If you happen to be in Downtown Seattle this weekend, track me down.. I’ll be at the SBS UG meeting tonight to talk about a new community project, out drinking with the boys later tonight, and tomorrow morning/afternoon just hanging out at the hotel. If you’re one of my partners and we’ve never met face to face track me down.

* Ok, obligatory community note here - Yes, I have tshirts. I am also here on behalf of Andy Goodman as the Deputy Riffraff General. No, I am not going to the Garbage Truck Driver Convention.

Starting with next week I am coming back to work full time (and then some) from my paternity leave. Depending on the little monkey’s sleep schedule I might be putting in a lot more hours in odd hours of the night and I’m committing to my comeback full on.

So I have started something.. several things in fact..

My first goal is to clean up Vladville a little. There are a lot of serious technical and business articles I have written but decided to pull back from Vladville since they don’t really fit into the vibe of the fun-n-gun style of humor displayed here.

So sign up for it here
Vladville Newsletter

It’s free and it’s actual content and it’s what I actually do (sans the satirical view of it you will still get here daily I promise you will love it.

Take a room full of MVPs and give them a bunch of interconnected servers for lab purposes. Take away Internet access. What happens next?

Monkeys launch a mailbomb at each other. It’s the equivalent of a slap fight, for geeks.

Vlad: At some level this is really childish..

Tim: This is childish at every level..

Who is YOUR daddy Wayne & Dana, who is your daddy?

Took the (out of town) team out to lunch today and they really enjoyed this lovely sign, on behalf of Orlando, the city beautiful:

Don’t be homeless. If you are homeless, remain in state of perpetual motion or sleep on the pavement. Other options include mounting the bronze alligator statue, sleeping at the bottom of a fountain or suspending yourself upside down from a city light.

Gotta love government bureaucracy. I wonder how many people got together to define the instance of a homeless person sleeping in a park.

Aaron Booker from Hardlines caught up with me at the recent Connectwise Summit. I’ve blogged about VarVid video blog that Aaron and Pat Dolan put together to give you the street-vibe around WPC. Now it was my turn, but first a bit of background:

Slimy Vendor Whore is something Dana and I came up way back in 2005 when I got introduced as Vlad Mazek, the Microsoft MVP, Exchange guru and an outspoken community leader and Dana got introduced as a vendor. As Dana sat there outraged at his introduction I of course piled on by not just saying he was a vendor but a slimy vendor whore at that. Ever since that my official introduction to anyone that was a potential lead outside of the general pitching/networking areas has been that I’m a slimy vendor whore.

As you will see in this video, I’m proud to unseat Eric Ligman from his throne as the king of our slimy vendor whore kingdom. Please watch the video and count the # of sales pitches and gratuitous self-promotional messages - I’d say make it a drinking game and down one every time you hear a sales pitch but you’d likely end up dead from alcohol poisoning.

Vlad Mazek Interview from Aaron Booker on Vimeo.

If you are thoroughly disgusted at what you just saw I’m going to let you in on a little secret that I see far too many people are not too clued in on: When someone sticks a mic and a camera in your face it is not to get to know you, the real you, your soul. It is a self-promotional effort of getting the content that others will want to get something for - you have only a few moments to present yourself and what you do for others. In crude terms, it’s an invitation to pimp. Unless you are a twelve year old girl nobody wants to hear your shoutouts, your thoughts on world peace or a funny joke or an anecdote of what the times were like when you worked on mainframes - they see a goofy picture you’re guaranteed to hate and they want to know what you can do for them. This isn’t 60 minutes, it’s 5 minutes - sell yourself.

Oh, and for those that haven’t met me and wonder if Vladville is just an act and what I’m really like in real life…. that’s me without caffeine in a basement in Florida during summer.

P.S. If you don’t creep out the guy interviewing you, you simply haven’t done your job.

Some of you have an unhealthy addiction to Vladville I’ll leave it at that.
I have been suffering from a severe case of Blogache, my head is stuffed with stuff I want to talk about, my sinuses are filled with how good the new Microsoft commercials are and I’m in a whirl over how good the business is. Talk about the right place, right time, right message and the right people. We are absolutely firing on all cylinders, but we are running out of cylinders. ;(

Anyhow, here are my thoughts in no particular order: ConnectWise conference is the best, direction-wise, conference I’ve ever been to. I got to sit around and talk to the CEOs of LPI, Zenith and ConnectWise for far more than just the few minutes we usually get. In terms of future and where those companies are going, we are right on the same page and in the same direction. This means the unbelievable growth curve we’ve had starts hugging Y more and more and my dream of a Ferrari rainbow gets more complete

Many of you have Microsoft problems and still a lingering anger over what is going on. Que sera, sera. On the business side I really can’t tell you that there is any interest in your concerns. On the MVP side, it’s really not a point of discussion at all, those guys are 100% on the ball to make the best product available. Microsoft seems to have their commercials out which IMHO look right on the money. I only saw one and I forgot the line at the end but it was basically a giant wind-up kick in the balls of Apple. Beautiful!

Cloud vs. On-premise: Who will win? Who gives a sh**. Listen, business is a game of gambles and investments. If you keep on hitting the red, and it turns out to fall on black you lose all your business. Tough luck. But if you grow up a littleand spread your bets around the table you just might find yourself ahead of the curve no matter what the future holds.

Finally, what am I up to?

I’m having a midlife crisis. It’s not so much of a crisis as it is collecting Corvette’s but I think the two go hand in hand. My dental surgery fun and drill is finally over tomorrow afternoon and with the wife back and work and little monkey in day care I’m pretty much dead set on bringing back The Ironman. You’re going to love the codename for this project, suffice to say, I have a lot of work to do in terms of redemption when it comes to my business, to Shockey Monkey, to a few partners that got screwed by me going on paternity leave, the tech contributions to the community and the list of fuckups goes on. The way I figure, I have until about Christmas (60 days give or take) to clean up my overpromise/underdeliver issues. I’ve hired a girl I’ve known since 13 to help me out specifically on some of this stuff (she is as big of an ass as I am so it’s a total c-c-c-c-ombo breaker type of a situation). I got me a shockey monkey!

Now the fact that I’m blogging this at 5 AM probably ought to be funny enough but sometimes hearing others admit that they suck is equally entertaining. Overheard earlier tonight in the NOC chatroom:

“It’s amazing how it takes 4x as long when you don’t know what you’re doing…”

“Why, are you still stabbing in the dark through the forums hoping to find someone as dumb as you are..?”

“Aha… I have defeated it!!! No.. wait.. it just stopped responding.. #@$%”

“Who wrote this @#%@%, it’s like clipart code for programmers… this one even has line numbers in the source!!”

“This masterpiece has “Made in India” written all over it….”

I can’t share which clients we were helping with the above are but sometimes it seems like it’s a miracle that the Internet works at all… 

Is pessimism a requirement for the CEO role?

There are really three ways I talk about my business and I believe they are all valid and without conflict with one another. I believe in what we do - so I do all I can to motivate my team and keep on pushing them forward. I believe in our products and services and the feedback + growth are stronger and more positive than ever in the history of the company - so I tell the same to our potential customers and partners. Then there is that third component - the direction - which seems to be solely on my shoulders to conceptualize, design and help implement. And not a day goes by without me wondering just how much we suck and how many balls we drop. That is what drives me day to day, the hatred of everything we do wrong and packed notepads of planned enhancements and improvements. Every day I walk out of my office with one less problem on my shoulders. To me, that’s my purpose here, to keep on making things better so that everyone benefits from my team to our customers.

And with that, I am particularly disappointed with what I’ve done with Vladville in 2008 so far. Vladville, SMB Buddy, Shockey Monkey, SBS Show & Co all need a lot more TLC than I’ve given them and frankly so do you. So hopefully in the next few weeks, and for the rest of 2008, I will redeem myself a little.

Of all the magnificent failures I get to deal with @OWN, from servers blowing up to SLA going up in smoke to earthquakes and difficult vendors, one of my most disappointing failures in 2008 is that I’m practically unable to do anything for the businesses that are in the path of Hurricane (or TS) Fay..

For years Own Web Now and my partners have done all we can to provide some free last minute relief for people about to be punched, lights out, by a hurricane. Everything from offsite backups, FTP space to move critical files up, ETRN when the power goes down so that mail can still get there, ExchangeDefender, etc - your usual ad hoc last minute stuff that the business either didn’t plan to get or simply could not afford.

Should one business provide free services to another business, in an emergency, even if their competitors had invested money (and thereby traded away some competitive advantage) - isn’t that unfair? Perhaps, but sometimes there is a little more to things than just pure cutthroat business competition. Sometimes it’s the economic survival of the ecosystem that we live in, and the same system that has made it possible for us to become what we are today. On a personal level, Florida is where I live and Florida (lottery) paid for me to go to college (Go Gators! Hooray for socialism!) so it’s not like I don’t owe it the slightest bit of proactive help when I’m in a position to do so.

Unfortunately, this year we are just swamped and in this down economy we are doing all we can to just keep up with orders, support and the new products we’re launching. So it saddens me to admit that this year we are just not in the position to do what we’ve been able to do over the past few years. It sucks.

So we sit here and hope for the best. Let it rain!

Today’s guest blog post comes courtesy of the page 18-19 of the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review. I think it sounds eerily similar to the attitudes we’re seeing in the IT field these days and felt it was relevant enough, so here it is for your consideration. Enjoy:

History has lessons to teach about the role of denial in the decline of companies. The stubborn refusal of the U.S. automobile industry to admit changeability of consumer demand is one of the best examples.

The Model T was introduced in 1908, and over the next two decades the Ford Motor Company sold more than 15 million of these cars. But by 1927 sales had flagged so severely that Henry Ford discontinued the line in order to retool his factories for its successor, the Model A. To make the change, he shut down production for months, at a cost of close to $250 million. This chain of events was disastrous for the company, because it allowed Chrysler’s Plymouth to gain market share and permitted General Motors to seize market leadership.

Why did Henry Ford, who was such a visionary in the industry’s infancy, fail to see that the Model T was about to run its course and that a smooth transition to a new vehicle was essential? Evidence of his signature model’s declining fortunes was everywhere apparent at the time. But Ford dismissed sales figures documenting the Model T’s declining market share, because he suspected rivals of manipulating them. One of his top executives warned him of the dire situation in a detailed memorandum. Ford fired him.

Ford’s blindness resulted from a conviction that he knew what customers wanted: basic transportation. He was equally convinced that this desire would never change. His favorite slogan about the Model T- “It takes you there and it brings you back” - captured his myopic view. What Ford didn’t grasp is that every product or service has two components: the core (the product’s primary purpose) and the augmented (additional functions and features). In every industry the border between the two inevitably shifts over time. (For another take on Core and augmented products, see Theodore Levitt’s The Marketing Imagination)

In 1908 the automobile was mostly core: It got you there and back again.

By the 1920s, however, the world was changing, whereas the Model T wasn’t.

The full piece is well worth the time to read it (and the magazine’s $20 newsstand price) and is written by Richard S. Tedlow, rtedlow@hbs.edu

And yes, I read the Harvard Business Review - as should you.