HighEndBuzz

Bad Behavior After the Bubble

As stated earlier, up to the point the Internet bubble burst IT people were in my opinion some of the most talented individuals in business.  They truly cared about their customers both inside their respective companies and outside the fold.   

Then the layoffs began.  First it was the contractors, some would say they were the engine for the growth of the Internet economy.  Everyone wanted to be a consultant in those days.  I turned down a technology strategy consultant gig that supposedly paid $350/hour.  That would have been very short lived.  I remember during the hiring process of a Jr. Network Administrator I joked with the VP of HR to find me someone who "had a heartbeat and could spell IT".  That's how desperate I was to fill all of the open headcounts.  Talk like that these days should lead to your dismissal.

Once the ax started to fall, I noticed some very disturbing behavior from IT managers.  They retreated back to their IT bunkers and settled in for the long war.  Gone were the days of collaboration and innovation; back were the days of policy enforcement and locked-down standardization.  The new thinking (which is very prevalent today in IT) was that added complexity and procedures led to job security.  While we were trying to simplify access to IT resources and dumb down infrastructure complexities during the bubble, the fallout after the crash scared these guys so much they increased the complexity. 

Ask someone in 1998 and the answer was "...piece of cake, I can have that hacked together in 2 days.", in 2005 you'll get "...I'm going to need you to submit your requirements in writing, I'll have an estimate in 2 weeks and will need to consult our feasibility committee and change control counsel.  How does next quarter sound?"

Now I'm not opposed to process and procedure, but if the procedure interferes with the building, marketing and selling of your particular product and service,  you need to fire the tool that got you in that mess.  IT people mean well and are still very talented, the majority of IT managers are lazy protectionists who have retired themselves into their silicon silos.  There are talented managers out there, but they don't last long in those environments.

When I was a young(er) man...

I promised I would share with you my opinion of the IT profession in a previous blog.  In order to do that I thought I would give some insight into my initial foray into IT and why I decided to take that dive in the early 90's.

While in the military I worked at the Natick Labs in R&D, more specifically in USARIEM (United States Army Institute of Environmental Medicine).  My position there in the Bioengineering department had been vacant for some time and the work was piling up.  After serving little more than a month at the Pentagon I was transferred to this outpost in what would be my first exposure to the IT world (other than college computer labs which in the late 80's were old DEC systems you had to share time on, but that's another story.)

My primary job was to work with 4 other engineers (all of whom were civilians as I was the only military person attached to that particular section) to design and prototype one of a kind devices that were to be used in research that would help our soldiers in the field.  We had an altitude chamber and several climatic chambers at the facility. 

When I arrived, I was assigned my workstation, a SPARC system.  No PC, no Mac, a Sun workstation.  It was up to me to read the 30 manuals, put the machines together and start working on a backlog of projects.  By the time I had left there and moved on to the civilian world I was an expert in Unix, OpenWindows, Sun Hardware, TCP/IP and SNA, not to mention C programming.

I was hooked.  It didn't take me long to get recruited by IMI systems out of NYC who put me on the disaster recovery project at NYNEX in Manchester, NH.  I worked with some very talented people from Comdisco on the project to build a "hot site" for the phone company.  We planned, built and tested systems from Tandems, to STARS, to every flavor of Unix box running proprietary software built by the phone company.  We were truly solving problems.

After that experience I went to a Litle&Co a payment processor in Salem, NH (my first "startup").  It is here, again in IT where we helped companies like AOL, Swiss America, and Vermont Teddy Bear process their credit cart transactions before the advent of online payments and paypal.  It was exciting, people were motivated and our job in IT was to develop the systems that processed the payments, manage the data and connect new customers to the environment.  There was a blur between what was considered traditional (whatever that means) IT and professional services (in today's terms).

After Litle&Co, the founder who sold the company to First USA Bank for about $100M took 35 of us to start LitleNet.  Again, the line between IT and Outward facing was a bit gray.  Everyone understood the mission of the company and all were engaged in solving problems.

Fast forward to my experiences at Adaytum.  There I served as the head of global IT.  But our team did everything from building best practices labs, to customer implementations when utilization was out of control to me even personally taking "customers on fire" and managing implementations that were on the verge of going bad like Nokia and Cisco.  We didn't care that we were an IT department, our mission was to help the building and selling of software.

IT people up to that point were some of the most talented people I had the pleasure of working next to.  They were engaged, they took risks, they could look in the mirror and call themselves early adopters.  Then something happened on March 10th, 2000.  Anyone care to guess?  Do you know why the movie Office Space has such a huge following now, vs being a complete sleeper in 1999?

The lights came on and the roaches scattered...more later.

NWA Woes...Again.

Again, more woes for Northwest Airlines.  Living in the Twin Cities I don't have a choice but to be concerned about NWA's imminent bankruptcy.  They have a nice strangle hold on the Sky's in this area although the latest expansion of the HHH Terminal has provided the upstarts with ample gates.  Unless you live under a rock you should know by now that the NWA mechanics union went on strike after refusing to give in to managements request for additional concessions. 

"Northwest has been trying to wrest $176 million of annual labor savings from its mechanics in an effort to cut overall labor expense by $1.1 billion and end four years of losses. The company, which is the only airline among the five biggest in the U.S. that hasn't won concessions from most of its unions, has secured $300 million in givebacks from pilots and managers and is still in talks with flight attendants and bag handlers."

This statement is not true.  Years ago all of the employees of NWA made concessions to management.  The problem is that the company never kept their end of the bargain made in those days and are now asking for additional cuts from the workforce.

Now I'm no fan of Unions.  They're corrupt organizations that feed on corporate America at the expense of shareholders.  They do next to nothing for the people they represent.  This strike goes to show that they would rather NWA went out of business than to give in to the airline.  I watched the news as one union official stated "we would rather NWA went out of business than give into any more concessions"...you may just have your wish.

There is an easy albeit high level (uninformed about the airline industry) answer to this.  Look at the examples of the low cost (new airline) carriers.  Build some of that model into your legacy business model over time.  Here's my solution:

1. Cut back you number of flights (use less fuel, less maintenance, etc.) Cost side of the equation.  If you're losing money flying certain routes, don't fly them.
2. Go from 7 different aircraft to 3 like you competition.  Fly 737 or 757 domestic, 777 to Europe (like partner Continental) and 747 long-haul.  (substitute these aircraft for Airbus version if you want, I don't care).  Sell of the rest of the fleet.  This will reduce maintenance costs significantly by cutting the number of maintenance workers you need.
3. Outsource major overhaul operations (like Southwest).  Spin off your maintenance facilities in Minneapolis and Detroit.  It alone could be a profitable business with all of the upstarts needing these services.
4. Improve the quality of your flight experience.  Until recently, I always flew NWA.  But my experience over the last few years with flight attendants and ground staff has left me wondering if NWA even cared about it's customers or if they simply look at us as cattle.  Fly AirTran or JetBlue, not to mention Singapore Airlines and you'll understand the difference.
5. Speaking of flight attendants.  Get rid of those old, crusty, mean flight attendants.  I'm not advocating ageism, but they act as though they are doing me a favor by my being on their flight.  Get some younger flight attendants that are excited about a new career in the Sky's, not some crusty old woman who's ass hits you in the head because her hips are so wide she has to go down the aisle sideways.  Didn't there used to be standards?
6. Leg room.  No further comment.

I obviously don't have all, or any of the answers.  However, the trickle down effect of not giving a shit is pretty apparent at NWA.  Management doesn't care about the workers, the workers don't care about the airline and the airline definitely doesn't care about its passengers.  In the end I why should we care with all of the new choices.  Pan-Am, Northeastern, TWA, Branniff, and now NWA...Good bye.

 

Moved...almost

We moved into our new office space today.  It's more of a technology incubator than our own suite.  There are several other startups in the building and you can tell there is a lot of energy in the place when you walk in.  We still have to move printers, books, etc., but all of the paperwork is signed, key card, alarm code, and phone system is configured.

Time to close more business.

Million Dollar Infrastructure for $100 a month...

In my previous life (before starting BluIntelligence) I was/am an IT guy.  I was Director of Enterprise Software Development at my last company prior to their acquisition and Head of Global IT at a software company prior to that.  My life since 1991 revolved around developing and deploying large infrastructure projects.  Siebel, Oracle, JDE, SAP and Microsoft tools are all in my bag of tricks and I have an extensive network of contacts at all of  these companies, not to mention the scores of former employees I could call upon to help with projects.

So in January of this year when I decided to start my own company you'd think I would rely on what I learned from deploying all of these solutions wouldn't you?  The truth is, I did.  I chose none of them.  The secret to my Million bucks worth of infrastructure is not to make the mistakes I helped others make at both start-ups and fortune 500 companies.  For those of you starting your own company, here's my little secret.

Let someone else run your shop...sounds simple doesn't it?

I'll get into more detail in future posts, but this is what our infrastructure consists of today:

1. Email:  Hosted through ActiveHost.  We access our mail either pop3 or web-mail.
2. Web Hosting:  Hosted through ActiveHost
3. Application Hosting:  Hosted through ActiveHost.  Our application we run our business on is hosted at our same provider.
4. Customer Extranet:  We use BaseCamp.  Awesome tool to provide our deliverables and communicate with our customers.
5. Internal Applications:  For everything else we use JotSpot, my personal favorite (a Wiki).  It has our CRM system, our requirement management, our team project deliverables, and our primary collaboration tool.

As a start-up we have the same application any larger company would have without the servers (we do have a file server for local files), application management, data center, or network infrastructure.  We also consider ourselves more agile due to our environment choices.  We're moving into our new office space this week, which means we're moving printers and laptops, not an entire computing environment.

I've personally purchased and deployed all of the enterprise solutions mentioned above and can tell you from experience we have all of the functionality in our hosted products (out of the box) as we would have had if we had purchased Siebel, Oracle or SAP (out of the box).  Just to put the cost into perspective, at my last company I paid $264,000/year in maintenance to run Siebel and had a team of 5 developers who made between $70,000 to $100,000 a year.  On top of that the production environment had 13 servers (test had 6) and was running on Oracle databases and EMC storage.  (And that's just one application)

Joe Kraus (yeah, the Exite guy) who is the CEO of JotSpot makes the point very clear in his blog.  I'll take it one step further though, it's teams like Joe's and Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com who are driving our start-up costs and companies like ours down even more than what they're experiencing.

My most important point in all of this is that outsourcing your infrastructure and application needs to a company whos sole business is to manage them will allow you to get on with your core business. 

The key question is:  "If this is so great why aren't more companies doing this"?  The answer is very simple, FEAR.  I'll answer this in more detail as well as give you some insight into what has become of the IT profession since the bubble burst in future posts, it's shocking. 

Growth of Firefox

A recent article at bytestart.co.uk stated that the Firefox browser now has 8% marketshare (May Data).  As you may remember I wrote a blog in February that had Firefox at 5.7% with a quote from Microsoft essentially stating that it wasn't really a threat.  Wonder what they're saying now.  I predict they will have a 12% share by the end of this year.

BlogExplosion or BlogImplosion?

I decided to conduct an experiment after someone turned me on to BlogExplosion, a service that allows blog owners to accumulate point by viewing other blogs for 30 seconds, where 2 viewings equals 1 exposure of your blog to the community.  Before I used BlogExplosion I got a baseline of my current blog traffic which is about 50 readers a day.   Not great, but I know that most of these people subscride to the blog in some form or another and send me emails occasionally.

I signed up for the service and started reading other blogs while my blog was being certified.  A day later, I'd accumulated over 100 point and got a chance to read some good blogs I'd never have been exposed to normally.  I activated my blog and started getting hits on my blog.  By August 9th, the day I turned off the service because it was so difficult to accumulate points and read others content at the same time I had 187 visits for the day.

The problem with this service is that with a 2 to 1 read to exposure rate, you can't truly appreciate other content enough and simply wait for the 30 second timer to count down.  After turning off (pausing the service) my blog, I noticed in subsequent days that my readership did not, in fact, increase.  My stats on Typepad didn't change one bit and my bookmarks on BlogExplosion totaled 1.

It could be that my blog really sucks, it could be the fact that I don't get a chance to update it daily (although I try) but I didn't see the impact everyone else was forecasting in the BlogExplosion community.  I think that most don't read the blogs, they simply wait for the 30 second timer to pass so they can click through and accumulate .5 points.  Cannibalism at its finest. 

Although a great concept (and one I intend to continue to use because there is some stuff out there worth reading), but BlogExplosion is the Amway of the blogging community, you have to consume your own product in order to acquire more "readers" who in turn must do the same.  I look forward to what they will offer next.  I've decided to activate (unpause) my blog on BlogExplosion once a week, that way I can read all of the blogs that attract my attention and accumulate "points" for exposure for the one day I go live.  What a great scheme.

Microsoft Wipes out Apple

Courtesy of NG Khai Computer Solutions...

Look at these two images.

Now I don't have Mappoint, so I couldn't verify this, but rumor has it (and it could be a old or even false rumor) that some smart ass(es) at Microsoft put an old satellite image of the Apple Campus in their product versus the latest photo.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but it sure is a bit humorous.

Mozilla goes commercial

No I don't have a problem with the boys at Mozilla forming the Mozilla corporation.  Now I didn't contribute one line of code to the "free" products but do use Firefox exclusively as my browser.  I'm one of those users that would pay $20-$30 to continue to use and get upgrades of the browser.  I don't think I've opened IE in months and Safari is somewhat limited in functionality, not to mention support in the web community (Can't use our Jotspot wiki with it). 
Time will tell if there is any backlash from the community of developers and advocates, some of who believe that software should be free.  I would tell them to be reasonable, remember when WebEx was free?  Some would sat that it's like comparing apples to oranges since WebEx was always in the business of making money.  But if the visionaries at Mozilla can break into the Microsoft dominated browser world and gain a significant market share, I say let those smart guys form a company and bring great products to market.  If they're as good as their free products I'll pay for it, if not they'll go the pets.com way.  Either way, give them a fair shake.