Moving On: Tales from Silicon Valley Lost

We've reached the end of 2013 and it's been a year filled with changes. In my world, one of the bigger changes underway is moving. It's with some melancholy that I find myself leaving Mountain View and the apartment where I've lived in since 1995. And, as we wrap up the year with packing, sorting, and throwing away things that have accumulated over the years, I find myself looking back over the years and the changes that we've been through.

There are many different reasons people move, but in one respect, there are really just two rather polar kinds of moves. One, where you find yourself launching into a new world, embarking on new adventures. And the other, where the ground beneath you drops away and you find yourself falling towards your new destination. One is full of hope and optimism. The other carries the sense of loss, of unrealized opportunities and unfulfilled dreams.

When I first moved back to the Bay Area back in 1991, I came out here with a handful of clothes, a sleeping bag, my bicycle and my electric guitar -- my amplifier got lost in the Greyhound luggage process. And now, twenty years later among all of the other stuff I need to move, I find myself with two bikes, a third frame, tons of loose bike parts, four guitars, an amp, various music electronics, and two sleeping bags with a host of associated camping gear.

The items that we accumulate all seem so important and necessary at the time. And yet, they can feel like such a burden when, looking back, you are faced with the reality that you haven't touched them in years. Even then, it's hard to let go of something when your mind tells you that you might use that again if you just get the right window of time. Even in the present day, it's hard to measure utility in your imagination.

Marking the Passage of Time
The great purge of stuff is a reminder of the many changes that have taken place over the years. Having experienced the desktop publishing revolution, the Internet, and then the cloud and Web 2.0, you can almost track the history of technology in the five or six outdated computers that I've had to get rid of. During the move, I finally decided to let go of my old Macintosh Quadra 840av. While I'd used school and work computers for several years before then, the 840av marked the first computer that I owned (not including the old Timex). Innovative for what it was at the time, it featured an on-board DSP to accelerate processes like Photoshop filters. It could also be used as a software modem when coupled with a Geoport adapter. I think it was the last of Apple's 68-series processor Macs. You can also mark all of the technologies that have gone away since that system: floppy drives, SCSI drives, the Apple display connector, modems, dial-up, and the capacity -- my iPhone has more storage than that system ever had, even with both of it's hard drives and the Syquest drives that I used to depend on.

And then there's the story told through the software. Stacks and stacks of original install floppy disks. Variations on desktop publishing tools -- Quark, Pagemaker, Freehand and Illustrator, software to rip Postscript on an inkjet printer so that you could proof your work. And who could forget all of the software from Kai Krause -- while the Internet generation still uses Photoshop and may have heard of Kai's Power Tools, few of them probably remember the days when he was a rock star at Macworld or the Seybold Conference. And then, there were all of my other software tools, the 3D rendering software packages, the various generations of Fractal Design Painter, software that no longer runs on the current OS versions, even as the processing power has dwarfed it's requirements. It's ironic that my old set of water colors has retained more utility.

Looking back at marketing, there are all of those things that used to be important but matter so much less now. Take printing -- having finished shredding documents that amounted to more than 12 trashbags of paper and materials, there's part of me that doesn't want to produce another piece of paper ever again. And graphic design -- in the world of web publishing, with A/B testing and SEO, I always try to explain that aesthetics takes a back seat to performance, measured analytically. Or tradeshows, most of which struggle to bring a fraction of the attendees that they might have 15 years ago -- why go to a tradeshow when you can get better information on the web? For every one of these, there are a host of companies in the support chain that have faded or disappeared, jobs that have come and gone.

Sometimes you hold onto the bits and pieces of stuff, the props for that moment you imagine when you can tell that story, "here is how this idea came together." And then when you find yourself looking at the pieces 15 years later and realizing that, not only is there no audience for your message, the medium is obsolete and the industry is gone.

A Home is not a House
For all of the changes in technology and industry, time has brought a cultural shift here that feels like a deeper loss. In many ways, the notion of community is gone -- ironic when you consider how frequently that term is used in social network software. You might argue that it's just me looking through the lens of time, but there is more too it than that.

Take the story of my apartment complex as an example. When we first moved there, way back when, there was a strong community there. There was a mix of young professionals and older residents, with a significant percentage of the community that were, by some apartment standards, long term residents. And they weren't long term residents because of rent control or they were trapped by the terms of a lease; they were there because it was a good place to call home.

The resident manager at that time was also a long term resident who lived there like she was part of the community. Several years after I'd moved in, I worked at a start-up with a guy who'd lived in the complex before I'd moved there and before he'd bought a house. He remembered the complex and the resident manager fondly. This is the essence of word of mouth.

But sometime around 2006 or so, they brought in a new resident manager. Instead of participating in the community, she managed the place like a gun-for-hire-CEO. Locked in her office and only accepting limited audience during business hours, she ran around the complex like Eric Cartman, making up rules and trying to impose her authorit-eh. She seemed to be on a strategic campaign to alienate and run all of the long term residents out of the community. In the months before we left, she forced us into new rental agreement terms and my roommate said she was threatening to give us a 60-day eviction notice sometime in early 2014. The business shifted to a bare-bones customer service model with outsourced facilities management. They're goal shifted to customer churn.

In that way, leaving the apartment was a mixed blessing. While aspects of it stand as home with the familiarity and foundation that you know; given the choice, I would not move there today. Nor would I wish it upon someone else. Their management strategy hasn't just destroyed the community, it's shifted to slum-lord. Sure, there is now modern exercise equipment in the exercise room, but it's window-dressing on a product that no longer includes support for plumbing, appliances, carpets, or any of the other things that there were once included. No, I wouldn't recommend it, nor would I wish it on anyone.

It's difficult to explain the how the culture has changed in one simple example. Everything that seems so broken could also be explained through the lens of progress. More density could be more housing available. Crowded bike cars and overwhelmed trains could also be more people taking public transportation. More people from different places could be more diversity. It reminds me of a discussion about the (now long gone) San Jose Live. "I like it because there are so many different types of people there," said one. "Aren't they all really the same type of people," said the other. 

It's Getting Ugly Here
We have a lot of names for it -- or aspects of it. Sometimes it's gentrification, sometimes it's income inequality, and sometimes it's just the Google Bus. It's often defined by the fashionable places to live and centers where there are jobs. In the late eighties/early nineties, that was Scott's Valley. Most of the people clamoring to live in the City now probably don't remember the period when rents in San Francisco were lower than the desirable places in the South Bay.

Two or three times in the past month, there have been reports of people in San Francisco and Oakland protesting the Google Bus. They've stood in front of them, yelled at the people inside -- even thrown a rock through one in Oakland. San Francisco is talking about charging all of these non-city transports $10 per stop for using -- and blocking -- the official city-operated bus stops.

Them and Us
In the early days of the Google Bus, it seemed like an interesting solution to a broader problem. At the time, there were still a lot really smart software people living in the city, working at start-ups, freelancing, and telecommuting. These were the people that preferred lofts and crowds to the quiet life in the Mountain View area. In those days, the bus seemed like a convenient solution -- picking people like that up, giving them a ride down 101, provide wifi and eliminate a bunch of cars. After all, when you think about how long it took for Caltrain to allow bikes on the train, it might be decades before they made power or wifi available.

But the Google Bus has expanded like crazy. And the animosity has grown. Nobody perceives these companies as local companies. It's not like the old days of factory towns, hiring locals, creating jobs, and generating wealth in the local economy. The tech companies -- as championed by Google's great hiring-only-from-top-schools-with-top-degrees-and-GPAs-philosophy and echoed in other factors like the H1b Visa -- hire people from other places and they drop them here. Instead of being members in one community or another, the various tech workers seem more like gypsies in both their community of residence and their community of work. Your neighbor didn't get hired by Google, but they might have been supplanted by someone that works at Google. 

Home is not a House -- Even if the Rent is Too Damned High
Sarah Lacy at Pandodaily just published this post pointing to the issue as a San Francisco housing problem. While I agree with aspects of her article -- there is a problem with housing and density -- I still believe that there is an aspect of the culture that is eating our area like a virus.

Housing prices have always been high here. In 1992, for the rent that I was paying for my one bedroom apartment, I could have lived in a large, three or four bedroom house back in Memphis. And while the senior management at the Semiconductor company that I worked for all owned beautiful houses in Saratoga, Los Gatos, and the San Jose hills, for most of the employees, owning a house was a stretch goal, something that was always a couple of steps out of reach, waiting for a financial windfall. So, while most of us weren't buying houses in Palo Alto, Atherton, or Los Altos Hills there was still a sufficiently affordable apartment community to support living here and making it home. Life on the edge, riding the start-up wave from rise to collapse wasn't a problem -- you simply needed to accumulate enough resources to carry you through until the next wave.

Years ago, one of the reasons why I moved to the Bay Area was that there were a lot of opportunities to work and build a life here. In some ways, this is the story behind the story. While we like to see the world through all of the exciting opportunities that we have here in the Bay Area, what's missing in the story is the collapse of opportunities elsewhere. Years ago, for people living here in the crowded and expensive bay area, there were still significant job options in the Sacramento area where you could go, afford a big house, and still be paid well and respected for your skills.

But these days, the economic collapse of everywhere has been profound. It's hard to fault someone for wanting a job and needing to go where the jobs are. But it seriously frustrating to sit and watch the politicians from other regions of the country stand on the throat of the economy and choke the life out of the economy -- or any potential recovery. Adding insult to injury, these are often the same ones that, standing at the threshold of the collapse, mocked California for the state's financial situation, mock the Bay Area for its culture. Their doctrine and practice is closely interwoven into the broader economic collapse.

Mark Zuckerberg and the Treasure of the Lost Temple of Pets.com
There is a mythology that hangs over Silicon Valley, driven by the days of the dot-com era. It is a dream, sold around the world and perpetuated by movies like The Social Network, Bravo TV's Start-ups: Silicon Valley, or even Amazon's Betas (a show I actually find amusing) -- you move to the Bay Area, work at a start-up, go through an IPO, and be rich. Except, in the media the work usually involves a whole lot less work and a whole lot more parties, Nerf-gun wars and fun -- but success is always big. And it's punctuated by a lot of scenic B-roll footage of San Francisco. 

Sarah Lacy's comment on the Bravo show touches on the broader trend that has shaped the Bay Area in many ways:

But I was wrong about one thing: I dreaded that it could unleash a “Wall Street”-like torrent of wantrentrepreneur douchebags flooding Silicon Valley. Turns out it won’t, because no one watched the horrid mess.

The reality is that, going back to the dot-com era, from the very moment that people started shouting out, "there's gold in that there valley", our area has been deluged with "we're only in it for the money" douchebags and the people that look up to them as fashionable. It's those people that read the Steve Jobs story and only see the businessman, where so many of the other aspects of him -- designer, scholar, hippie -- are more fundamental to the essence of our Bay Area culture.

Today's Silicon Valley grows increasingly intolerant not because we don't like different; rather, the greed-heads exploit the mythology of Silicon Valley to alienate us and crowd us out of the places that we like to think of as our home.

Save Silicon Valley Before all is Lost
It used to be that when you saw all of the new housing going up, you thought -- finally, with a few more houses, maybe things around here will be more affordable. It never quite works out that way. In the years following the economic collapse, many homes around here sat empty, closed by foreclosure, locked out of the market waiting not for long term local residents, but rather for the return of the speculators and the deep pockets of new money descending on the area. When new construction is goes up, most is houses and condos -- not apartments -- because strip-mine-style extraction of cash is easier than building a long-term residential apartment business.

Are we building new schools? Are we building new transportation lines? Are we adding transportation infrastructure options like more frequent trains on our existing systems like Caltrain? No. Because this isn't about making the area better for everyone around here. It's about exploiting the existing market, extracting cash, and moving on.

To quote Hunter S. Thompson from his mayoral race in Aspen, "change the name Aspen, Colorado to Fat City. This would prevent greed heads, land rapers, and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name ‘Aspen’. These swine should be f–ked, broken, and driven across the land."

Maybe we should consider rebranding Silicon Valley as 'Fat Valley'.

Google Glass - Here Comes Trouble

I must say, I was reading through the news headlines today and I came across this tidbit about somebody getting arrested in a movie theater for wearing Google Glass. Of course, it's one of those surprising stories that isn't all that surprising.

These days, it's difficult to go for more than a few days without hearing yet another story about someone wearing Google Glass and getting into trouble -- trouble that's a result of wearing Google Glass. From the woman that got busted for driving while wearing Google Glass, to people in bars and even people in the bathroom, people wear the device and trouble quickly becomes their next fashion accessory.

I have to wonder whether this is the kind of pre-launch product coverage that you want to have. Unlike the early hype on Google+ (before people really got a chance to use it), I'm not running into people that are anxiously anticipating owning the product. In that way, if these kinds of stories were post-launch, it might seem more like a "News of the Weird" episode than an ominous harbinger of unexpected problems.

In that way, I'm hard pressed to think of a compelling reason why I want one.

Marijuana and Messaging Strategy: Insights that left me giddy

As you probably already know, PandoDaily is one of my favorite reads. And since they acquired Paul Carr's NSFW company earlier this year, they've added some great writers and really boosted their content. One piece that I came across recently is an incredible article by David Sirota.

How Colorado disrupted the Drug War is a deep dive into the messaging strategy that empowered what might seem like one of the least likely states to reform their marijuana laws to disrupt the status quo and change the narrative on drug law reform. It's particularly interesting when you think about the inter-relationship between fear and the messaging surrounding the issue.

Fear is an extremely powerful message driver. Even now, if you were to consider discussing this article with your colleagues at work, you'll probably find yourself feeling anxious with your internal Safe-For-Work alarms going off. This isn't sex, politics or religion, but in some ways it's worse -- it's drugs. And 'pro-drugs' is just about as third rail as it gets.

I would put Sirota's piece in the category of Must Reads.

Lead Nurture Campaign Blunders - More Fun With Hurricane Electric

Email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns are not new. Done right, it can be a great way to draw in business. At the same time, one factor that you might want to consider when shaping your lead nurture program is the current status of the person in the campaign. Simply, if you have a customer or a prospective customer in your database with a negative relationship with the business, you may not want to include them in a default promotional program. Here's an example.

I'm pretty unhappy with Hurricane Electric right now. If you aren't familiar with the back-story, you might find this recent post amusing. While it's not a flat out "Hurricane Electric Sucks" post, I think you can detect the unhappiness in my tone -- and you're not reading the original emails. I don't think that the people over at Hurricane Electric would be surprised to learn that I'm not happy with them nor would I recommend their service going forward.

So imagine my surprise when I received an email from Hurricane Electric the other day offering to upgrade the service that I was just trying to cancel about a month ago. A new server? No. A cloud hosting option? No. An unused copy of Windows 8? No, something of even less use to me. That's right, they wanted to offer me an upgrade on bandwidth to the server that is sitting in their data center, idle. When you see something like that, it really catches your attention. How disconnected is it? Let me count the ways:

1. We just finished a series of communications back and forth about how I wanted to cancel our service
2. It was offering to increase bandwidth to a server that is essentially idle
3. It promoted the idea that the increase in bandwidth would help our business earn more by increasing traffic and overcoming the limitations resulting from our current bandwidth

What stood out even more was that the bulk email listed the sender as the very same accounts payable person that I had just been arguing back and forth with about closing our account with previously. It's laughably bad. 

Know Your List
If you want to run a nurture campaign, consider reviewing your member list and removing anyone with cases or customer service issues. You also might want to consider using cases and other customer service issues as a trigger for a different type of email campaign as they may not be suited to an upsell campaign.

Insurance Companies Suck: Core Strategy Undermines the ACA

In all of the back and forth over the Affordable Care Act that you find in the media, one of the things that I've never seen addressed relates to inherent problems with the fundamental strategy behind the law. In the media, you may see concerns about the lack of a single-payer, medicare-for-all option or, on the other side of the spectrum, people complaining about the mandate requiring people to buy health insurance. While these two examples deal with opposite sides of the political spectrum, in one respect, they share a common underlying issue -- insurance companies suck.

Anyone who has had to deal with health insurance over a doctor's bill knows how frustrating it can be. And it's just gotten worse and worse over time.

Insurance companies use layers of contractual complexity to make treatment and treatment reimbursement horribly conditional. Why? Because, fundamentally, the way that an insurance company maximizes their profits is by paying out as little of the money as possible. Insurance is a wager that you, as the gambler, wants to be as safe and as predictable as possible -- I am sick, I go to the doctor, and the treatment is paid.

In the midst of the storm of the healthcare.gov site problems, I read one post on Talking Points Memo that pointed to one of the challenges of individuals purchasing health insurance was that it was so complicated. And the entire reason it is so complicated is that insurance companies benefit from that complexity. They write policies that create a range of caveats to the "I am sick" equation in order to reduce the likelihood of a payout -- like saying that the roll of the dice doesn't count if they didn't hit the back wall of the craps table. Sometimes, they make these caveats deceptive so that you think that you're covered when you aren't. It's like playing 3-card Monte with some guy on the street -- you have a great chance of winning until you actually start playing.

This is why most states have insurance regulators and why we are forced to turn to "experts" in our HR department to help us navigate the contracts and, hopefully, prevent fraud. And yet, despite the existence of a regulation infrastructure in the states, the system has gotten progressively worse since I can remember.

The Pre-existing Condition
Perhaps the biggest sticking point surrounding health insurance was the pre-existing condition. This was the escape clause that would allow an insurance company to skip out on paying for various medical bills that might get too large and cut into their profits. Over the past decade or so, it also seems like they used it, increasingly, as leverage against churn. By that what I mean is, if you were unhappy with your insurance or you lost your job, the insurance companies forced you to keep paying for insurance coverage lest you be hit with the pre-existing condition clause when you get a new job or sign up for a new policy.

This use of the pre-existing condition was another driver for crappy health-insurance-in-name-only plans. If you were out of work or working at a job that didn't provide health insurance, you could get one of these plans and be able to say that you had maintained insurance coverage.

Underlying Fallacies of the Health Care Debate
I think that the think that pisses me off the most when I listen to a debate about health care is this idea that we make choices about the level of care that we want to pay for. Given the choice, it's hard for me to imagine somebody saying, "just give me half of what's required to make me well." Or, like the snippet from the Michael Moore film healthcare, "I know I lost three fingers in the accident, just repair one." These aren't decisions made by choice. In the same way, the decision to not participate in the healthcare system -- to not have coverage -- is not something somebody chooses. They may choose between having shelter or healthcare coverage, having food or healthcare coverage, or even -- like I might have back in my college days -- having beer or healthcare coverage, but it isn't healthcare or not.

Similarly, there is this notion that the reason that health care is expensive is because people with health insurance use too much healthcare because they don't realize how much it costs. It's as though we are choosing to take Vioxx instead of aspirin because we make decadent choices as opposed to the reality -- we take it because they, the experts, tell us it's better and more effective. In the old days of a lifetime relationship with a family doctor, efficacy might be measured by long term patient health. These days, profit plays a significant role.

I Don't Like My Existing Healthcare Plan
Which brings us to the issue behind the most recent round of controversies. I don't think that anyone actually likes their existing healthcare plan; rather, they probably prefer it over the idea that the available options are worse. Or more expensive for, essentially, the same crappy service. Because, like most of the airlines, we have been subjected to a historical degradation of service and the majority of the incumbents essentially offer minor variations of the same service, we don't see any upgrade in change.

The bottom line: insurance companies suck. And this is, fundamentally, what's wrong with the ACA. Rather than crippling an industry that most people have had terrible experiences with, the government essentially said, "heck-of-a-job insurance companies, let's give you more customers and more business." For many people, this would be the equivalent of handing over Social Security to the same corrupt financial industry that crashed the economy with the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Rather than stopping all of this "your surgeon was covered, but your anesthesiologist wasn't in network and so he wasn't covered' mess, they stomped on the gas and pointed all of us straight into the heart of darkness.

The Paradox of Choice
Here's a great link to psychologist Barry Schwartz's Ted Talk where he talks about how having more choices makes us less happy with our choice and also makes it more difficult to choose. In that way, another difficult aspect of the ACA is, inherently, one of the things that is supposed to be better about it -- more choices. The paradox of choice also plays into the health insurance offering -- with so many nuanced aspects to compare and options to segment, they can move you into a state of selection paralysis. This is another way that they are able to control the transaction.

In many respects, the importance of choice in health care is overstated. If we're sick and we need antibiotics, we don't choose which medicine to prescribe. We think we want choices, but, like a menu with too many options, more is not better.  

While the idea of more choices pays lip service to freedom, if you couple some of the themes in the Paradox of Choice with the idea that all of the choices are deal-with-the-devil options from businesses that many people have had negative experiences with, you're in for a high level of customer dissatisfaction, even if the product has been reformed and is actually improved. The reformed system may be better, but we are primed for not liking it.

My Terrible, Awful Day at Dreamforce 2013

Each year, Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference represents a mixed bag of experiences. On the one hand, it's an incredible opportunity to see a few of the ways that some of the world's top businesses are using software to evolve their businesses. And, if you work with the software, some of the breakout sessions can provide a great window into how to take advantage of certain features and functions.

At the same time, there is a dark side to entire Dreamforce experience, one that corresponds to crowds and capacity. There is a chaos that hangs over the event, a madness of conflicting schedules and oversubscribed sessions.

Back in the old days (that period when the year still had two zeros in it), the crowd helped contribute to the excitement. It was an era when there was still a lot of skepticism about the viability of the cloud and multi-tenant architectures. In that era, one of the most common question that I wound up having to answer was, "but really, who is using Salesforce.com?" In that environment, being in that sea of people was vindication.

These days, the crowd is more of a crowd than a bonding experience. What's more, instead of feeling like a giant user group, VIP passes and exclusive access options have turned the entire event into the equivalent of a crowded flight -- the people in first class get treated well, but most of us are stuck in the back with a middle seat, no leg room, and no recline.

Dreamforce is not like a traditional trade show in it's use of the convention center. Rather than many exhibits crowding a convention center floor, Dreamforce depends upon meeting rooms for technical breakout sessions. Each year, as the conference has grown, it's been surprising to see how the infrastructure has adapted to handle the expanding crowds broad agenda. Last year, when they closed off Howard street, held conference sessions in all of the surrounding hotels all the way to Union Square, and then blocked off the area around the Civic Center for the gala event, it struck me as a wonderful example of how San Francisco can come together and jump through hoops in an effort to host these kinds of things. In so many ways, the City is an amazing place.

And yet, for everything that worked well last year (other than what was probably a traffic nightmare for San Francisco), this year was marked by a conference out of sync with the city and the weather. With the November timetable, suddenly all of the outdoor overflow areas became unusable. Travel between downtown locations meant getting soaked between sessions. And while this year's gala event location at Pac Bell park had the potential to provide an well structured venue for an outdoor event, the predictable fall rain meant transformed the event into something into a gathering under the dry parts of the stadium to eat hamburgers and hot dogs, while watching some music on the television. Even the bus rides to the park were challenged with the traffic and the construction on Fourth street.

For the past three years or so, hotels in San Francisco sell out several months before Dreamforce. I knew it was bad this year when I was registering and the Dreamforce hotel interface was listing Hotels in Monterey. Another indicator is when the motels in the ugly parts of the Tenderloin/SOMA area are charging over $300 per night (it leaves you wondering what the people who wind up staying there end up thinking about San Francisco). Even funnier was when I mentioned the crappy hotel situation to our Salesforce account rep and he sent me a link to the housing page in the registration app (#worse-than-a-chatbot). So, invariably, I was forced to commute into the city from the South Bay each day. And while the hour or so commute on Caltrain isn't too bad, what it does add to Dreamforce is a lot of extra steps, the need to carry everything you need (or take back from the event), and it puts a serious damper on any evening events.

For me, the worst day turned out to be Wednesday. The third day of Dreamforce is a day that is punctuated with sponsored events and after-parties. But when you have the added commute to the overcrowded city, it can be a bit taxing. I decided to head out early that night and grab an express train home. Unfortunately, like many commuters that day, my trip home was hindered by a downed power line near the Hayward Park stop on the Caltrain line. I wound up standing in a packed train, waiting from about 6:50 until shortly after 8:00pm before we even started the journey down the peninsula. After a slow ride and a bus bridge at San Mateo, I finally arrived in Mountain View sometime after 10pm. I, like many of my fellow commuters, went home tired and unhappy -- questioning the wisdom of returning to the city for the last day of the conference (I ended up driving on Thursday, but I heard that Caltrain had another day of delays that morning).

Dreamforce: Too Big to Be Meaningful
As I've mentioned in the past, when you attempt to create an illusion of personalized experiences that are clearly generic scripted repetitions -- like the Safeway checkers reading your name off of the receipt like they know you -- it almost seems worse than doing nothing. It's like saying to the customer, "oh yeah, you are important to us, we value your business" with an accompanying satirical tone and an eye-roll. You're personalized customer experience is a mockery of personalized customer experience.

In may ways, that is what Dreamforce has become. In the old days of the conference, the entire experience was like a multi-tenant architecture. You sat, side by side, with your colleagues on the platform. Big companies, small companies, you shared an infrastructure and you shared the challenges of the crowd. You were just as likely to wind up sitting in the front row as you might be at the back of the venue. When you attended the event, you were part of a community.

Now, it feels more like you are part of a herd -- sorted, weighed, and routed as is most profitable. With VIP lines and exclusive access, you are often reminded that you are in economy class, not good enough for business or first -- despite spending what probably amounts to a premium, regardless of the size of your business. Yes, you are a customer, but as a customer appreciation event, this will leave you feeling like you are second class.

Consider this: in five years of attending the conference, only two of my five account representatives have made an effort to meet with me during the week of Dreamforce. If the customer-facing roots of your organization can't interact with your customers that have paid $1000 to come to your party, are you really holding a party for your customers? And can you really call yourself a customer-focused business?

Think about that. As marketers, most of us have considered road shows and customer events. We all understand the costs and the challenges. We've all consumed our share of free food and drinks at business events. Now imagine asking your customers to pay to come to your customer event. What kind of experience would you expect that they were expecting?

I used to think that it might be helpful to bring a team of attendees to Dreamforce; perhaps a couple of people from the sales organization, somebody from IT, and an exec or two. But considering how large Dreamforce has become, I've come to believe that, even if they were excited to participate and be a part of the crowd, the real benefits that they might have gained two or three years ago have faded, washed away in a sea of lines, generic experiences, and diverse business/software platform interests. Should I be battling with the people who might be there for Work.com? Or the developers who don't know about Heroku? Do I really need to hear another pitch on the latest version of Portal - now Communities -- when the pricing model is so disconnected from anything that makes sense for our business?

Would you pay $1000, then wait in line behind a thousand people if you could only ask one question? And, if you did all that, how would you feel about the experience if the answer that you received gave you less information than already got during your online research?

Can Dreamforce Be Saved?
This question is actually several questions rolled up into one.

• Has the conference grown too large for San Francisco? 
• Would it work better if it was relocated somewhere else that could handle the size of the event?
• Has the conference itself become too diversified and lost it's focus?
• Is there any way to make it effective in connecting with individual customers while hosting the massive crowds?

In many ways, I think that there are elements of Dreamforce that are intertwined with San Francisco. While a location like Las Vegas might be able to handle the large crowd, there is a reason that so many Internet businesses have found their home in San Francisco. The city speaks the language of software start-up and part of the dream in Dreamforce is a harmony with this world. And yet, there is little question that the San Francisco infrastructure is overwhelmed by the conference crowds. Housing, transportation, conference room capacity, all are being taxed beyond their limit during the event. Without limits, I expect the reality of the conference to just get worse and worse.

As for the diversity, there's always the dream of serendipitous interaction and the potential engagement with technologies and applications that you might not otherwise have imagined. And yet, when crowds become overwhelming, it's less about serendipity and more about traffic and road rage. Perhaps the bigger question is, what is a realistic take-away from this in-person experience?

So when you consider the world of modern marketing and making individual connections, it seems so antiquated to provide such a generic, impersonal experience. As the provider of the leading CRM platform, you'd expect the experience to be more personal. But perhaps that underscores the difference between the hype and the reality -- in the same way you'd expect Facebook marketing to be... better. Big data and algorithms are powerful, but they are hard-pressed to achieve something greater or overcome something as powerful as a long line or a frustrating commute.

And so, the spectacle will probably continue. And as it does, the evangelism will probably ebb -- or continue to ebb -- and instead of something amazing, it will become something amazingly horrible. My terrible, awful day at Dreamforce probably would have been better if all of the hotels in San Francisco weren't sold out and I was staying in the city and hadn't been stuck on Caltrain for over three hours. But without that Caltrain experience, I might not feel so compelled to ask is the entire experience really worth it?

The Don't-Let-Go Business: How Hurricane Electric Earned a Blog Post

I know that it seems like much of the posts that find there way here are lately arise out of some business or service pushing my buttons, so I promise that I'll put together something that's not an angry tirade soon -- maybe after this post.

Recently, I found myself embroiled in a situation that serves as a great reminder about how technological progress shapes business expectations. It's the kind of thing where, one day you're selling the "must have" advertising like a Yellow Pages ad or a Thomas Guide listing, then "suddenly" you wake up to realize that your product is obsolete, usurped by the Internet and Google. Not only do you have to re-envision yourself and your business to adapt to the new market climate, but you also have these longstanding relationships with some of your most loyal customers that have stayed with you all of this time. How do you handle dissolving these relationships?

As with other moments in the lifetime of interactions with your customers, how you behave as a business shapes your customer's perception of you and your future reputation, regardless of how awesome the relationship may have been.

Our Story: Longtime Hurricane Electric Customers
When you look back to 2006, it doesn't seem all that long ago. And yet, in the world of servers, 2006 is two to three generations in the past. And when it comes to web hosting, so much has changed since that time. Back in the day, many companies were running on dedicated servers in co-location data centers. The idea of using virtualized servers and grid computing wasn't really in play and a multi-tenant infrastructure was a tough sell for some in the IT world. Amazon Web Services officially launched in 2006. Technologically speaking, 2006 was in many ways BC, Before Cloud.

When you look back through time to those thrilling days of yesteryear, there were some common Internet provider business practices that just seem laughable in today's market. Back in those days, it was all about the box. In 2006, as we compared data center providers, having a local provider like Hurricane Electric -- versus, say, Rackspace -- offered some potential advantages in the event that you needed to do some level of hands-on maintenance to your server box. While it may not have any any real practical advantage, it helped comfort the IT guys who didn't really want to loose touch with the physical hardware. Another common practice was a set-up charge for a dedicated server. Essentially, since you were getting ready to run a server, this helped subsidize the Internet hosting company's costs in case you suddenly went belly-up ala so many dot.coms and start-ups. And it was not unusual to have longer initial term hosting contracts, year or multi-year agreements.

And that, in a nutshell, describes our initial relationship with Hurricane Electric. At the time, they were great, and a good fit within the prevailing business climate. Their hosting services did well, we were a couple of hops off of the main Internet connect running through San Jose, and all was good. During the server build process, we had spec'd one system, but for one reason or another, it wouldn't work with the drives that we had spec'd, so Hurricane offered us a 'free' upgrade to a dual CPU server board that had come off of a recently decommissioned system. As I say, we were happy.

So, jump ahead four years to 2010. With the server getting old in server years, we approached Hurricane about a plan to replace the box with a newer model, ideally with the current one running in the foreground while we built up the other one. Despite four years of consistent, trouble-free business running on hardware that was essentially theirs, Hurricane Electric wanted to charge us another set-up fee. Instead, we began looking at alternative hosting solutions.

In today's hosting environment, virtualized servers and cloud environments allow you to sign up with a credit card, build a server from a control panel, pay nothing for the server until you build it, and, ultimately, pay only for what you eat. Storage, CPUs, processor cycles, bandwidth can all be metered. When measured against the cost of hardware and colocation rent, the cloud was really a no-brainer decision. So move we did.

Leaving Hurricane Electric
This is the part of the story where things get really sad, where Hurricane Electric moves from becoming a respected local partner to one of those companies like AOL that make it very difficult to escape their clutches. Once we had our new cloud server up and running, we reached out to Hurricane Electric to shut down our service. First, Hurricane told us that we needed to send them written notice on company letterhead along with why we were leaving. Next, they told us that we've been under an automatically renewing annual contract and we wouldn't be able to cancel our agreement until Q2 of next year.

Since 2006, we've made consistent monthly payments for our dedicated server. We have been a consistent, no-hassle revenue stream. But now, like AOL's dial-up service, our needs and the terms of our agreement have become hopelessly outdated. And yet, within the halls of Hurricane Electric's accounting and customer service groups, they would rather cling tightly to a few more months of revenue than create a positive customer experience. Somehow, all of that historical value that we represented to them is no match for a couple of months payment. In short, they do not connect this portion of their business with reputation and positive word of mouth.

Where we could have dissolved the relationship with a simple "their service offering ceased to match our needs," we moved into a "their service offering may have been acceptable at one time, but even if they were an okay match for your requirements today, I would not do business with them." In the same way that I would never give AOL my credit card information -- anyone who has ever tried to disconnect from them knows how difficult they make that transaction.

Auto-renew contracts can be a convenience to customers, but too often auto-renew is used like a club, hammering the customer with a commitment that doesn't match their needs. Because it's employed in scams and borderline scams by businesses that look to surreptitiously trap customers in leech-like transactions, businesses should be hyper-vigilant around the use of this tool. When your business becomes knowingly collecting funds well past the useful life of the contracted service, you've entered the land of scam. Let's apply a new term, scamification, to our lexicon.

As marketers, it's particularly frustrating to see this kind of behavior from a business. When you think about all of the battles that you have to go through, justifying budgets in order to attract and win customers or to build reputation, only to watch all of those efforts flipped on their head when other parts of the business act aggressively to piss off the customer, it makes you crazy. Radio and print ads? Wasted. Those billboards? Pointless. When you compare the cost of what you might spend to publish a case study or a customer testimonial, then compare that to the negative word of mouth created by an angry customer -- or attempting to be former customer -- and yet, they don't get it.

After all is said and done, I would not do business with Hurricane Electric again. I would not recommend them to you either. While I would not put them in the same category as those scam businesses that trick you into an online transaction, then leech off of your credit card while you try to find a way to cancel their service, their business behaviors are such that it certainly reminded me of that type of business. Caveat Emptor.