Yesterday I held a big webcast to announce our big plans for 2011. To say it went well is an understatement. But in January we start offering all of these services and I want to make sure we are completely on record with everything that we are doing.

If you missed the webcast and would like to check our the official announcements check this out:

Did you miss the webinar? Here is the recording:

Webinar Recording (wmv movie 45 Minutes)
Webinar Slide Deck (pdf)
Webinar Podcast (mp3 higher quality audio)

Read the official announcement of ExchangeDefender Managed Messaging and CloudBlock over on our Own Web Now Blog.

So what’s CloudBlock, Vlad?

It’s three different things:

1. It’s not a solution designed for the channel. It’s a solution designed for the end users that want the bare bones commodity email solution.

2. It’s “Mail” solution starts at $2.99/month and includes Exchange 2010 mailbox (5GB Mailbox, upgrade to 25GB available), optional mobility, built-in security. It’s your typical Exchange hosting available from tons of vendors around the world.

3. It’s “Security” solution that starts at $0.35/month and includes SPAM filtering, Virus filtering, malware scans, DDoS protection, address harvesting protection and business continuity (mail queuing). Unlike the hosting product, this solution is designed to protect your existing email server on-premise.

Most importantly, CloudBlock is not Own Web Now. It’s not ExchangeDefender. It’s not my people. We have licensed pieces of our solution stack for a project that we believe can be profitable.

How does it make sense?

Let me Vlad-ize it for you.

Customer: I want a Ferrari.
Vlad: Fantastic. I have a few!
Customer: So I spoke to a guy at a Hyundai dealership, what kind of a Ferrari can you sell me for $8,999?
Vlad: I can sell you a 1:43 scale model along with an F1 poster signed by Michael Schumacher.
Customer: But I won’t be able to drive it at 180 mph?
Vlad: Relative to the ground? Only if you’re driving it on your tray while an airplane is taking off. Which is against the FAA safety policies.
Customer: So I can’t understand why a Hyundai is $8,999 and a Ferrari starts at over $200,000?
Vlad: [ 2 hour speach ]
Customer: I get all of that with Hyundai according to their sales people.
Vlad: Guess I’m going to lose this sale.

Translate the above to all the conversations you’ve had and all the deals you’ve lost to Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS. In light of all the outages they have had, you lost. In light of all the inconsistencies among the products and Microsoft’s inability to even roll out their latest Exchange and SharePoint releases, you’ve lost. In light of endless fears about the privacy and security, you still lost!

Why? Because when the client is making a decision on the price alone there is no amount of features or business fit that you can talk about, they only care about the lowest cost.

Emphasized enough? It’s true. While you can excuse some of it on clients just not understanding what they truly need – or your inability to explain it, when something is seen as a commodity it’s only compensated and valued as a commodity. Which means cheapest thing wins.

So why did you do it Vlad?

Because I’m a CEO of a for profit business, not a CEO of a religion. Look, it’s obvious from all the pain out there that there is demand for this type of a solution. If people are willing to pay for the bare essentials, who am I not to take their money?

That said, this is another weapon in our partners arsenal. If you are facing a stubborn client that is not willing to listen to your recommendation for what they really need, and they want the cheapest damn thing out there – you now have something to recommend. And when they need more, you should be there to deliver it. We partnered in CloudBlock because we felt it had a unique value that doesn’t exist with BPOS or Google Apps – it doesn’t have a VIP partner list or another business model. So you don’t have to worry about your customers being introduced to the competitors of yours that we like more or being gamed to sell more advertising.

You now have a competitive chip in the commodity space.

Won’t this kill OWN, ExchangeDefender, etc?

There is a certain kind of client that only looks at the cost. So yes, that kind of client wouldn’t consider OWN or ExchangeDefender anyhow.

Will some of the existing clients/partners go to this? Yes. And we’ll make slightly less margin on them. But what’s our margin if they switch to a competitor? Now does it make sense?

If you can’t explain the difference between a Ferrari and a Hyundai then let them buy a Hyundai and when they become to depend on it and want to drive it at 180mph – you’re right there.

Remember: If you don’t have alternatives, your clients will find them on their own. Not everyone is looking for a Ferrari, either.

More details on this in January. We think this is huge for the channel even though it wasn’t built for it. Differentiate, differentiate, differentiate.

After years of speculation.. here is the announcement.

Many are seeing this as a tactical nuke at Microsoft’s monopoly, however, let’s keep in mind that Google too often dreams big but things never quite catch up (see: backpack, Google Talk, Docs).

It’s going to be fun to see. With Google becoming serious, stripping beta tags, supporting the IT community and even the SMB community, things are certainly very interesting all of a sudden:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

I agree with their assumption, I’d love to see it delivered even more.

One of my greater joys in business over the past two years has been the development of our PSA. In the process of studying just how much we suck (and the extent) I’ve really gathered an alarming amount of data points that explain just where we suck but also the uniform way in which our client base is retarded. Naturally, it’s our fault.

Earlier today one of the kids from the Leesburg office drove down to frigid 60F Orlando and we took him out to lunch. We talked about some of the more advanced topics regarding ExchangeDefender. It’s so nice to see people interested in your work.

It’s also quite a pleasure to explain the actual meaning and implementation of the system and watch their dreams shatter in front of you. “Well, yes, that’s how we explain it. Here is what actually happens on the backend.” What can I say, my job is to deliver a message to destinations that are setup by a combo of a laid off IT helpdesk employee, part time lawyer and his wife, the disaccredited CPA. The miracles we perform to get mail to go from point A to point B deserve some sort of a sainthood.

So today we made some slight changes to the support system.

See if you can tell which one is for real.

This is the official business version:

Better Support Escalation

This dropdown allows you to select the service that you are requesting support for. This helps us route the request to the most qualified individual on the support team that can address your request quickly.

Note that when you select an item you will be presented with a checkbox to tell us if this is a service outage. If the outage affects the entire organization, and you check this box, we will escalate the request for free and bump you to the front of the queue.

Now, since I wrote the whole thing this afternoon, allow me to take you through the development process and the reality behind the sugarcoated marketing speak:

Business Problem Definition:

1. These jackasses aren’t reading the documentation.
2. Support team spends all day copying and pasting KB articles.
3. People shouldn’t pay for urgent support if there is a system down issue. We aren’t going to waive charges for urgent support. Meet me half way!

Business Problem Analysis:

1. Nobody reads our documentation.
2. Nobody bothers to file support requests with enough detail, only bare minimum.
3. Nobody reads anything we write or do.

Solution Matrix:

1. How about we hide a setting for our literate partners that lets them get free support?
2. What about embedding help right when they ask the question, maybe it temporarily distracts them and they forget what they wanted.
3. Maybe we can route these requests better around the clock, skip the middle man.

Voila.

Now, true: I wrote this to help my partners and make my staff a lot more efficient and provide more value along the way.

However: Things would cost so much less and perform so much better if we were not stuck in the baby sitting mode training people how to use the products they should have learned in less than 1 hour of video sessions.

This, IMHO, is what sucks about IT and what makes most people throw their hands up in frustration and they end up compromising for Google Gmail and the iPhone. Neither is a serious business solution, but serious business people are about money and efficiency – not about throwing money down the IT Strategic Initiative toilet, hoping to have something valuable at some upgrade cycle in the future.

Ballmer is under fire for some statements he made today. For what it’s worth, I defend the guy for being up front about the problem and what is going on. We can no longer afford little incremental fill-in-the-gap solutions. It’s all or nothing, black or white, people simply won’t put up with limitations in reliability. If they have to put up with limitations, they will go to the shiny crap or free crap – because let’s face it, if it’s all crap anyhow you may as well not pay for it and at least get some joy out of looking at it.

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.

Ok, this is perhaps the most exciting download since RTM released an iPhone download. Google has let the Google Chrome web browser out of beta. Go get it!

I was a little quick to judge the Google Chrome when it initially came out but since Shockey Monkey development (for the SM offline use) has been tied to Google’s Gears and this is by far the fastest and most stable web browser I’ve ever had. So if you dismissed it like I did, this might be a good time to take a second look at it.  

It would appear quite a few of you took offense at me uninstalling the “open” browser being developed by Google. The revolutionary new thinking, announced in a comic, apparently deserves far more praise than “It’s fast, now, how do I uninstall this?” according to some.

So, here is where I stand on all this, but I think this picture really sums it up:

Which is all fair and cool Brian, who hasn’t taken a shot at Microsoft to advance their agenda, but with all due respect as of late Google is more of a Microsoft than Microsoft seems to be. Not only does Google not seem to have the followthrough to seriously challenge Microsoft on anything, it’s solutions tend to be second rate ad collecting meme’s that hardly gather the attention beyond the Web 2.0 fanboy segment that signs up for a service the day it’s announced and never comes back again.

I know that “being open” is supposed to appeal to me as a consumer, in contrast to the evil closed deals of Microsoft, but if we are being open about all this can you take a moment and explain to me how a browser being built by an advertising company is going to help me bypass the more annoying and intrusive ads all over the place?

Google appears to have done in ten years what took Microsoft 30 years to do: gain irrelevance through series of meme’s and wars on the fronts it has no resources to fight. Pretty soon people will stop paying attention to these stunts. We do like to cheer for gladiators to kill one another, but if all they do is dance around and only protect their turf there is not much entertainment value to it all.

How many years has it been since Google opened the IM world with Google Talk? You can find dozens of examples of the same – if they can’t serve ads with it, it dies. So how earth-shattering is the Google Chrome? What revolutionary new features does it bring to the table that matter to people significantly? New Javascript engine? Process isolation for tabs? I’d love to know.

What do I love about Chrome? The same thing I love about Microsoft Online:

The more time these big guys waste in a pissing match of dominance, trying to be left alone on the stage to render the soliloquy even Shakespeare would be proud of, it seems like lately it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

These missteps by the large software powerhouses are making it possible for the tiny fish like my little software company to grow and be profitable by listening to what the customers want. The more time the giants waste fighting each other in a fruitless jealousy over who is going to be #1, the more time people like me have to take the money off the table and to the bank.

So it’s not that I have anything against Google. It’s just that I already have Firefox and that’s good enough for me.

Most of my community work and freebie stuff runs off of Google and I don’t think I’m cutting it short when I say that Google has by far the best calendar/scheduling app on the market today. So this release has definitely brightened up my day, Google announces Google Calendar Sync that does one way or two way sync with Microsoft Outlook, but this also opens up a synchronization from Google Calendar to Windows Mobile.

Leech it today..

For the past decade IT shops and IT departments have had to fight the “it’s good enough” mantra of cheap CPAs that were in charge of the company budgets. Going even smaller, “it’s good enough” brought you the world of NT4 and $4,000 DST patch, Windows 98 used in production in 2005 and beyond, etc. In the past few years as other options became available (more affordable and powerful computers, less expensive/financed licensing) customers became somewhat more strategic in their IT spending because they finally had someone that was shelling advice without per-hour pricing. We were in a renaissance, for about a year, and then Apple & Google came back and fucked it all up. If there is anything  you do, I hope you read the following article by my friend and one time SBS Show cohost Sarah Perez:

Google Sites the Next SharePoint? Maybe Not.. Why Google Apps Could Lose the Enterprise Market.

Let me give you a quick summary of the IT market in SMB over the past ten years: ’98: It’s too expensive, it keeps on crashing, fix it. ’00: It’s too expensive, it keeps on crashing, fix it. ’04: It’s getting cheaper, It seems to work. ’05: No surprise bills, eh? Ok. Sign me up. ’07: We want a Blackberry, Google Gmail and a Mac. ’08: Why are we paying for all this when we can get it for free?

Not a day passes by that I don’t talk to someone that lost a deal because their customer went the path of “It just works and its cheaper” and ended up with a Mac, no server, file server and a Blackberry. And for what its worth, you don’t meet a lot of people that hate any of the above – those that use them, love them. Sarah’s points out that users love it because they do not have to interact with the bureaucracy of the IT departments, they can just do their work.

Suddenly, good enough is back. Yes, Google retains the right to open up your files, do whatever it wants with them, offers zip in terms of SLA and no support beyond a FAQ and an email they may or may not respond to. But the premise is that you’ll never need to use those. Customer buys a Mac because its cool and because the premise is that the Mac will never crash, that it has no viruses or malware, and that the 50% – 100% premium is not that big compared to all the cost related to what you’d pay for a PC with similar applications.

So here, in 2008, we have a comeback of “it’s good enough” in that people are again comfortable not taking their IT as a strategic asset and instead focus on their core business and little else.

Microsoft seems to to agree. They are rumored to be building dozens of data centers with half a million sq ft, to build their consumer-business targeted empire of online applications…

… more on this a bit later.

This question came up during the geek lunch here in Orlando, far far away from the neverland of the Silicon Valley. Who cares about Yahoo and Google and Microsoft, I am tired of that drama said one of our local leaders.

So really, what is at stake on this Yahoo-Google-Microsoft love triangle? On one hand, it is the future of the Internet as we know it. On the other, it is the future of how we will be developing systems and distributing information. Let me offer you some background here.

The Ugly Truth

First, I need you to accept one fundamental truth that may not be very easy to swallow. Microsoft is an evil corporation. Not because they are closed, but because Microsoft still has not changed a lot since the times that they were spanked by DOJ and continue to be spanked by EU. Microsoft continues to try to dominate the open environment and continues to fail. For example, you can’t land at a single Microsoft.com page without them trying to force Silverlight down your throat. Around the Vista launch, everything they distributed was XPS so you wouldn’t dream use a competitive product. Microsoft has over years shown its desire to be the owner of all protocols, jack of all trades, so it can collect licensing revenue from anyone that dream play on their turf. That is why the DOJ and EU scrutiny has been great for the Internet and allowed so many of the things you rely on to be available for free. Just imagine the Microsoft world, in which you would have to pay a royalty to send a message to MSN IM or only use Microsoft IE to browse any page developed by Visual Studio?

The Quagmire

Now while the Microsoft corporation is evil, Microsoft employees are not. Absolutely everyone I’ve met there has been just phenomenal, down to earth, looking to help and looking to solve big problems with software. Everyone except Dave Overton, who kills kittens in his spare time and is trying to destroy SBSC (footnote needed).

So how does such a great group of people, with such noble cause, such an incredible amount of resources, so many young people looking to solve problems turn into such a monopolistic asshole of a corporation?

The answer lies in the psychology of the Microsoft machine, somewhat similar to The Milgram Experiment, in which the subject will completely defer judgement to the leader regardless of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I love you Steve, but this is squarely your fault.

You see, a Microsoft job is full of promises. First promise is that you will be working for the biggest software publisher on the planet which will give you prestige over everyone else in the industry. The second promise is the Microsoft share options that you’re given (or it used to be back in the 90′s before the .com bust) so you win the more Microsoft wins. Finally, it is the promise that it is a large company where sky is the limit and there is no ceiling so long as you don’t ask questions and play by the company rules.

And then Steve Ballmer, like he just finished a porn scene, jumps out in front of the lemmings at MGX (or MDX?) or any other internal event and proclaims – we will compete, we will compete with everyone, anywhere, and we will win!

So they do! And the few guys up top that decide how Microsoft competes have far different goals than the 99.9% of the base below them, but the 99.9% of the base below them has a goal of being in the top level management. The management goals are driven by the major shareholder goals, so the inner goal of being the biggest and best gets skewed by the shareholder goal of being the most profitable. So, how do you get to be the biggest and best and also the most profitable?

You screw the customer.

So much like the rest of the world looks at Americans as angry, ignorant people bent on world domination, people look at Microsoft as the big dominant bunch of proprietary mud slingers. While the majority does not approve of what is going on, they have to feed their families.

Why is it so hard to sell this in California?

There is much discussion about being open in Silicon Valley. But for all the talk, they are not all that much more open, they just play a lot more open, talk, share and you see relationships form and people go from one company to another all the time.

Silicon Valley is open to investment, open to change, open to new solutions and they all want to integrate with one another if it means more money. Meanwhile, they all follow their own dogma. Be it that they are “not to be evil” or “worlds start page” or “what is how” or “dog food cheap”

Microsoft’s influence over Silicon Valley would be detrimental to that spirit of innovation and integration and would lead to the same old constricted environment of ignoring the world for the promotion.

So while the best possible thing for Yahoo would be to take the Microsoft check and some corporate sales knowhow in the world of designing business applications, it could be the worst possible thing for the rest of us if Microsoft were allowed to become dominant again with the heavy hand on the open Internet.

I’ve been watching the outrage over the Microsoft-4-Yahoo! bid with mild interest and surprise at the angle that the general blogging public has taken against Microsoft! If I didn’t know any better it would seem like Microsoft is this giant evil behemoth just one secret ingredient away from conquering the world of technology. Cranking out billions and billions of dollars in profit, the Yahoo! takeover would catapult the company…. <Reality Mode: On>

The company whose major invention over the past three years has been a fucking table! The company that is facing a going concern on every major front: desktop, office, entertainment, online and mobility. The company that is struggling to limp under the weight of its own enormity, led by men defeated more than a decade ago bringing back the same concepts they lost with and ended up under Microsoft’s umbrella in the first place – the decades in which Microsoft won by pulling dirty tricks, abusing monopoly powers and competing in an environment in which everyone operated under the exact same principle – cash for product.

Times have changed, Microsoft has more enemies than it has friends, and even its friends are there solely for the economic benefit of an astonishing install base – all while investing in the areas where the future is going – away from Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop and infrastructure server.

That, dear friends, makes Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! and admission of inability to compete in the new world, not it’s one magic puzzle piece to the top.

Microsoft is on the defense from Google, Apple, Linux, Apple, IBM, Sun and Oracle in all major businesses. Microsoft’s product and innovation pipeline is not market building, it is market sustaining – at best – more of the same old debt driven infrastructure simply because it fits with the rest of the indebted infrastructure in the workplace.

Microsoft is the same company today that it was 10 years ago, only the version numbers have changed. Except today we have true alternatives.

These aren’t the words of some laid off English major, turned half baked blogger. These are words of someone that has built a business by betting on Microsoft. We continue to do so, in the Microsoft realm, but I would be a liar if I told you we’d bet one red penny on Microsoft’s online strategies.

That said, any market with a single dominant player and the competitors in the dust is bad. So you know what, let Microsoft dump some money into Yahoo! and give Google a run for its money. Last time I checked, Google was not a non-profit charity, they just haven’t had the chance to be as evil as Microsoft, yet. Let’s not give them, or anyone else for that matter, that chance.