Start of the football season. Let the trash talking begin.

So let’s see, who are we playing this year. Of course, there is FSU. Now their coach seems to have the right spirit:

The rest of the team gets it too I think.

Now last year we lost to Georgia…. so props to them. But I think one in what, 30, is a fluke. And considering they are #1.. See ya in Jacksonville.

Now hopefully this year we won’t see OSU back in the contention…for anything….. or backing into games just to be destroyed by the SEC. Maybe destroyed is too kind? Humiliated? I dunno, for some reason Inbred Hick League (Big 10) always seems to be in the contention despite the fact that they play high school teams it seems. But this year with USC in week three hopefully they will slide where they belong, somewhere behind Vanderbilt or Fresno State.

Let’s see… who else do we play. Tennessee? Citadel? WTF? That’s a school? LSU one is going to be ugly, I won’t lie. I guess we aren’t playing Alabama this year, I guess there wasn’t enough room on the whopping schedule between Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, Miami to fit in the overpaid coach and the diapointment crew. Rumor is, Chris Rue is walking onto that team to play a linebacker. My god, is this what being an OSU fan feels like, checking if the opponents are actually a college or a prep school?

Coments are open and welcome, bring it on

Go Gators!

A little while back I decided not to play a role in the neverending SBS world drama and perpetual line of jackasses posturing for attention and influence (but seemingly uninterested in doing any real work). I’ve done so primarily to optimize my time spent at work but mostly to give myself some focus and stick to the plan - what I’ve found out is that the most successful people in this business do not play in the drama either, they are taking money to the bank and Friday’s off.

But a part of this gig and keeping the conversation open is talking to my partners, my employees, random person that guessed my work extension or got the bat phone from one of my IT friends. And so even indirectly I get to feel some of the drama. I am going to share just the three top jackasseries of the week so you can see just what you get when you become rich and famous in the SBS land and everyone brings you their dirt. Here are the three mini-blog stories:

PPT-o-Matic

Congratulations to the SBS team for releasing SBS 2008 to manufacturing! Although we’ve made a business decision not to make SBS a part of our business going forward, you can’t say no to free training and we should be familiar with the product regardless of whether it’s going to be raised in a support request twice or make $20 mil a quarter. So I sent the link to a few folks:

• Windows SBS 2008, Part 1 of 8: Introduction
  Thursday August 21, 2008, 12 PM - 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 2 of 8: Planning & Installation
  Thursday August 21, 2008, 2 PM - 3 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 3 of 8: Migration
  Friday August 22, 2008, 12 PM - 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 4 of 8: Management, Health, & Security
  Friday August 22, 2008, 2 PM - 3 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 5 of 8: Messaging & Collaboration Management
  Monday August 25, 2008, 12 PM - 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 6 of 8: Remote Access & Computer Mgmt
  Monday August 25, 2008, 2 PM - 3 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 7 of 8: LOB Support & Troubleshooting
  Tuesday August 26, 2008, 12 PM - 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 8 of 8: Virtualization
  Tuesday August 26, 2008, 2 PM - 2 PM Eastern

What is shameful here is that all the seminars are free and that the negative commentary came from my own team. The complaint was that it was a very basic and at best a sales presentation for SBS. Now this is shameful for two reasons: 1) Of course it’s a sales presentation, Microsoft’s webcasts are always dripping with sales junk and worthless notion of “market size” and “opportunity” selling the dream of fortunes to those only clinging to the hope of success and 2) most SBSers are not highly skilled IT engineers that will ever concern themselves with anything out of the scope covered by a wizard. So Microsoft designed the first training to target it’s core SBSer base - stop whining, it was free and you got paid to learn. Worth checking out.

Successful Sale of Jealousy

Got plenty of jealous (some even angry) commentary about Arlin selling out to Microsoft. Oh dear god no, more people will try to use Grove now!

Personally, kudos to Arlin. He has done what no other SBSer organization has been able to - to sell Microsoft on committing some serious support to the SBS community and actual business training. In a single step he’s set a bar to entry into the training and an application to make sure people really focused on growing a business aren’t stuck in a conversation with guys like Geek Squad Dave pounding their chest at how great of an ethical consultant they have become.

Seems like a good deal to me. Personally, I feel this one is more about jealousy that someone finally managed to bring Microsoft to the table and put their pen to the checkbook. To be honest, I’d throw some of my people into this if we hadn’t already packed our schedules. Worth checking out.

Triumphant Ignorance

This one belongs in a class of its own so I’ve saved it for last:

BOB ONE-WPC ZERO.
No matter how you want to score this, my request for comments from those who found the last Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference to be worth the effort has yielded no responses. What it did get was yet another Inner Circle member, who reported that the 2008 event was a waste of time. There haven’t been many reports from smaller VARs. But if I were Microsoft, I’d worry considerably about the number of award winners and Inner Circle members who said they only sent skeleton crews, or even just one person

If you are going to the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference for presentations you’ve failed. Miserably. At concept and at understanding the opportunity:

“Let me see. The richest, most successful IT company in the world. The most successful IT companies that have partnered or won with Microsoft all in one place for a week. The $2K entrance fee keeping out the riffraff. Ability to communicate and try to find opportunities in this pool. My god, a person could transform their company through the relationships made there. So much business, so many relationships to st..

But nah, screw it, I’m here for the great breakfast and PowerPoint slides I can watch later!!!! I am here for Microsoft!!!” FAIL.

Folks, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again and I will keep on repeating it no matter how many of you don’t have the balls to admit the following to yourself: If you want to be the best, you have to strive to be like the best and the only way to do that is to learn from the best. So another fall comes, another collection of riff-raff festivals where people will fall over one another bitching about the exact same problems they had the previous year, at the exact same point in business maturity as they had last year, with the exact same process they had the last year and next year they will come back to the same place, albeit marginally richer, to bitch and moan about the same troubles they have had for years without an ounce of motivation or ability to make something better of themselves.

You gotta aim higher. There is no shame in being successful. But for that to happen you need to let go of your insecurities and the need to be the king of the wadding pool and maybe strive to be the last person in the Olympic race. Not everyone is destined to be IBM. But don’t sell yourself short either.

Anyhow…

This is the life and times of SBSers. Is it any surprise that the more successful people don’t pay attention to it? As you can see, not really.

One thing that gets me, been on really all sides of the IT business, is how easy it is to spot people that should never be dealing with human beings. The world of IT business has really evolved from the hippie-hair guru that dismissed everyone around him and acted like a god… that personality is dead and it seems to be lost the most on the older generation which likely got their pinkslip because they could not act in a professional manner.

How they went from being a fired antisocial guru to an IT consultant confuses me even more. I mean, if I hated people the last occupation I would want is the one of a patient mediator and teacher trying to bridge the gap between the end user training and complex computer user interfaces. But that’s just me. Here is the thing:

If you can’t be polite and courteous people will refuse to work with you.

I can understand the frustration, I can understand the personal problems.. but that does not mean I have to tolerate it or accept it. What kind of a leader would I be if I did that? What kind of a message does it send to your people to force them to put up with abusive and rude people, but never do anything but smile and try to help?

No. We are not DMV. We are not a punching bag.

Most techies like to assume that everyone they talk to is a complete retard and it is their duty to solve all the problems the other party has because the way they were treated did not meet their expectations. There is a lot of professional stuff in professional services, if you can’t act like one you need to seek a job where they will stick you in your cave and throw away the key. Only downside is that those types of jobs are few and far in between..

So let’s learn a little respect, k? Or you will be sitting in one sad, lonely unemployed corner all by yourself and your ego.

One of the best parts of the MVP summit is getting together with project managers who bring you all the Microsoft software and seeing exactly how they collect the feedback and how we all end up with the software that we use.

The picture below is of the entrance to the SBS MVP meeting room, where some of the most knowledgeable SBS experts got together with Microsoft SBS team to share feedback, direction, opinions and why wizards are so neccessary because people can’t read the damn documentation.

Here is the picture of the conference room door:

If you are having trouble reading, the door on the right has a sign on it right at the eye level that says, in English, “Please use other door” and an arrow pointing to, well, the other door:

The number of SBS MVPs grabbing or the locked door was just amazing. What was incredible though was that Chris and I were standing outside of the conference room looking and laughing at the whole thing.

Two MVPs went up to the door, could not open it, turned around and asked us if we knew if the conference door was locked. Chris said: “Use the other door” and the guys started to walk the other way in the hallway to try and find the other door.. “No, that door, the one on the left” like the sign says.

I decided to start taping the entrance but for some reason nobody wanted to walk in front of the camera

Tomorrow is April 1st and I will not be blogging out of protest.

You see, April 1st is the excuse for people without the slightest sense of humor to take one day a year and act like awkward imbeciles. I’m not even going to work tomorrow, I can imagine the helpdesk, voicemail, phone calls and other mediums will be flooded by people that get one obligatory day to pull out the giant stick they carry up their butt the other 364 (or this year, 365) days of the year.

Humbug. I wish most people could stop trying to destroy a productive workday and instead ration out that good spirit and humor over the course of the whole year.

See ya on the 2nd.

The American economic prosperity, let it rest in peace.

1776 - March 17, 2008.

JP Morgan buys Bear Sterns for $2/share. Federal Reserve drops interest rate on bank loans to 3.25%. Asians flushed down the toilet too.

Poof.

Integrity matters. Humble pie is tasty.

For close to a decade, Internet used to be an awesome place for deceitful sociopaths. That kind of environment, full of anonymity and unaccountability, is a great breeding ground for some spectacular outright shameful lies marketing strategies. But as Ashley Dupree found out this week, there is no hiding on the Internet from who you are. Especially if you are being judged on the daily basis by your customers, business partners, employers or politicians.

Over the past two years I saw two of my friends outright destroy their online identities because they did not want their personal, private, life to interfere with their work. They also get the double handicap for being girls (likely inbox full of “I’d tap that”) and dealing with the juvenile male Internet. The first girl worked in the public sector in charge of bringing businesses into the local economy to build up the job market. Unfortunately for her, she is an Irish catholic republican and makes Peter from the Family Guy look like a saint. She had to blow up her entire blog because her personality virtually guaranteed she would never be able to make it in the public eye. The other friend is an extroverted party girl that works in the software industry. She blew up her Facebook profile because even though the minxy chick at a social event gets you all sorts of contacts, it does not translate well into corporate promotions based on black and white out of context notes backed by the spite of office politics.

The sad thing is, what guarantees corporate climb makes you a total bitch that nobody wants to hang out with. What makes you a macho man party animal translates into a stack of sexual harassment lawsuits.

This is nothing new. People in the spotlight were always judged, always quoted out of context, always had their private lives violated and everything ever done used against them at the most inopportune times.

What is new is that the social Internet is putting everyone and everything into the spotlight. Everyone you ever encountered becomes a viable, relevant, reference. I had the privilege of growing up in South Florida and going to the high school in the hood (I know, hard to believe) so by the time I got to the University of Florida I got calls from Miami Herald about my former classmates doing everything from homicide to serial jewelry robberies (Go Dragons, Class of ‘07, release date of ‘22). Everyone, everywhere, and at any time in the past becomes a quotable reflection of your character and how you life your life.

So if you want to live and work in this century you have to come to terms with who you are and how you represent yourself. You can’t hang on to your secret personality and change clothes in the telephone booth. You have to let go of your inner sociopath, put away that second personality you’ve got going on, stop changing your clothes in the telephone booth and just be who you are. If you are going to be judged, be judged for who you really are.

It doesn’t matter if you’re fucking the governor or if the global network of computers is fucking you, the age of deceit and dishonesty is coming to an end. Embrace fame, and yourself. Remember, you’re selling yourself all the time to everyone.

Yes, I’m bringing the gaypile back. Had to be done. 

Name calling is fun. It helps people quickly identify what they are dealing with to save copy space and convey a message without getting preachy or far too elaborate. If you’ve ever had to put together a flyer you know what I mean, you try to sum up your entire universe of information to get the point across and you still want to capture attention. So you shoot for a compromise.

In professional (well, IT professional) circles, thats welcome. Coder, DBA, helpdesk can all convey a pretty clear meaning, sometimes positive and sometimes a derogative (“Oh, there goes Mr. MCSE”); And for the most part people welcome it and identify themselves as such.

In IT business, it goes the other way. We have a few dozen acronyms that we use to identify partners and opportunities. But sometimes people try their hardest to identify themselves to you. How often do you hear a pitch and just sum it up to the person to acknowledge you have received their bullshit and know what they do so they will cease the pitch? Some people can’t break out of that cycle. Some people are so sold on their own bs that they cannot escape it, even among the people that do the very same thing:

Hi, my name is Bob and I’m a trusted advisor. I do not try to make profit on products, I simply recommend whats best for you and…

Yeah, Bob, we get it, you’re full of shit. You don’t mark up the services you don’t consider material to your business. Microsoft licensing – $0 markup. Antispam – $0 markup. Offsite backups – $0 markup. You’re a great guy, thank you for recommending this to me – oh whats this $1,500 a month fee? Oh, for the managed services you provide on top of a $100 MSP software platform, $50 management agents and a $200 outsourced helpdesk? Whats that, a 500% markup, Bob?

People are trusted advisors when they are not directly trying to milk the highest possible markup from the customer. For everything else, they are trying to charge the highest possible rate that the market will handle without leaving them with less than 40 billable hours a week. That is called a business. Even if you run it by yourself in your underware 28 hours a week, you’re a business. You charge money for time, you are a vendor.

There is no shame in running a successful business. There is plenty of shame in running an unsuccessful one. Which one would you rather be? Pretty title with no substance or a success with a less glorified name?

-Vlad Mazek, MCSE, MVP, CEO. Decode that, b….

Disclosure: I have been a Microsoft MVP in Microsoft Exchange category for two years, each year the reward consists of some swag and a $150 credit in the Microsoft store. How I got the award (first or second time) is beyond me, it carries no professional status value (i.e., it’s not a certification of knowledge or experience like an MCSE) and I generally do not use it. However, it is a great honor bestowed by Microsoft to the enthusiasts of their technology and I am quite grateful for it and the product involvement that has come as a result of it.

Started by the opening few minutes of Simpson’s last night, here is some food for thought..

Some of you feel that you don’t have to support MVPs or really offer any gratification in return for someone helping you. You don’t. Some of you don’t even feel thanks are in order. Fair enough. Some of you feel that the content produced on the Internet is done at the will of its creators, distributed for free to get attention and you can take it or leave it. Very true. Some of you will go to community events like SBS groups, .NET meetings, Linux user groups, bootcamps and mashups without thinking you owe the organizers a damn thing. You’re right!

Point is, you cannot owe someone something if you didn’t agree to purchase it. If it had material value, it would come with a price tag and you would judge if it was worth the monetary tradeoff or not. And since it comes without a price tag it is equivalent to a giveaway. Do you owe it thanks? Sure, if you appreciated it. Do you owe it gratitude? I suppose so, if it gives you a lasting benefit.

In a nutshell, we are a free society with an incentive based monetary system, and if someone is going to offer something for nothing you do not owe them any compensation, personal or commercial.

So you don’t have to. But should you?

Wayne brought up a great point this morning, in a nutshell saying “people can only keep on fighting the good fight whilst they don’t need to think about how to pay the bills. Once they need to think more about money than the job they like doing, they stop to do it.”

Some people thrive on accomplishment. Some thrive on money. Some thrive on personal gratitude. Some thrive on attention. Some thrive on argument and passion. Most people have something that makes them tick, something that self-motivates them to do what they do.

The Answer Underpants Gnomes Are Seeking

South Park is a world famous adult cartoon that places children in rather vulgar adult situations and exposes how in a naive fashion children expose the huge adult flaws in logic.

One of the most quoted episodes is the one of the Underpants Gnomes (wikipedia), in which children are asked to write a paper on economics. They meet the underpants gnomes who sneak into kids rooms at nights and steal underpants.  Gnomes have this colossal operation and setup, designed to make profit with just a few missing pieces. They know where they are (collect pants) and where they want to be (profit) they just need to fill in the middle. This is also known as the “every web 2.0 and dot com business plan, EVER” which is why you see it quoted on nearly every social networking site out there when reviewing questionable business plans:

So, let’s circle this back. When you hear or see someone giving something away for free, you ought to try and answer: How are they going to survive doing that? Are they giving it away to gain exposure? Customer base? Attention? What is step 2?

Same question ought to get asked of the Microsoft MVPs, group leaders, event organizers, user groups, etc. How are the leaders, in the end, being compensated for their work?

The easy answer is the question “Who gives a shit” - after all, if they have the time to write, blog, podcast, video blog, answer questions and participate in the IT events and discussions they likely need to get another job. So what if they get tired, someone else will just fall into their place and it’s not your economic duty to subsidize people with flawed business plans - you’re saving $$$ for the iPod Touch.

And for the record - I don’t blame you. I am perhaps the same. I’ve watched the Evolution of Dance video on YouTube at least 20 times and to my recollection I haven’t paid the guy, or Youtube once. I am sure the guy makes money somehow, somewhere, frankly I don’t care.

But the things I do care about, the things that I enjoy, I support. I love 2 Live Crew music and have purchased every single CD they put out. I love The Darkness, and have purchased the CD’s and even went to a concert. (yes, there is a pattern here, I like it when people do phenomenal things with so few resources / talent). I hate Michael Savage and his beliefs with a passion, but I love his delivery - so I bought his books. I could not fall asleep without Coast 2 Coast AM, and I subscribe to its Streamlink even though the program is available on the AM band and I don’t believe in bigfoot, chupacabras or the JFK conspiracies.

Point is, I support what I enjoy because I care that it survives.

End Game

If you don’t support what you care about, it disappears. If you take what you get for free for granted, it comes back as the nastiest commercial substitute you can imagine. If you can only take, without ever giving, you might get accustomed to that and when you need it there may be none left for the taking.

The loose change bin, do you ever put loose change back or do you only take?

In restaurants, do you ever compensate someone for their hard work - even though it’s their f’n job - or do you just stiff them?

Well, dear friends, it works the same way in Cyberspace. If you don’t support the things you like, they will go away.

If you are a content creator that doesn’t want to run a business but is open to a monetary contribution from the people that enjoy what you do, setup and publish a PayPal address. You can even make a subscription, by making Paypal do a reoccurring withdrawal of a few bucks a month. Whatever the case, you are sharing what you want, the public that appreciates you will send you it feels like is appropriate and it’s not a business, it’s just a way of saying thanks.

For the consuming public: Without gratitude, the courtesy goes away. For the content creators: Be honest about what you want.

If you choose to do nothing, you end up with the insults to your intelligence such as this guys site, and SPF Nation. But if you don’t care, perhaps thats the best you deserve.

P.S. Woops. Had to edit the link to coasttocoastam.com - apparently, coast2coastam.com is an amateur porn site. Thanks to Danny from Nofx for pointing that out.

There, feel better? Now back to your regularly scheduled program.