What to do when nobody cares about you anymore? (Windows 7 Saga)

Posted: 11:16 pm
January 9, 2009
Microsoft
1 Comment

It has to be a tough time at Microsoft.

Trying to excite the public about the notion of another Windows operating system, in a climate where all their tech enthusiast fans who would have blown up their systems on the new beta now have new toys.

windows_7

Microsoft has lost the cool edge. That now goes to Apple and Linux.

Microsoft has lost the cutting edge. That now goes to guys collecting gadgets and playing with the Web 2.0 apps.

Microsoft lost it’s partners loyalty. I think I’ve said a word or two about that.

What to do, what to do…

Microsoft will surely get a ton of advice from people who are not in charge of software projects and don’t run software companies. I’m sure they will also ask inconsequential focus groups that are not going to rush to the new release.

So what is Microsoft looking at?

Let’s consider the evolution of the Microsoft Partner:

90’s – “We’ll figure out all this tech crap you want to use for a small fee.”

00’s – “For a small monthly fee we’ll keep all your systems up without surprise fees or downtime.”

2009 – “We do it all.”

Microsoft finds it’s former ground troops, VARs, partners, resellers and OEMs who are no longer dependant on Microsoft. Microsoft has to go to market on their own, convince every segment of technology using audience that this isn’t Vista and try to bring everyone back from thinking that this is a boring software services business – look at their CES presence, it’s all about convergence and Microsoft as a cool media company. Eh, it ain’t. But there is no shame in that.

How do I make money?

This is the key question for many IT solution providers to answer and that answer seems to be void of the word “Microsoft” more and more. Successful IT providers are no longer Microsoft Partners of the 90’s, the MSPs of the 00’s or the hype seeking flashes in the pan.

The successful business of 201x is the one that offers a solution portfolio.

As much as technology has become commonplace and easy to use, it still sucks. It still breaks. It still needs a geek every now and then. But now those geeks won’t come to your office with a can of WD40 and an antispyware-ladden USB key. Oh no. They will come with their own stack, their own offering, their own brand and an expected commitment.

The IT solution provider of 201x offers hosted Exchange with their logo but can also deploy Exchange and Zimbra if you’ve got the money. The same shop offers their own branded offsite backup agent with a local network storage device, backed with a disaster recovery plan and ability to restore workstation images and productivity within hours. Modern IT solution provider delivers and develops their own solution, supports and backs it 24 hours.

It does so without on staff developers. Without a data center. Without a tech support payroll. Without a room full of monkeys watching every data point 24/7/365.

The IT solution provider of 201x responds to the demand.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, it does squat to generate that demand. And when it does, it generates demand for it’s services, not for Microsoft’s stuff that no longer matters.

Microsoft, Amazon, Google, X, Y and Z get this as well – which is why they are creating their own tools that also go direct.

Everyone gets to fend for themselves. The market determines who is the best.

Welcome to Capitalism. You want the money, pick it up it’s yours. If you don’t I have no sympathy for you. 🙂

It’s great to be….

Posted: 6:47 pm
January 9, 2009
Awesome
Comments Off on It’s great to be….

Almost makes up for 5 years of living in Gainesville. Almost.

This was an amazing season for Florida. Full of close games, top opponents, Heisman’s, teaching Georgia some respect, giving Big 12 some humility, getting shamed by Ole’ Miss, stuffing some old foes and walking all over #1 spots. One thing is for sure, there is plenty of trash to be said.

But Thursday night was all about what will likely go down as the most dominant player in college football: Tim Tebow.

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Another fantastic year for Gator Nation, proud to be a part of it.

Reflective Sucking

Posted: 3:10 pm
January 8, 2009
IT Business
2 Comments

Behind pride, effort and excellence all of us put in our work there hides a little layer of shame and disappointment in how much we suck. Some of us know it, and we work on it every day to mitigate it. Some of us don’t recognize it, receive it as feedback, and judge whether it’s actually a problem or if the client is just being unreasonable.

Then there is a whole new level of sucking which I discovered over the past two weeks working with a new vendor.

This level of sucking is the reflective level of sucking.

Ever got remarkably poor service and got enough time to stew in it that you actually got to thinking – My god, do I put my clients through this?

Sometimes in incompetence of others you reflect on how poor your service is from a certain point of view you have not considered before. Then you think of a way to address it quickly and separate yourself from the crowd.

Remember, sucking just because everyone else around you sucks is not excusable. Differentiate yourself by being better than the crowd.

I’m working on something. Something I recently discovered is that we just suck, remarkably, at introducing people to our way of doing business. We do a great job at proving the business model, offering incentives and getting people to deploy the product. We do a terrible job getting people to understand the proper contact, escalation, support limitations and general “How to work with Own Web Now” deal. So I’m basically shooting a video. How do you jam your entire business process in a 3 minute video?

Grumble Grumble Grumble

Posted: 3:36 pm
January 7, 2009
ExchangeDefender, OwnWebNow
2 Comments

This was originally intended for OWN Blog, but I could not quite manage to make the post respectful or free of profanities, so Vladville it is.

I want to let you in on something I’m thinking about.

The most exciting product I have is ExchangeDefender. There are days when I just sit there, logged into one of the clusters and watch the lines pop up a few times a second: Detected 112 SPAM, 5920 SureSPAM [Quarantined].

Each time a line pops up on my screen, a little dream of a spammer dies.

It’s the best job you can have on the Internet while still keeping your clothes on.

When I started writing this software in the 90’s I never thought we’d make it to year 2000 doing this, much less 2009. But here we are in 2009. Now we have new enemies, it’s not just Vlad vs. Spammers.

Our users are getting progressively more retarded. (#2)

Our partners are getting dumber by the minute. (#1)

Our battle is no longer against the Spammers. (#3)

The reality of the situation is that we’ve reached the level of technology use in business where education is not enough to keep stupidity away.

#1 Lot’s of people made lot’s of money with ExchangeDefender. It seems they invested it in hiring people dumber engineers because not a day goes by that I don’t hand myself a full faceplant reading some of the feedback and support requests. It’s as if people actively try to shoot themselves in the foot, screw their customer, and ask us to find a more lenient way for them to cover it all up. This leads to #2:

#2 I have lost the number of counts I have personally had to explain to people that the UPS message that we blocked as SPAM was actually a forged SPAM and not really from UPS. I am not a violent person, but I wish I could jump through the phone and choke the stupid fuck, who had the above explained to him, that still wanted the attachment just in case.

#3 The most dangerous people happen to be semi-technical ExchangeDefender users that think they are smarter than the average bear. You know, the CPA network managers (happy new year dear!) who think they have this invisible shield around their network that guards their users from running around the room with scissors and impaling themselves twice a week.

Our threat portfolio has now grown beyond the realm of email.

My personal problem with the above is that it’s not our job to protect users from their stupidity. Web filtering is clearly a realm of local area network policy management, not cloud service provider who takes the brunt of the attack.

Here is a way to simplify the situation: When you are being attacked by thousands of Russians, Chinese, organized criminals and mobsters you do want to have a 500 lb gorilla in front of you. When your dumbass employee wants to download TV shows at work, you beat them with spare office furniture.

That’s just my opinion. Check the local laws, it may not be legal. God bless Texas.

Nobody gives a flying f… what I think:

So we’re extending our ExchangeDefender portfolio to include web filtering.

The ExchangeDefender Desktop Agent (www.exchangedefender.com) will have a new beta available mid-January with a web filtering addon that will explicitly protect users from malware. We’re going to try our best to make this free.

Depending on the reception, we will extend it to include policy management and other categories, though that product will come at an additional cost (approximately double what ExchangeDefender currently costs). Almost the entire fee will go to pay for the definition files because, believe it or not, people that browse around pr0n sites to categorize them as pr0n charge for a list of those web sites. A lot.

It has been my firm belief that no infosec company should ever behave like a mob and deliver “as much protection as you can afford” so it comes as a bitter change of course for us to offer an expensive addon to the service.

Anyhow, just thought I’d let you know what’s on my mind. If anyone on my staff would like to take a crack at this blog post and make it sound better than “You all suck, so we have to change our approach to protecting you” please let me know 🙂

Got Class?

Posted: 9:16 pm
January 5, 2009
Gators
1 Comment

What a fantastic year it has been in the world of college football. University of Florida dominated the scene again, only to be shamed by an unranked team that has always been able to dial it’s number. It’s great to be a Florida Gator.

Earlier this year we went to Atlanta to watch the Gators take on University of Alabama. I have to admit that I have never seen that many polite and courteous people in one place. They dressed as if they were going to a formal dinner. Hats, jackets, all very tasteful. Not a single Nascar-looking fan among them all.

Florida fans… well, I’m one of the more reserved and respectful UF Alums. That ought to tell you something! When Florida fans get off the bus it looks like the insane asylum just had a kegger. God I love my people!

Katie did feel bad about how nice all the Alabama women looked. I tried to comfort her, it’s hard to find a tasteful piece of clothing in blue and orange. No matter how nice it is, you come off looking like a lunatic.

So here is one to the Bama fans. Very classy.

tebowcreation

Now it’s on to Florida to defend the South. Tickets in hand for the game on Thursday and we are heading to Miami baby! Tim Tebow jersey and all. Bring out the crazies! Just to give you an idea of how demented UF folks are, here are some Tim Tebowisms. Enjoy:

# When Tim Tebow holds the Heisman, it puts down its stiff arm.
# The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a freight train, it’s Tim Tebow.
# God wanted to create the world in 10 days, Tim Tebow gave him 6.
# Life doesn’t give Tim Tebow lemons. Life asks him which fruit he wants.
# Tim Tebow doesn’t bowl strikes, he just knocks down one pin and the other nine faint.
# Tim Tebow’ house has no doors, only walls that he walks through.
# When Tim Tebow was denied an Egg McMuffin at McDonald’s because it was 10:35, he threw a football at the store so hard it became a Wendy’s.
# Tim Tebow pummels that bridge when he gets to it.
# Superman is the Tim Tebow of superheroes.
# Tim Tebow doesn’t punch in to work. He stiff arms.
# Tim Tebow can eat five times his body weight in tigers.
# Tim Tebow won the Tour de France on a unicycle to prove to Lance Armstrong it wasn’t a big deal. He thinks yellow wristbands are gay.
# What color is Tim Tebow’s blood? Trick question. Tim Tebow does not bleed.
# Tim Tebow ordered a Big Mac at Burger King, and got one.
# Tim Tebow can get Chick-Fil-A on Sundays.
# If at first you don’t succeed…you are not Tim Tebow.
# Superman’s only weakness is kryptonite. Tim Tebow laughs at Superman for even HAVING a weakness.
# When the bogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks the closet for Tim Tebow.
# Superman wears Tim Tebow pajamas.
# Tim Tebow has been to Mars. That’s why there’s no life on Mars.
# In the beginning there was nothing. Then Tim Tebow stiff-armed that nothing in the head and said “Get a job”. That is the story of the universe.
# When Tim Tebow wants popcorn, he breathes on Nebraska.
# When Tebow spikes the ball, he strikes oil.
# Jimmy Hoffa is buried under the Meadowlands because he tried to tackle Tim Tebow and got run over.
# The speed limit on the University of Florida campus is 20 because that’s how many defenders Tim Tebow runs over on one play.
# When Batman is in trouble, he turns on the Tim Tebow signal.
# God has a Tim Tebow complex.
# Rome wasn’t built in a day because Tim Tebow wasn’t born yet.
# Barry Bonds didnt take steroids, he injected tim tebows saliva.
# Tim Tebow gets called for roughing the tackler.
# Tim tebow once sneezed at the line of scrimmage and knocked over a linebacker.
# A meteor didn’t kill the dinosaurs; Tim Tebow did in a pickup football game.
# Tim Tebow sleeps with a night light. Not because Tim Tebow is afraid of the dark, but the dark is afraid of Tim Tebow.

And my absolute favorite:

When Tim Tebow does push ups, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the world down.

So here is one to the college football, tradition and the sense of community. Gator Nation baby!

Fail.

Posted: 11:12 pm
January 4, 2009
Vladville
1 Comment

I saw this at the book store yesterday and it damn near brought a tear to my eye:

photo

That bull is the symbol of the American pride: confidence and hope in the American financial enterprise. It stands on West side of the New York Stock Exchange and is frequently surrounded by tourists, tapping it and taking pictures from every angle imaginable. That is the spirit of America, what all of us sacrifice hours of each day to contribute to: by working, by saving, by investing and by building this great nation.

Yet, for the second time in the history of United States of America, massive fraud and borderline criminal behavior has compromised the faith we, and the rest of the world, hold in the economy and the those at the very top of the commerce regulatory chain. Everyone from the crooked CEOs now in jail to secretary Paulson to Bernake to congress and sleepy W have smashed the American dream to pieces.

How do we rebuild the promise of America?

By doing our job, doing it as well as we can and not making the mistakes we’ve made in the past. Tomorrow many of us will go back to work after a long and well deserved holiday break, let’s remember what brought us to the leadership role and what will keep us at the top: AMBITION.

Vladcast is Back!!! #13

Posted: 7:01 pm
January 3, 2009
Vladcast
8 Comments

Welcome to 2009! Ok, so doom and gloom up front: It’s going to be a tough year. We’ll still move forward, we’ll still make a lot of money, it’s just going to be tougher all around.

In this podcast I describe the practice I’ve put myself through during the past 4 months since coming back to work @ OWN full time. It runs about 17 minutes and really good stuff starts at 5:20 mark.

But is that such a bad thing? No. It’s when we are tried the hardest that we perform at our very best. It’s also the judgement time for those who spent their more fortunate times without regard for how to design a business that performs. I have been talking to people all over the world and the response is unanimous: It’s getting tougher but we’re doing well.

I believe we’re very lucky. Yes, lucky. This is the time to take a hard look at ourselves, punishing look at those that are no longer with us, and gain some strength from the whole affair. What can we do today to be stronger tomorrow so we can rock out in 2010 and beyond? Opportunity knocks every day.

Play VladCast: [audio:http://www.vladville.com/media/Vladcast13.mp3]

Listen to my attempt. For some reason, people love this format. As Susan likes to remind me: I love your sensual voice Vlad! I’m going to say what’s on my mind, and much like V… I hope you talk back and give me ideas. I would love to be fortunate enough to have enough time to talk and argue with each and every one of you. No such time, for any of us, I’m afraid. But hey, shoot back from your office chair and let’s see if we all can’t help one another out.

I’m taking the first step. Hear it out, tell me what’s next: vlad@vladville.com

Add feed to iTunes  / File Attachment: Vladcast13.mp3

And now something new…

Posted: 9:53 pm
January 1, 2009
Podcast
Comments Off on And now something new…

One of my most critical failures of 2008 has been my role in the perpetual growing pain that is Own Web Now. The moment we had enough servers, we were again over capacity. The second we finally finished training the new staff, the new stack of resumes showed up. The moment everything worked just remarkably we added more hardware or added new features that caused new issues.

Thats life, thats business.

But it takes a toll on a man. So about two months ago I decided not to allow my business to run me an my agenda. There are weeks of my life in 2008 where I can honestly say I did absolutely nothing but keep the machine up and running, or as we say around the office: “I have been holding Internet together all day and my arms are tired.” When I did get the little meandering tasks in check I was so disoriented or had so little time before the next meeting that I never even got back to my agenda. So I made a lot of changes and the productivity went up. Took about two months to perfect it but now I’m ready to talk about it.

Tune in (really, it’s a podcast baby!) tomorrow on vladville.com and hear all about it.

P.S. Going to come back to the Mic in 2009 😉 Most of my close friends have told me that I don’t come off as great on the blog as I do in person so let’s see if I can throw in some extra entertainment value your way.

Welcome to 2009!

Posted: 11:44 am
January 1, 2009
OwnWebNow
Comments Off on Welcome to 2009!

Happy New Year, may all you’ve wished for come true.

If you want it, today is the first day to work on it. None of that “Oh, I’m tired” or “It’s a holiday” or “I’ll start it tomorrow, strong!” lazy talk. Success takes hard work and near compulsive dedication to it. It doesn’t matter what day or time it is, or what other plans you had.

Instead of beer during today’s SEC humiliation of some other team grab a Netbook and crank out some plans during commercials.

What works, works…

Posted: 10:34 pm
December 31, 2008
Awesome, OwnWebNow
Comments Off on What works, works…

Last day of the month, last day of the quarter, last day of the year.

On behalf of my family and my Own Web Now family I would like to thank all of you for making OWN products a part of your business. I absolutely love my job and considering it’s primary objective is to make you money… I’m thankful for you putting in so much into mine. 2008 was off the charts, literally, beyond all expectations. Thank you!

Today we were sitting around doing cleanup, looking over reports, charts and straightening out the automated billing and reporting systems. Two things seemed very interesting:

1) The strong got stronger. Much stronger.

2) The weak got smaller and quite often disappeared.

Now this is normal because the small fish is always the first to disappear. No need to explain that one, mostly because nobody cares.

The strong getting stronger is actually very interesting. When we plot the numbers we clearly see our large account and mixed account growth spike as the year goes on and take particular bursts – when the political runoff in US seemed to favor more moderate candidates, when the primaries were held, when the election started to look in Obama’s favor, when Obama was actually elected, when we lost 500,000 jobs..

Partners that bought different services and used our product mix and our support kicked it up a notch the worse the world appeared to get. This is because people with the mix and an assortment of tools are in business for one thing – to collect the money for serving the need.

Partners that only bought one line of services, or seemed to trial but never get beyond 30 days or even sign up a customer nearly disappeared. This is your typical analysis-paralysis, where they perhaps spent too much time trying to figure out the best of breed and in the process ran out of business or even talked their prospects out of things with tier own doom and gloom. Techies have a nack for talking way past the sale or finding ways to break it instead of closing it. Se la vi.

The only way we can explain the economic downturn of 2008 is in our ability to effectively guide our partners towards a business plan that capitalized on the new business fears and lack of desire for commitment. Lot’s of our clients clients didn’t want to build their own vaults, servers or security appliances.

I think this is what 2009 and onward will prove even more conclusively – that people who are in business of technology will continue to prosper because business responds to business demand. Geek Squadders of the world that are in technology business stuck in how broken technology and every aspect of it is – well, they’ll hopefully end up employed by someone who can use grunt monkeys.. as I say, we’re always hiring 🙂

Partners that realized that when prospects aren’t buying new servers there is money in the current infrastructure or in hosting made a killing.

If you were in that pile, congratulations on an awesome 2008.

Thank you for all your money!