Everyone I talk to as of late seems to be facing more cautious leads. While the sales at OWN are still running fast and strong and we will definitely have an all time record January on the books, our growth is coming on the back of years of research, working close with our partners and being in the right kind of a market with the right mix of products.

That’s the secret to success regardless of the time or climate.

One thing that I don’t get is that most people are surprised that we are growing OWN, working on the new products, hiring and opening offices. Just because we’re doing so well now apparently means we should just sit on our ass and thank our lucky stars?

No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You see, before you get to be successful, you have to lead.

Remember all the local PC building shops destroyed by HP and Dell? Where are they now? That era is long gone. Replaced by people who thought they could do better using the PC as just a building block of the service business, not it’s cornerstone.

Now we’re in the gold age of service providers, era dominated by high margins, rampant outsourcing, specialized providers, support and celebration. Let’s drink to this, for it will never end because this time it’s different. You know, like the OEM computer builders used to say.

The only thing that is different with each passing era of technology is the group of assholes behind the scenes thinking about how to make things better, faster, cheaper and put you out of business.

…

You probably won’t see what we’re working on at OWN until the summer or likely until the fall. But the question remains: Why are you growing and expanding into different areas if the current stuff is doing so well?

Now here is the kicker: The guys ask that question right after they tell me that they are struggling to roll out the solutions they have rolled out in the past.

The way I see it, the solutions you are providing now are not the solutions you will be providing in the future. So I’m designing and building something that makes sure I’m here a few years from now.

As always: Who am I not to take your money?

More about this on next weeks Karl’s SMB Conference call, Wednesday at Noon.

Seems some new cool features just got delivered to ResponsePoint faithful in the form of SP2, click here to snag it.

Among the new features: digital service, administrative panels to let users configure call-routing schedules, parked call return and customized URLs for notifications – which means you can finally use this to bring up HUD from Shockey Monkey as you could with Asterisk for the past two years.

Keeps on getting better, RP folks are really nice. Good job.

There are many people you can screw over in your company and never really notice it. There are even roles with the responsibility of minimizing the impact angry workers can make. Security personnel, data center guards, lawyers, inhumane resources..

But whatcha gonna do brother when an indian pwns your cron? From the article (excerpt from Wired):

“….another Unix engineer at the data center discovered the malicious code hidden inside a legitimate script that ran automatically every morning at 9:00 a.m. Had it not been found, the FBI says the code would have executed a series of other scripts designed to block the company’s monitoring system, disable access to the server on which it was running, then systematically wipe out all 4,000 Fannie Mae servers, overwriting all their data with zeroes.

“This would also destroy the backup software of the servers making the restoration of data more difficult because new operating systems would have to be installed on all servers before any restoration could begin,” wrote Nye.

As a final measure, the logic bomb would have powered off the servers.

The trigger code was hidden at the end of the legitimate program, separated by a page of blank lines.

To sum it up: Fannie Mae had an Indian consultant THAT THEY FIRED DUE TO INCOMPETENCE running around their network, unrestricted, modifying software without peer review or tripwire, AFTER THEY HAD BEEN TERMINATED?

I am not sure who get’s a bigger FAIL here?

Earlier today a fellow blogger from BusinessWeek (awesome magazine btw) cleared up a non-event for us in the IT world that might surprise some that are stuck in their OS comfort zone with XP. Namely:

If you want Windows 7, you’ll have to do a clean install.

So while there will be upgrade pricing and you may be able to install Windows 7 on the PC you’re using to read this blog post, you will have to clean install all of your applications and reapply all your settings when you get to Windows 7.

After all, not much of a surprise: Rarely anything has an “upgrade” path anymore, it’s all either a migration or “came with the new computer” zone.

With the first 72 hours running against delinquent accounts, the new routing engine performed remarkably well. In about an hour we’ll do a wide deployment across the entire network. It will take approximately 3 hours for the upgrades to be performed.

The good news:

1. Performance was off the charts. Always good when rolling out new software.
2. We were never the bottleneck. This was a significant area of doubt, even though we had all the numbers in the world, we never had a proven model over time. Here is essentially how it works: messages are flushed to a queue and delivered sequentially from each processing node. As the mail load increases throughout the day, is it due to multiple ExchangeDefender connections or is it due to the saturation of the link? Good news is, it’s not us. When tested over 300+ IP’s worldwide, when certain links showed slowdown, others went through just fine.
3. Network congestion or server overload? This is something we are generally not alerted to and something VARs rarely either know how to access or have permissions to view. Exchange 2007 does issue performance based errors but your weakling consumer firewalls do not – they just defer the connection or drop it outright.
4. DNS issues? This one was fun.. we pretty much DDoS’ed people We found hosts who took forever to issue a banner – so we flooded them with SMTP connections. Then we started transfering 256K attachments, then 1 Mb attachments. Guess what? They flew!!! We are narrowing this down to two effects: 1) Problems with DNS servers. 2) Excessive RDNS or RBL lookups.

Problems with DNS servers are more difficult to isolate because they may be sporadic depending on their load. As most sites are not likely to run their own name servers or their own caching name servers, external lookups may take longer. Sites that ALWAYS had terrible initial greeting are very likely just using dead RBLs or way too many antispam measures – ALL of which need to be shut off.

So far we’re looking at the healthiest week on the network, despite DDoS and attacks as ususal. Let’s see what we can pull up when the entire network is actively managing connectivity to target servers.

Ok, so it is a sneaky subject

But it’s true. In a positive sense too: You can now use Google Gears for full Gmail offline experience. While you are online, all your content is in sync. When you go offline, Gmail works through Google Gears to allow you to read, star, reply and compose messages. When you get back online your changes sync up, mail is sent and operates very much like Outlook in the offline mode.

Read more about it here.

While Gmail has supported POP3 and IMAP for a long time, giving you the ability to take messages offline and continue to work, this new experimental feature is significant because the flags and message status indicators are updated on Gmail web site instead of just in your client. Personally, I use Evolution for my Google Apps.

This is still experimental so it could warrant waiting for a solid release.

Disclaimer: I’m a paid Google advisor in another area.

There are times at which I amaze myself at the dumbass things I do with my skills. Earlier today I completed a contract and service configuration process driven purely by JavaScript. There is even an entire layered page constructed entirely with JS. While there are maybe 2-3 AJAX calls just to check for username or domain availability, exactly 611 lines of code drive the client-side-only UI that is clean and uses 0 popups, alerts and all the other distraction junk.

Oh.. and it’s fast. It’s really, really fast.

You’ll be able to check it out in our portal or Stuart Selbst’s portal next week. As for the rest, it’s in SM3.

I promised to myself that I will keep the basic economics posts to a minimum this year so let this one stand for January, in hopes that it can help you understand what is going on.

Much of business is logic based on models, experience and conservative/aggressive business planning.

Then there is that tiny, ugly, human part: emotion. Are business owners, managers and CEOs fearful? Are they fearful for what the investors will do to their stock option values if they don’t meet their expectations? Or are they fearful that they will be out of a job if the economy keeps on going down and they didn’t cut aggressively when they had the opportunity to make a difference by cutting spending?

Tragically enough, the former is true at this point. Many of the jobs you see on the chopping block are being cut simply because companies must put forward the face of frugal if not cautious pessimism for the near future of the economy and act now.

If you lost your job, I’m sorry.

. . .

As for us at Own Web Now… we had new people start today, we are opening a new office on Wednesday and will have more people start next Monday.

It’s as simple as: It’s my money on the line and I see the opportunity for product lines that address the problems that are emerging in the marketplace.

As of late, I have spoken to a lot of people who are down about their business and relative disinterest the leads are showing in what they are offering. If you’ve ever met me, you’ve heard these words: “How can we help you make more money?” – If you are getting shut down in your pitches perhaps it’s time to start asking questions instead of trying to sell something the customer doesn’t want to buy.

It’s 2009, and despite the market being dominated by GoDaddy, we still sell Web hosting. At a significant margin. To a lot of people who find our offering, or performance and our reliability more valuable than others. Does that discount GoDaddy and what they have accomplished, or does it change the direction here? Neither. It’s simply the case of offering a product and fulfilling the demand. Not too long ago, that was the only demand we filled. But we grew, we expanded, we got better, smarter, faster – and in spite of the doom, we are growing. Rapidly.

It’s raining out there… You know the prize.

You have a choice to slam on the brakes or throttle.

(for a moment we’ll have to ignore how that strategy eventually worked out for Senna)

I guess we will never learn if the support team could kick developer teams ass.

Earlier today we rolled out the new ExchangeDefender code to a select* group of users. This new software is intended to adjust connection timeouts during peak hours and log timeouts so it can be reported.

One of the more frustrating things we have is that a lot of people simply do not have a network with enough capacity to run a mail server. Without limits in place we find sites that at random times get congested and only accept the smallest of messages. Bigger pieces, particularly those with attachments, can get delayed from a few minutes to a few hours. This is a rare issue but it creates an insane amount of support requests.

Recently we started extending connection timeouts on per-IP basis but I’d rather throw alerts and advise clients to upgrade their connections (or suffer timeouts and delays).

Now if we get over 30 seconds of inactivity the message is flushed to a queue with a 90 second timeout. If it’s more than that, it will be switched to a queue with life of 180 second timeout.

Logging of this activity will help us plot the timeouts on per-host basis so we can have a model for each client that reports an error. It takes far too much time to go through each queue to inspect each message, now we can have full host reputation reporting to justify the recommendation they get more bandwidth.

Some experimental code ought to improve things. We’ll know tomorrow.

* “Hey wait a minute, I am not paying you to run experimental software on my business email.” – I know and I have great news, we’re only using this on the delinquent accounts for people that are more than 30 days out. So if you complain, expect to talk to the billing person first

No, not really. I doubt they would ever be willing to pay what it would take for me to work there. But it is Sunday, day for giving, so here is my opinion on what Microsoft should do.

First, let’s be honest. Despite the recent fat trimming, Microsoft is the most dominant computer company around. Apple gets all the love and the hype but single digit market share compared to Microsoft’s 89%.

What is the real problem with Microsoft? Aside from Office and Windows, both of which are under attack, company is bleeding cash chasing more innovative companies. Without ability to focus, it is starting to lose the turf not just to it’s direct competitors but also to it’s own older operating systems. 

At this point, Microsoft Windows Vista may as well be the last OS that Microsoft gets a significant market share with.

But it doesn’t have to be.

It is up to Microsoft to make Windows 7 what it’s customers – ALL of it’s customers – want it to be.

Who are Microsoft’s customers? Well, everyone. On every kind of a device. This is why Microsoft has 852 (estimated) SKU combinations of Vista and Office alone. Same OS should smoke on a 8″ Netbook and give the same sort of experience a $3,000 laptop does.

Microsoft should immediately kill Software Assurance.

Microsoft’s goal is to go to software subscriptions. In order for that to happen, Microsoft needs some sort of a promise that it’s OS will keep on evolving in order not to treat the OS purchase like a fixed, aging part of a PC.

Microsoft’s partners – from VARs to OEMs to ISVs – need a predictable environment to operate in and make a profit. It takes years to write solid software and pay off the R&D – so ISVs need to make sure the software they write will be sold. OEMs and device manufacturers aren’t going to waste time writing drivers for an OS that will run on a few PCs. VARs are deploying their solutions on top of an OS core that is supported by all their other value adds – from service management to the vertical business application integration. Everyone in the chain waits for Microsoft to present something.

For Microsoft, OS and Office business has not changed in the past 15+ years even though the demands of it’s users has. On one end Microsoft is losing to competition, on the other end it is losing by having it’s users with an inappropriate version of OS or Office running on their device.

It sucks for everyone.

Microsoft needs to do two things:

1. Monthly Subscriptions. Deliver a simple-to-license, everyone-can-play subscription version of Windows that can get addons for an additional monthly fee. Let’s say Windows is $5 / month. Want a DVR functionality, that is $6.99 / month extra. Want enterprise integration – $1.99/month. Let your customers build what suits them best, give them the right to keep the same kind of experience that grows on top of a stable core that everyone from ISVs to device makers can  get behind.

2. Deliver long term reliability promise. The reason very few are willing to go to Vista, and will go to Windows 7 even less, is because there is no incentive to change the status quo if it causes a chain of changes that will just put the company onto the install/upgrade/migrate/relicense treadmill. In order for the CIO’s and CTO’s to bite anything beyond getting the latest OS only when the new piece of equipment is purchased there needs to be some promise behind it. Microsoft has always been seen as “well, it’s sucky now but it will be fixed in the next release” kind of a company and this is an opportunity to break out of it.

We are heading towards the world of web based apps. If the desktop is reduced to a browser interface between the application, keyboard and the printer it’s value goes from $180 (Windows average) to $0 (Linux / embedded OS) that more and more manufacturers are shipping with their new PCs. Users seemingly don’t care. It just works, eh?

Microsoft is currently trying to fix Vista, the PR campaign gone awry, with cosmetic enhancements without addressing the core problem. On the web services side it is even more sketchy.

Time to get it together. In words of Office Space: What is it you would say you DO around here?