Walking a fine line

I own an IT vendor firm that four years ago moved from serving major global enterprise clients to trying to serve the SMB market.  Our resulting experience has forced us to move back upstream to the enterprise market while keeping only the largest of our SMB clients.  This is not due to commission structures, but because our sales people, and management, grew enormously frustrated with the purchase and decision making processes of many SMBs.  Our people wound up investing the same amount of time, and often quite a bit more, to close sales that were only 10% - 40% of a typical purchase from our larger clients. The lower level of technical sophistication, combined with the amount of hand holding required by many SMBs resulted in our firm selling smaller service packages over a longer period of time that required more support, much of which was expected to be provided for free prior to the purchase of any maintenance agreements.  This is a recipe for disaster that would put many companies out of business.  

There is a very significant difference between working with a large company to sell it something that you know it wants, in an environment where you are competing with other firms for budgeted dollars, where sales cycles are longer but fairly consistent and the client does not necessarily want much hand holding, versus attempting to sell to a smaller firm that may be just "looking" or is attempting to educate themselves prior to really analyzing their options, have zero or little known budget, and often requires far more education around the solution(s) being sought.

My recommendations are: 1) SMBs not receiving call backs due to commission structures should change vendors. 2)Be up front and honest with yourself and your vendors, don't force them to spend rediculous amounts of time educating you and your people so that you are then ready to begin analyzing all competing vendors and solutions.  If this is your need, educate yourself on your own time. 3) If you are lucky enough to find a vendor that will spend lots of time educating you and providing advice for free (which we still do a LOT of), remain loyal to that vendor and it will pay off in the long run.  Don't jump ship to save a few bucks whenever possible because soon that vendor will no longer be willing to help you build your business as a partner by providing valuable insight, and will begin viewing you as an underperforming "account".

Wow, this struck a chord.  I know for a fact this was all about
the fact that the salesteam wouldn't get credit for the sale.  I
did buy the system I wanted later - I just didn't use sales rep (I had
wanted to verify that I was getting a dual core chipset for this system
and their site didn't make this clear but that's another blog
post...)  I got a call from a PC vendor wondering if

I didn't build a PC becuase my wife needed it ASAP and the parts I was
looking for are difficult to get (3.8 GHZ Intel Dual Core Chipet.)

I did have to verify that I would only use this PC in the US. 

The poll asked for the number of Linux servers installed.  It
didn't ask for Linux servers as a percentage of total servers.

If I have 25 servers and all of them run Linux, that says more about my
satisfaction with the OS than if I have 25 Linux servers out of several
hundred.

Measuring satisfaction would be very interesting and I agree, this
doesn't measure the entire issue.  We'll work on trying to capture
satisfaction at some point this fall.  However, 44% claim to have
no Linux servers at their business and many have less than 5.  

So much of the technology used by businesses originated in the public sector.  The list of most powerful computers is largely filled with computers created for governmental institutions around the world.  The internet itself originated as a network for the US Department of Defense to communicate from a variety of locations.  DARPA continues to push the envelope with robotic transportation.  I tend to think about new developments coming down from on high and look to those expensive, well established research areas to see what is coming to a business near me in the next few years?

I?m finding I have to adjust my eyes to other areas to see where the new challenges and opportunities for business present themselves. 

There are more and more technologies influencing the business world that are surfacing from the consumer space.  Some might argue that technologies like peer-to-peer networks, instant messaging; AJAX, etc. are not rooted exclusively in the consumer world.  That may be true.  However, it is the business person using these technologies (or services based on these technologies) as a consumer that are forcing IT to take them seriously. 

I spoke with an IT Manager for a financial services company recently about how much trouble they were having with employees and instant messaging.  They had recently deployed a new corporate messaging service that allows them to be much more diligent (read cover their butts) on communication via IM.  No one wanted to use it.  Everyone had buddy lists that were a mix of clients, co-workers, friends, and family and the service they selected did not allow for communication with all of these parties.  They are now able to cross this off their list of compliance risks but works have lost the utility they once found from IM.  There are other examples:

I spoke with the founder of WiMax.com yesterday - he sees the future of mobile business platforms being driven by teenagers with cell phones downloading Mp3's, games, etc.  and not the government. 

I look around my office as people walk in with various 5GB to 60GB hard drives in their hands and wonder how my company, and every other company in the world, is protecting their data from malicious employees.  What are the business applications of really large flash memory devices and how to they change the way businesses function?

The recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco presented all sorts of ideas that blur the line between an application and a service. 

 Add to this the increased interest in governments across the world to mandate particular technology standards and you have IT organizations surrounded.  Regulation, Massachusetts naming OpenOffice the standard for all state documents, FCC involve etc present further complications for an organization.

Yesterday, TR Staffer Michael Beganny took a little field trip to the Boston Museum of Science to see the new Star Wars exhibit.  First, let me say that I'm jealous.  Very jealous of this trip.  Nothing takes me back to my first grade times like a good shot of a land speeder. 

You can view the whole photo gallery from Michael's field trip here. 

IDC's Roger Kay weighs in on the issue of standards (particularly wireless standards) in an article here. 
Kay seems to suggest that many of these standards battles become more
important as the technology is applied to consumer uses. 

Any time standards are discussed I flash back to my time working as an
engineer (or sorts) at a TV station.  All of the senior engineers
loved to talk about the technical merits of Betamax tapes over
VHS.  We all know how that standards war played out for
consumers.  Professional video operations still used (and probably
use to this day) betamax tape for the same reasons. 

Is it the split between professional and consumer needs, price sensitivites, etc. that create these standards wars? 

And now for something completely different...

Look at what some people at University of Arkansas have created using
everyone's favorite Halloween icon - the pumpkin.  My favorite
part of this little oddity is the "Intel Inside" logo found just above
the DVD-RW drive.  The photo gallery links to a site where you can
view more photos.  Unless someone can direct me to some
application for this project I will chalk this up to the wonderful
world of college where so many things a student does has no practical
application. 

Bill Gates recently unveiled the next wave of products from Microsoft. All of the products have "Live" in the title. ZDNet's Dan Farber writes, "It's about connecting users at the center, with relationships with people, data people care about, applications and all devices coming together to do things for you."

This follows on Microsoft's announcement that the Windows and MSN groups will merge. I tried one of their new Live applications, www.live.com and here are my thoughts: 

They announce very prominently "Firefox users, Firefox support coming soon. Please be patient. ;)" Whoa. That could be interesting. Will this be the start of the thaw over the browser wars? 

The application itself is little more than an RSS reader with some hooks into MSN and various other Microsoft Passport gated applications.

Microsoft has a ton of other services in the works. Most compete with existing services but I'm excited to give a few of these a whirl.

This move doesn't feel like a market leader moving forward on an ambitious project, it feels like a company trying to illustrate how it gets it. It seems as if Microsoft is barely balancing on a very high beam. Their competitive edge has always been the fact that they OWN the desktop. These moves seem to be conceding that the desktop is less important than it used to be. 

Occasionally, I will stop in at the Dunkin' Doughnuts right next to my
office in New York City before starting my day. For those of you not
familiar with Dunkin' Doughnuts coffee, you are missing out. It is
quite good and about half the price of those other coffee shops . I ran
into a co-worker as I came out with my coffee today and asked me how I
could so regularly frequent a place with such poor customer service
(this shop is an "only in New York" kind of experience.) Without much
thought I was able to answer that I was willing to sacrifice customer
service for a good, cheap cup of coffee in the morning.

As I sat down in my office I began thinking about the news story I read
this week about Dell's rather drastic turn for the worse in Server
support surveys. Clearly, server customers aren't in a position to
sacrifice customer service for price. I've long listened to people sing
the praises of Dell and their ability to lower costs while maintaining
equal or better service. Has Dell finally found a point where they
can't support at the same level while retaining their price
competitiveness? There have been chinks in the armor on the PC and
Laptop side for some time and while they are still tops in most surveys
their lead is narrowing and the difference in support is very apparent
to long-time customers.

Is this slip a momentary issue, as Dell would have us believe, is this
really about other server vendors improving their service while holding
down costs, or is this a fork in the road for Dell?

According to the host of American Public Media's Marketplace, workers
will spend the equivalent of 550 years reading blogs at work in
2005. Here's hoping whatever portion of that time is spent with
TechRepublic's blogs provides some benefit.

In other news, here's a link to full coverage of Microsoft's SQL Server Launch. You can also check out what's new in this photo gallery
of the launch where the band Cheap Trick provided music. Making
no judgments about the band, is any band named Cheap Trick a smart move
when launching a new version of a very popular product?

At least that is what my five year old daughter said.
I try to keep the personal out of my blog but I felt like sharing this
conversation.

My daughter: "Mommy, Mommy Mommy! They're talking about
TechRepublic on the Today show!" (She proceeds to bounce around
excitedly.)

My wife (after listening for a while :) "Honey, you're very
close. They are talking about the Czech Republic. That's a
country."

TechRepublic is taking over the world!

Phil Windley of ZDNet has a really interesting blog post today
discussing the planning businesses must do to prepare for disasters -
not the whole disaster recovery set of issues but the connectivity and
productivity issues. Read the post here.

A while ago I wrote about the myth of the paperless office
and how so many organizations had gone half way but still relied too
heavily on physical paper. Perhaps a catastrophe like pandemic avian
flu or other situation like that will quickly force the hand of a
number of businesses to take connectivity, paperless communication,
etc. more seriously. Let's hope this remains a hypothetical post...

Still, Windley's question is a good one, is your business ready?

A ZDNet discussion about the trend toward software services prompted this response in it talkback section.  I know only a few people every click out, so I will include a portion here: 

I'm
going to reveal a dirty little secret of the computing services
industry. They deliberately fail. I used to work for a F500 company
that delivered services on a global basis. Ready for the business
model? It goes like so:

* Sign an agreement with the customer at a rock bottom price, and promise the same SLA as your competitors.

*
For the first few months of the contract, devote an overwhelming amount
of resources towards supporting and delighting that customer, at the
expense of your other customers.

* After the first few months,
under support the customer, as you do all of your customers, because
otherwise you won't make a profit.

* When the customer
complains, or contract renewal is near, devote an overwhelming amount
of resources towards supporting and delighting that customer, at the
expense of your other customers.

Business leaders everywhere are under pressure to "deliver value"
and cut costs.  If your company is considering bringing in on-site
or call center support they will need to work very carefully on the
creation of VALUE while they cut costs.

Late last week, Gartner came out with a recommendation
that businesses upgrade to Microsoft Vista sometime in 2008. The
main
benefit Gartner sees with Vista is improved security. They claim
that
most of these benefits are available from other providers right
now. Basically, no need to rush out unless you seek some of the
new functionality for a specific application you are running.

The whole discussion made me think of a conversation I had during a recent once a
weekend trip to Home Depot. I was making my latest set of purchases for the
money pit (this time a new back door that actually keeps the cold air out) when
I was informed that the rather detailed order might not be executed that day due to computer
issues. It seems that the order entry system at this (and the associate
thought it was all) Home Depots runs on Windows 98. They had recently
upgraded the back end systems and were having significant challenges getting
Windows 98 to interface with the new system.

My company, and TechRepublic's parent company, CNET Networks is one of those
companies that pretty aggressively follows the upgrade path of the major
software packages including Windows and Office. Our business requires
that our web sites work with all platforms, browsers, etc. and that mandates an
early adopter upgrade path. Being in this environment, it is easy to
forget about the many huge businesses that "lock and load" a desktop
OS once every 10 years or so.

My Home Depot sales person connected me with the systems guy
that was trying to
make things work at this location. He wouldn't tell me much as
soon as he
found out that I work for a media company that I might write about what
he said ( he was a consultant and not a Home Depot employee.) He
did say
that the company's training curriculum is rooted in 98 and is a massive
investment (imagine the number of new employees hired by Home Depot in
a given
year!) kept the company from
upgrading.

Will Home Depot take the plunge with Vista? Is Gartner's 2008
recommendation
on track? Or will the next upgrade be to a Linux desktop?
Or, will
Home Depot move to a platform independent browser-based
application? Home
Depot are locked and loaded on 98 because they have the OS secure, have
stripped out unnecessary services, and can run the OS on very low cost
systems. It would seem that they somewhat regularly have growing
pains with this system (and may lose a significant amount of revenue
when they can't take orders. They are likely to move to a new
system sooner than later. They seem like excellent candidates for a desktop linux roll out.

Even if Vista proves to be
significantly more secure than past Microsoft Desktop operating
systems, why
would they replace all of their low cost desktops (the store I visited
had over
150 systems) with systems that require 10x the RAM to simply run the
OS?

I'm sure Home Depot's IT organization is evaluating Vista and other
options. Given my regular visits to the store, I'm fairly sure
I'll be able to share information on Home Depot's decision shortly
after it rolls out.

As you likely have seen, we launched a new feature to TechRepublic called the Workspace. 
If you're a registered user and logged in, you can access the Workspace
on any page from TechRepublic header (Click on the "my Workspace" on
the top navigation bar on any page.) 

You can also get a tutorial on the Workspace here. 

Now, the important part, WE NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU.  We have had a
great many people send us feed back but we need to hear from you. 
Any and all feed back is most welcome. 

Microsoft's announcement
and details since the announcement that it will move more aggressively
toward a business model centered on services instead of software
certainly has a lot of people buzzing. 
Beyond Microsoft's entry (actually, the announcement that they WILL
enter this space) there are 100s if not thousands of other software
offered as services throughout the industry. 

I keep thinking back to my time in the late 90's when I worked for PC
World and it seemed that I was speaking to new Application Service
Providers every day.  Hosted business applications, hosted
everything (the office in a box!,) hosted CRM (one of the survivors,)
Intel and SAP's partnership to bring ERP to smaller companies in a
hosted format, etc. 

What makes this go around with software services different?  What hurdles still remain? 

Certainly access is much better and cheaper than it was in the
1990s.  Browser technology has evolved significantly.  The
services companies here today have built much more flexible services -
one frequent problem with the early ASP's was their inability to
business situations that differed from their initial design. 

What hasn't changed - 

Trust - If my business is moves its data to this service can I trust
that it will remain safe?  How does the service provider deal with
my competitors? 

Portability - What if I choose to leave the service.  How do I migrate data? 

Service -  If Software is a service, can I be sure I will get SERVICE? 

Did anyone else read the book _Chaos: Making a New Science_ by James
Gleick?  If you have you will no doubt remember the brilliant way
he described, and in my case introduced fractals to the reader. 
While interesting as a mathematical concept, they are also amazingly
beautiful to look at.  We have a photo gallery
of fractals generated by J.C. Sprott for you to feast your eyes
on.  Enjoy and if you haven't read Chaos, put it on your
list. 

Cisco, 

You announced today that you would buy Scientific-Atlanta,
the maker of set top cable boxes.  You talk about the acquisition
as a way to continue to grow your revenue and profits.  We
understand, Cisco, that this is what you need to say to please your
investors and conceal the development plans that must be a part of this
deal.  I hope that this doesn't stop you for considering the
following ideas:

1. Please provide home and small businesses with cable internet with
   easy to use hardware based security features.  Some of us will
   take the time and spend the money to do what needs to be done to secure
   our home networks but so many don't you can help and make money in the
   process. 
2. You own linksys and soon, Scientific Atlanta.  Can you work
   to create devices that easily combine home router and cable reception
   functionalities?  While you're at it, please throw in the VoIP
   technology you've made so successful in the business world and
   Scientific-Atlanta's DVR capabilities too.
3. You're in a unique position to bring the computer, TV, and phone
   together - please help your soon-to-be new customers - the Cable
   Companies - to understand how important good service, robust
   functionality, and smart software interfaces are to a user
   experience. 

Perhaps you're already working on this and if you are, please respond
to me (you can send me a private message from my profile page) and let
me know what is in the works. 

Best on your new endeavour,
Pete

P.S. - I'm sure the members of TechRepublic have other ideas on how you
can help lead the pretty clueless cable industry into this new
era.  Please listen to their thoughts too. 

The Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States has long been called
"Black Friday."  Millions of shoppers roll out of bed early, often
still stuffed from the feast consumed the day before, and go out buying
holiday presents at ungodly hours as retailers offer aggressive sales
to reward such insanity (can you tell I was home this past Friday
morning?) 

Now media outlets are calling the Monday after Thanksgiving "Black
Monday."  Apparently, this is the largest ecommerce day of the
year.  Why?  Because corporate internet connections are
faster than home internet connections. 

The internet has long been credited with helping increase the
productivity of a workforce and, as a staff member of TechRepublic, I
hope that TechRepublic has been a part of this productivity
increase.  Never the less, access does not always bring
productivity.  Walk around your office today and check out all of
the networked printers and see how many receipts lay waiting for your
co-worker to pick up for their records. 

What the T3 provides, the T3 taketh away...

Mozilla is hinting at a focused marketing push for Firefox in the near future and is truly taking the battle to Microsoft's backyard: Marketing.

The challenge, retaining the "I found this browser and most of the
world doesn't know about it yet" coolness while also getting the rest
of the world to know about it. Up to this point, Mozilla, Google,
and others have primarily depended on PR to get the word out on their
products. Clearly, the plan was a successful one for Google as it
is now a verb as well as a company name, and number. How will it
work for other open source projects?

Other open source marketing efforts are from vendors that are adding
value to the solution - Dell's Linux Servers, IBM's extensive work with
Linux in both hardware and software sides of their business, Linux
distros by RedHat and Novell/Suse that focus on support services in
addition to the code, Oracle and other enterprise application companies
touting their ability to run on Linux, etc.

So much of the open source "movement" is about defying traditional
marketing, business models, etc. I look forward to seeing what these
open source marketers come up with as they work to make the "best kept
secrets of tech" more widely known.

Wait a minute!

Wasn't the debate last year about how desktops were doomed to be replaced by laptops?

I don't see my desktop, laptop, or cell phone replaced by either-or anytime soon.

Not for my field either.  I am a Control Systems Engineer and double as our Systems Administrator and have to interface to many different products to configure them or program them.  I would dearly love to have a device that could be all of the things that I need that is the size of a Blackberry, but until they make something that could connect to devices and handle all of the other stuff (email, spreadsheets, documents, etc) I won't give up my laptops.  Besides, what would I play Quake on?  LOL...

I was drawn to today's news coverage over some growing pains
experienced by Wikipedia. I won't detail the issues here but you
can learn more at the related news story.
We at TechRepublic deal similar issues every day. We have
hundreds of user generated posts every day and thousands of users
depend on this information every day.

I look around the IT and Internet landscape right now and I see so many
projects with motivations similar to that of TechRepublic, Wikipedia,
Digg.com, and others. I love what I see; a belief in the
importance of collective knowledge, a focus on a diversity of
viewpoints, continual improvement, and an understanding of the
incredible power of the internet to unite diverse and disparate groups
through this simple and flexible medium.

Many of these services are stewarded by a (relatively) small group of
individuals with a shared belief in the goodness of the project.
As some of these projects (Wikipedia, Open Source Software, etc) become
used by more mainstream groups, we see more and more of these
challenges. How the more popular services respond to these
challenges impacts the entire set of similar but unrelated products
that are not as popular but founded on the same principles. I'm
watching closely.

TechRepublic recently soft-launched a wiki based product for the
express purpose of letting members respond, improve, and update our
editorial content. Take it for a test drive.
We realize that the challenges faced by sites like wikipedia are always
present on TechRepublic as well. Thank you to all of the
TechRepublic members that work so hard to make sure that the
information shared here is vetted, accurate, and useful.

1.  Majority of businesses report that Spyware is under control.  Some
members I've spoken with claim that dealing with Spyware issues is
consuming 25% of their support team's time.  This isn't going away
anytime soon. 

2.  Microsoft buys Open Source Provider.  I've
seen some claim that Microsoft might buy RedHat Software or another
company providing a supported version of Linux.  Fat chance. 

3.  Businesses flock to Microsoft Vista.  The hardware requirements and continued security concerns will make adoption of Vista a slow process for most companies. 

4.  Legislators back revise regulatory requirements. 
Many of the regulatory requirements passed by US legislators have
created a tremendous amount of work for IT that is sapping companies of
their flexibility and creativity, not to mention their budgets. 
No one wants another Enron but most would agree that Sarbanes Oxley and
other regulations are addressing a problem but not providing a
cure.  Still, Congress won't step on the political landmine that
would relax some of the more strict portions of these laws and create
more effective regulations. 

5.  Mega mergers yield huge gains for top vendors. Oracle
has impressively consumed the company formerly named Peoplesoft and
claims to be well on its way to the same end with Siebel. 
Nevertheless, I predict that these mergers as well as others
(Symantec/Veritas) will NOT drive significant growth for these
companies.  Prediction within a prediction - there will still be
more mega mergers on the way. 

Berkeley's Seti@home program was discontinued on December 15th.
More accurately, it will no longer accept new participants. For
those not familiar with SETI
(Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and the Seti@home project,
it was a project that used
volunteer's idle CPU time to process radio data collected from space in
hopes of discovering intelligent life. I had, at various times,
donated computer time to the project. While I wouldn't classify
myself as someone that is hugely confident that we will discover alien
intelligence in my lifetime, I certainly would like it if we did and
always enjoyed returning to my computer to see the Seti@home
screensaver chugging through the small amount of data that was pushed
to my computer. I'm also a really big fan of the way in which the under
funded
SETI project solved their computing problems and greatly increased the
amount of data they could process.

You can still donate unused CPU time to SETI@HOME but it is through a
new service called BOINC or Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network
Computing. In addition to the SETI project, they now have a
number of other projects that you can harness your computer to in hopes
of helping further scientific research.

I wanted to focus whatever small readership I have with this blog to this new service. Take a look for yourself.

I was talking with a member late last week when the conversation turned
down a familiar but fun path. The gist of the conversation was
this:

1. Companies that outsource their IT infrastructure rarely see costs or performance improve
2. Service providers that have landed a contract are rarely motivated to make problems disappear. Bill more hours!
3. Hardware and software vendors walk a fine line between looking to
   provide a bulletproof solution and looking to find a lifetime client
   that will regularly upgrade, buy additional product, etc.

It is not in anyone's interest to make problems go away.

Up until this point, the conversation was fun but not all that
new. Then it took a turn. IT Professionals are guilty of
the same kind of behavior. Company policies, procedures, and
staff structures reinforce complexity and an unnecessary dependency on
IT.

"But most IT Professionals I know have way too much on their plates," I said.

"And most IT professionals secretly love that and are very afraid of
the alternative," was his response. Problem is that these arcane
structures and procedures are often the precursor to senior executives
investigating the outsourcing of IT...

Truth?

Then your next position should be focused on Voice/Wireless networking or Security according to Janco Associate's 2006 IT Salary Survey. Some interesting findings but most of the findings seems to reinforce my perception of the job market in general.   Focus on some hot/emerging specialties, less salary growth at the executive and Managerial levels with very modest growth for IT staffers. 

I've written before
about the opportunity vendors, especially software vendors, see with
smaller businesses.  Larger businesses have by and large selected
their business application software.  Vendors make good money on
upgrades and maintenance but the growth rate is not there to please
shareholders.  The solution for many vendors is a new focus on
smaller companies. 

Of course the business model is very different when you target small
businesses.  The level of pre and post sales support cannot be as
aggressive as with a multi-million dollar engagement with a very large
company.  That's where being an early adopter helps.  

I was talking to a member working for a services company who share with
me the way vendors specializing in "enterprise" software are adapting
to the new business strategy.  At least one vendor, SAP, is taking
their best support people in each region and are seeking out aggressive
smaller companies looking to take advantage of these new software
services early.  They get all of the talent and support that a
Ford, Citigroup, etc. would get and become "regional reference
accounts" for higher margin lower support level accounts to
follow. 

If your company is seeing a real need for these software services, you may do well to get to the front of the line. 

I agree. I work for a SMB under 100 employees in the IS department.  If you can't take care of at least 50% of the decision making process, there is a major problem.  When I look to make a purchase I'm 80-90% sure of what I want with a few product specific questions.

I was speaking with someone last night about vendor upgrades cycles and
the number of bells and whistles that get bundled into new versions
that few people use.  I discovered one feature of my relatively
new ThinkPad laptop that I thought I'd share with those other ThinkPad
users out there.  If you hit the "Fn" key and the "PgUp" key
simultaneously, a small light will shine down on your keyboard. 

Try it out.  Know of any other cool ThinkPad tricks? 

I live and work in New York.  Like so many New Yorkers, I have a pretty significant train ride to get to work.  This weekend we had 2 ft. of snow fall on the area and my commuter train did not run all day on Monday.  No big deal for me.  I transferred my calls to my home office, plugged into all the systems I needed via VPN, and no one was the wiser. 

This morning I was reminded of how much of a luxury this is.  People around me on the train were talking about three hour commutes by car only to find that there were no parking spots in New York City because so many spaces were filled with snow.  I realize that many people simply cannot work from home.  If you are a car salesman, you kind of need to be by the cars.  But most of the people on my train spend most of their day on the phone in front of a computer.  When will businesses recognize the benefit of giving people the option?  Even if only for emergencies. 

To me, the need for businesses to prepare for extreme situations is separate from the argument around whether people should be allowed to work from home on a regular basis.  With the prospect of a major flu epidemic, terrorist activity, as well as the always present risk of (insert local natural disaster here) it seems like only good business sense.  Add to that the moral obligation of not placing employees in situations where they take unnecessary risks (like driving on very slippery roads)...

Is your business ready? 

Bill Gate opened the RSA conference with an announcement that Vista
will solve password issues by significantly improving and simplifying
authentication on clients running Vista. 

Phew!  Nothing left to worry about!  The world's computer systems will work together with the launch of Vista! 

My friend at ADP manages upwards of 20 unique passwords which change on
varying schedules.  ADP is the largest payroll company in the
world and my friend theoretically has access to payroll information for
the entire Northeast corridor of the United States.  

Will ADP or other companies (especially public companies required to
pass Sarbanes Oxley audits) take Gates up on this new feature?  I
have my doubts. 

The New York Times published an interesting article on the challenges Microsoft engineers face with the Vista launch.   Apparently, Vista's code base is significantly larger than XP's.  Much of the code bloat is done to enable backward compatibility with both hardware and software.  

Take a look at the article.  One quote really stuck with me:

"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes
products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security
challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."  - Ray Ozzie, Microsoft CTO

At some point, Microsoft is going to have to rip off the band aid and draw a line in the sand.  Apple regularly releases new operating systems and often makes the hardware requirements very stringent, leaving older customers with little choice but to live with a legacy OS or buy a new system.  

TechRepublic members are mulling over the relevance of Vista for their business.  Join the discussion here.

A recent news.com article caught my eye. OK, I thought. Dell wants share so they are firing a quick shot across the bow to get people to purchase now. Consumers sometimes need a nudge and this can be a very effective tool to push people towards a purchase.

But wait, I kept reading:

"The price cuts in part stem from discounts on components. Excess
inventories of processors and other parts are causing manufacturers and
distributors to cut prices to get rid of inventories. Similar hot-spot
deals will likely pop up at retailers and the Web sites of direct PC
sellers over the next few weeks, if history is any guide."

Dell has excess inventory? The "just in time" leader has inventory rotting on the shelf? I know, I know. Much of the Dell story is myth. Of course they don't purchase components as you buy them. "Build to order" only goes so far and Dell has made it their mission to design their advertising, web sites, and pricing models to move those components they have ordered in volume. Perhaps more business school case studies have focused on the Dell story than any other business in the past 25 years. Is this a hiccup or a sign that the bloom is off this rose?

• My inability to do work without the internet. My home office uses VoIP so no calls, most of the data I had planned to examine was housed online - IM, e-mail, our corporate intranet, etc. ALL GONE! I ended up doing some expense reports - it is amazing how quickly I can do them without any interruptions.
• My daughter, now 5 and 1/2, was clearly aware of the crisis. In an effort to participate in the drama, she came up to me while I was on hold with our service provider and asked "which is better Daddy, Yahoo or Google?" She was unaware that the internet could go out.
• From my years of being a non-IT guy working on TechRepublic, I've become keenly conscious of how my helpful suggestions to tech support may not be that helpful. Not doing this might be the most difficult task I faced in the past month. I did pretty well. The tech support guy on the other end did great (thanks James!) It is difficult to deal with 90 second silent periods while on the phone. My instincts were to provide more color, ask about the systems they used, etc. I held my tongue and I'm a better man for it.
• I had a renewed appreciation for Justin James soapbox post regarding web-based apps.
• Finally, I still have a security blanket (of sorts) - my Treo 650. It took me a few minutes but I quickly realized that I was not cut-off, simply slowed down. The relief! If I could only get a VPN connection...

A recent blog post by George Ou got me started on a brief rant over bad Power Point presentations.  I thought I'd continue the rant here.  

First off,
I have no issues with Power Point. In
fact, I like Power Point a great deal... 

...when done
well.

But nothing
is worse that a meeting with BAD power point.
Here are my pet peeves.

• Power Point slides with more
  than 50 words. If you need to
  squeeze a lot of information for a presentation, create a hand out, or
  better yet just share the idea verbally.
  That is why you are presenting!
• Use of tiny fonts. This goes
  hand in hand with my previous point.
  Too much text demands that the font size is too small to read in
  most group settings where a projector is used. Small fonts are left for sourcing of
  material, PERIOD. How many times
  have you been in a meeting where the focus in the room shifts from the
  presenter/speaker to the simple act of READING THE SLIDE!
• Power Points are not scripts. Worse
  still are the cases where the presenters just read from the slide. I?m
  quite proud of the fact that I read pretty well myself, thank you, I came
  to the presentation to encounter new ideas in an interactive setting or to
  hear someone present ideas to a larger group verbally. The power point is the visual support to
  this not the script.
• Bad animation. It can be useful to introduce points one
  at a time and animation helps you do this in a clear and easy manner. But don?t have things flying all over
  the place all the time. Just don?t,
  ok?
• Sound files. I once sat through a day of
  presentations all tied to a meeting theme (another blog perhaps, no themed
  meetings please?) Anyway, the theme was football and there were whistles,
  and crowd noises, etc. TIED TO
  USELESS ANIMATION. For the love of
  all that is good in this world.
  Just don?t do that. I beg
  you. Use a sound or video file to
  display a point, that is very effective and can work really well. But if
  the sound doesn?t support the information you need to convey, leave it out.
• Meetings of 2 or 3 people with
  power point. Bring in a visual if
  you need it but power point presentations are by and large best used with
  a group.
• If you?re giving a presentation
  with power point, prepare by practicing the presentation. Nothing worse than a presenter reading
  through the presentation to remind them of what they are to talk about. Big downer.
• Power point for the sake of
  power point. Building good presentations
  take a ton of time and it is often time wasted. A good presentation can be made better
  with power point but so often, power point sucks whatever value might have come
  from the meeting.

Thanks, I feel better.

I received this e-mail last night.  I don't have an account at Chase so I knew it was a Phishing attempt.  Now, I am a notoriously bad speller so I can sympathize but really... This is bad.  

Here is the e-mail copy:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear client
of Chase Bank,
Technical services of
the Chase Bank are carrying out a planned software upgrade. We earnestly ask you
to visit the following link to start the procedure of confirmation on customers
data.
To get started,
please click the link below:

[LINK DELETED JUST BECAUSE IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA]

This instruction has
been sent to all bank customers and is obligatory to
fallow.
Thank
you,

Customers Support
Service.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I know it is reasonably cheap to send e-mail.  Especially cheap when you don't worry about ethical and legal regulations around the collection of e-mail addresses.  Never the less, you still have to create the e-mail, the dummy site where you harvest the information and you need to take the risk of getting caught stealing information and defrauding customers.  You'd think with all of that you would at least spell FOLLOW correctly.