Dear friends, it has started.

The wave of press coverage and blogging pundits trying to dismiss Vista SP1:

You can’t trust Vista SP1.

You have no idea what SP1 is going to do.

We’re going to ignore it until SP2.

So far very little has been said about SP1.

I am not going to link to the unsubstantiated trash above just to drive traffic to them, but it is becoming apparent that Vista’s shortcomings have been a goldmine for the journalist hacks and Adsense whores trying to milk every ounce of pain, suffering, blood and tears that the Vista eXPerience has been.

Now that Microsoft has addressed the outstanding issues, now that the performance has been boosted up to 50%, that 64bit support has been firmed up, that application compatibility has been improved, that reliability, performance, power consumption, security, desktop and management and a ton of other things have been enhanced and fixed, what is left for the pessimists to cling on?

Nothing bad has been said yet. So, if there is no negative coverage of SP1, what in the world will drive traffic to my site? Uh oh. Ok, how about a cover story about how the public confidence in Microsoft has been eroded and we ought to just ignore the SP1 changes and hopefully ride the wave of any tiny complaints all the way to the speculation over Windows 7? Back to the fear machine.

Seriously folks, if you want to complain about Vista at least substantiate it with something other than sap stories of how you can’t trust Microsoft that has fixed all the stuff you’re complaining about.

In the meantime Steve……….. Can you hire a marketing agency?

Got a moment to catch up on my thousand unread blog posts and apparently the big deal this Easter weekend is the Apple Safari invasion of the Pristine Microsoft platform. As consumers, we just don’t know how to unclick the box that tries to offer us software we don’t want to use. That’s what brought on the entire spyware nightmares, isn’t it? Yet, we haven’t learned a thing in the past decade.

How dare a monopolistic company in control of online MP3 stores, MP3 players, computer platform use it’s muscle to force the users to install the software they don’t need, how dare they bundle it!?!? How dare they force me to install iTunes just to play Quicktime movies? How… dare… they treat us poor Microsoft users like this!?

Ok, I have to stop before the flood of insincerity drowns me.

This is not a matter of who started it first. That is called a precedent, a principle that is used to judge cases based on how they were ruled on in the past given similar circumstances.

When Microsoft pulled all of the above, and far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far worse they got away with the slap on the wrist. US DOJ had a chance to split Microsoft like a 80 pound tremor patient working a chainsaw. But they did not.

Microsofties, at least the ones I work with, do not quite see it that way. They feel that their prosecution was uncalled for, that it did not do anything for the consumer. What it did do was create the concept of Untrustworthy Computing, with millions of paranoid computer users that won’t even do so much as click on a button to install Windows updates. The same users that clicked on every popup and virus offered up are now so paralyzed with prompt fear that they don’t even keep their computers patched, resist new versions, ignore prompts and generally do not even read the screen anymore. It is primary Microsoft’s fault, the champion of “You don’t own the OS, you just lease the right to use it and you better like it how we tell you to use it or it’s going to cost you.” – why should Apple, or any other software publisher, behave any better if there is no penalty for disrespecting your customers?

Welcome to Untrustworthy Computing, which software update do you want to dodge today?

Microsoft’s official reply will be posted here in a few hours. Enjoy the fireworks kids!

So you come here every now and then and read (or listen, or watch) what I have to say. But here is your opportunity to ask whatever you’d like: Karl has invited me to his SMB Books conference call and you get a chance to set the conversation. The conference call is this Wednesday:

Wednesday, March 26th
9:00 AM Pacific Time Zone
- Dial (319) 279-1000 (U.S. phone number)
- Your participant passcode is 1024518.
- This call is limited to the first 300 attendees.

There will be a relatively big announcement on this call, but the other 30-40 minutes are all yours. If you got to have lunch with me, what would you like me to talk about? Best answer gets an iPod (comments only) and I’ll give another iPod away during the call… get creative.

Oh, and happy Easter folks, like only Vladville could celebrate it:

And you get to see it this Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

Ok, now this is dope! Microsoft Small Business (ie, Eric Ligman) is sponsoring Nascar car #49 and giving SBSC’s an opportunity to put their logo right into the middle of the bump zone.  

This blog is brought to you by Bud Light.

I don’t care what you sell, the last person on the Internet you want to mess with is the guy that runs one of the largest message hygiene networks around. I receive well over a thousand legitimate business messages a day, excluding monitoring, reports, newsletters, mailing lists or commercial junk. I have the non-business mailings down to a science, before I ever read anything I look if it came as a SPAM newsletter or an actual communication. I build an adequate rule. Between all our vendors, suppliers, partners and associates I receive well over a thousand junk messages a day that are automatically filtered into a Newsletters public folder.

Simply put, you have to write a heck of a memorable message for me to remember you.

God help you if you SPAM me, and I remember your company name the second time your SPAM comes in. You are never (ever, ever, ever) getting my business again.

I buy a lot of stuff online. What can I say, I’m a busy guy and I live in a tourist city so the smell of Coppertone and burned british folks who haven’t yet discovered deodorant makes going to the mall a very unpleasant experience. I recently purchased two items online, from two different vendors. Here are their messages:

Vendor A: Blah

Monday: Vladimir: Your Exclusive BLAH 10% Member Discount
Tuesay: Another Chance for Sweet Savings – 20% off any purchase
Friday: Preseason Sandal Sale – 20% off!
Friday: Spring Fashion Sale – $15 off all Fashion Shoes $50
Friday: Your recent BLAH order

I have intentionally left out the single legitimate communication on this list: my tracking number for the purchase I made on Monday, which according to UPS still has not shipped. What does this tell me about Vendor A? Well, first that they are incompetent and that they can’t fill the order in 4+ business days. Second, that they likely have financial problems if they stoop to such a pushy marketing campaign to get sales.

Vendor B: Finish Line

This order was mine, pair of Adidas shoes. Same industry as the above. Bought on Tuesday morning: Order was filled by noon and an invoice was sent to me immediately with another $15 off $75 purchase in the same email. Smart. I am going to nuke an advertisement right away, but I am not nuking the invoice – and chances are I will see it again and more likely to come back. End of day, UPS tracking number with the package already picked up from the shippers facility. Since then, no SPAM.

The frequency of your communication is equivalent to the extent of your desperation

I have a very simple rule, direct non-business mail should come in with at least a seven day interval, unless it is an urgent notification that the previous communication was incorrect (change of venue, change of time, change of offer, corrections, etc)

Anything not directly related to a business transaction is SPAM. I do not need an invitation Monday, a reminder on Tuesday, a peer review promo on Wednesday, an incentive email on Thursday night and a last minute fire sale email on Monday morning alerting me that the earth may fall off its axis if I don’t attend.

It’s in poor taste, poor form, and it cheapens anything valuable you may have to say otherwise. It clearly communicates that last ditch of desperation, where one more email may lead to one more sale.

Today’s consumer is more like a hot girl at the club trying to avoid the perverts hitting on her. Yes, she will fake interest in the conversation. Maybe she will even smile politely. She may even give you a fake phone number. This is far too connected to the online behavior. We use aliases to get the information that requests our identity. We give out voicemail only numbers to sales people because we do not want to be interrupted. We sometimes even have polite conversations with sales people just to convey the fact that we are not interested and we hope to find those magic words that make them delete our profiles from their CRM with utter disgust.

Let go of your preconceived notions of what outbound marketing should look like and come to terms that conformity to signup/checkout forms does not extend to limitless permission to SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. Let go of the bad advice you got from some marketing reject who hasn’t had a real marketing job since the 80′s, it’s no longer about the volume of the people you reach (or the repetitiveness at which you reach the same person) it is about quality of your communications and the fit with my expectations.

Frankly, even the illegitimate pharmaceutical spammers seem have more candor and tact when compared to the so called marketing professionals. Marketing needs to be valuable to be considered, otherwise its just an unwelcome interruption. Deal with it.

I am not exactly “beloved” for my opinion of my IT brotherin, the antisocial and borderline sociopath behavior that comes as a result of spending fourty hours a week staring at the monitor and conducting more than half of the “conversations” over the wire instead of face to face or even voice. I don’t mean to sound like I am judging here, I am very much in this crowd as I have previously texted and even IMed people that were just a few feet away from me. This type of communication, and lack of need for a social experience, explains why most communication written by IT staffers sounds like the fire & brimstone from some relatively mellow individuals. It explains why people tend to hang out by themselves at IT conferences, why they never grow significantly when they go into a consulting (people service) business, why IT culture in general tends to be skeptical and introverted.

It also explains why services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendfeed, and thousand other services happen to be so successful: Introductions are easy, you can enter a conversation at any point and end it whenever you get distracted by the next thing.

Now Sarah started this whole fire, but Larry Dignan flared it up by trying to figure out the value in the conversation. That is very, very, easy to figure out: there is no value to the extended conversations happening outside of the source (blog post, conference). Here is the basis of my argument: translate the conversation into an actual human interaction – people talk all the time. Can you be in every person-to-person exchange, at all times, in all the subjects that interest you? No. Sure, the Web 2.0 makes it easy, but the expense of being involved in all the conversations is usually far higher than the benefit, which can be reduced to simply the personal satisfaction of having a discussion. There is a value in having something thoughtful to say (blogging, to external audience) and direct exchange of ideas by people who are interested in what you have to say (comments, from the external audience to you). You’re providing something valuable, and in return you are getting something valuable back, that you may not have considered.

That is the value of conversations: the exchange of ideas.

As for trying to interact with angry villagers with pitchforks out in the streets (Twitter), or time investment equivalent of NSA’s wiretap program (FriendFeed)… if thats the extent you need to go to in order to get attention its probably a good indication that your life/work are not fulfilling enough so it might be a better idea to invest in those, instead of the poor online substitutes for them.

Ok, it’s a trick question. Take a look at the following exchange.

You should activate an operating system once. Due to the OEM scandals and widespread piracy, Microsoft came up with WGA which has done little to prevent piracy, but a lot to annoy legitimate users. You can see Susan’s discussion above and you should be aware of it too:

When you install Vista SP1 and it patches certain drivers (change in hardware) it will require a new activation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947519/en-us

Which is OK, fair enough, making sure the OS hasn’t hopped from box to box. Click on the link, activate over the Internet, back to business. Unless you use MAK or OEM – in that case you get a warning that your copy of Vista is not legitimate and you’re given a three day Window during which you must convince an IVR and some sweatshop blue badge that you indeed are a legitimate customer. So if you manage Vista deployments, get ready to annunciate installation GUIDs over the phone for all your Vista deployments.

This may be the first time in recorded history that a pirated copy of an operating system is actually less of a hassle than the legitimate version.

Ok, so I said that the day I meet a decent twitter client I will actually blog about it. This day has come. For the past week or so, I have been using TwitterFox extension for Firefox and I must admit I like it quite a bit. I use FireFox as my main browsing and development platform (Greasemonkey, nuff said) and now I can use it to keep up with twitter.com friends as well. 

Twitter: The Worlds Biggest Waste

There is absolutely no way to rationalize twitter. It is a spectacular waste of time, it is unreliable, it is annoying and impressively useless. But I have started to use it more as I’ve gotten progressively more busy and trying to fit 20 hours of work into 6 comes with certain sacrifices – no IM on the work PC, no b/s newsgroups, no forums, basically getting work done means having to give up all the social stuff that makes working in IT so much fun. I know, woe is me, but soon enough you’ll all get your monkey and we’ll hire enough staff to deal with the rest and allow me to spend more time on freeones. Umm, freeones.

[ continuing roughly 20 minutes later ] Oh, right, twitter.com. Ok, so here is what I like about it. It is like a permanently-offline instant messenger client. My Mac at work is used primarily for social business, and I hit it up once a day, between 1-2 PM, and clear through all the mail, instant messages, etc. It is what I use to let people know I am indeed alive. Now, Audium generally has anywhere from 50-80 tabs of IMs that got collected overnight, and three out of four people are not online. This is where twitter serves a purpose. I can see what everyone is up to without looking at their status on MSN messenger. People tend to be just as open on twitter.com as they are on IM, except there is no expectation of instant response (or a response at all) so its a very good way to see what everyone is up to. It also has a lot of content that you would otherwise not see anywhere else, since all the cool kids are using it. For example, keeping up with WordPress development, Seth Godin’s thoughts… clear, concise. I can continue redneck jokes with Tim Barrett for hanging out at Fox & Hound (Tim runs the Vladville PR department). And then there is Robert Scoble and 18,000 worthless updates a day on the flavor of his farts.

So you take the good with the bad, and TwitterFox lets me stay tuned without the hassle. (I dumped the Vista sidebar widget because it crashed and fell apart so often).

If you’d like to follow me, I’m http://www.twitter.com/vladmazek but I also syndicate the updates on www.vladville.com (look at the right hand side, under Newsletter)

Ok, so a week ago I took my wife (29) to see a Dr. Seuss movie and they had two Vlad’s in it. Coming to terms with not going to conferences this year means tons of swag piling up and while I’m not about to pull a Ligman and shell out $150K, I figured it was time to lighten the swag load. So I offered an iPod to the person that leaves the funniest comment on this post. Now, I was going to put it up for a vote, make it fair.. frankly, it wasn’t even close, take a look and I’m sure you’ll agree.

MikeyJ writes:

Vlad, Vlad the Riff Raff Regurgitator
Promisin’ Monkeys and an SPF hater.

He’s got a hand on his Weasel
But no Indians in his Bucket
When it comes to sugar coatin’
He just says… “f***it”

He’s the leader at OWN
Defendin’ yo’ inbox…
What happend to the SBSShow?
That s*** rocks

He’s on planes from FLA,
over to the Big D
Spendin’ all his spare time
supportin’ the community

VladFire, VladCast,
an Exchange wiki too
That boy got no time
to even take a poo

He built a Hackintosh
‘cuz the customer’s right
That’s the type of guy he is –
out o’ site

I could keep on rhymin’,
there’s so much to say
But there’s just one reason I hit vladville every day

Vlad’s the man, the one, the only.
Without a blog post, my RSS is lonely.

Thanks to Vlad for all he’s done.
It’s hard to believe he’s only just begun.
Always willing to go the extra mile.
That last line’s just so I can rhyme “gaypile”

Thanks, man, from all the silent lurkers out here.

This is officially the funniest thing I’ve ever read on Vladville, Eat your heart out captain feedback!

Time has come to decommission the Shockeky Monkey mailing lists as they have more than served their purpose. Earlier today a new mailing list server has gone online and I will be moving the content/people/etc to it at some point either tomorrow or Thursday. My hope is to use the current list to drop the final release of the Shockey Outlook VSTO (different from the legacy Outlook agent designed to move contacts, convert emails to support requests, upload tasks and calendars – the 2007 one is built on Visual Studio Tools for Office and is far more robust) as well as Shockey Server (Shockey Monkey agent software for Windows platform monitoring; Rich has been working very hard on the fixes for the hung service so the system can be rebooted). So more on that today.

Today I started to wrap up the new signup management code so that portal creation, activation and branding are more automatic and reliable. I have also tested a significant portion of the migration code (Shockey Monkey 1.x to 2.x) but intend to run our paying OWN Partners by hand to minimize impact to their business operations. In case this doesn’t make sense think of it this way – who is more important than the people that pay OWN salaries? Egg-zactly.

Things are moving pretty darn quick now that everything is done. As I have mentioned before, Shockey Monkey delays are starting to make even Microsoft look good, so as this becomes professional software it will be handled as such in every way.