Let me tell you a story.

Back in the day we used to use AlertSite for our uptime and performance monitoring. 

They were affordable and most importantly flexible.

Any time we spun up a new service or were in the process of evaluating other services they were really good about letting us spin up a 30/60 or even 90 day trial.   We did this on numerous occasions.   Like when we started using Marketo, and noticed a huge difference in the up-time that they reported with ‘actual’ up-time.   It worked in their favor.  The majority of the time those monitors turned into actual revenue generating monitors.

When renewal time rolled around, and I looked at other alternate services.  They weren’t always the cheapest, but we still used them because they were good to work with. 

Then one day something changed.   I need to monitor something for 30 days on a trial basis and they said ‘no’.   I’d need to buy a subscription. 

What happened next?   Well they lost us as a customer.   We moved to neustar/Webmetrics.  All and all we’ve been happy with them.

Until…

Until I need to use/evaluate their DNS offering.   I needed it for less than 30 days, about two weeks to be exact.  Guess what happened?  I got the hard sell, I got the “No, we do 1 year minimum commitments.” 

So instead of having a great opportunity to let me use it in the real world and earn my business, the pushed me into a corner.  A corner that will likely cost them the Webmetrics business at renewal time.  

So when your customer asks you to jump, especially when your cost is essentially “Zero”, yes the right answer is “How High”.   Don’t look at me like I’m your next meal, because you’ll get 0 meals from me, and lose what you used to get.   Treat me right as a customer and I’ll treat you right as a vendor it really is that simple.

Let me tell you a story.

Back in the day we used to use AlertSite for our uptime and performance monitoring. 

They were affordable and most importantly flexible.

Any time we spun up a new service or were in the process of evaluating other services they were really good about letting us spin up a 30/60 or even 90 day trial.   We did this on numerous occasions.   Like when we started using Marketo, and noticed a huge difference in the up-time that they reported with ‘actual’ up-time.   It worked in their favor.  The majority of the time those monitors turned into actual revenue generating monitors.

When renewal time rolled around, and I looked at other alternate services.  They weren’t always the cheapest, but we still used them because they were good to work with. 

Then one day something changed.   I need to monitor something for 30 days on a trial basis and they said ‘no’.   I’d need to buy a subscription. 

What happened next?   Well they lost us as a customer.   We moved to neustar/Webmetrics.  All and all we’ve been happy with them.

Until…

Until I need to use/evaluate their DNS offering.   I needed it for less than 30 days, about two weeks to be exact.  Guess what happened?  I got the hard sell, I got the “No, we do 1 year minimum commitments.” 

So instead of having a great opportunity to let me use it in the real world and earn my business, the pushed me into a corner.  A corner that will likely cost them the Webmetrics business at renewal time.  

So when your customer asks you to jump, especially when your cost is essentially “Zero”, yes the right answer is “How High”.   Don’t look at me like I’m your next meal, because you’ll get 0 meals from me, and lose what you used to get.   Treat me right as a customer and I’ll treat you right as a vendor it really is that simple.

Cisco umi, is just such a product.

What is umi?   umi is John Chamber’s delusional Telepresence vision for the consumer.

High Definition telepresence for the consumer, yep you read that right.  Video conference on your HD TV.  With tilt/pan/zoom support and it can even record it for you so you can play back those awkward family teleconferencing moments at a later date.

But wait, that’s cool? What’s dumb about it?   What’s dumb is that it’s $599 for the unit.  While that doesn’t seem all that bad, when you consider I paid less than that for most of my Hi-Def TV’s that’s kind of pricy.

For starters, it’s a consumer product, and Cisco Sucks at anything with a user interface that isn’t command line so expect this to be hard to use.

Second, you will need two of them, so that’s $1200.

For that money, I’d send my parents at the other end a PS3 and a PS3 Eye camera, total cost:  $350.   Then they’d have a blueray player and decent video game system. 

Best of all, NO SUBSCRIPTION fees.

that’s right, Cisco charges you $24.99 a month (1 year contract), or if you’re smart you’d opt for the annual plan for a whopping 9% savings at $274.99 Annually.

I don’t understand what you get for that?  A directory service so you can find your parents/grandparents on the other end?

So you’re looking at $599 x2 and $274.99 x2 for this?  That’s a lot of jack.

Also listed in the things you ‘Need’ are:

- TV with HDMI, while most people have that, I suspect none of my parents or grandparents do (yet), and I have little desire to telepresence with anyone else at this stage.

- Broadband, and a good one, with at least 1.5mb up.   That’s more rare than you might think and that’s just for 720p calls.  1080 requires 3.5mb UP.

Video is what it is, but I know few folks with that kind of reliable up-stream bandwidth.

Given that now FaceTime is free on all apple products and the plethora of other options out there, while they aren’t true HD are far more than adequate.

This is dumb Cisco, very very dumb.

I recently got my hands on an iPad.  I’ll be the first to admit I thought the iPad was kind of stupid.  After all it’s just a big iPod Touch or a big iPhone without the phone.  Then I played with one and got to thinking this isn’t so bad.

Well after a couple days of living with it, it’s pretty darn useful.  It’s sleek, lightweight, good battery life, and fairly usable.  eMail is good if you like email the Apple way.

For a 1.0 product it aint too shabby.

I highly suspect some useful improvements in the coming releases.

* Multi-tasking is a must have for this.  While most apps are good at letting you pick up where you left off, when you need to bounce around to collect some info for an email, it’s kind of tough. 

* The keyboard is surprisingly useful, although it’s not real well thought out.  You don’t need to type much to figure out some symbols are hard to get too.

* Editing a wiki with html like source is darn near impossible for example.   Yeah, I can use an Apple BT keyboard, but I need more control with that keyboard.  Maybe an apple keyboard driver to make the function buttons do stuff will help.

As for a multi-media device, this thing is pretty sick.  Great at browsing the web, and playing tunes, movies and TV.

In that regard the iPad is about 100x more useful than a netbook.

It’s strengths are simply:

* a Good web browsing experience, even if it is Safari-Lite

* email, the email integration is good and when iPhone OS 4.0 features come to this and you get a unified inbox, I’m sure it will get better.

* Lots of apps and games, some good ones are even free.

* of course it’s an iPod so it’s got your music.

* TV and Movies.

The biggest gotcha with using this is that you feel like you’re at an amusement park.  Meaning every time you turn around there is something that’s going to cost you money.  Very little added value is FREE.

Good apps cost money.  Out of the box I had to drop $30 on pages/numbers/keynote.  Another $20 on a good pdf viewer and a utility to be able to copy files over the airwaves.

This thing is good at video, but where do you get video? iTunes of course.  Which means $$$.

You can use the ABC app to watch ABC video online, but that assumes you have a connection, you may not, and you’ll be forced to watch commercials.

I frequently grab TV shows I miss, in torrent form and put them on my media server at home to watch.  I’d like to do the same here.  But as we know that’s not easy or fast.   First you have to download them and none are in apple format.  So then you have to ‘rip’ them.  That takes time and resources.  Then copy them again into iTunes. 

Here’s where things bother me. 

I pay roughly $100 a month for digital cable, with DVR.  I can watch and record what I want when I want it (and pretty much skip commercials).

That works out to $3.33 per day.  

Or in iTunes pricing la-la land, at $1.99 a show (plus tax) = $2.13 per episode, that allows me to buy 47 episodes or 11 shows per week.  (If I want to do without cable).

That might seem like a reasonable value, but when I consider that I can’t really get everything on iTunes.  (Most sports aren’t there and they certainly aren’t live), that narrows the selections of what I can use this for.  Basically just TV shows and select movies.

Let’s just say there are (3) shows I don’t want to miss.

Those 3 shows together add up to: $139.97 plus tax.   That’s entirely too much.

Realistically, I’d plunk down:

$10 for a season of each or $30 total to be able to watch them in Hi-Def any time I wanted without a connection needed (meaning I’ve downloaded it locally) and without commercials.  That’s more realistic to me.

So in the interim, until pricing gets reasonable, I guess I’ll have to do the download, and rip solution.  In which case they get $0…

The same thing goes for movies. 

$19.99 plus tax is entirely too much for a digital copy.

$5.00 is acceptable, just saying.

This certainly means I’m all over the place and being able to listen to a consistent signal or station is a good thing.

XM is pretty consistent on the highways, but when you’re in the mountains (which is where we prefer to ride) it can be spotty.  Especially when you’re on the north east side of the mountain.

So, being that I live in the North East, motorcycling unfortunately isn’t a year round event.   From sometime in November to at least the end of February, with a few exceptions the bike gets put away. 

Every year I call up XM, explain to them that I don’t need the service until March.  They threaten me with re-activation fees but when I persist they have usually discounted those months.  Enough so that it’s still worth it for that rare winter day around here when it hits 50 degrees and we go out for a ride.

Since the XM/Sirius merger, there isn’t any competition.  You can’t play one off the other any more.

I picked up my bill this year to start the negotiating process that happens every winter. Only to come to a few new realizations that really bothered me.

I remember last year being promised the price wouldn’t change for, I *think* 3 years. 

So what’s the strategy?  We didn’t raise our prices, but we now have to charge you a music royalty fee.  WTF?

This irritates me.

I *may* not even listen to music, in fact I generally listen to sports, or the comedy channel.  Their 80’s channel only has 100 songs, if you ride a 12 hour ride you will hear all of them, often twice.

I’m not against the artists being paid, but I am against XM billing me for a line item that is simply part of their cost of doing business.

Very few industries can do this.   I don’t patronize car repair places that charge me a line item ‘rag-fee’ or ‘fluid disposal fee’, and I likely won’t patronize XM any more.

I also get dinged $2.00 so they can send me an invoice.  I’m perfectly happy to receive this digitally, but no, I’m not going to let them auto-charge me for anything.   When they auto-charged my credit card in years past they couldn’t seem to charge me the same amount twice (even though my subscription didn’t change)

This year, they have a new feature.  I am apparently not alone.  They now let you suspend your account.  So that later you don’t have to be threatened with re-activation fees.  They also get to continue to list you as one of their ‘subscribers’ albeit a suspended one.

So for now I’m a suspended subscriber.  Helping to dilute your royalty fees.  I expect that will remain until I just have to have it for a big trip.

We’ll see.

Good tutorial for installing LAMP with apt on desktop.

A great theme “Balazan”

and links to all the goodies you need.

Items plugged into this laptop are/were:

+ a Logitech VX Revolution (Wireless) Mouse.

+ a Logitech diNovo Edge Keyboard (also wireless).

+ a USB cable into my USB KVM which also shows up as a mouse/HID device

+ a Bluetooth presentation mouse, though not currently active.

I did the normal trouble shooting steps.   Made sure my anti-viri software was up-to-date. Plugging and unplugging mice and keyboards.  I *thought* it was the diNovo Edge as it also has a little track pad.   It would go away for a while but not permanently.

It made using the computer almost impossible.

After a little more research I found technet Article: The Microsoft mouse pointer moves erratically or does not respond when you use a Microsoft pointing device # Q321122 and was appalled at the 82 steps it took to fix this.   Why this is still an issue after almost 2 years, and why since it is an issue that there isn’t a utility to deal with the 2000 registry entries I had to manually delete is beyond me.

But if your mouse suddenly gets the shakes.  You may want to look into this.

FWIW, deleting all the devices from the device manager had a greater impact than deleting all the registry entries.

-Datapoohbah.

No offense was intended to those that actually have Parkinsons disease and shake like my mouse was shaking.  It would be nice if you could eliminate a few drivers and registry entries to get rid of it.

For the past couple years we’ve used Trend Office Scan.  For the most part it’s worked OK.  The interface and admin tools are horrible though and it’s also good at finding things but not necessarily cleaning it up.

Over the last couple months we’ve had a few (read more than 4) instances where computers were infected and Trend Office Scan was oblivious.

We’re up for renewal in February, so the timing is perfect to switch.

In the recent cases of infestation we’ve been able to limit the damage and clean up after trend with other 3rd party products.  Mostly free versions so this really makes us suspicious of Trends effectiveness.

For the record, we are not open to any Symantec solutions.  That’s just not going to happen.  We’re also not big fans of McAfee.   Those two companies seem more focused on Marketing than creating reliable usable products.

We’ve looked at AVG and Kaspersky and Microsoft ForeFront and are leaning towards AVG.

AVG looks great on the client side, but administratively it’s kind of week.

Kaspersky is just overkill, we’ve toned down UAC messages, and installing Kaspersky will remind you why you did so.  It’s also prohibitively expensive.

Microsoft ForeFront, really come on…  A corporate anti-virus solution should not have the complexity of Sharepoint to administer it.  It also shouldn’t need to use 3 different servers.

We are leaning towards AVG but we are open to suggestions.

Requirements include:

• Cost: < $20 a user
• Basic Anti-virus is really all we need, we don’t need another firewall product and we don’t need extended browser enhancements or even email scanning.
• Centralized updating and management is a MUST.  Our users shouldn’t ever need to do anything and we need to report on the condition of the product.

If you have a suggestion or a comment on any of these products please post away.

Thanks…

It’s in your best interest to make sure the ‘try’ part works.

We’re re-evaluating centralized Anti-virus and would really like to evaluate AVG’s Network offerings, but it’s proving to be harder than it should be.

We’ve used Trend for the past couple years and it’s been OK.  Recently we’ve had a few things get by Trend and AVG Free has picked it up and dealt with it.  So we’re anxious to give it a look.

We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans.  Super stable hardware.  We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series.   We have a handful of e6500′s, a few 6400′s and a couple e4300′s.

For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  The e64/6500′s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues.   The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though.  Very unreliable.  Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.

Outside of that they have been pretty good.

The e4300, not so much.

This little laptop is super sweet.  Nice small, fast, good battery life.  But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes.   We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success.   We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit.  The problem persists.

I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada.  Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.

It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.

We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution.  We really want them to work and be stable.  There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.

So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.

Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.

UPDATE

On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand  Manager.  He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300′s running Vista.  A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.

We’re going to hang tight until then.   If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on.  The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome.   We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.

One needs only to look at the economic crisis on Wall Street, banking, big business, retail and the automotive industry.  All of these industries are filled with MBA’s and folks who should know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be smart, right?

• I know a person with a Masters in Computer Science who also holds an MBA and that literally couldn’t change a toner cartridge in a printer without help.
  (Yes I know they can be complicated, but damn, the instructions are pretty clear on the bag that the toner comes in).

The item that really got my goat today can be found here in the article written on November 28th entitled "You Can Support Headcount and Share of Voice on a Tight Budget" by one; "Alan See", Marketing Genius and MBA.

In this ~750 word article, the marketing genius would try to convince you that during these tough economic times you can "Do more with less" and by doing so you can still build sales leads and retain head count.

On the surface the article looks pretty good.  No, it’s not real deep, not a lot of marketing material is deep.

But the reality is this article spins and skews what went down during this "engagement" in a way that is almost criminal.

"the company increased qualified leads by 7 percent while cutting the budget by 24 percent. The decrease in spending was not the result of reducing headcount. During the campaign, the sales force set three consecutive monthly sales records, as well as three consecutive quarterly sales records."

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? 

Who wouldn’t want to hire a guy who could increase your sales leads 7%, set sales records, cut your budget and allow you to retain staff during these tough economical times?  Oh, and while he’s at it, single handedly increase your "share of voice".

So that’s the spun version of what happened at this "engagement", and as you know there’s almost always two sides to every story.

I’ll try to keep this simple so those with MBA’s can keep up.

Suppose you run a lemonade stand.

Your basic costs include: Water, Ice, Lemons and cups. 

Your primary method for advertising includes:

• Word of mouth (Brand X, our lemonade is delicious)
• Print advertising (Direct, local market advertising, perhaps leveraging coupons to reach your market).
• Direct Customer marketing, via email or snail mail.  (Hey Joe, you’ve enjoyed our Lemon aide in the past, you should try our new pink Lemon Aid)

You’re trying to grow your business so you hire engage a marketing genius.

This new guy has lots of great ideas for focusing your marketing. 

• Fewer Tasters, More Buyers (Marketing term: higher quality leads)
  Specifically he wants to reduce the number of ‘shoppers or tasters’ so that you use fewer resources sampling your products (cost savings). 
  (Bear in mind that tasters and samplers aren’t a burden, and history has clearly shown that the more people you have tasting your product the more people buy)
• Stop/Slow Direct Marketing (decrease the spend, save the headcount)
  Stop doing what you’re good at.  Stop that local or direct marketing that has worked so well in the past.  Stop inviting new and current customers to taste your new flavors, that might waste your time.
• Use Smoke and Mirrors (Marketing term: proclaim yourself thought leaders)
  Instead of spending your hard earned marketing dollars to generate leads (tasters of your product).  Spend it on a thought leadership piece, to educate the market on organic lemon farming, water filtration.  The things that help to make good lemonade.  Nothing directly related to your specific product, just over-all feel good, brand awareness marketing. 
• Get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon (Marketing term: leverage social networks)
  The value proposition here is still debatable.  This too is feel-good marketing.  Being where your customers expect to see you.  Nothing wrong with this just, but be mindful of the time you spend doing it and the ripples that come from it.

There is nothing wrong with thought leadership marketing.  It’s generally a good thing.  But it’s the type of marketing you do "in addition to" what has made you successful in the past, not "instead of".

The problem comes in when you cut your marketing spending on your bread and butter marketing and focus all your internal resources on the other.

What you don’t read about in Mr. See’s article is the flat spin he put the company in by neglecting the bread and butter marketing that the company lives on.

Three months of consecutive sales records?  That’s a true statement that had absolutely nothing to do with his efforts to ‘reduce the spend and save the head count’.  
It’s completely unrelated. 

Did any of his work pay off?  Yes, in some ways it did.

It is true that the thought leadership piece did drive a few highly qualified prospects our way.  A few prospects closer to buying without wasting a lot of time tasting.  If we calculate the true cost of those leads, the cost would be considered astronomical.

In the process of this engagement we all learned a very valuable lesson.

Do what you’re good at, and do it well. Ignore the obvious and it will eventually catch up to you.

Thankfully I don’t have to use one.  But I did get to play with one at a Christmas gathering last weekend.

It was pathetically slow, slow switching applications, slow changing from portrait to landscape.

The clickable front, button simulator, was a nice touch.  But the Pearl like keyboard in vertical mode is horrible.

I hope Blackberry can fix these issues.   It will not replace my 8830, or my iPhone which is still a sub-par enterprise device.

So basically, everything you’ve read on the Internet is true.  This phone sure is pretty but its poorly executed.