent ( number 7,617,530 ) issued November 10, 2009 and originally filed in April of 2005. You see, there are a lot of people who hate the idea of software patents. In their eyes, no software patent is valid. I'm still not sure where I stand on software patents nor am I a Microsoft hater, so I tried to turn a critical eye to the patent. Once I read it (and read it and read it and read it...) I came to a very firm conclusion: What was the USPTO thinking? This is so obviously wrong that I can't imagine how this got through.

The patent is entitled “Rights Elevator”. It describes “systems and/or methods” to allow a computer user to elevate their rights from a lower, standard user account to higher level administrative rights. If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. It has existed in UNIX systems since at least the 1970's. In UNIX and Linux we use a command called su, for superuser, to obtain the rights of another user with higher level rights. There is even a short hand version called sudo which runs a command or program once with elevated rights.

All patents have to pass certain tests for them to be granted by the US Patent Office. For a patent to be granted the claims must describe an invention that is novel (new), useful, and non-obvious to practitioners of the inventor's art. These tests are important. Without them a lot of inventions would be granted patents that should not. That would, in turn, inhibit innovation.

It is hard to argue that this patent passes at least two of the three tests. I agree that it is useful. The ability to briefly elevate rights to install software or copy files to a restricted directory has been proven to be good method of balancing security with the need to do certain important functions. I have a Unix book from the late 1980's that tells a sysadmin how to do that using existing UNIX commands like su. Therein lies the problem. It has already been proven to work because it already exists. That kind of kills the novelty of the invention doesn't it. The patent makes the argument that remembering a user name and a password is too difficult. Part of what is says is innovative is not having to remember a user name. That's a load of hooey. How hard is root to remember?

Let's be nice though. The Microsoft patent also includes a component to select a higher level account with a GUI and ask for a password. You have to admit, given the prevalence of graphical operating systems today that seems like an obvious addition. Wait! Did I say obvious! That seems to run afoul of the non-obvious test. In fact, this is something that most Linux distributions do today. They even reference Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat in their prior art list. How is this method any different from what is already done in Linux and Unix systems.

To be fair, this method of elevating rights temporarily with a graphical interface may not have been used when the patent was filed in 2005. I don't think that's true but I'll give the USPTO the benefit of the doubt. The method outlined in the patent, however, doesn't move far beyond sudo (which is also referenced in the prior art listing). Certainly not far enough to claim novelty and non-obviousness. It doesn't take an expert in software and operating systems to see that, never mind someone practiced in the art of system administration.

This method is so ubiquitous that everyone does this. Everyone except Microsoft that is. Windows, in all it's forms, has always required you to either have administrator rights or log in as someone with those rights, when that was possible at all. The Windows Vista UAC allowed you to override built in restrictions not elevate your rights temporarily. The UAC never even kept you from doing something. It just nagged you that it was bad. Windows 7 finally catches up with the rest of the world and Microsoft is trying to patent it. Talk about making lemonade from lemons.

How did this one get by? There could be a lot of reasons including overworked patent examiners. The patent should be overturned and likely (hopefully) will. In the meantime the patent office needs to do something. Maybe independent panels who don't work for a vendor. I'm not sure. All that patents like this do is throw fuel on the fire for people who want to eliminate patents, especially software patents.

This one should never have been granted. But then, I'm no lawyer nor do I play one on TV.

Obfuscation through non-erudite terminology

2009-11-03T14:17:00.008-05:00

I've spent a lot of time around both lawyers and engineers. One of the common complaints about either group is a tendency to say things in non-human terms. The assumption is that there an attempt being made to obscure facts through archaic language. Actually, both groups use their own language in an attempt to be more precise, as do scientists, police, and accountants. It is language designed to communicate to each other not to the world at large. The problems occur when they try and explain what they are doing to folks outside their profession using that same special language.

Marketing folks, on the other hand, are supposed to communicate in ways that customers understand. In my own career, I have often been employed as a geek who can speak, translating from technospeak into plain language. That is the heart of technical marketing.

Instead, we consistently find technical marketing people using language that no one understands. It's not that it's too technical. That would make sense if you are selling to techies. No, quite the opposite. A lot of the time, it simply doesn't make much sense. Let's look at the sampling below. In an attempt to not pick on any one company, I won't say who specific quotes came from. The list was a quick sampling from a number of company websites, technology news sites, white paper titles, and press releases.

Navigating to Customer Satisfaction
Innovations in Managing IT Service Quality
... To Accelerate Innovation Across The Network
Improve Business Efficiency and Agility & Enables organizational agility. These came from two different web sites
Sustainability can help you unlock the value of green
Provides actionable knowledge
Reduce costs as you solve IT challenges across your information infrastructure.

Most of these don't make much sense do they? “Navigating to Customer Satisfaction” would kind of make sense if this were a shipping company (it's not). I'm hoping they really didn't mean “actionable”. “Actionable is a legal term that means an action that is grounds for a lawsuit. If the knowledge is actionable, then I don't want it provided.

My favorite is “Sustainability can help you unlock the value of green.” What does “green” mean here? Besides the color, it is often misused as an adjective to mean environmental friendly. That phrase is, I'll grant you, kind of an obtuse way of saying “good for the environment” but at least people get that. When did green become a noun? Can I have two greens to go? Maybe they mean a putting green. Building a golf course around my green will unlock it's value quite nice, thank you. Or salad greens, perhaps? In that case, the value comes from destroying (that is eating) them not from sustaining them. That sounds more like something I would need Ex Lax for.

I'm not against using language in a sophisticated manner. This blog has a plethora of SAT words like obtuse, obfuscation, archaic , erudite, and, of course, plethora. What I don't like is mangling language, especially in marketing. Marketing is supposed to make it obvious and clear why you should buy something. Instead, we are treated to tongue and mind twisting phrases that only confuse. I don't want to hear “optimizes performance envelope capabilities”. Say “It's much faster” or even “ higher performing” instead. I know what that means without my decoder ring.

Speaking of the decoder ring, here is a (tongue in cheek) glance at part of it. I hope this helps in the future.

TechnoBusiness Marketing Speak	What it really means?
Innovate, Innovation	To make something that is totally new. Or something that sounds new but isn't.
Enabling	Helping... you to spend money.
Driving	Pushing... you to spend money.
Solution, Solutions	A fix to a problem. Or, a bunch of stuff thrown together into groups. We can sell you bundles this way.
Mobility	Moving around. Like moving your money into our pockets.
Optimize	To make something so that it is as good as it can be. Unfortunately, we seem to have to optimize constantly so it really doesn't make things optimal.
Efficiency (Attain Efficiency)	Using the least resources possible. Notice, that money is not included in this. Your money anyway.
Productivity (Boost Productivity)	Doing more with fewer resources... including your money.
Smarter	Not doing stupid things. It does suggest that you are doing some dumb things right now doesn't it? Feel insulted?
Business Need	Stuff your business needs to keep going. As in “our business needs your money”

Sometimes though, you hear something that is pretty straight up. It doesn't mean you believe it but at least you understand it. So, from the front page of Microsoft's website comes “Windows 7 is pretty dope.” It's not hard to guess that someone likes Windows 7. If only we could always be that obvious.

FTC Is Okay By Me

2009-10-27T15:21:00.005-04:00

I'm fired up about the new FTC rules regarding bloggers. I didn't say I was mad or annoyed about it. Actually, I'm happy and excited. For those who don't pay attention to what goes on in the blog world (and yet you're reading this... whatever.) there are new rules in the U.S. regarding how you present certain information about products in blogs.

The U.S.Federal Trade Commission, commonly called the FTC, is charged with insuring fair trade in the United States. Part of their mission, I would argue the most important part, is consumer protection. These are the federal watchdogs that make sure that business doesn't take advantage of the average consumer. That is precisely what they are doing with the new rules for bloggers. In a nutshell, if you get paid to write good things about products, you have to reveal that. If you talk about the results of a test or a consumer experience that you know are not typical, you have to say what is typical. If a company comps you with free products, services, or tickets to a Buffalo Bills game, you have to reveal that too. Okay maybe not the Bills tickets this season. (I live in Buffalo, NY so no hate mail please. You know it's true.)

Basically, if you are being paid to say nice things, it is a paid endorsement and that has to be disclosed. It doesn't matter if the payment is money or in-kind. You have to let people know that you may be influenced by that compensation. This is not a privacy issue, it's a commercial one. It is important that someone reading a blog know what conflicts of interest may exist that could effect what the blogger says. This is not about free speech. It is about commercial speech which can have restrictions not applicable to individuals.

Frankly, these rules are no different from what you see on TV or in newspapers. When a celebrity endorses a product on TV, at the bottom of the screen are tiny letters that say “Paid Endorsement”. This is because it is really an advertisement, placed by an agency or company, and using the actor as a spokesperson. The only real difference is when they tell you that you can make millions with no money down, they have to let you know that that only applies to those at the top of the pyramid. Getting rich without risking your own money has not been typical since the dot com crash. Unless you are a Wall Street banker of course.

And while the rules don't address Twitter and Facebook specifically, the same should apply in those media as well. While we're at it, white papers should also denote when something is done for pay. When I was in the analyst game, I insisted that any white paper I put my name on be only what I wanted to write. Otherwise, the company could have the paper but leave my name off of it. Even with creative control, I still told the audience that it was a sponsored paper. Despite my best efforts, I still couldn't be sure that my client didn't exert some influence that created a conflict of interest. Not in a nefarious manner mind you. It's just that relying on someone for your livelihood can change your perspective even if you are not aware of it.

So, I'm glad for the new rules. It's sad that we need the government to remind us of our ethical duty. It's unfortunate that we can't trust what we read. Too bad. But until the day comes that all people are perfect, I'm glad to see my government taking a stand and insisting on good behavior for our citizens. Thanks FTC.

eBox Shebop

2009-10-22T14:04:00.005-04:00

Back in the day, Linux was mostly a geek toy. You had to compile the kernel from source and install all the applications including the GUI by hand. Even by Windows 3.1 standards, it was very technical and primitive. In those days, Linux's best attributes were that it was free and basically UNIX. A lot has changed since then. Linux has become a viable UNIX replacement in servers, helping to fuel the rise of a great many Internet companies. It has also tried, with limited success, to become a desktop operating system and rival to Windows and Mac OS X.

One of the biggest holdups to widespread adoption of Linux has been installation and configuration of software applications. Linux distros seem to subscribe to the philosophy that real men hand edit configuration files. It's the command line that separates the men from the boys. Linux is like a techie version of a sports car. It's about proving something. I just won't say what that something is. Package managers have done a lot to streamline installation but configuration has always been a black art. There are entire books written to help trained system administrators tackle SAMBA configuration. Not to mention every other major Linux package.

This might be fine for the hard core sys admin. It makes them feel superior to the rest of the morons out there. It doesn't work, however, for the vast majority of people milk fed on Windows installation and GUI-based configuration. Even when there are decent configuration tools (which often, in an awesome display of irony, have to be installed and configured separately) and package managers, everything is piecemeal. To set up a user on a box requires configuring many different applications using different tools, some only available from the command line. All of this has been holding back adoption of Linux as a commercially viable alternative to the Windows hegemony.

The good news is that this is changing. A fairly new distribution called eBox has solved many of the problems that have plagued Linux server installation and maintenance. Perhaps it's fair to say that eBox is a mega-distro. It is based on Ubuntu Server, which is itself Debian based. What sets it apart is the comprehensive web-based management tools. They allow single screen configuration for many typical tasks that a sys admin faces. For example, you can set up a user account along with associated file shares, email accounts, and groupware configuration all from one place. This is even better than Windows which still relies on wizards walking you through the process.

Think of it this way. Old Linux is like shopping on a busy city street. You have to walk and walk to lots of individual stores to get what you want. Windows Server is like a department store. Everything is in one place but you still have to go from department to department. eBox is like a personnel shopper. Everything comes to you.

One of the best features of eBox is the initial package installation. It groups packages into functions like networking, security, communications, office (basically file and print services), and infrastructure. This makes it easy to configure a server for specific purposes such as an office file server or a network gateway. The documentation clearly shows where to place the different types of servers in your network to get maximum safety and effect.

eBox is not perfect by any means. Installation (on a virtual box I admit) was difficult. Not difficult in the sense of hard to do since it walked me through every step. Difficult because it hung up a bunch of times. The root password is not obvious. I wasn't asked for it and it isn't the same as the initial admin account as is typical of most Linux installations. That severely restricts what additional software I can install on the server.

While the seection of packages are good, there is not database server package. I know that PostGre SQL server is installed but configuration for it is not included in the web-based configuration system. Application or database server and developer packages would be a good idea. Virtualization packages would also be nice in the future. Maybe a “cloud” package although I suspect that way madness lies.

eBox is an important step forward in making Linux a viable alternative for enterprises of all types but especially for the Small-Medium Business market. With limited or no IT resources SME organizations need easy setup, configuration, and management. That was hard to deliver using Linux before eBox.

There is one truly unfortunate aspect of eBox: it's name. It shares said name with a small PC product from Taiwan. It's bound to cause confusion. I suggest changing it as soon as possible.

Disclosure: The eBox software was provided for free. Of course, it's provided to anyone for free. Just download it from their web site. So, I guess this doesn't really count but why mess with the FTC.

Lost In The Clouds

2009-10-12T09:29:00.006-04:00

Ah! Lost in the clouds again.

Sounds nice right, unless you're a T-Mobile customer. In that case, lost in the clouds means your data was lost during an upgrade. Too bad. Most of the attention in the blogsphere has been centered on how stupid this appears. A lot of folks are railing against how avoidable this was, how best practices for data protection are well known, how unfortunately common this sort of thing is, etc. I wrote a book on that stuff years ago and it was not new then. Well, some of it was new but the basic blocking and tackling wasn't.

The central issue is being avoided though. It's uncomfortable to address if your company is involved in any type of outsourcing, and what major computer company isn't these days. In all the moaning about how Hitachi Data Systems and Microsoft (T-Mobile partners in this fiasco) should have done better, in all the technical details, in all the posturing about best practices, the core problem with outsourcing is being ignored.

Trust.

I don't care if it is Cloud Computing, call centers, data centers, or overnight delivery. When you outsource you have to trust the outsourcer to do as good or better a job as you would. You can't be looking over their shoulder 24/7. They can't have you in their shorts either. For the relationship to work there needs to be a lot of trust.

I have been on both sides of the outsourcing game. When you hand over a mission critical functions to someone else you have to do your homework. You have a duty to make sure that the outsourcer has the capabilities, best practices, and determination to do your business the way you need it done. They have to look out for your interests. It's a relationship that needs attention.

This is the problem with outsourced Cloud Computing. You have to have the expertise to evaluate your outsourcing partners, the time to conduct appraisals and look at references, and people to monitor performance and deal with problems. I'm not saying that T-Mobile didn't do this. Bad things happen to good companies. But with the hype around outsourced clouds, a lot of trust is being handed over to folks whose abilities are barely known. It's like getting married after the first date. And in this case, what happens in Vegas ends up all over the Internet. Like Paris Hilton, but I digress...

What worries me is that a lot of folks will get sucked in by the Cloud Computing hype who are not ready to do it right. I especially worry about smaller outfits with fewer resources. To them, Amazon S3 is a god send (not to pick on Amazon). Or Mozy for that matter. Solves a problem cheap and quick. Just what everyone wants. Don't worry. They're big companies. We can trust them, right? Right...

Trust takes time and effort. Any type of outsourcing, Cloud Computing or otherwise, requires a lot of trust. Go slow, take your time, and get to know each other first. You have the rest of your lives together. No need to rush.

Of Paperweights and Doorstops

2009-09-29T14:05:00.004-04:00

I have quite the collection of paperweights and doorstops. They didn't start out that way of course. They all began life as usable electronics like cell phones and networking gear. All were the victims of upgrades to newer gear such as Wireless-B to Wireless-G. My cell phone upgrades every two years per the plan, leaving a graveyard of old phones. Some devices were on their way to the trash and I couldn't help but save them from becoming toxic waste. Don't kid yourself. Even the most innocuous electronic devices have heavy metals, plastics, and other materials that will continue to pollute for centuries to come.

What annoys me is not the proliferation of electronic gear but the fact that they can't easily be reused or upgraded. Why? Because they are designed to be tossed away, use closed architectures or, and this really galls me, are purposefully locked.

For example, I decided to upgrade my cell phone this year. My old one worked fine but was lousy for texting. So I took the old one to a Verizon store and asked if they could convert it to a Tracfone. Tracfone is a pay-as-you-go cellular service provider which is great for the kids. The no-contract, phone card type system keeps teenagers from running up massive phone bills. I was told, quite emphatically, “No!” What's so ironic about this is that Verizon owns Tracfone. I was offering to spend more money with them but they didn't want it. So the phone sits in my desk draw waiting for its day of liberation.

I could attempt to jailbreak it. Jailbreaking consists of hacking the hardware and firmware to remove whatever is tying the device to the service provider. Why should I have to do that though? Besides the fact that I might brick the device, it's also likely that Tracfone/Verizon still won't let me use it.

There are alternatives. I could donate the phones to various groups that re-purpose them for soldiers in Iraq or victims of domestic violence. Worthy use but I wanted to get more out these myself. And I'm pretty sure they don't want an old DSL Modem.

The sheer waste is incredible. Millions of these devices get tossed in landfills or, hopefully, sent to a recycler. All could be given a new lease on life if only they could be opened up, added to, and tinkered with. I'm not suggesting that vendors open up the phones when the are active. That would be nice but unnecessary. It's great that Cisco opened up their Linksys Routers. Lots of hackers enjoy extending their WRT54 devices, adding new features and sometime using them for entirely different purposes. I'm not that ambitious. I only want my devices to have a longer lifespan.

One of the great things about computers is that they can be used nearly forever. I know a lot of folks that still use DOS era computers for useful purposes. Some are hobbyists and others use them for a single purpose like voice mail. I still use a nine year old 40GB disk. I stuck it in a USB drive case and use it for email backup. Why can't we do that with all of these devices? Okay, it's big company greed but it's stupid greed. They could sell me a cheap retrofit kit and make a couple of bucks that they wouldn't have.

Reuse is the ultimate recycle. Let my devices go!

Rollups In Our Lunchbox

2009-09-23T12:09:00.009-04:00

There's been a lot of chatter about the acquisition of Perot Systems by Dell this week. It's not surprising that in a slow news week so much attention is being given to a deal that is only one of many that have happened in the past few months. Most of the commentary is the typical stuff such as “This will (or will not) help Dell compete against IBM and HP.” or “Dell service partners will (or will not) be mad as hell.”

I'm more interested in what the Perot acquisition says about the state of the computer industry. Since 2000 the computer industry has been consolidating, coalescing into a handful of companies that directly deliver solutions to customers. The rest of the industry exists to serve these mega companies. It's like the car industry. There are only a half dozen companies that sell cars and services to the vast majority of consumers. The rest supply parts such as headlights and seats.

You can easily tick off the number of computer companies that sell the majority of equipment to both business and consumers. Dell, HP, IBM, Cisco, and EMC are delivering complete solution sets in all segments including enterprise computing of all types, consulting services, and consumer products (through brands like Linksys and Iomega). Microsoft is a special case. It is a major, first tier company that sells mostly software (mice and Xbox systems aside). I wonder how long it will be before Ballmer buys a large or specialty hardware company like Acer. I wonder about the same for EMC. How long before they buy a specialty server company or small networking company.

There are a few companies overseas that are part of the mix as well such as Hitachi in Japan, the aforementioned Acer in Taiwan, Lenovo and Huawei in China and Groupe Bull in Europe but their sales, product depth, and international reach pale in comparison to the biggest five or six American companies. Don't kid yourself though. Any of those could be the next Toyota. Or a great acquisition. These folks compare to Fiat. Not GM or Ford but certainly an important company.

Apple is important but still small in comparison. They are like Porsche - a well-known, high-end luxury brand that people pay more for because they want something they perceive of as special. They are technology trailblazers with a great sense of style. More taste maker than mainstream sales giant.

Unlike the auto industry, there is still a healthy second tier that is trying to move up. NetApp comes to mind. Brocade and Juniper too. These companies are centered around being best of breed in one area of the industry such as data storage or optical network equipment. This segment keeps getting smaller though. How much longer can Brocade or Quantum remain independent? Sooner or later the combination of size and narrow focus will make competing against the top tier impossible. They won't be able to offer anything unique enough or broad enough. They will either sell out in some face saving “merger” or go the way of SGI, becoming mere shadows of themselves. Perot Systems is a great example of a second tier player (IBM GS and HP Consulting they are not) being absorbed by the first tier. Second tier players provide entry into a whole new segment for a big company.

There is also a whole host of small companies that supply specialty equipment or develop new technologies for big companies. These small companies are technology Spackle. They fill holes in a big company's product line. A few will grow independently but most will be gobbled up by bigger companies. Some will fail altogether. A great many will stay small, too small to acquire. They will continue to survive by supplying critical parts to the big boys. There are lots of small companies that make specialty chip designs or cores, RAID controllers, and software libraries.

This year has been a banner year for rolling up small companies. With credit tight and VC money still not flowing free a great many small companies are realizing that, despite current success, they won't find the money to grow. Really, how many computer technology IPOs are going to happen over the next two years? For many small companies it's grow or die... or sell out. For the big companies this is a boon if they have cash on hand. They can buy out the smaller players for much less money then they can in good times.

So, what's next. I think the majors will continue to buy companies. Dlink is a good acquisition target. They have a great consumer and SOHO line that would help out HP or Dell. The macro trend will continue for awhile. Tight credit and investor wariness will make life difficult on the companies exiting the startup phase. The biggest companies will take this opportunity to reinforce or extend their product lines, perhaps even get into new segments.

So, if you aren't selling cars to millions of people, you are probably selling headlights to the guys who make the cars. Don't feel bad. There's opportunity in that.

Free Software Tools for Geeks

2009-09-14T10:48:00.003-04:00

Everyone knows that techies have different needs when it comes to software. Come on. Admit it! For the average person a slow network is a mystery and an annoyance. For us, it's a project and all projects need tools.

Over the years, I have accumulated many software tools that can be had for free. Some are open source tools supported by a vast community of developers. Others are a hobbyist's pride, given freely for all to enjoy. Some are particularly useful.

So here is my top software tools for the serious computer geek, with commentary. Did you expect any less?

PuTTY

If you don't occasionally need a terminal session then you have no right to consider yourself a computer geek. The command line is what separates the real deal from the poser. PuTTY is an excellent Telnet interface with support for SSH, Rlogin, and even a serial shell.

Pros

Git 'er done! PuTTY gets you a command line to almost anything. It emulates the most common types of terminal (ah! The VT100. You never forget your first) and has a bazillion options to tweak your terminal session. Mostly, the default settings are all you need.

Cons

PuTTY only handles one session at a time. You have to load multiple instances of the software to talk to multiple systems. Even more annoying, when you shut down a session, the whole program shuts down and you have to reload it to talk to another box. Still, these are annoyances not major flaws.

KeePass

There are lots of websites to visit, servers to manage, and PCs at home and in the office. All have passwords to manage and it's a pain. If you use the same password over and over you know that's a security risk. Besides, the user name and password requirements vary from site to site and box to box. Keeping an unencrypted file or database of passwords on your computer is inviting disaster.

Enter KeePass. It manages an encrypted database of information about your logins. Besides storing user names and passwords, KeePass also has search and organization capabilities.

Pros

Does the basic job of storing user names and passwords extremely well. Search is fast and accurate. The password generator is also useful when you want to create secure but different passwords.

Cons

The interface is a bit dull but, really, it's not a game after all.

MailStore Home

Unlike most people, techies tend to generate and receive a lot of emails. No matter how good your email system, sooner or later your system bogs down if you don't archive them. Or you bog down trying to find needles in your email haystack.

MailStore Home is the little brother, freeware version of a commercial package. It does a credible job of archiving and indexing emails. I find it useful for archiving emails to a USB drive which acts as a backup. I can then delete emails from my email client with confidence.

Pros

MailStore Home interfaces with most of the major clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird but also can archive from a server, including Exchange, POP3, and IMAP mailboxes, and webmail systems such as Google Mail. It's also pretty fast for an average techie which means an above average email user.

Cons

It can copy but not move emails. That's great if you want to backup your email but not so great if you want to truly archive them. Instead, you have to remember to go back to your email client or server and delete emails manually.

Sun VirtualBox

In the world of virtualization, VMWare has the mind share and Microsoft's VirtualPC comes bundled with their servers. Sun's VirtualBox is not as well known which is too bad. It's best feature is that it is really easy to use. You can run most anything you want with minimal effort. It's free for individual use which makes it a great choice for home or a hobbyist. Would I run a data center cloud on it? Probably not. For testing, developing, or just plain goofing around, it's so much easier to use.

Pros

Easy to use. You don't need a four week course to start using it. It does a very credible job of creating virtual servers or desktops.

Cons

Configuring inbound network access, such as an HTTP server, is not intuitive making VirtualBox more useful for virtual desktops or sandboxes. I still can't get FreeNAS to work right because of server access problems.

The list of freebie tools is much longer than this. This is but a sample of tools for the techie. Also in the mix is 7-Zip, an excellent archiver, and Filezilla, a classic and profoundly useful FTP client. For the software developer, I also recommend Sun's Netbeans. It's a full blown, commercial quality, IDE that is especially good for Java development but has decent support for PHP, Python, C/C++, and many other languages.

A lot of these tools are much better than the stuff you pay for. Some of them you do have to pay for if you want to use them in a commercial setting. It's always a good idea to check the license. And, if you are managing a large commercial environment, many of the tools won't provide the scope of features and services that you need. However, for the hobbyist, individual, or SOHO environment, these tools can't be beat. They give you what you need for a great price – free!

eyeSpy With My Eye My Desktop In The Sky

2009-09-11T11:48:00.012-04:00

I've been intrigued with the idea of server-based desktops for awhile. In the past I have toyed around with Desktop Two and the recently deceased Jooce. While interesting, they all suffered from the same set of problems. They were usually:

slow;

lacking in useful applications, and;
had significant security problems.

The last item is significant. Despite what the folks at Google would tell you, most companies don't want to keep sensitive files on someone else's server. The most standout issue with virtual, online desktops (which, heaven help me, they are calling Cloud Desktops) is that there didn't seem to be enough need for them. Until now. I'll get to that later.

eyeOS overcomes the majority of cloud desktop problems. Written in PHP5, you can install it on your own internal server or even a web hosting server. It's open source to boot! This is important since it makes it easy (or even possible) to create your own web-based applications to run in the virtual desktops. The suite of applications that comes with eyeOS is pretty good but the ability to create your own makes it a much more useful platform for business.

Being able to install eyeOS on the server of your choice also goes a long way to removing security objections as well. IT can now control the security environment and does not have to rely on blind faith in a service provider. The same goes for performance. You can use your own magic and hardware to up performance levels to where you want them to be. Even installed on a web hosting platform, eyeOS had a decent response time, granted for a small number of users. That it worked at all in anything resembling a useful manner was pretty startling.

The big question that is still unanswered is “who cares?” That's the acid test for all products. Why should I spend any time at all, let alone money, on this product. As little as two years ago, I would have to have answered “ I don't care.” Today, the world is a different place. We now have a proliferation of small, Internet enabled devices including smartphones and netbooks. Many of these are too underpowered to have a full range of desktop applications – or do they?

This is why eyeOS really makes sense now. Virtual desktops have been primarily concerned with giving users a consistent and controlled desktop experience throughout an Enterprise network. That's fine except that it doesn't carry on to other devices. With eyeOS, you can set up your own cloud desktop service, that meets your standards for security, and make it available on anything with a browser.

With eyeOS in hand, you can outfit your sales force with cheap netbooks and still give them a full range of office and corporate applications. In other words, the whole desktop experience. For an added bonus, if users stick with cloud desktop for everything, you don't lose or expose your data even if they lose their PDA, smartphone, or netbook. It's not on those devices, it's on the server.

The best part is that they users don't have to do anything special to make this work. They sign into the eyeOS server and away they go. Users don't have to remember to copy files to encrypted drives or anything like that. They just do what they normally would do on a desktop computer. In terms of data security, this is a great leap forward. And the fact that only administrators can install applications is sure to please corporate security types. Fewer rogue applications in the corporate network is a good thing indeed.

eyeOS is not perfect by any means. Many of the critical applications, email especially, are nowhere near what a decent corporate application should be. However, it is clear from the Zoho widgets (downloaded separately) that you can integrate other online applications into eyeOS. With more and more companies going to web-enabled applications anyway, lack of sophisticated, standalone desktop applications is really not a problem.

Cloud desktops and eyeOS in particular, are not quite there yet. However, they are rapidly getting there. An organization that is committed to cloud desktops could make eyeOS into what it needed. Not out of the box of course but with a relatively small amount of effort.

The old fashioned, fat desktop will never go away. There are too many applications that will never port to a platform like this. I don't see programmers writing serious code on a cloud desktop. For the average wage slave, however, this would be an improvement and IT will love it.

EMC Pacmans Kazeon. Mmmm. Good.

2009-09-03T11:59:00.008-04:00

More news on the storage M&A front and once again it's about EMC. EMC announced that they are acquiring Kazeon a self avowed “leader in eDiscovery” tools. Stripped of all the eDiscovery hoopla, Kazeon makes a decent indexing and classification rules engine. In that space, it is a very useful thing indeed.

What Kazeon does is catalog and index your data and run the information past a rules engine to generate additional metadata. Again, that's good but only as good as the rules. They also layer on some analytics which is all the rage in eDiscovery. Analytics are also only as good as the data and metadata and, in my opinion, overemphasized in the eDiscovery market. But that's just me...

Kazeon is a hand in glove fit for EMC. For many years now EMC has looked to get past selling just hardware and has wanted to sell systems to store and manage data. That's a great strategy since it creates new value but sticks to their knitting. Kazeon is another value added tool that EMC can add to their toolbox.

The Kazeon acquisition also gives them some eDiscovery street cred. They have been trying to play in the eDiscovery sandbox for years, mostly through their Documentum offerings. Nothing wrong with that since the majority of eDiscovery work is about workflows anyway. However, automated tools for tracking data also are important not only to discovery during litigation but also to insure compliance with in-house data retention rules. And by retention I mean destruction. But you knew that didn't you...

The dirty secret about data retention is that no one can really comply with their own internal rules without knowing where and what all their data is. Knowing where all your data is is a really hard problem to solve. That's where Kazeon comes in. They create catalogs of vast amounts of data that allows you to better comply with discovery rules, a preservation and legal hold, and internal data retention policies.

So, Kazeon is an obviously good thing but why is it good for EMC? Actually, there are two (probably more) reasons why this works so well. First, it adds value. If I buy tons of EMC storage, the Kazeon/EMC products will help me to know what I have on it. Second, those catalogs of information and metadata need, you guessed it, more storage. It's the reason Documentum was such a good deal for EMC. It lets you get more value from your stored data and makes you store more data. A twofer for EMC.

EMC will now be able to deliver, by itself, one of the most comprehensive information management systems available. By combining Documentum, Kazeon, and all the other tools EMC has at its disposal, plus hardware, they will be able to deliver an information management solution that will make lawyers squeal with delight.

That's not to say it's perfect. Kazeon can't help you if someone dumps their files onto a flash drive or emails a smoking gun document to their Gmail account. Smartphones and PDAs are also a challenge that Kazeon will not help with. Still, they hit all the high notes and do better than what most companies do - which is nothing!

As an aside, Kazeon also has an intellectual property (IP) management component to their systems. IP management and eDiscovery are very similar problems – you need to know what data you have where, in order to comply with rules and regulations. EMC has often touted Documentum as an IP management tool. They haven't gotten too far with that since it takes so much effort to set up Documentum to do IP management. Unless you are already committed to Documentum across the company, there are better out of the box IP solutions. Kazeon will give them some more heft in that space. It will allow EMC to automate many of the sticky tracking and classification tasks associated with IP management, especially in preventing leakage. It's not there yet, but getting better.

I don't know if EMC is full yet after eating up so many companies. Kazeon is quite a tasty and healthy morsel for them though. It makes good, strategic sense. I wonder if they left room for dessert.

Cloudy Skies This Week

2009-08-27T13:28:00.012-04:00

Recent blog posts and comments I made on Twitter might give some people the impression that I'm against cloud computing. I bet I've given some people the impression that I hate cloud computing. Despise it! Want to see it die! Nothing could be further from the truth. I love the idea of cloud computing. It's the cloud computing marketing that I take issue with.

Overall, what's not to like about the cloud idea? The promise of cloud computing (notice I say promise, not reality) is the ability to only buy what you need with the option to buy more later if you want to. In that respect, it deals with one of the key problems in computing: coarse granularity in systems. If I need 10 percent of a server, I might have to buy a whole server. Someday I might need that whole server but not right at the moment. Then again, maybe never. We have wonderful terms for buying more than you need such as underutilization. The best term is “a waste of money”. So, buying only what I need when I need it is a great way to manage my budget. Same goes for software. I no longer have to buy a software package designed for fifty people for just three people to use. It's efficient and cost effective. It also makes it easier to quantify the cost of running an application.

Cloud computing is also evolution not revolution. We have been doing limited purpose cloud computing for years. It's called web hosting. And email hosting. Oh. And application hosting. Do I notice when my hosting provider adds new resources in order to add more customers. Not really. I pay ten bucks and get a chunk of resources adequate to running my simple web site and that's how I like it.

So what's not to like? Well a couple of things really. Security of a cloud is no better than security in a non-cloud data center. You still have the problems of internal espionage, external break-ins, and other Dick Tracy stuff.

There is also a migration problem. When the day comes that your application needs to move to a dedicated system (don't kid yourself – it will happen), you might have a heck of a time moving it. Unlike moving up to a bigger piece of iron, applications may have to be rebuilt to live in a different type of environment. In that way, I suppose, it is different. It's worse... and nobody wants that.

This is especially true of clouds built around service frameworks like Amazon's. At some point the application might get big enough that it makes sense to bring it in house. Worse yet, you could find yourself dissatisfied with the service provider (like that never happens!) and forced into an acrimonious divorce. This is an especially nasty problem because they have you by the data stores if you get my meaning.

These are not reasons to forgo the cloud. They are reasons to be careful. Figure these issues out ahead of time and make good choices up front. And ignore the hype. If someone slaps “cloud” on something that seems not so cloudy, be suspicious.

Remember, cloud computing is a strategy and maybe an architecture. It's not a product no matter how many times the corporate talking head says so.

Green Clouds and Other Sickening Stuff

2009-08-24T13:43:00.004-04:00

Last week I rented a car from Hertz that was supposed to be a “Green Collection” car. Since it was a Ford Fusion, I assumed they meant the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Hybrids are green. This car, however, was not a hybrid. It was a plain old Ford Fusion. I read the fine print and discovered that Hertz defines green as “ fuel efficient, environmentally-friendly cars”. The cars are all EPA rated at 28 mpg but no one gets that with normal driving. Now, a mid-sized sedan that got 23 miles to the gallon on average doesn't seem all that green to me. My fairly large crossover does better (and is rated better ) than that.

Which brings me to my latest pet peeve - meaningless and overused marketing terms that appear to have real meaning. Like “lite”, both green and cloud computing are overused and under defined. Both have come to mean almost anything some slick Willy marketeer wants them to mean.

Green, in the case of Hertz cars, doesn't mean really environmentally friendly. It means not as unfriendly as some other cars. Sort of a “we stink less” kind of promise. That's not what most people understand green to mean. Ask anyone what green is and they will tell you that it somehow helps or enhances the environment, like clean energy.

And all you computer geeks out there should not get too uppity since we have the same problem with cloud computing (and green computing for that matter). Steve Duplessie of ESG has the best definition of cloud computing that I have seen to date. He described it as a strategy for utilization and purchasing. That sentiment is a good description but drives product managers apoplectic. When you sell servers, storage, or software (or increasingly all three) you can't get people to buy a strategy. You need customers to buy stuff. Real stuff. Stuff that can be shipped in a box. You can't ship strategy.

So the response is to slap the word cloud on everything from hardware to software to services. Like green, it's meant to make people feel virtuous about buying something. I buy some VMWare software and slap it on a “cloud capable” server and I doing the cloud thing! Aren't I smart. I buy some offsite storage like Amazon S3 or rent a piece of software from Google instead of buying it and I'm the cloud king! Woo hoo!

There are two outcomes for this type of overheated terminology. One, sooner or later folks wise up and start to get annoyed at the labels, even when they are useful labels. Second, they get confused and stop buying the stuff we need to sell to stay in business. We came perilously close to that with SAN and NAS ten years ago and “Web 2.0” almost became a dirty word. Everyone get hurt when we do this sort of thing.

Here's my rules of thumb regarding marketing terms:

When one term can mean many different things, it's a bad term.
If you need white papers to simply describe what you mean, it's a bad term.
If you start to see a term everywhere even where you shouldn't, it's a bad term. Or at least has jumped the shark.
If you ask five people what something means and get three different answers, it's a bad term.
If VC's are investing in something with that term, it's a bad term. Just kidding about the VC's. We love you guys. Give us money!

What I'm waiting on now is Pond Computing. You know, green and cloudy.

More on the Microsoft Word Patent Infringement

2009-08-14T12:31:00.005-04:00

I am truly fascinated by the Microsoft-i4i patent infringement case. What's not to love. A small company takes on one of the biggest money makers from one of the biggest companies and wins! Today, Groklaw ( www.groklaw.net) published links to the court documents along with some commentary. It's really good stuff.

As I have (repeatedly) mentioned before, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a technologist and business person. Some of the arguments presented in the documents are technical legal arguments. I won't even begin to comment on those.

I also won't comment on the whole idea of software patents. I'll let the folks at Groklaw do that. In this case it really doesn't matter because it's not what the case is about. The core issue is whether Microsoft should have known better and done something different before adopting OpenXML.

What caught my attention immediately was how the court got the subtle technical arguments presented to it. Clearly, this is not a case of some judge living in the DOS age. Despite Microsoft's protests to the contrary, the court understood the technical arguments and simply didn't agree with Microsoft. Too bad for the boys in Redmond – someone found a judge with the geek gene.

The opinion goes even further and says that there is no evidence that the jury didn't get it either. In a way, the court says that unless you can prove that the jury is stupid, you shouldn't assume they are. Truth be told, the technical aspects are not that hard to understand. Despite all kinds of obfuscation, it appears (at least to the judge) that the jury understood the issues well enough to decide rationally. As normal people become more sophisticated about software and computers, the “ jury is a bunch of technology dolts” argument will be harder to make.

Here are a few additional thoughts based on the court documents:

The court understood that a metacode was like a programming instruction designed to manipulate content for display. The definition it used was “an individual instruction which controls the interpretation of the content of the data.” This is dead on. A file of codes mapped to the content is the metacode map called out in the patent claims. I do have to wonder if this definition could be applied to other types of instruction-to-content mapping schemes like CSS. However, the patent is pretty narrow (which is probably why it was defensible). Further study is required.
The Finisar vs. DirectTV ruling popped up. The short form of Finisar is that if you sell a component of something that is important to the product and infringes, the whole darn thing infringes. You can't buy an infringing LCD component, put it in a TV and say “TV's aren't patentable!” Sorry. Doesn't work that way. It was used in legal arguments around contributory infringement. Finisar is something to watch out for when you buy components. If you put something in that infringes on a patent you might be hit over the head with it, even if you get it from someone else. Know the IP situation at your vendors!
What is even better is that i4i's claim to infringement was proven, in part, by a Microsoft email! An email from an employee that indicated they knew they were infringing. From the court's opinion:
“ i4i even presented an internal Microsoft email from January of 2003 containing i4i’s product name, the patent number, and a statement from a Microsoft employee that i4i’s technology would be made “obsolete” by the accused WORD product (which admittedly added XML functionality to the previous version of Microsoft’s WORD product).”
It almost seems like a joke that Microsoft, who sells products to manage email for eDiscovery, could get hit over the head with a smoking gun email. Probably created in Outlook and sent from Exchange. For this alone, Microsoft should be embarrassed.
I love the arguments about what a data structure is. It was almost Clintonesque, on the order of “depends what 'is' is.” Even Microsoft's own expert had to concede that their own previous arguments support the i4i definitions. And you wonder why the jury didn't believe Microsoft. That and the email maybe.
Obviousness was obviously argued. Microsoft based it's obviousness argument on the inventors' own previous software. The inventors themselves disputed this and apparently the jury believed them. Again, who are you going to believe? They guys who invented it in the first place or the alleged thieves? Discuss amongst yourselves.
At one point, Microsoft must have argued that since the USPTO was willing to reexamine the patent, that shows that it could be invalid. I like that one a lot. The judge, not so much. The court rightly points out that looking something over a second time is not that same as saying it's invalid.

In the end, reading the court documents provides a picture of a jury and judge who actually understood what the deep issues were. That's encouraging. You hear so much about juries and courts that give enormous awards based on emotion because they don't understand business, technology, medicine, or science. That does not appear to be the case here. Big message here – don't rely on stupid juries. They aren't so stupid.

A couple of other takeaways. One, even mighty Microsoft can be hit in the head with an email. Get control of that now. This is an example where someone has to train folks not to write this type of email in the first place. I'm still chuckling over this one.

Second, take software patents seriously. It is clear that Microsoft knew that this patent existed. They just assumed they could get away with ignoring it or beat i4i into submission. Such arrogance should not be tolerated in any company. All of this unpleasantness could have been averted. I bet Microsoft could have bought out i4i for much less than the litigation is costing them.

And finally, whether you like or dislike software patents, this is an argument in favor of them. i4i, a real company and not a patent troll, would have had their technology stolen from them without the protection of the patent. The system worked and protected the small inventor against the giant corporation. Huzzah for patents!

I promised I wouldn't comment on software patents, didn't I? Sorry about that but I couldn't resist.

i4i Pokes Microsoft In the Eye

2009-08-12T14:27:00.007-04:00

Microsoft just a got a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It was delivered by a company out of Toronto called i4i with the help of a judge in Texas. They have, in theory, halted sales of Microsoft Word 2003 and up and the Office bundles that contain them. How long this will actually hold, given appeals and such, is uncertain but the basis for the injunction is interesting.

i4i has a patent, US Patent 5,787,449“Method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other” , that describes how to finely format documents without embedding formating codes in them. The i4i method is to create a map of formatting marks associated with locations in a document. On the surface, this may sound like a common method but on closer inspection that might not be so.

The patent application itself gives a rather good history of document formatting starting with pre-printing press days through to the current electronic documents. You see, the most typical method for formatting electronic documents is to embedded formatting codes into the document itself. That's how the .DOC, RTF, and lots of other document formats work. You want a word to be bold, you embed a code for start bold text and end bold text in the document. In the old Wordstar days you actually saw the formats in the document. I guess I'm showing my age here.

The second most usual way to format an electronic document is to assign codes to parts of a document (such as a paragraph or header) which describe their structure. An external source file is then used to provide formatting for the document based on the structure. This is common on web sites since HTML describes the structure of a document but not its format. CSS describes the look of a document by defining the format of each type of content. So, in an HTML document, all <H1> tags define a header but not how the header looks. CSS defines how H1 headers look when displayed. These are further modified by embedding codes the old fashion way such as inline CSS. Separating structure from formatting has the advantage of allowing you to present different views of the same content. This is one of the ways that websites are able to give you a special view formatted for printing rather than viewing.

Both approaches have limitations. The first method tends to tie the document to a particular software package or API limiting it's openness. Like MS Word .DOC documents, the file might not look or print right when rendered in a different word processor or even a different version of MS Word. The second method tends to take a sledgehammer approach, coarsely limiting how the document is formatted. To get fine formatting you have to resort to kludges, such as using format types in only one place, or embedding codes the old-fashioned way and ruining portability.

What i4i came up with is a different method. It claims a system which creates a map, called a metacode map, which maps formatting to specific places in a document. It doesn't need to know anything about the structure of the content. In fact, it might have no structure at all other than what is forced on it by the formatting. The map is external to the actual document content allowing for different format files to be used with different content. This is apparently what Microsoft does in .DOCX, .XML, and .DOCM files. The i4i approach combines the fine formatting control of embedded formats with the portability and multi-view advantage of the external definition approach.

Since I'm not an expert on Word file formats, I can't comment on whether they infringe on the i4i patents. The judge seems to think so or he would not have ordered an injunction against the sale of the product. That means the judge thinks that Microsoft is infringing and doing harm to the patent holders.

What is Microsoft to do? They could try and get the injunction overturned. Likely they will try and do that no matter what. They might try and invalidate the patent but one usually does that before the injunction is handed down so I'm guessing they haven't had a lot of luck with that.

They can license the patent from i4i. I can't imagine why they wouldn't do that in the first place. No matter what it costs, it can't be as bad as this. At the moment, i4i has no real incentive to license anything to them. They have Word at a standstill and US$200M in Microsoft money. It doesn't get any better. Heck, if I was Google, I would buy i4i just to get the patent and kick Microsoft while they are down.

They could also change Word. To stop infringing, they will need to adopt another file format that is not tied to the patent. There are open source formats, like the ones that OpenOffice.org uses, or they could fall back on an older format. In any case, if they can't overturn the patent, they will need to change Word or pay more money to i4i.

There is a bigger problem looming and not just for Microsoft. How many other folks do the same thing? It is a logical thing to do. That doesn't make it legally obvious, especially in 1998 when the patent was issued. Most software companies tend to encode content in XML and use something like an XML style sheet or CSS to format it. However, if Microsoft could come up with this method for Word, why not lots of others. i4i should be emboldened to go after more infringing companies now. Once you have slain one big giant, the others do not seem so intimidating. Smaller companies will feel like easy pickings after Microsoft.

My advice to Microsoft – change Word now. Use the same format as OpenOffice.org. It also helps you with your open source cred.

My advice to everyone else who writes document-centric software – check your products. i4i will now have a more solid patent. If you do something like this you might want to change it or come up with an alternative. Otherwise you have only yourself to blame.

Tom's Cheapskates Roll Call of Productivity and Multimedia Apps for the Truly Frugal

2009-08-04T11:23:00.006-04:00

When I blogged about Microsoft and Netbooks, I made the statement that nobody uses OpenOffice.org because they already use Microsoft Office. While I still maintain that is true, it doesn't mean that you can't dispense with all those expensive software applications in favor of open source. That includes Microsoft Office.

In fact, it has become even easier to put together a sophisticated set of software for everyday use using only open source or freeware offerings. There is now a critical mass in productivity and multimedia applications that can be had for nothing. This is the good news.

The bad news is that the free stuff is rarely as elegant as the commercial versions. In almost all cases, the GUI leaves much to be desired and not just the eye candy part. Most free software seems to have been designed by and for computer geeks. There is a somewhat old school feel to much of it and, at times, can be downright confusing to use. If you compare software like Audacity, a sound recording and editing tool, to commercial software such as Pro Tools or even the software that comes bundled with a Mac, the interface falls woefully short. This means the learning curve is high, especially for non-professional users.

So, I now present to you my Cheapskates Roll Call of Productivity and Multimedia Apps for the Truly Frugal. The first thing you will probably note is that there is no video editing software on the list. I have never found a free video editing suite that is reliable (as in doesn't crash a lot) and so I stick with bundled commercial applications.

Office Applications: OpenOffice.org

Okay, they need to figure out the name problem. Because of trademark issues, the OpenOffice.org people have to tack on the .org to the name of the suite. That's stupid. Get a new name. No one will care.

Strengths: It's a complete office suite,with MS Office compatibility and native exporting to PDF. The Writer word processor application is a darn good word processor. The presentation and spreadsheet applications are also pretty good though not great.

Weaknesses: The Draw program is just plain lame, hard to use, and lacks features. The OpenOffice.org GUI is ugly and many icons don't look like anything. The database program seems more techie than Access and lacks application tools.

Email: Thunderbird from Mozilla

This is an example where the open source/freeware version far exceeds the commercial variety. Simply the best email client for most people with awesome anti-spam filters. Add the Lightning add-on for calendaring and you have everything you need.

Strengths: Manages multiple email accounts as one. Freely available add-ons give Thunderbird all kinds of features that are not found in other email clients without creating bloatware. The anti-spam and security features are unbeatable. It's fast and easy too. Lots of support for use with online services like Google Calender, Remember the Milk, and Trip It. Thunderbird integrates news feeds from RSS, ATOM, and Newsgroups into your email.

Weaknees: No native Exchange or Blackberry sync support. This kills it in the business environment. Yes you can have Thunderbird access the same LDAP compliant address books as a Blackberry and make Exchange available as a POP server but that's a kludge. Could also use IM support.

Browser: FireFox from Mozilla and Chrome from Google

This isn't fair of course since almost all browsers are free. Still, you don't have to live with Internet Explorer. As a side note, this is what I find so odd about the recent EU slapdown of Microsoft. They didn't seem to understand that you can install five other browsers with less effort than uploading photos to Flickr. I still don't get it. But I digress...

I could write for days about the strengths and weaknesses of these two browsers. Needless to say, they are better than IE and everyone knows it or doesn't care.

Image Editing: GIMP (Gnu Image Processor).

Despite another lousy name which makes it sound both broken and politically incorrect, GIMP is the best image editor this side of Adobe Photoshop. You can actually get an add-on that makes it look and act sort of like Photoshop.

Strengths: Up to your eyes in features and filters. You can pretty much do everything imaginable in GIMP. Lots of add-ons give you all kinds of additional image manipulation features.

Weaknesses: A lot of time add-ons simply don't work and they are always tough to install. The standard GUI is also quite hideous which is ironic given what the software does. It can be hard to do more complex manipulations that commercial software has wizards for.

Sound Editing and Recording: Audacity.

Gotta love the name which is clearly a play on words. Audacity is a sound recording and editing program with a host of features including the ability to use industry standard VST plugins. This makes Audacity a great tool for the amateur and a platform for the pro.

Strengths: Gobs of features. Does all the basics such as analog and digital recording plus lots of signal processing to clean up what you record. My favorite feature is the ability to mark places in an analog signal and export them as separate MP3 files. If you are ripping an old analog record, this is a very necessary function.

Weaknesses: No mixer. You can mix but it is not as simple of moving a bunch of virtual sliders. The interface is busy and complicated. Compared to commercial offerings like Pro-Tools, Audacity can be confusing. A lot of the plugins you find on the Internet don't work well or at all. You need to have a good grounding in signal analysis or sound engineering to do most anything.

Instant Messaging: Digsby

I've tried a lot of IM clients including Trillian and Pidgin. None compare to Digsby. What makes Digsby special is that it can handle a wide range of Internet-based messaging. Not only does it connect to every major IM system, it can also connect to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, POP email, and Online Email like Yahoo. Email support mostly allows you to preview messages and launch the real site or client, but that is more than most of the others do.

Strengths: Extensive support for all the major (and quite a number of the minor) IM networks plus social networks and email. Malleable and attractive interface with support for skins. Good Twitter support.

Weaknesses: Email support is not complete so it cannot be used as an all-in-one messaging platform. Digsby also lacks user created plugins which limit functionality compared to more open offerings such as Pidgin. It is also the only program mentioned here that is Windows-only. The website says that “ digsby is coming soon for Mac and Linux!” but that is not the same as now or even “November”.

I'm sure there are a bunch more if I took the time to think about it. What is most encouraging is that the ability exists to put together a complete set of desktop applications for nothing. You just have to compromise a bit, especially in terms of support for corporate systems and GUI. That is might be enough for some folks to pass. Too bad. They are missing out on a great opportunity in these frugal times.

How Microsoft Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Netbook

2009-07-28T13:55:00.007-04:00

There has been a number of news stories lately about Microsoft and netbooks. The upshot of the articles has been how amazed people have been that Microsoft is not overtly hostile to netbooks. The second round of news was that folks at Microsoft consider many netbooks to just be little notebooks.

Why does this surprise anyone? Many computers sold as netbooks are basically notebooks with small screens and cramped keyboards. They have nearly the horsepower of a desktop computer with hard drives nearing 200GB and one or two Gigabytes of RAM. This is a far cry from the original netbooks which had tiny four or eight Gigabyte solid-state hard drives and and 512MBs of memory.

Most importantly, these new netbooks/notebooks run Windows. If nothing else this should make Microsoft sing with glee and do cartwheels. When the first netbooks were introduced with Linux as the OS, many immediately predicated the demise of Microsoft. Clearly, the rumors of its death was greatly exaggerated.

While the original netbooks were okay (and only okay) for Internet access at Starbucks, they were close to useless for nearly everything else. Why? Because most people use Windows applications not Linux applications. If you want to take any of your important applications with you, you can't. Like that presentation that you are flying in for. You don't need a big honking laptop for just that. But you do need PowerPoint. And, while I love OpenOffice.org (I'm writing this using the Writer application) it just isn't want what most people use. Neither are online applications.

For Microsoft, it gets even better. Most netbooks use Windows XP. They get to drag a little more revenue out of their dying old product and get set up for Windows 7. What's not to love? More money!

All of this money also comes with the gratification that they kicked Linux, as a desktop OS, right in the teeth again. They also proved that that the desktop OS still matters and that not everything is online yet and might never be.

Finally, for those who really want a netbook to be what it was supposed to be, our buddies in Redmond will soon roll out an online (and viable) version of Office. You will be able to access it from your Windows 7 notebook and show the customer your PowerPoint presentation. Microsoft everywhere, no matter where your office is.

It is no surprise that Gates and Ballmer are not intimidated by netbooks. They own the netbook market. I can see them doing their happy dance right now. And it's not pretty...

The Incredible Shrinking Communication

2009-07-20T10:18:00.004-04:00

It seems that we are constantly inventing shorter ways to communicate. Note that I didn't say faster or more efficient, just shorter. The Internet especially seems to want to help us shorten the length of what we read. In the age of print, books and pamphlets dominated alongside newspaper and magazine articles. While radio and television started the process of condensing communication, it has accelerated dramatically since the Internet became more ubiquitous. Our attention spans shrink and so does what we read.

Of course, the perceived attention span shrinkage may be a symptom not a cause. As we have less time to devote solely to reading, we crave shorter forms that give us what we need most in the smallest amount of time possible. We still want longer form writing when we have the time. Reading a book on the beach is the ultimate summer pleasure. Other times, we barely have time to check Facebook. Subsequently, we now have a hierarchy of written communication. It starts off long and detailed and ends in microblogging which is incredibly short – haiku short – and lacking entirely in details.

Books provide deep understanding. If you want to become expert at something, books are a good place to start. Articles don't go as deep as books but the longer format allows you to become knowledgeable about a great many things in a short amount of time.

Unfortunately for the magazines and newspapers that typically publish articles, blogs are superseding them. Blogs have a two key advantages – instant distribution and easy publishing. Instead of waiting hours or even months to get something in print, a blog gets your “article” out there right away. And anyone can publish a blog. No wrangling with editors and publishers. No pesky fact checkers. That, of course, is the weakness of the blog. As a reader you don't always know if you are getting facts, opinion, spin, or outright falsehood. Blogs are killing newspapers and magazines and I worry that the truth will die with them. Disclosure: I always present this blog as opinion and nothing more. Don't believe everything you read. Fight the power!

Microblogging and status messages on services like Facebook are quickly becoming the way that many people broadcast information. Short, instantaneous bursts of information, microblogging leaves little room for understanding or explanation. In terms of depth of knowledge they are at the shallow end of the pool. But this is what we want or need. We want to know a little something about everything but don't have the time to read hundreds of books, newspapers, or articles. It's kind of like an information buffet. You take a taste of this and that so that you can see what you like.

As recent events in Iran have shown, microblogging is a very powerful media. Anyone can crank out a Tweet from a cell phone and have it be published before authorities even know it's there. It's hard to censor in those circumstances. Once again - Fight the power!

Perhaps in the future communication will get so short that no one will say anything at all. I could live with that. It would certainly cut down on the information overload if there was no information. I doubt very much that's where we will end up. But every time I predict we are at the floor, we push right through it.

Still, with SMS limited to 160 characters and Twitter limited to 140, I can't imagine how much smaller we could go. Perhaps we will need to write in glyph based languages like Chinese or Ancient Egyptian where more information is contained in each character.

Of course, many times there is beauty in simplicity and in an economy of words. In that vein I offer you this haiku:

Like the bird in spring

Sitting in the tallest tree

I must Tweet today

Ba Da Bing!

2009-06-29T15:22:00.003-04:00

Microsoft has recently launched it's new search engine, called Bing, with a massive advertising campaign. Excuse me. It's not a search engine. It's “the worlds first decision engine.” Whatever that means.

Okay, I know what that means. At least what Microsoft wants you to think it is. The thrust of the marketing campaign is that you get better tools for deciding which sites to bother. Of course, that's not the real purpose of Bing. At its heart, Bing is about sticking Google in the eye with a pointed stick. Not unlike the purpose of Google Chrome which is to kick Internet Explorer in the groin. As good as they are, neither delivers the knockout that these companies would like to deliver. And so it goes.

Being the hopeless tech geek that I am, I couldn't help messing around with Bing and found a few interesting surprises. The unique features that Microsoft has created have led me to use Bing pretty much the way I approach Chrome – it is more useful in certain circumstance but won't change my everyday habits.

Google is still my go-to search engine for most everyday uses in the much the same way Firefox is my everyday browser. When I want something quick and dirty, Google is my engine of choice. That's not going to change. It excels at finding the usual stuff quickly. If what I'm looking for will pop up in the first three entries, Google is great. Its clean interface helps, providing users the basics like the site name and summary, so that it is easy to identify a site quickly.

Bing is different. It is really good at organizing result sets. Like Google, you can toggle between different types of searches, such as Images, Video or News, using links at the top of the page. Unlike Google, the information on the page is arranged into logical categories, specific to the search, with the best hits displayed in each category. You can see more of the them if you like but that's usually pointless. If what you want is not in the top five hits, its not anywhere in the results.

For example, in searching for Helen Kane (a singer from the 1930s that was the model for Betty Boop), I get general results, then categories such as Songs and Albums. Even better, on the left side are similar searches. In this case, actors and musicians from the late 1920's and early 1930's are featured. Makes sense.

Together, these two features make it easier for me to drill into just what I want without complicated queries. For more obscure information, Bing makes it easier to find what I need by guessing some structure and organizing the results accordingly.

Another feature that Microsoft is touting is the little popup on the side of each entry that gives a more intelligent summary of the site. It's fine for what it does but is more of an amusement than a useful tool. You don't get enough to avoid clicking through to the site and the simple summary on the page is usually enough to decide if you want to click through in the first place. Cool technology in search of meaning.

There is yet another advantage to Bing, though the same could be said for Yahoo, Ask, and any other search engine – different results. The dirty little secret of all search engines is that the same query often returns different result sets. The search algorithms are based on statistical equations that can return different sets even when run on the same data. You can sometimes get different results from the same data set by rerunning the same queries on the same engine. Since the search is kind of fuzzy, the result set is not absolute. This has long been one of the reasons that professional researchers will often use more than one commercial database provider even when the underlying data is the same. I saw this a lot in the patent search game.

All that is to say that using multiple engines for particularly difficult searches is a good strategy in any event. When the quick Google search fails to get me what I want, I can now turn to Bing. I get some different results and some better organization.

Technology-wise, Microsoft has come up with excellent search software. Unfortunately, that is not enough to move people toward abandoning Google and using Bing as the search engine of first choice. Instead, it will be where you go when Google doesn't cut it. Good technology but bad business. Bad business because Bing needs advertising and lower hits translates to lower revenue. Bing is not a Google killer. More of a Google annoyer.

Let me put it another way. It's not going to go Ba Da Bing on Google.

FCoE is Rubbish

2009-06-25T17:15:00.005-04:00

I'm beginning to understand the debate about the Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FcoE) concept and I don't like it. At first it made little sense to me. iSCSI delivered most of what we needed in terms of cheap SANs. It leveraged the IP infrastructure already in place in just about every organization in the world. iSCSI also made use of 40 years of experience, knowledge, and training. For high performance you went with Fiber Channel since iSCSI couldn't meet the very high loads of some systems. Otherwise, iSCSI was good enough for a lot of applications.

So why FCoE? The cost structure is likely to be higher than iSCSI or at best the same. The performance wouldn't be the same as pure FC. The idea that you need a gateway to the IP network doesn't really make sense to me either. Who really does that anyway? A few folks doing long distance SANs perhaps but there are tools for that and cost is not a big problem in those environments. You can always gateway to iSCSI if needed and the hardware for that already exists.

Then it occurred to me. It's marketing, stupid! When networking vendors such as Cisco go out and sell their SAN products, they are generally on the same footing as the FC players like Brocade. Brocade has more experience and knowledge about SANs which translates into an advantage for them. They also know the storage folks inside large companies that network vendors don't. Those storage guys like having their own flavor of network technology. It keeps the network admins out of their shorts.

Now, FCoE starts to make sense. You can sell IT on convergence or native integration or unified platforms or whatever marketing babble you choose. It is hoped that management will rally around the idea of having one networking platform even for two different types of network applications. Don't kid yourself, SANs and LANs are very different network applications with very different technology needs.

Best of all, as a networking vendor you have the upper hand in the sale. You can insert your champions (the core networking folks) into the process. You can sell expertise that the FC guy doesn't have. The worst case scenario has you on equal footing to the FC vendor where you can sell on the merits of the products. Of course, with 30 more years of experience in Ethernet, you will have a few tricks up your sleeve that the FC guy doesn't. Nice position to be in.

FCoE as a convergence/integration/unified platform play is rubbish. No one is going to run SAN traffic and LAN traffic over the same Ethernet network. It will still be two pools of equipment, much of it specialized to FCoE. Most of the real networking expertise in a company is in the IP space so no real advantage there. Once you start to install the specialized FCoE switches and NICs (or brand new unified platforms using a forklift I imagine) the costs won't be that much different.

iSCSI makes sense in so far as it provides a low cost SAN option for low to mid-performance SANs. Old fashioned FC makes sense because it provides a proven high performance storage networking capability for intense applications. FCoE does neither. All it does is give networking vendors a leg up against existing FC vendors.

Great marketing I must admit. Not convincing technology but a good way to position SANs as just another network flavor. If there is a technology advantage here it doesn't seem to create much of a business advantage for the IT folks.

I'm sure I'll get a bunch of hate mail telling me all the minor advantages of FCoE, many from corporate mouthpieces. Instead of wasting your time on that, tell me why someone will pay money for FCoE rather than iSCSI or FC. Tell me why we need to gateway SANs from FC to Ethernet which can't be routed and hence not good for wide area applications like remote backup.

Don't go down the road of the unified platforms either. Saying you need FCoE to create unified networks is not true and, at best, self serving. Unified platforms happen because of software not Ethernet.

Just don't say convergence, okay.

Software Collectivism

2009-06-17T15:48:00.003-04:00

What makes great software? Better yet, why do some companies or institutions make great software for awhile then push out mediocre product? On some level, it might be because they simply run out of good ideas. As software companies become more successful they also become so focused on giving customers what they ask for that they no longer leave room for innovative and inspired ideas. I've seen that a lot. The accountants and the operations people get involved. All the creativity gets sucked out of the process and the result is boring, me-too, and incremental.

The bigger problem may be environmental. The best software organizations often started out as lose associations of people, more like collectives or communes then traditional companies. Microsoft in it's early days was a bunch of guys sharing an apartment trying to score a big deal. It was freewheeling, creative, and irrational. How could this bunch of kids think they could land a deal with IBM, then the biggest computer company in the world? It was nuts but no one told them that.

There is a reason so many tech companies get started in college dorms. You concentrate smart people with no preconceived notions of what is (or more important isn't) possible. No silly meetings, just creative action. Yahoo and Google both started this way. Google is desperately trying to hold onto that part of the culture even as it grows to enormous size and influence. The same is true of Facebook.

What these companies have in common is that they are formed within a commune-like environment with few rules. This is critical since innovation is inherently irrational. You have to be willing to suspend the negative beliefs and inputs common in business. There has to be an acceptance of small failures and forks in the road as part of the process of creating greatness. No one told these “kids” that what they were doing was stupid. The only thing stupid was the amounts of money they made. The open source community was like this in the beginning. A virtual commune if you will. All could participate and contribute whatever they could. Everyone could reap the rewards of the results too.

Collectives are common in the art world. Groups of artists get together in loose confederations to bring individual talents to bear on a project. Once the project is done, the artists move on to other projects and other associations.

Software is like art. It is unpredictable, creative, and inspired when done right. Like a group of artists, programmers need to keep a single and irrational (there's that word again) focus on producing something wonderful without being bothered by the corporate drones. A commune-like environment helps maintain that focus and keeps at bay those who would suck the air out of the room with negativity.

These environments can be recreated in the corporate world. Back in the 1990's I had the pleasure of working in a group like that. We were isolated from the day to day operations of the company, both physically and psychologically. What came out of that group was spectacular with a few failures that we learned from. It didn't last long but it was great while it did.

So, if you want innovation in software, if you want new, inspired, and just plain cool products, then create software communes for your programmers. Keep them away from the corporate vampires that would suck the life out of them. Recognize that software is art not science and approach development that way. It might seem weird to the rest of the company which is exactly the point.

I feel inspired. Maybe I'll organize a software collective to create something awesome.

People. People Who Need People.

2009-06-12T11:30:00.004-04:00

If you ever saw Sesame Street then you know the tune to “Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood?” Sing with me...

So after complaining bitterly about people who kill innovation and products, I thought it made sense to talk about the people who do the opposite. The people who make innovative products happen. I'm not talking about the folks who are tasked with designing and creating new products like engineers. They can make a product but cannot make a product happen.

So, here I want to sing about the unsung heroes of the product development process. Cue the Bob and Muppets please.

The Visionary

Behind every successful product stands a visionary. The Visionary recognizes good ideas and has that irrational need to see them turned into useful products. They never lose faith even when the folks in Sales declare they could never sell it and the Finance people are totally freaking out with thoughts of bankruptcy burning in their heads.

It's not that The Visionary doesn't get the risks, they just see beyond them. They provide the energy that keeps people going in the face of setbacks and derision. Lacking The Visionary, the most innovative products die on the vine, starved for affection and direction. Without The Visionary, everyone on the product development team eventually wanders off to more acceptable projects with more predictable outcomes. In other words, incremental boring product development instead of the truly wonderful.

The Visionary provides the necessary moral support during the darkest days. Kind of a combination of mom and Yoda.

The Git-er-done Guy

Whereas The Visionary has the faith, they often don't have a clue how to make the vision occur in real life. That's where The Git-er-done Guy comes in. They can map out all the things that need to occur in order for the vision to be realized. The Git-er-done Guy makes sure everyone stays on track and actually makes the blasted product. If there is no Git-er-done Guy, product development degrades into naval gazing and staring at the stars. Nice recreation but rarely productive.

Let me put it another way – no one buys vision. Okay some VC's do but not your average consumer. The Git-er-done Guy makes sure the grand idea becomes a grand product.

The Plumber

Sooner or later, all product development runs into problems. This is especially true for the most innovative products. Often, it's the internal workings of the corporation that are clogging up the works and impeding progress. It's sad but true that there are a lot of people within a company that will not benefit from an innovative new product. It might be because it will take away resources or attention from their own products. Another likely culprit is FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. When a company does something it has never done before, it scares the heck out of a lot of well meaning folks. And there are the power mongers who see a new initiative as a threat to their own status and well being.

All of this negative energy has a tendency to hold up product development like a stuck drain. Enter The Plumber!

The Plumber knows how to remove obstacles. The Plumber knows the workarounds. The Plumber gleefully unclogs the corporate drain and lets the project flow normally. You can tell who The Plumber is because they are first person to say “ Let me see what I can do..” when some obstacle is holding up forward motion. They have the skills and, more importantly, the desire to roto-router the clog and get things moving again. They might only appear once during a project but boy are you glad they did.

Making products, especially the best, most innovative, and coolest products, is an act of faith. Lots of people lack that faith and actively suck the air out of the room. The Visionary, The Git-er-done Guy, and The Plumber make sure all the negative vibes (and action) don't kill or maim the wonderful and new. Find them. Foster them. Then thank them.