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

What is it you’d say you do around here?

Posted: 12:15 pm
February 4, 2013

Uncategorized
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One of the best parts of my gig is hanging around and talking to entrepreneurs and small businesses. ExchangeDefender does business worldwide with all sorts of organizations, I’ve been lucky to travel the world with it, and small business is just fundamentally more remarkable when it comes to the passion for detail, quality and reputation. In enterprise they call this quality “leadership” but in small business it’s really all about hustling and making every day better.

This weekend I was out buying something fairly labor intensive and I spoke to several different companies about it. Where larger and more established ones focused on the financials, mind numbing series of options that only made it more difficult to hand over my money, technical details that I’m sure even they didn’t fully understand or had the capability to explain, customer service courtesy.. small businesses focused on the quality and advice. Here are some of the quotes:

“I mean, it could be done for less but I would not put my name on it.”

“What you need to consider is X, Y and Z.. let me show you the pitfalls of each.”

“This is what I do for a living, I would not let you talk to someone else and tell them I did something like that to you”

Literally every interaction is about quality, detail and education.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I dislike luxury. I love it. I own a Mercedes Benz and the dealership I bought it from has 2 concierges that drop off loaners and pick up your vehicle anywhere you are – no need to drive to the dealership. In case you wanted to, the waiting room has free soda and a neverending hors d’oeuvre. The one time I went to the closest Mercedes dealership and decided to wait they had a chef making lobster eggs benedict with the concierge serving a choice of white and red wine. The lesson with luxury is probably all too familiar to my female readers:

When they want something from you they’ll wine you and dine you and treat you great. Then they try to fuck you.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a $300 oil change or $50 windshield wipers you know that feeling.

This is why, whenever possible, I try to give my business to small business. Not because of the treatment but because of the passion and attention to detail. I work very hard for my stuff and I only trust it to someone that is going to take care of it as I would.

The Point

Every small business starts with an incredible promise, passion and care.

It’s a fatal mistake to be 100% focused on products and service – if you don’t sell and market and grow you will disappear. But just as abuse of focus on quality can be fatal, so can the abuse of focus on the profits and sales.

I know far too many companies, may of which you’ve probably been burned by, that grew on a great product and then fell into the sea of mediocrity where all they care is about what they are going to sell you next.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design and ignorance: owners enjoy the good life, take their eyes off the ball, bonus their sales people over their product people and pretty soon the obsession isn’t about the customer and what the client needs – the obsession is on what else we can sell to the customer. It’s not about adding value anymore, it’s about milking out more revenue from what is already being delivered.

It then feeds on itself. As the business becomes more about the numbers than about the service, it’s owners and creative lifeline of the company take another step back.. The faith is all but sealed then – find a buyer or race to the extinction.

Don’t think this affects multimillion dollar companies either – it happens in SMB too. I used to be a pretty big proponent of a group that was founded on the principles of sharing and holding other people accountable: they shared SharePoint templates, marketing plans, product deployment guides.. but a funny thing happened on the way to the bank: their meetings became about which overcompensated people to fire, how to cut costs and they sat around like the sheep in a room staring at the business revenue and profitability profiles that did nothing for their business but make them feel inadequate. Here is a f’n newsflash:

Your business is not about you. It’s about what you can do for your clients.

Yes, we can argue whether it’s better off to be Daimler/Mercedes Benz or the local guy building Cobra replicas and barely scraping a decent salary.. but there is no argument over what is truly important in business: your clients. Money isn’t everything or the only thing and without clients you get none.

Forget that little tidbit and your clients will forget about you. Quickly.

Happy Monday Folks. Australia, see you in a bit!

Virtual Management

Posted: 5:00 pm
February 1, 2013

Shockey Monkey
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There are thousands of books written about management, I’ve read more than I’ll ever be willing to admit, but I will sum them all up for you in one line:

The only thing separating a good manager from a bad manager is the amount of information they have to make good business decisions.

There. I’ve just saved you years worth of studying. You’re welcome.

The problem with getting the good information about your business is that the people that have the best information are the ones that spend the most time with the clients: they know all the challenges, they spot all the opportunities and they have the rapport and trust of the client that is absolutely priceless. They also happen to be terrible at documenting all this because there is no incentive for them to pass on the knowledge, they are there to do the job. When your management process interferes with their ability to do their job… well, there is a term for that: Corporate Bureaucracy. Or slightly less offensive terms like CRM & ERP.

Things are a little bit different in SMB. Which is why the big boys can never enter the SMB space: They try to solve the problems that managers have instead of helping the people that actually do the job. I am not knocking that in the slightest, in fact, I am jealous and hateful: those solutions cost a ton of money because they sell to the people with money. There is only one problem:

…running a business based on those solutions is kind of like trying to lay tile on sand, it looks great from the top but the second you step on it you sink.

In order to manage everything sensibly.. everyone needs to have input. Not just top down but bottom up too.

Here is stuff that we’re adding to Shockey Monkey in February: Goals, Achievements and Reprimands.

Key here is that the system is managed by everyone. It’s not just about the managers uploading goals and reprimands into an arcane HR software that will only be looked at the day you need to print out a reason to fire someone. It’s about transparency.

Managers will enter the goals and employees will enter accomplishments.

This way the career management becomes an arcade game of who is more obsessive. If employees are shown how they will be compensated and are given the power to visualize how they go from $ to $$ to $$$ in their career, there is a clear incentive of what needs to happen.

Compensate good behavior. Terminate bad behavior. The end.

Shockey Monkey Beyond IT

While Shockey Monkey may have had it’s humble beginnings as my side project to help thousands of my partners without an effective way to organize and bill for services, no what those same partners are selling Shockey Monkey to their clients.. there is a need to adapt to the reality that most businesses do not have a single workspace.

So in February we’re adding the ability to create multiple service boards. Each has it’s own tickets, it’s own rules, it’s own SLA, it’s own management and soon it’s own ACL (access control levels)… but initially the choice is simple: Is this a board we will use to correspond with our clients or is this the board we will use to manage internal company stuff like projects, case work, research, etc?

Looks pretty simple, right?

The Beef With Vendors

Small business is also different from the Fortune 500 in the level of dependence on third party vendors. Most of us don’t have entire departments built for the sole purpose of not paying people on time: purchasing, procurement, etc. If you’ve ever worked with Fortune 500 or Government you know that getting paid by those organizations is harder than landing on the moon. The problem in small business is that so much time goes to focus on the clients that pay the bill that too little is left to work with vendors efficiently:

Quick, how do you get the credentials for your vendors shopping cart? How about a password reset link when your admin tries to make a change for you? Where do you retrieve invoices? Who is your sales rep at the company you haven’t ordered anything from in the past 6 months? Where is their LinkedIn account? How about our contract – you know, the one signed 3 years ago – wanna guess which filing cabinet that thing is in? The answer to all these questions is obtained the same way: Search Outlook. Timeout. Timeout. Crash. Restart. Repair. Timeout. Whitescreen. Reboot. Repeat.

This vendor section is pretty much the most ambitious piece of our Spring update and I really cannot wait to get my hands on it. If I’m right, this will virtualize me to the point where I will just be able to leave a FatHead in my office smiling at the door while I ride around all day and let the others do the work that I would otherwise have to be involved in.

Every business.. and every employee at every business.. looks at their useless pointy haired boss as a scatterbrained bowl of insanity making random business decisions while genius employees have their genius ideas discounted.

Shockey Monkey is fixing that for businesses worldwide. And people love us for it.

Vendorification

Posted: 5:44 pm
January 30, 2013

Shockey Monkey
Comments Off

We do an amazing job tracking our clients. Meanwhile, we do a terrible job tracking our vendors and more often miss out on the potential opportunities to grow our business together. Some of you choose your vendors poorly and see them as an obstacle that is trying to screw you out of money – I can’t help with that – but the people we work with closely are strategically important to us and we need a better way of keeping in touch with them. Specifically:

It is one of my long term goals to be efficiently impersonated by my staff so I can play with toys all day long with the cloneVlad does all the CEO stuff.

Now, Shockey Monkey as you know is the core of everything we do. And with 2013, as you’re able to sell Shockey Monkey to any company on earth, it needs to be able to track any kind of a vendor.

Here is what I’m thinking:

The problem with dealing with vendors in small business is that all the engagements are initiated by the CEO or decision makers – all of whom are the least likely to efficiently organize documents or access credentials.

ExchangeDefender was started 15 years ago, I’m still asked to search my Inbox for some random vendor we got started with in the 1990’s.

We are adding a new module to Shockey Monkey to track vendors, vendor contacts, vendor resources and notes & documents:

Vendor data: Mailing address, fax numbers, phone numbers, web site.

Contacts: Vendor sales, support, procurement, shipping personnel contact info, both phones and social stuff to keep an eye on and annoy at will.

Resources: Key. There are more outlets that companies are using to distribute information and being able to pay attention to all the LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Web site, Blogs, Pinterest, Support Portal, Billing Portal, Shopping Cart, Youtube Marketing, Youtube Training, ecommerce catalog, support knowledge base, NOC twitter account, CEO blog.. I think you’re starting to get it! There is a lot of stuff to track and having it all in one place so that any employee (with permission) can access credentials to perform their job – EFFICIENTLY – in a secure, documented and ACL respectful way that is easilly accessible through search.. is key.

Notes & Documents: If you suck, and most of us do, only the person that filed the paperwork can actually file it. Yes, one day we’ll all be riding around in our hover cars and rocketships and you’ll have an efficient edocument library, until then the collection of emails, contracts, faxes, images you snapped with your phone at their booth and voicemails will need to be organized.

Simple, right?

Every CRM out there is absolutely awesome at tracking clients. Typically for sales purposes.

Small business exists beyond the “Sales” department and if we treated all of our operations with the same level of accountability and performance bonus promises.. well, Shockey Monkey is there to help you do just that. Regardless of if you’re an MSP or a plumber or a baker or firearms dealer.

HR tips for effective sexual harassment

Posted: 10:36 pm
January 28, 2013

Boss, IT Business
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The easiest thing you’ll ever do in your business life is hire tons of ineffective employees. It’s easier than coming up with blog post titles that have nothing to do with the content of the post! So I’ll keep it short:

Round up all the employees you’ve got on your payroll that resist change and like their job description clearly stated in a clear bullet point list that doesn’t change… and fucking fire them right now. Seriously, don’t even bother reading this blog post: People that don’t work on changing your organization for the better, that don’t tinker/tweak/test better ways of running your business should be templated, documented and outsourced… immediately.

Business that doesn’t innovate doesn’t improve and doesn’t survive. The End.

Only keep the people that are capable of thinking and eager to make things work – better, faster, more efficiently, more effectively. Keep your creative core. Like the reliability of the person that keeps your books – fantastic, outsource it to a CPA agency where they don’t suck the life out of your organization. Like the accountability of the janitor that shows up every day – hire a custodial firm and focus the company culture on improvement, not stagnation.

Unfortunately, you better be really passionate about what you do because having a company full of passionate and creative people is like staffing a grocery store with a bunch of starving zoo animals. They will wreck the joint fast – so you have to keep them motivated, distracted, driven and constantly moving the target. A bored creative person will find a way to entertain themselves at work and that is not going to be fun, just trust me on that one.

That’s it.

This is the brave new world. Everyone is eager for the buck and the lazy, unmotivated, change-resistant people are dime-a-dozen, outsource your mundane tasks to the sweat shops that will hire them and keep them in check with the kinds of HR controls that would make Henry Ford roll over in his grave. In a competitive market dealing with innovation and constant change the only advantage is your ability to quickly adjust and effectively promote your gig. If it’s easy, it will be automated.. if it’s time consuming, it will be outsourced to the third world, if it’s cheaper.. well, it’s only gonna get cheaper:

So if you’re not where you need to be going there is no time like now to start moving.

Happy Monday.

This post has been partially inspired by Dell. Yes, even they realized that nobody can make money on cheap PCs and are trying to take the company private because admitting to their entire shareholder base that they need to cook the golden goose to move to the next level is.. challenging. Odds are, your problems are smaller so if Dell can do it, you can too. Or you can keep on building PCs and refilling printer cartridges for people that work like it’s 1999. I’m sure you’re smarter than Dell and more successful too. Wake the f up. : )

What is your exit strategy?

Posted: 2:09 pm
January 24, 2013

Boss, IT Business
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The performance of ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey have been a fascination for many of my friends and partners and to be honest I’m the one that’s least surprised by it: which is why I’m always shocked when people ask me the following question:

Vlad, What is your exit strategy?

Cold. Feet first. Wrap me in dollar bills and stick me into a Corvette and roll that bitch off the cliff loaded with explosives and blow the motherfucker up before I hit the water.

Then collect life insurance.

Yes, I want to keep on making money even in the afterlife. Why? Because that is what I do.

I have this conversation with people all the time and it’s very, very, very simple.

Back when I started Space G (which became what you see today) I had many friends that moved to the Silicon Valley to be the .com millionaires. I f’d up and went to college. We all make mistakes. But funny thing happens when you’re broke: You learn to respect the value of money. You become weary of borrowing it, you become suspicious when someone wants to give it to you and you learn that nothing ever comes easy. Ever ever. Even Ana Nicole Smith had to work for her $ and look where it got her.

Business has a simple premise: Make more than you spend. Keep the difference or reinvest.

For the first few years I reinvested aggressively – everything I had (not just financially) went into it. It taught me a few things:

1. More or less, financial rewards are proportional to the effort.
2. Business world is not fair
3. Some people are scumbags – trust is earned
4. Given the chance, most will take advantage of you
5. There is no crying in business but there is always another day

I have lost so many deals and so many customers have fired me that if I cried over every one of them I would have drowned by now. I’ve been screwed by so many people that I could put Peter North to shame. It is what it is though – just like there are people out there that have to clean toilets – it’s a job. Just like everything else, I just try to be a little bit better the next day, the day after that, next month and next year.

I am in no position to offer advice – I’m rich and employed – find someone that isn’t either and have them coach you. I cannot tell you what to do beyond explaining what we do at ExchangeDefender and what works and doesn’t work for us. I don’t know your risk tollerance, I don’t know your work ethic, overall ethics and morals, I don’t know your skill level or willingness to succeed. But you do.

So instead of asking others what they plan to do – ask yourself what you’re willing to do and where you are going with your business. Everything else will fall in line.

Maybe someone rich and desperate and bad at math will come along and swoop your business. In the event that doesn’t happen, a huge chunk of your monthly revenues will continue to go into your pocket. Just keep stacking it.

….

Here are comments from my Facebook friends:

Julian Wilkinson Heart attack working hard doing what I love.

Tom Wyant Sell out to one of my sons so he can support me until I die at the age of 107.

Not for attribution: Screwed to death in a traditional harem.

Ed Mana The front door to my office.

NBQ–Never Be Qutting

Posted: 4:47 am
January 15, 2013

Vladville
2 Comments

rfr I’ll make this brief as I’ve discussed this subject before but I’m reminded of it’s truth every day in just about everything I do. Ready?

Success is not so much a factor of ___ (insert any random motivational garbage that makes you feel good) but more of a pure unwillingness or inability to quit.

All day.. every day.. I deal with people who whine about how things aren’t fair. Yeah, well.. tough shit cupcake, life ain’t fair. Now that you know that, what are you going to do about it?

Most quit.

I don’t mean quit in it’s literal black-white dictionary description of totally abandoning all pursuit of success. Most quit in the 50 shades of fail – they get quiet, slow down, get high, get drunk, reduce interacting with people or problems that got them to the breaking point of realizing not every day is going to be filled with rainbows, roses and unicorns.

When you see success, with the exception of lottery and intentionally leaked home made sex tapes, it is never a matter of accident. It requires a lot of hard work, lot of sacrifice, lot of time and almost mandatory pile of mistakes to overcome and bad decisions to correct.

There is a radical disconnect between success people perceive.. and how someone got there in the first place. Here is a short summary: it’s not easy, it’s not fast and they didn’t quit. Most people expect the exact opposite: They see some level of success, they want it.. and they want it now! When they don’t get it almost immediately, they quit. Thereby guaranteeing they will never realize any level of success because a loser is a loser.

Whether you choose to quit outright or choose to be mediocre, the results you get are purely a mirror of the effort you put in and adjustments you make to navigate around the sea of failure that you face in everything you do.

It’s a choice.

It requires mental toughness and willingness to look past your ego.

With every problem and every obstacle and everything you’d rather not deal with every single day of your life… you have two options: fuck it or fix it.

It’s really up to you. Yes, life is unfair. But if you have an option to make things better or do nothing – then you have nobody but yourself to blame for failure. And trust me, it’s much harder to look in the mirror when stuff crashes and it’s all your fault.

If you have to quit, quit at a point you set for yourself before the journey began – when you assessed your risk, commitment and potential returns. There is a difference between knowing when to quit and being a quitter.

So it’s rather simple – challenge yourself and take care of business. Things are going to be great.. or will suck.. but you won’t remember minute to minute or day to day challenges – you will only remember your victories. There is only one way to get to them.

Happy Monday.

Angry Vladendar

Posted: 11:13 am
January 10, 2013

Boss, Pimpin
Comments Off

In the few spare minutes a day I get to think about something other than work I like to think about all the business ideas I could pursue if I wasn’t successful. One of them would be a “realist” calendar for someone in charge of shit (people|technology) that spends the day twirling a giant never ending mess into a cake masterpiece.

I’ve been posting some stuff I tell myself when I have a rough day on Facebook and every time I do a bunch of people like it and email me about it. Here is the one from last night:

When all else fails you… just continue working on all the other problems around it and fix everything you can.

I don’t think many people understand where these come from but it’s typically after I have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and am left with 59 options of which 55 will totally fail no questions asked and the remaining 4 are mediocre. I’m typically wrong about my assessment too so I try to share what’s going through my mind. How do I get to this point?

If someone ever came into your office and said something so inconceivably idiotic that you started to laugh at the thought of it.. and they didn’t join in.. you know what I’m talking about. Something that is so hilarious until you realize it just happened to you.. and your options are murder, alcoholism or something else.

My Idea

I would build a calendar.

You know, kind of like the images and sayings that make stupid people feel better about themselves.

Unfortunately, motivational crap comes in three flavors:

1) Business – For managers that can’t inspire their workers so they settle for the next best thing, images that make the employees think they aren’t slaves (see Walmart break room).

2) Prepubescent Teen – Someone out there loves your ugly ass, you just haven’t stalked enough people yet. Cute, but doesn’t help with work.

3) Religious – Oh my imaginary friends come together now and relinquish me from this f’d up situation because I’d rather believe in a feelgood lie than face the messed up reality.

Of the three, I’d probably opt for the #2. Because I’m still searching for that fountain of accountable people and hardware that doesn’t suck.

But if I had a calendar.. Vladendar.. Here are the rules:

1. It would have an end of the world day. There is no better way to establish influence over people than pretending to know when the world would end.

2. Most of it would be filled by tragedies and starving people… cause no matter how bad and sad you may feel about how your day is going, someone else is definitely having a worse one so pull up your panties and be a big girl.

3. Instead of “on this day in ….” or national holidays, I would list creative ways to kill yourself. Cause let’s face it, if you aren’t contemplating murder you don’t need to be motivated to do anything. And if you are.. don’t half ass it. Man up.

4. There would be no weekends. If you own a business or manage a large product line you know what I mean.

5. There would be at least 4 weeks of blank pages. Those are for you to fill in as you want for at least 1 month of the year that you aren’t doing anything productive and just dealing with @$#%. Use it to write suicide notes.

6. One day of the year would be your day. Bring your Speedos to work day. Why, because fuck em, that’s why. If you can’t enjoy what you do and have to act it, well.. there is a reason why you’re not in Hollywood, mkay?

7. Back pages would have instructions from the Anarchist Cookbook. This way every day you could tear a piece, flip it over on your desk and leave it there. Folks that clean or hang out in your room when you’re not around would become a lot more hesitant to give you shit.

So that’s my idea and I’m taking it to Etsy as soon as this software biz thing falls apart.

Surface After Honeymoon

Posted: 3:55 pm
January 7, 2013

Gadgets, Microsoft
1 Comment

Three months ago I wrote about my initial impression of the Microsoft Surface tablet. I was pretty happy with the device (it has actually replaced my iPad) and it has gotten better since. People keep on asking me about it and whether I’d buy the Surface Pro (you’d have to be stupid to do so, see below) when it comes out. So here is the update.

Keyboard

Still terrible.. The softtouch keyboard is the worst thing I’ve ever used. It is terribly inaccurate and if it weren’t for the numbers I would probably type much faster using the on-screen keyboard. The speed doesn’t bother me too much (I have an iPhone and an Android phone for business) but the accuracy does. Look, my spelling is atrocious as it is – I don’t need Surface making the drop from 8th grade skill set to the 3rd grade. It’s just awful, disappointing in a sense that I thought the initial suckiness was mostly because it was new and you always need to “get used” to a new keyboard. The only thing I’ve gotten used to is that it sucks as anything other than a screen scratch protector. Mouse is terrible as well.

This item alone… should scare anyone dumb enough to think about purchasing Surface Pro.

Screen

Worse than the first impression.. Initially I couldn’t see much of a difference between my iPad and my Surface and as far as display goes it’s pretty much the same (even though iPad Retina is technically far more superior).

Where it fails a lot is in the input. It’s Windows, OK? You still get presented with menus and window controls that are not easy to hit at all. If you’re reading this blog on a Windows laptop or monitor, visualize how big the File menu is or how big the close control is. Now, shrink it to the Surface size. Now place your finger over it – how confident are you that you’ll hit the right control? There is a big difference between copy and cut and it’s not a pleasant one either.

The screen is OK for Metro and overall navigation and reading. But the moment you try to actually do something or open Explorer or Internet Explorer.. it’s just awful.

Apps

Getting better.. Finding a lot more stuff in the Marketplace (still nowhere near Android or Apple) and the actual content inside the apps is on par with what you’re used to if you’ve already got a tablet.

This category loses as much praise as it gets – the management of the tiles is painful mostly due to the terrible screen input. By default each app has a tile on your main screen and the developer picks how big that tile is – but you can resize it. You do so by holding down the tile for a second (sometimes more, feeling like eternity) and selecting the smaller or bigger size. Then you have to drag the tile to the position you want it in – either through the excruciatingly slow right/left scroll or by dragging the tile down and then back up where you want it (as the whole Surface main screen zooms out. Here is the problem – 9/10 times I tried the zoom and drop.. it didn’t work. Sometimes I’d drag it too far down, sometimes not enough, sometimes it randomly dropped the tile somewhere in the middle.

You can definitely tell they rushed it, it’s by no means a polished product. We can just hope that it’s an Xbox and not EveryOtherMicrosoftBuyTheNextReleaseForAFix product.

Killer Feature

Still the web browser.. In terms of ability to do stuff with a real desktop “experience” (even without desktop apps) separates this device from the rest of the tablets. Internet Explorer now also supports Flash and being able to see and experience the web in a way that it’s built (and not shrunk down to some 3rd party app) makes a huge difference.

Annoyance

The mail app is terrible. No ability to mass forward a bunch of messages. Seriously?

Knowing what you know… would you still buy it or go Pro?

Surface RT… Probably. We’ll buy any new gadget simply for the lab testing purposes and making sure our apps work on them flawlessly.

Surface Pro.. Absolutely not, you’d be an idiot to buy one.

There are several things that most of my Microsoft friends don’t know (or willfully choose to ignore) about Surface Pro. First, you won’t get the 10 hours of battery life you now get with your iPad. Actually, you won’t even get half that much. The keyboard is terrible leaving you at the mercy of a crappy screen that is just not capable of providing a good interaction with typical desktop-sized apps. Then there is price – at nearly $1000 you’re better off getting the Lenovo Yoga or something that has been actually built for the productivity as opposed to the Microsoft.. hack.

Just my opinion..

If these were not business purchases though.. I would have a hefty dose of hesitation. Surface products are just not good and that’s why they are not selling (not my opinion, fact) and even though Microsoft is burning money big time on TV to promote it (fact; like we asked them to do years ago when they were a dominant player to help us against Apple / Google that were barely on the radar).. they aren’t coming even close to making a dent. Of my Facebook friends, only Microsoft employees and their biggest fans are taking up the Windows Phone and most of them haven’t touched the Surface but to be fair most of them will probably want to wait for Surface Pro.

Here is the problem.. that should stop you cold in your tracks: Windows 8 has had a terrible start. No disputing that, they are giving it away at $40 for the Pro all day and it’s selling slower than even Windows 7. As of late Microsoft has been less and less patient dealing with sideshow products – and with Windows 8 tanking – how patient will Microsoft be with an overpriced, underpowered, half baked product? Surface Pro will come with barely 4 hours of battery life and a four digit price tag all without 4G.

Will Microsoft stay patient with its half baked devices or will it release 2’s as soon as possible next year? Will the users bite or will they buy from Samsung/Lenovo/Dell?

2013 Predictions

Posted: 12:26 am
January 2, 2013

IT Business
1 Comment

As I mentioned previously (and throughout 2012) we’ve just gone through the year of the big eating the small. This happened both on the big money front (through M&A) and on the small money front (clients moving from “consultants” to full service IT Solution Providers). This is good and it’s natural – once business matures it also becomes quite expensive to operate and shops that were once running on the fumes of passion turn to their owners being managers, leaders, motivators and obsession goes from technology and things like money and business performance. More thoughts on that later, all I have to say is that 2012 has been the most successful year we’ve ever had and most of it is thanks to the success our partners had.

With that in mind, I offer you my predictions for 2013. Keep in mind that I’m not a journalist, I’m not an entertainer, I’m not making this on behalf of any company / sponsor / etc. Just my humble opinion.

More gadgets, less IT

If you paid any attention to the trade rags, all the IT world was infatuated with MDM (mobile device management), BYOD (bring your own device, employees using their own computers/gadgets/phones to do work) and single panes of glass.

Here is the bitch – they have been trying to figure this out since the last century with Active Directory and a billion other bandages ever since then. They are further now than they were back in the days where you could quarantine XP machines from joining your domain until they applied all the required patches, etc.

Today.. you’ve got phones, tablets, PCs and Macs roaming the network with no shame.

It has gone unchecked – and it will just get worse.

For an overwhelming majority of tasks you don’t actually need a PC. All the modern stuff is being written for the mobile first (not .NET first) and with the cloud backend.

Design-wise, the more you can make something an app or service, the less people will get a chance to object to how you get things done so long as you get them done. As I mentioned at the launch of Shockey Monkey 3 people spend all this money just to setup an environment to run an app to get things done. If stuff can get done without all the setup, pain and investment then what’s the point of having it in the first place?

Things like security, regulatory compliance, redundancy, data retention/backups, etc sure are important but that’s not something that “employees” worry about, it’s something lawyers worry about once the company is sued. And business is all about risk, Vegas-style baby!

Expect more gadgets with more form factors, resolutions and operating systems.

Simplicity beats Support

Related to the topic above, simplicity will continue to be the name of the game.

Many IT Solution Providers made their buck in “support of IT” whether through blocks of hours or MSP. But a funny thing happened – people stopped wanting to upgrade to the next greatest thing. It became harder and harder to justify and the pain alone is not making it worth it anymore.

Speaking personally here, we haven’t updated to Windows 8 or Office 2013. No plans to either. No Retina MacBooks that I know of and we certainly don’t see anyone asking for the latest iPad or iPad mini.

If you look objectively (or call me biased, your call) – Mac has always been seen by the PC users as.. infantile. You can call it simple if you want to be nice but you get the idea. Turns out that all that power and complexity and flexibility that us PC users liked didn’t really thrill your average user.

Look for 2013 to take even more power from the MSP/VAR/IT department.

If it’s easier to subscribe to a service that can be canned at any time, don’t even expect to be invited into the conversation – it will just pop in. Ditto for the gadgets and other non-complex, sub $1,000 stuff.

Services, Services, Services, Cloud, Cloud, Cloud, No support, No support, No support, No support, Not even outsourced to India

One of the biggest Shockey Monkey feature requests (that we don’t have an answer for until the end of January) has been the vendor management control. Instead of dealing with just a few vendors we’re dealing with a ton of them and they all have portals, support sites, forums, control panels and dashboards. And the only person with the login credentials is the boss or whoever put the credit card down. Good luck getting into all these resources that different employees across the organization need to have access to.

This is a scenario that so many small businesses find themselves. They have a problem, they google for a solution, if it’s cheap they go with it. Loop closed.

Expect more and more services to pop up everywhere. Expect apps to fill the gap.

The whole “cloud” has gone from a total hype word to a backbone of all the growth behind apps and services.

Sounds terrible, where is the opportunity?

There will be more services, more apps, more gadgets – yet nobody will be able or willing to support them all. One of the arguments you’ll have to make with your clients is that it’s cheaper and more effective to have an IT person (service) around to deal with it all.

There will be more solutions with less reputation. Mark these words and glue them to your fridge: Your clients need to find out about the technology from you. Not from the App store, not from Verizon guy, not from a blog – you. This will require you to change the way you “market” things: more mail, more training sessions, more demo days and lunch and learns. The old tired “What don’t you like about your computers” is done.

DIY only makes sense until the problems pile up. As one of my partners told me “SMB doesn’t mean small & medium business, it means Small Minded Business. The only reason clients pay us is because they can’t be bothered to do it themselves”.

My argument is that simple problems will be solved by the users. Big problems – compliance, backups, data integrity, audits, employee monitoring, timesheet accountability, business continuity (when a DIY/BYOD mobile worker leaves, how does a new employee continue?) and so on – will be done by you.

Services, apps, cloud – and you. Embedding all this stuff people want into the overall solution is a huge opportunity. But it requires different staff and different talent.

Finally, the biggest opportunity might come from the economy itself. We just made it through the fiscall cliff. The Federal Reserve is printing money faster than ever, Japan is devaluing it’s currency and European Union is shuffling around debt pretending it doesn’t exist. At least for the time being, people might feel a little bit better about outsourcing – not quite committing to “building” stuff but catching up.

The opportunity is out there. 2013 will be the best year yet, so long as you remember that we’re in 2013 and not 2003.

Coming IT Consolidation

Posted: 4:17 pm
December 26, 2012

IT Business
Comments Off

Apparently something rubbed a few of you the wrong way so I figured I’d offer some perspective because I can’t reply to all the emails individually. In the last email I implied that the IT Solution Providers (my term for everything consulting / reselling / implementation related to IT) had the best year ever with most of the riffraff getting eliminated in the process and our best / most profitable years being behind us.

That makes no sense Vlad!!!

It does when you think about it.

In the 90’s SMB spent a lot of money to build networks. With them came IT guys and then IT departments.

In the 00’s SMB got tired of their IT guys and cut costs by outsourcing IT to MSPs, VARs and so on. Most skilled IT folks went out on their own and started IT companies.

In the late 00’s and early 10’s we’ve seen a huge move to the cloud. Yeah, I know, there are like 4 dudes doing REALLY great selling HP & Dell but everyone else (including the two companies) are struggling to keep it going.

Consolidation

SMB IT was established on the back of IT infrastructure.

It grew through outsourcing.

It grew through the cloud and acquisition of the smaller guys. As a matter of fact, most of your smaller IT guys that weren’t great at business are now working for my partners. I see a lot of people that I know.. now working for someone else I know.

Growth has been easy to come by.

So what’s next?

My crystal ball is still in the shop so I don’t know.. All I know is that you’ve got to stop digging your own grave by working with companies that are trying to eliminate you. Or continuing to “be busy” without regard for where your new opportunities come from.

Business as usual has to change. You have to be a little bit more than irrationally optimistic to think that the same kind of card stock crap marketing that made it last decade is going to work going forward. Or that you’re gonna tweet your way into a goldmine.

Fact is, the IT has lost both power and sex appeal. Best Buy has really lost the shine it had a decade ago. Look at your ugly Dell and HP laptop – it looks and weighs the same as it did a decade ago. People are buying tablets, smartphones come with 5” screens with the app sophistication, speed and simplicity we don’t have on desktops and the biggest IT concern these days is BYOD – not something new to buy or implement. Look at Windows 8, at $39 for the upgrade they can’t even give it away.

Like I said about 5 years ago or so, focus needs to be on services in the all-encompassing sense where everything is taken care of. While it’s true that there will be less and less people that find IT important, those that leverage it to it’s fullest extent (or comply with the regulatory requirements, etc) will become more and more open to additional services.

In short, the best years for some of us are still ahead of us. Unfortunately, most IT businesses will certainly not be around to see it. The difference is effort, right partnerships, right solutions and ability to implement as much technology as possible to make the business operate better thanks to technology – not to make technology a burden that they cannot live with out. It’s all about the strategy.

Listen, every year I talk to less and less partners about the new stuff we are doing and every year I hear the same deadend excuse – we’re swamped right now but we’ll look at it ____ later. People sacrifice long term corporate growth for the short term growth. While you will never, ever see me criticize the spirit of a hustler, if you’re constantly passing up strategic opportunities to become more relevant for quick cash now, the well will eventually dry up and you’ll be lucky to work somewhere else.

We’ll be doing a big “2013 – Year Ahead” podcast next week if you’d like to know some specific details..

In the meantime, pimp on and keep on making that green. Thank you for your tremendous support of ExchangeDefender (and the Unicorn) and Shockey Monkey in 2012. We’re throwing more $ into R&D than ever so next year is gonna be even better!

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog