I’m on my way to Dallas for the HTG Summit. Got a ton of shirts and associated swag, stop by, say hi, bitch about my products and I’ll fix em. The usual.

OWN had the pleasure of resurrecting the hot plate blade center back to life overnight. Had we not gotten this together we would have looked like such losers I’d be afraid to even walk around Dallas.

Umm, yeah, I couldn’t keep a 4-blade $20K blade center together. My bad. But please give me your colo business!

The rough thing is, there is no way to win any sympathy points at all with your peers. But here is the messed up part. There was an extra blade in the blade center that NOBODY can account for. It’s not ours. It’s not the developers. It wasn’t on the purchase order. Nobody knows where it came from, we just know that the extra ram that was supposed to go into isn’t compatible with that motherboard. Here is where insult turns to injury: In the system that the system does fit and boots with full compatibility and speed the heat output is so high that it triggers the heat sensor on the CPU and marks the system down for overheating, shutting it down. And just when you think you’ve been kicked enough, and you tell the monkeys you’ll hang them upside down about not being able to find a server in 20” of vertical space – you notice that the overheating server blew off the label from the blade.

Vlad: It was a hardware  failure.

Dave: Should have gotten a Mac. OS X never overheats.

Vlad: One node failed.

Erick: Have you heard of this new technology called clustering?

Vlad: But I didn’t set it up

Karl: Oh, tell me a tale of how you can’t keep $20,000 worth of server alive!

Vlad: But it was the new third party RAM that we didn’t order that overheated it.

Mark: You know they have heatsinks for RAM now, it’s new.. maybe 6-7 years old?

No matter which way you spin it there is no running away from five nines. There is just no way to gain any sympathy when you spend so much $$ on the stuff.

These days I am having some tough conversations with a lot of small business owners who are struggling.

Yet, at the same time, my company is growing explosively and launching new products on the back of the OWN partner base.

So how can this be? How can one business owner be struggling while their peers are growing by leaps and bounds in the market that seemingly nobody is investing money in?

Simply put, there is a huge difference between a small business owner and an entrepreneur. They sound similar, but they are worlds apart. The small business owner builds a business plan, evaluates the market, finds the niche and builds a business around it and the said plan. They go after what is hot now and presume that small adjustments in course can be made over time to adapt to new technology while doing the same old thing.

I’ve had many discussions with small business owenrs over the years, most of whom have never figured out a way to grow their business beyond just themselves, and I don’t mean to rehash the argument. There is no point, the other side is dead or dying.

Why? The market they prepared their business plan for ($5K SBS install and management) is no longer there. Their business therefore is a lot less viable and they are either running it on the side or at a fraction of their income at the glory times.

Entrepreneurs don’t focus on the market, they focus on the opportunity. This focus comes at a significant risk and cost, something many small business owners shy away from for many reasons. Fortunately, some people learn the business essentials early on and apply them one opportunity at a time, scale and grow.

……

This is why there are people that are doing remarkably well and are existing beyond the crisis. To the same extent, OWN is not growing today using the same business plan or same products we had 2-3 years ago.

Now… how you would design a business to behave like an entrepreneur, and hit the level of reliability and consistency in all it’s ventures, is what consumes my every day. As you can tell from the constant bitching blog posts, it’s not so simple.

I’ve finally almost caught up with my email. That seems to be the perpetual state of my existence lately, I guess I’m famous. But almost, yes, almost got all my mail and issues all taken care of. Training up the new MonkeyForce has been a bitch, if I were a loser I’d probably just quit right now and say we’re not going to grow anymore but far too many of you know where I live and if the monkeys stop hitting delete there will be a pitchfork army at my door by the evening.

Phew, what a relief. Dodged e-myth prophecy once again!

And now that I finally have a breather, time to get myself way in over my head again! But more about that later, here is what you’re likely missing out on:

My good friends Wayne and Robbie are doing a huge webcast to introduce those of you down under to SBS and EBS.  Registration required but a free event. They will also be taking to the road and such. Own Web Now Corp is also doing a huge show of support for SBS with a new community, check back tomorrow. No, we still won’t sell it.

I got an invitation from my partner Dana Epp introducing the AuthAnvil v2 next week. Make sure you sign up for it – now much like ExchangeDefender and all the other serious stuff there are minimums – but if you work with OWN there aren’t – you can buy it one token at a time, $20 a month. I am sure I could put another pimpnote in here.

Someone out there ran a study and found out that SPAM gets 1 response per 12,500,000 messages. It also found I have a body of a prepubescent Chinese gymnastics champion. Please. We get dozens of calls a day with people questioning why their UPS invoice got stuck in the SPAM queue. Do you have an account with UPS? No. Do you ship with UPS? No. And you want the UPS Invoice from heyyou@retardibetyoullopenthatexecutableattachment.com delivered to you ASAP? Every company has exactly 1 idiot that will keep ExchangeDefender around as long as there is email.

Finally, a huge apology to Garett Chipman from TVG Consulting for still waiting on a quote from me. Second one in line to Stuart Selbst from SecureMyCompany for not getting the branded panel in place for the launch of the 50 cent / gig offsite backup. Apologies to the ConnectWise and Autotask families for the lagging SM integration projects, everyone waiting on Shockey Monkey, Vanderbilt, MonkeyForce, people waiting for the newsletter, James Cash, the angry UK villagers that didn’t get their invoices AGAIN and everyone else that stuck with me while I worked like a migrant fruit picker to staff and train this company through another growing pain point. Oh and Susan Bradley for working as my administrative assistant and getting me everything I asked for over the past month! Flowers are on the way.

What a lovely profane, filthy road it has been writing this blog for the past year. I would like to thank my friends Chris and Susanne, for helping with the notion that no matter how something sounded there was always a way to bring it to a new low.

It is November 4th and honestly, I’m out of ideas. I have pretty much accomplished my mission of pissing off everyone I can to the point that I can actually enjoy my life, family and business without anyone bugging me or waiting for me or thinking I’m a horrible person for not doing them a favor.

So tomorrow, this blog goes back to what it was prior to the Vlad, the worst person ever series that started last November.

Bit of background for anyone that cares: I have this personality flaw of extreme persistence and competitiveness which just so happened to be channeled in the wrong direction. I did just about everything I could to promote this blog and share the values that are important to me. It lead to a very wide readership through the blog itself, SBS Show, Shockey Monkey, Vladfire, etc. It lead to a ton of conference speaking engagements, focus groups, awards, etc. It also lead to a lot of personal anguish because there isn’t a sweat shop behind Vladville and people like to write very needy things when they need something. When and if I said no I got dragged through the dirt and had some filthy things said about me (far filthier than you’ll ever read on Vladville). I’ve singlehandedly taken more blame for Microsoft Online than even those guys did. I’ve been called everything from asshole to down right just the bad human being for not attending certain conferences their friends threw. I was “informed” that if I didn’t show up at certain meetings the person would do everything in their power to talk down my business and promote my competitors. The crown jewel of this came last year when I said I would be taking some time off to spend with my wife and my new baby. I think the series of articles written here over the past year have successfully separated me from enough “community” enough reporters trying to build a story and enough Microsoft staff looking for free publicity. Most people that have met me know that I’m a smartass and actually a very nice guy – and I made a mistake of allowing people to take advantage of that. So hopefully I have now built a firewall thick enough to make sure what I do and what I stand for doesn’t get involved in that. Don’t get me wrong, I am not hating on anyone that is trying to shamelessly whore themselves through those things to build a business, I totally respect and recommend that, it’s just that I’m not interested and I need to learn how to say no politely.

Royal Oak, MI, October 3, 2008:  Amy Babinchak and Eriq Neale, MS MVP’s, Authors and Speakers,  have teamed up in a new business venture to provide remote support services to IT professionals. By formalizing and centralizing the remote support services of highly skilled professionals across a wide range of products ThirdTier.net will be the place where IT professionals turn to when they need assistance to resolve that tough problem for their client. Third Tier will also offer SMB focused vendors the solution to the difficult problem of supporting a wide variety of skill sets in the SMB market space, thus making it easier for them to offer their products to small business customers.

· Central location for IT Professionals to contract experts on a wide variety of technologies to remotely assist in problem resolution.

· Experts providing vendors the solution to product support in the SMB market space.

….

indianinthebucket.com for bottom-feeding NOC services, thirdtier.net for the expert services.

Let’s face it, times are hard. Depending on where you are geographically, times are really hard to depressing. We’re doing incredibly well (September on course to be the biggest month on record ever) but we saw this thing coming and redid our portfolio in order to keep on growing amid the market meltdown. Truth is, when people have less and less money coming in you have to help them spend less money. The pie-in-the-sky productivity savings and workforce optimizations do not work in this market, people do not invest in their information technology, they try to make it fill the gap and even find ways to immediately reduce costs.

Features? Forget about it. Upgrades? Dream on. Migration with the promise of a new OS that hasn’t been battle tested with all LOBs with documented support? Lights out.

Roll in the crumbling financial markets, continued housing slide, election throwdowns..

If your big play for 2008-2009 fiscal year was SBS or EBS upgrades and deployments, you’re.. well, you know. ___ed. Insert your favorite expletive there.

Thankfully, Microsoft is being very nice to the MVP bunch and has invited us up to Redmond for a week of SBS training. I’ve decided to take the trip as well since a lot of my partners are in the SBS land and I know you folks are struggling. We are doing what we can at OWN to help with the cause because we know that as bad as things are right now the crisis always shakes out the weakest fruit and makes the marketplace better and more profitable for the rest of us. So we are doing what we can to provide the training, ramp up our partner community and give it a shot in the arm it needs.

But what always comes up with projects like this is that there is a demand that it be free. So I figured I’d open up just what the cost of any “free” venture is. Let’s assume that my time is worth nothing, that I will collect salary no matter what. The price of the free training is still:

Plane ticket: $600

Hotel: $1,300

Cab, tips, etc: $120

So even eliminating the enormous cost of spending time away from business for a week, the cost of free training is over $2K. Folks like to complain about how little comes out of the conferences in terms of free videos, training, recordings and blog posts. Folks want to feel like they are there. Truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as free – someone always pays – and even when folks do something for free it buys them no goodwill – most people go about business as usual and reward companies on a selection criteria that is void of community contributions. Some solutions, as I’ve noted here, have even died in the SMB space due to the lack of support. Is it fair? Of course, absolutely, but that explains the suckiness of the sharing that is seen from the top down. I suppose I’m just a dumbass, so you’ll see something pretty special come around next weekend. Stay tuned.

I have not exactly been celebrated for holding a very low opinion of most “We install manage and support SBS networks” shops, especially in the one man shop category. But it seems that my reigns as the SBS Public Enemy #1 are being taken by someone new so in spirit of helping they guy out from the public religious drubbing and eventual crucifixion at the Garbage Truck Drive Convention this October, I’d like to offer a slight SBS-atheist (“No, god did not create the SBS CEICW Wizard on the 8th day”) reality check to some of my dear friends and respected colleagues who seem to be living in a delusional dream state.

First, you are not going to beat Susan Bradley in an argument by calling her out on technical facts. She corrects Microsoft’s web sites and KB articles for living. The way to get under Susan’s skin is to say that she is “just a CPA” and should go read an ISA book by a good friend of mine. What happens is reminescent of the fabulous 80′s cartoon:

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword and said:

I have the poooooooweeeeerrr!

She then proceeds to point her sword at her Mini which becomes a mighty wrecking ball and probably says: “Here is your button. Now bend over!!!!”

Susan is a dear friend so in a moment I will demonstrate how you get her to stand in front of Skull Mountain.

The real reason SBSers aren’t installing _______________________

The real reason is because most SBSers aren’t technology savvy people to begin with, most of them were barely able to manage their own workstation as the counter went from 1999 to 2000. Most are your garden variety hacks in multiple IT gadgets, enthusiasts if you will. They knew how to uninstall spyware. Maybe they knew how to connect a printer, install a switch and figure out through documentation what the difference between the WAN and LAN ports was.

Then the divine intelligent creator came around one day, we’ll call him Mike Marshall, and thought:

What if we created a roadshow that did nothing but take end users and consumers through the Microsoft’s product stack and do a quick and easy demo on our latest technology and teach these people how to click on wizards, add SharePoint parts, etc. Let’s break through this myth of IT being something that required training, certifications, experience, degrees or really any knowledge beyond the brain dump.

Then Mike went to a tall mountain where he talked to the burning bush that gave him “Microsoft Business Solution Accelerators” that would guide the horde of SBSers through the waters of wizards that you couldn’t just click Next on and actually hat to put in a IP address or a hostname.

Eventually these shows became the breeding ground for the Microsoft solution stack and training of people who wanted downloadable virtual images, walkthroughs and workshops. Microsoft all too happily obliged.

What we ended up with is a large but diminishing population of people who have no ability to manage a server and never should. Just a bunch of CPA’s (see, thats how it’s done n3wb writer) stabbing in the dark for a solution to their infrastructure problems.

Surely it’s more complicated than that?

Nope. Not at all. The SBS community played a big part in getting DIYers to ignore the world outside of SBS and to discard it as irrelevant. When I started hanging out in the SMB IT community around 2002-2003 you would see endless threads of people saying “Why not just install SBS” or “Pull that Windows 2003 server and install this SBSized wizarded thing”

People like me, who wrote technical articles and organized SBS groups, are partially to blame for this.

Bottom line

It’s not that these incompetent people are choosing to ignore Linux or Windows 2008 or Exchange 2007 or cloud solutions or ______. It is that they lack technical competence to do anything out of their comfort zone because they are the glorified script readers and button pushers and they reject the notion of anything that might force them to read Google, open up a book.

Just read all the outrage lately over the SBS support going to the callback model only.

Why do you think that is?

Because folks that don’t know what they are doing can easilly say it’s Microsoft’s fault and spend the rest of the day on the phone all while telling their clients that Microsoft is on the case.

But what about Microsoft’s side in all this? Why do you think they only chose SBS to be a callback platform? Because it takes a lot longer to troubleshoot an issue if your caller can’t figure out where the registry editor is or how to stop and start services. If you’ve never been on the receiving end of some of these calls then you’re missing out. What happens when you ask someone if the service is running they will try to read the entire services right panel, with descriptions and all to boot. “So are these sorted alphabetically? Can I just do a search?” <faceplant>

That can’t be, that simply just can’t be…

Welp, it is. I would venture to guess that upwards of the 90% of the SBS-or-death consulting market is comprised of just CPA’s, lawyers, the most savy IT people in the shop and not of actual certified engineers, people with IT degrees. I’m just basing that on the tier-1 questions we get in our support portal.

The SBSer elite doesn’t want to admit this is the case because they just refuse to believe it and they have no circumstantial evidence to point to. That’s because Johnny the SPF doesn’t go on the Internet to post a question. He doesn’t take the time to come out to the SBS user group. He doesn’t stand up and profess his issues at the TS2 event or Microsoft roadshow because he knows he is a fraud.

That’s the truth kids. It’s not that people are making bad business decisions or are just uninformed of other solutions or that they cheat their customers — it’s the fear that their inability will show up one day and they would be exposed for what they are — power-user way out of his comfort zone.

But is all this a necessarily bad thing? For the customers stuck with the SPFs, yes. But for the greater majority of clients, Microsoft and the SMB IT ecosystem this is a huge win. I suppose the greatest compliment one can pay to the designers of SBS is that they’ve designed a product that is used and managed by people that never should be touching that server to begin with.

Last night was our monthly meeting for Orlando ITPRO and it was the first one in quite some time. We had a few hours of just plain conversations about a local data center that recently had a network down status for over 12 hours and the importance of limited SLAs when things go wildly out of your own control.

For my part I was talking about our network management for unmanaged servers. Say that five times fast. There are many networks and customers that do business with us where we are not the managed services provider (company too large, privacy issues, IT policies prohibiting external access) so things like logmein and VNC are out of question. So what tools do we use to both assure staff has no access to the passwords and critical authentication data but also that we keep our level of integrity when it comes to accessing remote systems?

TechSmith Jeng – Screen video capture to save sessions and store both for compliance and legal purposes but also send to the client for training purposes.

code4ward Royal TS – Royal TS is a consolidated remote desktop tool, looks and feels a lot like Microsoft SCVMM for virtual machines, except for managing multiple remote desktop sessions.

Accountability and flexibility… for free.

If you are in the IT space, you need to be watching this. Even if you don’t work with or against Microsoft, Microsoft is a major force in this business and you need to know what they are up to.

OwnWebNow and a few of our partners are doing a bit to bring you the first impressions live from the event. I’m personally using the new Own Web Now Partner Call podcast to interview my partners about what they are learning at WPC and what they are thinking about doing to become more successful with the info they learn.

Listen to the first Own Web Now Partner Call with Mark Crall. Mark talks about the changes to the partner program, changes to the SBSC and community engagement from Microsoft, free exam vouchers and quite a bit more about business and economy in Charlotte.

I will have more calls from WPC today, tomorrow and after that when they get all their thoughts together and figure their strategy out. One of my other partners from Dallas, Pat Dolan of TCC Technologies is doing some video from WPC as well, check it out. Here he is talking to Dave Sobel.

Damn CPA’s getting pwn3d all over the place. For the billionth time, when working with someone in the Accounting industry remind them:

“password” is not a good password. It doesn’t matter that you have an antivirus installed.

Now back to the grave dancing thing I do so well Poor Susan, serves her right for shipping me a flaming piss yellow hard drive.

It’s so scary when I’m in a good mood. It’s Friday, had like 8 support requests all day, our container just landed in Australia and the one for UK goes online Tuesday. ’tis good to be the king.