Comcast Throttles

I guess I should not be surprised.  I have been suspecting it for some time now and right before posting this entry I searched for "Comcast Throttles" and found 3,210 hits -- with just about every one of them recounting their stories about how Comcast selectively turns down their bandwidth.

I do download things, but I do not consider myself a big bandwidth user.  My biggest loads are Microsoft software updates, then Audible audio books, then a song here or there from iTunes.  But I find myself tripping whatever mechanism Comcast has set up, and then I stay turned down -- sometimes for days.

I measured my throughput daily for the last week and you can see my bandwidth changes quite a bit.

I am sure that Comcast has to manage a variety of loads on the network, so I don't expect to be at 15 MBPS all of the time.  But any time that my download speed is less than my upload speed -- is clearly suspect.

I don't think there is any law against turning down my bandwidth, and I am pretty sure that I don't have a contract that guarantees me a certain throughput all of the time.  The offense in my view is that Comcast denies doing it -- when they clearly are. 

Maybe I should move to Kansas City!

I don't think legislation is the answer because our lawmakers are definately under the spell of big companies like Comcast -- so any attempt to control their businesses would result in fewer rights or benefits to the customer.  

So let's hope for competition to solve the problem.  

Some links for you:

The "Comcast Throttles" search.

Speakeasy's Speed tester 

Wired Mag on the 250 BG cap 

Now I have to start looking for ways to give Comcast less business.  More on that later.

The Surface - The Second Day

Yesterday I brought my new Windows RT Surface into the office and the whole world changed.  In 5 minutes, my IT guys had it set up to use Remote Desktop Connection and presto - every app that I can run at the office now runs on my Surface.  

Now those are apps that count!

The entire Adobe suite, Quickbooks, Visio, Access, SQL Server... this wipes out just about all of the list of not so good things I said after day 1 and puts this machine so far ahead of my iPad that there is no comparison.  

I would go on and on about this but I have work to get done and I am doing it on...my Windows RT Surface. 

Yow, I am sounding like I have lost my objectivity.

What if Advertising Doesn't Work… At All?

Forget not knowing which half does not work.  Click through rates are at 0.02 – it is not that hard to imagine 0.00.  OK, maybe a Bud advert gets a guy off of the couch and headed to the frig to have another beer.  But outside of that could there be anyone left that believes anything they see in advertising?

When AT&T says they have the best cell coverage, or BP says they really care about the environment, we know that in fact the opposite is true.  Following this line of thinking I suppose the scale of advertising effectiveness could go below 0.  There are a few attack ads I have seen this campaign season that have inspired me to fight harder for the guy being attacked.  I would put that in the negative effectiveness category.

Advertising worldwide is a $400B industry.  If everyone comes to believe that advertising just does not work, it could free up that money to do other things – like lower the cost of products, or pay for R&D.  Alternatively, it could be a means to accelerate creative destruction.  Essentially a tax on companies that make bad products or that have weak values.  They spend their last available dollars on big branding efforts and then go out of business.

It is interesting to note that Google, a company that makes its money selling advertising, does very little advertising of its own products and services.   We could say that with over 65% market share – they don’t have to advertise.  If we see a big campaign out of Google, it may be a sign the end is near!

What will a world without advertising look like?

The Surface – One Day In

Yesterday I attended the Seattle Interactive conference which gave me a great real world testing scenario for the Surface.  Here is my current thinking about this device:

My Favorite Parts:

1. Instant On:  Just as good as the iPad and clearly the killer feature.  Nothing keeps me from my Windows 7 machine like slow boot up time and its inability to handle sleep mode.  This machine comes on with a swipe and when done you just put it down. 
2. Battery Life:  Also amazing.  I used it for ten hours yesterday and still had 26% left.
3. Windows RT:  Not so hard to get used to.  Access to the desktop is easy.  The fact that I could get to the control panel was a pleasant surprise.  Connecting to wifi networks and other machine administration tasks was easy and familiar. 
4. Office Aps:  I did not try PowerPoint, but Word, Excel, and OneNote all work great.  Integration with Skydrive was easy and I used it right from the start.
5. Mail:  The new mail app is clean and works pretty well. 

Not So Good Parts:

1. IE:  The browser was the hardest app to get used to.  I struggled with the tabs and the back button, it just seemed to be a bit off.  Some sites just don’t work well with the browser and I really wished I had another browser – even if just to see if the problem was with the site I was viewing or with my browser.  This needs work.
2. Apps:  The WSJ, NY Times, Netflix, and Evernote apps were fine right out of the box.  I was surprised that there was no Twitter app, I also wished for apps from The Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek.  IMDB would be good too and I am sure there are a handful more that I will miss today.  I know the apps are on the way and so I am really not hung up about this too much.
3. Mail:  I mentioned above that the mail app works fine, but I miss outlook.  Don’t get me wrong, there are parts about Outlook, and frankly email in general, that I would gladly do without.  But I depend on Outlook to get me through my emails and when it is time to sit down and really crank through my inbox the lack of Outlook is going to push me back to my full PC. 
4. Stability: My Surface has crashed a couple of times.  I am pretty sure the crashes were due to up and down connectivity at the conference and either the log in process with the browser, or the mail app’s connection to our exchange server.  Once the device froze up, I did not really know what to do.  So I held down that button on the top and just hoped for the best.  It seemed to work, but I am not so sure I actually re-booted.  So that is going to take some getting used to.

All around I am excited about the Surface.  It is a big step forward for Microsoft.  We are not going to know how big or how far forward for at least six months, maybe a year. The Apps will tell the story.

Getting to the Future

Last year the Microsoft Office team produced a video showing their vision for the future.  It is pretty cool.

Technology companies produce mountains of these aspirational works -- probably mostly to inspire their own people to get motivated and build the stuff.  I still remember this video Apple showed in the 90s.

Dr. Francis Colins said:  

The First Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of a truly transformational discovery, while underestimating its longer-term effects. 

At the time he was talking about he the human genome sequencing project, but it applies to all technological advances.  We always want the future to get here sooner and we often are dejected, or at least frustrated, by the time it actually arrives.  But arrive it finally does and we only have to look at the amazing things around us to confirm Dr. Collins' first law.

The buzz about the Internet of Things is roaring and we are not so much talking about how refrigerators are going to be on the internet, but an avalanche of billions and billions of sensors reporting everything from the proximity of cars to each other to advances in industrial automation.

China is doing its top down thing in an effort to lead in the industry.  They just concluded their third Internet of Things Conference this last weekend.  The EU has gotten underway with an initiative to establish standards and information sharing with their own IOT web site.

Here in the US it does not appear that there is a governmental initiative, but plenty of companies are working on building the tools we will need to make the most of the concept.  IBM was probably first with its Smarter Planet initiative, now in its 4th year.  Microsoft has StreamInsight, Oracle has its initiative, and there are many others.

It took the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 before people could visualize a world with billions of little computers in people's pockets.  There had been smart phones before, there had been PDAs, but for some reason the iPhone showed us the way.

What is going to be the thing or event that breaks through and enables everyone to visualize the Internet of Things revolution?

What is going to get us to that future?

The Microsoft Effect

The Hawthorne Effect famously demonstrated the changes to worker productivity resulting from changes in work environment.  Like many studies the key learning turned out to be somewhat different than anticipated.  Initially intended to figure out if lighting levels or other environmental factors impacted productivity the result turned out to be that workers did better when working together to improve the conditions.  The improvements were not dependent on the changes but on the process of working together to make the changes.

I have to wonder if the same thing is happening in the Microsoft/Google/Apple race for the hearts and minds of the workers.  Each is courting the users with new and improved ways to be productive.   Microsoft has of course dominated the worker productivity area with the Office suite and the addition over the years of Outlook, Access, Visio, and OneNote. Google helps workers find stuff and has innovated around the edges with priority inbox in gmail and better spam filtering and Google docs and drive. Apple has turned the world mobile, brought about the app revolution, and companies now shower iPhones and iPads on their employees like they used to do with sales trips to Hawaii.

I am 24 hours into using my new Windows RT Surface and all I can think about is how much work I could do on the thing.  It has been 90 years since Elton Mayo did his study in Hawthore, IL, maybe it is time for a new study.  We could call the key learnings the Microsoft Effect.

Partners Will Embrace the Surface

Well MS has launched the Surface running Windows RT and it is a pretty cool machine.  There has been a bunch of noise about how Microsoft is sticking it to its partners by jumping into the hardware business. I think this is another case of the media inventing a fight because it is good for the media.  

In two and a half years Apple has sold 100M iPads.  In the same amount of time Microsoft has grown the Windows 7 user base to more than 600M -- just about all of those were sales of new machines.  It is just about impossible for anyone to imagine the MS Surface outselling the iPad.  It is not hard to imagine the Windows 8 user base to grow at 300M units per year.  

In other words, there is plenty of room in the market for everybody.  Microsoft's partners are going to sell hundreds of millions of Windows tablets in the years ahead.

Microsoft and its partners, that number in the hundreds of thousands, solve business problems for their customers.  Armed with the Surface, Windows 8 RT, Windows 8, and every shape and size of hardware imagineable from a legion of capable hardware makers, these partners are going to have so much to offer their customers that it is going to take years for the market to absorb it all.

Next week we get the new Windows 8 Phone.  Partners are going to embrace that new device too.

Technology That Changes The Game

It was a relatively short time ago that computers were produced in the dozens, cost millions of dollars, and were run by the phone company, the government, and a few very big businesses.  The most technological thing that a small business had was a cash register.

In an office environment like a law firm or an accounting firm, there were typists, and a copy machine, and the only cloud application was the connection to AT&Ts big computer (the phone).  In some cases professionals had specialized tools -- I for example had my HP12C programmable calculator.  I never programmed it to do anything though.  Amazingly, HP still sells that very calculator - 30 years later.

Then came the PC and voicemail and email and mobile phones and well, we all became computer operators plus whatever our jobs had been before that.  Now we spend so much time staring at the screen that we feel like computer operators all of the time -- so it is no wonder that we sometimes forget that we have actual jobs to do.  Facebook even relieves us from having to pull away from the computer to waste time at the water cooler.  

We have become much more productive despite the time we have to spend getting our machines to work for us.  Since the introduction of the PC, GDP per capita in the US has grown from $27,000 to $47,000 per year.  And that is the average for the entire country.

Keep in mind that workers that use PCs have done much better than the rest of the population, so the productivity has more than doubled for PC users. Advances in technology drive our economy and our ever improving quality of life.  This is an easy argument to make when you consider that penecilin was an advancement in technology.  A bit harder in the context of nuclear weapons. 

These advances in technology have provided for us so much extra time and money that we don't know what to do with it all.  Most of us have more than one computer plus a phone with computer like computing power plus maybe a tablet too.  

There are two types of advances in technology: incremental things and game changers. New computing capacity that reduces the time to run a report from a giant database is incremental.  New sensors that report every person's location, everything they purchase, and many of the things that they think and say into a giant database is a game changer.

The incremental things we get from technology are gains in efficiency that make one business more productive than another.  Game changers are new capabilities that just could not be done before and that completely change the business environment.

As the cost of compute cycles comes down the incremental functions will blend into the background and deliver less and less profit to their makers -- so look out HP and Dell.  Game changers will become the whole game and command more and more of the profits.  And as always the pace of change will be accelerating.  Very few companies have the will to change their own game.  Apple did it with the iPhone and now generates half of their revenues from a product they introduced only 5 years ago.  Google did it to the advertising industry -- but it remains to be seen if they can do it to themselves.  Microsoft is in the process of trying to change their game with Windows 8.  Will they be able to do it?  

Advertisers Trade Digital Dimes for Mobile Pennies

Tomorrow is the big Windows 8 / Surface Launch, so I will continue on with the Microsoft vs. Google vs. Apple thinking from yesterday.  

Henry Ford is credited with the famous line:  "I know that fifty percent of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half."  I wrote a post about this a few years back and also dug into the idea that Google is trading analog dollars for digital dimes.  Which turns out to be easier for Google, the company that gets the dimes, than for other advertising providers that are losing the dollars.  The advertising dime migration is fueling a whole bunch of creative destruction in the advertising business.

It is going to get much worse.  Every day advertising gets more measurable and it might just turn out that the non productive half of the advertising business is in fact bigger than half.  In an anemic growth environment, or worse yet another recession, companies might just find a better use for a big part of the $600B presently spent on advertising.

If so, what happens to all of the technology companies that have placed their bets on making advertisers their customers?  What if the digital dimes get traded for mobile advert pennies?  Google was perfectly happy getting new revenue away from the newspapers -- so they did not care that their prices were a tenth of the market.  But if Google has to trade its own dimes of revenue for pennies -- it is going to hurt.

All the while Microsoft soldiers on making businesses productive.

Business Runs on Microsoft Software. Period.

It is insteresting and instructive to take a step back from the big ecosystem builders and think about who their customers are and what they are selling.  Just so we all start from the same point on the map, I am going to clarify that customers are the people that pay and they pay for whatever a vendor is selling.

Microsoft

This is a big week for Microsoft with the long anticipated Windows 8 launch.  Even though I am very much looking forward to getting my MS Surface (hardware) this week, Microsoft is still the maker of software and its customers paid $16 B in the most recent quarter and generated $5.3B in profits including for operating system software ($3.2B revenue /$1.6B profit), servers and dev tools ($4.5B/$1.7B), and productivity and business software ($5.5B/$3.6B).  This is highly profitable business with one half of all revenue returned in profits.  You will notice that a bit over $2B is missing from this revenue analysis - because that is the amount MS generates from XBox -- without generating any profit.  Ouch!

Simply, customers pay Microsoft for the software they need to be productive.  Anyone who has tried to be productive on an iPad knows what I am talking about.  Producers need Microsoft's products to produce.

Apple

Apple quite famously makes more revenue and profit on the iPhone than all of Microsoft combined.  In its most recent quarter it generated $16.2 B of a total of $35B from the iPhone at 43% margins.  Any company that can grow from zero in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced to over $60B in annual revenue from a single new product line - deserves to be the worlds most valuable company.  Even more impressive is the $9.2B in iPad revenue last quarter from a product just 30 months in the market.  However, as Apple is demonstrating with the change of the standard cable plug on the latest version of the iPhone - it is selling devices that are driven by their popularity, not by business acceptance.

So, customers pay Apple for fashionable gadgets and Apple cranks out fashionable gadgets like no one else.

Google

Google has revenues about the same size as Microsoft's.  The most recent quarter concluded with $14.1B in revenue and $7.45B in profits. 75% of Google's revenue comes from advertising.  Advertising was 97% before the acquisition of Motorola -- and Motorola now makes up 19% of Google's revenue.  Google makes all kinds of software (gmail, Google docs...) but most users get those services for free -- and the customers are the companies that pay to place their advertisements where those users can see them.

So customers pay Google for advertising.  Google dominates the search market with 65% of all internet search traffic.

When analyzed from the perspective of the paying customer it is almost hard to believe that these three companies are fierce competitors.  No one buys Microsoft products to be seen with them in the first class lounge at the airport.  Almost no one pays Microsoft for advertising.  Just about everyone pays Microsoft to make their businesses run.

Optimism is good for your health

A friend read me the Optimists Creed this morning and it was a good reminder of how being positive undeniably lowers my stress level.  Lower stress equals better health.  Here it is:

The Optimist Creed

Promise Yourself

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.

To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.

To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.

To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.

To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.

To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.

To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.

To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

It turns out that there is an organization called Optimist International that works to instil the values of optimism in kids through optimists clubs.  Pretty cool.

Washington State Unemployment Insurance Hits 7%

In the period of 2009 to 2013 the Washington State Employment Security Department will have increased our unemployment insurance rate from 3.7% to over 7%.  'Here is our tax rate history displayed on the top of our last statement.

Those of you that have fought this battle know that these insurance rates should reflect our experience rating.  This essentially means that companies that have more people on unemployment pay higher rates.  There are many problems with this system, but here are the two that I think are the biggest.

1. Insurance should spread risk over the pool.  The idea that the State of Washington should make money on each unemployment insurance premium -- is counter to the idea of insurance.  The government regulates the insurance industry to protect consumers from insurance companies that want to make a profit on every policy holder.  The government should apply that measure to itself.
2. The structure of the system raises costs to businesses during an economic recovery.  We do not have access to the data that drives our experience rating.  In fact, we believe that our experience rating has improved at the same time that our rates have doubled.  The more corrosive thing is that if the current system was properly implemented, it would dampen every recovery by increasing tax rates that apply directly to hiring -- right when the economy needs employers to hire the most badly -- during a recovery.  We now have to pay over $2,000 per employee per year to have employees in Washington State.  And that money does not go to employees -- it goes to the Employment Security Department.

Some communities in our state depend very heavily on state assistance to exist and a good deal of that assistance is delivered by the Employment Security Department.  Those communities need jobs.  Unfortunately, the more a community depends on government assistance, the less that community will be able to attract new employers.  The simple reason is that no employer can compete with unemployment benefits that exceed its ability to pay wages.  We have closed facilities in small Washington communities for this very reason.  No rational person would choose to work for a living if the state will pay them more to not work. I am sure I don't have to carry this scenario out to the extreme to make the sustainability point.

Every time we hire for new positions, we advertise in all of our locations and hire the best people we can find.  This dramatic increase in the cost of operating in the State of Washington is going to push us to hire more in other locations.  The net result will be that the cost of unemployment insurance will have to be borne by fewer and fewer employees.  One must wonder where the tipping point is - 10%?  

I hope someone starts working to turn this around.

What is CRN Smoking?

CRN ran a story this morning about how Microsoft is like Philip Morris.  I know that expecting web sites to avoid link bait is like expecting candidates running for the oval office to tell the truth.  Even so, this one is over the top.  There are many companies with comparable growth rates to Microsoft.  Picking the one that sells an addictive product that causes cancer and that spent decades undermining efforts to understand the effects of cigarette smoke -- is poor form.

The article did make one good point though:  when channel partners pick the vendors they partner with, they are making investments.  In fact, they are making very big investments.  

CRN says that channel partners should partner with Apple, Cognizant, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce.com instead of Microsoft because those companies are growing faster. Really?!?

Let's take this apart company by company:

Apple:  Apple is in fact starting a partner program.  Apple however does not have a single enterprise software app.  It can offer a desktop operating system, and a productivity suite, but Microsoft has hundreds of products -- and most of them solve very real enterprise computing problems.  

Cognizant:  Most people have never heard of this company.  It is in fact a $6 billion dollar company, but it is a consulting and outsourcing firm -- a competitor to most channel partners.  I bet it is a very big Microsoft partner.  So there really is no reason a solution partner would partner with this organization instead of Microsoft.

Google:  Google is kicking everyone's behind in search.  True.  But I can't think of how it would make sense as a channel partner to give up Microsoft's partner program in exchange for Google.  Google offers no side by side go to market capabilities to support partners.  Even if we were to humor CRN and think for 10 more seconds about this one - how can a partner make any money deploying Google Docs?  This is one of those cases where Google takes a dollar someone else is making and turns it into a dime of advertising for itself.  So Google can take revenue away from Microsoft, but it does not have that dollar to share with its channel partners.

Rackspace:  Rackspace is not even a software company.  

Salesforce.com:  Salesforce.com, like Oracle (where Benioff came from) has a nasty habit of eating its own young.  A few companies have made a living working with Salesforce.com, but most get run over by their scorched earth sales team.  And all of that to partner with a company that has one product.  Oh sorry, two products if you count Chatter as a seperate product.

Microsoft has made its way in the world by working side by side with its hundreds of thousands of partners worldwide.  There are some companies that are growing faster, but none that comes anywhere close to supporting a partner ecosystem like Microsoft does.

It is hard to imagine what CRN was smoking when they proposed that Microsoft was like Philip Morris!

Ideas Happen When Execution Works and it is Safe to Fail

Reason #3 (Why our clients choose CSG).  

Ideas are just about everything. I say “just about” because like Maslow’s hierarchy, the basic things need to exist first. So humans need food and security before the other stuff, but life really would suck without the top items (love, esteem, and self actualization). The same goes in marketing. Without the ability to act on marketing ideas -- the ideas are worthless.

Marketing firms are often evaluated on their ability to execute, but that should just be the cost of getting into the dance. Once in, it is all in the ideas.

At CSG we build technology to make the execution so good that we can invest most of our energy in the highest value activities -- generating and testing ideas.

Indeed testing is essential because ideas come in both the good flavor and the bad flavor and all ideas have to be tested. The bad ideas have to be killed off to make room for testing yet more new ideas. Again this relies heavily on ease of execution. The kind of flexibility needed to implement a new idea and then kill it off -- requires amazingly effective execution.

One more thing. Having the strength of execution that enables the rapid change associated with testing ideas also requires a culture that accepts failure. Without it, people naturally hold on too tight to ideas that do not work. Worse yet, when the stakes are high enough (i.e. people with failed ideas get fired) we sometimes see people waste all kinds of resources dressing up bad ideas to make them look good.

So, ideas are everything and they require great execution and a culture that accepts failure.

Romney Says: No Taxes for Me!

I know it is not fair to hold a presidential candidate to what he says in the debates, but it is nice to dream.  Last night Mitt Romney said:

...there’ll be no taxes for anybody making $200,000 per year and less, on your interest, dividends and capital gains.

Awesome! All I have to do is switch my pay to a dividend and presto - no taxes! Anyone like me with a small business will be able to do the same.

Hey, anyone with a spouse could file seperately and get another $200,000 tax free.  Sweet!  $400,000 in income without any taxes at all.

I  am pretty sure our government needs taxes to run.  We can borrow a trillion here  and a trillion there, but somebody has to be paying some taxes eventually.  Also, if we iinvade Iran, someone is going to have to pay the bill for that.  I know they have oil, but using the spoils of war to pay for the war is an idea that hasn't worked for over a hundred years.  

So even though no taxes would be great for me, I am going to vote for Obama.  He has just as much of a challenge with the truth as Romney does, but I think we are less likely to invade Iran with him in office.  Along the way he may even get past these silly antics about most of the nation getting away without paying taxes.

Later:  I did not see any mention in the WSJ or the NYT about this zero tax on dividends issue, but I did find this article on AcccountingToday.com.  Good thing too because I was starting to think I had imagined it.

Atlas Shrugged Part 2

Atlas Shrugged was one of my favorite books in high school and it was fun to think about those days this week as I watched both Part 1 (on Netflix) and Part 2 in the theater.  

No matter your politics, these are good movies worth watching.  The writing and the acting and the production value are all good enough -- and the content is interesting to think about given the choice we have approaching on November 6th.  

I find these movies even more interesting because I am just now in the middle of Ken Follett's newest book Winter of the World -- about the rise of Nazi Germany and WWII.  Patriotism and its extreme cousin nationalism have been used to implement policies that have not just destroyed wealth and prosperity, but millions of souls.  

Even though I do not subscribe to Ayn Rand's philosophy entirely, I do believe that a capable person cannot be compelled to carry the people that are not capable of carrying themselves.  I do believe that at times people with means will choose to help others.  But there is a very wide gulf between choosing to help and being forced to help.  I think this even applies to taxes.  It is much easier to pay taxes when the money is being put to good use.  When it is not, everyone puts the maximum effort into avoiding the payment of taxes.  

Another of my favorite themes is that absolute power corrupts absolutely.  This is plain in the movie as the role of the socialist government expands and the aptly named Wesley Mouch rises to take over everything.  Quite similar to stories of unbridled power of the secret police in many other stories.  I also thought it was interesting to compare to the way conservatives often make the same mistake.  There was a good story in today's NY Times about the potential self destruction of the 1%.

Even though these seem like opposites - the arc of each story is really the same. 

My Voting Checklist

With the election under four weeks away I am still undecided.  Readers of this blog know that I voted for Obama last time, and that I think peace is the most important pursuit.  So here are my three top items and how I think the candidates stack up.

Peace

I think Obama has the lead here.  It seems that most first term presidents are itching to go to war because it help their re-election chances.  Even though it is deplorable to put our citizens in harms way just to improve the president's chances at the polls -- I do think it happens.  The fact that Obama has gotten us out of Iraq and has not invaded anyone else (like Iran) is a check mark in his favor.  Also, following this line of reasoning, he is going to be less likely to start a war in his second term than any first term president.

Special Interests and Deficit Reduction

This is a tie.  And when I say special interests I mostly think of industries getting bail out money, and not so much who is getting payback for campaign contributions.  I have it as a tie because I think Obama has proven incapable of stopping the flow of money from the US Treasury to Goldman Sachs (I think  oldman Sachs is a good label for all things evil on Wall Street even though I do recognize that there are plenty of bad actors in other firms too).  I don't think Romney has any intention of stopping the flow of our money to these bad guys.  So incapable vs. uninterested equals a tie.  This same thinking also applies to deficit reduction.  Obama can't get it done and Romney does not want to.

Managing the Unions

On this one I am undecided.  Of course the Democrats have been in the pocket of the unions for all of my lifetime.  But Obama has done some good stuff to manage their influence.  I am quite involved in education reform and I think the Race to the Top effort was a well crafted plan to reduce the union's efforts to block progress in education reform.  The Republicans have always been in an all out war with the unions.  Sometimes I think that much antagonism is not going to get us to where we want to go.  It could even strenghten the unions. The public union problem is going to be front and center in the next four years as minicipalities try to figure out how to stay solvent in the face of liabilities that have been passed forward for decades.  

It will be very intersting to see how the remaining debates illumnate the candidate's approaches to these three issues.

Licking the Cookie

Fortune Magazine and an unfortunate number of other publications have reported on phenomenon called "Licking the Cookie" at Microsoft.  You know, practice of claiming ownership of a project and therefore preventing anyone else from actually working on it.  Just like when you were a kid and your younger sister licked the last cookie on the plate to keep you from eating it.

The image is hard to get out of my head and now I see the same phenomenon everywhere.  What is it that compels people to get in the way of a problem, just so that one day, if they ever get around to it, they could take a swing at solving it?  Owning unsolved perpetual problems does not seem like the most logical way to advance or otherwise gain job security.

This dynamic does enter the logical universe when the cookie licker also owns whatever would be replaced when the problem is solved.  The guy in charge of a multi-year CRM implementation would most certainly throw sand in the gears of any conversation with Salesforce.com.  Better yet, he could lick the Salesforce.com cookie and make sure its evaluation never ever sees the light of day.

Entrenched interests are doing this everywhere.  Most visible to me is the movie industry trying to prevent a free and open internet and drafting behind them are the television and cable people.  Every once in a while a bright light shines out from one of the big auto makers, but for the most part they are sitting heavily on alternative fuel vehicles.

We are very lucky here in the US because we have a vibrant start up ecosystem that will gladly run around the ends of the big fat cookie lickers.  Not so much in other economies.  So thank you Google for turning the newspaper industry up side down and go Tesla!

Won't Back Down is a Heartbreaker

Yesterday I had the pleasure of watching Won't Back Down, the heartbreaking story of one mother's seemingly impossible quest to get a good education for her daughter.  It is a good movie no matter where you stand on education reform.  The story and the characters are great and even though you kinda know through the whole thing that they are going to win in the end -- it is still riveting.

I say it is a heartbreaker because it exposes how messed up educaiton is in our country.  Here in Seattle, 25% of the students in the Seattle School District attend private schools.  I am guessing everyone knows which end of the economic scale that is.

In our country, 40.2% of students from top quartile income families achieved a Bachelor's Degree by age 24 in 1970.  By 2009 it had improved to 82.4%.  At the same time the bottom income quartile students went from 6.2% to 8.3%.  See www.postsecondary.org for details.

With these numbers staring us in the face, we should get going and do something.  There is no question that there is plenty of blame to go around.  It is a shame that all of the press about the movie tries to expand the Teacher's Union vitriol.  Anyone who has seen the film realizes that the school administration and the principals and many parents are also standing in the path of progress.

I think the main message in the movie is:  our kids are going to jail instead of college while we fight about who is at fault.  Everyone has an opinion about who is at fault, I bet that we could agree however, that it is not the kids fault.

So let's do something.

I happen to think voting for I 1240 in WA State is one of those things.

Technology That Works

Reason #2 (Why our clients choose CSG)

Sometimes the simplest things are very difficult to implement. At CSG, we have been developing technology for 15 years and we use that technology to deliver better results for our clients. From our proprietary phone system, power dialer, voicemail automation, voicemail stitching, email integration, email stitching, cross platform reporting, lead distribution, deal registration and our latest innovation OneVoice, our technology works.

We accomplish all of this while maintaining redundancy and security at the level required by the biggest and most demanding technology clients.

We do mobile and social media too, but often we see the industry using those “hot” technologies as a means to deflect attention from the fundamental plumbing required to make the trains run on time.

We think our success in technology puts us well ahead in the industry. The biggest advantage however is how it enables us to think freely about new ideas. Have you ever been in a meeting where creative ideas die because the tech people say it cannot be done?

Here is Reason #1:  We Get Results