LB Steak: Clever Marketing, Puffery or Misdirection?

So I had dinner last night at LB Steak in Santana Row. It was part of a group/work dinner. Like most typical group dinners, my expectations for the food wasn't particularly high -- work dinners aren't something you go to expecting to enjoy the food. What's more, having been to LB Steak for some truly mediocre brunch in the past (nice outdoor seating in Santana Row), I already had some sense of what to expect. I feel like I had a reasonably low bar going in.

Still, I was thoroughly surprised by the restaurant's marketing of their food and their dining room -- and not surprised in a good way.

Prior to grinding my way through rush-hour traffic to get there for dinner, one of my colleagues had told me that we'd be seated at the "Chef's Table". Now, being someone who enjoys my share of food and restaurant experiences, I must say that the idea of being at the Chef's Table had me hopefully optimistic. Perhaps this would be one of those enjoyably unique experiences that would walk back my previous brunch experiences. Imagine my surprise to see some of my colleagues sitting at a large table by the front window of the restaurant as I walked up.

I wasn't the only one. A couple of others asked the waiter about the "Chef's Table" and he said, "oh, that's just what we call this."

As I posted on Twitter last night, I suspected that they had switched tables on us for some reason (perhaps group size), but when I spoke with my wife about it, she said that she knew about LB Steak's "Chef's Table". So I looked it up this morning. Here's the link to LB Steak's private dining page. Further, on the PDF of their private dining menu (page 3), you'll find a description and picture of their "Chef's Table".

Of course, as I mentioned on Twitter last night, I don't think that the common perception of "Chef's Table" is "Big Table in the dining room by the front window and door". So I went looking for a definition of "Chef's Table". Here's what's on the Wikipedia page for restaurant:

A chef's table is a table located in the kitchen of a restaurant, reserved for VIPs and special guests. Patrons may be served a themed tasting menu prepared and served by the head chef. Restaurants can require a minimum party and charge a higher flat fee. Because of the demand on the kitchen's facilities, chef's tables are generally only available during off-peak times.

 Note: the emphasis added is mine. 

Clearly, LB Steak intends to set an expectation with the "Chef's Table" designation. It's an obvious attempt at priming (psychology) the customer's perception with a perception of exclusivity. For me, that core misrepresentation ate at me more throughout the evening than I ate at the food.

Being Sold on the Prime Rib Eye
In another round of adventures in labels versus products, the waiter sold a significant portion of the table on the 12oz Prime Rib Eye. He made some explanation about it, but mostly emphasized about how tender it was. Perhaps you are wondering what a Prime Rib Eye is?

• Expectation-wise, you might think it was Prime Rib...
• Or maybe you might expect that it's a big thick Rib Eye steak. 

As it turns out, it's a steak that's about the typical thickness of a slice of prime rib (about 3/4"), grilled like a rib eye. It's hard to represent the difference between the plates of steak that were presented to the table and what you probably were expecting if your mind was aligned with either of those bullets I've listed above. Visually, the product looked like something an inexpensive market steak you'd expect to get your average local grocery store. Or perhaps something you might get at one of those low-end chain steak restaurants.

The LB Steak menu lists this "35 Day Dry Aged Prime 12 oz Boneless Ribeye" at $52. I suspect that if I went to Costco right now, I could get a three-pack of prime Ribeye steaks for about the same price, any one of which would have delivered a product closer to what I would expect a business that features "steak" in it's name to be able to produce.

Puffery
So the question that you might ask is, are these misrepresentations by the business puffery? Merriam Webster has the definition of puffery as, "exaggerated commendation especially for promotional purposes : hype". Wikipedia goes further.

In everyday language, puffery refers to exaggerated or false praise. In law, puffery is a promotional statement or claim that expresses subjective rather than objective views, which no "reasonable person" would take literally. Puffery serves to "puff up" an exaggerated image of what is being described and is especially featured in testimonials.

There's also this great link from the puffery page to restaurant menu writing style. In short, it's not unusual to attempt to inflate the description of dishes or make them sound more exotic. In one sense, you could say that that is what LB Steak is doing.

At the same time, while a "tenderloin of pork avec compôte de Pommes" may be "a pork chop with a dollop of applesauce," most people would probably be unhappy to be served some thin slices of lunch-meat-cut ham with some applesauce under the guise of a "tenderloin of pork".

This is the problem with their "Chef's Table" nomenclature. They could name it anything -- the Silicon Valley table, the Grand Table, anything -- without creating the false expectation of a "Chef's Table". Rather than elevating the dining experience, I think it undercuts the restaurant's credibility with the customer. I think that this is a clear-cut case of marketing quackery.

The iPhone 7 gets a Headphone Jack!

Here's a story I came across on MacRumors this morning. Essentially, this guy modded an iPhone 7 and added a fully functional headphone jack. However, it's an interesting underscore to the BS that they had to eliminate it to make room for the camera.

British Airways F'ed Up Online & Customer Support System

For the past 14 hours, I've been wrestling with the British Airways online system, trying to correct a problem that their system created. In the process of attempting to correct the seating assignment, I've learned a few things about their system -- and about why you might want to avoid booking flights with them. Put simply, their system is not designed for customer support or customer satisfaction and I've now been told repeatedly that, "if you have an issue in the 24 hours before your flight", your fucked. Harsh words, I know, but British Airways "customer service" people say that they can't do anything in that 24 hour window. If you had one person tell you that, you might attribute it "a bad apple" customer service rep. But when multiple customer service people tell you the same thing, then you know that this is a business strategy.

When you're checking in for a flight, there are many aspects and errors that can go wrong. It's especially challenging for international flights because you have an added layers of documentation and permissions, concerns about connections. Tensions are higher because the costs are higher -- your $1000+ flight is not equivalent to a $100+ domestic flight. You might expect that in this environment, there would be added pressure on an airline to do things right -- or to make things right when things don't go according to plan. This is what makes British Airways system unusual. Rather than being engineered to make things right, the system seems designed to generate customer frustration.

Here's the story of my experience with British Airways and some insight into the underlying mechanisms in their system that appear to be optimized for frustration.

My wife and I booked trips on British Airways about a month ago. My wife needed to go to Helsinki for a business trip and I decided to accompany her and take the time for tourism. Because of the different purposes of our trip, we had to book our tickets separately. Hers through her work travel system, and me selecting the corresponding flight directly from the airline. She opted for the American codeshare version of the BA flight because AA is one of their preferred corporate airlines and she already has a lot of American miles. I opted for British Airways because I'd already flown on them a couple of months earlier on a trip to Brussels.

Our frustrations started with navigating British Airways ticket pricing, which I already wrote about and you can find more about here.

So, one aspect of British Airways default ticket is that you can't select a seat until 24 hours before your flight. Should you choose to, you can pay something like $30 to select a seat in advance, but the default window is 24 hours before. We opted not to pay this as it would be an upcharge that my wife's work would be unwilling to reimburse -- and having one assigned seat without it's mate is kind of stupid.

In a discussion with customer service (either through her travel agent, AA, or BA), my wife was able to address the issue of us traveling together and get our two seats grouped. When we went to check in, it assigned her one seat and me the seat next to her. Unfortunately, when I went to create my online boarding pass, British Airways system counted it as a second check in and relocated my seat (and hers) to an entirely different location. The first one was better, the second one seemed to be triggered just a few hours before the departure, and those seats weren't very good. After spending some time on the phone with British Airways customer support, they assured as that everything was fine. But when we went to the airport service counter to get boarding passes -- you guessed it, they were messed up and wrong. Eventually the service counter people just manually moved us to the original seats that we had together -- but they acted rather pained to have had to do that. They also gave us the explanation that "they'd changed planes, so that probably messed up the process".

On the return flight, the leg from Helsinki to London is a codeshare operated by Finnair. As we ticked off the time, trying to get into the system right after it opened, we hit a couple of roadblocks as British Airways system seemed to struggle with the record exchange with Finnair. Eventually, we were able to both get checked in -- and change seats since the first leg of the flight was only about half full. I say change seats because, despite many empty rows, British Airways auto-seat assignment software assigned me a middle seat near the middle of the plane. It also assigned me a middle seat for the second leg of the trip, the transcontinental flight back to San Jose.

No matter how I tried, I couldn't change the BA seat assignment. I couldn't access it. And they stuck me in a middle seat. Despite trying to check in right near the start of the 24 hour window, British Airways stuck me in a middle seat.

So I reached out to British Airways and Finnair customer service on Twitter. The Finnair customer service team responded quickly, and when I provided them with my flight details, they told me that the couldn't access the British Airways seat assignment system. They couldn't change it. I would need to work with British Airways to change that seat. So I continued to reach out to British Airways -- that all started at about 11:00 in the morning.

My wife and I speculated that we might be able to access the BA flight once the 24 hour mark for that flight arrived. Meanwhile, I continued to try and reach out to British Airways. When the 24 hour mark before the second leg of the flight came and we still couldn't access our seat assignment, I attempted to call the airline. I'd tried calling earlier, but the local customer support number was only good for Monday through Friday, so the only number "for travel problems within the 24 hour period" was an international number. When I called that number, I waited on hold for 12 minutes before a woman from their customer service team took my info, then told me that she couldn't make any changes during the 24 hours before the flight. I told her about how my wife had tried to purchase an upgraded meal, but the transaction didn't seem like it would go all the way through. She said she couldn't fix that because it was within the 24 hours before the flight. In short, it was a 15 minute international call -- at my expense -- to learn that British Airways could not help me. They were unwilling or unable to make any changes within the 24 hour window.

So I continued on to post complaints on Twitter. Eventually, around 6pm local time, British Airways Twitter support team responded to me. After sending a direct message to them with my flight details, an hour or so later, they finally responded with this:

"as you're due to travel within 24 hours, we're unable to amend your seat. The airport have control of the flight and seating. You'll need to make any amendments to your seats at the airport. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused."

Somewhere in all of this (perhaps on the telephone), it became clear that it would never have been possible for us to edit the second leg seat assignment. Whatever we were assigned, we were assigned and their "24 hour lock" on the system meant that, for your second leg seat, you were essentially hosed. Suddenly it made more sense why, on my return trip from Brussels, I was stuck in a middle seat in the back of the section despite aisle and window seats still open. And how, when I'd tried to change my seat online, their system wouldn't let me.

Keep in mind that my wife and I travel on airlines frequently. We often manage our seats using online the online interface after check-in has opened. In fact, my wife has sometimes made multiple changes. I mention this only to underscore a point -- while many airlines block out a wait time and only allow check-ins 24 hours before a flight, most flights will allow you to manage and change your seat up until the time you're at the airport getting on the plane. As long as there is space available. Unless you're attempting to change class -- where they'll upcharge you. So this limitation in the BA system is both unusual and bizarre. It's also a giant FU to their "customers", the people who are paying for seats on the plane.

This experience comes on a flight that is supposed to transport me into "bronze" status in British Airways frequent flier program. Another special British Airways surprise for me was that I fully expected to have already achieved status on my flight to Helsinki. However, surprisingly, the fare that we purchased for these tickets meant that the "points" value for my transcontinental flight on the carrier was only 20 points, what looks to be the minimum value. My previous one hour flight from London to Brussels was actually worth more "points". Yet another FU to their customers.

This is truly "Customer Lip Service".

While we can never be certain of what the future holds, despite my "frequent flier" status that I will have earned after this flight, I won't be rushing to rebook another flight on British Airways and, as I mentioned in my previous blog post about the business, I would advise anyone considering doing business with British Airways -- Caveat Emptor!

United's "Re-accommodate" and the "Customer" Lie in Airline Doublespeak

The Internet is abuzz with the story of the doctor on the United Airlines flight who was "asked" to give up his seat, then beaten and forcibly removed from the plane. If you haven't seen it, the Jimmy Kimmel show had a pretty good synopsis. As shocking as the video footage of the event is, perhaps what might be even more surprising was when United came out with the statement:

Flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked. After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate. We apologize for the overbook situation.

I say shock, but I don't really mean shock, because in many respects while we're surprised that a business might say something like this, we're not surprised to see this kind of language and attitude from an airline. In that way, what I should probably say is that, while the footage and story is distressing, it's not really surprising.

The Grand Airline Lie: "Customer"
Most of us have expectations for "customer service". Inherent in that relationship is the principle that, as a customer, you have options and by choosing to spend your money with a vendor, part of your decision will be based on what you get for the service and how you are treated throughout the transactional experience. Or as you'd find on Wikipedia:

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees "who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest". Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.

While you'll hear the airlines use the word "customer" a lot, for most travelers, there is little meaning beyond an exchange of money. Rather than being treated like customers, most airline passengers are treated more like cattle or sheep. We probably have more in common with the animals at factory farms than we do with the classic notion of a "customer".

And it's not just United Airlines. On CNN during the news cycle around the United story, the network ran a series of clips of people being thrown off the plane, all from different airlines. American, Delta, Spirit. They even lumped in a woman who was forced to buy pajama pants because JetBlue wouldn't let her on the plane wearing shorts that they didn't like.

Let's face it. They all suck. Some suck worse than others. People joke about it, but nothing gets better. Instead, things just deteriorate further.

So how did we get to this point? Here's a piece from Wired that does a good job of characterizing the problems with United. How United Turned the Friendly Skies into a Flying Hellscape is an interesting look at the recent history of the carrier and the impact of the merger with Continental. But in some sense, as noted, this issue transcends United.

The Inherent Tension of Flying
Traveling can be stressful. Some stresses are common -- we all struggle with time zone changes -- and some stresses are individual -- I may not be afraid of flying, but you might be. Time and schedules also ratchet up stress levels -- from concerns about making a flight or connecting flights to factors outside of the flight itself like business meetings, appointments or even vacation itineraries.

In the midst of this stressful environment for travelers, the airlines have been doing everything they can to ease traveler stresses (haha). Seriously though, rather than that, for the past 10 years or so, the airlines have increasingly pursued strategies of testing the limits of what passengers will tolerate, all with an eye towards increasing profitability. The Wired article talks about "Calculated Misery" and links to this New Yorker article, Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer. The article talks about JetBlue being a hold-out on charging baggage fees and what drove them to change:

Wall Street analysts, however, accused JetBlue of being “overly brand-conscious and customer-focussed.”

In short, not only do airlines, as a business, not care about you, the "customer", they're business model is increasingly built on taking advantage of you. United Airlines profited to the tune of nearly $10 billion dollars over the past two years with that business strategy.

And the effect on "customers" is to put them on edge, forcing them into a combative, defensive mindset. It's not really difficult to see the equation, build systems that impose misery, tensions rise. Add in a good portion of unequal treatment -- like walking past the first class section and seeing spacious seating that is such a contrast to the cramped seating that you're being put in -- raises tensions higher. That's partly why we have more incidents of "air rage" taking place.

You Must Obey the Uniformed Flight Crew
Since we returned to flying following the 9-11 highjackings, we've all been chartered with paying special deference to the uniformed flight crew. It goes without saying that it's an essential rule for the safety and security of the flight. At the same time, there are flights that it seems like turn into something just short of the Stanford prison experiment. Whether it's a result of the "psychological effects of perceived power", or simply a flight attendant having a bad day, airline passengers have to be aware that something that starts as a simple customer service incident can easily escalate to an event that brings in law enforcement. After all, who could forget the guy in the "Princess Bride" shirt?

These incidents between passengers and airlines staff will keep coming up because that's the business model. To quote from the Wikipedia page on the Stanford prison experiment:

The experiment's results favor situational attribution of behavior over dispositional attribution (a result caused by internal characteristics). It seemed that the situation, rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behavior.

The "customer" environment created by the airlines, while endorsed by Wall Street, is toxic. These days, when you engage with an airline as a "customer", you have to devote an inordinate amount of energy to mitigating the stresses inherent in the experience. That's why "the friendly skies" is laughable. There is no joy in the base level experience. There isn't really much that an airline can do to "wow" you. And the hostile environment turns minor events into seeming random acts of cruelty.

Take the United Airlines incident as an example. When United decided to remove those people, was it clear who they chose and why? Were they flying on standby? Did they pick Dr. Dao because he's asian? Did he pay less for his ticket than other passengers? While news stories may relate different answers to this, that we can believe that it was a random act of cruelty speaks volumes to the toxic  customer environment.

But it isn't going to change. Because profits and "shareholders enthusiasm" for more profits. Despite the tremendous first day dip in United Airlines stock value, it's value is returning. And it's unlikely that you'll see any government regulation that makes it better. At least, anytime soon. So, until such time as there is something like governmental regulation that forces the airline industry to end their "calculated misery" approach, you need to recognize that when the airline industry uses the word "customer", they really mean something "transactional actor". Sure, they will do things that seem kind of like customer service -- like having people respond to your frustrated posts on Twitter -- but their ability to do much of anything beyond kind words is quite limited. In the end, their goal is not really to make you happy, it's to get you to stop squeaking.

British Airways Pricing Dynamics Deconstructed

Last month, I flew on British Airways to Brussels for a conference. It was a good flight as flights to Europe go and, as we're expecting to make several trips to Europe this year, it had me expecting that we would be flying British Airways frequently this year.

Here are a few of the reasons why I liked the flight:

• It departed and returned to San Jose. It's hard to underestimate how awesome this is. Besides the smaller airport, saving on the hour drive on each end of the trip... priceless.
• The flight was on a new 787. The 787 really is much nicer to fly on.
• British Airways offered "Premium Economy" tickets for a lower price than "Economy". (Their "Premium Economy" class is essentially what Business Class was 15 years ago). 

Anyway, no complaints. Until we got ready to book another flight. Essentially, my wife has a business trip, I'm going to travel with her, and so we need to coordinate our flight while purchasing from two different systems -- her corporate purchasing and me directly. While it should be reasonably easy, you have to remember two important factors when considering a corporate travel portal.

1. It's going to price compare and force you to take either the lowest price -- or something within say $100 of the lowest price it sees. Otherwise, it's out of policy.
2. You may face other limitations and limited choices, so you may not be able to easily mix and match as you might do with a third party tool.

Naturally, the first place that I went to check pricing was the British Airways site. We were playing around with dates, because we still hadn't determined how long we'd stay or the parameters of what we'd do. For a simple search, I tried flying out on Sunday May 14 (for her to arrive in time for her meetings on Tuesday), and flying back on Saturday, May 20. This is what the results looked like:

$366 for Premium Economy?!? Sweet! This is looking promising. So then, I went to look at the return flight.

$2182 for Premium Economy on the return? That seems a bit steep, but it is cheaper than economy. At the same time, you can see in the date tab above that, returning on Sunday looks like it's only $746. So I decided to try changing the return date to Sunday. FYI, you'll notice the check box about changing outbound dates. I'm not exactly sure what functionality that's supposed to provide, but it had no effect on the pricing changes that happened.

When I selected the return date on Sunday, not only did the return date change, but the Outbound pricing changed. Here's the new outbound pricing.

What happened to my $366 Premium Economy seat outbound? Now my options are $366 for regular economy or $648 for Premium Economy? WTF? When I first saw this, I was enraged. Just so you know, here's the return on Sunday.

Now, the return in Economy is $765 and Premium Economy is $963. So, while the total cost of the fare on a Premium Economy seat is lower than it was, it's been undercut by the regular economy seat price. Of course, if you're purchasing through a business portal, you're probably not going to be about to get that lower priced Premium Economy seat because your pricing system will have been undercut by the economy seat.

Just to explore some more dates and pricing dynamics, I decided to try changing the outbound date to Saturday, May 13 (using the interface and keeping the return date on Sunday, the 21st).  Here's the outbound result of that.

And here's the return.

Note the outbound $391 and $698 the return $765 and $963 for economy and premium economy respectively. Now, for the final piece of the experiment with the British Airways interface, I changed the return date back to May 20 (while leaving the outbound date as the 14th). Here's that screen, first with the outbound.

And then with the return.

With these dates, the return on May the 20th is priced at $765 and $963. In other words, while the day you're traveling affect British Airways pricing partially, a more significant factor is how many days you're staying there. It's sort of like the old "Saturday Stay" rate, where if you stayed through Saturday, your fare would be lower. Except, in this case, if you stay long enough for British Airways to consider it not business, your fare may be lower, but you need to fly economy.

So what's the strategy behind this? Why do they price their economy seats artificially high if you choose a short set of dates? Why do they lead with a super-low price on the outbound Premium Economy seat on that business length stay fare? Since I don't work for British Airways marketing or pricing groups, I can't say. However, from our black box testing, I think we can put forth a few theories.

1. Overall, they are anxious to win some business traveler flyers. By offering somewhat competitive rates for a Premium Economy seat versus say, an Economy seat on another international carrier, they hope to win some of those premium seats. As you can see, when you pick fly on their short schedule, you'll end up paying $937 more than what they value the seat for on either end of the extended date range. 
   
2. Why lead with the $366? I think this works as a loss leader to entice you into the rest of their pricing web. If I had to guess, I'd expect that it's sort of like a prime to trick your brain into thinking, "this is not that expensive... and I get Premium Economy."

Based on running our numbers though, I don't think we're going to book on British Airways. Despite my overall positive experience on my previous flight, we can't escape the feeling of "Shenanigans". Besides, as noted, there's no way my wife could select Premium Economy in the her corporate business travel portal when the economy prices are lower. Instead, we're now looking for an airline with a more predictable pricing practice.

The Getty Images Extortion Letter

So I'm still annoyed about the whole thing with Getty Images. So I happened to do a quick search on "Getty Images Licensing Compliance" and came up with a number of posts addressing "the Getty Images Extortion Letter".

This article, How to Respond to the Getty Images Extortion Letter, is great. It's from the Art Law Journal. It provides a comprehensive explanation of what's going on as well as a template letter for your response. 

Here's another post from a hacker/security site with a more extensive cataloging of Getty Images extortion racket.

My takeaway?
I'm not going use Getty Images any longer and I recommend you avoid using them as well.

Getty Images' Scammy Image Licensing Shakedown

An interesting thing came across my desk at the start of the year. One of my first pieces of email was from a colleague in Germany emailing me in regard to a marketing-related legal problem. It seems that Getty Images had contacted them and claimed that we were using one of their images and that they didn't have any record of us having acquired the license to use it.

To start with, this was rather surprising because in all of the years that I've been using stock photography, I've never actually used Getty for stock images -- unless, perhaps, their images were subcontracted by some other agency. Or, perhaps, one of my vendors might have contracted with them. But personally, no interaction on my part.

Since the correspondence came from Germany, it took me a bit with Google translate to get to the root of the issue. Rather than walk you through the forensic work, let me summarize. Getty was hounding our German office for licensing on:

• An image in a PDF of a brochure that was created in 2001, (Feb/March of 2001 from the metadata in the PDF file).
• The image is basically a minor 1.75" x 2.75" image on the second page of the brochure
• The content is a street in China, shot from traffic
• The brochure was for a subsidiary company that is no longer an active business entity
• The brochure lived on the web because our German web site was very slow in updating their web site
• When the German web site was updated late last year by our Global operations team, the existing assets were migrated to the new site.

Now, you may not remember back to 2001, but as happens I remember this time well. This was back when George W. Bush was just starting his first term following the Supreme Court's Bush v Gore decision to give Presidency to him. This was before 9/11 and the twin towers of the World Trade Center came down. For me, this was several companies prior to my current job. As it turns out, that also holds true for the staff involved in producing this brochure.

Getty Images Scammy Shakedown Behavior
I should point out that the emphasis in the correspondence from Getty was on paying them. Again,
this is from Google Translate, but here's an excerpt from the email:

Please note that this matter is not done with the removal of the image material alone.
   
Even in the case of unintended use, the use of photographic material without a valid license is deemed to be copyright infringement pursuant to § 97 of the Copyright Act and related rights (UrhG). The purpose of this notification is to determine a previously acquired license or to achieve a fair settlement of the matter if no valid license is available.

Please complete the following steps within 14 days of the date of this message:

- If a valid license was obtained before using the artwork, please provide the Getty Images sales order, invoice number, or other license information. If the artwork is recorded on behalf of a third party, e.g. An advertising agency or a web designer, please notify us of the company name and ask the third party to contact us directly to check the existence of a valid license. As an end-user, it is ultimately your responsibility to clarify the facts.

-If you do not have a valid license for use, you will not be able to use the image material in the future
You need to set the current usage immediately
Remove footage from your site. You will also find an offer in the appendix
Compensation for the unlicensed use of the relevant image material. If the amount to be paid is not received within 14 days of receipt of this message, we will take further steps. Please note the information on the transfer in the attached offer. Payment can be made online by using the above URL and the access code.

Please note that we only charge the average license fee for the commercial use of licensed images, which is on your website. Getty Images, additional costs of EUR 300.00 per image have been incurred. We do not currently charge for these costs as we are aware that this unlicensed use of our image material may have been unintentional.

We would also be happy to help you find a consistent solution for the use of image material as soon as the amount has been paid.

As the world's leading provider of digital media, Getty Images strives to protect the interests, intellectual property rights and the livelihoods of photographers, filmmakers and other artists who entrust Getty Images with the licensing of their work. Getty Images hopes for a friendly settlement of the matter and is grateful for your cooperation.

Getty Images is aware that you may be hearing from our company for the first time. On our website (www.gettyimages.com) you can find out more about us and how to license and protect our images. We also provide information on copyright on our website. If you have any questions regarding this letter and the attached FAQs, please contact our Copyright Compliance Team at 0800 000 7228. We are very anxious to help you clarify this issue.

We look forward to hearing from you soon. In all correspondence, please always state the name of your company and the reference number, as indicated on the attached claims for damages. This information will help us to speed up the examination of the matter. Please note that we will initiate further legal action if you do not respond to this letter.

If you have any questions, or if this notification has been mistakenly notified, please contact us at 0800 000 7228 or e-mail us at: copyrightcomplianceDE@gettyimages.com.

My contacts in the industry tells me that part of the driver behind this Getty essentially outsources this licensing validation process like those debt collection agencies and selling debts.

Is it reasonable to expect you to retain proof of a licensing transaction from over 15 years ago?
I would say no. Frankly, I didn't actually think that that brochure was even available outside of an archive of old electronic files that I inherited when I joined the company. At the same time, most companies have document retention policies that would typically specify the destruction of many of these kinds of materials, so having proof of licensing for something this old would surprise me more than the latter.

Further, who's to say that rights to this image are only available through Getty. Is it possible that this image came from some other collection of images? Is Getty playing the -- this is a small enough issue that you won't devote the time and effort to validate the claim and just pay us? This aspect reminds me a lot of another Silicon Valley nightmare, the patent troll.

Based on all of this, I would highly recommend avoiding Getty Images. While the front end of their business may be legitimate, the tail of the beast shows some pretty scammy behavior. As they say, caveat emptor.

For the record, I should note that I have used (and licensed) stock photos from a variety of sources since the early 1990s. I value the stock photos and the work of the photographers that produced the images that communicate in our work.

Google New Wifi Router vs Apple Abandoning the Airport

A couple of weeks ago I came across news of Apple abandoning development on their Airport Express and Extreme wireless routers. As I noted at the time, it is another troubling hint at the direction that Apple is taking their product line -- and how they are abandoning long time pro Mac users and the great technology that they've supported us with in the past.

Today I came across this review of new mesh router products including one from Google. Oh the irony. As I read through the features and capabilities, the devices reminded me a lot of Apple's existing wireless products. It's disappointing to think that we may be faced with a lesser interface, courtesy of Google, simply because Apple lost it's vision.

Ah, but I suppose it's better for Apple to focus time and resources on something important, like what color watch bands to offer on their next update breakthrough announcement.

Facebook Fake News, Scamville goes Election Influence and More

So I came across this article earlier today, Just how partisan is Facebook's fake news? We tested it, from the folks at PC World. The long and short of it is, if you like some Republican elements like Donald Trump, your feed will include fake and misleading news. Oh, and the amount of this is significantly higher than a similar Democrat feed.

The post is worth a read. But this, and much of the other stories about fake news on Facebook, reminded me of this from back in 2009, Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell. For me, the point that came to mind was something that I started writing about this back in 2009, but it looks like I didn't publish. Here's a snippet from that:

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What I see is not necessarily what you get...
It's no secret that the core technology of the Internet enables one party to personalize a message for another. From the moment that you're client computer sends a request for content to a web server, that server is able to shape the content that it sends back to you based on who you are, what you were requesting, and where you came from. With modern internet marketing, we use this capability all the time, and futurists suggest that everything we experience will only become more personalized.

The problem is that, even for those of us that get it, it can be difficult to fully grasp the scope of "what I'm seeing may not be what you are seeing" means. This issue is magnified when organizations deliberately use these capabilities to essentially hide their worst practices:

From the Video Professor post

What you see when you first hit the site depends on how you got there -- directly or via an advertising partner. The least scammy version is what you see if you go to videoprofessor.com directly. On the home page in very small font is a statement that you are going to be charged $290 if you engage in a transaction with them. But that’s the only on-screen disclosure you’ll see.

From the How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro post

Cloaking: This is when you show a different page based on IP address. We and most other ad networks would geo-block northern California -- showing different ads to Facebook employees than to other users around the world. One of the largest Facebook advertisers (I’m not going to out you, but you know who you are) employs this technique to this day, using a white-listed account. Our supposition is that it makes too much money for Facebook to stop him. Believe me, we have brought this to Facebook’s attention on several occasions. Here’s what this fellow does -- he submits tame ads for approval, and once approved, redirects the url to the spammy page. To be fair, players like Google AdWords have had years more experience in this game to close such loopholes.

The thing is, compliance and auditing is all about third party perspective -- that the reviewer sees what you or I see. What happens when the regulator doesn't seeing the same thing that the customer sees? From restaurant reviews to personalized customer experiences, on some levels, people expect that the average customer experience will not be equal to the 'reviewer' experience. VIPs often get special treatment. But, if that VIP experience is built around circumventing rules or laws, what kind of label do you put on it?

The same can be said of shaped experiences in order to increase the likelihood of a transaction. Remember the movie, The Sting? The scam is all about creating an illusory experience for the mark, shaping reality into an environment that's favorable for a transaction. So where does optimization end and scam begin? To quote from Arrington's post:

Here’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam – would users pay for it if they knew exactly what they were buying? In Video Professor’s case, the answer is no, and the company has to resort to tricking the user into paying nearly $300 for a bunch of CDs.

As we move down the path of personalized experiences, the capability to use technology to manipulate consumers through shaped reality is getting easier. Even with today's technology, it's possible for two computer users sitting right next to each other to be visit a site (or series of sites), and receive a completely different content experience. In The Sting, the mark is convinced of the manipulated reality through the introduction of a host of actors that help endorse the experience, but on the computer there it's easy to get sucked into the idea that what you are seeing is the same thing as everyone else sees.

What's more, most of our defenses against this revolve around the idea that for our reality to be manipulated, we need to be in a 'closed' environment that prevents third party validation. You might think, "If I Google the Video Professor guy, perhaps I can find out if it's legitimate." Or, perhaps you take it one step further and Google "Video Professor Scam", you might expect to find a series of top ranked pages detailing customer complaints or other news. Instead, the top result from my most recent search returns a link to a press release archive site that includes a link to a 50% off discount off of the Video Professor product.

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So back to the election and fake news -- later this morning, I came across this post on Recode, Let’s get real. Facebook is not to blame for Trump, by Joshua R. Williams. Okay, so here's the emphasis in this one:

Much of the coverage and outrage has been directed toward social media, its echo chambers, and specifically those of the Facebook platform. While, to be sure, much of the fake or inaccurate news is found and circulated on Facebook, Facebook is not a news outlet; it is a communication medium to be utilized as its users so choose. It is not the job of Facebook’s employees, or its algorithms, to edit or censor the content that is shared; in fact it would be more detrimental to do so. This is for two very good reasons:

One, either human editors, or artificial intelligence editors, by removing one item or another will appear to introduce bias into the system. The group who’s content is being removed or edited will feel targeted by the platform and claim, rightly or wrongly, it is biased against their cause. Even if the content is vetted and found to be true or false.

Two, censorship in any form is bad for the national discourse.

So rather than blaming Facebook or other platforms for the trouble in which we find ourselves, let’s give credit where credit is due: The American people.

The emphasis has been added by me, because this point is fundamentally wrong. Facebook is a marketing platform that makes the majority of it's revenue connecting businesses that have promotional goals to the "users" on the platform. To quote from this post, Why You Should Sponsor Your Social Media Posts, (emphasis added by me)...

Because of all this, Facebook is usually the first place business marketers turn to for the distribution, promotion, and amplification of their ad content and campaigns, which makes it hard for businesses, especially new or small businesses, to find a place among all the clamor and competition for their posts to find an audience. Keep in mind, Facebook is no longer a good source for organic marketing outreach. It is now a pay-to-play network, or a network that gives special preference and advertising priority to businesses that can pay the most to be the first result viewers see on their social media pages, which can be bad for small or new businesses trying to find sponsorship for their own social media posts.

Well, it's pay-to-play unless you can work your way organically into the feed. In broader terms, you might consider that, "native advertising." To quote from wikipedia,

Native advertising is a type of disguised advertising, usually online, that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. In many cases, it manifests as either an article or video, produced by an advertiser with the specific intent to promote a product, while matching the form and style which would otherwise be seen in the work of the platform's editorial staff. The word "native" refers to this coherence of the content with the other media that appears on the platform. 

The thing is, Facebook has already built marketing personas for these demographics. This happens through the content that's delivered in the feed. And similar to the Scamville era issue, if you can target the gullible, the likely to be scammed, and significantly increase your ROI.

The reality is that there are some broader fundamental problems with Facebook and the manipulation of it's "user" base. Much like the happy-feeds-make-people-post-more-happy-stuff, sad-feeds-make-them-post-more-sad-stuff tests, the reality of the impact of the "feed" is probably far more frightening that most would choose to admit. At some level, review and regulation should probably be considered -- but that probably won't happen as a result of the election that was probably manipulated in some part by the platform.

Enterprise Car Rental: Customer Lip Service

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I was finally contacted by Enterprise Car Rental. Back at the beginning of June, I spent some time on the phone with Jose, who claimed to be a regional manager for Enterprise in the Miami region. Jose listened, he was apologetic, and he told me that he would take care of everything for me. He also asked for my home address, the implication being that he was going to send me something as a symbolic apology. I also asked for a complete postmortem in an email.

And so, I left it there, waiting to see what Enterprise would do, what their response was. And, as things happen, I was very busy over the next couple of weeks. But I didn't forget. A week or so ago, I even called Jose on the cell number that he provided me, and left a voice mail requesting follow-up.

Since we first spoke, however, I have not heard anything nor received anything. Enterprise still has not credited my card for the incorrect charges. In short, they haven't done anything.

Earlier this week, I tweeted multiple follow-ups to @enterprisecares. They told me that they would follow up with Miami. To date, I still haven't received any response.

As I mentioned on Twitter, Enterprise Car Rental has inspired me to add a new tag to my blog, Customer Lip Service. This is one of those when they say that they'll take care of you in an attempt to make you feel better, but don't actually follow up with any real action. Remember when Iomega customers actually had to sue the company (and win) in order to get support for their ZIP Drives?

If you're considering renting a car, you should seriously consider this customer experience horror story as a cautionary tale.

Marketing Foods with Nutrition Science

Here's an interesting article about the industry for nutritional studies, How Candy Makers Shape Science. It's a deeper dive into how nutritional studies are funded by the food industry and a look at why you get studies like, "Children who eat candy weigh less than those who don't," paid for by candy manufacturers.

For me, one of the most significant quotes in the piece is, "The only thing that moves sales is health claims." It's worth a look.

Adobe: Now With Even More Features You Don't Need

Perhaps its a symptom of a disease, but when you've got "designer" running through your blood, you can't help but look at it, see it, in everything around you. You always find yourself evaluating design. Does this work? Why did they do that? Or the ever popular, I see what's wrong here. It's a blessing and a curse.

Several years ago, software publishers began adding these "home screen" elements to their software. When you're in Word or Powerpoint and you get ready to create a new document, a screen will pop open with a host of graphic options for you to choose from. More recently, that evolved into this idea that, you know what might be faster? If you didn't have a document open, they could pre-load this home screen with those document creation options so that you didn't have to click "New" before the screen popped up.

Adobe took this concept in their Creative Cloud series and began popping windows with promotional tiles of 'Tool Tips' and 'New Feature Guides'. Essentially, when running in idle with no documents open, Adobe applications started to look like an XBox One interface. Of course, the problem with this kind of interface is that, if you use Photoshop all the time, you probably aren't particularly interested in Tool Tips or New Feature Guides. "Ah software, I grow tired of you trying to teach me basics when I've been using this software for 20 years".

Fortunately, somebody with some insight at Adobe included a preference setting that allowed you to disable the Home Screen interface. But that didn't last for very long. Somewhere (probably in the department where they are focused on making each version of Adobe software worse than the previous one - a tradition since Photoshop 5), they decided to eliminate the opt-out box. Don't like that Home Screen interface? Bummer. You can't turn it off, otherwise you might miss how you could load all of your images into their cloud sharing interface. Or something. Maybe they hope to expand into renting movies and a streaming music service too. Because if all the other software companies jump off a bridge should you jump off it too?

Endless Frustration: Salesforce.com and Email Sync

With support for the Outlook Connector coming to an end with the roll-out of the Winter '16 release, Salesforce admins everywhere are researching email integration solutions. That is, of course, unless you're someone who had already previously found Salesforce's default level of email integration to be way too crappy.

As an Salesforce Admin, I'm not too engaged in day-to-day customer activity, so my own need for email integration has been rather limited. Additionally, since I live on a Mac and most of our users are on PC (and like using Outlook), the ugly dark pit of Outlook integration was something that I tried to hand off to the IT organization -- my best efforts were usually applied to a strategy of "I didn't get any on me, did I?" In that context, one of the reasons we actually chose Salesforce.com as a CRM platform was that it was actually better at email integration than some of the other options that we looked at way back when. Funny, right?

The great "shift" to Salesforce for Outlook by Salesforce was the first big "Fuck You Customer", at least in the domain of email integration. At the time it was introduced, new 64-bit Windows systems were being rolled out, but the Outlook Connector didn't work with them. Instead, Salesforce decided to go down this path of Salesforce for Outlook. Sure it doesn't work with a lot of older systems. Sure it only syncs emails to leads, contacts and opportunities (like email to Salesforce). Sure we've put in specs that say that it requires Exchange. But you can administer this one from the cloud -- sort of. The bottom line was that it sucked. Hard. And when I spoke to the product managers at Dreamforce, they told me, "It should work with POP/IMAP -- we haven't really seen any issues -- you should just move forward using it." And they also said, "basically, you just need to use it, because this is the future -- there will be no more development on Outlook Connector." It sucks. Just eat it.

Now, here we are several years later, and instead of making it better for all of their users, they've alienated whatever percentage it is that does not use Exchange. You could look at it as a mistake, but four years of IdeaExchange complaining about email integration and an overall lack of any sort of rapid response is a pretty good indication that this is no accident. There's no one over in charge of email sync saying, "oops, this looks like it was a roadmap mistake, our bad." No, instead this has the aroma of a plan.

What I think that we're missing here is the "hidden" price increase. Now, you will pay for email integration to Salesforce.com. It is an ala carte option, available only through their partner network -- unless you are Microsoft email customer. For Microsoft email customers, Microsoft will subsidize the cost of your email and calendar integration.

It's moves like these that push you to consider competitive solutions. In the bigger picture, what that means is that Salesforce is increasingly moving the company into a place where they are ripe for disruption. As someone who has gone from the strong like end of the spectrum to the really dissatisfied end, I'm sure that I'm not alone. Given the right circumstances and the right solution, I could see a mass erosion of the Salesforce customer base -- sort of like the death of Syquest.

I still haven't determined the best path for email integration. Right now, I'm looking at Match My Email, which seems to be the best balance of Gmail and Outlook support. But, as I look through the details, I can't help but wonder -- why doesn't Salesforce do this themselves? Oh, because Fuck You Customers.

Southwest Airlines: Monetizing Imaginary Money

Southwest Airlines is a great example of one of those love-hate relationships that just make you crazy. On the one hand, with their unique approach to service, Southwest Airlines revolutionized our expectations of low cost airfare. So often, when you see some of the financial results come out for the various airlines and Southwest is profitable while other airlines struggle, you can't help but cheer. In part it's like, "see, you can be a nice, fun environment with low cost airfares and still be profitable." But regardless of however many quarters Southwest outperforms them financially, they never seem to learn the good lessons and the airline industry as a whole seems to strive for the gold-standard in sucktastic customer experience, the cable company.

But yes, in the midst of all of that, there are aspects of Southwest Airline's service that you want to love. Price is one. Once upon a time, you could hop on a plane to LA and return for under $100. These days, that number looks closer to $200, but it increasingly comes with caveats.

Over the years I've spent many hours in airplanes on many carriers. There have been a few years where my percentage of travel was close to 50% -- not as great as some, but not insignificant. It used to be that there was a certain amount of credit given to seasoned travelers. For most of us that traveled on business, your main goal was a streamlined trip through the airport travel experience. That meant a carry-on because you didn't have time to waste with checked baggage. It also meant your were flexible with your routes; changing flights was no big deal. But when most of the airlines started charging for carry-on baggage, suddenly the overhead space became crowded with Aunt Susie and Uncle Pete's luggage. They didn't care about efficiency, they just wanted to save money -- or they were afraid of losing their luggage.

For business travelers and premier flyers, "perks" like boarding early weren't about anything but getting in front of the chaos that comes with boarding. Aunt Susie and Uncle Pete, meandering down the aisle, trying to find their seat. Putting their bag in sideways because the "carry-on" didn't seem like it would fit. Filling the overhead bin space with bags of snacks and souvenirs that they didn't have room for in their big checked luggage.

Southwest gets lots of these travelers who don't travel frequently. Families. People on vacation. People who may rarely fly. Their system is great if you're one of these travelers, but the chaos sucks for experienced business travelers that benefit from efficiency. No assigned seats means if you arrive for boarding at the last minute, you'll be lucky to find a middle seat in the back of the plane and your bag is probably getting checked -- no waiting around sending those last minute emails before you board. Probably the worst part of that is that you could have probably squeezed your bag in somewhere, but those people filled the bin with sideways bags have taken that space and often the Southwest flight attendants just let the chaos happen.

These are just a few of the reasons why, for business travel, Southwest kind of sucks. If you add in that, in the old days, their was no in-flight entertainment system (admittedly now an extinct feature), as a business traveler I never chose Southwest for long duration business flights. It's one thing to put up with the chaos for a 1 hour flight, it's another thing entirely to deal with that for four hours or more.

I think that this is part of the reason Southwest tried to create a "business class" boarding process and associated fare. Unfortunately, it doesn't really address the issues with late boarding and last minute, it just puts you at the front of the line when they open it up. For most Southwest flights that I've been on since they added it, it's not a time when people are actually getting seats, it's just one more thing that the gate attendant has to say before they begin letting everyone else on board.
Where Southwest Outperforms the Other Airlines
As noted, Southwest Airlines sucks for business travel on so many levels, but they actually do offer certain advantages when it comes to the number of flights. While the traditional carriers like United, American and Delta may offer only two or three flights per day to primary travel destinations, Southwest often runs six to eight flights. Don't want to catch the 6:00 am flight to LAX, take the 8:00am or the 10:00am. You can get Southwest flights throughout the day. When you're planning your departure from your home airport, it's usually easy to predict your schedule, so lots of flights may not seem like a big advantage. But where it is helpful is -- if you know you need to arrive in LA by 5:00pm, you select an early flight, say 12:00pm, and if something happens to delay that flight (incoming flight problems for example), you probably have two or three options for later flights that will still get you to LA in time.

Historically, this has also been true with return flights. If something happens and your on Southwest, there are probably several more flights that day that could get you there -- you probably won't be stuck overnight. As I mentioned in my Twitter posts related to this, in the past, I've also happened to show up at the airport early and been able to get on an earlier flight just because it wasn't crowded and they let me go as standby.

Unfortunately, twice in the last year, I've booked flights on Southwest specifically because of the multiple flight advantage, then managed to wrap up my business and get to the airport early, hoping that I might be able to get on an earlier flight. Both times, the Southwest customer service rep informed me that I couldn't change my flight without paying more than $100. When I wrote about this on Twitter, here's what Southwest Airlines customer service had to say:

and this was their comment on me noting the "no change fees" promotion in the jetway boarding my flight.

With nothing to do in the airport on Wednesday afternoon, I had lots of time for Twitter.

Technically speaking, Southwest is correct. If you're changing the ticket and there is a new corresponding fare and you're not charging something extra to make that change, it's not really a change fee. But while legally your statement may be accurate, as a customer, it feels a lot like a "fee" to change. Put a different way, if you have to argue the nuance of language with your customer as though you are a lawyer, you've already lost a marketing battle, particularly when the nuance involves just how much it's going to cost the customer.

Still, when you drill down into it, the tone underlying this debate is essentially something like this, "you're trying to get over on us." You selected one of our "loss leader" low cost fares, and now you expect to be entitled to all of the 'privileges' associated with our airline. By "switching" from one flight to another "not full" flight, you cost us. Parenthetically speaking, what does this change cost? It costs the potential to charge the increased far that you would have paid if you planned to make that change. In other words, it costs imaginary money.

On Wednesday, when Southwest didn't want to change my flight and put me on standby on one of two earlier flights, they saved themselves $200 of imaginary money. $200 that I didn't spend, $200 that they didn't make, and $200 that they didn't lose by just making the change for free.

But if that's not bad enough, here's why Southwest sucks for business travel. Here's an example snapshot from my corporate travel engine. I picked a Tuesday in June for an example "trip" to LAX. As you can see from the screenshot, I have a couple of options (I limited them to Southwest between 10:00am and 1:00pm for simplicity).

If you were booking through the Southwest Airlines web site, you'd see this fare as a Wanna Get Away fare -- the fare with no changes available. But, from the corporate travel engine, it's just another flight. You can dive into the terms, but there's another factor here -- the corporate travel engine just looks at the price, $148, and bases policy calculations on that number. Want flexibility? That fare isn't shown and, if it was, it would be out of policy because this fare has set the baseline.

Then again, we should be happy that Southwest fares are even displayed. For years, if you wanted to book Southwest, you had to go outside of this system and jump through corporate hoops just to select them.

So congratulations Southwest Airlines. You're watchful management of my airfare has saved you hundreds of imaginary dollars over the past year and all you really lost was the "happy" that used to be connected with the "customer" when you described me.

Salesforce.com and POP/IMAP Email Sync - An Update

Recently I wrote about how Salesforce had decided to EOL support for POP/IMAP in it's Outlook Connector. Since that time, I spoke with my Salesforce account rep expressing outrage. If you're reading this, I hope that you have too. I'm still considering writing a similar 'outrage' email that I send to Marc Benioff.

In positive news, community specialist Kristie Garafola has updated the success.saleforce.com page on this issue. She is now asking for input as to what POP/IMAP platforms you are using.

Hi Everyone-  I’ve been speaking with our product team to get more information for you and have a few questions.  Can you see below and let me know your thoughts?

IMAP and POP3 are communication protocols to access email servers. What we need to know to address the request is what are the email servers you are connecting to (through IMAP and POP3) when downloading your email? If it's not an Exchange Server, is it mostly Gmail? What about other email services? Understanding what email servers you’re connecting to and their popularity will help us prioritize our focus beyond Exchange.

For those currently using Apple Mail on Mac to connect to an Exchange server, you may use our Exchange Sync model and get calendar events and contacts syncing. With Exchange Sync, it does not matter whether the user is on a Windows machine or a Mac, and which email application is in use, as long as the back-end email server is Exchange 2010 or 2013.

As for the Salesforce App for Outlook, it will work in OWA on a Mac when using a browser, and eventually on Outlook for Mac when downloading it from Office 365 (i.e. only the newest version).

We can evaluate bringing support for IMAP and POP3 with SFO, or even better, explore the possibility of porting Exchange Sync-type capabilities to sync contacts and calendar events with Gmail. Once I have more information on that, I will post again.

There's more, but I didn't want to grab the whole thing. On the upside, what I take from this is that the outrage is being discussed. I don't think that they're in full-on head-slap mode, but I think that they know that there are a bunch of people who are pissed. At the same time, I'm not sure if it's enough outrage to actually spur action -- or simply one of those "oh yeah, we're listening" followed by nothing.

What I take from Kristie's post is that she's trying to get a grasp on an issue with outrage (Salesforce for Outrage?), but she does not seem particularly versed in the technology of email. Her post reads sort of like somebody who stepped into a quagmire of crap, then discussed the issue with the product team and they responded with something like "fine. which way should we through the rope to pull you out..." followed by more frantic sinking.

There are really a couple of issues here:
First and foremost: Salesforce.com's solution for handling email integration and syncing SUCKS! For years, they have provided support for Outlook integration (early on, it was seemed like it was important to them, but the first step down the FAIL path started with Salesforce for Outlook). When they partnered with Google to do Google Apps integration, they could have implemented a Gmail integration at that point -- or shortly thereafter -- but they didn't. As for Mac email support, probably the best tool was always the MailDrop app developed by a guy who thought it would be useful -- but never adopted by Salesforce. And he's quit supporting MailDrop. Bottom line = Email Sync is really an afterthought.

Second: Kristie's post gets a little muddled in dealing with the difference between clients and server sorts of issues. Put simply, the client is the thing that lives on your computer, the server is the email system that lives in a data center or in the cloud somewhere. It's the place that collects your email when you're not connected.

Connect for Salesforce was client-side add-on. It was designed so that a Sales guy could install it on their system and sync their emails to Salesforce. MailDrop and most other email sync tools are client-side add-ons. A server-side sync tool would require that your IT team install something on their overall email system. Most IT teams hate doing this because the software (e.g. Exchange) that runs email is finicky and a bit of a pain in the ass to run. Between SPAM, hacking and other mysterious issues, the server side of email is sort of like the Devil's Triangle of IT -- beautiful when the weather is nice, but subject to spontaneous bouts bad.

Salesforce for Outlook claimed to be a server-side sync tool, but the reality was that, while there were server-side permissions, it is still a client-side add-on. In it's early days, essentially what Salesforce for Outlook would do is sit on your system and, when you flagged something to sync to Salesforce, use the same basic approach as Email to Salesforce (where you simply BCC your email to Salesforce). That's why it worked with POP and IMAP even though it wasn't "supported".

This confusion between client-side and server-side makes sorting through solutions and planning an updated roadmap even more challenging. While Exchange is popular, we use Google Apps and Gmail, but there are others beyond that. From open source solutions to old systems or perhaps even for IT teams that just don't want to use Microsoft or Google, the back-end of email could be in place for a variety of reasons. For users on these systems, POP/IMAP typically provides the bridge to the client. Imagining a server side component to fit this landscape is like trying to imagine a single tire that fits every car. 

Back on the client side, there are wide array of options as well. On the PC side, one of the things that made Outlook such an attractive option for a Salesforce sync client is that Microsoft bundled it with their Office suite, so virtually everyone using the Office suite could potentially be supported. Are there other email clients? Sure, but building for Outlook probably touched the broadest user base.

Meanwhile, in the Mac world, there are different options. For a long time, people in the business world took the approach that the Mac didn't exist. Over the years, that landscape has been shifting significantly. While it might have been "tolerable" for Salesforce to ignore the Mac back in 2005, the times have changed. On the Mac platform, the Apple Email client is probably the default standard, but there are many email client options out there. For Apple users in the Microsoft realm, Microsoft used to sell their client as "Entourage" because it wasn't exactly compatible with the Outlook/Exchange environment. In recent years, they changed the label to Outlook, even though the Mac and PC versions are sometimes not equivalent. Historically, most Mac users connect to their email system using POP/IMAP, because most server side email systems don't support a proprietary Mac connection.

Google's Gmail lives in it's own special category. The server side of Gmail is managed by Google and the native email client is actually a web browser. Most business users would access Gmail through Google Apps which provides some administration tools and potential extensions or plug-ins. Google also develops extensions for Gmail; some are supported in Google Apps, some are not. Many users also connect to server-side Gmail through POP/IMAP and run other clients like Outlook, the Apple email client and others. It's probably also worth noting that the Outlook-Exhange interaction is so important to some businesses that Google actually built an Exchange-protocol support for Gmail in order to streamline sales of Google Apps to businesses. In other words, you could be in a business, connecting to Gmail through Outlook where your Outlook thinks it's communicating to an Exchange server even though it's talking to Gmail. This is part of what makes the SFO-Exchange server validation so frustrating for some end-users -- Gmail can pretend to be Exchange enough to satisfy Outlook, but not enough to satisfy the new SFO.

My Ideal Salesforce Email Sync Roadmap
If I were defining the product roadmap for email sync in Salesforce.com, here's what I would do. First, I would eliminate the Exchange Server validation in Salesforce for Outlook. Put simply, if it used to work and now it doesn't, you broke it. POP/IMAP support in Outlook takes care of a huge chunk of legacy systems and users on the PC. I would also make an officially supported sync tool for Mac and the Apple Email client. It's overdue. This should address a broad cross-section of users out there. I would also partner with Google to offer a plug-in or extension for integrated sync from Gmail and Google Apps. An easy extension for syncing to Salesforce from Google Apps would be a big win for many in the SMB market. This initiative would say, once and for all, that Salesforce cares about email sync.

But my roadmap wouldn't stop there. There are some people that want to have a single integrated environment for eveything. If Salesforce added a browser-based email client -- ala the Gmail browser client -- they could pull emails into a window in Salesforce. For many users and administrators, the ability for users to manage their email from within Salesforce would bring a significant bump in adoption. Imagine if Email was a tab.

Anyway, that's how I'd set the table. What I actually expect to happen is some lip service to this issue, promises of future improvements, but no action. When you look across their existing "partner" landscape, there's a lot of money changing hands in email sync. Unlike the old days when platform providers like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Twitter saw something that looked like a cool extension of their functionality and, essentially, brought it in house, Salesforce has shown that their strategy over time is, if there is something developed by Salesforce Labs or some cool functionality that is convenient to bake in -- if somebody is willing to pay another $15-however much more per user for that feature, monetize it. If they don't support it and you have to pay an additional cost, oh well. Remember, your success is what's important to them.

Google, Mobile Usability Site Optimization and the Tyranny of the Algorithm

While we all recognize that the world is being reshaped by smart phones and mobile devices, there is still this difficult gray area that lives in the difference between mobile and the traditional desktop. Even Google struggles with it. Here's an example -- if you search YouTube on your desktop device, you can view a host of music videos, official ones from the artists associated with them. Try to view them on your mobile device and you'll have a difficult time. It's not the video format, it's their content rules that block your access.

Despite issues like this, there are people out there that want to remake the Internet, to change it so that you have "equal" access to the contents of the web, regardless of device. It's a noble goal, but it significantly underplays some critical differences between the desktop world and the mobile world. The "madness" destroying "the best minds of our generation" seems to be this fixation on making the desktop world function like the mobile world. Take Windows 8 and the "Metro" interface as an example. Or many of the stupid crossover features in the Yosemite version of Mac OSX. From a design standpoint, it's worse that the lowest common denominator, it's trying to force the desktop to adapt to the mobile-touch model.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
     starving hysterical naked

Google has now decided that the rest of the world must follow this edict. If you're a webmaster, you've probably already received notices and alerts that they are updating their indexing rules to include mobile usability as a ranking factor in indexing. It doesn't matter if the vast majority of your traffic is not mobile, Google has decided that you need to tune your content for mobile.

For some industries, mobile traffic is anything but the norm. For a couple of sites that I manage, mobile traffic probably represents less than 10% of the traffic -- the business is primarily B2B and customers go from office desktops to the resources on the site. There just isn't a huge demand for importing 3D CAD files onto your iPhone. However, back in the halls of Google, this year's graduate class of geniuses has suddenly decided that Aunt Minnie should be able to see those pages of CAD files with an experience that corresponds to the same one an engineer with a high-end CAD station can.

Here's the crazy part -- remember when they decided that they wanted to include Google+ considerations in your search results? Because clearly you want a personalized search experience and, when your friend 'likes' those CAD files, it probably means that you'll want to check them out too. Anyway, Google is already delivering some level of "personalization" in their search results. But is is reasonable for them to tap a different ranking for desktop and mobile? It used to be, but not anymore. So says Google. Because it doesn't matter what you think you know about your customers, Google has decided that they know better. And they will change the world. You could ignore it, but that won't just affect the small percentage of people who might have a lesser experience on your site because they were using a mobile device. Now, it will affect your visibility to all of your customers.


Accessibility is not the same on the web as it is in real life. This "one-size-fits-all" approach, making everything adapt to mobile is deluded at the core. It's true that, when I'm mobile I want access to things like Salesforce.com -- and I need access to all of my data there. I want recipes and directions and sometimes shopping. I price compare. Sometimes I look up stuff in order to explain it. But, even if it were available on my phone, I wouldn't use my phone to create artwork in Adobe Illustrator. And more to the point -- I don't want Adobe to re-engineer Illustrator so that the one somebody-somewhere-who-has-decided-that-it-would-be-cool-if-they-could-use-Illustrator-on-their-phone is satisfied. This is not progress. This is not thoughtful product roadmap. These are outliers, problems best addressed by extensions or accessories.

A better path would be if Google simple called attention to potential mobile issues, but didn't include it in ranking -- unless you were ranking on a mobile device. I'd be cool with that. But they don't ask me. And it's their algorithm. We just have to live under it.

WTF Salesforce.com? Product Roadmap to EPIC FAIL

Planning product features and the product roadmap -- it's something established businesses do in an effort to chart the evolution of a product in alignment with the market. While it's usually based around a presentation, it's really a conversation to discuss whether the direction makes sense. While someone may own it, it should be a consensus document. I write this to underscore how this recent feature deprecation announcement from Salesforce.com represents a strategic choice on their part; albeit one that has the potential to drive a broad exodus from the platform.

What change is looking like it may be the stupidest roadmap decision of 2015? Salesforce has essentially killed support for email integration for companies using POP and IMAP.

But wait, you might say, there is "Email to Salesforce". What I'm talking about is the integrated support for Microsoft's Outlook email client, what used to be the "Connector for Outlook" and then became "Salesforce for Outlook". Salesforce for Outlook, the product feature that they've been telling us is the path forward for four or five years now, does not support POP or IMAP. In the past, the product managers at Dreamforce used to tell us, "although POP and IMAP aren't officially supported in "Salesforce for Outlook", go ahead and use it. It should work." However, the latest version of Salesforce for Outlook only works with an Exchange server. Why? Because they baked in validation to make sure that there's a connected Exchange server.

And then there's this from their blog:

Announcing Availability of the Salesforce App for Outlook
Mar 18 2015 | By Ryan Aytay
Today, we’re excited to announce the new Salesforce App for Outlook. This exciting integration gives you a brand new way to experience Salesforce, right from Outlook and Office 365. Even better, it’s 100 percent cloud based with nothing to install! The Salesforce App for Outlook is the latest milestone of our strategic partnership with Microsoft.

This follows an email that they sent out the day before. Here's a snippet from that:

What is changing?
With the Winter ‘16 release*, we will retire and end support for Connect for Outlook. After the release, the application will no longer save your emails or sync your contacts, events, and tasks between Outlook and Salesforce.

*Currently targeted for October 2015; date subject to change

What do we recommend?
We understand that this retirement will cause some disruption for customers using Connect for Outlook, and we are here to help. Prior to the Winter ‘16 release, we encourage you to migrate to Salesforce for Outlook, the application with enhanced features that brings Salesforce directly into your Outlook environment. There is no cost to migrate, and you can learn more about it in the video here. To get started, please see the Salesforce for Outlook Quick Start page. In addition, you can find more information in the Connect for Outlook Feature Retirement Knowledge article.

Why are we retiring this product?
Salesforce for Outlook supports the latest versions of Microsoft’s operating systems and Outlook. Moving forward, we will continue focusing our development efforts on Salesforce for Outlook.

And then there's this from their ideas portal. The gist of this idea thread is that for four years -- since they first dropped Salesforce for Outlook on users -- people have been asking for POP / IMAP sync support. In the latest comment from Project Management section, there's this from early March:

Kristie Garafola
Thanks everyone for your thoughtful feedback. I completely understand the frustration and the challenge this presents. While Pop3/IMAP was never officially supported by SFO, you have all made it very clear that it was used- and used heavily- prior to the release that added the supportability check that is causing the problem now.

I have consolidated your input and am escalating this to see what our options are here.  Thank you and I'll circle back as soon as I have more to share.

The reality is that the most likely victims of this shift in product support is the SMB market. These are the businesses that are more likely to use Outlook with a POP/IMAP set-up and an email system like Google Apps. Microsoft's Office 365, the product direction from the Microsoft roadmap, is a subscription-based cloud service that parallels the pricing structure of Google Apps. Of course, since they announced a partnership back in 2008, customers have been asking for integration and sync between Salesforce and Gmail, but there has been no support nor improvement in support since that time. Contrast that with the current move -- basically Salesforce for Outlook will work correctly if you pay Microsoft about $4 per user per month. Merry F'n Christmas Salesforce customers!

For Salesforce users that need email sync -- which is virtually all of them -- we've had to endure shitty email sync for years. Connector for Outlook was a good tool, but when they first rolled out Salesforce for Outlook, it was essentially a canned version of Email to Salesforce -- it would only add email to Leads or Contacts and Opportunities if the Contact was on the opportunity. It sucked, but it was the only solution for 64-bit OS users and later versions of Outlook (2010 and beyond). It took two years of updates before they actually approached the functionality that in the original Outlook Connector. Now this move. And don't even get me started on "officially supported Mac email sync.

The bottom line really is, Salesforce.com has shitty email sync and integration support and their roadmap is for more of the same. If you're a sales guy and you can't sync your customer's email to your CRM platform, then it's not much of CRM platform. Instead of actually building in useful email integration, Salesforce seems like they would rather devote product engineering resources on things like "Like" buttons for Chatter and those "all critical" tangential product elements like HR systems and Work.com. Or maybe support for the Apple Watch. Exciting. New markets are all well and good, but if "the Number One CRM Platform in the world" can't easily record customer communications, it may be time to abandon that moniker. And, for customers, it may be time update your roadmap with "start looking at Salesforce.com alternatives".

SMX West Expo: Why do you charge for your expo?

So you're hosting a conference and you decide to charge for exhibition attendance, what's your strategy? Often, a baseline charge is a good way to make an event more exclusive, providing the exhibitors with a filter that reduces the number of people who attend simply to sell the exhibitors something.

Put differently, if you're hosting an exhibition, you're exhibitors would probably rank conference attendees as their best prospects, people who use the products or are in the industry as second best, and the least desirable being the vendors and businesses that attend simply to sell products or services to the exhibitors -- exhibitors, publications, consultants, shipping companies, suppliers. We've even had people come in off the street collecting bags of booth give-away stuff -- on occasion.

An on-site charge can go a long way to prevent this kind of traffic.

However, I'm trying to imagine the "bad" traffic in that mix trying to sell to companies exhibiting at a search marketing conference. Now weigh that against the potential "walk-in" customers to an exhibition that might actually benefit from the products or services that a company exhibiting there would display. If I were an exhibiting company, I would be pissed. Or rather, I wouldn't be a repeat exhibitor.

This is to you, sponsoring companies of the SMX West Expo -- I won't be visiting the expo because they decided to charge for expo admission. I don't know anything more about you or your business. Google, Yahoo, I didn't get to speak with your team there. AimClear, Alight Analytics, Marin Software, SEORadar, Moz, Yext -- I missed seeing your booth. If you were trying to reach me, your marketing dollars were wasted. Were I in your shoes, I'd express some concerns.