As I sit here in my new Atomic Tangerine office I know I have a lot to be thankful for. As much as I like to complain about everything that is going wrong, because after all this is my only outlet, things are pretty damn phenomenal over here. I get so much fanmail about literally everything we do that it’s hard to pick out just one thing we do really, really well - it’s difficult to even prioritize. For example, I got woken up at 3 AM this morning with a request to put up a blog post saying that yes, everything is OK, even though a 5.6 magnitude earthquake rocked our MAE West data center in San Jose.

There is one feature though, that really seems to have gotten a superhero status within ExchangeDefender. I am pretty much ashamed to the core of my soul to admit it because it’s that classic Microsoft innovation irony, of throwing together crap that has existed for decades and pretending its the next coming of Christ.  

But customer is always right and I’ll take all the fanmail I can get.

The feature I am talking about is called ExchangeDefender LiveArchive (our new ExchangeDefender web site that goes live tomorrow or its third prize boys).

The reason I can talk about it shamelessly is because, like the Microsoft Innovation Directive #109 states, it’s finally out of 1.0 and ready for prime time and is damn near flawless after we rewrote a major part of the authentication that was just a nightmare.

What’s this innovation I speak of? Well, we’ve built an exact replica of your mail server in the cloud! It’s distributed, it’s seamless, it keeps last 7 days worth of email and it works in realtime – read, send, reply, forward or delete email with your own identity, signature, name and any email address in your Exchange profile. Did I mention that its free? Yup.

Now, to the observant and educated eye this is just a webmail with a stateless copy of all inbound email. However, to the gullible IT staffer I am Vlad, defender of all email.

Most importantly, to the organization that just had its fiber chopped in half, Dell server processor meltdown, corrupt Outlook profile or Exchange mail store crash that will take eseutil 3 hours to rebuild….. this is Vladfairy sprinking his magic SMTP dust that makes business communication fly.

Must….stop….drinking… at…. work.

I cannot even begin to quantify the number of people that have emailed us to thank us for this feature and all its been able to do for their users. I now know of every major disaster, Internet outage and brush fire because people email me to tell me they were able to stay in business without a second thought because they just continued to work as is.

With the hurricane spinning just off the coast of Florida, my community that has been hit from every angle imaginable by every name in the dictionary, this feature and this feature alone is what makes my job worth doing. Even if the whole day gets wasted writing a newsletter.

Thank you to all of those that have supported and used ExchangeDefender through the years. Your money, through the good and the bad times, has made it possible for things like this to come to market and really make a life-or-death of business value to all our clients.

Thank you.

For the past two days I have been writing and deleting major portions of Own Web Now’s upcoming newsletter. You see, we are a network operations and software development company that caters exclusively to the tech savvy audience and some of it is too stupid to figure out how RSS works, in spite of it being completely integrated in their OS, their browser, their desktop and their email agent.

These folks, many of whom fork over thousands of their clients cash to keep junk mail out of their mailboxes, would like us to spam the crap out of them. So they can be better informed? No. So they have one less thing they can complain about when things go wrong and they feel they haven’t been informed enough about it. In the recent statistical breakdown, my support staff spends half the time answering questions about crap that has been documented. They have been begging me for a “canned response” functionality in Shockey Monkey but I don’t have the time to get to it because I am sitting around designing a newsletter for people that will never read it.

Loving my fucking job… I’ve been reduced to a retarded secretary that is too slow to be an administrative assistant (I think the professional name for this condition is “PR Professional”)

Anyhow, assuming the ConstantContact messages aren’t routed straight to trash, the design of a newsletter is really a battle: uneducated PR meets idiotic marketing. Who wins? Well, the bandwidth providers that have to move all of this garbage around, so it will never be seen as more of a headline. So, I am really trying to isolate who I am supposed to cater to.

I imagine 90% of the people will junk the newsletter.

The remaining 10% will either build a rule, try to unsubscribe or forward it to someone else that will not read it.

Of those 10% I am assuming 1% will actually read it.

So, 0.1% of my total newsletter distribution will be comprised of people that:

• Read everything I write
• What the hell is this OWN thing, click..
• Oh, Vlad! Let me at least skim through it and see what he’s up to.

I am perhaps closest to that last one, meaning I will scan through some of the newsletters while the other ones I am just hitting delete while the preview window is on. I have my Outlook set to automatically download images as to make them feel good about thier job, make it seem like someone cares.

So here is what I’ve decided to do.. We’ll have a single newsletter, with a single publishing date – 3rd of the month. Why third? Well, try pronouncing third with my accent and you’ll find out the contents of every newsletter you’ve ever seen. (if you don’t get it, don’t worry)

Top / side of the newsletter will have the headlines, which is likely what anyone would be interested in even remotely (my client base is not the impulse buyer group, telling them about AuthAnvil will not open the floodgates of Amex) and the rest will be copy and pastes of stuff already found on Own Web Now Blog and Network Operations site.

Hope you have a more fulfilling day than I will…

From the Captain Obvious Department: Internet has changed since Al Gore invented it.

ICAAN, the international body governing the top level domain policies, is meeting tomorrow to decide the faith of the whois system, originally designed to help organizations identify domain name ownership / identity. However, as the Internet has grown beyond its legitimate residents of pornography and students (ehm, researchers) seeking the said pornography, many criminals have found the whois system to be an excellent source of b2b spam data. Imagine the freely accessible, global database of domain names matched to the identity of the IT person in charge of it – why, you could SPAM them to death, you could send them fake domain renewal requests, you could build your own database, the possibilities for evil are endless.

Over the past few years few registrars have found a way to make money off this problem by offering “Private” registrations. Now it seems ICAAN is looking to put an end to it completely, a timely decision benefiting nobody.

If you would like privacy online you might want to think of a good fake name. Vlad Mazek is taken. Just use your fake name and you’ll be set.

Here is the problem though, or at least the start of the problem, for the privacy conscious – you’ve seen nothing yet! If you think the ability to match the organization with the contact IT person is a skill you might as well move to Afghanistan an start digging a hole because if you’ve ever lived, worked, Googled or had your picture taken (or been in a public place) your anonymity is soon to be gone. That is at least where we’re going folks.

Just what do you think this whole “Web 2.0” thing is? A giant party for heterosexual-yet-inactive-but-not-by-choice residents of San Francisco? Not entirely. The “Web 2.0” and its full embrace is about replacing the traditional content of the Internet as it was in the 90’s when it was dominated by people that had something of value to say (researchers) or something of value to show (porn). But now that everyone with the keyboard is a researcher and everyone with the webcam is a porn star the Internet is elevating a little bit. “Web 2.0” is about identifying relationships.

Internet of 1999 can be summed up by two web sites – www.youtube.com and www.wikipedia.com. One is a continuous stream of crap to share with the people you barely know, the other is a loosely reliable knowledge database. And Web 2.0 is changing that. Web 2.0 is changing the Internet as we knew it and making it about connecting more than 90’s version was about linking. In plainer terms, Web 2.0 drags you to the person you want, introduces you and reads you their bio. The old Internet gives you their old business card.

That is only where the fun begins. The old privacy concerns used to be finding out where you lived and what your phone number was. Todays privacy concern is that everything you say, do, participate or enjoy becomes an immediate and accessible public property. And all the world is your neighborhood. Networks like Twitter allow people to publish their entire life, which they personally open up, to anyone that might be watching. listening and reading. You don’t even have to be a willing participant, if you’ve taken a picture with someone that uploaded it to their social network and then “tagged” you, that data is up there.

And the Web 2.0 is all about personalizing and connecting this world wide web of information that is just sitting out there, waiting to be put together…. and abused. See why people fear Google?

This has been on my mind for a little while now and sometimes the fanboy eyeglaze needs to wear off before you evaluate things for what they are.

I will never buy another Windows Mobile phone until Microsoft stands behind its platform and here is why you shouldn’t either: It’s not Microsoft.

Microsoft has made its significant wealth by producing business tools that grew, scaled and upgraded. I have never owned a computer that I couldn’t upgrade to the next version of Windows. Our servers have scaled from Windows Server standard, to SBS, to Enterprise with clustering. We (and I) could afford to keep up with the technology and with Microsoft and realize the business and productivity benefits because we did not face a significant hardware charge every time we wanted to implement something new. The idea of Software Assurance further delivers on this promise.

But take that same strategy to Windows Mobile platform. Can you do the same? For a very large population of devices the answer is yes – albeit, illegally.

Want a legal way to upgrade your phone? $499 please. Wait, $499 is $400 more than you advertise a brand new phone for, how can an upgrade cost four times more? Oh! You’re not really upgrading my phone, which is perfectly capable of running the said software, you’re just replacing it with the brand new phone. Oh, and you want at least a two year contract on it too?

This is where the Microsoft – OEM – Telco menage a  trois infuriates the customer and makes them abandon Windows Mobile and crumbles the Exchange, Unified Communications, Windows Platform and the “connected” dream evaporates: They look elsewhere.

I cannot and will not recommend a Windows Mobile phone anymore until Microsoft starts offering upgrades for them, directly from Microsoft’s site. Please do not buy into the lie that only the OEM can write the drivers and only the carrier can publish it because thats a total copout. For literally everyone in my audience that has seen a Windows Mobile demo or a new release preview, just what do you think that demo ran on? Boiling pot of water? Of course not. Microsoft develops and tests this software on the Windows Mobile devices you own and use. Every developer that compiles of a piece of Windows Mobile code already has the architecture cabs as a part of their Visual Studio SDK for mobility so if we can roll out the new OS, if we can compile software for it – what are we waiting for the OEM and the carrier to do? Compile their garbage IM software and design a new theme?

OEMs and carriers have the least incentive to implement any software upgrades because it means more support and more documentation work for them. They usually never relase them and you’re stuck buying a new phone. And in business, being forced to buy something new and abandon something functional is equivalent to theft.

Blackjack is my last Windows Mobile phone, even if I get a free one I will give it away.

If you are a business, avoid Windows Mobile until Microsoft chooses to stand behind its platform a little more than just releasing Haloween backgrounds and ringtones.

For those of you that don’t understand what I mean without using crude street language (all complaints should be sent to my PR firms: Tim Barrett & Co in USA and Susanne Dansey, LTD worldwide):

If I wanted to be fucked by a telco carrier and mislead into a product purchase of a toy that will be obsolete the moment I opened the box I would have bought an iPhone.

I know its been a few weeks since I closed down the signup forms for Shockey Monkey but the avalanche of signups was so big (along with the other internal OWN issues I mentioned) and it has taken me a while to process everyones signup – I am about a day away from being done though!

I estimate that all the people that received the “You’re in email” will be in OWN Support Portal by the end of business tomorrow, and I hope that everyone is up and running and online by the end of the week. Please remember that once you get the welcome email from the support portal you need to update the contact and company information (this is required in order to generate a valid SSL certificate request) and then follow the instructions to order Shockey Monkey (which is free, for now and for a while); After the SSL certificate is generated you take it to GoDaddy or your choice of SSL signing places and obtain the cheapest possible SSL certificate signed for Apache. Copy and paste the certificate (or attach) to the order ticket and I’ll get you up and running by the end of this week. Promise.

Considering that there is no way to get Shockey Monkey anymore, this is the end of the line where I’m going to be the sole marketer / developer / activator and manager of the project so things will start moving quite a bit faster from now on.

For what its worth, thank you for your patience and I look forward to spending most of my time on development again…

It’s been about a month since I logged into the Facebook. It’s been about two weeks or so since I even looked at Yahoo groups (sans one bad day I ended up wasting on the drama of Senseless & Hopeless); I have no idea just how far I have fallen back on the RSS feeds, blogs and other community lists/sites I follow but it’s been a while.

So today I did a flush – mark all unread items as read and will look at it next week when things calm down a little.

These things happen every now and then, you fall back and… well, you can either deal with depression of being behind every time you open your RSS reader or you just say screw it, I’m just going to miss out on a few things. Now, it’s given that you are going to fall back every now and then so key is to be prepared. I have a few blogs (maybe 5 total) that I check every single day because I know those movers and shakers make a difference in my world and if I miss their moves I am screwed. Then I have the hundred others “amplifying” the same stuff, so even if I ignore a few weeks of their stuff it will not be the end of their world.

I always look for tiers to help my day, and being human I only have two tiers… Important and not. Important gets done. Not important doesn’t get done today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not ever unless it becomes important again. Priorities are a wonderful thing.

I don’t know why anyone would ever want to try this but OS X 10.5 “Leopard” has already been hacked for installation on a PC. You need a single layer DVD copy of Leopard that you can get off thepiratebay.org and a this patch set.

Leopard on a PC? Just how badly does Vista suck in peoples eyes if they are willing to consider this?

Ok, so a slight delay in the hints of whats going on because I’m drunk. I forgot margaritas fix everything and I have already sent my official DrunkSMS to Dave Sobel (we exchange them on weekends). Anyhow… Yes. The blue pacific margarita. Yum. Tasty. And works very quickly when you’ve pulled an all nighter and traveled a few thousand miles in the 24 hours.

Where was I.. yes, drunk. Not Queenie drunk where at 2.0 BAC she can still recite A Midsumnmer Night’s Dream but Nascar drunk. So, whats in the store at OWN. Well, here is the thing. We’re taking what we already have and we’re mashing it up together. We already have the corporate blog, and last week we launched the network operations center to let people know whats going on our network in realtime so there aren’t “are you guys breaking the internet tickets”; This of course ties in back and forth but we’re taking it a step further with Shockey Monkey and doing predictive pulls based on the ticket context. So if you indicate that you’re having a problem with your web hosting and we’re patching Microsoft servers an advisory link to NOC will pop up. Nifty, I almost know how I’m going to do it!  I am here to inspire confidence. Now, we’re also adding a documentation network, you can actually see a themed mockup over at our Documentation Center, we’re just waiting for the lawyers to finish up their circle **** and figure out what content can and cannot be shown in public. The idea is that there will only be one spot for documentation and support team is to ruthlessly link to the established pages and document new ones whenever someone with more brains than we have asks an intelligent question that wasn’t previously answered (ie: hole in the documentation). Finally, new flagship product pages for.. well, everything.   I can’t show you this yet (some marketing thing) but it ought to launch by Monday.  The OWN hopefully by the end of the week because there are more products. We are taking a different direction, we’re doing more “consultative selling” on the solutions so that both SMBs and IT solution providers can deliver an effective pitch to whoever decides to cut the check. I believe I explained the concept of sold you a dream before where it is your objective to give the subject enough information so they can sell themselves the dream of actually using your proposed solution. Well, we’re doing that. I’m bringing lots of Vlad to it too, embedded podcasts and video, lord knows I never intend to pick up a phone again so if you want to hear my soothing voice you’ll be able to listen to me sell sharepoint parts. I can hear women (yes, both of them) just melting with excitement over it.

Finally, and most defeatedly if I can be allowed to make up a word – a monthly mailing list. First of the month, I will send an email to our parnters, customers, friends and give them the insight into the things you’d already know if you gave a f… This is a huge disappointment, we’re putting together a defunct 90’s technology for the people who are supposed to be technology consultants yet cannot grasp the modern concept of syndicated content distribution..

And you know how I said sooner than later.. Yeah… 1st. November 1st. November first, 2007. Thats like 5 days out or so. Drunkass out.

I’m getting too old for this shit; strings of allnighters don’t mix well with cross country flights… anyhow, feeling much better about things after the all nighter and whats going on. Flew to Dallas yesterday, back in Orlando in the new office now. Here is the oneliner that kind of made my week:

“Taking time off future tasks to address current problems? Yeah, I remember when Microsoft did that in 2001, thank god their software hasn’t been plagued by security issues since then!”

Smartasses. But the point is valid, whether I like it or not, this is the high tech field and it waits for noone, forgives no mistakes. To be honest, I think I may have overblown the severity of this without cause because I tend to take people at their word – after all, they are my partners, why would they mislead me if we share a common interest? Well, here is what numbers revealed – thousands of partners making a ton of money off virtually all of our products. Over 80% of those have not opened a single ticket! Of the 20% of the partners that did, roughly 100 partners and/or clients have caused over 50% of the support cases.

Now…. either we suck horribly, horribly bad for those 100 companies while 14,000+ are OK, or we allowed some people that really do not qualify to offer our products without knowing how to support/troubleshoot them. That was my first question. Then I got to see the breakdown per criteria – the number of tickets opened where it was clear that the user did 0 troubleshooting and was just handing the bucket off to the vendor “just checking if its you” (me) – 60%. We’re not talking about companies that had legitimate issues, that even opened tickets on daily basis or for the same thing over and over again – I’m talking about guys who at any time had 8 outstanding tickets asking the same questions that were answered in the manual but they didn’t read it because, and I quote: “I wanted your answer to these questions before I waste my time reading through a bunch of text.”; Mind you that this includes the legitimate support requests, service issues, problems, orders, etc.

So either we suck or some of our partners don’t deserve to be in our partner program. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and I will take the responsibility for it because I am the one that allowed everyone with a decent web site into the partner program. I will admit and take responsibility for the issues with the billing, with the service quality and for poorly qualifying and training my partners. Thats my bad, and we will fix it. This is also where it gets ugly – there is rampant abuse of the system as it is right now and that will have to adjust as well.

I am very optimistic about this and I promise you this will not take long. The mockups that were presented last night will all be live by the 1st and I will give you a preview of them tonight. If you get a chance to take a look through them and give me a quick thumbs up or thumbs down I would really appreciate it. We will fix these issues, and we will fix them fast.

BillG.

I’m still alive, thanks for checking on me. No, it’s not the survey, I still haven’t had the chance to look at the results (Note to self: record the SQL password and db name next time).

No dear friends, nothing is wrong. It’s 4 AM and I am still working. People are banging the ExchangeDefender and other product order forms faster than we can rack the servers up, our Shockey Monkey portal is flooding faster than we can hire folks to fill it, and I’ve been doing my finest Ironman performance as I’ve promised you results last week. Why me? Well, as Mr Gekko would put it: The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Thats the case here too, just who are you partnering with?

So as much as I would like to give you my take on the many business and technical epiphanies and exploits of the day-to-day CEO, I am exhausted, so I am going to offer you a really primal essence of a business that burns itself from within. The following story is true, sadly.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7055625.stm

Delhi, the Indian capital, has been swarming with the wild monkeys that had been displaced in the process of urban sprawl of this industrial-turning-service economy. I am not kidding. The city officials solution to the explosion of Rhesus monkey population within the city has been to train the larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller monkeys. I am not kidding. This same practice of arming up one group of people you hate to go after the other group of people you hate more, also known as the “United States Foreign Policy” has worked brilliantly in Afghanistan, Iraq and other marvels of American diplomacy. Again, this is not a joke. Finally, much like their human counterparts, the monkey population has had a “Macaques Blowback” as one Microsoft employee titled it, or the Rhesus Insurgency… I am STILL not kidding:

SS Bajwa, Delhi deputy mayor was killed in an attack by a horde of wild Rhesus macaques (monkeys) that jumped him and threw him (or he fell) off the first story terrace in his home. Ok, joke time:

The Monkey Horde:
So, bitch, you want to send your big langur monkeys after us? First you step on our turf, break down our hood, then you send your boys after us? <smack>

Where yo monkeys at now, huh bitch? You punk us out of our hood and now you want to play a gangster?<smack>

Who is yo daddy now, huh punk? Who’s the big monkey now? Think you can fly like me? Oh no - the floor! (rhyming is free)

Yes, I am assuming that monkeys can talk from my experince with Microsoft PSS, but even I am surprised with the gang mentality. I guess tech support will turn anything evil.

Which brings me to the concept of business building that many of you had asked me about since the Cycle of VAR post I made last week. The question that came up is: Given my business plan - how do I staff appropriately if I cannot afford the high end engineers? This is very simple - If you can’t afford high end engineers, you can’t afford to offer high end solutions. I deal with this day in and day out, and I know many of my fellow MVPs in the enterprise space see it as well - “Oh my god, I need help, the person that set this up left and nobody else knows how to do XYZ”; Now, the 20/20 hindsight says that in order to support complex infrastructure you need complex training and cross-training so you don’t have a single point of failure in your support infrastructure. And even though you’re reading this now - and probably thinking that its common sense - you are not going to do it. Why? Greed. Forget about cross-training, how can that happen when there is no initial training to begin with? And initial training, the tens of thousands of dollars in classes and out of office blocks do not happen in a startup company - hell, if the people are working less than 40 hours or billing less than 30 a week you grill them! Don’t you? But guess what, you can only whip that one horse for so long until it gets a different job. And then… then the empire falls down. Then you fall off your first story terrace. You have sold, and contracted, expensive servers that “The Genius Employee” built/hacked together at $11/hour salary and only a new $80,000 a year employee can support. No fear though, I’m sure the community will save you, that there is a partner out there just waiting to throw you a rope and save you… Yeah, you keep on smoking that crack. The core of every business plan is WHAT, HOW and EXIT STRATEGY. If your “how” is “we make it up as we go along” and the exit strategy is “we know people that can help us, I know Vlad is good with Exchange and Amy can do ISA” then not only are you screwed but you are lying to yourself about it too.

The lesson is that you can’t build your business with langur monkeys and rhesus macaques because your business is not selling bannanas, its selling high end IT infrastructure. High end infrastructure costs money, requires talent, requires training and thats why you make the big bucks. If you’re stupid enough to think you’re selling a commodity service that is going to be backed by indianinabucket.com then I assure you the fall from that first story balcony is going to happen very quickly, very painfully and now just might be the time to examine that business plan and figure out if you’re in the IT infrastructure support business or if you’re just competing with the monkeys on phones removing spyware.

Which one is it?