We’ve got your green right here.

As some of you have figured out already, OWN has committed to scaling out our other product lines to EU and Australia. This commitment came out of the loyalty we have received from our partners in UK and Australia and we are bringing Shockey Monkey, LiveArchive, Exchange 2007, Offsite Backups and Sharepoint over the Atlantic and Pacific, starting May 1st, 2008.

It’s not easy, being green

ExchangeDefender was our first and only global infrastructure project. We learned a lot in the process and with the desire to scale out the US-based services we wanted to do something that was wildly different from our strategy in United States. We are based in Texas, where everything is bigger, including the power. <sarcasm>If there was a global capital for tolerance, it would be Texas.</sarcasm> When we sat down to draw up the new global infrastructure, we wanted to change our 80lb, 3 AMP server habit and we started testing the green stuff. Surprisingly enough, there is quite a bit in the way of components that are green and still performance conscious.

Performance was our key concern. SuperMicro, Dell and other manufacturers provide greenish, power-effective, systems but they seriously lack on the horse power or space. But if you look a little harder, there are devices that are both sizeable and capable of performing well under the load.

For example, Western Digital manufactures a SATA2 3 GB/s drive, 1 Tb in size, that consumes 40% less power. Because it draws less power, it heats the chasis less (less cooling needed in the HD slots) and is overall more cost efficient. It spins at 5,400 RPM which is your average laptop drive, but under load speeds up to 7,200 RPM which is average for the desktop. For low intensity storage, low priority inserts, etc, we were able to adjust some of our own (read: poorly written) code to work on it quite well.

For their part, Dell also has a low power high performance solution in PowerEdge R200 for smaller nodes. It also has the PowerEdge 2900 III Energy Smart, about 2x the price of the regular model. For their part, SuperMicro brings forward a 1U server with a 260W power supply drawing less than 0.4 AMP at full blast. (if you don’t know me, this would be a great place to stop reading this post)

Texan by the grace of god..

So there you go, Own Web Now Corp has gone green. We felt that as guests in these nations we should start to be more respectful.

As for our beautiful home, crank that Dell: “Malaysian by birth, Texan by the grace of god”; We will continue to rack servers that weight more and consumer more power than a teenage girl because nobody wants to see that buffering text while waiting on pr0n to load. As vulgar as that may seem, it’s the truth, people pay for performance and convenience - and the market isn’t ready for the green.

I knew there would come a day when I would have to categorically disagree with Karl on virtually every piece of advice he has offered. Take a look at this post on Hiring the Best Employee.

The basic flaw in Karl’s process, and process of hiring in virtually every corporate institution, is that the focus is on finding the right fit for the role, not the right individual for the company. Have you ever heard the following words:

You are just not a good fit.

Yeah, you’re just a fantastic person, very talented, exactly what we are looking for except you didn’t fit the role of the imaginary employee we came up with while circling the lines of the resume of the last two people that didn’t leave this company in a quadruple-fatality shootout.

Criteria hiring works OK in very large companies both because HR department has limited time/money and the employees are not really meant to be very fluid in their capacities. They post a list of qualifications, people with time to rearrange their resume send in their applications, the most apt liars that can repeat them back to HR meet the hiring manager who is really looking for someone that can read and think at the same time. This is an awesome way to hire a burger assembler at McDonalds or a data entry person in a hospitality industry.

It is a horrible way to hire in SMB, and the reason why most one man shops that do hire someone end up firing them on a very short schedule. How is it that someone that fit every one of your criteria, that you really liked, that could do everything that was expected turned out so horribly - as a matter of fact, most turn out so horribly bad that many one man shops never want to hire another person again or be someone’s manager?

Flexible Prospect, Desperate Candidate, Fired Employee

The traditional hiring process falls apart at the mere premise that there are people out there so unfulfilled with their jobs that they have the time to spend on full-day interviews, three lunches and two application appointments. Unless you are offering a LOT of money, or seeking an executive with commensurate pay, you are statistically less likely to find a good candidate and more likely to just find someone that is unemployed for a number of very good reasons.

Think about the desperation for a second. If you are finding a candidate that is willing to put up with such a huge hassle not to work for a brand name company with global visibility (IBM, Google, Microsoft) after which they can go to another big company and claim global experience, how desperate are they for employment now?

Desperation brings out the worst in people. They will lie. They will tailor the right resume. They will subject to every test, interview, assessment and application you give them.

Then as soon as something better, something they really wanted, becomes available they will leave you.

What went wrong? You hired the wrong person. Right role, right fit,  wrong person.

The truth about SMB is that we look for flexible people, ambitious and knowledgeable, that want to work well with other people. But at the same time we want to subject them to baselining, assessments, comparative metrics and treat them as business assets that will constantly learn and evolve just not to the point that they figure out that they can make more money elsewhere for far less work. This is the underlying theory of “Human Resources” — treating people like movable objects, hiring them based on a list of credentials, bullet points, and percentage based compatibility with the set of criteria in the Kit with folders Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.

Then the business owner sits back in dismay when the employee leaves under the most unpleasant of circumstances… seriously, should you ever expect any better?

The Right Hiring Process

Hire people. Not roles.

If you hire the right person, they will find a way to fit the role you give them now. They will be able to adjust as your business adjusts. They will be capable of being promoted, of teaching, managing, nurturing and growing other employees that your company gets as it grows.

If you hire the right role, that employee will be gone with the first sudden shift in your business strategy (read Erick’s book on Managed Services) and you will be stuck at square one of looking for a fit for a hole that will change shape with a business that must change in order to grow and survive.

You can either adjust your business hiring practices to fit your changing business and the rapidly changing IT market… or you can franchise a Subway hole in a wall sandwich shop.

The process of finding, qualifying, and hiring people is NOT bullet point or KIT based. It can’t be downloaded online, it can’t be ran through a computer, it is not something you can process. If you want to see how well the process-based hiring works, go to Target. Look at all the drones there. Not an ounce of passion. Not a cent of personality. Just drones running around doing what the master told them.

But you don’t want that. You want an adaptable, flexible, skilled, creative passionate employee that is going to have your best interest at heart and do as they are told (hopefully for less than market value). Good luck with that.

The process of hiring, qualifying, nurturing, leading, empowering, enabling and growing a creative sales force that can work in a rapidly changing business is at a core of business leadership and being able to work with people and treat them like people.

We look for good people. There is always plenty of business to go around and plenty of things to get people to work on. There is not always a ready supply of people that are motivated, willing and capable of working on what we have. But we also aren’t installing a revolving door in our office.

Hire the right person. Get them to build up your company in the same way you have built it to the point of being able to allocate a salary.

Only then do you get someone who has your company on their mind, not just themselves. 

This blog is brought to you by Bud Light.

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

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

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

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

Vendor A: Blah

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

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

Vendor B: Finish Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Friday.. joke time.

Last week, after spending some quality time mopping my office floor, I decided it was time to get some help. As hard as many of you feel I work, I am lazy in day-to-day life on the same order of magnitude. If you notice, those servers were shipped when I moved into this place a few months ago and the tree in the back still has a sales tag on it. I am afraid if I pull it the whole thing will fall apart and then I’d have to explain why my office has a dead orange tree.

So last week I got a Rumba. I fully expected this thing to simply blow all the crap around the office and make the dirt more distributed (and less noticeable) but I have to say that it has surpassed my every expectation. This little monster not only gets into everything and manages to finds its way out, it also sucks hair, dust and assorted crap right off the floors. Now, granted, its hardwood so not a big deal but I am still impressed. It has certainly eliminated many hours from the local assortment of illegal immigrants.

Which leads me to believe that we are being replaced by robots.

Which further leads me to believe that there aren’t billions of people in India, or even millions. I believe there are exactly 5,000 Indians on that subcontinent, all of whom rush into the street for the annual picture that makes it seem they live on top of each other with the collection of edible and homicidal animals.

But why? Why do that? What are they hiding?

And then it hit me.

Indians have already been replaced by robots. They are just trying to make us not go over there and see them living in their gold palaces while IVR responds to technical calls, support requests and customer service!

Here is my list of evidence:

1. Tech support Indians sound nothing like any of my Indian friends. They all speak in the same tone, with no inflection, no volume changes, no respect for any punctuation.
2. Tech support Indians do not respond to questions you ask but are answering the questions they believe you are asking.
3. Tech support Indians do not interact well with humans.
4. Tech support Indians either lack self awareness (”So, where are you at?”) or are unaware of their surroundings (”What time is it there? How’s the temperature?”)

Finally, I have developed an algorithm for checking if the Indian tech support is human or just a robot:

Step 1: Make up a word. See if they ask for a definition of the word or play along. “The computer is bizongling.” - Human will ask for a definition, robot will do a pattern match and proceed to answer a question.

Step 2: Stress test. Fire several questions in rapid succession. Human will try to respond to the most relevant question immediately. Robot will have a long pause.

Step 3: Full Duplex Check. Talk over the Indian tech support. Human will stop and get confused over why you’re such a bastard. Robot will continue to talk.

Step 4: Suicide check. Ask them to spell their name. Robot Indian Tech support names are Roger, Mike, Rod or Ted. Human Indian Tech support are either Patel or look like a Sunday newspaper put through a paper shredder and reassembled in random order. Ask them to spell their name. Third repeat into it you should hear a loud scream.

You don’t want to know how much time I have spent on tech support to become this cynical. I firmly believe that if I’m paying you and you’re not there to help me, you might as well be there to amuse me.

Earlier tonight I was chatting with a friend of mine and we were comparing and contrasting some of the truly ridiculous individuals in our business. Such total outright whores that pretend to be one thing but the money trail reveals them to be nothing other than shills for anyone with a check. On one hand, we have people that have been successful in the business, share what they think will improve their community, but aren’t shy to stick the barcode forward and ask to be compensated for the content that has been thought through, organized, delivered in a consumable way (Karl, Erick, Dana). On the flip side, we have people that pretend to be like that but when you scratch the surface you only get the infomercial. I have made my dislike for those pretty open. My friends advice?

“Forget about them, they don’t matter.”

True. However, when everyone agrees not to say anything, when everyone just turns their back onto the unsuspecting public getting screwed, when everyone is a closet hero that is mad, tired as hell, and not going to take it anymore… okay, well, maybe just a little bit more… okay, well, never mind.. that dear friends is how the people get empowered and allowed to continue until the only thing that is left is them and people to aspire to be like them. 

Now, friends, it doesn’t matter who I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter if it’s in IT, it doesn’t matter if it is happening or not – in order to be right with yourself, your community, your world and be able to sleep at night you need to be able to distance yourself from the herd, think for yourself, and when something bothers you do something about it.

Thats what the blogs, podcasts, video blogs, conferences, group meetings, peer get-togethers, peer chats, 2AM IM sessions on the toilet and being a decent human being are all about. Thats why I encourage people to blog, to speak, to lead. Enough crap has gotten by, IT or otherwise, when the few agreed behind the closed doors not to discuss the problems in hope to save face and the trouble that might ensue if they made their thoughts known.

Remember, you are entitled to nothing and you have everything you deserve. If you strive for more, well, it takes some courage. And it won’t win you a Miss Congeniality award either, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll leave this place a little bit better than you found it.

More on this tomorrow from a very special guest on Vladcast #12.

Marketing oneself is a very suttle thing. You don’t need to wear a striped suit with question marks all over it and yell at the TV for people to pay attention to you. You don’t even need to read every Seth Godin book to become someone that people want to get stuff from. Sure, if all else fails you can always wear a hot pink shirt and throw on a purple pimp hat c/o Erick Simpson, but really the life is much simpler than that:

Have something interesting to say.

Make it easy for people to listen to you.

I’ve gone through an interesting week of public criticism over how my company sells software. Everything is a learning experience. But let’s say you’re not selling anything and you don’t need to build a moat around your business. Let’s say you just want people to pay attention. How do you do that? Well, first you put up a blog. But second… you make it easy for the people that read blogs to actually read your blog.

Here are a few blogs I read that you don’t. With the way they hide their feeds you’d almost think they are trying to hide in the crowd. Here are the links to their RSS feeds:

Wayne Small

Andy Goodman

Mark Crall

Get your feed on.

It’s Sunday, so here is your lesson…

The man kind… Is a social one, my brothers and sisters….

Love thy neighbor, love thy fellow man. Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you….

We are all equal, created by God, and we need to pray together.. we need to geek together..

As a humanity.. as a society… as a community..

That ought to be enough for the front row in hell..

Why the tears, nobody invited you to the party? You didn’t hear about the latest event? You missed a networking opportunity? How did that happen?

People only hold the door open for so long. When they don’t see anyone coming towards it, the door gets closed.

Such is the case of the IT communities in Orlando. And boy do we have some awesome tech groups here. For example, we have four LUGs. We have a .NET group. We have an SBS/ITPRO group. We have IAMCP. We have a PHP group. We have a Cup o’ Code for Web 2.0 enthusiasts. We have PodCamp Orlando.

The opportunities to network, to discuss things with your peers, to get something off your shoulders with the only likely group of people that would understand… the way to open your mind to something new… is out there. You have been cordially invited.

But here is the bitch about friends and socialization… If you’re perceived to show up only when it has some direct payoff to you, you tend not to be invited to the special things. People like hanging out and working with people that they like. These are human beings, not clerks at a store anxious to make your day. If you don’t care about them, they won’t care (or think) about you when they could use you.

Social benefits come to those who show interest in their community and their fellow man. Relationships are primary, business relationships are secondary.

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.

Last night we held our first meeting since roughly September and the attendance was fairly good. We had a few regulars, few newbies, few old friends.. all in all it was a good networking meeting and the chance to catch up with peers and everyone picked up something new about Microsoft licensing, CRM 4.0, Cougar, etc.

JJ Antequino from Microsoft was on hand too, still with the TS2 team, to talk about all things tech - Linux, Vmware, Citrix, Citrix app streaming; We have been very fortunate to successfully find the balance of sabotaging his career to the point that he’s not promoted yet not fired. Good news for Florida!

Some people got new jobs and talked about that, others went back to their businesses, some got a decent haircut and a shower which is always good news. It was just an evening of discussion of diverse IT topics:

Cougar, Centro, Responsepoint, GP/CRM and financial integration middleware, Dlink switches for small business, Citrix, Microsoft Licensing (new volume), SAS70 data center certification, mobility, CLEC bailouts, Silverlight bashing, divided house on the XP vs. Vista.

So next month, we’ll try the same. At some point, someone will find some value in the captive peer audience and present something that might elevate their business and their expertise and lead to subcontractor gigs or leads.. but until that happens, the peer conversation seems to be quite valuable as well.

We’re trying this Orlando ITPRO thing again. At some point last year I got so disheartened by the collective disinterest that I handed the ball off to someone I was hoping was dumber than me and would break his back for the common good of thankless people. He wasn’t that dumb. So the whole thing died, pretty much, and we all went our happy ways. Except that a good bunch of us still kept in touch. But then the interest in having the band together picked up – funny how there is suddenly more value in hanging out with peers when the economy goes down and the new sales leads go to shit?

So, we’re trying it again. But not on the back of any camel or on any particular message. The new moto is, “Bring Your Own Brain” or “Bring Your Own Bullshit” in strictly democratic sense. If you have something to say, you post your intention to discuss it at the next meeting and voila, you’re the featured presenter. If by some miracle we have two people, the order of presentations will be determined by the arm wrestling match. If there is no decisive winner, we move on to the coconut oil wrestling contest. It gets more graphic from there, suffice to say I think the next round would just lead to one person defering to the other.

We’ll see. So far 20+ people are on the RSVP list and I’m really taking the path of least resistence – I am only helping facilitate the delivery of the items the group overwhelmingly feels there is a need to deliver. If that becomes a monthly exchange of ideas and viewpoints, or a vendor slumber party, or whatever… it will be so not because of the leadership but because of the constituency.

We’ll see…