I got that question posed to me today in an entrepreneur interview for UCF. What I proceeded to say was a PG-13 rated response of tourette’s syndrome that most VARs, partners, techies and CIO’s spout about nearly every company they deal with:

“I love their software, but they are such total arrogant dicks that the moment someone comes out with the slightest reasonable replacement I will burn their software, piss on it, then ship it back wrapped in their support contract”

Ok, so that’s the clean version of what I get to hear regarding some of the dominant solutions in our business. Not just related to software but also regarding user group organizations, books, conferences, etc. Aren’t we just a wonderful bunch of people?

My goal as the CEO is to take responsibility for what we do and to do whatever I can to keep a customer when they are pissed. Whether its our fault or their fault, here is nothing worse than disappointing a customer… short of ignoring their requests, being deceitful about what is actually going on, and dispatching their call to India.

I handle the disputes directly, by myself. We’ve made a significant effort to make sure the problems get to me and that the problems are wide open for everyone to see, to the point of running a transparent NOC, transparent feedback system, DID that rings right on my desk. Being that open and up front about things has a lot of vulnerabilities too, which sort of serves as a motivating stick for the rest of the company to either minimize the apparent problems or document them openly so everyone is aware of what is wrong.

It tends to work. Thankfully, we don’t have many issues so I can handle the problems by myself. It does not do much towards keeping the clients though - if they are pissed, they are leaving to go to another place where they think they will get better service. However, we do get a chance to part ways on good terms and leave the door open for other solutions or down the road.

I take immense pride in what we do over at Own Web Now and the one thing I hope we can accomplish is for all of our clients to actually like doing business with us.

P.S. So what makes a client pissed? Bull and lies. IT people tend to be a pretty reasonable and understanding bunch - after all, they deal with computers that disappoint on daily basis. So they have a bit of a tolerance for failure. What they don’t have a tolerance for is being ignored, being made unimportant, not having anything to say in public, being closed in opinion and in product input.

I’ve been up since roughly 9 PM last night working on the Shockey Monkey service desk enhancements and so far the evening has been quite productive. I’d venture to guess that my output tonight has been greater than it has been over the past few days combined.

The secret to it is that practically nothing happens overnight. Nobody needs to talk to me urgently, no fires need to be put out, nobody needs to have a manual read out to them over the phone or over trouble tickets, there are no issues, nobody needs a quick minute or a quick meeting or a presentation or tickets to an event…

It’s just me and Benz, and an occasionally frightening episode of Coast to Coast to keep me awake.

Obviously, allnighters become exceedingly difficult the further you get away from college and to be honest, I’d rather take a 2 hour nap in the afternoon and trade it off for the 2 hours at the crack of dawn where I can actually focus and get stuff done.

This goes for any do not disturb task, it is nearly impossible to focus during the day with all the distractions and while I do have a sofa in my office I tend to sleep on it as I imagine I would on a bet of nails and broken glass - the moment my back touches it I jump back up - be it for the phone, forgetting to mute the sound and an IM coming through, not flagging the phone and Office Communicator in the DND mode… you name it.

So I have one question that I hope someone out there has figured out (come on Pablo!) - how do you effectively trade daytime nap hours for the midnight work hours? Is there a way to establish a long term sleep pattern that involves two sleep sessions in the 24 hour span? If so, whats your trick?

Today is the second day ever that I am ashamed to be a Floridian.

Back in August of 2005, Florida got scraped by a little hurricane called Katrina. It proceeded to go around the panhandle and absolutely decimate Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Then part of Florida’s finest Highway Patrol got dispatched to the disaster zone to help with the crisis management, driving 10+ hours to the affected areas, just to immediately turn back and go home. These scumbags, supposedly sworn to protect us, drove across the state, tagged in, and because in the middle of the catastrophe their assignment wasn’t available immediately, they decided to turn back and go home - right away.

Today, we have yet again solidified our position as the most ignorant state in the union. We collectively decided to ignore the infrastructure, education and support problems that the state faces, and decided to give ourselves a well deserved property tax break. After all, who makes better financial decisions than the poor and lower middle class families that are not just taxed the most but hit with the highest insurance premiums and second most regressive tax system.. We elected to give a giant middle finger up to the education, debt payback, insurance reforms, infrastructure investments that would actually drive businesses into the State… and chose to get ourselves a little cash back that will just go to pay for fast food and a new iPod.

I am sad, ashamed and disappointed in this turn of events. We want to live in paradise, we just don’t want to pay for it. We want to have affordable education, we just don’t want to pay for it. We want to live on an acre of land, we just don’t feel like its our duty to pay for the road, power, utilities, police, fire departments and amenities required for us actually to live there. We want to drive businesses to the State, but we don’t want to train our population to work in the kinds of jobs that still make America competitive with the rest of the open WTO world.

It is called sacrifice folks, money does not grow on trees and we cannot pound the ATM window and cry every time we need more. This is the very basic fundamental truth of fiscal responsibility that seems to be lost from the highest levels of our government to the very lowest income families that today cemented our future for a quick and meaningless rebate. 

Last night we held our first meeting since roughly September and the attendance was fairly good. We had a few regulars, few newbies, few old friends.. all in all it was a good networking meeting and the chance to catch up with peers and everyone picked up something new about Microsoft licensing, CRM 4.0, Cougar, etc.

JJ Antequino from Microsoft was on hand too, still with the TS2 team, to talk about all things tech - Linux, Vmware, Citrix, Citrix app streaming; We have been very fortunate to successfully find the balance of sabotaging his career to the point that he’s not promoted yet not fired. Good news for Florida!

Some people got new jobs and talked about that, others went back to their businesses, some got a decent haircut and a shower which is always good news. It was just an evening of discussion of diverse IT topics:

Cougar, Centro, Responsepoint, GP/CRM and financial integration middleware, Dlink switches for small business, Citrix, Microsoft Licensing (new volume), SAS70 data center certification, mobility, CLEC bailouts, Silverlight bashing, divided house on the XP vs. Vista.

So next month, we’ll try the same. At some point, someone will find some value in the captive peer audience and present something that might elevate their business and their expertise and lead to subcontractor gigs or leads.. but until that happens, the peer conversation seems to be quite valuable as well.

Pretty simple question: What dooms certain businesses to fail or never grow beyond where they are at right now and presumably have been for years?

If you ask the business owner, it’s always the same answer: money. Except it’s not really money, it’s fear - money is easy to obtain if you have an idea and can justify it to someone who actually makes a business extending currency to people that can pay it back with the business profits.

Most of the time, the problem is in getting things done. Some like to call this execution, but as I mentioned before, if you’re a particularly earnest idiot you are still doomed to failure, despite your execution. (footnote: every single NCAA athlete hoping to go pro)

In the end, it really boils down to two things that are within your own control (third being the information / due dilligence but that can be outsourced / learned): work ethic and embrace of change.

Work ethic - Let’s face it, unless your big business idea is playing lottery or legalized gambling, few things will come to you if you just sit on your ass. If you are not wired to work hard for what you want, if the ends do not justify the investment in time when you’d rather be doing something else, if you are not capable of motivating yourself when things seem their darkest… business ownership ain’t for you.

Embracing change - People are afraid of change. Tony Robbins did a presentation at TED and asked the audience if they liked surprises. Everyone yelled out “Yeeaah” to which the response was: “Bullshit. You like the surprises that are good for you.” It’s true, given the option of doing something that requires a lot of effort, retraining, thinking and reading people often opt for same ol, same ol. Even if the same ol’ crap is the reason you’re in the funk to begin with, it beats thinking and reading!

When these two superpowers combine, you get what I like to call “The Law Of Best Intentions” where people generally mean well, want to do good, are hungry to succeed and are temporarily motivated to do just that. But just as motivation is the act of raising your ass out of the chair, it works the opposite way in reverse. The act of your ass slamming back into the chair and continuing to do what you always did before gets you the same results or lack there of.

In a nutshell: If you can’t motivate yourself to work hard to be rich, go work for someone else.

Let’s face it, web browsing on a Pocket PC has been one huge disappointment after another. Not to just fault Microsoft, all other contenders have not come even close to a desktop browser in your pocket. Not Opera. Not Minimo. Not Deepfish.

Then enter iPhone with Safari with full AJAX and suddenly the Windows Mobile enthusiast is reduced from a human being to the gorilla banging the bones in front of the monolith during the 21st century odyssey.

But if you really want to browse the web on your PocketPC there is a glimer of hope, Skyfire:

It sounds ok, until you come to the part explaining that in order to get these cool features you also must run a server-side component in order to browse the web on your phone. If thats not a dealbreaker for you, here is the Youtube video.

Not very elegant, but a small price to pay for a useful web in your pocket.

I’m looking for some volunteers to help with the best practices on Network Documentation and SMB Projects. This is a part of my soon to be announced agenda behind Shockey Monkey 2.0 and the way the product is being positioned outside of the backoffice. Thats about all I am willing to say until the week after February 4th when the Shockey Monkey conf call will happen. (if you are a current SM subscriber you’ll really want to be on that call)

Concept Description

Network Documentation - Picking up on the great work by Karl Palachuk, this will be an electronic network documentation offering. The problem with paper based network documentation is that it is obsolete the moment it is printed out. Still, it is a huge asset to the company because it identifies what it owns. I would like to come up with a basic set of network documentation items (server passwords, ISP information, etc) and a more complex one that will be commercial. At this point I am considering offering the ability to create your own templates and the ability to purchase other templates for your use.

Read between the lines: I am looking to create a commercial layer where you can make money by creating electronic forms and selling them to the other Shockey Monkey users who can in turn make SM a tool the company cannot live without, an asset instead of just your own backoffice automation tool.

Project Management - Again, pimping Karl because he turns vapor into wine. But as you may imagine, this rabbit hole goes even deeper than it appears. We all know how to move a domain from one registrar to another. We also know how to switch around MX records. We all also know the syntax to export users from the active directory. Not brain surgery by any means. But quick, can you in a single sit move a pop3 user to Microsoft Exchange in the office and roll out ExchangeDefender without referring to any documentation while the phone simultaneously rings while your boss is beating you down for not being a profitable asset of his or hers company. If so, come and work at Own Web Now, we’re always hiring! Ok, Ok, back to the topic

The concept behind PM is not to replicate the functionality of Microsoft Project or other tools that nobody with less than an 8 figure project uses. The concept behind SM Project Management is to create a process for the project. Assume process is deploying a brand new server into a p2p environment. The SMPM (another acronym) is to create series of tickets and forms that can be assigned and managed by multiple people. Heck, even one person can get distracted and thrown off their game far enough that they miss a step and take 5x longer to do the simplest task. But if there was a checklist, or better yet, if there were trouble tickets to go along and update as each part of the process was completed it would become rather obvious just how far along the project is, it would become easier for multiple people to work on the project and it will become easier to get contractors to manage aspects of it too! For example, what if you outsourced the box drop, cabling and connectcomputer tasks to someone that is more suited to sitting in front of workstations and running cables and fans? You could now integrate third parties into your project and because everything is outlined in canned (that means per-populated / pre-set) tickets the process goes on without your constant advice, followup and explanations.

Just as in the items above - mo money, mo money. Think of it as a layer of compensation for community participation.

If you are interested, please drop me an email at vlad@vladville.com. Please be patient as I only check that mailbox once a day and at times there are hundred messages, or thousand messages. Preference will be given to the individuals that are using Shockey Monkey (eventually) but this need not be locked down because of what I will be discussing during February re: Shockey Monkey 2.0

We’re trying this Orlando ITPRO thing again. At some point last year I got so disheartened by the collective disinterest that I handed the ball off to someone I was hoping was dumber than me and would break his back for the common good of thankless people. He wasn’t that dumb. So the whole thing died, pretty much, and we all went our happy ways. Except that a good bunch of us still kept in touch. But then the interest in having the band together picked up – funny how there is suddenly more value in hanging out with peers when the economy goes down and the new sales leads go to shit?

So, we’re trying it again. But not on the back of any camel or on any particular message. The new moto is, “Bring Your Own Brain” or “Bring Your Own Bullshit” in strictly democratic sense. If you have something to say, you post your intention to discuss it at the next meeting and voila, you’re the featured presenter. If by some miracle we have two people, the order of presentations will be determined by the arm wrestling match. If there is no decisive winner, we move on to the coconut oil wrestling contest. It gets more graphic from there, suffice to say I think the next round would just lead to one person defering to the other.

We’ll see. So far 20+ people are on the RSVP list and I’m really taking the path of least resistence – I am only helping facilitate the delivery of the items the group overwhelmingly feels there is a need to deliver. If that becomes a monthly exchange of ideas and viewpoints, or a vendor slumber party, or whatever… it will be so not because of the leadership but because of the constituency.

We’ll see…

Well, well, well. The Windows Mobile 6 that Cingular has been promising since this device shipped, and almost a year after devices start popping up with WM6 on the market, Samsung & AT&T deliver… yawn.

To boot, there are some interesting gotchas according to Chris..

Frankly, EAS on iPhone would be a little more exciting.

I rarely blog about my actual work and what I truly do as a CEO. Too much of what I do is so unbelievable that I think most people would misread my blog posts as true ramblings of an insane man, not just progressively vulgar humor. But for your enjoyment, and for the entertainment of those soon to be laid off and considering a career in IT business ownership, here is my daily log:

Midnight - Friend/Partner keeps on bouncing his issues with ExchangeDefender directly to my email. His comments make it obvious that he has no idea how the product works, which on a level makes me think he ought not to be selling the product in the first place, but despite multiple requests to follow the protocol, he refuses to. Miscategorized SPAM is to be reported to spam@ownwebnow.com - he outright refuses to do so. Issues with the product support are answered by product support, https://support.ownwebnow.com, not the CEO. On top of which he hasn’t deployed ExchangeDefender correctly to begin with (wide open, no IP restrictions); For anyone else, I would have dropped all accounts instantly. But since he is a friend, I am wondering how far the friendship goes - remove accounts within 3 days or 7 days?

6 AM - Note from the analytics overnight job, and I quote: “It appears the system design is racist towards the Irish. Recipient restrictions cannot be enforced against the Irish with ‘ in their last name. Please discus with customer.” Well, that one is just going to go swimmingly well, “We need you to change your name because our system doesn’t like the name O’Maley.“

7 AM - Orange.co.uk, which appears to be the AOL of United Kingdom is totally broken and has 0 postmaster contacts. So far ignoring email, voicemail, phone calls and virtually every way of contacting them, both from their direct customers and from us. Frankly, I am pondering nullrouting their entire address space to see if we can get a phone call from someone over there.

9 AM - Still dealing with Blackberry and the exercise in futility that is their alliance program. I have been dealing with some 2-bit sales jerk for two weeks now over the name of our company so they can accept the NDA so they can tell us how to even begin offering their services. At this point we sit on 10 emails, 3 faxes, and two phone calls all trying to explain to a friggin Canadian that the name of the company is “OWN WEB NOW CORP” and there is no punctuation. 

9:20 AM - Letter from our international SIP carrier, notifying us that they are now in bankruptcy court and are discontinuing our service.

While writing this blog post, something just exploded outside of our building and all the banks around me have their alarms on, which is just the kind of soothing background noise I need on a difficult day.

I need to pick up some sort of a heroin or alcohol addiction. The downside is that I’m a wuss when it comes to liquor so it puts me to sleep, and I don’t like needles so that kind of kills the heroin track.

The joys of CEOdom. I think I’m going to take the advice from the bank alarm thats six blocks away and calmly walk downstairs to the art shop and hang out with the brothers and see if I can get a second hand high.

Hope this satisfies the curiosity of the people that ask how I come up with all the funny blog posts. You have to have a way to laugh at yourself or throwing yourself out of the window becomes a real option. Or you crack and go work for TS2