Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

You know we are in trouble when even Bush can’t dumb it down just how messed up the financial systems are. When I explain to people the business of banking I get a range of epiphanies from “oh, so this is supposed to happen” to “that’s just not fair“

Truth is, not only is it right, it is the very definition and spirit of the American way and capitalism itself. In a nutshell:

Financial prosperity of a capitalist system is dependant on volume always increasing. More credit extensions, more sales, more deposits, more loans, more taxpayers more people. In effect, your very social security benefits and retirement are dependant on there being enough suckers in the workforce making deposits between the age you retire and the age you drop dead. The profitability of the banking system is dependant on ever-expanding credit, with ever-expanding deposits followed by ever-expanding loans. Believe it or not, the bank business profits do not come from your personalized check orders every 5-7 years.

So how do banks make money? In United States we have what is called a fractional reserve banking system under which the central bank sets the reserve rate, or the amount of money the bank is required to keep in reserve to meet the demands of daily withdrawals and other business. So every time you make a deposit into a bank you are not dropping a pile of gold coins which then goes into the back of the bank to be loaded onto a horse drawn carriage and pulled across the dusty planes of Texas. What you are actually doing is making a loan to the bank expecting a full repayment. What the bank does is set aside the reserve rate (let’s say 10% of the deposit) and use the remaining 90% of the deposit for a commercial loan to someone else. They in turn take the loan and deposit it into the bank and the process repeats – save 10%, loan out 90% and so on.

The profitability of the banking industry is tied to the loans it makes. As it makes these loans it then packages them up and sells them to another financial institution which is the designated backer of such loans. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two names you’ve heard a lot about, were the designated backers or purchasers of such loans.

Here is where things get ugly. During the Clinton years there was a huge push for financial institutions to deregulate the process of who backs loans, how and when. It established a deregulated quazi-market under which the loan packages could be traded almost like stocks and the companies that purchased these securities had to mark them to market – that is, the values of these loans had to be adjusted on the books to what their real value was. So long as the housing prices appreciated in value, so would the value of these loan packages and the more money that was loaned out for housing, regardless of whether the borrower was able to repay the loan, the better it looked for the financial institutions because the value of their books kept on going up. It’s like holding a stock that perpetually increases in value.

You know what happened next 🙂 As the housing bubble popped folks holding these loan packages could not get rid of them fast enough. They piled up at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as at some of the largest brokerages in the world which served as a medium for these transactions. As they could no longer sell and offload these loans, and as their value started to fall through the ground, so did the company.

Sure, that’s ugly. But here is the really messed up part:

Remember the 10% (or currently sanctioned amount) that the bank has to hold in reserve to meet daily withdrawals and regular business operations? Yeah, that works great if everyone doesn’t try to take their money out at the same time.

If more than the 10% of the deposits get called in the bank has to liquidate some assets (i.e., the $30,000 loan it extended to a college kid so he can rice out his Scion sC and put spinners on it) and as more stuff heads for liquidation so does the bank – it fails, just like any other business, because it is unable to meet its financial obligations.

In fact, this is how the Great Depression started, people started a run on banks so their money wouldn’t disappear. In part this gave birth to FDIC, the federally insured deposit accounts and so on. Psst. Did you know that a bank can actually temporarily suspend withdrawals and keep you from your money? What is the first thing you are thinking about right now? I’ve got bills to pay, time to get some ca$h. This is called a bank run.

So what are we bailing out?

The $700 billion dollar package being debated in Washington DC is to help back the loans that are considered insolvent. You’ve read that right: We are being asked to shell out $700 billion to cover the repayment of loans that the banks deem impossible to collect. The dude behind this proposal? Henry “Hank” Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs that presided over the company while the current deregulation took place and made it possible for the ridiculous loans to be traded around, current United States Treasury Secretary and board member of IMF, whose job is to support regulation of financial markets and financial health of the United States of America. What he is asking for is $700 billion to spot the bad decisions made by him that eventually lead to the problems we have now.

And you know what – you’re going to pay it. 🙂

Here is the bottom line: The reason there is a panic right now and you haven’t heard anything about this for years is due to the fact that there is a huge bank run underway in United States. As this is going on, the banks are refusing to issue loans no matter how good and solvent the loan may be. The banks are concerned about the massive debt they have on books that they are not sure they will be able to collect, so they are refusing to extend any credit because they need to keep the bank operations going.

Back to the financial prosperity of a capitalist system and how it impacts even us – even Karl Palachuk, recession blindfolded and cork 2″ in his ears, is unable to ignore this one. If you do HaaS and depend on readily available credit and ability to pay off the infrastructure purchases over time you might find your next big purchase and next big financing deal declined for no apparent reason. We are a nation that depends on readily availability of huge sums of money to make business deals happen without having 100% asset solvency (ie, cash on hand to buy stuff).

The $700 billion is going, in part, to keep things going as they have been going and effectively forgive the massive near criminal greed of bank executives, and it will be approved and go through because the financial prosperity of our system depends on our ability to overindulge and pass the bill off to the next sucker in line.

So long as the line of suckers is perpetual and we can print funny money to get a free pass whenever we are called on the inherent flaws of our society, the American dream lives on.

Only in America and God Bless America.

Or so says Larry Ellison. (here is a shorter summary):

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

This from a guy that effectively pushed for cloud computing during the middle of the last decade, dearly funded the Network Computer concept that many cloud providers now see as the future and even powers the cloud computing’s shining star: SalesForce.

So what is pissing off Larry and Oracle?

The same thing that’s pissing off Microsoft, Apple and any other traditional infrastructure company. The fact that their premium solutions are becoming a commodity, that their premium solutions require so much training, upkeep and migration scenarios and planning that even the most skilled of IT staff need retrain every few years while the software companies themselves push for software licensing subscriptions while offering no compelling financial or operational reason to keep the data center in the office.

What’s more, guess what the kids are writing apps on these days. It’s not Oracle. It’s not Visual Studio.

This creates a huge problem for Software+MandatorySubscription+MandatoryMigration that companies like Microsoft offer. And as they struggle to implement the new partner programs and go to market as service organizations that they really are not, a whole new generation of application is coming with the next generation only bound by it’s creativity not by the built-in features it can afford or that the other vendors demand be in place.

Hardware has long been a commodity. Operating systems are almost there.

Where does that put guys like Larry, that make multimillion dollar sales orders for what is effectively becoming a near-free product?

Bashing the solutions they themselves envisioned and conceptualized a decade ago.

Evolution………… No, the dinosaurs aren’t going to disappear overnight, but their numbers are greatly diminishing. It’s not fashion Larry, it’s business, and I can assure you that lots of it is leaving your pipeline and going into mine.

It’s been a tough few weeks at OWN as I think we have become the “it girl” at the same time as the new product releases and upgrades are hitting the market. Although we are turning the corner and things are starting to improve dramatically I figured I’d write this if for no other reason than to share a failure, let it either be a reminder or mortality or graffiti for others that will run into the same issues down the road.

Just like I beat up on Microsoft for making me look bad, I have a ton of partners that beat up on me when we start to suck. I’ve always had an open door policy and people both email and call me directly even when there are issues that should be handled by the few dozen other people in the organization whose job it is to handle those issues. Why? I feel that there comes a point where an executive needs to talk to an executive in another company as the last ditch effort to make things work. So if things look bad, regardless of if they are over $100 or $100,000, I need to know. We track the crap out of the client support and purchasing behavior, but I assume there are at least 10x to 100x problems as we get reports of, which is why they are all at least considered.

So where did I lost da ball game as they say? Well, we announced and launched four products in the space of a month. Never gonna do something that stupid again, I can tell you that much. Because here is what happens – no matter how hard you work and test and plan and prepare, something always fails.

It’s not something uber-critical, it can be something that just annoys people. The problem with small mistakes is that when they annoy the user the perception of your product and service changes from positive to a negative. The worst thing you can do as a service organization is make your users unhappy with your service. Once they are unhappy they will report every issue they face, be it your fault or not, because the last time they went through their checklist something was your fault so this time they bring it to you first.

This starts a cascade effect of a flooded helpdesk. A flooded helpdesk takes support personnel, which is the frontline of all product issues, off their game and makes them the fault monkeys. Fault monkeys spend all day and night apologizing for inconveniences and falling over one another to patch the holes as soon as they are reported but they don’t have an hour or two to take the problem back to the analyst to identify the issues, forward to the programmer or ultimately me to fix them from actually storming the helpdesk.

This creates a further stress on account managers, infrastructure managers and other people in the organization whose job it is to track metrics and the behavior of the system. How? Well, the support monkey keeps track of problems which he takes to the analyst at the end of the shift. When you bring issues one by one they can be fixed one by one, consulted, peer-reviewed, etc. When you bring 20 at 5 minutes before quit time the bottleneck just shifts.

The epic failure in the entire chain of command is when the bugfix introduces more bugs because the fix had not been tested to the full extent and the loop goes back twice the intensity.

What am I doing? Well, talking to partners, making sure the process sticks even if we’re shorthanded, apologizing, even working on support tickets and trying to reach around to the programmers (yeah, believe me, the experience is just as it sounds) so that we correct the issues.

We have been doing something monumental over the past 2-3 days to fix all of this and we’re on schedule to have everything together by the end of the weekend. But that introduces yet another problem that is a little difficult to fix. First, we need to grow rapidly, but the skills of people in the marketplace just stink. This means that training can take a little longer to bring online and we get to train people during graveyard when things are a little slower.

The more important problem, which I hope every service organization reading this is taking to heart and pounding into the paper, is that you get a chance to fail the client exactly once. Yes you can make them smile for a minute with a comp or a gift card or an apology, but once you fuck up you’re fucked. Sorry about the colorful language there, truth of the mater is that once your client has an ounce of doubt into your ability to deliver the service you have promised – even if you’ve stood by your SLA and offered refunds and made the client whole – you are now on the defense and will be thought as the first point of failure because the confidence of your client has been shaken.

It’s tough, it’s ugly and this is why IT is a business and not a lifestyle. You have to be sharp, you have to be good and you have to be on it 100% of the time or you may as well not even bother. And lord help you when you fuck up, because that 40 hour week is something you won’t even be able to dream about because you’ll be working around the clock.

Love it or leave it…