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

To Robbie, from the City of Angels, with love. (Warning: not safe for anyone, anywhere, anytime)

Posted: 10:35 am
August 12, 2008

Awesome
11 Comments

Final warning: You should not read this blog post. Under any circumstances. Ever.

I love Los Angeles. Best place on earth. Tons of energy. Tons of people. Tons of opportunity. I’m here on my second leg of ExchangeDefender 4 tour and I always make it a point to make a religious pilgrimage – and as you’re about to find out, it is a very religious experience – there is nothing you can do to get closer to afterlife (legally) than the below.

Some people like to wrap themselves in a bed sheet and stand with thousands of other smelly men in the middle of a desert so they can throw a tiny rock at a rather large rock. I like to stand in a line for hours with a bunch of girls not hot enough to get into a club, all for a little nutritious goodness.

If you’re a foreigner, this would be a good time to go dust your furniture, wash the dog, etc. I’m in a rather good mood so this is about to get dangerous.

My dear pal Robbie could never quite appreciate the beauty of the type of food we eat here in America. I must admit, I find it intimidating at times, but that which does not kill me can only make me fatter. So a few years back Robbie and I started talking about the “Luther Sandwich” which I have yet to try. But every time I am in Los Angeles I make it a point to go to Pinks – a family hot dog Hollywood legend since 1939.

Earlier in the day I was looking over ExchangeDefender 4.0 core infrastructure and had a good cause to celebrate. I got to meet up with one of my partners from Los Angeles, Garett Chipman from TVG Consulting. We had the complete “The Hills” experience, eating at a nice restaurant in West Hollywood, on the sidewalk, etc. I got a pizza that seemed to have more veggies than cheese and dough so naturally I had some room left for dinner. And after a long day at work, what better dinner treat before bed like the following options:

So Many Choices….

As I mentioned, Pinks is as much of a hotdog stand as it is a Hollywood tourist attraction. However, when you do show up between 11pm and 3am the place is more of a last call of sorts for bar hoppers and people looking to hang out. On a beautiful LA evening in August (68 F, coming from Orlando in the 90’s with 200% humidity and Dallas hitting in 100’s, this is heaven) there is nothing better than hanging out in a line waiting for a dog. Just in case you’re wondering, I’m not the only guy there, at the time my turn came there were well over 100 people here with the line wrapping around the building.

So how do you stay popular in Hollywood and become a tourist attraction? How do you stake that claim? Why put pictures of celebrities all over the joint. Name sandwiches after celebrities. Here are a few choice pics, enlarge for the actual description:

The Hollywood “Walk of Fame” Dog: All-Beef STRETCH Hot Dog topped with Yummy Coleslaw & Chopped Tomatoes.

The VIEW Dog – TWO All-Beef Hot Dogs in one bun, Topped with Mustard, Onions, Chilli, Cheese & Guacamole.

Brooklyn Pastrami Dog – All-Beef Hot Dog, Topped with Mutard, Pastrami & Swiss Cheese.

Planet Hollywood – Polish Sausage, Grilled Onions, Grilled Mushrooms & Bacon. But wait! Topped with YUMMY NACHO CHEESE.

The Gustavo Dudamel Hot Dog (these are getting progressively more disgusting as you get further in the line)

The “Mulholland Drive” – 10″ Stretch Hot Dog, Grilled Onions & Mushrooms, Bacon, Topped with Nacho Cheese.

Three Dog Night – Hot dog even I didn’t have the courage to order. It’s three beef hot dogs, three slices of cheese, 3 slices of bacon, wrapped in a GIANT tortilla, topped with Chilli & Onions. Oooo lawd.

The Millenium Dog – 12″ Jalapeno dog, chopped tomatoes, lettuce, chili, grilled onions, topped with guacamole.

The Olympic Rings Dog – I actually got this one. I know. I know. 10″ Stretch hot dog. Yummy Barbecue Sauce. Topped with our Famous Onion Rings.

The Ozzy Spicy Dog – “Hot as Ozzy Osbourne”

The Building Process

The hot dog assembly process is pretty impressive. First you are greeted by the assembly engineer that takes your specs and verifies the request.

He then lays out little aluminum/plastic napkins to lay the dogs and buns on. Then, from the metal chest I can only assume is heaven, god creates hot dogs which are carefully placed into the buns.

The hot dog then goes down the assembly line for bacon, cheese, nacho cheese, chili, etc.

The finished product is then delivered to you and explained. The people in front of me were really hungry. My order is on the right. Olympic dog, chilli cheese bacon dog and two plain mustard dogs.

Here is a closeup of the artwork.

How many calories is that? I don’t know, but I did get a diet coke to offset it. Three of them. I was concerned about not taking in enough sodium yesterday I suppose. Gotta get your vitamins.

Now here is where it gets graphic. This is the clean side of the hand after eating the Olympic dog and the chili dog. What you can’t see is the back side, covered in chili oil that will give my hand an orange stain for weeks.

All done.

Have you saved any room for desert?

Of course. I’m not an animal! Waiiit.. Wait a minute…

But of course! Randy’s doughnuts in Inglewood! I believe “Lardo” the doughnut mascot from The Simpsons was actually concieved as a parody of this very doughnut stand. Not sure though. But the doughnuts are delicious.

If you’ve made it this far, I applaud you 🙂

So a call to action. Please register for TechEd Preday in Australia. Find the one they call Robbie Upcroft and bring him a hot dog. Frozen, Corndog, Olympic dog. You name it. Look around Robbie, you will see Wayne Small attached to him. Wayne will be asking you for your business card. Everyone to bring Robbie a hot dog and present it to him gets two beers on Own Web Now / Vladville, Wayne will be your official beer distributor.

Update: Of course this blog post is for the ladies. Who loves ya, baby? With Playgirl out of print, I got your back: Where else on the Internet can go find an IT blog that gives you a shot of a few hundred weiners all in one blog post? That’s right! Vladville! You’re welcome.

Who knew Henry Ford was an infrastructure VAR?

Posted: 6:27 pm
August 8, 2008

IT Business, Vladville
6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off on the ExchangeDefender 4 Road Trip

Posted: 10:14 pm
August 7, 2008

ExchangeDefender, OwnWebNow
Comments Off

As you may have noticed, I’ve been rather quiet about the ExchangeDefender 4.0 upcoming feature set. For a product scheduled for launch date of August 19th it’s pretty unusual for me to be this silent about it.

So you know this is going to be big 🙂

And when you see what we’ve been working on for the past eight plus months your thoughts are going to be… “I get all that for that price? How can they possibly make money on it?”

Pssst. We’re gonna make the future users of ExchangeDefender pay for the enormous infrastructure expansion bump you’ll see. And the new pricing will be announced on the 20th. And it’s gonna be higher. Significantly higher. But every service provider in by the 19th will be locked in to the current pricing. So if you aren’t in the partner program, today is a day to get in and sign up for the Service Provider account. It’s $150 for the first 100 accounts, $1.50 per account after that. You get first 60 days free. You can make a good $ on the markup of that alone, and on Aug 19th when ExchangeDefender becomes a product onto itself you’ll be able to damn near build a business on it. If I’ve written about anything on here is that you’ve got to spot opportunities when they present themselves – this is your opportunity. No exceptions will be made after the 19th.

So tomorrow I go to Dallas to inspect and sign off on ExchangeDefender 4.0. We are so badass that the head of this monster is split between three data centers 🙂

On Sunday I board a flight to LAX to visit the live geographically redundant data center doing the same thing in DC. God willing, in December there will be one in London too. And then Australia. ~~And then Elbonia!~~

So that is what I’m up to. Join us 🙂

P.S. To my blogging friends and tireless advocates that have been just amazing partners in the Own Web Now business I want to ask you not to blog about this last offer. I feel that enough ass has been kicked and I’ve given both the IT world and the IT community enough of what I and my OWN family are all about. And while I appreciate that you want to give that one additional kick in the ass, even I thought about not posting this. So the comments and trackbacks are disabled, this is the biggest business favor I can offer my readers and I’d like to keep it as such.

Pampers and Clouds: The end of an IT generation

Posted: 11:11 pm
August 6, 2008

IT Business, IT Culture, Microsoft
6 Comments

Geek Squad Dave first gained notoriety in the newsgroups for his very public lack of ability to grasp the basic concepts of vendor and client management and dealing with cost structure changes. After being condemned in public by most of his peers Geek Squad Dave became only the second person OWN will not do business with, which has apparently motivated him to become an unofficial spokesperson for one of our customer-direct competitors where he hopes to lead the drones of retail consulting IT failures like him – and god do I wish he succeeds. He also appears to be preoccupied with me for some reason even though I don’t remember ever meeting the guy. Here is his latest bit of “brilliance”:

I’ve been in this industry since Vlad was in diapers and I can assure
you the WAN bandwidth is always going to be behind LAN bandwidth. And that as bandwidth increases, the apps and data will too.

This is a part of the Geek Squad Dave’s argument on why most applications will just never make it to the cloud. Now, for this to work I am going to need you to ignore a few things. The last time I was in diapers was about 28 years ago or so.. so please ignore for a moment that this genius comes from a man who has been virtually unemployed for that period of time and failed to even accidentally be successful enough to hire another person. Please also ignore the flawed logic of “this has failed before, so it will surely fail again.” Also ignore the billions of dollars being pumped into the transformation of IT infrastructure by every major vendor. Let’s also ignore the wisdom of people who work with network engineers, developers, major IT powerhouses all of which are indicating that this is the direction they are strongly focusing on. That’s just how much ignorance you’ll need to think that we are not on a cusp of the most significant change in computing during most of our lifetime. Pampers stage included.

You see, for the longest time we’ve had this shift of computing and processing power from mainframe to PC, from PC to server, from server to workstation and the trend always flowed to the device with the most computational power because that is what transformed data into something useful. But over the last few years we have seen the relevance of a local area network diminish. Change in paradigm? Change in trust? Change in cost and affordability? It doesn’t really matter why, it matters that the computing experience is no longer dependant on you being a part of some segmented network that needed to be managed, monitored, tuned and audited around the clock. Your phone accesses the same Internet. It sends around the same email. It provides similar services, often better and more reliable if at times even cheaper. Ever tried to print a picture across the Internet and pick it up at a local CVS? Or have a picture book shipped to your doorstep?

The large data set argument is the last one in the defense of the local area network and is by far the most flawed of them all. If the data set grows, the processing power needed to manipulate it grows. Major movie studios do not render their movies on expensive standalone SGI’s anymore – they render them on server render farms. Major database and transaction systems no longer sit on monolithic clusters fighting a storage medium bottleneck – you’ve guessed it, data farms. Large files, voice, video – all within the reach of your cell phone powered by a tiny battery.

Welcome to the future. (PDC ’08 Sessions)

As the cloud computing becomes more prevalent medium for long term storage, processing, scalability and affordability, what unique feature will bring computing back to the confines of the LAN? That my friends is what is crushing guys like Geek Squad Dave right out of their almost-business, the inability to deal with change combined with lack of expertise to seize the opportunity. It is what separates IT solution providers from independent Geek Squad guys running out and “trust recommending” the solutions. One provides solutions, the other picks out laptop bags and offers input on which version of Quickbooks or Office you should buy. The successful IT solution providers of today and tomorrow are the ones who stay informed and can demonstrate the ability to help a business be successful in the modern times.

The opportunity is incredible. And the only requirement is shedding the ignorance.

This is the most exciting time to be in the IT space, bar none. And if you think you’ve seen this before… your mind is starting to go, a good indication that you’re closer to diapers than I am.

Perplexed by Change in Direction?

Posted: 12:34 am
August 6, 2008

IT Culture
4 Comments

It means confused, just in case you’re wondering.

Why do companies that have been built on going direct suddenly decide to care about the reseller channel?

Why do companies that have been built on the reseller channel partnerships decide to go direct to the customer?

Mo money. The grass is always greener on the other side.

That is all there is to it. Or as my buddy Robbie would put it: It’s that simple.

Really? Really.

With every change of guard and seasons, the occupying management force will do a business assessment and identify key areas of improvement, the opportunity matrix, the differentiating factor… and the rest is basically what the Dilbert comic is based on.

These change strategies are all ultimately based on a flawed concept that while everything else stays the same and we change only this one thing, we will be able to make $X more money. People making this kind of a call probably never heard of causality. 🙂

You see, the problem is that when you change one little thing, even with the best of intentions, you end up pissing off a large contingent of the base that got you to your current stature. So it makes sense to do it when you are at the bottom and the feds just raided your office. But what happens when you are at the top and your change for an incremental % of market share results upsetting 100% of the constituency that got you to your current leader role in the market? There goes your sand castle.

Now sure you can draw parallels to Dell and Microsoft, but I do the same for my OWN company. As the reseller base erodes and folks flunk out of business there is mounting pressure for us to go direct.

Whenever there is a high demand of unquantifiable revenue opportunity I like to find out who is suddenly making this need apparent. How did the world change overnight that we could be making all this money and how did all these customers figure out to call us? Dig a little below the shiny cover sheet of the presentation and you find out that it’s Bob, the failed VAR, callling from the $25,000 job he got with his largest client and he needs us to go direct because he is tired of returning support phone calls during summer from his car during the lunch hour.

So let me get this straight. We’re going to throw our biggest partners under the bus in order to be friendly to the very customers that couldn’t even keep the ol’ Bob in business? We need to go direct for that? Answer on the first ring for that needy client base? Reeeeeeeally?

Let me think about that one… Bzzzt. No.

I wonder if Dell, Microsoft and others are looking past their presentation cover sheets or blindly salivating over the large dream numbers?

Live from the Garbage truck worker convention…

Posted: 3:50 pm
August 5, 2008

Awesome
4 Comments

Ok, not really, that one is still scheduled for October 4th-6th, but the college football season in the south is getting warmer than a moonshine possum stew. Here with some thoughts is Chris Rue’s-black-half-brother-from-another-mother:

Amen. Inspirational. SEC, SEC, SEC!

(having a bunch of dental surgery done so things are going to stay quiet around here for a bit)

Being Vlad Mazek

Posted: 3:57 am
August 4, 2008

Uncategorized
4 Comments

One of the readers emailed (vlad@vladville.com btw) to ask what it’s really like to be Vlad Mazek. Surely the post about working long hours can’t be real because nobody would believe that someone in my role would work that hard.

Believe it.

Look at any successful (and legal) company and you’ll find it is built on hard work in particular off the backs of the people on the very top of the org chart. I’m not talking about charlatans who sell fraudulent dietary supplements over the web and write books to inspire others to be worthless scammers in just 4 hours a week. I mean real companies, that have been around for years, with track record of building millionaires up and down the management chains.

Those folks work hard.

After giving my son a bath and rocking him to sleep around 9PM I hung out with my wife and watched Venture Bros for a little while. So after the whole day of out and about and working on the monkey, I took an hour or so to relax. Then at 11:15 PM I went to the airport to pick up Erick Simpson from Intelligent Enterprise, a highly respected MSP organization and a training firm and author and the list of credentials goes on. Four beers, two diet cokes and two bags of pretzels later, Erick and I compared notes on trends we see in the SMB space. Trends, business model changes, competitive landscape, opportunities, threats. We wrapped up at 3:18 AM.

In three hours I will be waking up to meet over breakfast with Stuart and Frank from SecureMyCompany, global leader in hosted Kaseya deployments.

After which I will go through the usual 9-5 day running the company that provides thousands of you with the services that make it possible to do your job.

Yup, that’s what a Sunday night to Monday morning, on three hours of sleep, looks like if you want to be successful.

Is this gratuitous self-promotion? You bet. But who do you think the customers pick and trust to run their IT? Companies that work hard, care and improve their offerings every day, or slackers that despite their lack of motivation and insurmountable demand for technical services managed to remain unemployed and employeeless but took a dozen vacations?

Ask yourself what you are really spending your life doing and who you are serving. When you have some perspective then you can define your goals, your process and pave the way to the destination. Hint: It ain’t getting done in 4 hours a week.

There are no rewards for just doing your job

Posted: 4:53 pm
August 2, 2008

IT Business
8 Comments

Yesterday was a slow day, with all the 1st of the month stuff wrapped up people tend to sit back, refocus, adjust their appointments and plan for the week ahead so Monday morning doesn’t start on a bad note. It’s also time when we look at what others in the company are doing, developers look at support, support looks at ops and facilities it’s all a part of oiling the machine. At some point in the afternoon I get an IM:

Stamantha says:

Why is Sheldon updating tickets? I have him on vacation this week.

Now, what I’m about to share with you is not in any self-help book, HR guide, socialist pamphlet or Islamic fatwa. Perhaps it should be. Ready?

There is no award for doing your job.

There is no award for doing what you’re expected to. Meeting expectations is.. well.. a requirement to remain employed. If you sit on that line you will be the first one gone. Hate to break it down like that but it’s the truth. People who do the bare minimum do not get promoted, they do not get raises, they do not get bonuses.

Same goes for delivering services. If you simply do what you said you would do you’ve earned your pay. Nothing more. If the five people around you are doing the same but also picking up the slack, documenting their work, contacting the customer for courtesy followups, managing their schedule and their customers demands.. well, those people get more money.

Somewhere between stupidity (working harder than those around you) and insanity (knowingly working harder knowing that no raise or bonus is guaranteed) there is a little thing called work ethic and that is what elevates the excellence of the team, the company and the solutions we deliver. If that sounds like Dilbert’s pointy haired boss saying our people are our greatest asset then I’ve hit my mark, because…

… because for the most part that whole thing is total bs that companies give their employees to keep them under delusion of future for just one more day. Efficient and flexible companies are not built on psych profilers, blank incentives and meaningless perks. Employees are not motivated by a shocky stick and a output measure every 60 minutes. Companies driven in such a way guarantee only one thing: that your employees will only do the bare minimum required to get to the next step, and they will resent you when they do the bare minimum for the next step and do not receive the anticipated result. Those folks are not on the same mission you are, if that is how you value your people, in an inverse proportion (the less I pay you, the more I make) then your employees will work the same way (the less I work the less stressed I will be and I will be happier)

Companies are built by example. Define goals, define requirements, define the effort required and then publicly reward the people that align themselves with your mission. Reward them publicly and excessively – you will find more of your people taking the same path.

Companies are built by leadership. Why are people working on vacation? Why are they looking at their case work after hours or getting stuff done whenever they get a chance? Because they see me do it. We are on the same page. I don’t jump into a room, smack a deadline on the wall and say “We’re going to get this done – Oh by the way, I’ll be in Hawaii next week, please try not to bother me.” This is not a Michael Jordan commercial, this is the truth about the American enterprise – if you are any kind of a leader people will follow you and try to be like you. So why not give the best possible example of working towards the common goal?

Companies are built with hard work. This doesn’t go without saying, it has to be said: If this stuff were easy everyone would do it and we’d be making minimum wage. But it’s not, and for us to stay where we are and get even better we need to work hard. We are not in this to just manage, to get by, to slide, to coast, to barely register. We are in this to be the best and it’s not easy.

So back to the question, why is Sheldon working while he is on vacation? Maybe he is a fool. Or maybe he understands what we are all about and is dedicated to the same goals that we’re all dedicated to. That’s not something you can profile, thats not something you can influence with the minimalist salary baits for incremental improvement.. That is something you establish by example, leadership and hard work.

Lucy’s Sail: Shockey Monkey Forever

Posted: 12:56 am
August 2, 2008

Shockey Monkey
4 Comments

After over two years in production, design and testing… The “When it’s done” just became “Done.“

v2 has been in use at Own Web Now for a while and the underlying framework is being used to power all our upcoming projects. So naturally the amount of work that went into making sure this was rock solid was quite large.

The wait is.. over. If you’re on the list, you’ll get a welcome email today. You will be on it by the end of the weekend. No more wait lists, no more queue, no more “coming soon” – we will have thousands of you in the queue online today.

Oh, did I mention that it’s free? Yeah, it’s free for our partners. Will remain free till 3.0. To find out more about that and the signup come back in a few days when we launch the new SM web site. The names on our new list of “friends” will surprise you.

Now back to the celebratory Mountain Dew! 🙂

By George, I think Dell’s got it

Posted: 1:22 pm
July 31, 2008

IT Business
4 Comments

For years Dell lead the way of ugly PC manufacturing. Their claim to fame has been the cheapest and most generic PC on the planet, delivered to your doorstep in any variation of ugly you want.

Beige, duotone silver, black did not matter in the rainbow of ugly because the competitive matrix was between price and performance and Dell had solutions in all the corners.

But then a funny thing happened.

Little fruit company out of Curpentino started making flashy computers that did pretty much what Dell’s solutions did. The little fruit company grew from obscure single digit percentage to being the third largest shipper of personal computers in America.

Suddenly, Dell could not grow its business and grow its margins. Suddenly things like design became important. Green became important. Style became relevant.

Dell was no longer just another fish in the ugly pond. It did what all the great companies do when they get told they simply aren’t keeping up with the marketing expectations.

It evolved.

Dell didn’t roam the desert for subjects to trick into thinking they are better than the market tells them they are.

Dell didn’t turn and say that it simply didn’t compete with pretty and flashy.

Dell didn’t sit back and choose to fight with the same tools it has used to get to the top, they completely redid their product line, changed their values.

Dell reinvented itself.

Little lesson for all of us. It doesn’t matter if we think we are right. It doesn’t matter what the perception is or who is causing the disruption.

What matters is listening to the clients, to the line of people lining up around the door to give us their money, and making sure we satisfy them.

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog