Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog | Vlad Mazek on IT, Business and Technology

Name calling for fun and profit

Posted: 11:42 pm
February 25, 2008

Gaypile
Comments Off

Southpark101_2D771689 Yes, I’m bringing the gaypile back. Had to be done.

Name calling is fun. It helps people quickly identify what they are dealing with to save copy space and convey a message without getting preachy or far too elaborate. If you’ve ever had to put together a flyer you know what I mean, you try to sum up your entire universe of information to get the point across and you still want to capture attention. So you shoot for a compromise.

In professional (well, IT professional) circles, thats welcome. Coder, DBA, helpdesk can all convey a pretty clear meaning, sometimes positive and sometimes a derogative (“Oh, there goes Mr. MCSE”); And for the most part people welcome it and identify themselves as such.

In IT business, it goes the other way. We have a few dozen acronyms that we use to identify partners and opportunities. But sometimes people try their hardest to identify themselves to you. How often do you hear a pitch and just sum it up to the person to acknowledge you have received their bullshit and know what they do so they will cease the pitch? Some people can’t break out of that cycle. Some people are so sold on their own bs that they cannot escape it, even among the people that do the very same thing:

Hi, my name is Bob and I’m a trusted advisor. I do not try to make profit on products, I simply recommend whats best for you and…

Yeah, Bob, we get it, you’re full of shit. You don’t mark up the services you don’t consider material to your business. Microsoft licensing – $0 markup. Antispam – $0 markup. Offsite backups – $0 markup. You’re a great guy, thank you for recommending this to me – oh whats this $1,500 a month fee? Oh, for the managed services you provide on top of a $100 MSP software platform, $50 management agents and a $200 outsourced helpdesk? Whats that, a 500% markup, Bob?

People are trusted advisors when they are not directly trying to milk the highest possible markup from the customer. For everything else, they are trying to charge the highest possible rate that the market will handle without leaving them with less than 40 billable hours a week. That is called a business. Even if you run it by yourself in your underware 28 hours a week, you’re a business. You charge money for time, you are a vendor.

There is no shame in running a successful business. There is plenty of shame in running an unsuccessful one. Which one would you rather be? Pretty title with no substance or a success with a less glorified name?

-Vlad Mazek, MCSE, MVP, CEO. Decode that, b….

Whom do you trust?

Posted: 12:27 am
February 25, 2008

Vladville
2 Comments

So I spiked a little fire yesterday when I mentioned I don’t talk to the press. It also reveals why you rarely see quotes from the truly successful IT firm leaders and why a specific set of people seems to be quoted over and over (hint: it’s not because they matter). How does it work?

Successful people tend to be far too focused on their work to waste time on an interview for a chance of winning a surplus gadget of the week.

About two weeks ago a very polite person called me and when I informed her that I do not talk to the press she explained that it was a peer survey, that it helps companies I deal with, that blah blah blah, basically she hit me in the soft spot since I make my business on features designed through feedback. So I figured, ok, let me help, sure let’s go through the survey. Fast forward 28 minutes later, we had completed section 1of 18 – and I politely told her that I have to get back to work as that was going to be my last day at this job before I join a Christian mission excavating a vulcano in the phillipines.

Truth is, anyone even remotely successful is successful because they are on mission and have organized their day not to be interruption driven.

So who gets quoted? The guy that was unemployed at the time the reporter went down the list and hit the first live body that had read competing publications coverage of the event. Is that really someone that ought to be providing an opinion and be quoted as an authorative source – someone who got the attention solely because they were motivated to give it because they were incentivised by a USB 1.1 switch?

So…?

So the truth is that everyone is aware of the above – which is why the request for any survey gets filled out by exactly 3 people unless it is accompanied by a free tshirt. And the sad thing is, people still buy into the hypothesis of the press coverage supported by an unemployed consultant!

Thats not how you get a clue about whats really going on out there folks. You do it by forming relationships with people, important people, over a period of time, so that when you have something you want to bounce off them they will take your call from the bleachers of their sons basketball game or from under their Harley. People that don’t talk for free, people that charge for their time.

So in case you’ve been thinking that the great way to optimize your day is in following trade press and ignoring your peers and influential business leaders…. think again.

Opinion on SBS 2008, Essential Business Server and SMB computing in 2008 and beyond..

Posted: 6:41 pm
February 23, 2008

Microsoft
7 Comments

For about two weeks I have been dodging press, peers and clients that wanted to find out about 2008 and how it is going to fit into their future plans. I was quite anxious to see just what my peers would be saying publicly, considering that under NDA we had insight to this for quite some time. So here it is, in a nutshell:

Later in 2008, Microsoft is going to begin to answer the small business technology problems that were posed in 2005. How do I do more with less, how do I consolidate my operations, how do I make my network more manageable and….

And well, EBS and SBS 2008 would have been great in 2005. In 2008, they are a throwback to the way computing used to be done in SMB and is statistically no longer the case for the majority of startups, growing companies and even the bottom tier of the midmarket that has been overwhelmed with complexity.

Sure Microsoft will try to claim that the existing install base is its biggest enemy in getting 2008 into the shop but the reality of the situation is that the world has changed a lot since 2005 and the problems we had back then have largely been solved either by third party software (thereby locking down the deployment in 2003 with no easy/cheap migration) or moving to the cloud.

Few years ago, moving to the cloud was something that was very much frowned upon by my SMB peers. Nobody could quite “get” the concept that there is no need for a local server if all the customer wanted was Exchange and SharePoint. People used to beat me up from all angles on the concepts of remote storage, offsite Intranets, offsite servers, etc.

But guess what… in 2007 and 2008 we have been retiring servers worldwide as people moved to the crowd. Which people? IT people in SMB, IT consultants, everyone that had far too much complexity, downtime, multiple offices, etc. Why do people move to the cloud? Because they are too busy managing internal applications and business processes and don’t want to waste time on the overrun Exchange, document and file servers.

Really, the argument comes down to whether it is cheaper for you to build your own network, or get 99.999% uptime on someone elses. And much like you don’t happen to have your own cell phone tower and pay upwards of $50-60 a month for the phone plan, SMB has no beef spending half that and getting the rest of the stuff delivered as a predictable service. It is almost impossible to defeat a service pitch in the SMB because the internal (replacement) solution requires a nasty (expensive) migration and it is just a problem that keeps on growing so it can be done yet again in 3 years. More people coming out of schools powered by Google, more people are trading off their infrastructure budget for the specialized application powering their business and they are moving on.

So where does 2008 fit? Well, it fits in the shops of the “old school” ignorant admins who feel that if they can “see” the server, its secure. The same that turn off Windows Updates to improve reliability. It fits in the traditional high-bandwidth offices that need to move around large files. It fits in the shops that have specialized applications that require an onsite server.

Where does SBS and EBS fit? I’ll let you know when I find them. People that needed WSS 3.0 already installed it. People that needed Exchange 2007, already got it in the cloud for less than $10 a month. People that needed SQL 2005 for high bandwidth, high transaction applications – yup, the security of a data center. People that needed a better way to manage multiple servers… They got an MSP or a more competent IT guy.

While there certainly will be a market for SBS 2008 and EBS, it is no longer the most demanded option in SMB and is slated for a decline and further losses to the cloud and the MSPs (who for all intents and purposes are part of the cloud). And when something is no longer the most demanded solution, it starts a decline, it grows and empowers the competitors and the process accelerates. I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan to be around in a market of declining opportunities. There is an opportunity… for someone.

Futility of Incompetence (how Monkey is made)

Posted: 9:54 am
February 22, 2008

Shockey Monkey, Vladville
3 Comments

I have been fortunate enough to build a big enough business that calls for a lot of decisions on a daily basis – so statistically speaking, I get to deal with a lot of incompetence. I have gotten so good at it that I am no longer afraid of failing, and even have that little sixth sense when I can feel my ass getting bit as I’m making a call. Most failures are of the “Ah crap. Oh well.” nature, learn the lesson, hope not to make it again, move on..

Then there are those failures where you don’t get to shake it off and move on. The kind that grab you by the back of your head and rub your face in it. The kind that make you deal with your failure, all day long, while making you shake your head in slight disbelief at just how magnificently you suck. The kind that when you turn to your friends for some comfort they not only laugh at you, but also tell you all the other bad sides of your failure that you haven’t even considered. Such is the story of Thursday in Vladville.

This entire week I have been deploying Shockey Monkey 2.0 into a sandbox environment for the purpose of both testing and further development. It gives me a chance to write the deployment scripts and scenarios and also go through all the #VLAD code segments where I left a note for myself to spend more time on. Maybe I am alone at this, but I am far from a linear programmer, when things are going well I just keep on cranking it out and leaving breadcrumbs in the areas that I need to visit back later. Mostly complex validation, bounds checking, fixin’ the stupid user, etc.

Yesterday I decided to take the entire day to improve the UI a little. The biggest reason for the lack of management software adoption in business is the visual design. If a user has to click on 50 links in order to enter time, or if they have to dive through 6 tabs, two popup windows, three inline divs and one link to just say they took 2 minutes to call the vendor.. guess what, they aren’t going to do it! Now, some say that if you want a paycheck you’ll do it but threatening users to use the software or not get paid is not a good company morale move. Truth is, the software sucks. For the love of god, one of the two solutions that loosely compete with Shockey Monkey are either so poorly designed in both form and function that they require a friggin University to figure out. The other one follows the abandoned concepts of each era of UI design: never be afraid to pop up a window, whenever possible stick crap into a frame and back it with ActiveX so it only works in one browser (poorly) and lace the interface with more stars and input field forms than a warez site trying to get you to click on as much porn as possible before it takes you to the actual download. I thought I could do better than that.

Boy was I wrong. Yesterday I decided to improve my time entry UI. Here is a tiny screencap:

Now the first obstacle is trying to make sure that the time format is recognizable by the people that don’t follow the AM/PM system. Since the monkey is famous worldwide, this was more than important. So I ping one of my partners:

Vlad Mazek: ping
Ian Watkins: pong
Vlad Mazek: question, if you got a moment
Ian Watkins: Sure
Vlad Mazek: when you’re entering time, does it take the 24 hour military time or the american am/pm time?
Ian Watkins: Both
Vlad Mazek: you use 24hr, rght?
Ian Watkins: Can sometimes get confused
Ian Watkins: Sometimes 🙂
Ian Watkins: But we tend to use it if we need to be specific
Vlad Mazek: well, you’ve been pretty much useless to me today, Ian 🙂

Now here is what the above actually means, in my mind: you can’t count on the user to follow the form, so bind onChange and a few other events so when they enter 23 instead of 11, deduct 12 from their total and flip the am/pm select box to the proper index. This isn’t hard, it’s just a giant pain in the butt. Fast forward a few hours, I try to seek some positive reinforcement from my peers:

Rich Walkup: oh i’ve done all that before – trust me – i used to work on a biometric payroll system with a computer timeclock
Rich Walkup: what really sucks is …..
Rich Walkup: when shit starts at 11:30 and goes over the DST
Vlad Mazek: and ends at 2:00? 🙂
Rich Walkup: sorry to throw a wrench into your system brother but….

Visions of someone starting a time entry at 1AM on a DST day and ending it at 2 AM on a DST day fill my head with livid rage, because I know someone will do this and of course they get paid $20 million an hour and this could bankrupt them so they demand free crap. Note to self: Add an address input field to the signup form so if/when this happens I can go kill the bastard.

You see, in college I used to teach a CS course. I remember saying things like: “I understand that these fundamentals are hard for some of you to do because they are time consuming, but they help those who have never programmed before learn how the data is processed, how to do proper error checking, how to write good software.” and I would generally murmor something about how by the time they are writing any commercial code these things would be built into the IDE anyhow and will just require a drag and drop of a time control.

Yesterday I spent all day writing time validation functions for Shockey Monkey. My professional development career has effectively been reduced to keeping stupid people from trying to bill 26 hours in a 24 hour day.

FMR.

All you need to know about Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and Windows Small Business Server 2008 and the extent to which they will change the SMB server landscape and your SMB opportunities..

Posted: 11:59 pm
February 20, 2008

Microsoft
3 Comments

mmmmeh..

Vladcast Episode 12 – Who Motivates You?

Posted: 6:38 pm
February 20, 2008

Vladcast
3 Comments

Vladcast #11 was the most popular Vladcast ever (yeah, four people!) – kind of ironic when you consider that it had nothing to do with IT and technology. I am not sure how, but I confused a lot of you into thinking I’m some motivational guru – far from it. But I did get asked at one point just who motivates me and if you’ve seen my SBS Show and Vladcast projects you’ll see that I am very motivated by people that are successful and willing to share their formula for the greater good. That in turn is what I do with the Vladville and OWN each and every day. But I am not a great motivational speaker so I wanted to let someone else, far more eloquent than I am, explain to you just what I believe. Hope you find the 7 minutes very inspiring.

Play VladCast: [audio:http://www.vladville.com/media/VladCast12.mp3]

Add feed to iTunes / File Attachment: VladCast12.mp3 (6976 KB)

Yay, Florida!

Posted: 9:29 am
February 20, 2008

Misc
Comments Off

Just when you’re about to question whether humanity would be better off if Florida burned and sunk into the ocean, few good stories make me feel like we aren’t about to fall back into the stone age.

First, the Florida School Board decides that Evolution Must Be Taught. I am sure it was very hard for them (vote of 4 to 3) to decide that for the good of this country young minds need to be taught to reason and base conclusions on overwhelming observable evidence over blind faith in the invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster which created the entire universe after drinking heavily and created humanity by the touch of his noodly appendage. And while the school system will not consider these creationism theories yet, there may be other places to learn about creationism, like maybe one of millions of churches or Olive Garden restaurants (hey, don’t hate on my beliefs!)

But speaking of space, if you live in Central Florida today is a very exciting day. In about an hour you might get to hear the sonic boom of the space shuttle Atlantis coming down. Turn your head southwest:

And to top it all off, at 10:01 PM the total lunar eclipse starts, the last until December 2010!

God bless Florida. Perhaps today will be remembered as an investment in the future of Florida where we will have more kids growing up to be engineers trying to figure out how to solve problems instead of high school dropouts converting abandoned gas stations into churches claiming to have all the answers based on a 2,000 year old book. (Citation: State of Tennessee)

Distance From The Herd

Posted: 10:27 pm
February 18, 2008

Friends, IT Culture
2 Comments

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.

Where is the buzz and why (or why not)?

Posted: 12:28 am
February 18, 2008

SMB
Comments Off

Over the past two years all the buzz in the SMB has been about conferences, new products, managed services.

This year, not so much. Few folks have covered their intentions to hit the NOLA conference, which would be the only one I would attend this year if I wasn’t expecting to be a daddy that week. Not a heck of a lot of chatter about Vista SP1 which is just around the corner. And the Windows Server 2008 launch that is just about a week away almost doesn’t exist in the minds of the SMB tech world. Ditto about the managed services, for some an afterthought for others a long time way of doing business.

So if the SMB world is not caught up with the new product launches, disafected by the conference sprawl, service packs, beta testing, MSPish stuff… what is everyone up to?

The big thing of 2008 is the apparent consolidation of offerings. Nobody I have talked to in the past two months has even noticed a slowdown, it’s actually the level of growth and adoption of managed infrastructure that is making people not look at the conferences and other out of office activities (though I’m sure the perenial disappointments of SPF Nation and people pouncing on the blood may have something to do with it). New names are showing up as employees of my long time partners, order flow in Feb is yet again the largest it has ever been, people are knocking the door down asking for more.

So what’s up?

Be it through managed services or just geeks becoming better businessmen and women, SMB appears to be consolidating around the things that work and seeking out the more profitable solution over the more flashy and hyped one. People seem to be unplugging more crap, testing less betas, participating less and focusing on their own a little more. Who seems to be winning out? Hard to say, you never know who is telling the truth. However, judging by the growing employee counts and orders it seems the pureplay MSPs are maintaining or stagnating while the people with a wider focus are growing – guys with expertise in security, VoIP specialists, portal designers, financials.. Basically shops that are more than just workstation-server types appear to be getting the most clients.

So to those of you that are wondering about why there seems to be so little happening in the way of Server 2008, Vista SP1, Conferencing, MSP and overall chatter.. successful folks have their mind on their money, money on their mind and all the extracurricular bullshit just doesn’t seem to make more money. About as raw and honest as I can put it.

Vlad(tm) PR shuffling

Posted: 12:36 pm
February 17, 2008

Misc
1 Comment

I need to adjust my public contact information ahead of some very important releases, both commercial and philanthropic. In a nutshell I want to make myself a little more available and offer a guaranteed response. So here we go:

Public Email: vlad@vladville.com

Public IM: vlad@vladville.com on MSN/Live Messenger, vlad@vladville.com on Google Talkr

I will be answering email as well as chat Monday through Friday, 1 PM through 4 PM EST which is GMT -5. If you do not get a response from me within 24 hours please send the message again.

This is for the Vladville, Shockey Monkey, SMB Buddy, SBS Show, Orlando ITPRO stuff only.

This is not meant for corporate affairs or business-related communication, all such mail will be promptly deleted. If you do want to talk business then please contact me on my business email address and IM which I am at 24/7/365, no farther than 2 feet away from something that receives email, voicemail, phone calls or chat requests. Keep in mind that I am not tech support but if something needs to be brought to my attention, please do so. Again, 24 hour response or resend. If it takes 3 days and you still get no response I have died. Say a prayer for me. Pour a bit out of a 40oz for me homie. If I appear to have died but am still somehow blogging, posting on forums, you hear my voice on the podcasts or video, it’s more likely that I am alive and you happen to be a spammer that can’t make it into my inbox. Pick up the phone, hire the “Jesus Loves You” plane and spray your phone number over downtown Orlando or Disney World, try smoke signals, HAM radio… Hate mail gladly accepted at my PR Agents office, Tim Barrett & Co now serving angry Vladville readers worldwide.

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog