I originally started typing this as a comment on Karl’s blog but realized that it would probably read better with some formatting. To save you some reading time, Karl’s general thesis is that vendor loyalty goes both ways and in order for VARs to be loyal to vendors, the vendors need to be loyal to the VARs. Please read it in its entirety before you consider my response:

From someone that is both a vendor and a VAR, I will tell you that most VARs do not see the venue as a two way street or a partnership of any sorts. Most VARs see that they are the ultimate trusted advisor to the client, with complete control and brand representation to the end client. Many do not even consider themselves to be a business but we’ll just keep this a single absurdity post.

VARs on one hand believe they are agents of the vendor and as such entitled to same or better perks than even the vendors employees, after all the VARs do bring in money while employees just collect it, right? VARs also like to pretend they are a trusted advisor, someone that is completely impartial to the solution being offered and only interested in their clients best interest. Again, please play along for a moment and don’t point out how the two clearly conflict.

I am VAR, hear me roar:

As a VAR I contribute to your company:

• Revenues
• Renewal fees
• Reduced support costs as I usually handle Level 0 support

Consequently, I expect:

• Everything your company makes, free of charge, without limits or restrictions of any kind.
• Free support. Free escalation. Free direct escalation to the top support team.
• Free sales assistance and marketing assistance $$$
• Discounts on everything I sell so I can choose my markup
• Bonuses and commissions on everything my clients buy
• Free training, free conference passes, free branded training for my clients
• Complete and total branding that removes the vendor out of the loop
• Full legal protection from any software malfunction (bug) but do not dare enforce your licensing or legal terms on my clients.
• No barriers to entry, no paperwork requirements – but keep all my competitors from getting into the program too.
• No committments
• No minimum sales to obtain any benefits

Basically, VARs expect to eliminate everything that makes the vendor profitable.

VARs demand, but are unwilling to commit.

From the vendor standpoint, if a VAR is unwilling to do any of the above then what exactly separates a VAR from a direct account?

You see, unless you are not willing to see the relationship as one that should drive higher profits to the vendor as a result of your relationship, you should not expect to see any higher benefits of being a VAR as opposed to being treated as a customer.

You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a partnership, or you’re just an unreasonably needy customer. And we have a partnership program for a reason, so we can avoid unreasonably needy customers.

You want to keep a scorecard on your vendors, but many VARs get upset when the vendors keep the scorecard on them.

I’d love to see this as a two way street. But it’s not.

We all run greedy, profit oriented organizations. We all have to meet our needs which come before the needs of everyone else. We then look for people that see it our way and are willing to work hard on the same goals. We then look to the mission of our business, to serve our clients. From time to time we find a solution and a company that helps us achieve our mission, and we work with them.

The difference between the top 10% and the rest is that the top 10% sees the vendor as a direct company asset. Most people understand that this is a business and in business you are either making money or losing money. If you are making money, you are an asset, if you are costing money, you are a problem. Top 10% of partners sign extended support contracts, they get priority support plans, they come to conferences, they get staff trained, they get staff involved, they champion the products and their use, they help others get introduced to the solutions.

The 90% stick their hand out and say “gimme” and expect us to prove to them that they should be our partners. I am *not* kidding you. The 90% are the reason you get stuck in India on a support call, because you are no different than the consumers, customers, the IT janitor, the SPF. You have all produced the exact same benefit to my company and spent the exact same amount of money, that is why you aren’t treated any better. You don’t see this as a partnership, you chose to only expect benefit traffic coming in only one direction – towards you.

Thats the ugly truth behind business plans, products, partners, employees and everything else. And if that prompts an emotional response, then it’s probably a good indication you are not cut out to run a business. Sorry. Karl offers you the same conclusion, though delivered in a much softer blow. My goal is to help you understand it.

This is not a game.

Here is something to brighten up your weekend, it certainly was the high point of my week.

I hate unsolicited direct contact from random staff I have never met, particularly if they are in the sales division. Why? Simple: When I need something, I sit on the phone or get a call back six days later. When they need something: SPAM, phone calls to the direct line, cell phone, and anything they can find on Google.

And seriously, if you’re going to fu*k with anyone you really ought to pick someone other than the CEO of an antispam company that can keep you from doing your job.

So when the people call after the big ticket purchase without request I just looooove to offer them something so disgusting, so repulsive, so nasty that they will never be able to look at the computer screen again and see my name and try to make a call before or after lunch. I can generally get them to hang up well before I get to the disgusting part, but now they have turned to spamming as well. Again, I am the wrong person to call. But if you’re gonna go after my account, there is one way to earn respect.

Click here for the Outlook screenshot.

For you older people (where old > 30) here is something that will make it easier on your magnifier tool.

Dell:

Hi Vlad,

My job is to make sure that your business is in the right segment within Dell in order to ensure that you receive the best pricing, service/support, etc. To do this I need to know what your technology needs/plans are for the next 12 months to see if you belong in our business alliance group, where you’ll receive preferred pricing and a dedicated sales rep/support team.

If you would, please take a quick minute and complete the following, which will allow me to make sure that your company is in the best division of Dell based on your needs.

Vlad:

Dear John,

We are in a market for 300,000 Vostro notebooks, 200 GigE Switches and can you recommend a server solution for something like that? Oh, and a color printer scanner combo, can they print and scan while you sit on them?

-Vlad

Dell:

How much weight are we talking about sitting on the printer?    Seriously, we can put together pretty much any solution for you.   Who is going to be the end-user for this solution?  

Regards,

John

Good show Dell! Here is the screenshot, obviously names have been stripped. I have to admit, as unwelcome as the intrusion was, the person on the other end handled it remarkably well and still tried to close!

Can you get that kind of a service from HP? Nope, didn’t think so.

Fire up a browser folks, you are going to want to see vladville.com in it’s full glory.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am very proud to announce that my wrist is limp with an iPhone 3G synced to our corporate Exchange 2007 and gmail powered vladville.com.

As I mentioned to someone that complained about how we do things at OWN – “It is what it is, if you don’t like it see ya” – and seeing how the Microsoft direction as of late makes no sense to me, I figured it was time to take my own advice.

Blogger from my iPhone.

As of late the word out of Microsoft has been nothing short of idiotic fanboyism: Don’t look at others, we’re changing the world man!!! So it’s nice to see some realistic stuff come out from Microsoft that actually addresses the concerns – by the head cheese himself. You can read the whole note in its entirety here.

Some notable excerpts:

· Windows: The success of Windows is our number one job. With SP1 and the work we’ve done with PC manufacturers and our software ecosystem, we’ve addressed device and application compatibility issues in Windows Vista. Now it’s time to tell our story. In the weeks ahead, we’ll launch a campaign to address any lingering doubts our customers may have about Windows Vista. And later this year, you’ll see a more comprehensive effort to redefine the meaning and value of Windows for our customers.

For what it’s worth, lingering doubts is a little soft. People hate Vista and Office 2007 enough to ask for illegal or old copies of XP/2003 or abandon your entire platform and application to head over to a Mac.

Apple: In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. We’ll do the same with phones—providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.

It’s nice to see that they actually recognize this now. For years Microsoft’s stance was: “Apple is not really our competition. IBM is.”

I’d like to propose something here. Take the $300 million and take $150 out of it and go by a webcam. Record Steve saying that out loud. Seriously. Add a soft voiceover: “Mac. Great for indulgent douchebags and toddlers that think the computing world revolves around myspace. For the other 97%, come take a look at Windows.” Invest the remaining money in the “Vista: Sunk Ship” campaign you were going to go with.

Seriously, how is it that a guy that runs f’n Microsoft can put together the reality of the business computing so eloquently in one paragraph but nobody thinks to run with the message on the actual facts?

Looking ahead, I see an incredibly bright future for our company. As I said at the June 27th Town Hall for Bill, we are the best in the world at doing software and nobody should be confused about this.

Nobody arguing that. We just wish that was what Microsoft focused on again.

You cannot be all things to all people. Or you turn into a Walmart. I for one think Microsoft is better than a Walmart, I hope Steve realizes that and figures it out before they lose even more ground. That’s the big Microsoft problem – it’s trying to be everything to everyone and everywhere all the while it’s competitors are getting better and better.

Oh, and for some Dilbert levity, kudos for the PHB quote:

5. Focus on employee excellence.

Most of you remember the Howard Cunningham feature in Shockey Monkey. Howard is a good friend from DC (Macro LLC) and always full of great ideas about the time value of money and getting the most out of your monkeys.

Last year at the Microsoft WPC keynote by Kevin Turner, or as will now go down in infamy as the “infrastructure flush heard around the world”, it became clear that for OWN to compete in the new world we need to be better, quicker and more standardized than the other guys chasing ads.

That means as a service company, we had to adopt ITIL and really drive down how we define the process of service delivery (you can read about that in my book). But I’m not just writing it to make Karl rich, it really is a blueprint to a service delivery model that you’re going to have to play by or go extinct.

When I looked at how we go from where we were, to where we need to be, I knew that my biggest value is in the time my people spend to render services. We needed something spectacular, quick and as fast as we are. We need to be as responsive to situations as IM. So here is what you know so far:

Nice inline components that slide in and out of view when they are needed. No screen clutter, no massive refreshes, no popup windows, no wasted resource anywhere.

But then we throw Howard Cunninham into it.

Every ticket listing has an AJAX info bubble which you can roll over to see the last few updates. The rows get highlighted when they are updated between your page refreshes, and we can quickly act on them by previewing and tagging them.

Nothing like taking less than 5 seconds to review 3 tickets.

But let’s say that a support request update is something quick.

Something simple. Like “Did you reboot?”, “Whats the password”, “Have you tried this?”

Should a user be forced to load up an entire new page with all the assemblies, control panels and a page with more options than what they use to launch the f’n shuttle into the space?

What if it’s just a oneliner update, that shouldn’t use up extra resources, shouldn’t take up more bandwidth, should just be on demand and quick?

You’ve quessed it. Hit the Q for Howard Cunningham Quick Update!

Type in your update:

Quick options to make the support request update not send more email, not show up in the customer view or even close it out completely.

Update ticket. Done.

We can do this all day, no time wasted, no resources wasted. I feel like my computer has a little stroke every time I touch Outlook – now I don’t have to rely on Outlook. Heck, I don’t even have to rely on a computer, I can do this from the back of a data center, from a Kiosk, from an iPhone.

But don’t you worry about… No, I got AuthAnvil integrated baby. Oh, you give your customers Administrator password to a bucket of indians not even fit to work for PSS phone shields?

That is my differentiating factor. Enterprise software, enterprise infrastructure, talented staff in the new world and not a pile of monkeys with some degenerate CRM doing the needful and learning English one kb guess at a time. The world is changing, this is what I’m doing to remain on the top.

Consolidate yourself out of business… or Take the red pill, stay in wonderland, and I’ll show you how deep the monkey hole goes.

Where do you want to go today?

Apple has been making some noise lately with the new iPhone 3G. While I’m a die hard keyboard fan, I rarely talk on my cell phone but carry around my iPod Touch everywhere and its easily my favorite gadget. Why? It works with my business stuff and it lets me enjoy the nice part of this business – the friends.

So last night I checked the Apple iPhone inventory and they had iPhone in stock. I showed up at about 8:20 am this morning and got into a line. Don’t get me wrong, I live in Disney World and standing in a line for 90 minutes for 45 seconds of fun is just a part of the magic.

I stood there and typed a long email to Howard and by the time I looked up nearly 30 minutes had passed and nobody had walked out the store. Finally, one person out with his iPhone 3G. I was not about to wait and figure out how long the 100 people would take to get through the line.

Just how hard did Apple and AT&T work to screw their customers? It’s pretty amazing, and intentional, to force people through the in store process and not rely on the online system that was used in the original iPhone launch. Is the iPhone that special that over a week after the launch they cannot properly stock and distribute the iPhone? Not really, they just don’t want to. They know that people standing in the lines are there just chomping at the bits to get the iPhone, so why not take the opportunity to make you stare and play with the entire Apple assortment of solutions while their 16 year old “geniuses” learn how to type.

Needless to say I left, but you know who I feel bad for? Microsoft. How demoralizing must it be to work there and see their competitor bash them in the press and television, come out with crippled services, uber-closed devices matched with extensive inability to meet the demand for both the hardware and software (Google for Mobile Me woes). You break your back working on Windows Mobile, team up with companies to build hundreds of solutions and offer variety and choice – just for the clients to vote with their feet away from you, away from your solution and away from your partners.

As tough as this may be for Microsoft, it’s an inspirational event for the rest of us. If you design a killer product that people want, they will take the abuse and tolerate problems because only you have what fits their needs.

As an entrepreneur, it is a pleasure to see that a giant multi-billion behemoth is unable to compete when customer is king.

Ok, so this looks like a major step in the right direction with the remote web workplace enhancements. It has a new Views filter that rather quickly renders picture thumbnails.

The Good

Yes, something for the ladies there.

One interesting (or annoying, depending on how you work) part is that only filenames are clickable, clicking on the icons themselves does not open them. However, clicking on them does select them, so conceivably with the large amount of images you won’t have to strain your fingers to select a bunch of files on the page.

There is also a built in Search functionality, which actually seems to work rather well.

(btw, whoever owns this code, you should validate your inputs. Hitting Search on an empty search input field still pushes you forward to the results page even though you didn’t search for anything, making me wonder what else isn’t being validated)

I’ll give it an A on the picture management side, could have used a streaming screen saver or a slideshow function.

The Bad

The Video side of the home isn’t quite as well put together. There are no video previews or image snapshots. There also seems to be no option for the ability to stream files from the server, it’s very much a download and play type of an affair. Downloading multiple files gives me an option to download them as a self extracting executable or a compressed zip file, which doesn’t really do much in the way of media usability. No ability to create a playlist, which I am sure won’t go far with my audience that spends half their day on freeones downloading 15 second previews of larger movies and would like them streamed down from the home server.

The Ugly

The remote desktop access is too whiny. Four prompts after hitting Connect to your Home Server link, ending in a long bunch of text and techie jargon that no regular home user would understand (in order to RDP to the server you must add it to your Internet Explorer trusted zone) or follow. Pass, back to logmein.com.

Not much new to report on the Home Server console. I think this is the biggest fail for WHS, given that the PP has been under development for as long as WHS has been on sale. The Addins section is Microsoft’s opportunity to create an “App Store” like experience for its users and a way to promote its developers. Yet there is seemingly no way to add or search for addins from this screen. There is the general “Jr. Server Admin” rookie link leading to a chm that no home user would ever explore but no link to the web site to obtain them. The Live Search (hey, it’s default on the box) doesn’t show a Microsoft addin download site in first two pages of search results (“whs add-ins”) and the chm also fails to list where to download them. It does however list the worlds most unfriendly TechNet style process for installing an addin, with two more steps than it would take you to recover from an alcohol addiction. This is a Home server, right?

Finally, the client console software autoupdate still fails. It sends the user to download a Troubleshooting package or to call Product Support.

All in All

Microsoft’s big problem with this solution is the apparent lack of fit and design – if it’s a server appliance it requires far too much server management experience (reading, downloading software, deploying it, reading chm files). It is not very user friendly, it doesn’t seem to update properly, it requires far too much effort to discover and install add-ins to extend it’s functionality. If it’s a home NAS solution it hides far too much of its power. If it’s just a Microsoft mee-too for the consumer NAS market then it really fails in usability and user friendliness when compared to the solutions 1/4 its cost.

If you paid $500 for 500GB and the above features, would you be wowed? Consider that for half the cost you could have this. Given the amount of time PP spent in development I’m not sure what level of hope there can be in a v2 of this.

Windows Homo Server Pride Pack 1 has stepped out of the closet. Or Windows Hell Server Porn Protection is out. All relative to how low your morals are I suppose. There will not come a day on which you will convince me that there isn’t some dirty mind inside the bowels of Microsoft coming up with the most inappropriate acronyms to push this running joke of “So what do we call it?” that is WHS naming.

What’s in the pride pack? 64bit Vista backups. Enhanced remote access.

Either way, enough to make me dust off the unplugged WHS and check out what’s new.

Ever wonder what happens at intersection of stupidity and far too much spare time?

People always ask me why I named the product Shockey Monkey. To some the title is downright offensive! Truth is, over the course of the workday people forget to read and need to be shocked back into the correct behavior. When I decided to write Shockey Monkey I didn’t just need a tool to streamline operations, I needed a system that fixed stupid with every fiber of its being.

I have a dream.. brothers and sisters.. that one day my staff will read the screen and not need me to sit around and manage them. Until that day, bzzzzt.

So what’s the general problem we have when working on tickets in an unmanaged scenario? We often ask who is working on the ticket. During the day as requests are coming in fast and furious and people are running back and forth across multiple offices/shifts it’s hard for one person to manage the entire operation. In my mind, the support team should work as a “team” and tag the requests as they go along.

That way, you know who is working on what and you don’t double up the effort.

So, welcome the Tag feature to Shockey Monkey. Right on the update ticket header you will see a new Checkbox, AJAX enabled and all. Just hit it if you want to tag the support request or start typing in the box below and it will automatically do it for you!

Here is what it looks like after the support request gets tagged.

Now, let’s say you’re opening a support request, how do you know if anyone is working on it? Well, if the Tag checkbox is there, you’re the first one with the right to take a crack at it. If it’s tagged by someone else you will see the warning, in this case red Alert: Tagged by Vlad Mazek.

This is where the bzzt shock really comes into Shockey Monkey. Let’s say you aren’t reading the screen. The moment you click on the textarea to try and update the support request the giant hand of Vlad reaches down from the sky with a tazer in one hand and shocks you into reading the screen.

Bzzt! You’ve been shocked!

I had even thought of adding a disable string to the action chain but decided against it in case the tag was made by someone who just left for the day or had something far more urgent come up.

Now you may ask…

But Vlad, why not just take away the ability to update the ticket if someone else tagged it?

You don’t work with people, do you?

Here is what happens when you take people’s ability to do something: They keep on clicking on it, refreshing the page, checking the battery in their keyboard, adjusting the wireless keyboard sensor.. everything but reading the damn screen. They might even open up Communicator or email/call and ask about it and then I’d have to rip their f’n head off and beat them to the point that they can only move their hand around enough to read braile encoding that says why don’t you read the f’n screen you idiot politely explain to them how the “tag” feature works.

So Karl, yes you can hire the right people. Yes, you can develop the standard for your people to follow. But if you don’t have a taser to enforce the standards and practices in realtime and fall back to personally standing over their shoulder or obsessively beating down monkeys only after they have made a mistake, buddy, you’re going to run out of people.

Karl’s process and Vlad’s adaptive learning… the new era in IT monkey accountability. Tag it before you work it. Read or be shocked.

I have a few days to kill before we officially start selling Shockey Monkey v2 (waiting on Windows Mobile application to be completely bugless) and I figured I’d sit down and work on Shockey Monkey performance a little.

Good news. No page under Shockey Monkey requires more than 1 second to render, with most actually rendered in under 0.3 seconds.

The network utilization is a whole different story unfortunately. You see, all the pretty AJAX interface and usability functionality comes at a cost. Roughly 400 Kb worth of uncompressed Javascript type of a cost. To give you an idea of why this is a problem: imagine refreshing the support request display give times. You would have downloaded 2 Mb worth of Javascript. Not good at all.

So one of my tasks this weekend was to figure out a way to reduce that burden. The first problem was that of multiple requests. Between my own and third party Javascript I had eight Javascript files, meaning eight requests to the web server. Since IE and Firefox only use a maximum of two requests to the server this meant that the browser would request, load, request, load, request, load… and make you pull your hair as you watched the loading bar bounce around.

I first started with trying to combine my Javascript on the fly which resulted in a learning experience that packed Javascript code cannot be combined. FMR.

I finally ended up uncompressing all of my Javascript and minifying it in a single Javascript file. Here is the before:

Notice it took nearly a second for the combined request to pull down all my Javascript files. But with minification and a single script:

Notice that after minification and consolidation the Javascript library has gone from over 400 uncompressed, to 340 compressed, down to 142 compressed and minified! The total download and render time from nearly a second down to 1/5th of a second! If I put my marketing hat on, that’s 500% improvement!

So a page with 168 support requests, live code and effects including autocomplete and all the other good stuff is yours in 2.38 seconds.

I have two items remaining in the to do list. First, enable gzip compression on the server even more. Second, find out why Javascript is not being cached. Currently I am trying to cache Javascript code at 1 month:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 1 month”
</IfModule>

But not making it very far with that one, yes the module is loaded and available.

As far as the iPhone is concerned – app works flawlessly over Safari even the visual effects are all there. As for release, any day now folks…