Damn Ostriches

Posted: 1:02 am
March 17, 2008
SMB
25 Comments

Nothing makes me happier than getting ignorant emails asking me to take my blog posts down. It’s your choice to be ignorant, if everything is OK and you’re determined there is nothing wrong out there, just stick your head in the sand and let the rest of us that have businesses to run, employees to pay, customers to be responsible to and generally aware of the business ecosystem do our jobs.

ostrich_head_in_ground_Full

To those of you without sand in the ears, curious as to what the problem was:

NEW YORK (AP) — Just four days after Bear Stearns Chief Executive Alan Schwartz assured Wall Street that his company was not in trouble, he was forced on Sunday to sell the investment bank to competitor JPMorgan Chase for a bargain-basement price of $2 a share, or $236.2 million.

“The past week has been an incredibly difficult time for Bear Stearns,” Schwartz said in a statement. “This represents the best outcome for all of our constituencies based upon the current circumstances.“

So let’s recap. Monday, everything fine. Tuesday, everything fine. Wednesday, things are going great! Thursday, we’re good. Friday, A-ok. Saturday, market closed. Sunday, sell the company for $2/share, effectively a bankruptcy, potential loss of 15,000 jobs.

What happened on Saturday? Did they get a $39 late charge fee on their Visa bill and they couldn’t cover it? Someone mug the CEO who just happened to have 16 billion dollars in assets on him at the time? Did the repo man come over and take their fridge so they don’t want people in the office? What happened?

What happened is that there was a whole lot of lying going on about how screwed some of these banks are and the weight of the bag of insolvent debt they are dragging. All these banks, including the President of United States of America, are collectively staring straight at the camera and lying to everyone about how deep in trouble we are in hoping we don’t catch on to the fact that behind the scenes they are buying each other for $2 and the fake monetary system is used to move around fictional money not based on a gold standard from one empty bucket to another.

There is a difference between denial and outright lying. Denial is saying that we’re not in a recession. Saying that everything is OK and then bankrupting the company four days later while admitting that “this past week has been an incredibly difficult time” is lying.

Bonus Round

The blog post is not going down but I have a business question for you to answer:

Assume that all financial, lending, credit and borrowing systems are connected, worldwide. [Check] Assume that the companies that manage/run/operate those companies are now filing bankruptcies or selling for $2/share which is below the market value of even their headquarters. [Check] Assume credit is almost impossible to obtain. [Check] Loss of jobs [Check] Loss of value in your home that is impossible to liquidate under current circumstances [Check] Loss of 401K, mutual funds, real estate and other investments [Check] Increase in energy costs [Check] Political uncertainty [Check]

You run an IT Solution Provider business that grows as the current customers grow or new businesses get started. If the current businesses are downsizing and there is no new business, how does your company grow? (one man shops substitute “salary” for “company”)

How is that for starting a debate?

Now let’s make it nasty. Your possible answers are:

A. There is no recession, business is up and will always continue to go up so long as we make minor adjustments to our course as we go along. (This is remarkably similar to the stance the CEO of Bear Sterns took, look above, right before the giant wave of reality destroyed his business a few short days later.) If you picked this answer you are a fucking moron, let me save you some time and point you straight to the form.

B. Sell the customers Windows Server 2008, Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and show how an investment in new infrastructure will reduce operating costs and make the business more productive while realizing savings. You are still an idiot, albeit an enterprising one, I would like to offer you a 100% commissioned sales job at Own Web Now.

C. Sell the customers managed services, which cost far less than the internal IT employee salary for keeping the company technology infrastructure together. (Hope they don’t read the fine print at the bottom of the contract where it says you will only manage their infrastructure after it’s brought “up to spec” meaning a massive upgrade and redesign of a network glued together by someone that spent four days of the workweek on a torrent site trying to leech down the new cracked version of Vista activation server.)

D. None of the above.

So what is the solution? Well, planning, for one.

Dreams, hallucinations and denial? Not so much.

Listen, these aren’t girl scout cookie stands disappearing. These are the biggest banks in the world, folding under the pressure of insurmountable and unpayable debt, generated by the economic indulgence that likely fueled the growth of businesses that you have grown your own enterprise on top of. We aren’t losing a farm, an economic sector, a state or even a really big building – we are losing the very top of our financial world which fuels everything we do and in turn makes it possible. The very top is crumbling, admitting that it cannot live up to its obligations, admitting that things are bad, wasting jobs, financial portfolios, tanking property values, soaring energy costs… This isn’t some highrise getting blown up (WTC), a company wiped out by criminal activity of its management (Enron), a town flooded (New Orleans) or a bad roll of dice in Las Vegas. 

I beg you, please start thinking about it! This does, or rather soon will, affect you.

It was nice while it lasted..

Posted: 11:39 pm
March 16, 2008
Gaypile
5 Comments

58The 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.

The coming age of marketing accountability

Posted: 11:20 am
March 15, 2008
Gaypile, Web 2.0
2 Comments

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.

0312084kristen1

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.

I am not the bunny Vlad that makes the cookies!

Posted: 11:38 pm
March 14, 2008
Misc
11 Comments

So what kind of a Vlad am I?

horton12_502

The person with the most original comment/answer wins an iPod! Multiple answers allowed, contest not open to OWN employees/friends/family, ends Wednesday, March 19th.

Ouch, the death of SBSC

Posted: 12:22 am
March 13, 2008
IT Business, Microsoft, SMB
Comments Off on Ouch, the death of SBSC

Due to the popular and seemingly angered demand, here is a blog post for you today. In the few years that I’ve posted here on nearly daily basis I’ve encouraged you to take these rambling, incoherent, grammatically and politically incorrect posts not as the gospel from some all-knowing entity but to just think consider them and hopefully start a blog of your own and discuss them. Wonderful things happen when we talk, when we take enough pride in our work to discuss it in the open and hopefully let others understand just why we do what we do. Maybe we even learn something new or find an error in our ways.

So my thought for today is, whose fault will it be when the SBSC is dead?

If it would make it easier to consider this, whose fault is it that the Firewall Dashboard from Scorpion Software is dead. Now Firewall Dashboard is a commercial product by one of the best friends and peers you can have in this business, Dana Epp. Dana has made enormous contributions to the community, from presentations, to blogs, to conferences, to user groups, to all the MVP stuff, and a ton more than I can account for here or that even Dana could put on an expense report. Time is money, right? This guy gave and gave, and will continue to contribute to community, because great people like Dana do not see the community as the brief marketing outlet, or a stepping stone to the next promotion. He is our peer. But today, according to Wayne, SMB community has lost a great product and very likely a great vendor that supported and understood the needs of the SMB community. Wayne goes on a little further to explain the connection between community investment and the types of products built for the businesses that people in our community serve. He goes further to say:

“So the next time a vendor makes a great product like this go out and buy it.  Don’t continue to use it in “trial mode” if it’s giving you value.  Don’t complain that vendors don’t build product for the SMB space either.  They do and we continue to screw it up by not supporting them.”

http://blog.sbsfaq.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=141

Who can we blame?

If I am going to channel a VAR, the easiest person to blame here would be Dana, since it’s never my fault and he’s the face of it so it’s easy to take a potshot at a reputable IT leader in hopes that my miniscule penis will grow beyond 1.75″. Dana is just a bad businessman, he made a product available for free and I am not some dirty stinking vendor that takes peoples money for software, I am a noble IT consultant who gets compensated for the time and expertise to recommend the best product for the client and implement the cheapest possible solution that saves everyone money. So what if it has a watermark?

If I am going to channel a horrible, inhumane vendor, I would say its the customers fault. They refused to support my product, I do not have unlimited funds so screw this, I am going to make software that people want to pay for.

But since I am both a vendor and a VAR in this space, I am going to try to explain a compromise here. The compromise is that for the most part VARs are not good businessmen (if they were, 99% of this space wouldn’t be one employee and a cat/dog plus spouse on part time basis), that vendors do not have the level of funds required to properly market and target the kinds of VARs that can make them profitable in this segment.

But blame never really accomplishes much because the ultimate loser in the entire equation is the SMB customer.

Why this even matters….

This matters because it explains why things are so bad in SMB IT, why there are so few solutions specifically created for this space and most importantly – why your vendors are trying to go around you and direct to your customer. The reason is, SMB VARs have no loyalty to the vendor. One bad release and you’re through. One cheaper reasonable alternative and you’re out the door. The product that made a ton of money for years was replaced in 2005 and you’ve got nothing good to say about them – they suck but you haven’t tried them since. Hey, those are the breaks.

But it’s not entirely the VARs fault. The reason VARs have so little loyalty is because the vendors have a split second attention span when it comes to VAR demands, needs and complaints. Everything is brushed aside, will be fixed in the next version, we’re trying to address the issue – all while the people you’ve formed relationships with keep on getting promoted to bigger and better jobs. The SMB VAR apathy is well earned.

We all know this, both the VARs and the software publishers, so how do we change? How do we do better? How do we improve?

From a vendor to another vendor, avoid the SMB community like a plague. Advertise, but do not buy the ring just yet.
From a VAR to a VAR, buy the products that serve your customers the best. Likewise, do not look for a marriage.

Over time, vendors will be able to look at their balance sheets, find the good, smart people in the VAR game and find a way to get their advice and help them grow. VARs will tell one another, recommendations will make the product successful far more than advertising, sponsorships and talking about how the great the product will be.

Now, what do we do with the other 90% of the market, both solution providers and software publishers? That in fact is the death of the SBSC

The Death of The SBSC

Microsoft Small Business Specialist Community, is in my opinion, the greatest gift to the SMB sector any software publisher has ever provided. Global presence, local involvement, sales assistance, marketing collateral, free training, free priority support, free presentations, free trucks, tshirts, swag and more all for the people who choose to ask.

But what happens to this wonderful SBSC community if the actual community shows no support for it? What happens to those telePAMs that everyone loves to hate? What happens to all the trucks if you aren’t relying on them? What happens to the licensing models, promotions and incentives if you don’t take advantage of them? What happens with PAMs, PCMs, PALs and other resources as they go unappreciated and underutilized?

What happens when after years of trying Microsoft suddenly realizes that the 90% of the SBSC community will never really turn into a business, but is only in this as an immaterial participant that is perpetually on the sidelines of going from their basement to the corner office?

What happens when Microsoft realizes that the only function of the SBSC is to help find those 10% of VARs that actually make it up the certification and business process enough to extend big time resources to and make a true partner – not just a target to throw tshirts and pens at?

What happens when Microsoft kills the SBSC as we know it today and just makes it an entry point into the Microsoft partner program where those who run a VAR business separate themselves from people who like taking money for playing with computers?

That is the day the SBSC dies. Who will we blame then? Will we be able to beat down Dave Overton for drowning little kittens in a lake? Will we blame Eric Ligman for the bass in his voice that blew out our speakers? Will we blame Steve Ballmer for not jumping around yelling “SMB VARS. SMB VARS. SMB VARS.”

I know it is a delicious fantasy to hold on to the image of software publishers with billions of dollars of marketing and not an ounce of fiscal responsibility. I know its easy to call out the idiot VARs for their lack of commitment. I know its very easy to pin one pile against the other, all while everyone sits around and protects their turf.

But I will share something with you folks, something that I hope sticks with you because you’ve read this long post and at least you care. The big, ugly, fundamental truth no matter which pile you are in is that we look for hungry, ambitious people that are not afraid of hard work. Those are the guys and gals that make it. Those are the partners that you want, be it a vendor or a VAR. Successful people tend to hang out around other successful people because they find motivation in the people that work for where they are, they learn from them and most importantly – they see the person that values hard work and show a bit of faith that they would work just as hard for me.

The rest is riffraff, and if you’re in it that’s your own damn fault – and the blame for that is very easy to place.

BB in 1 Week with Monkey & Weasel

Posted: 6:18 pm
March 9, 2008
OwnWebNow, Shockey Monkey
7 Comments

After two years of pushing this stuff forward by myself (and a few thousand partners) the time has finally come to put the Own Web Now monster behind The Monkey and The Weasel and let it out of my direct control. What this basically means is that I’m in for a week of documenting, explaining and selling the idea of the entire OWN enterprise, everything we run and support, tying together with everything and everyone we work with.

What this means is more money, more time on development and yes, phone and full support for the Monkey. Unfortunately, it is going to take all my time as well as everyone you know and work with at OWN so expect the things to be a little slow at OWN this week. I will not be available on the phone, no blog, no IM and if you have a big issue that you email me about either use the portal or you’ll get a response in a week.

See you next Monday.

Time based Outlook 2007 rules

Posted: 5:57 pm
March 9, 2008
Exchange
7 Comments

Every now and then time-dependant rule questions come up and today I took a few minutes to figure them out. The good news is, Exchange 2007 transport rules make this easy and seamless. The bad news is, Outlook 2007 can do this too but only as a client-based rules. This means that without Exchange 2007, time-dependant rules can fire only if an instance of Outlook 2007 is running.

Corey Powell asks:

I have a customer with 6 sales people.  They have leads arriving via email to one email address.  They want the “on-call” person to receive all of the leads that come in for the period of time that that person is “on-call”.

So, how do you do this in Outlook 2007? Easy:

Click on Tools > Rules and Alerts > New > Check messages when they arrive > with specific words in the message header:
” 07:”
” 08:”
” 09:”
” 10:”

Forward it to people or distribution list and pick a user.

This will effectively forward messages received from 7:00 am – 10:59 am to the user or distribution list you specify. Repeat for the other 6 shifts with respective 4 hour windows.

Few notes: leading space is very important because some MTA’s use IPv6 which without a leading space can match the wrong part of the header. Furthermore, Outlook does not have the “and” operator (something that Exchange 2007 does in its transport rules stack) so if you receive mail from other time zones your filter may not work as intended.

Determination over Awareness

Posted: 11:10 am
March 9, 2008
IT Business
10 Comments

Over the course of the past week, two of my very dear friends Karl and Marx have blogged about how they will not let the negativity over US economy interfere with their business direction this year. Among the notable quotes:

Mark:

“I may have slept through economics but I do know what my peers and customers are telling me.  Between the news and the fear manipulation being done for the sake of votes I’m done listening to negativity.  Now if you will excuse me, I’ve got a profitable business to focus on.”

Karl:

“I don’t understand why the media want to talk us all into a recession. This morning I turned on CNBC. What’s the story? Target same-store sales are up. Walmart same-store sales are way up!!! Walmart’s dividend is 95 cents a share. That’s huge.”

Now, don’t let these guys fool you. They are not ignorant by any stretch of the imagination, they have both done very well with the basics of American capitalism in that they have both built successful businesses, they have both given jobs to a bunch of people thereby fueling more than just their own pockets, through their companies they have given a lot of businesses a chance with the latest technology without the surprise costs.

They are not saying that things aren’t going in the wrong direction.

They are not disputing that we lost 68,000 jobs on Friday.

They are saying that they have a business to run and that playing into the fear and propaganda is not something they want to engage in. They are not letting the pundits distract them from their mission.

Does that mean that just if you wish upon a star hard enough and if your heart is pure you won’t see your customers go out of business? Does it mean that Mark and Karl have been sprinkled with pixy dust or that prince charming kissed their articles of incorporation so their companies can life happily ever after? No.

Business leadership is a delicate combination of determination and awareness. Know what is going on around you and work hard towards your goals. They are not mutually exclusive traits. (see posts on “execution” – being a determined and driven idiot does not guarantee success) Determination and awareness need to be in balance and most importantly, they need to be ongoing.

Most people let their circumstances dictate their direction, they believe that because they are agile they will be able to adjust to anything that comes their way.  Thats like saying that it’s OK to hit a wall at 60 mph because you have car insurance. Business success does not come as a result of tiny adjustments over the course of time – maybe business survival at best.

Business success comes from seeing an opportunity (or threat) before everyone else does, giving your customers/clients an insight into what is going on, presenting different options and showing that you are basing your recommendations both on your expertise and your awareness for what is going on.

So back to Karl Marx. Obviously successful guys. What are they seeing and saying that the others are not?

Is Shrink-Wrapped Software Dead?

Posted: 10:43 am
March 9, 2008
Web 2.0
6 Comments

The latest issue of Time (March 17) questions whether we’ll soon see the end of commercial software installed on the PC in favor of web-based apps that do pretty much the same thing. Except for free and without the associated complexity.

I have discussed the web vs. LOB app issues in business use extensively and I believe that the trend to the web will continue. Simply because it cuts costs. Not just in the purchase price of the software but also the maintenance, patching, upgrading and migrating from one version to the next. Not to mention a full time person (or a support contract from an IT solution provider) to keep it all together.

Home market is a different story. While at work you create documents, print invoices, email extensively and manage appointments and calendars, your home life might be a little different. Editing pictures. Producing video. Webcam with friends and family. All very bandwidth intense applications, where having 10,000 fonts makes a huge difference. Has anyone sent you a business memo written in Windings? Now have you ever plucked a funky font for a flyer or a party announcement?

Web applications are great for business which needs the bare minimums to get the job done. For home use, I expect something to compensate for my lack of skill, even if I need to throw the processing power of a small server at it to make it look good.

I don’t think that the home / end user market is going to be as driven to the web apps as they will to the sub-$100 commercial software. Go to your local Best Buy, the most successful electronics dealer in America, and compare the square footage they dedicate to boxed software when compared to the flat screen TVs. They wouldn’t dedicate that much space to something that didn’t sell.

For the sake of the argument, here is what Anita Hamilton offered as the paid software vs. free software alternatives:

Paid Software

Free Software

Adobe Photoshop Elements

Picnik

Microsoft Office

Google Docs

World of Warcraft

Scrabulous

Family Tree Maker

Geni.com

What do you think?

Man of the Year

Posted: 6:47 pm
March 7, 2008
Vladville
1 Comment

This is the biggest badass I have ever seen. He just ran a half-marathon, at age 101, drinks beer, smokes and stays out late. Among the quotes:

And Martin likes running, “but not as much as I like my beer,” he added.

Martin is also the father of 17 children, which also doesn’t impress him. “Pity I didn’t have anymore kids,” he said with a sigh.

Martin says that in the last weekend, he’s completed a 13-mile half marathon that took him a little more than five hours. It would have been faster, he says, but he says he stopped for a beer and a cigarette.

ht_runner1_080305_ms

Damn. Chuck Norris looks like a bitch compared to that!

And a happy emasculated weekend to you all!