Things are a little quiet on the ExchangeDefender front over the past few hours. A little too quiet if you get my drift. Normally, we can tell when a spammer takes a coffee break, so either someone is hiding and keeping quiet while the feds are mapping out the points of entry or we’ve delinked China and Russia from the Internet.

Whoever is the cause for the unusually quiet morning on the spam storm front, I hope they totally OSU the spammers.

The other day you got to read about some motivational buffoonery that is often implemented in the IT field, how to demoralize your troops with a self-congratulating motivational speaker that isn’t qualified to work in this field to begin with. In case you are not motivated to read it, in a nutshell: Don’t put idiots in front of your staff because they are smarter than that and will resent you.

The same principle of “People that work here aren’t fools..” applies to the communication on corporate change. Takeover. Sale. Bankruptcy. Financial problems. High profile layoffs, legal problems, going concerns. Larger companies have to state their going concerns (or in plain terms “ah, crap”) every quarter in their financial paperwork, but smaller companies resort to a smaller and more inappropriate way of doing this: bullshit through rumors. That’s the business term for it, trust me, I went to a business school.

How does BTR work? Well, instead of being honest and up front with your staff, you call in a meeting and just start dropping hints about what is coming without being explicitly clear about it. Things like, “Our property has appreciated 800% over the past three years, so we will have some realtors around to give us an idea of exactly what its worth. Oh, I am also going to be flying to New York for about a week on business, in my absence Marcy will run the operations.” Then Marcy takes the post after the big boss leaves and she gets to answer the question if we’re for sale. She denies it, because even she may not know, meanwhile the big boss starts showing up less and less at the office. Rumors start to fly, and there is nothing like a business that is held together by collective fear of uncertainty.

Lesson: Never bs your people. They are on your side. Screw them once and you have enemies for life, making it virtually certain you can’t come back to the same market.

Is it natural for business owners to have to lie? Well, kindda; maybe not be as forthcoming about whats going on? Sure. You don’t want to break a deal just because the rumors get out because you spelled out every detail of the upcoming transaction. You also don’t want your best people looking for a new job because the last deal you spoke so highly of fell through and now they don’t get their golden parachutes. But there is a happy middle. For example, I always say we are not for sale. I always say there is no interest in going public. Knowing full well that I would catapult OWN to the moon if the price were right. This is something that is discussed though, not swept under the rug. Are you in a for profit business? Say it. Does the property you sit on have an offer on it that is higher than the profits the business will generate over the next five years? Sell it. But don’t pull dirty tricks when you do it. Don’t send your 162 workers home for refurbishments for a week, and then a day later announce that you’ve sold the biz, closed operations and here’s two months salaries — good luck finding jobs in the tourist area during off season, we’re going to Bahamas!

That is exactly what Dolly Parton did, and its what IT companies do all the time, completely preoccupied with politics, scheming and moving all the while not having any respect for people that work for them. We’re not in days of Al Chainsaw anymore, throw that stale “Big Tales From Management Nightmares” book out the window and treat people right. Food for thought: Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap guys are no longer around, but office shootings are on the rise.

Another year, another bunch of calls from OSU fans trying to give me crap. Karma’s a bitch. So even though I got nothing on the game this year (my team lost to a school that lost to a I-AA team!), this bit of hate mail is for those of you that took your time to (again) give me s… today, when will you learn?:

Congratulations to LSU for winning the OEC, Ohio Embarrasment Championship, with score of 38-17. Previously known as the Bowl Championship Series, the championship game celebrates the supposedly undeserving team from a real conference that gets to make their mark on history, as the undisputed shamer of corn pushers with weak schedules who backed into the game by the virtue of not losing to the pile of unranked teams they are not supposed to lose to in the first place.  

So is BCS flawed? Yes. But only in the terms of weights placed on strength of schedule. You see, for the most part, BCS series works – with the exception of teams that play.. well.. nobody.. and then get shamed by the undeserving teams like Florida, LSU, Boise St, West Virginia. Not by a field goal or two, or even two touchdowns, but big margins of victory. Meanwhile, the “deserving” and laughably “smart” conferences, are backing into the big games, year after year, being shamed into the record books by teams that play in tough conferences.

I know some OSU fans are going to disagree with me, so please consider Ohio State record against SEC teams:

2002 31-28 (Lost to South Carolina)
2001 24-7 (Lost to South Carolina)
1996 20-14 (Lost to Tennessee)
1995 24-17 (Lost to Alabama)
1993 21-14 (Lost to Georgia)
1990 31-14 ((Lost to Auburn)
1978 35-6 (Lost to Alabama)

Oh, one more –

Lost to LSU.

The fact that its harder and harder to make money in SMB infrastructure support is nothing new, you’ve read about it here over and over. But now some of you are starting to see it and I’m glad I’m not the only one talking about it. Check out this blog post from Brian Williams on one of the leads that fell through:

“Two days later I followed up via phone to see if there were any questions or concerns, at this point no still getting additional quotes. A week later another follow up to see where things stand, we’re almost done gathering quotes but we’ll be honest you’re the highest bid so far so we’re going to exclude you from our final selection.

One of the prospects informed us that the winning bidder informed them that their existing 4 year old PC’s would not need to be replaced (which we suggested replacing), and the winning bidder quoted a white box server with Intel Dual Core processors not Xeon’s as we had proposed.”

He goes a little further:

“We believe we’re doing right by our clients in quoting servers with SAS drives, Xeon processors, Dell servers with silver warranty for 4-hour on-site support, keeping equipment on a 3-year replacement cycle and much more. We will stick to our guns because when all is said and done if we start to change our philosophy to win bids then we’ll end up with clients who have equipment that is down, lost revenue and an increased stress level for all.”

Now, Brian is an IT consultant so I will defer to him based on the expertise, but I too would have shot down an SMB server with SAS and Xeon drives. Frankly, in all our data centers I have yet to meet a client that has been able to justify a Dual Xeon configuration – from the first time Xeons came out all the way to the current quad core 53xx that people love to spec – do you guys do it just to artificially lift the price of the system so your commission / services look tiny by comparison? Especially if you’re rotating systems out every 2-3 years, unless the customer is pounding the SQL end of the system with some heavy duty LOB or has 50+ users (in which case it shouldn’t be a single server deployment anyhow) I just can’t reason it out. Either way, as I said, I am not an SBSer or an SBS consultant so I am sure Brian had a very good reason for his recommendation.

But what he discovered, and what many of you are discovering, is that its harder and harder to make a buck on infrastructure work in SMB anymore. The entry level dual core servers are so powerful, the SATA2 drives are quite impressive and honestly we are not back in the 90′s and early 2000′s where there was a night and day difference between a server with Celeron and IDE hard drive, today less than $1,000 a server without OS brings more than most smallbiz shops need packed with max amount of RAM.

You are also competing against the “It’s good enough” and “How does Google do it for free?” and the big iron in a small closet no longer flies and any time you are in a sales situation and are trying to defend your solution instead of keeping the client dreaming about the possibilities your solution offers that the others don’t… well, that’s where you lose the bid.

So its time to sit down, figure out if its time to retrain or refocus. One thing is for sure, if you’re looking to grow, you won’t be doing it in the infrastructure business. More on the doom and gloom in the new Vladville Newsletter.

Is what you see below Windows Mobile 7? More pictures here.

I’ll be at CES this week, if you’re around drop me a note, let’s meet up. We’ll be recording some stuff in Las Vegas, so if you would like to be famous…. drop me a note.

One sure way to prove yourself as someone that is too stupid to work in IT (and hopefully inflict some bodily harm) is to try the same motivational techniques that are used on dumb jocks on IT people. Believe it or not, what stimulates a 400lb linebacker to run through another stupid mass does not motivate people that spent 5 years in college earning their degrees so they can work in the tech industry.

It pisses them off because instead of working or getting something meaningful accomplished, they have to listen to this marketing puke that probably had a hard time figuring out how to work the elevator. No engineer or tech wants to listen to some washed up senior executive, out of touch and out of experience, congratulate himself for an hour.

IT people, and other knowledge workers, are motivated by purpose, meaning, vision, and understanding how they fit into the solution. They are motivated by speakers that have found unique solutions, that work on interesting projects towards big goals.
Thinking about hiring a motivational speaker for your tech troops? Then for gods sake, don’t pay some self-congratulatory marketing puke that is going to motivate them to go apply for an MBA degree because of the image you’re projecting.

This is how I actually talk to my clients:

Vlad Mazek, Direct CEO Line

As you may remember from our last newsletter, we have put in a lot of effort into the communications, support and documentation of all Own Web Now Corp products. As we grow, and as we scale, it is important to get good documentation and to back it, 24/7 when problems come up. We now have more people working in our helpdesk at support.ownwebnow.com and during December we have both decreased the time to ticket response as well as the time to full case resolution. We have provided more options for support, far better documentation if you wish to do it on your own and our blogs for NOC, Help and Company have all had a number of posts to help you stay in touch, at all times.

However, as we grow and scale and you work with more and more new names, the personal rep that has been built up over the years of business doesn’t extend to the new people you see handling your issues. While I am proud to say that our support today is better than it ever has been before, and that our satisfaction ratings are at the all time highs, I too have seen some complaints from people that miss the old fashioned way of dealing with issues when they come up. We know everything that isn’t working 100% is urgent, we know you want a response right away and we know you want a quality response. Trouble ticket responses are dry, lacking any wit and body language that comes when you’re working with someone you know.

So if things are ever getting out of hand, if you are just not happy with how your issue is being handled, if you have a recommendation that you think would help us, I am here for you. I want to hear from you. We have worked very hard to establish our reputation, to partner with you, to deliver these phenomenal products – and sometimes emails and support tickets can lead to a misunderstanding.

So please, give me an opportunity to make it right. Feel free to call me direct and leave a message if I am away from the desk, I will call you back within 24 hours: xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Things have been going well, very well at Own Web Now. I’ve blogged previously about some of the issues and complaints we’ve received and we’ve done our best to correct a lot of these items.

Still, we struggle with the perennial one man “I can fix anything by myself in 3 minutes” that just can’t comprehend how things work in larger organizations, that the purpose of helpdesk is to provide an answer as quickly as possible, that there are policies and procedures in place to handle things and keep the playing field leveled for everyone. When we ran our profiler to match the complaints to the system users, I believe something like 80% of the complaints came from the one man shops. It was also ridiculous to see that the same percentage of people accounted for over half of all the support cases. Anyhow, I have worked my ass off to make sure our support, documentation and communication are top notch.

I’m kind of the top of that food chain. The big Mayor McCheese if you will. If my clients are not liking the answers they get, if they don’t feel like they are treated with respect, if they aren’t getting the support that they want… well, now I’ve given them a direct line to me so we can handle things before they spiral out of control.

Personal service doesn’t have to fall to pieces just because the company has grown beyond the single person rendering that service.

2008 Will Be The Year of KPI

No, not a calendar featuring Karl Palachuk, though I’m sure now that I mentioned it, one will be in print tomorrow.

For 2008, my major area of focus will be improving the crappy key performance indicators we currently have in place for our service metrics. I literally have 10 numbers I look at (newest ticket, oldest ticket, tickets closed today, tickets opened today, number of tickets with multiple updates, urgent tickets covered by SLA, high tickets covered by SLA and something else) or basically not enough. So stepping it up, big time.

Steven VanRoekel is quoted by Cnet commenting on the initial sales of Windows Home Server: “It’s definitely tens of thousands, which in a month and a half is good”

I deal with managers all day long so let me try to help you with what I’ve so far coined as:

Middle-managers Counting System

The following conversion chart helps convert middle-manager numbers into real world numbers based on the circumstance the manager is in (bragging vs. defending.)

Middle Manager – Reality

When talking about things positive for the company:
Some, most, plenty, lots – 0
Successful – 0
Everyone – (everyone I know outside of our own company) – One person
Tens of thousands – Two people
Millions – Three people, from different companies

When talking about the install base:
Some – 0
We don’t report numbers – 0, and the two dudes that bought it asked for their money back.
Runaway success – 1 person that wrote in something positive about the product. (ToDo: Case Study)
Mass appeal – “We have it on good authority that a girl installed our software. I don’t know if she’s hot.”

When talking about things that are negative for the company:
Lots – 100% customer base
Some – 50% customer base
Very limited exposure – 30% customer base
A few cases – 20% customer base
Virtually none – 10% customer base
Absolutely zero – 9% customer base

And of course, the one even I have used:
Still investigating the issue – 100% customer base, 100% shipped product that is not yet installed, and we’re pretty sure 80% of the issue is not going to be fixed in the next relase either. Oh god, tell me Live.com is still hiring.

So what did Steven actually say, when put through the DeManagerLiser:

“I think we burned 20,000 DVD’s, half of which shipped to HP, Sony and discount software warehouses. The rest we expect to offer up as confetti to the CES organizers”

Here is problem with WHS that I believe CNET didn’t address: Backups are not sexy. When you design an appliance that is not sexy, it doesn’t sell well. And when even that killer feature that you pitch turns out to be faulty, people switch. So far WHS has done more for Linux and Windows Media Center than it has done for its own brand, at least with the tens of thousands (two people) that I’ve talked to about it.

Has the file corruption on a file server you bought to protect your family treasures been big enough to destroy WHS? I doubt it. But here are five things WHS can do to get to that 4.5 million sales in the next month. Yes, month:

1. Gateway Mode – Turn the Windows Home Server into the family gateway, armed with parental controls and AD-like policy management for web site blocking, report computers.
2. Microsoft iTunes – Family collection of shared MP3s, videos, etc availabe for sync to an iPod or the two Zune users.

And the sexy stuff:
3. Play XBOX game backups stored on the WHS.
4. Media streamer hooked into Youtube.com. This alone ought to be enough to kill Apple TV.
5. TV Interface – It’s in the living room, right? So why not let it work with the TV instead of forcing a client (Vista/Xbox) on it?

I think the WHS concept falls apart on the company culture. When I first told Kevin Beares that I just didn’t get the hoopla over the WHS and asked him how this was any better than a networked USB drive he went on to list a bunch of things that I couldn’t even begin to translate to a consumer. So I told him we’d look at WHS only as a SOHO business solution.

What I think really killed it for me, and what I am sure many of you will agreee with me on, is that this product is way too Microsoft Business to be used by a family. Kevin told me that everyone inside of Microsoft loved it and used it. Well, yeah, no shit, this is an awesome geek toy. But a consumer device it is not. You can see the Microsoft Business dry look and feel in the remote access features alone – way too much SharePoint 1.0 look, virtually void of any positive consumer experience – Excel 2007 stylesheets have more consumer appeal than the file listings. Not even a slideshow. No image previews…

I like WHS. But I hope WHS team is hard at work with a shippable SP1 this month. Yes, this month, because time is short. Because if all you do is appeal to geeks, geeks that now have a spare box in their home that doesn’t seem to do any more good to them than a file server with a file corruption bug, you’re going to be losing that spare box to a Windows 2008 server, Cougar or whatever else that “box” can be repurposed to. Heck, most geeks reformat and reinstall their main dekstops more than a few times a year, so if you want to solidify your current install base it needs to be more than just a limited-use/limited-appeal proposal.

In my voice-less trolling of meetings this week I participated in a rather pointless debate over definitions in trying to discover, after all these years, what type of an organization are we. Are we a support organization that delivers technical support and primarily assists users with the use of our products? Are we a service organization that delivers Internet services with support being just a minor component on that.

You can probably guess from this blog what my attitude is. If I could have spoken I would have asked “Is there any way we can penalize the idiots that request support for the fully documented issues, or because they didn’t RTFM – can we deny them support on the ground that they are too incompetent to request support and still get away with charging them?” 

I guess I won’t be writing the mission statement this year.

Division between service and support is a pretty big one – assume that its mutually exclusive as well. A good support organization should follow through with the customer until their problem was resolved, even if it involved third parties. A good service organization would deliver a solid product that didn’t require support. A milkshake.  

So what about offering support as a service? I’m a little divided on that one, mostly becausue I have yet to meet an organization that can do it well and still scale. Yeah, small consulting outfits like lawyers and accountants and corner shirt store can do it very well, but they can’t scale. When they do scale, you end up on the phone with India. Even Kinko’s to an extent does this, if you take them a project that is too complex or needs to be done on the short schedule, they will not do it while you wait. Want 2,000 copies, bonded and perforated – sure, give us an hour. Want a banner? Whoa, whoa, give us a few days.

The other limitation in support as a service is the matter of boundaries. How do you clearly communicate where your support ends?

Today I worked an issue I like to call “Support as a disservice” – I helped one of our partners customers partners. Try to wrap your head around that one for a moment. Our partner had a client who was getting upset that they were not receiving any email from their remote billing partner. Any email. After three wasted tickets of “It’s not our fault, next” and days of “no email” from the customer I got on the horn with the IT guy at the remote office and tried to get to the bottom of it. They didn’t have a mail server – they used their ISPs mail server. They also got a bounce back saying that the message was not delivered due to the timeouts. So today, I was on the support call with my partners customers partner and their ISP guy who didn’t have access to their server mail logs. (another reason phone support blows, you always get the lowest dude on the totem pole); In the end, we concluded that the mail is flowing, except in some cases involving some funky configuration on the partners customers partners ISPs mail server.

Do you see the problem here? This issue involved six people in five different organizations, and yielded one very helpless and disappointed third party, which will no doubt reflect poorly on my product even though its not my fault to begin with. So even though we went that extra mile, as a support company, we would easilly earn the Suckiest Support of The Year award. However, as a service company we proved that the product works, that there are no issues and we went a little further to help an unrelated third party see that we stand behind our services.

My basic thesis is: It is easier to define limits for a service organization because your deliverable is a particular feature (ie, you get to send email) where a support organization can either have a happy customer with all problems solved or an unhappy one that is uncertain of why they are paying us. With the later, there is no happy middle because the limit of “how happy are you” is hard to measure and while your support can make lots of people happy, you can still lose customers because some will feel you have not done enough.