New Year, New Mac

So in the back and forth over what to get for Christmas, my wife decided she would like to have an Mac of her own to use as her system (she's been using PCs regularly for many years). My initial inclination was just to buy her the latest Macbook Air, fully decked out. Essentially, that would be the same as my personal system, albeit a couple of years later with a somewhat faster processor. However, before I decided to pull the trigger on that, I decided to check the Apple site and see what options might be available in the refurb and clearance section. In the clearance section, I came across a couple of listings for the previous generation 13" Macbook Pro (pre-USB-C, Touchpad, and no Magsafe connector version).

If I could identify faults with my 13" Macbook Air, I would say that it only has two real shortcomings. First, the lack of a Retina display. As my eyes have aged, they can challenged by the lack of sharpness on the older technology LCD panel. It's also not great for image editing -- if you happen to be doing that work on a laptop screen. Prior to my wife and I getting married, when I was at home, I would do my image editing on a big screen monitor sitting on my desk in my dedicated home-office workspace. Since getting married, I no longer have the space for the desk or the monitor, so I've found myself editing images directly on the Air. Of course, Apple could update this, but they've had years to make the update and haven't done it -- I don't expect a Retina Macbook Air any time soon.

The second issue relates to the first -- when I had my Macbook Air sitting at my desk, I used to hate the fact that it only had one Thunderbolt port. I like to use one port for Ethernet and one port for display. Since the reviews weren't great for most of the Thunderbolt docks that I saw, I never invested in one. That being said, a second Thunderbolt port on the Macbook Air would make it a perfect system for me.

But, as I said, Apple isn't moving this way with their new products. Instead, the last generation Macbook Pro is really the last thing we've seen out of Cupertino resembling a Pro class laptop.

So I was looking at this clearance 13" Macbook Pro -- Retina display, two Thunderbolt ports, and even an integrated HDMI port, something that I often wind up carrying a dongle for when I travel -- and I began to see a plan take shape. After discussing it with my wife, we decided that we'd order the clearance13" Macbook Pro for me and give my wife my older Macbook Air. Merry Christmas to all. Overall, the ordering process was pretty straightforward -- other than the free shipping experience that UPS provided, essentially stealing one of our vacation days (you can read all about it on my Twitter feed). And I spent the New Years weekend migrating my old system to the new Macbook Pro.

So a couple of hick-ups that I experienced that I should probably warn you in case you find yourself in a similar position. I had a Time Machine backup of my Air, but when I tried to use the migration assistant, it told me that it couldn't use the back-up because there was a difference in versions between the two systems. Initially, I thought it was probably because my Air was running on Sierra and I expected my new Pro system to be running High Sierra. That turned out to not be true, but not before essentially forcing me to migrate my Air to High Sierra. When it still wouldn't work, I dug deeper and discovered that the new Pro clearance system shipped with El Capitan, and that was the OS difference issue. The new Pro is now running High Sierra too. Perhaps if I'd felt like jumping through some hoops, I could have restored my Air from an older backup, then went looking for a signed copy of Sierra, but it seemed like a lot of extra effort just to avoid the upgrade.

Reflections on the 13-inch Macbook Pro (early 2015 model)
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the upgrade to my system. This Macbook Pro is noticeably snappier than my Air. This system is running an Intel i5 at 2.6 GHz while my older Air was running an i7 at 1.7 GHz (or something like that).

The Retina display is much easier on my eyes.  The display color seems much richer and type is so much sharper that I don't find myself reaching for my glasses -- something that had practically become a necessity with the Air.

Another reason why I thought it might be better for me to get the Pro is the differences in the laptop body. One of the things that my wife and I can sometimes struggle with is being able to identify which device belongs to whom. With iPhones, we use different models, so it's pretty easy. With iPads, we use different color cases. The Apple product that sucks the most for multiple users in a household is the Airpods, since there's no really easy way to differentiate one pair from another, even though they're uniquely paired to a specific user's devices. Anyway, with one Pro and one Air, it's much easier to identify which system belongs to whom.

There are some issues that I have noticed with the Macbook Pro though. Probably the one that I'm most aware of is the battery life. While the early 2015 era Macbook Pros are supposed to be pretty good on battery life -- or at least supposedly much better than the current generation (I've heard several stories of crap battery life on the USB-C / Touchbar models), the battery life on the Pro is no match for the Air. Even with my couple of years old Air, I could easily expect four to six hours of active system operation before I saw my battery falling into a "really need to charge this" zone. With the Pro, I'm getting below 50% in two-three hours of use. It's sort of like turning over the keys to my high mileage compact and jumping into an SUV. It's a workable battery life, but at this point, I'm thinking I don't want to get too far away from an outlet.

The touchpad on the Pro seems a bit more sensitive than the one on the Air. While I've been using the system, I've found myself accidentally triggering clicks and inadvertent mouse movements. I'm still playing with the settings, so hopefully I can make that work a bit better.

In conclusion, I think that the ideal system would be a Macbook Air with a Retina display. If that system was available, I'd buy one today. Having spent a couple of years getting accustomed to the battery life of the Macbook Air, that feels like a bit more of a critical requirement than the Touchbar designing product team seem to recognize. That being said, I am really appreciative of the Retina display and the extra ports on my Pro, but YMMV.

Photography and Skin Tone

Here is an interesting article I came across talking about the history of photography and how the process was optimized for white skin tone. If you've spent any time attempting to color correct or color-balance a photo with a number of people in it, you're probably familiar with some of the challenges and limitations.

One thing that this article seems to miss is that there's also a skin type that seems to celebrate the reds in the photography process. Often, when you get this skin type, it looks like the person is in the middle of a drunken bender -- something I used to think was entirely possible for one of the corporate executives that had this skin type. Sadly, I seem to have hit this stage in life myself -- the exceptionally red-face, not the drunken bender -- and I'm often plagued with trying to desaturate the reds in my face without screwing up the rest of the image or making me look unnatural. It's a reminder that, for however good the newest cameras might be, there are still limitations inherent in the process.

A Tale of Two Laptops

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
(and they say I write long sentences) Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

It was within the period of a little more than a month or more that two laptops were stolen. And while law and justice play a role in the unfolding of the events, sometimes the injustices that you find are bound to a different set of concerns.

Property crime is not new to Silicon Valley, or the rest of the world for that matter. For years San Jose promoted itself as one of the safest big cities, hiding under mantle of a low murder rate. But there was always property crime. Several years ago when we had an office in San Jose, somebody broke in one night and made a quick walk-through grabbing laptops off the desks where people had left them. At the time the thing that struck me was the irony of providing giving someone a laptop that never left their desk. In addition to the hardware, some data was lost as there was no structured practice for backup. In the months and years that followed, the official practice for laptop backup became being supplied an external drive -- maybe -- and a request/suggestion to back up to that drive.

Offices in the areas around what is now the Google campus used to get broken into a lot -- to the point that you would sometimes see more Mountain View cop cars in that neighborhood than your own. Friends that had an office in that area had several break-ins. Once, they not only stole computers, they also stole the software disks. It's probably better now with Google everywhere over there. Is it worth breaking into a building for a Chromebook?

Stealing laptops out of cars is so common, most local restaurants have signs warning you not to leave personal property in the car. Sometimes the signs even specifically mention laptops. Over the past couple of months, I've heard stories of several laptops being stolen from cars in parking lots. And one evening, when we were at happy hour and discussions about the cops in parking lot came up, it was noted that they were there because there had been repeated break-ins.

It was in this manner that Mr. Thinkpad was stolen. He was boosted from the passenger area of a car, window smashed, laptop grabbed, thief and laptop into the get-away car, and away. Mr. Thinkpad probably thought he was safe in the same way that novice campers may believe that bears or racoons won't take food of their tents or their cars. Unfortunately, glass provides little security and SUVs, wagons and hatchbacks live under greater threat as access to the cabin provides access to everything -- there is no real out-of-sight.

Most of what Mr. Thinkpad took with him was in the cloud, as many of our processes have moved that way. There were several active presentations underway that were lost, possibly more, but when it comes to work systems, Mr. Thinkpad was probably backed up more consistently than most. And the concern? Other than for the active presentation, perhaps the greatest concern raised was for the glass in the SUV as the vehicle was new.

In the days and the weeks that followed, a new system was spec'd, ordered, and arrived around the time when Mr. Air would disappear. In fact, Mr. Thinkpad's relative was sitting on a desk, still in the box, when Mr. Air vanished. Mr. Air was abducted, seized from the desk in a daring mid-day entry into our office around 1:00pm. The thief walked in through a normally locked door that was propped open slightly to facilitate international visitors going back and forth to the bathroom. This inside of a semi-secure building with cameras and a guard who often hangs out at the front desk in the lobby -- the illusion of security. The disappearance of Mr. Air was such a surprise that, people in the office thought that maybe somebody had played a joke, hiding him for amusement.

While Mr. Air was not a work system, work was sometimes done on him. It's one of those crazy things -- sometimes work doesn't invest in tools for the work environment and you find yourself working on a system that's five or six years old -- functional, but heavy, slow, and hitting the limits of it's capacity. When Mr. Air did do work, most of it was shared back and forth through the cloud, meaning that no work was lost. At the same time, what Mr. Air did carry from work was the password and keys to a host of systems that all needed to be reset.

But the greater loss with the disappearance of Mr. Air was the personal data. Not only did Mr. Air hold the passwords for work systems, he also carried passwords for all of the home projects. And then there's all of that other personal stuff, like taxes. Mr. Air was not backed up. Mr. Air's predecessor, Mr. MacBook Pro had been time-machined shortly before his surprising, untimely passing, but in a strange twist, the drive used to back up Mr. MacBook experienced disk problems in the weeks following Mr. MacBook's passing. So, also lost with Mr. Air was nearly a year's worth of activities.

In the hours and days following Mr. Air's disappearance, the main questions tended to surround aspects of Mr. Air: Wasn't he backed up? Didn't he use a password? Did he have "Find my Mac" enabled?

And, in the days following Mr. Air's disappearance, there were continued postmortem reports on the thief -- they got him on video, they could see the car on video -- as though this would provide comfort or a return of Mr. Air. Additionally, it was noted that, "it's too bad it wasn't a work system."

A cost-conscious business might question or nuance the liability, or hold no responsibility for events and property under their roof. But that same line of questioning might lead to larger questions like what is reasonable to expect from an employer or an office environment. And with the Internet, broadband and online collaboration tools, is it necessary to subject people to unpleasant aspects of a shared office environment. And while many businesses offer features like gourmet kitchens, free sodas, or Xbox gaming areas, is a base level of security a reasonable expectation?
----

The storyteller makes no choice 
Soon you will not here his voice
 - Terrapin Station

I don't have any good take-aways from all of this. Much has already been taken. I will say that, from a broader perspective, the entire experience has prompted me to reevaluate a number of my views on company culture. Here's hoping you find insights along a gentler path.

Messaging Ripple: A Salesforce Price Increase

Pricing strategy is a deep and complicated topic. You can find volumes of information on the web about pricing strategy. One interesting breakdown that I came across was in a white paper from Bessemer Venture Partners that's available for download from this page. One thing that I found particularly on point was this quote in the preview text:

Although the “flinch test” (keep raising the price and constraining the terms until the customer flinches) may have been an effective pricing art in the era of enterprise software, much more thoughtful strategies are needed for the modern models.

The flinch test. It has an uncomfortably familiar feel to it.

Upsetting the Status Quo
Imagine that pricing is a balance, a point of equilibrium between what the vendor would like to take from the relationship and a contrasting force of what the customer would like to spend in the relationship and how much they need in terms of service. In this model, a sales contract is reached based on a balancing of those two interests in at a point where both parties are satisfied. However, what constitutes a balance is never fixed, it's usually more of a range -- sort of like being on a see-saw and staying in balance as long as neither end touches the ground. With flinch test pricing, there is that idea of attempting to adjust pricing in favor of the vendor who, as an incumbent, maintains some entrenched leverage as it's hard to disconnect from the see-saw.

But with Salesforce, there's another aspect to their pricing model. Salesforce prices on a tiered pricing model. Here's an interesting excerpt from the Bessemer white paper:

The mindset of maintaining a long relationship with the customer supports having a tiered model. As the customer grows, its needs evolve. Part of the sales process is demonstrating that the customer’s needs can be met both in the present and in the future through higher tiers that it can “graduate into” over time. This also implies that sales cycles may be longer in order to prove out this value proposition over time...

The perception of growth on the part of customers is an important part of psychological pricing that compares favorably to the perception of “being charged more for a service level that I barely need.”

A fundamental component of Salesforce.com's tiered pricing structure is that you are "paying for things that you don't need." Some of these functional elements may be capabilities that you hope to "grow" into, while others may be things that simply don't fit your business process. Either way, there is a wealth of functionality that most likely sits idle, regardless of your business.

For customers, unless you've defined some specific measurable metrics, ROI can be seen as a Glass Half Empty / Glass Half Full sort of thing. Am I experiencing Value? Do I see the utility? Do I think we're taking advantage of all of the capabilities that the software offers? Half empty or half full is an easy state to remain in when everything is at equilibrium. But changing the cost equation can reactivate a need to scrutinize and measure -- and if there is not objective metric, it's easy to harmonize with the unused utility aspects.

The Uneasy Influence of Power in the SaaS Relationship
One of the things that makes a price increase so much more uncomfortable when you're dealing with a company like Salesforce.com is that, if you've deployed, the software has probably become entrenched in your business processes. This means that, if you are unhappy with the change in the vendor-customer relationship, you don't have many avenues for change. In this paper that I came across on Price Fairness, that kind of power magnifies the negative impact of a price increase.

Power affects the impact of different industries on price fairness judgments. When an industry is more powerful, as in the case of healthcare insurance, consumers are sensitized to fairness concerns. They are, however, reluctant to react because the alternatives are not good. The result may be capitulation: purchasing the product despite being angry as indicated by the dotted arrow. The result however, may also be explosive anger.

As with healthcare insurance, some may claim that there are many alternatives, but the reality is that that there aren't really that many viable ones.

In that context, even the threat of a price increase for a SaaS product like Salesforce.com can seem more like extortion than an acceptable business practice. The implication of the message is, "how entrenched is this software in your business processes?" And, as customers, your take-away understanding is more likely to be, "let me think twice about how I leverage this software in my organization. Is this new feature worth enabling another hook into my business or should I instead be looking at disconnecting dependencies?"

Personally, I would consider it an epic messaging blunder.

To end on a positive note, here's a little something in honor of the arrogance of the message and crazy seat licensing, here's a Bob Dylan song being performed by Tom Petty.

Dear Apple, WTF did you do to iTunes?

I'm not a fan of the recent updates to iTunes, but I probably shouldn't be surprised by the changes. Driven by the 'need' to address complaints from some iTunes critics, Apple seems to be steadily devolving the software.

It started out with the most recent 'major' revision to iTunes. This is the one that switched everything from one window to a series of functional pull downs for music, videos, apps. Suddenly, a list of options that that could toggle from a single screen required a pull down, and the app couldn't remember it's previous state. Way to bury the functionality guys.

And for whatever reason, the guys in charge of this version felt like when you couldn't remember where you were before, the place you probably wanted to be was looking at the list of things that you already downloaded from iTunes. Use case? You've got me.

Essentially, what it did seem to do for me was add clicks and interaction when you just wanted to sync your phone and update any apps. Not to mention the whole, where am I and where is the stuff that I'm looking for...

But when your so close to brilliance like that, you probably just need a couple of tiny tweaks to make it really special.

Enter the latest version. It looks like they've fixed the problem with remembering the app's previous state (sort of), but they also seemed to have decided that what you really need is extra security. Now you have to enter your password two or three times in order to update the apps on your phone. And you have to love the latest feature that they introduced; namely, they've figured out a way where it can't remember all of the apps that you were downloading during an update. Trying to update five apps? It may stop on the second or third app download. And, if that wasn't frustrating enough, the only thing that could be better? You need to enter your password again in order to download.

It's crazy. It's like iTunes has gone from overly simple to the kind of craptacularly disjointed and complex that Microsoft might engineer. If this is the future, we're doomed. Talk about an overhaul that needs a serious overhaul...

The Cost of a Seat on Facebook

Just a quick thought to reflect on this morning. I was thinking about the nuances of customer portal pricing and page view limitations when I started thinking...

How much does a seat on Facebook cost?

There are a lot of aspects here -- server time, bandwidth, power, storage, engineering and development, marketing, etc.. You could break it down in a number of different ways, but here's how I was thinking about it.

First, there are the those front end development costs to build the system. In one respect, you might think of that as fixed. Sure, there is ongoing research and innovation and the expenses associated, but in some respects, once you've crafted the platform, it exists.

Then you have your operational costs: power, bandwidth, servers, storage, everything needed to run your network. Some of these costs may vary, depending upon the user, how active they are, how engaged they are with the platform, that sort of stuff. Still, if you think about the model for that, there are some basic cost predictions that you could develop.

All of that being said, think about how much it costs to add a user, essentially one more entry into a database table. Again, the simple cost of that line would be minimal. The only real substantive costs come through increase in resources required based on things like how active the user is, how much simultaneous activity that you need to support, etc.

This is what makes some of these customer portal pricing models that you see in the market seem so ridiculous. Many of the businesses selling cloud-based customer support portals want you to pay up front for something that most of us look at as simply adding lines in a database. It would be as if Salesforce.com wanted to bill you for each contact that you stored. In the modern world of the Internet, Facebook is happy to add users. Google is happy to give you Yet Another Email Address, and they don't mind if you use their platform for one more search. In a market where pricing like this exists, the prospect of pay-per-record (more or less) invariably seems mind-boggling.

A Salesforce Seat versus a Facebook Seat
This same issue really defines many of the current battles that I face related to Salesforce.com. Within most organizations, there is little resistance to paying for a tool that the business is using; however, the inevitable question is, "are we using it." If adoption is defined by a percentage of utilization, justifying the expense is more difficult when you have some users with very low utilization -- particularly when they 'cost' as much as someone who uses it a lot. You wind up with a conflict between the benefits of ubiquity versus the cost of paying for everyone to live on an all-you-can-eat platform. And if, in terms of code, a user isn't really any different than a contact, there's that inevitable question that eats away at the justification -- why does this cost so much?

When you contrast what Salesforce offers to the traditional pricing approach for enterprise software like Oracle, it's easy to see a benefit to the "that's not a module, it's included" approach. At that point, it's easy to find yourself in a position to use more that you might have envisioned in your initial look. This can also wind up with Salesforce eating larger portions of your software infrastructure.

All of that being said, the time when Salesforce.com seemed like an unbelievable value have passed. While I am often impressed with the utility, value isn't really a word that I would apply.

Customer Portal: Zendesk Looks Promising

The latest candidate in my customer portal software search is Zendesk, and I must say, I like what I'm seeing. Essentially, Zendesk is a pretty straightforward customer support ticketing system with support for web, email, phone, chat, Twitter, and Facebook. It has self-service help, community help, forum, ideas, and knowledgebase functionality. It's cloud-based. It already has some pre-built integrations with Salesforce.com. But here's the best part -- instead of charging you for the number of customers that you have accessing your portal, Zendesk just charges you by the customer service agent seat.

Salesforce.com's closest offering is desk.com which provides similar (but appears to be more limited) functionality. However, desk.com caps your monthly customer page views. They also offer a flex agent seat, enabling you to allocate temporary agent status on a billable hour basis. And, while I like the potential flexibility that this offers, it's still difficult to shake the feeling that, rather than flexibility, this is a calculated move enabling them to keep one hand on my wallet.

So if you're looking for a customer portal solution, I still don't have a definitive suggestion for you. I can safely say that Salesforce.com's customer portal has priced itself out of the market in my book. Perhaps the only thing funnier was when I got pricing from Jive. With Jive, it seems like they dove into the madness pricing pool that Salesforce was swimming in and enjoyed it so much that they decided to jump back in.

Like CRM and many other enterprise software applications, many solutions claim to offer the same features, so realistically, it's best to work with your potential users to understand their requirements and then compare products with some hands-on time. That being said, I'm pretty impressed with my initial evaluation of Zendesk as a potential solution for my customer portal application.

LinkedIn and Freemium: Why Overselling a Premium Trial Is Bad For Brand

It's the dirty little secret that many online subscription services want to hide -- if they can get your credit card number and commitment to a 'membership', they can leech off of your bank account, probably for longer / significantly more cost than the amount you might have been willing to spend on the service. My most recent reminder of the audacity of this scam practice, was with LinkedIn and their 'premium' membership.

I mention LinkedIn in the title of this post, not because I consider them the worst offender. I think that the worst of the worst are pretty solidly in the neighborhood of scams that cloak the subscription commitment process (see the Scamville posts). In this case, LinkedIn is up front in informing you of the subscription, but it's the what you get for the price that got them this post.

LinkedIn initially got their hooks in through a free 30-day trial. Initially, the promotional email pitched it as a different version than their normal premium package. I remember reading it and getting the impression that this was a new program that they had started that would cost less and add some unique features that I might use. Considering that I had been active on LinkedIn for over three years before they targeted me with this program, there is an implied notion that this program was different than the premium package that I had already chosen not to pay for.

And so, for 30 days, I got the opportunity to see who had looked at my profile, the chance to send 10 introductory emails through LinkedIn -- something that I hadn't used any of the default five of -- and LinkedIn's tribute to virtual goods, a badge on any resume submissions that I sent out. And, while it's pretty cool being able to see who has viewed your profile, the package is certainly not something that I would run down to Fry's and buy for $30 if it were in a box. In fact, at $30, I would never buy these features -- but I might 'forget to cancel' a trial of the service. Thirty days out, I might even have forgotten what the price was that you initially quoted. And so, hooks in my wallet, LinkedIn proceeded to suck money and destroy any brand equity that they had built with me.

LinkedIn Premium ran in the background for over a year. I didn't really think about the cost until the other day when I happened to be looking at my bank statement and saw the LinkedIn charge. A sense of outrage came over me. They sucked $360 out of my account over the course of a year for a 'product' that I wouldn't have spent $30 on. $360 for a stream of trivia about who viewed my profile.

Ethical Business Practices Don't Operate This Way
Contrast this practice with Basecamp. Several years ago, I first signed up with Basecamp to share files and collaborate on projects. At the time, there wasn't really anything quite like it. Since then, competitive solutions for aspects of the service have come online. Sometimes, I'll go through a month or three where I don't use the service. But I still maintain a subscription.

Each month, 37Signals emails me a receipt for the charge. Each time I receive it, I ask myself whether it's worth continuing the service. It's been over five years. This is what an ethical business practice looks like. This is one reason why I have a tremendous respect for the team at 37Signals.

Subscription Pricing
Nobody ever forgets the cost of their Salesforce.com subscription. At $60 per month or more, depending upon the edition, it's not something that you forget. Even within the corporate budget, the question repeatedly comes up, "What about Salesforce.com? Do we need to keep paying for it? Are we really using it?"

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the subscriptions that try to disappear and hide invisibly. Remember when AOL moved from being your go-to dial-up ISP to an afterthought in the broadband world. They dropped their subscription pricing to $10 per month -- keep access to your email and use dial-up if you need it was the pitch. Eventually, they dropped the cost of maintaining an email account to free, but they made you jump through hoops to get them to stop charging. Think about all of those people who sat there -- and for how long -- with AOL leeching $10 or more a month.

Now look at some of LinkedIn's premium pricing options. At $30 per month (or $20 per month for the Salesforce.com-to-LinkedIn API connection), it's high, but not necessarily reaching the level of a something that you question the cost every month -- particularly if you're not being reminded of it. It's the cost of buying lunch for your colleagues. And yet, it's also almost a "how much can we get away with" price. And when you consider what you get, I don't think it's something that every user would benefit from -- more likely applicable to a select set. So, basically, you're dumping these crap features on me, leeching from my bank account, and testing the threshold of what I might tolerate? Congrats. You crossed that line.

Dear Salesforce.com: Web-to-Lead/Case Spam Sucks

Dear Salesforce.com:
Recently I contacted customer support about problems with Spam getting loaded into my Salesforce instance through web-to-lead forms. While I've enjoyed discussing this problem with your customer service team, please take note of a couple of important points that you may want to add to your solutions when discussing this issue.

Captcha? Really?
Please remove the word 'captcha' from your customer service rep's vocabulary. While I'm sure that there are some web novices out there that are managing sites, most of us with this issue understand the dynamics of web forms and are fully aware of captcha. Many of us also know that captchas can be beaten, and that the people who we are likely to filter out are not spammers -- they are potential customers who don't want to be bothered with additional validation layers.

And for those Salesforce customer service reps who want to help me manage my demand generation programs, I just want to say thank you for your insightful recommendations.

You Are Not Alone
I am not the only customer with a form-based Spam issue. Here's an idea that's been posted on success.salesforce site over a year ago. Any thoughts on when we might be addressing this issue? I realize that hiding the OID will not stop bots from automated submissions that use the actual form, but it's a start. And for those of us that have been customers for a long time (i.e. prior to when this was a problem), even masking the OID doesn't fix the issue. Remember how, when stuff is published on the web it never truly goes away? Making this the key to a gateway that enable the unwanted stuffing of data into your account IS a problem.

Frankly, if I were you, I would consider this unrelenting spam problem to be an assault on your, not just me. When Google started doing email, they used their resources and the power of the cloud to help reduce spam that users experienced. Then, for fun, they bought Postini. Is this really just 'my problem' or is it 'our problem'. 

When You Recommend Solutions That Cost More, I'm Probably Not Going to Be Happy
I know you like your partners. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot -- they all offer good solutions for aspects of lead filtering and validation. But seriously, do I really need to pay these guys just so that my sales guys to don't have to click on Viagra spam? If the spammer community has essentially broken a feature of your platform, should I be the one who has to pay for the patch?

Sincerely Yours,
Yet Another 'One-captcha-recommendation-away-from--really-angry' Customer

Frustrating Aspects of Blogger - Lost Posts, Accidental Publishing, and more

If you use blogger, perhaps you've experienced this. You spend hours or days crafting a post. Then, as you get ready to publish it, you go back in to make edits. You make a change, then decide that you don't like that change. So you undo. Suddenly, your entire post is gone. A blank text area has replaced all of those words you put together. Quickly, you try to recover before Blogger's auto-save replaces your precious text with nothing. Too late. It's gone.

This morning I lost another post to the monster that lives underneath Blogger. To say that it's frustrating is an understatement. Part of the problem is auto-save, but part of the problem seems to be something in the way that Blogger handles undo. Of course, the whole thing would be moot if Blogger provided something like subversion on the auto-saves for a given session. Would it be complicated? Perhaps. But I, for one, think it would be totally worth it compared to the frustration of the lost post.

The Accidental Publish Feature
Another Blogger problem that's frustrated me several times recently seems to be related to the interface. Several times, as I started to type the title of my post, I accidentally hit the return key instead of the shift key or the apostrophe -- it happens. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Blogger seems to automatically click the Publish button based on that return. The next thing you know, I'm publishing posts like "The". Then deleting them.

I suppose in the high speed world of Google, two-steps is too long for publishing. Think about the drop out rate in the publishing pipeline!

Ah well, don't mind me. I'm just grumpy because I lost another post.

The Boring, Unloved World of Enterprise Software that Sucks

Sarah Lacy published an interesting read on PandoDaily over the weekend. The post, Why Oracle May Really Be Doomed This Time, was a nice analysis of the changing landscape in enterprise software. Spurred by Oracle buying Taleo, Sarah's post takes an interesting look at the forces that are pulling on Oracle and SAP. There are several aspects that make it worth a read, but I want to highlight a few things that I found particularly amusing about the piece.

One is the idea, essentially, that in terms of 'loving the product', Oracle sucks. Oracle sucks, SAP sucks. It's complicated, it costs a ton of money, and it doesn't do what the sales guys promised. As Sarah tells it, this is the story of enterprise software of the 90s and the early 00s. One of my favorite parts of her post was this quote:

The reason Oracle’s rollup strategy won was because companies were pummeled into a place of Stockholm-syndrome-like acceptance. When I was covering Oracle in the mid-2000s, I spoke with customer-after-customer, and I can’t say any ever loved the software they spent millions on.

My own experiences with Oracle users/champions is similar. Nobody loves the software. Many love the idea of the software and the potential of the platform, but the user interface invariably seems like it was designed from the school of ugly equals functional. Cost is also a common complaint, whether it's those ongoing annual service charges or the, "we can do that, it just means implementing this other module" never-ending upsell. Contrast these aspects with Salesforce.com, particularly when it comes to their ongoing extension of the capabilities without having to deploy yet another expensive module in order to use the functionality.

But the point of this post isn't really a enterprise software versus enterprise software debate, nor a look at the idea of "when it doesn't matter if your brand experience sucks". What I really found amusing about Sarah's post was the comments. To date, there are 118 comments on her post -- and some extremely passionate voices coming from a variety of angles. Check them out. This isn't a topic that is being argued by a few PR people making statements and promoting the company line -- many of these comments are from angry people who are passionate about their software -- enterprise software.

And they said that enterprise software is boring and that nobody cares. 

Corporate War Stories from the Battle of Salesforce.com

Among my other activities, I've been actively involved in projects evaluating and administering Salesforce.com over the past four or five years. And while I would love to be able to characterize the whole thing as easy and fun, in reality, the experience has been quite a bit less than that.

I'm not talking about the software platform here -- Salesforce.com is, hands down, one of the most amazing software tools that I have worked with. Instead, the battle has been a culture war, shaped by a cast of players with a variety of agendas, concerns, and a tremendous amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I've spent a fair amount of time analyzing, reflecting, and explaining, so maybe some of this will be helpful for you.

Knock Knock
Part of the challenge comes from the way that Salesforce.com first gets through the door. In the old days, your average sales guy in smaller companies used ACT to manage their contacts. In that kind of environment, CRM and Contact Management are often interchangeable words, and from the IT side of the world, it could be considered a personal preference decision software dictated and configured by individual sales guys. It's these same sales guys, or their front-line marketing colleagues, that start the wave to bring Salesforce.com into the organization.

Down the Web Hosting Rabbit Hole - Bluehost Terms of Service

I've been doing some research into web hosting providers for a couple of different projects. One of the projects involves looking at a simple shared hosting provider for small business and web development. A couple of quick searches on Google will produce a series of top ten web hosting provider sites, each with reviews and some categorizations for specialization (my expectation is that there is some sponsorship-based promotions driving a number of these). You can also find links on the Wordpress and Drupal sites pointing to preferred hosting providers.

I don't really want to run through the list of all of the providers that I looked at; rather, I want to point out what came up as a big surprise to me with one -- Bluehost. Over the course of my review and analysis, I was pretty impressed with the offering from Bluehost. They're listed on the Drupal site and they rank up well across a host of the different top ten sites. They offer a wide range of software easy-install scripts for everything from content management to business tools. But one of the biggest differentiators for me was that, unlike most shared server providers, they offer SSH shell access to your server root. All in all, their service looks impressive and their cost seems very reasonable.

Gotcha - the Bluehost Terms of Service Agreement
More often than not, you don't expect to find surprises in contract forms like user agreements and terms of service. For a web hosting provider, you probably expect things like no hosting illegal content, copyright-infringing material, or porn. You might also expect no spamming, malware, or other malicious activities. What surprised me in Bluehost's terms of service -- and you probably would not expect to find in a ToS -- was a prohibition on profanity. That's right, if your site contains profanity, they can shut down your service.

I was so surprised by this that I did a deeper Google search and found multiple complaints and concerns about Bluehost and profanity. One even included a transcript from an online chat with their customer support regarding the policy. To be fair, I haven't had an opportunity to contact Bluehost regarding their policy -- I was looking for an email address to request a comment, but I couldn't find one. Some of the complaints expressed concern or suspicion that the policy (or it's interpretation) might be shaped by Bluehost's location in Utah.

Ultimately, I don't really care to explore what drove this policy or the moral prism by which web site content might be interpreted. As someone who publishes a blog that's often targeted to business readers, I am very conscientious about the content that I publish and how it might be picked up or read in the workplace. And as a professional spokesperson for numerous businesses, I also understand the importance of keeping communications with certain frameworks. That being said, as a writer, I reserve the write to use whatever language I deem appropriate and I'm not about to have my web site hosting provider function as a censor.

And that's why what I would say to Bluehost is, in the words of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to Michael Arrington, "F*ck Off!" I will be taking my web hosting business elsewhere.

Who Needs Social Networking Anyway?

These days, you can't throw a rock without hitting yet another software service pushing social networking features. Social is the next killer app, or so we're told. Social is the feature that will vault your ho-hum service into the realm of Facebook or Twitter. Social is the must-have feature for services like touch is for smart phones.

The problem with social is that, while it makes sense to some, some isn't everyone. For all of those that are interested (or should be interested) in what somebody else is doing, there is an equal or larger number (I'll let you estimate the multiple) of people who not just don't care or can't be bothered -- knowing is an inconvenience. This is particularly true in the business world -- understanding why social is relevant can be difficult for many business users.

This issue is getting pushed to the front burner with the newest update to Salesforce.com, Winter 11. With the Winter 11 release, Salesforce has activated Chatter for everyone -- force-feeding it to their customer base so to speak. If you're dealing with a user base that get's freaked out by changes or new technologies, this may have dropped you into a hurricane, but is it actually a tempest in a teapot?

Social Networking for Business
In the early days of Twitter, many of us dove into the technology, thrilled by the power of "follow". For many business users, follow was a cool idea, but Twitter wasn't secure for business communications. Then there was start-up company Yammer, and some similar knock-off companies that followed -- basically Twitter for business. We did some experimenting with Yammer, and while it did perform like Twitter, we struggled to find an effective use case for the platform. With Yammer -- simply basic Twitter functionality -- we found that emails and direct communications tended to supersede Yammer posts. Essentially, the problem with social was that it was like adding a layer of social to our social business interaction.

When they were first introducing Chatter at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference last year, initially I had the same feeling. Here was something that wouldn't really change the way that we use the software, instead acting like yet another add-on. But as I realized the potential impact of being able to follow key account or opportunity records, I started to get really excited. Here was an opportunity to roll up all of your important business activity into a single feed.

When Chatter first rolled out, I pushed and pushed to become part of the beta, and when we finally got it activated, my excitement turned to disappointment. While I had envisioned a system that, if you follow an account, would let you know when there were any related records that appeared (or were updated), the actual implementation didn't work that way. Currently in Chatter, you have to follow specific records to receive feed updates from those records, and it only generates feeds based on that record. In order words, you can follow an account and still not know if anything has happened (in terms of activity) on that account. Theoretically, this functionality will be implemented in a future release, but until that time, Chatter remains yet another social layer.

Don't get me wrong -- Chatter stands unique among most social networking tools for business in that it integrates business records, not just people. This has the potential to swing the balanced for business users that don't think that they care "what other people are doing." I'm truly looking forward to the future implementation of this functionality -- assuming they don't get side-tracked by adding some of the other "social" functionality features.

The Real Cornerstone of Social
While people and follow are often considered the core for social networking, I think that the real cornerstone of social is the aggregate feed. Whenever people ask me about Facebook or Twitter (particularly questioning their value), I try to explain it to them in terms of the feed. By simplifying and aggregating brief updates of all of the things that you follow -- and creating your own headline news -- you can more easily feel connected to the things that are important to you.

When Salesforce can get this functionality fully implemented into their platform with Chatter, it promises to be an incredibly powerful tool. Imagine following a key account in Salesforce and receiving an update whenever an invoice is sent to that account from an integrated Oracle system. Or maybe you need to see when your parts shipped from China. Imagine being able to get that data and review it on your iPhone while you're standing in the checkout line at Costco. Meanwhile, your account manager can customize their feed to follow any new cases created at their key accounts.

Simply put, the key to social is the customizable follow-feed relationship. With Salesforce.com, Chatter, and your key business objects, you can see the lights coming, but there's still some time remaining before it runs over everything else. Hopefully they can get it implemented before they alienate the anti-social business users.

More Net Neutrality - T-Mobile's Text Tax

Here's another good technology post from Techcrunch. This is a guest post from Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha. ChaCha provides a service where you send questions and they send you a text with your answers. This is a good breakdown of Net Neutrality and Mobile -- Why Net Neutrality Needs to Be Extended to Mobile Platforms.

Remember when mobile Internet was thought to be the savior of an open Internet and Internet broadband. Mobile Internet was going to free us from the limited number of offerings available from the wired carriers. Don't worry -- the carriers will fix that...

Breaking Bad: the AT&T MicroCell and Your Craptacular Mobile Signal Strength at Home - Initial Review

If you found this post, it probably means that you have poor cell coverage at home and you're wondering whether the AT&T 3G MicroCell can solve your problem. I've had the AT&T MicroCell running for several days now. While my time on calls using the 3G MicroCell is still somewhat limited, I wanted to share some operational experiences with you.

General Background
The 3G MicroCell has been offered by AT&T as a solution for improving your coverage in areas where the existing cell signal is week. Functioning like a wireless router, the device connects to your broadband connection and provides an access point for up to 10 AT&T phone lines. Note that these phone lines must be registered with AT&T, and it only works on 3G phones. Also, like a wireless router, it's signal radiates out from the unit and walls reduce the distance that the signal can go.

Set-Up and Configuration
As noted in my earlier post, set-up and configuration were fairly straightforward. You need to be able to log into your AT&T account on line to register the unit, and when you first set it up, it wants to be close to a window so that it can get a GPS signal. It uses GPS and a registered location for 911 tracking. My only comment on this is that I'm surprised by how long it takes for the unit to train.

Basic Performance
Once I activated the 3G MicroCell, I've been getting 4-5 bars throughout my home. The unit alerts you when you are connected to the MicroCell by changing the network display indicator on your phone. However, even with the unit centered inside my home, when I go outside, I find the signal falls off quickly.

I haven't dropped a call while talking on the 3G MicroCell when I've been in 'strong' coverage areas of my home, but I have experienced several calls where the call quality had issues. Basically, the call seems to experience some sort of packet drop -- like someone turned on a metronome and every click is a moment of silence. A couple of times, I've wound up redialing the person in an effort to correct the issue.

The place were the 3G MicroCell causes the biggest problems is when you get close to the edge of coverage. Theoretically, the MicroCell should shift your coverage over to the strongest available 3G cell signal (your local tower); however, if you have been on the 3G network for any length of time, you probably already know that switching networks is one of the times when calls frequently drop. And drop they do -- so far I've dropped nearly every call near the edge of the 3G MicroCell coverage. Of course, even if the switch between networks was seamless, you are probably still moving into an area with craptacular coverage, so you'd expect some issues.

Yesterday, I actually wound up unplugging the 3G MicroCell.  For whatever reason, yesterday my iPhone decided to stop receiving incoming calls -- this has happened to me before. Instead, I would simply get an alert that there was a new voice mail on my phone. After restarting my iPhone several times and wrestling with the same issue, I decided to unplug the 3G MicroCell.

Is the 3G MicroCell the Solution for You?
If you have really bad cell service in your home (0-2 bars), you might want to consider the 3G MicroCell. However, the decision may not be straightforward. Here are some guidelines that you might use to make your decision:

• If you are in a location where the 3G MicroCell is all that stands between you and no coverage (like your cabin in the mountains), you may want to consider it. The device will create a cell signal. However, it definitely has issues with range and it's not clear how much bandwidth requires on your broadband connection. If you have multiple people using the 3G MicroCell at the same time, I don't know well it will perform.
  
• If you are in a location where you have spotty coverage in your home and you can expect to be inside or within the 3G MicroCell coverage area for extended periods of time, you might want to consider it. The device would be a better supplemental solution if it didn't take so long to activate.
  
• If you have spotty coverage but you frequently run errands while talking on the phone (going in and out of the coverage area), I wouldn't recommend the device unless you intend to plan periods of time when you don't leave the coverage area. I experienced too many call drops at the edge of the 3G MicroCell network to recommend it as a solution.
  
• If you have 2 or more bars of coverage in the area around your home (inside will always be worse), I wouldn't recommend the 3G MicroCell. The dropped calls that you experience are inconvenient, but you'll probably experience more headaches with the device than without it.

AT&T MicroCell is now Up and Running

Just a quick update on my earlier posts -- I now have the AT&T MicroCell booster up and running. While configuration and set-up were pretty straightforward, I was surprised by how long it takes for the unit to train to the AT&T network. When you go through the activation process for the first time, AT&T tells you that the process could take up to 90 minutes for the unit to get a GPS signal and activate. It seems like the thing that takes the longest time is for the unit to decide to start broadcasting a 3G signal.

All that being said, as I walk around, I have 5 bars throughout the apartment. In terms of that, everything seems to be good.

A couple of things that I came across in the manual that are probably worth noting:

• When you're on a call on the 3G network, your call won't automatically transfer to the MicroCell. This means that you may need to hang up and redial if you go from a call on the road to the MicroCell coverage inside of the house.
• Calls initiated on the MicroCell will transfer to the 3G network when you move outside of the covered area. The signal will automatically transfer to the strongest 3G signal. However, once again, if you go in and out of the area, I don't expect that it will transfer back once it has left the coverage area.

In all though, initially the coverage boost seems to be helpful. So far, the only signal anomaly that I have experienced while on a call -- I picked up a digital signal hick-up in the voice transmission during one ongoing phone call. But the bigger question -- how many drop calls have I avoided?

A Quick Tip For Using Blogger

This morning I was working on a couple of blog posts that I've been writing. As I worked my way through a draft, I realized that, essentially, I wanted to revert to the version that I started with, and I started undoing the changes that I had made. Unfortunately, Blogger seems to remember only a select number of those changes -- once you go beyond those, it basically deletes your entire post and lets you start from scratch. Follow that up with a quick, software-based auto-save, and the next thing that you know, you have gone from making edits to rewriting your entire post.

Some Blogger features that could stand some improvement:

1. Control over the auto-save settings -- while it's great to save frequently, it would be nice to be able to control a timer or provide a setting that enabled you to block autosave.
2. A revert feature -- sometime similar to subversion that allowed you to roll back to previous drafts would be really helpful. This is basically a standard feature in most design and publishing software. 

Hopefully, this will be helpful for you. For me, it's back to the drawing board on two posts that I was working on.

Updated Integration Between Blog, Twitter, and Facebook

I was doing some experimenting with the blog today and I've updated Marketing To Me with some new publishing features.

1. I've created a page in Facebook. With a quick Google search, you should be able to fine some fairly straightforward instructions for creating a page in Facebook and linking it to your blog. I used the notes feature in Facebook to publish new content from the RSS feed. We'll see how the whole thing takes off.
2. I've updated my Feedburner settings to automatically publish a Twitter post whenever I publish a new blog post. This is a new setting in Feedburner, and if, like me, you find yourself going jumping across different applications in order to publish links to your new post, this is a big time saver. Cool features include automatic link shortening and the ability to automatically write text at the beginning of each post.

I'll let you know how in all works out.

Failures in Product Marketing: VMWare Fusion 3.0 Upgrade

For the past ten months or so that I've been using VMWare Fusion, I've been pretty impressed with it. To date, the biggest hassles that I've had with it revolved around the Windows installation and registration process. But for the most part, the software has run seamlessly and performed extremely well. So yesterday-ish, I fired up the software and was alerted to an available update -- Fusion 3.0. Normally, this means I go to the site, log in, download, install, and everything is good. This time, my fun began during the install process when I noticed the serial number field didn't pre-populate with the serial number.

Product Launch for Upgrades Goes Horribly Wrong
Instead of simply alerting me to an update, they were also alerting me to a case study in Product Launch gone wrong. Let's start with the positive stuff -- it looks like the demand for upgrade was so overwhelmingly strong that it blew out the new serial number registration system that they decided to implement. I say new because it may have been running for some time, but before yesterday I never encountered it. As a result, I spent half an hour struggling with their site interface, trying to understand why it couldn't find my serial number nor remember that I was a registered Fusion user. Based on comments from other users, I wasn't the only one -- from serial number recognition to activation codes, it looks like the number of people struggling was substantial. On the VMWare Blog, they even posted a 30-day trial serial number so that people could essentially bypass the system, giving VMWare and any of their customers that found their way to the blog a 30-day time-out to resolve the serial number issue.

How Version Upgrade Offers Should Not Work
Searching around the site, I also eventually found some other important data -- the upgrade to 3.0 was going to be a for-pay upgrade. VMWare wanted my wallet, but I was only able to discover that after searching their site. Now it's possible that I missed this information, hidden in the endless stream of conferences and roadshow notifications that they send to me, but regardless of the notifications that I received, when I went through the normal upgrade process, I didn't discover that things were different until I was halfway through the install process.

Pricing on the paid upgrade was surprisingly confusing:

• For $39, you could download the 3.0 update
• For $99 $59, you could get the download and a 12-month subscription that entitled you to software updates.

You'll note the strikethrough because apparently the original price was $99, but then they discovered that Amazon was selling a new package for about $65. Yes, for a time it was actually cheaper to order a new copy of the software than to upgrade. As a sidebar for you international site managers, comments posted on the VMWare forums indicate that while they changed the US$ amount, they didn't change the UK£ amount.

Now if you're like me (and a lot of others out there), the terms of this upgrade are quite confusing. Specifically, did getting the 'no updates' version entitle you to updates? On the VMWare message boards, debate on what the difference was between the two went on for a while. Finally, VMWare's Director of Personal Desktop Products weighed in with this clarification.

VMware Fusion 3 comes with free UPDATES to fix bugs and the like. So, VMware Fusion 3.0.1, 3.0.2, etc are ALL free UPDATES with any VMware Fusion 3 full purchase or upgrade. If we were to come out with a VMware Fusion 3.1, that is an UPDATE that would be free to all VMware Fusion 3 customers.

The Subscription offering provides MAJOR UPGRADE protection for 12 months. UPGRADES are major new releases with significant features. So, it will protect you in the event that VMware Fusion 4 is released in the next 12 months you will get that MAJOR UPGRADE for free with valid subscription. So, $20 gives you protection that if VMware Fusion 4 comes out in the next 12 months, you will get it for FREE as part of your valid subscription.

To summarize:
All VMware Fusion 3 customers will get UPDATES and bug fixes for free. If you buy the Subscription add-on, you will get MAJOR UPGRADE protection in the next 12 months.

While that may clear up the difference in the two price options, it doesn't really address the strategy behind the 'upgrade' offer. Specifically, what benefit or loyalty does VMWare provide to existing customers? While I picked up my copy of Fusion 2.0 with my system purchase and a $50 rebate, the list price for the software was about $60-70 list -- and there were a number of discounts and rebates that brought the price down to $40-50. In that way, the base upgrade price is equal to or greater than the initial price that I paid for the software. If this were a mind-blowing update or VMWare had done an exceptional job of building loyalty, an 'upgrade' that cost more than the original might seem like it makes sense, but neither of those are true. Instead, as a 'loyal customer', you start thinking about putting off your purchase until you can just buy new with a discount. Overall, their pricing strategy seems to fall a bit short.

It Gets Worse: Upgrade Insurance
The Upgrade pricing option is even worse. Essentially, what you are doing is paying $20 to VMWare as insurance against them making a major upgrade in the next year. The problem with this strategy is that in this case, the guy your betting with also has control of the results. VMWare controls their roadmap and they decide when they are going to release their next version. And if their next upgrade happens to take more than a year, you just gave them $20 for nothing. In fact, here's something that another poster in their community pointed out:

• VMware Fusion 1.0 was released on: Aug 6, 2007
• VMware Fusion 2.0 was released on: September 15, 2008
• VMware Fusion 3.0 was released on: October 27, 2009
• So if version 4 follows the same it too will be over a year before it will be released and therefore everyone who buys in this release frenzy will in all likelihood not get the next version and wasted $20!

It looks like the biggest reward from VMWare for being a loyal, early adopter is that the company gets more of your money.

In discussing this issue with one of my colleagues, he noted that many enterprise-grade software packages include a maintenance subscription charge, and that if you aren't current on that ongoing charge, you need to pay to become current before you're entitled to the lower cost upgrade. Since upgrade costs are typically significantly lower than the high initial purchase price, these maintenance subscription prices are just accepted. It makes me wonder whether this aspect of their pricing strategy isn't something that has carried over from their server products. Is this a case of server-room marketing not understanding a desktop consumer audience?

The Bottom Line
The long and short of the VMWare Fusion 3.0 upgrade is that I'm going to wait. While I'm certain that there are benefits to the upgrade, the pricing issues make upgrading anything but a slam-dunk. Meanwhile, in all of my searching through the VMWare forums, the 'sales collateral' that I received the most exposure to was different users posting issues that they were having with the upgrade. Essentially, the process of trying to upgrade let me straight into a word of mouth lion's den -- and one that sold me on delaying instead of purchasing. It's an interesting lesson.