Archives for October 2007

The Zombie PC

October 31, 2007 Leave a Comment

Ah, Halloween. The day that all the ghosts, goblins, and zombies come out. Unfortunately for a co-worker of mine, today was the day that his Windows laptop become a zombie. He flew across the country to spend a day working on a customer deliverable with members of the team that are based out here in San Francisco, only to spend at least 2 hours today trying to get his Windows XP laptop to work correctly.

I thought this was a timely, as this morning I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that talked about the 50 Gigabytes of crash data that Microsoft can receive in a day from Windows users who click the “tell Microsoft about this problem” button when something crashes on their systems. Luckily for the poor Microsoft engineers who have to sift through this data, my co-worker didn’t click that button at all today.

All of this made me appreciate my MacBook an the MacOS even more. Even with the reports of installation bugs in the latest upgrade of MacOS, I can’t fathom going back to my old Windows system. While traveling, I don’t even give it another thought as I sit down next to fellow business traveler on a plane and open my MacBook, have it wake from sleep, I login and start working in under 10 seconds while they are waiting for their computers to startup.

In the little over two months that I have been using my new MacBook–wow, it’s only been just over two months, it feels like so much longer–I have not had it crash once. Ok, well…that might not be technically true. It did technical crash this morning…I was actually shutting the computer down to swap batteries when the system encountered some error and I got the “your system encountered an error, please manually power down” message. I don’t count this because it didn’t effect my productivity (I was already shutting down the system). This was actually during one of the zombie moments my co-worker was dealing with and I was rebooted, and back to productive work before he stopped his cursing…the system still wasn’t working.

And I don’t even know how many times I have put this system to sleep during this period. I would conservatively estimate 100+ times since I receive it. As so many others who have made the switch, it just works. I could never say that about my old Windows system, especially with regards to putting it to sleep! This being said, I’m still taking the pragmatic approach of waiting for the next patch release of Leopard before upgrading…even thought some of the features like spaces will be just improve my productivity even more.

I haven’t spent much time writing about my switch because, quite honestly, I’ve been too busy getting work done. It’s gotten to the point where it just seems natural to rely and even depend on my computer just working. Today’s events just reminded me of how fortunate I am (and surprises me at how foolish corporate IT departments are at undervaluing their employees time by not considering the Mac as a technology platform).

Love my Mac…and I can’t afford to go back!

Side Box: One issue that is a bit annoying, mostly because of the battery drain it causes when I’m traveling, is the CPU over cycling that Firefox seems to have on the Mac. I used Firefox exclusively on my old PC and never noticed a constant CPU consumption issue. With Firefox on the Mac, it always seems to be using 10% or more of the CPU time on the computer. Even when Firefox is hidden from view and there is nothing running in the windows. Very frustrating as I always seem to have about 6-10 web site tabs open to various things that I’m working on or reading. So when I travel, this constant background CPU noise shortens my battery life by a noticeable amount.I haven’t had a chance to research this yet, so if any one knows a solution to this please share!

Beyond the Software Consolidations

October 22, 2007 Leave a Comment

Today I came across an interesting posting from Chris Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI, about Consolidations in the Software Industry. He makes some interesting observations about recent consolidations in the technology industry amongst the “next 40” (the largest 40 software/services companies after Microsoft). He also points out the next set of acquisition targets from that same set.

Predictions are always hard to make (and harder to look at years later). But out of Schneider’s next acquisitions, I have my own set of thoughts I wanted to share.

Sybase, Tibco, BMC and CA – I actually don’t see these companies being acquired. While there are some interesting technologies that they all own (BMC and CA have a diverse collection of tools…both old and new), at a cursory glance there is nothing immediately compelling within them to make them acquisition targets.
Cognos and Citrix – These could be acquisition targets from someone.
- Citrix has application virtualization and acceleration technology that might be interesting to someone; as long as their other applications are of interest or could be easily disposed of.
- Cognos is interesting to those who are looking to acquire customers in the BI space (maybe combining with Sybase?)
Red Hat and Adobe – I don’t see these two being acquired (or wanting to be)
- Red Hat – If Red Hat were to be acquired, I fear that the open source world might start to swing in a completely different direction. I don’t see Red Hat letting that happen.
- Adobe – They have an interesting mix of products that makes them much more unique than these other companies. Their combination of enterprise and end use solutions make them an interesting company to watch in the next few years.

Even more interesting than focusing on these acquisitions, is focusing on the companies that aren’t getting acquired. These are the companies that we don’t hear about that exist below the radar threshold. Small companies that are profitable, doing interesting if not exciting stuff in very focused or niche markets. I know of a number of companies like this that were boot strapped by their founders, grown to impressive revenue numbers, and still kept private and focused on providing value to their customers and their employees.

Some of these companies get acquired every now and then and pop up above the radar level. But the more interesting thing is how many stay down where they are. Perhaps this is part of the maturing of the High Tech industry that has been in process for a while. The development of High Tech business leaders that are in the business for something more than the quick buck or the big bang.

Whole Foods Teaches IT Customer Service

October 3, 2007 Leave a Comment

Lately, in my discussions with IT executives as well as small and medium sized technology company executives the topics of Open Source and Software as a Service (SaaS) customer services has been coming up. It seems that some Open Source ans SaaS providers have lost sight of the importance of the Customer. I have heard of SaaS providers that provide a level of self-support in the, now standard, form of Community Forums but fail to actively participate in the community themselves. I have also heard stories of Open Source users contacting the Open Source provider for support, even willing to pay for onsite consulting, but being ignored unless they purchase a multi-year support contract first.

It appears that the Technology business models may have changed, but many business are still operating the same. Regardless of their size or type, the executives behind these technology companies need to relearn a basic premise of business: you only exist for the customer; without the customer the business doesn’t make money and you don’t get paid. I might be a bit more sensitive to this than most due to my entrepreneurial spirit and constant contact with customers as part of a sales team. But some of the stories that I heard start to border on the level of astonishment in regards to how these companies have ignored their customers.

Maybe these software executives should take a lesson from Whole Foods.

Now before you think I’ve flipped, listen to this story of customer support that I experienced tonight. My wife was shopping at whole foods and when she got home realized that the checkout clerk had not given her the packages of meat that she purchased. When I ran back to the story to pick up the package at the Customer Service desk, the clerk who helped me was sincerely apologetic and also gave me a bag of chocolate chip cookies for my troubles.

When you look at this at the surface, you realize that this is the type of response one would expect from a business focused on keeping a loyal customer. All jokes about “Whole Paycheck” aside, I’m sure the clerk wasn’t even thinking about how much money we spend at Whole Foods regularly or about the $60 we spent there that day. She wasn’t thinking about the fact that the free bag of cookies (which costs $5.50) was almost 10% of the value of the groceries we bought that day. What she was thinking about was just keeping a customer happy and making amends when the business as a whole made a mistake.

Now translate that same thinking to the much more business savy technology industry. When an executive in an Open Source firm doesn’t want to send a consultant out to a user of that company’s Open Source software for a paid engagement (typical rates run between $2000 and $3500 per day) because the user doesn’t have a support contract (which typically runs between $20,000 and $40,000) who is the executive focusing on? Obviously not the best interests of their company.

Here is a chance to show a prospect the level of support you can provide…while getting paid for it…and earn the right to sell the customer a support contract. It’s earning 10% now in order to earn 100% later…who wouldn’t do that? It’s possible that there were absolutely no one available who could provide this consulting. Possible…but customer focused companies always seem to find someone who can wear multiple hats or be re-prioritized to earn a new customer. So, if the executive wasn’t focusing on what’s best for their company or what’s best for the customer…who or what were they focusing on?

Maybe some of the software executives behind some Open Source and SaaS companies should step out of their offices and into the real world once in a while. They could start out simple, lets say Business 101, by actually going out and visiting a customer and learning what’s it like in their customer’s environments. And if they really want to challenge themselves by taking Business 201, they could try working for a while at Whole Foods…