Dreamforce 2012 - Networking Tangents & the Mysterious Account Manager

With Dreamforce fast approaching, schedules are getting filled and calendars are getting booked. After several years of using the Salesforce.com platform and attending Dreamforce, one of the things that strikes me as quite funny is who uses the opportunity to meet with you and who does not. Sure, there's a long line of partners and other vendors who are anxious to meet you, but what about the Salesforce.com account manager and the staff that you actually work with -- theoretically...

Over the past years, I've had three account managers try to make arrangements to meet with me. Or rather, I've had two account managers try to meet with me during the event and one arrange a meeting/presentation near the end. At the same time, the two account managers who I did meet with have since moved on to work with Salesforce.com partners. Funny thing is, they continue to meet with me and probably will meet with me again this year.

Contrast that with some of the other account managers I've had to deal with over the years. These are the guys who consider sending a template bulk email as a customer touch. Some of these guys seem more focused on selling tickets to Dreamforce than to understanding our account. This is typically magnified by Salesforce.com's insistence on shuffling account managers every year.

One year, I was invited to a group reception event by my account rep -- a guy who I never met in person. In addition to not meeting him at the reception, I also didn't meet the 'customer success manager' that I was previously introduced to by email. In fact, the only person from Salesforce that I did meet was a nice account rep handling very small accounts in the Southwest. And, even though it seemed like I was sort of 'in the way' of her gathering with her colleagues and friends, she was still thoughful enough to chat and discuss my account with me. I found it a bit ironic.

Sometimes it makes you want to send a note:

Dear Mr. Benioff,
Here's one big reason why your product isn't a success in our account -- for as much know-your-customer as I would expect from one of the most amazing software products that I've used, you guys really don't seem to understand us, to interact with us, to have a strategic plan for our account...

But perhaps this is the larger aspect of the SaaS pyramid. When you're down at the base, you look a lot like scraps.

Ramp up to Dreamforce2012

We're closing in on that time of year again. Time for the clouds to come out and take over the city. It's the time when the wind swirls with marketing hype, where we stare up into the sky and dream about the possibilities. Visions of globally connected enterprises. Social work environments. Happy customers. Sales. More sales. And growth -- oh, glorious growth.

I know what you're thinking, "the political conventions came and went." Sadly, politics these days seems rather devoid of hope and vision. Or the promise of real innovation -- sort of like Oracle OpenWorld. Kidding.

But seriously, we're about a week away from Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual festival of technology summit meets dog-and-pony on steroids. It's 'the world is flat' with some marketing hype, the leading edge of enterprise software with some marketing hype. It's also parties and crowds -- amazing, exciting crowds. The crowds are a living, breathing answer to all of those skeptics in IT who said things like, "but really, who is using it?"

This year looks to be even more amazing (as you can expect a week of Benioff repeating), with sessions spread out over Moscone and hotels from the Palace to Union Square, the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Civic Center Plaza, and two or three after-hours block parties. At this point, the hotels in the city are sold out and you're hard pressed to find anything closer than San Mateo. Expect traffic in San Francisco to suck next week.

Sadly, as someone who has been to a few of these, I also know about the hangover. I know about the return to the real world, full of skeptics and naysayers. The return to real world problems like web-to-lead spam and the never-ending 'we can monetize that' parsing of services you've been used to having free access to for a long time. The joys of trying to overcome the unengaged account manager. I know that when I go back to the office on Monday, it will be another Monday, not the day that everything changed.

In that way, the experience is kind of funny. Whenever you get such a large crowd together with everyone focused on the same core topic, it's hard not to be excited, to feel pulled in and part of something larger. But organizational change -- enterprise change -- is a massive effort. It's a religious conversion that requires a baptismal tsunami.

But maybe this is the year when the technology and the cloud have become so mainstream that the writing is on the wall. Maybe this is the year that the waters surge. I know what you're thinking, but I can't help it -- I'm getting kind of excited.

The Problem with Mobile Advertising

We've talked about it in the past, but here's a piece on Gigaom with actual data about how mobile advertising doesn't work: Report: 40 percent of mobile ad clicks are fraud or accidents is worth a read.

The Right Product in a Copycat World

So have a ruling that Samsung copied Apple. And yet, if you went to your local wireless store today, there are still Samsung phones for sale. But even if there is an injunction, you'll still see a market for what are, essentially, iPhone knock-offs. Is this whole thing just another example of billionaire on billionaire crime? Should you care?

It's similar to when somebody comes back from a trip to China and says, "look at this amazing copy of an iPhone accessory that I found for less than a dollar." Typically, it only takes a couple of days for them to be reminded of the difference between their knock off and a full priced version. Caveat emptor, right?

Me, I try not to subsidize copycats. I always feel a twinge of disappointment when people talk about buying fake Rolex watches or other brand-based knock-offs. I mean, think about it -- here is something, a brand, that the buyer applies some level of value to. And yet, they would spend money on a copy, a mimic. It's like a discount against their own values. It's basically saying that the brand doesn't bring some sort of tangible, value add in terms of function or form -- they simply want the cosmetic benefit of being associated to that brand. It would be like me walking around with a cardboard cut-out of a supermodel and telling people that she is my mistress. Or, accounting for variations in quality and a really good knock-off, perhaps a celebrity impersonator. 

Seriously though. Imagine if someone made an exceptional watch with the quality of a Rolex at a fraction of the price, but it was called 'knock-off-ex' and it wasn't a copy? How many people do you think would jump at the chance to buy one in the back alleys and the night markets? There's an ironic twist in there somewhere.

The Hidden Cost of Creating Your Own Copycats
Some premium brands actually undercut their own value when they make their own knock-offs. Whether it's those low-cost, consumer-grade product lines or the products that they make specifically for their outlet stores, when premium brands dilute their line, they also dilute the real weight of their influence in selling the value proposition.

Remember in the months before Apple launched the iPad? At that time, all of the PC manufacturers were selling netbooks, those sub-$500 notebooks that could sort of run Windows. Everyone kept saying to Apple, "your products are too expensive, you'll never compete with netbooks. When are you going to offer a netbook?" Apple and Steve Jobs kept saying, "no, the netbook is a stupid idea -- it's a sucky product with no margin." And when they introduced the iPad, the initial reviews were basically, "it's not a netbook. It doesn't have any of the ports or expandability of a notebook. This thing sucks."

But what Apple essentially said with it's product line was, "when you're looking for something that does what a computer does, then you need this, this and this. We're not designing a luxury product, we're designing 'The Right' product."

The iPad is not differentiated on quality -- a low end computer with a cheap processor and low-end components -- it's a mobile device designed specifically for what it does. Features like integrated accelerometers are not something that you would find on a netbook or a notebook, but they were essential to making the iPhone and iPad successful as a gaming platform. Apple maintains a harmonious message about what you need because your experience with it tells you that the iPad is something completely different.

Republicans, Music and Burning Man

Is it just me, or does it seem like an odd coincidence that the Republican convention will end right before Burning Man? How many of the convention-goers are headed from Tampa to the playa? I actually found this video clip from the Republican convention, but I think that the source is mislabeled.

Apple v Samsung - The Verdict: Copycats and Knock-offs

So the verdict in San Jose is in and Samsung was found to be willfully infringing on Apple's patents. For detailed coverage, All Things D has a great Apple v Samsung summary page of the trial and links to several jury-member interviews. For an in-depth explanation and analysis of the patents and the legal proceedings, I think that Foss Patents is unparalleled.

Reactions to the Verdict
As you might expect with any contested issue, you can get find different voices. Marketplace found people in Korea who simply expected a home field advantage verdict -- Apple wins because they are local and they employ lots of people here. All Things D had a quote from a guy from Microsoft talking about how it was a win for Windows Phone. Kara Swisher captured a rather amusing interpretation of Google's response.

Samsung tries to spin this as, "a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer" and a case about giving "one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners," this reality is far from that. One look at the details of the case and the patents involved will lead most people to the same conclusion. But like much of modern politics and media engagement, Samsung seems to believe that if it can win the PR battle, that the facts will rewrite themselves.

If you read through the jury interviews, you'll find that the jury really wanted to find examples of prior art. Apparently, it made the first day of deliberation a rather heated one. But, in the end, they found that there was overwhelming evidence.

Perhaps the most interesting analysis of the verdict that I came across was from Farhad Manjoo on PandoDaily. Copying Works: How Samsung’s Decision to Mimic Apple Paid Off in Spades is a thoughtful analysis of how Samsung's decision to copy Apple was a successful business strategy.

His post is a great read -- he tells the story well -- but it's also rather amusing to read the comments. It's eerily reminiscent of the old Mac v PC back and forth. Perhaps the real lesson here is that, for all of those Apple evangelists, there are an equal number of anti-Apple wackos, the Tea Party nuts of the technology world. For them, the idea that Apple wins and that people copied Apple designs is kind of like the whole black president thing -- a travesty. Or a conspiracy.

Show me the prototype. Are you going to tell me that your 'computer' doesn't resemble the one from 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The other thing which I think that Farhad really captures with his post is that, while the penalty for violating Apple's patents may seem steep in a consumer sense of scale, when you compare that to the business that Samsung has been able to build, the actual amount is peanuts. It's certainly not a disincentive. Samsung will be fine. They will move forward with new phones that don't violate the letter of Apple's patents, but they will remain competitors. First they mimic, then they evolve.

Tales from the Copycat Hall of Fame
In the technology industry, there have always been copycats. Remember when Huawei was trying to compete in the telecom space and their new switch product bore a remarkable resemblance to a Cisco switch -- right down to duplicate bugs and the Cisco name in the Huawei product manual? Sure a settlement was reached. It goes without saying that within their territory, governments can dictate the terms that businesses operate under -- sometimes those terms can be nationalistic -- but that's not really the point here.

The real point is that, nearly a decade later, both companies continue to sell products. Many customers, partners and/or whatever-else continue to do business with them. They did not get a Scarlet "C" to wear on their business cards. There may have been a period of 'lost face', but that faded. Whatever traditional business rules that they may have violated, their violations weren't so heinous that other businesses refuse to do business with them.

Of course, if you're a start-up, remember... don't try this at home. The penalties for robbing a bank like Bonnie and Clyde are far more serious than the penalties for stealing millions and causing a complete financial system collapse. Do that, and you're probably 'too big to fail".

Apple v Samsung: Internet Time meets Kickin it Old School

One of the realities of the world in Internet time is that copies are generated in a fraction of a second following the introduction of the original. Take location-based check-in as an example. Following the smart phone and location awareness, applications like Loopt explored the idea of knowing where all of your friends were. While many of us found this creepy, somebody thought that a better way might be one in which you voluntarily let your friends know where you were -- and check-in was born. There was Foursquare and a bunch of others that are gone now, then when Facebook and Yelp saw the interest those companies got, they added the feature to their software. Eventually, it got to the point where it wasn't a question of whether or not you were checking in, but more about what platform. And then we all got tired and it went away.

And through it all, we might have had conversations about whether Facebook or Yelp were copying Foursquare, but there was no patented stake in the ground that said, "this company came up with the concept of check-in, and everyone else is copying their stuff." Location-based check-in wasn't reallty even possible until we all started carrying geo-aware smart phones.

This type of stylistic feature copying is rampant on the web. It's common in art, music and literature. You might say that his art is like Dali, my writing is like Carlos Castaneda, that Justin Bieber sings like Melissa Ethridge, or that that snare drum sounds just like it was recorded in the eighties.

Along those same lines, one of the common copy discussions in the valley surrounds Zynga and how they rose up building games that were similar to games that other companies had produced. Take Words With Friends as an example. It's basically online Scrabble without the trademark. And Words With Friends isn't the only Scrabble-like game you can find on the iTunes App Store. There are dozens of similar games, if not more. As a game framework, Scrabble is over fifty years old. First person shooter and resource-based simulators are younger, but they are also more of a framework than a game. For many of these games, re-skinning the game is the game. Now, instead of your shooting character being a soldier, he is a bear or a squirrel. His targets are nuts or plasma-generating space turtles. And his weapons are a coffee grinder and a flaming, greasy spatula. And so you have thousands of games and copies.

Apple v. Samsung and the Patented World of the OS
With their vendor partnership, Samsung and Apple have a unique relationship. In August 2010, Apple met with Samsung to warn the company of the patents that believed that they were infringing. This All Things D post provides a nice summary, but if you want to check out the presentation, here's the link.

What I found noteworthy about this presentation is, I believe, a bit under-represented in the coverage of the trial. Specifically, as you go through this presentation, you'll find patents for technology that go back to 1992. Many aspects of the iPhone OS actually go back to innovations that were first developed for the desktop OS. What's more, when you reflect back on the idea and remember the technology of the time, you can see how something that seems almost like a trivial addition in the desktop world can be transformational in the smart phone environment. Perhaps prescient. Visionary.

Take one example of the patents in the Apple presentation, rotating the display orientation of a captured image (p35 of the file). The patent was filed back in 1996. My expectation is that this was filed in conjunction with those monitors that you could rotate. It's a not-particularly noteworthy feature that was primarily useful in the world of desktop publishing and too small monitors. And yet, coupled with the iPhone, it makes the display seem natural. Obvious. But before the iPhone, mobile devices didn't change orientation. There was only one up on a phone. But it didn't need to change orientation because it had a physical keyboard that told a clear story of bottom and top -- rotating didn't make sense.

Looking through Apple's patent presentation, you can see how the iPhone is culmination of 35 years of computer and OS development. It's the union of all of those sophisticated, thoughtful features that made an Apple an Apple -- that Windows users might have said, "didn't matter". It is not just a phone or another consumer device, it's personal computing transformed into a consumer-accessible mobile platform. It's a computer that makes you forget you're running a phone software application and tricks you into believing you're using a phone. In that same way, many of Apple's patents aren't simply something innovative approaches to a phone -- they're really computing innovations.

The iPhone and the Shot that Started the Revolution
Remember back in the days before the iPhone? At that time, the battle for the consumer market centered around the television. The television was going to be the intersection between the web and consumer. It was TVs. It was set-top boxes. It was smart media players like Blu-Ray. Nobody expected the iPhone to be the device that changed everything. Until it did.

Most consumer electronics companies don't develop their own operating system (most might even be an understatement). In that same way, many of the sophisticated functional elements that run underneath the hood of the iPhone are simply beyond the scope of their capabilities.

Now, I'm not a patent attorney, nor am I involved in the Apple v Samsung trial. But for me, this presentation was a compelling reminder of the difference between the original idea and the copy.