Seven Years to the Next Bubble Bursting?

I have posted several rants in the past about Wall Street and Washington, so now that the reform bill is reaching what appears to be its final form I suppose I should follow up.

As with just about anything anymore, these complex problems seem to require complex fixes.  I thought putting Glass Stegal back in and putting greater restrictions on publicly traded companies that trade for their own account would do the trick -- but hey -- I am definitely not an expert.

Here is a good article by Gretchen Morgenson from the Sunday NY Times that more or less boils it down.

Some good parts, some bad parts, but in the end there are still going to be banks that are too big to fail.  So set your alarm clock for seven years from now and hold on for the next round of the roller coaster.

The Search for Search Confidence

We are leaving a world of workflow and entering the world of search. In order to be effective, workflow requires hierarchy and organization and alternatively, search requires comprehensiveness and speed. The pace of the migration depends heavily on our confidence that search tools are capable of finding just what we want just when we want it.  Once our confidence in search gains a foothold we will never look back.

To find a document in the workflow context, a contract for example, we would go to a contract management system which in the physical world might be a file drawer labeled contracts, but in the digital world would be a tab in a CRM system labeled contracts.  Once we understand the hierarchy and arrive at that location,  we are able to sort through and find the contract on some ordered list - probably alphabetical.

In the search context all documents of any nature involving any party would be in one giant hypothetical drawer and we would search for the contract by some indexed keywords -- probably name, maybe plus contract.  

The workflow structure is more comfortable because we have always done it that way and we like it because it is orderly and logical.  However, If we fail to find what we want in the workflow context we have to find a person who is more likely to know where it is - muttering all of the way about how people do not adopt these tools.. bla bla bla.

Anyone familiar with the experience of searching for things and not finding them, has probably adopted a process that includes widening the search until it is certain to catch the object searched for, and then narrowing until it the list presented is short enough to look through.  Whenever the list get's too short, i.e does not include the item being sought, then back up and try a different query.

This search process depends entirely on our confidence that everything is in the giant file drawer -- this is comprehensiveness, plus the ability to do many searches until the right combination of criteria are discovered -- this requires speed.  Once search achieves a certain amount of this user confidence, the workflow method of organizing/finding things is going to feel as ridiculous as an iPAQ in the age of the iPhone.

When searching for something in Salesforce.com it is difficult to back up enough to cast the net wide and get a comprehensive dataset to start with.  Just about all tab based workflow systems I have used suffer this same malady.  The purveyors of workflow style systems are notoriously bad at search -- maybe they don't think it is needed.  

Immigration Policy is Making US Insane

The parable goes like this:  If you offer a Russian anything they want, with the proviso that whatever they pick their neighbor will get twice as much, the Russian will say:  "Put one of my eyes out".  

According to this piece in the NY Times today, the parable should be revised to read:  "If you offer an American...".

The article argues convincingly that we underfund education because we want to ensure that children of immigrants are not the beneficiaries of our educational system.  We are committed enough to this idea that we are willing to sacrifice the education of our own children in order to accomplish it.  That is some extreme protectionism.

There is no question that immigration policy is a very complex issue with many variables.  Just read this paper by the UN's Social and Economic Affairs group on the relationship between policy reform and income distribution and you will gain a new appreciation for the complexity.  For a quicker reference, here is a link to the CIA World Factbook's list of income distribution showing that of the 134 nations on the list we are 45th from the end that is most polarized (Namibia) and a long way from the least polarized (Sweden).

I put in these two reference points because I still think of our country as the land of opportunity.  America is the place people want to go when they want to improve their lives through hard work -- not through a free ride.  We hear often these days that our current policy changes are socialist, and maybe they are, but we are a long way from the socialist end of the income distribution curve and our recent willingness to let the hand outs go to those that don't need them only pushes us more towards the rich get richer model.

We want our economy to grow.  In order to have growth we need immigration.  Highly skilled people want to move here (for now at least) -- so let them in.  Along the way some not so skilled people will get in too -- that is also going to work out for us in the end.

Here is a link to the posts in this blog tagged Immigration.  There you will find the numbers on Immigration showing that we have strayed from our roots and our immigration rate is well below where it has been in the past.  should loosen immigration policy.

Thinking Like the Customer

Here I am wanting to catch a little World Cup or Wimbledon action before I start in on my Saturday list.  The broadcast of sports events on the web has come a long way -- but still has a long way to go.  I remember watching with amazement when the Masters first started putting real time scoring on the web -- how cool was that!

There is no question that I am not a big time sports enthusiast.  I am not so deep in the pursuit of these activities that I already know what is going on, or that I am willing to go through a whole bunch of effort just to see a few minutes of a match.  In essence, I am a customer available for the catching -- but you are going to have to make it easy, and explain everything.

One thing I do not have memorized is the time difference between here and South Africa.  Sure I can easily find out by going to a world clock website.  But as a possible new customer, does FIFA really want to send me away from their site to figure out the time difference?  They do a great job of putting the time of the next match right on the web site, but they do not say what time it is in South Africa now. 

They could learn from the Wimbledon team.  Right there on the site they show the local time in Wimbledon, and my local time.  Thinking like the customer I see.  Clearly this is not a technical feat.  Just a simple example of understanding what it would be like to be somewhere other than where the event is occurring.  

Wait.  I still cannot figure out when the next match is going to be held -- because they do not say what time the match is starting!  So close.  I am sure the argument is that the matches play in order and they do not know the exact time -- well then, why don't they say it follows some other match.  

Come on people! I am going to mow the lawn now.  No more eyeballs for you.

Book Review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

It has been a while since I have written a book review.  I have still been reading, but have been on a literary side road that I was not so sure how to think about.  I have never really thought of myself as a science fiction reader or as a geek.  Turns out, I identify well with both!

The reconciliation between my real and imagined selves has kept me from sharing my thoughts about these books.  Clearly my brain is a complicated place! 

Last night I just finished re-reading Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson.  This book was written in 1999, so I will not reference other book reviews this time because there is a well formed Wikipedia page about the book here.

This book could be taking over the number one spot on my favorite books of all time list.  If so it would be displacing Clavell's Noble House.

I suppose Stephenson has an advantage because Cryptonomicon is mostly set in the Philippines, Seattle, and Eastern Washington -- all places I have lived.  I am fascinated with Hong Kong, but never lived there, and really my fascination is with the pre 1997 version.

The main ideas in Cryptonomicon are really resonating with me right now for some reason.  I know I liked the book a great deal the first time around, but for some reason it didn't strike me at that time to be even in the top ten.

Most of all, Stephenson is a great writer.  There are scores of sentences in this book that are worth reading over and over and his sense of style, and sense of humor, are evident throughout.  Althought he calls himself a science fiction writer, I think of him as more of a historical novelist. Either way he is way ahead of the few other science fiction writers I have read in terms of pure literary ability.

He reveals highly complex ideas bit by bit and causes the reader to gain an understanding of a concept while deeply engrossed in a story.  This is something Clavell also does very well.  Both Stephenson and Clavell write books that are so long that by the time you get to the end you can't even remember what you did not know at the beginning.  Drawn into a thousand pages of good storytelling the time just goes by and boom, out the other end you exit with a deep and insightful new perspective on how people think in China, or how computational capacity changed the world.  Conveying the idea that fairly early into WWII the Allies had broken both the Japanese codes and the German codes but knowingly sent troops into harms way for fear of exposing what they had accomplished is not a trivial exercise.  How valuable is knowledge or capability if it cannot be put into use?  Similarly, digging into monetary systems at a macro economic scale and their relationship to confidence, security, and ultimately power is a formidable dissection.   This part ends up occupying a similarly furnished room adjacent to the code breaking dilemma in that money you cannot spend has questionable value. 

The complex relationship between Americans and the people of the Philippines is also a topic with as many stratifications as the Grand Canyon.  Overcooked expectations, assumptions, promises, and disappointment have been deposited layer upon layer from Teddy Roosevelt's administration to the present day.  Stephenson's two main characters in the Philippines are of Filipino Americans, Douglas McArthur Shaftoe, born from a Filipina and an American Marine during WWII, and his daughter, America Shaftoe.  These names only start to tell the story of how our two countries will always have a close and involved relationship.

Since the first time I read Cryptonomicon I have started several other of Stepehson's books.  Unfortunately, I have not gotten all of the way through a single one.  So now I am going to go back to Quicksilver and see what happens.  

Are You Twittering or Communicating?

During the Channel Management Summit this week it was no surprise that we ended up talking about social media.  It was interesting that we got onto the thread of how we talk about what we are doing in social media.  When using Twitter, we have a tendency to think of our activity as using Twitter, or Twittering, or Tweeting.  In fact we are really communicating with our followers.  

This tracks back to an earlier concept I wrote a post about:  The difference between the How and the What.  In this case the what is:  communicating, the how is using Twitter.

When we insert this concept into the context of channel marketing, we would do better to talk about what we are doing more than the how we are doing it.  Marketers have always had multiple ways to communicate with their customers or partners -- many hows.  Twitter is just one of those hows.  

Credit due:  Axle Shultze of the Social Media Academy deserves credit for bringing up this point.

The Bandwidth Debate: Not Boring Anymore?

Over the years, I have had to force myself to read stories about broadband deployment, net neutrality, and the FCC.  Highly regulated things drive me crazy in the first place, add in the lobbyists and long timelines to deployment, and I can always find something else to think about.

All of that changed on February 10, 2010 when Google announced their experimental fiber network.  This is a very creative way to get the debate unstuck from the mud in DC.  The FCC could be entering a new era of independence from the telcos:  they are actually installing 20,000 measurement devices in homes to see if the telcos are telling the truth about bandwidth delivered.  We already know the answer to that question.

Add to this Starbucks announcement this month of free WiFi -- their coverage map is quite impressive.  It is hard to know how fast these connections are going to be, and if it is going to be a winning business model for Starbucks, but the US is clearly waking up to the bandwidth debate.

The entrenched parties (telcos, gov, ...) have been slowing down and slowing each other down for so long that when these new parties zoom past the contrast in approaches will be quite dramatic.

The next thing to watch could be LTE.  This new wireless standard could deliver sufficient bandwidth for streaming HD TV.  This technology could be the enabler for a leap frog of the old infrastructure.  Let's hope it happens here in the US and not just everywhere else.

 (coverage map courtesy of Chandu Thota)

Good People with Good Ideas

Put 75 people together in a room and you never know what the conversation is going to turn too.  That is the magic of conferences and what keeps me coming back.  The Channel Management Summit created this effect and then some.  Yesterday I made a forecast about how I thought the conversation would go and well, it went a whole different way.  There were some great panel discussions, and good presenters.  The conversation quickly departed the stated theme of “From Volume to Value”.  That being said several of the channel partner program owners did indicate that they wanted to invest more meaningfully in a lower number of partners – which seemed to fit the bill.

Here were the items that stuck out for me in my notes:

Look in the Mirror First

If you want your partners to respect you, make sure you have your act together and that starts by working internally to ensure that everyone inside your company understands and agrees with the direction and is willing to stick with the messaging.  This will result in fewer random changes, a greater ability to explain the reasoning behind your decisions, and less confusion.  All seemingly simple, but in real life – quite a challenge to execute.

Get in their Shoes

We can get so caught up in our own stuff that we lose touch with the reality of our partner’s businesses.  Take the time to actually talk with them, figure out how they make money, understand their pain points.  We had a great conversation about what partners will and will not do.  Will sell your product (if it works), will work side by side with you, won’t penetrate new markets, won’t lose money.

The Death of Leads has Been Exaggerated

Instead of killing leads, social media has increased the volume.  Along with this increase has come a decrease in quality.  This has increased the importance of good process, professional qualification, and rigorous feedback tracking.  This was great validation for us – because it is what we do at CSG.

There were also some good presentations about measuring investment in partners – partner by partner – and comparing it to revenue generated.  Some ideas about how to start using social media tomorrow (get your partners to do it).  And good thoughts about specific things you can do with your most valuable partners. 

All together a great conference.

Getting from Volume to Value

One day in 1906 the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that 80% of the peas produced in his garden came from 20% of the pea pods.  Ever since that day, channel partner program managers have been trying to grow just the highly productive pea pods.  For the next two days, those of us attending the Channel Management Summit in San Jose will be talking about how to escape Pareto’s 80/20 rule and get from Volume to Value.

I have the pleasure of chairing the event today.  Here are a few of the thoughts I hope to use to get the conversation going.

• Why now?  After 104 years of living with the 80/20 rule why do we think that we can now escape it?
• What happens when we cut off the less productive 80 percent?  Pareto also found that if you deconstruct just the top 20 percent, the rule still applies – 80 percent of the peas produced by the top 20 percent of the pods are produced by 20 percent of those top 20 percent.
• How do we find the top partners of next year?  The top 20 change over time so shouldn’t we invest most heavily in the partners that are going to be the most productive next year?
• Are Value and Volume mutually exclusive?
• How are social media, better data management, and automation changing the game?
• Is the environment getting more competitive?  Could the partners we turn away from become the top 20% for someone else?  Does that matter?

I am very much looking forward to the conversation.  

Labor Arbitrage, Automation and Customer Service

The feature article in the NY Times Magazine yesterday told the story of IBM's AI team creating a credible Jeopardy contestant.  Clearly the IBM team has made some progress since Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in May of 1997.  The computer may not win, but IBM will win a great deal of attention during the event next fall.  Probably both great technology and great marketing.

While reading the article, some roads converged in my technology imagination, mostly in the areas of labor arbitrage, automation, and customer service.  The effects of these changes are going to be felt slowly over some time -- but they will be significant.

Labor Arbitrage

We are a decade into the Internet enabled off-shoring movement fueled mostly by low cost labor.  Technology innovations only happen when the innovation is ten times better.  Offshore labor does not have to be 1/10th the onshore cost, but it needs to be at about a third in order to work.  If we are paying $9 per hour onshore for something that can be done for $3 per hour offshore -- the inefficiency of distance and the added cost of travel and/or transport can be overcome.  If onshore and offshore labor rates converge, off-shoring will become less compelling.  This convergence can happen by offshore labor rates rising as competition for workers and living standards are raised in offshore markets, or as onshore labor rates fall.  Wait, how can onshore labor rates fall?  Through automation.

Automation

Everywhere we look we see automation.  Cars are still being built in this country because robots do most of the work.  We see the combination of automation and self service every time we go to the bank machine or the grocery store.  Google signs up customers without any salespeople -- which is automation displacing labor in yet another way.  The IBM Watson project may seem too theoretical to start displacing humans, but as the NY Times piece points out, the first application may be in the call center.  Giving the computer the job of answering customers complex questions.  Just like on the manufacturing line, the bank machine, or the grocery store, the computer does not have to answer all of the questions, just a good percentage.  When the human's job becomes handling the extreme exception and managing the machine -- the skills required and the associated pay are each increased significantly.  At the end of this road lies a customer service capability for companies who have never operated in that mode.

Customer Service

Search for "Google Lack Customer Service" and you can read for days about how Google just does not do it.  This is a cause for relief by some of Google's more customer centric competitors.  When IBM delivers to Google an engineering driven answer to this deficiency it will be as big as any significant change in an ecosystem.  Kill all of the wolves and the elk population goes through the roof.  Google is not the only engineering driven company that will benefit.  HTC and many of the other sophisticated OEMs, will be able to accelerate their evolution from manufacturer for others to full competitor.  The ecosystem will never be the same.

Earlier this year I heard a presentation by Jaron Lanier where he gave the low cost labor countries like India, China, and the Philippines 20 years to get up the education ladder far enough to be safe from the flood caused by automation.  Could be 20, I would guess 10.

The Secret to the iPad is iTunes

The best thing about the iPad is iTunes.  There have been many reports of people walking out of the Apple store with their shiny new iPad, sitting down on the curb, only to find that the thing will not work until it is connected to iTunes on a Mac or a PC.  The Apple store will actually do this for you in the store if you want.  Many people have called this a shortfall of the product, but I propose the connection to iTunes is one of the things I like the most about both my iPod Touch and my iPad.  Here are the reasons:

1. Nothing to Lose:  Since the iPad is just showing me the things it got on the last sync up from iTunes -- my stuff is always backed up.  No worries -- I could run the thing over with the car and be out the iPad, but not my data or apps.
2. Easy Restore: Reinstalling an operating system on a PC is a week long exercise.  Sure I can wipe and reinstall the OS in a matter of a few hours, but then it takes me a week to find all of the other applications and files.  And I remember each application just when I need it and don't have time to install it.  I can wipe and restore my iPad with one button push and about an hour.  
3. Online or Offline:  The above listed backup and restore benefits sound a lot like the thin client benefits that have been championed for over a decade.  The difference is that once synced, the iPad can work connected or not connected to the network.  A thin client or a web OS type machine could not do that.
4. Lower Expectations:  Sure there are many things my desktop or laptop computers can do that my iPad cannot do.  But I never expected the iPad to do those things.  Steve has made the iPad do the things it does very well, which also means that the things not well suited for the device are not even attempted.  This is a much better user experience.

PC makers could apply some of these lessons and create a much better PC experience. Did Steve say that Apple was working on reducing the iPad's dependency on iTunes?  I think that would be a mistake.

File System Up for Grabs

After years of ever increasing complexity, sometimes even brought to us disguised as simplicity, some personal computers may actually be getting easier to use.  I am not talking about the Mac. I have tried to find ease of use in Macs over the years and just don’t see it.  Steve Jobs finds it easier – but long time Mac users are so deep in their own perspective they cannot see simplicity any more.

I am however, talking about the iPad and phones.  This could also go for anything running Andriod, but I don’t have first-hand experience with that yet.

The iPad is very easy to use.  You can just hand it to someone and they figure it out.  Ease of use is almost always accomplished through a reduction in functionality.  This is true with the iPad in several areas and most notably the lack of access to a file system.  We know there is a methodology of storing files on the machine, but the user never sees it.  I suspect this trend will continue because the file system is a very complicated thing and the source of endless user frustration.  I never have gotten used to the different views of the file system through Finder on Macs.  Thank goodness the search works well. 

Keeping files all in one place on a Windows machine is no easier and the lack of search that actually works amplifies the problem.   This is where the fan boys from either side blast me with evidence that the Mac presents the file tree well and that Windows 7 has great file search.  I don’t buy either argument.  If I can’t make the search work on Windows 7 – there is certainly going to be a very large population of people with the same experience (everyone less willing or able than me to monkey with the thing and make it work).  And whoever invented the virtual folders should just be shot.  I want my files to be in real folders.

The Microsoft site says this about search on Windows 7: Start typing into the Start menu search box, and you'll instantly see a list of relevant documents, pictures, music, and e-mail on your PC.

Sounds great, but this has not been my experience.  For me it takes forever and  usually returns with nothing.  Yes my indexing is on, and I have even reinstalled Windows Search per instructions from MS.  

Here is what I get when I search for excel files on my fully indexed B drive:

OK.  So neither Apple or Microsoft has a good way to manage files, and Apple has addressed the problem in the iPhone OS by hiding the files all together.  The need for file management is not going away.  Ever since the first written business record was generated – a method to store and recover files has been a central part of administrating a business.  No one in business is going to accept a system where all of the files are just thrown behind a curtain and magically retrieved just when needed.

With Apple going the other direction, Microsoft has an opportunity to capitalize.  Here are the main elements I would like to see:

1. Search that works.  I have been using X1 on my Windows 7 machine and it is incredible.  Fast and I am confident it is searching everything. Maybe Microsoft should buy these guys.
2. Don’t bury files all over.  I want all of my files close to the surface and segregated from program files.  I want to be able to back up just my files.
3. Don’t hide or translate names.  Get rid of virtual folders that include other folders but don’t really exist.  This is more than my small brain can handle.  Don’t hide part of the file name (like the extension), don’t have hidden files, if access to files or folders is restricted, grey it out or something.  Not showing it just causes me to keep looking and looking.
4. Don’t mix metaphors:  Why do mapped network drives show up under “Computer” and not “Network”? 
5. A new name.  Every time I try to explain Windows Explorer to my wife she only hears Explorer and thinks I am talking about IE.  I can just hear the internal debate about someday merging Windows Explorer with the browser – if only the EU would not block them…bla, bla, bla… a good way to view the file system should be separate from the browser.

Somebody is going to figure this out and it will be one of those revolutionary things that no one notices at first, but builds a technology foundation for long term customer satisfaction and retention.

Microsoft Losing its Killer Reputation

There was a time not long ago when Microsoft was the most feared company in the tech industry.  The rare individual that has not had at least a second hand (if not a first hand) experience with Microsoft's predatory practices, would certainly have read about them in the press.  From legends about the original DOS code deal, the OEM pricing policy, to Netscape, to tech startups that found their product ideas incorporated into MS products after pitching MS to acquire them, there is seemingly no end to this story.

Until now.  Could we be entering an era of a less predatory Microsoft?  Here are three things that contribute to such a thought:

1. Other predators on center stage:  Facebook, Apple, and Google are really getting into the act of either ripping off the ideas of others, to just swallowing start ups in one gulp.  
2. Microsoft's Partners are a significant asset:  Microsoft has been building its partner program for 25 years and it is the biggest, most sophisticated, and most mature business ecosystem the industry.  There was a time that people partnered with Microsoft because they had to, now they partner with Microsoft on its merits.  
3. Microsoft's margins are on the decline:  95% margins for packaged software were great -- but exist no longer.  Margins in the cloud are much lower -- maybe half that.  Declining margins mean less budget for R&D and Sales and Marketing.  This is going to be added encouragement for Microsoft to get along with its neighbors.

Microsoft may or may not be engaged in a thoughtful strategy of playing more nicely with others.  Premeditated or not, Microsoft does seem to be losing its killer reputation. I think this is a good thing for Microsoft, and its partners.

Intuit and the Tyranny of the Uptime Clock

Those of you following my Twittering and blog posts must think I have become obsessed with the Intuit outage.  At CSG we operate a hosted enterprise software service and face the tyranny of the uptime clock -- just like Intuit.  As the technology industry moves to adopt cloud computing, we all suffer a credibility loss when a major player like Intuit has a long term outage like this one.  The lack of an explanation, and generally poor levels of communication by Intuit during this episode does not help.  Sure they could not post on their own websites while down, but they have official blogs outside of their control that were up and so they did have the ability to communicate.  Here is a short list of the communications:

Intuit on Twitter @Intuit: First post was 11.5 hours into the outage, at this writing 8 posts, including a gap of 16 hours before the latest post saying they are now on the way back up.   The posts pointed to their community page with 4 undated or time stamped updates, and 2 references to the small business blog, where they posted an update 12 hours into the outage.

Quicken on Twitter @Quicken: First post was 13 hours into the outage, at this writing only 4 posts -- saying they are working on it.

Official Quicken Blog:  No posts, last post was April 26th.

Quickbooks on Twitter @Quickbooks: No posts, last post was May 21st.

The main site just now came back online -- making the outage approximately 34 hours in duration.  Current explanation: 

Our preliminary investigation indicates the outage occurred during a routine maintenance procedure Tuesday night. An accidental power failure during that procedure affected both our primary and backup systems, taking a number of Intuit websites and services offline. While power was quickly restored, we're working diligently to validate our systems and bring them back into full operation.

Intuit reported 300,000 online customers in May of this year -- many of whom use accounting and merchant services applications that require near universal uptime.  In the industry this is often referred to and "four nines" or "five nines" uptime for 99.99% and 99.999% uptime.

A few basics about uptime:  Scheduled outages are usually not included in the calculation, so the .001% downtime permitted in five nines uptime buys only 5.26 minutes of unscheduled downtime in a year.  Three nines gets you almost an hour, and two nines gets you almost a day.  Fortunately nobody died in this outage, so even a 34 hour outage is not a catastrophe on the BP scale.  But it will take 388 years of perfect uptime before Intiut can claim five nines of uptime.

All of us are relieved that they are back online.  This event will undoubtedly slow migrations to the cloud, and should give all of us reason to check and recheck our redundancy and uptime plans.  In addition, we should be checking and rechecking our communication plans associated with any downtime.  We are certainly capable of turning a bad situation worse by failing to communicate well with customers.

Intuit's Cloud Outage

When I saw some traffic in Twitter last night about Intuit's web site going down I first thought it would be back up in a minute and would be no big deal.  An hour later I checked back -- still down.  I checked @intuit, @quicken, and @quickbooks on Twitter thinking they would post an update -- none.  I searched for Intuit related blogs -- no posts in over a month!

Knowing that millions of people use intuit's accounting, payroll, tax preparation, and merchant services, and thinking that these activities are almost always time sensitive, I naturally thought that this was going to be a big story. Next I thought that since small businesses are a big deal for technology companies, and technology companies want small businesses to adopt cloud computing, this would be a big deal in the technology industry.  A major vendor like Intuit going down for hours without any communication to its users is enough to set back cloud adoption a few years -- right?

So I searched the news on Google about a story.  Top search result: Intuit press release about low cost Payment Solutions, next was CEO Brad Smith being profiled by "Inspiring West Virginians", and the next four were all about stock performance upgrades due to good recent financial results.  No stories about the outage.

Back to Twitter, a real time search for Intuit Down:  just a few tweets.  Nothing like I expected.

When a $3 Billion company with millions of customers goes down for over 12 hours without a mention in the press, without an update to its customers, and without any public outcry to speak of I can only conclude one of three things:

1. I fell down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole and never came back, or 
2. Not communicating during a crisis works -- no communication = no crisis, or
3. Not that many people are using Intuit's Cloud Services.

I did watch the movie and even with the 3D I don't think I am chasing the Jabberwoky -- so #1 is out, BP and others will tell you that #2 is not true, so logic tells us that #3 could be the most rational conclusion.

Intuit's recent acquisition, Mint, has stayed up the whole time.  No mention on any of Mint's blogs either.

Microsoft News 180?

The news herd has a tendency to travel together for a while until someone "breaks" a story and breaks away from the group.  The contrasting new perspective becomes news itself and then the herd reforms going the other direction.

This kind of thing may just be happening with Microsoft right now.  Microsoft has been getting the short end of it in the media for months - or even years - with that week when AAPL gained the number one market cap spot being the low point.  

This week looks to be different however.  The Xbox is really standing out at E3 with Natal/Kinect (why do they do that code name thing?), and a positive piece about profits, cash, and general sanity on CNN Money.

Maybe Microsoft has been characterized in the media as a predatory monopolist, a second rate innovator, and uncool for long enough that the new story about a Microsoft comeback will stick for a while.  As the CNN Money article points out, Microsoft is the second most profitable company in the US, has a giant pile of cash, and is adding to the pile at a pretty good clip.  And you can be part owner for a P/E of only 13.2!

Microsoft has so many products and technology assets that there is no end to the possible interesting combinations.  The combination Microsoft chose to spotlight yesterday is Xbox 360 Kinect + Windows Live Messenger = Video Kinect.  Let's imagine this for a moment.  A high quality game environment, big bandwidth connectivity, an interface that reads the motions of the user (formerly known as the controller), and two way live video chat.  If this works we could have real life emulating person to person interactions in a dimension we don't even have a way to categorize yet.

This could be cool.

Innovation Meets the Desire to Sell Less

Google's pursuit of efficiency through superior engineering has already driven a great deal of change in the advertising industry and is now driving change in how selling is accomplished.  They have achieved extraordinary growth without any sales or customer service to speak of and now other companies are trying to emulate this lowest of selling costs.  The question is: How does a company with a high cost of selling become a company with very low cost of selling?  I can think of two routes:  sell better or sell less.

Effective companies do this by measuring everything, then cutting the things that don't measure up, and doubling down on the things that do.  The result: increased selling effectiveness and lower cost.  In the dynamic world of sales and marketing a once highly effective sales tactic can lose momentum and fade into inefficiency.  After all, we hope that the things that don't measure up did not start out that way.  This seems simple enough until the conversation turns to innovation.  A company only focussed on measuring the relative efficiency of the things it is currently doing will not try to do new things and will be quickly passed by competitors that are not so burdened by yesterday's thinking.  

Time is an additional layer of complexity in this analysis.  Selling costs money now and delivers benefits in the future.  Very few companies have successfully neutralized the time dimension when analyzing sales effectiveness.  So cost cutting always looks great at first because the lower cost is being compared to sales activities purchased in previous periods.  Then the gradual decline in revenues starts and things don't look that great anymore.  Often at this point more cutting is administered and you can see where this is leading.  Bleeding the patient has obvious limits.

Better selling comes from innovation.  Innovation comes from rapid experimentation.  Rapid experimentation comes from the freedom to try new things.  New things are never sure things and all of this costs money.  Whether you are an investor looking to put your money to work, or an employee looking for a career, or a buyer looking to standardize on a product/service, beware of the company that is on the sell less track.  

If you are interested in more on this topic, try these posts:

Sales vs. Engineering

The Changing Role of the Salesperson

Making Marketing More Measurable

Science vs. Spray and Pray

Is Your KPI and RBI or an OBP?

Brand Promise vs. Intention

Working With People You Like

Last night we had a small event for our team leaders and employees participating in our mentor program.  We went out to an informal dinner and then to my house to get a lesson in the making of lemon-cello.  It was a very fun evening and a good opportunity to remember how important it is to like the people you work with.

Our company has been selected as one of the best places to work in Washington State in four of the past five years.  One of the main reasons we achieve that honor is that we just like being in the same room.  Sure it is important to enjoy what you do, and I submit it is just as important to enjoy who you do it with.

Life is too short, and we live a great deal of it at work.  I feel very fortunate to spend that time working with people that I like.

HP Announces Printing in the Cloud

HP rolled out its web printing capability, ePrintCenter, at Internet Week NY yesterday.  Here is a pretty good article in PC Mag about it.  

I don't ordinarily write about individual technology announcements, so why would I write about this?

Well, yesterday I wrote about two things that could really change the way small businesses buy technology: Google's Cloud Printing and Tungle.me's web based scheduling service.  Google's thing is still just a plan and HP has promised to deliver cloud printing this summer.  

Here is how it will work (from the PC Mag article):

The print-through-the Internet feature (which won't work with the older generation printers, unfortunately) lets you simply e-mail a file to the ePrintCenter's email address, which rasterizes the image and sends the print job to the printer. According to HP, the ePrintCenter can handle files in most common formats, including PDF, JPG, and Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 versions of Word and Excel. Each printer gets a unique e-mail address.

I stopped buying HP printers for home a couple of years ago because they break so much and the software on the PC was gigantic.  Why printing would require software in the hundreds of MBs just never made any sense to me.  Add to that the fact that the software was telling me to download updates every other day -- and I was reminded early and often that HP was not the printer to buy.  All I wanted to do was print!

Anyone who has ever done tech support will tell you that printing is still a giant pain in the neck.  If HP does this right -- it could be a game changer.

This may not seem like a big deal -- but I bet the Microsoft Small Business Server team is thinking about the implications.

Could Small Business Go Without Networks?

Lately I have noticed two very interesting developments that don't seem like much at first but could have bigger implications down the road.  

First is Google's Cloud Printing Initiative

This yet to be released product is intended to let you connect printers to the web and print to them from anywhere.  I for one would appreciate this very much because my side job as tech support guy for my kids would get much easier.  Our network printers at home are a pain in the neck.

Second is Tungle.me's Web Based Scheduling System

This new service enables anyone to coordinate scheduling across multiple calendar platforms.  Exchange has done this forever inside companies -- but such functionality has not been available between companies before.

If you put these two things together, small businesses can delay building their own networks much longer than before.  Add to this cloud based file storage, databases, and collaboration tools and small businesses may not need their own networks.  Just a router and a connection to the internet.

That would change things a bit.