Gnostic Adventures

The iPad is the PC of the future

2010-01-28T13:01:00.002-05:00

In the wake of yesterday's iPad announcement I wanted to bring some history to bare. When the iPhone was released the experts spoke, "the iPhone will not substantially alter the fundamental structure and challenges of the mobile industry" Charles Golvin, Forrester Research January 11, 2007. The iPhone was not a viable Enterprise device. It seems funny now, but many didn't see it's difference.

At the time I'd commented, "The iPhone UI brings the dream of the interface in the Minority Report from 2002 to life where Tom Cruise pointed, pushed and dragged information around a massive screen. An environment has been created that allows you to flick, pinch and drag your way through massive amount of information. The way this resonates to me is that it's fundamentally more human in nature. ...Suffice it to say, the iPhones interface has gotten so many layers of interface paradigm out of the way and simply allow you to touch your information, which is fantastic."

With that backdrop it's funny to see Mr. Golvin say, “I think this will appeal to the Apple acolytes, but this is essentially just a really big iPod Touch”. The iPad is the PC of the future, period. When we look at how technology is used in our homes, this modality exactly what we really need. How many of us like sitting at desks more then couches? How many like power cables? We clearly see the slippery slope with the death of the desktop PC. The only unit showing growth in that category is the iMac with it's heavy entertainment leanings, and media hub functionality. Everything else is about mobility, it's about freedom. In the past we needed to make large compromises for this freedom with slow connections, crappy UI's or limited functionality. This dilemma is over.

The iPad is not "just a really big iPod", it is the most personal of computers we've ever seen. Between the UI advancements of the iPhone, the developer community that's surged under it, and it's form factor, the iPad will change commuting in our homes and in our workplaces for the next decade.

It's said and posted, and I hope history will not leave this wrong for someone to rub my nose in ;)

Small is beautiful

2009-05-22T21:04:00.009-04:00

A few weeks ago I got a call from an aspiring entrepreneur that had a, "great idea!" His idea was for an iPhone game that, "would be huge!". Sensing my disbelief, he comforted me with, "I've been playing games for 30 years." This was of limited comfort. He was a first time entrepreneur with a BIG idea. Not big as in Google/Microsoft, but costly and complex to execute. The smallest starting point possible would be a $250,000 experiment. Probing about his experience or partners it became very obvious that he had a ton of energy and enthusiasm, and a huge blind spot on the mechanics of execution. While blind spots aren't good, the big problem was that he was unaware of it. Given that I never want to discourage virgin entrepreneurs, I tried a different line of discussion.

Asking about the market, the complexity of the game, distribution, etc. he started to get a sense of what he might not know about pulling this off. I suggested that he might shrink his idea to the smallest possible footprint so he could begin to understand these issues in a less costly way. He told me that he'd already been through this exercise and that the $250K was the less costly way! After the requisite, "that much money is going to be hard for a first timer to raise with no prototype, proof of market, applicable experience, etc." we hung up. These discussions are very frequent with first timers. They have a dream of what's possible and want to make it happen. It is the reason to love them, but it's also at the core of the failure statistics of startups. They don't know what they don't know.

A week or so later I got a call back. I could barely make out the words, but our first timer was very excited. As he calmed down he told me how he finally settled down and worked on making his plan smaller. His requirements went from 3D graphics to 2D, and 8 levels of game play to three. I asked if this would still let people try his unique ideas, and was meet with an emphatic YES. And the greatest thing was that it would cost him less than $15K, a number he would do himself!

By making it smaller, he made it possible. Subtle insights that mitigate the risk of a first timer come through execution. By doing something small you can be doing something. Rather then dreaming about a crystal castle, you can be cutting your teeth on a brick one. And I have read E.F. Schumacher.

The opiate of the entrepreneur!

2009-04-11T16:38:00.008-04:00

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the Connecticut Innovations Annual Technology Celebration. It was an amazing turnout of over 600 to celebrate CI's 20th anniversary. I was on a panel talking to college students about being an entrepreneur. The question came up of, "Why do you do it?" While it seems like a reasonable question given the poor odds, the fact that everything is a variable and you typically risk much of what you've accomplished up to that point, but it just doesn't seem like a reasonable question to me.

That which makes us, humans, the unique animal is seen in the things we create. The only better then the creation of each of us are those things that people create together, and one of the greatest forms of these creations is the company.

In these times of economic challenge and corporate excess, it's very easy to loose sight of this. The company, teams of men and women organized for the purpose of building and selling things, captures so much of what it means to be human. Creating companies is the ultim

ate creative activity. This group of like minded people are united by their ability to see a different future, a better one. They see how to do it, and infect others to see it with them. In the picture above is this group (a few folks are missing) for Continuity Engine.

Continuity Engine sees a better world for regulated smaller businesses. We are building tools to take the majority of work our of the compliance process. We thing that smaller businesses have significant advantages in servicing their clients, but material challenges caused by that same scale. Continuity Engine is using a series of trends for the purpose of eliminating this disadvantage. With the power of Software as a Service, open source licensing and social networking we think we can change this little corner of our world!

As a delusional college student I really wanted to change the world. As a schooled Marxist I thought that doing this would be accomplished in a very different way, but I'm happy to say that I've been given the privilege to do just that. Every entrepreneur is in the business of changing the world in their own way, big or small. Through innovation they let segments of the market solve problems better, save money or in some other way make their situations better.

Through Perimeter eSecurity I've meet dozens of entrepreneurs, in the ensuing time I've meet dozens more. In working with Connecticut Innovations with the CTech accelerator and Yale with the Yale Entrepreneurial institute I'm meeting hundreds of young entrepreneurs and it is intoxicating. The amalgam of optimism, creativity and the galvanized will of the entrepreneur is the source of most of humanities energy. It is something to behold in mass and something we need to make sure to nurture.

Crowdsourcing for Banking

2009-04-07T10:34:00.003-04:00

Now is the time! We've seen open source licensing change the way so many things work and now is the time for it to change banking.

We are a bunch of idealists at Continuity Engine and we're excited to be part of this change. Here is the link to the press release.

The economy and the downfall of Microsoft

2009-03-07T11:56:00.008-05:00

Over the last 20 years the key to Microsoft's dominance has been PC manufacturers. Among the hardware folks were Apple with its own software, and every other vendor with Windows. Microsoft had the great advantage of a competitive hardware market with vendors compressing margins and kicking each others heads in to make the total hardware/software package far less expensive. It's been a good run, but the winds of change are blowing.

Given the state of the economy, market and new alternatives the PC market is in a state of flux. The PC market is off 15% or more with the only sector showing strength is the Netbook market. Netbooks have less memory and storage and can be had for around $400. This makes every component decision that much more important in the unit costs. Among the most expensive part in any PC is the operating system license, and this is where the story gets fun.

Netbooks are driving an alternative to Windows called Linux. Linux is freely available to the manufacturers so they can keep the money that they used to send to Microsoft. If keeping much needed profit dollars weren't enough, another incentive is Linux itself. Linux is small and light allowing it to work on lower powered machines well. In a recent review of XP vs. Linux, the XP system couldn't keep up with a two way video conference.

Adding fuel to this fire, the highly profitable server business is under air assault by something called cloud computing. Cloud computing works by running your software on the computers of Amazon, Google or one of the other folks in the business. Amazon was the first to the dance and has more than 400,000 subscribers. Each of these users results in at least one fewer server that HP, Dell, IBM or Sun will sell. Google, as an example, uses their own proprietary computers and don't buy traditional servers. Google runs nearly 1 million servers and turns its spare capacity into new revenue with the cloud offerings. When folks buy these services they get themselves out of a ton of other costs from power, to bandwidth, to managing the stuff. It's a huge win for clients at the expense of the hardware folks.

With these pressures on the hardware folks it's hard to see how the traditional lock step of them with Microsoft holds up. With a shrinking pie for the combined wares of hardware folks and Microsoft, the hardware folks will need to cannibalize Microsoft to insure their own viability. While changes of these magnitudes are typically slow to happen these forces combined with bad economic forecasts will accelerate the markets adoption of these very attractive alternatives. In this world it's hard to see Microsoft dominating the future the way it has the past.

The advantage of great engineering

2009-01-30T16:29:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite stories about great engineering is about one of my favorite companies, Honda. A friend of mine who races motorcycles was telling me how he'd been thrashing his Hawk (Hi Dan) for years and he was going to rebuild the engine. Having worked on a number of different brands he found himself shocked at what he found. The Honda had more than 20% fewer parts! Even more to his amazement was the fact that after all of the abuse he had dished out the major moving parts showed NO sign of wear. Honda had used great engineering to decrease the number of parts and then spend the savings on making the parts that were left better. Due to this discipline Honda has an operating margin of 11%. This is higher than anyone in the car business. They engineer costs out, quality in and make money where others loose it. I love it.

Yesterday the news came out from the research house iSuppli that the new Blackberry Storm costs them $202.89 each to build. This compares to the iPhone 3G at $174.33. So while the average retail of the Storm is lower then the iPhone, Apples engineers have made a device that sells at a higher price, is percieved as premium and costs less! I love it! It's outselling the Storm four to one, it's driving post sales revenue through it's AppStore that recently crossed the half a billion downloads and it's less expensive. The profitability can be reinvested into innovation to further their advantage. I really love it!

It's such a wonderful case study of great engineering and great business that I had to gush about it.

IT and Texas Hold'em

2008-11-28T11:47:00.002-05:00

IT, meaning information technology, is a funny thing. Over the last number of years many saw it as the source of massive productivity increases and the way to make their businesses more competitive. While this was the case generally, any specific situation could vary to a huge extent.

Traditionally IT projects all worked the same way. Step one was to decide that you wanted to do something, followed by investigation into the rough cost, getting dollars budgeted, putting out an RFP to figure out what solutions might be available, whittling down the alternatives, trialing a couple, selecting the final, getting the hardware that it will run on, piloting it in your company, figuring out how to get it to everyone, and then supporting it. That was one heck of a sentence!

What all of this translates into is that IT projects involve spending the vast majority of the money BEFORE ANY benefit is realized. And the reality is that some work and some don't. At one point there was statistic floating around that up to 70% of all large software deployments were abandoned before completion!

While many in the industry talk about ROI (Return on Investment) the way a manufacturer purchasing a new stamping device would, there really isn't that clear of connection for me. The problem with IT is that the critical factor is US, you and me. Will we like it, use it, etc. It strikes me that with the wild swing is return, and with zero being a reasonable outcome, IT spending is more like Texas Hold em then like typical corporate investments.

If this is indeed the case, then it would have a significant impact on the type of person you'd want in the role. Often IT people are not know for their social or people skills. As such they think about the technically RIGHT way, and not the way that will work based on the tells of the other players.

It is with this position that I offer a radical idea. Turn IT spending into a poker game with the returns directly impacting the CIO and the team, and make sure the CIO is a decent gambler. If he had limited confidence in a given situation and wasn't getting a good read on the other players, he'd lighten the bet. And where there was greater certainty he might go all in. I suspect if one set a model up like this that the ROI would be far better overall, and holiday parties would undoubtedly be improved with these new sensibilities.

Hershey and a design breakthrough

2008-11-28T00:28:00.000-05:00

As someone who designs software I spend a great deal of time thinking about how things work. While there are the truly great things like the iPod, there are a huge number of things in this world that don't work well. Last year at my 40th birthday party I was outed! While I love the finer food and flavors, it came out that my standby is PB&J and the requisit chocolate milk. Over the years I've been frustrated by the Hershey syrup spout. It was invariably dirty, and with my children being the other users it was usually gross (not that it slowed me down much). With that background I want to thank Hershey engineers for addressing this issue with their fabulous new top! If my calculations are correct and the typical mom/dad spent 10 seconds a day wiping the top clean this design change will save over 100 years of time per year. I guess it is the little things in life that make a difference.

Time, Friends and Facebook

2008-11-25T18:12:00.003-05:00

As I use Facebook more and more different aspects strike me. The one that came to light was that fact that none of us have any time.

This last weekend I was lucky enough to get to spend it with my best childhood friends is Austin Texas. While fun was had by all, this fun was 20 years in the making. Each of us, there were three, have our lives, schedules and logistics that have conspired to make this nearly a quarter century in the making. This is not a good or acceptable interval. It got me thinking about time and friendships.

While we all have our lives packed in such a way that we have very few spare weeks, weekends, days or even hours. We do dozens of things in a given day, where our grandparents or Europeans would only have a handful. The absence of these big blocks of time make maintaining the relationships beyond the immediate very difficult. Even a leisurely phone call is challenging because we'll be leaving in a few minutes...

While our time is so short what I notice with my own time is that I have lots of free seconds. 30, 60 maybe 180 seconds littered throughout my day. What do I do with mine? Mostly nothing! Look up the game, the most recent tech announcement, etc. The value of these seconds is not great.

So to recap, lots of wasted seconds and friends that I'd really like to keep up with. How might these two things be married....Facebook!

I've found that since I've been on Facebook, with an iPhone in my pocket I've grown closer to 20 folks and communicated with them more, and on more topics then I've done in my life, and it's only been a couple months.

Facebook on the iPhone have made my life better by making my friends more available and allowing me to use spare seconds in a radically more valuable way. If you believe, as I do, that from human communication come ideas, insights and goodness we should be in for something truly exciting.

Facebook is a customized reality show

2008-11-07T23:52:00.003-05:00

I'd had an flux capacitor moment (I'd just taken the '80s movie quiz on Facebook) that lead to my Facebook status on Friday, " Facebook is like a custom reality show staring all your friends, but without the stupid competitive plot line...come to think of it it makes Seinfelds plot look meaningful.". After a handful of comments I wanted to play out the idea a bit further.

It struck me that I was watching Facebook like a TV show. There was a cast of characters, some primary and others supporting. There were plots that were evolving amongst the characters. But what made it so compelling was that the cast was so varied, and the plot unpredictable. In reallife time has grown so short that lifes contacts have been sanitized of so much of the interesting tidbits and asides, but on Facebook you have this richness. In our real lives we often don't have time for more then work, family and a close core of friends. While this intimate group provides us with much joy, its characters are often so well known as to limit the drama. On Facebook the technology allows us to have more friends, increase diversity and add drama because it requires so little of our time.

Over the course of recent weeks I've seen relationships spark and fade, puppies born, the euphoria and opposite of the election, and friends go through hard times. Facebook is amazing for it's ability to see the drama of life, our lives. TV is simply not this compelling.

I'm really happy about the last 200,000,000 years

2008-08-26T16:21:00.003-04:00

I was going through some pictures and found some that we'd taken at Dinosaurs Live. It was a very cool show put on by the BBC with robotic dinosaurs that were full scale. It was a very humbling experience to see creatures of that scale moving 20 feet from you. As you think about the scale of them it's mind blowing. http://www.dinosaurlive.com/. Check out the link for tour dates, it's great.

The *nixification of everything

2008-07-03T22:46:00.005-04:00

With all of the news last week on Bill Gates departure it got me thinking about good old Microsoft. While those that know me are aware of my numerous, and strongly held opinions about Microsoft, the question that kept coming to me wasn't negative. The question was, can Microsoft survive in the OS business over the long term against the *ix's (Unix, Linux and...Mac-ix)?

The main focus of the question was the scale of humanity that MS employs to write EVERY aspect of the software. Due to the proprietary nature, if they want it, they got to write it. IP stack, calculator, Directory, Mail server, programming frameworks, etc. As word came out of the Apple WWDC regarding SproutCore and the compilers, the world is paying more attention to the fact that Apples OS has a lot of non-Apple stuff in it. Geeky users like myself have been compelled by the *ix nature of OSX for years, but I'd hadn't thought about the increasing amounts of work that Apple doesn't have to do because of the compatibility with Linux. This seems huge in that it let's Apple reprioritize their development resources to the places that add value.

With the success of the iPhone and the move of the iPod to OSX we have millions of non-geeks carrying *ix as a matter of course. In this world can Windows last with such a structural cost disadvantage over the mid/long term?

Happy Independence Day

iPhone apps

2008-03-07T17:03:00.003-05:00

I watched the iPhone SDK unveiling today and it was great. The Forrester folks who wrote off the iPhone for the enterprise must be preparing to eat their advice.

For enterprise apps they showed some cool stuff from SalesForce and a great vertical app for healthcare. As with all the native apps that ship on the iPhone you saw really easy access to large amounts of data easily. The apps that they show were built in 2 weeks from a standing start so it should be wild what we'll see, and I can't wait to see this with 3G support!

The "big smile" moment was reserved for the native game developers. With the accelerometer you have to think of the iPhone as a Wii controller with a screen, a great screen. It showed folks gaming just like you do with a Wii only in a mobile device. It was crazy cool.

The gravity of SaaS, and a great show

2008-02-10T19:26:00.000-05:00

As someone who got thrown out of more VC meetings in the late '90s for talking about shared infrastructure I had the most wonderful time last week. Rick Chapman of Softletter put on a conference in Atlanta on selling SaaS and everyone in the SaaS community was there. From Peter Coffee from Salesforce.com, Zach Nelson from NetSuite, the folks from OpSource, the omnipresent Jeff Kaplan and a host of other luminaries. Rick put together a two day conference that had 10 years of content in it, and it was great.

The attendees were ISV's from various areas of the application spectrum, and at various stages in their conversion to SaaS. The show did a great job of laying out many of the issues that I saw in my time at Perimeter. From platform, to product management, to sales compensation, to upsell mechanics the show hit on virtually all of the challenges of SaaS and gave a lot of meat on addressing them.

This post is really one of thanks and joy that the time for SaaS has come.

Organizational Physics

2008-01-08T09:15:00.000-05:00

Wow, a new year is here! Time, she is merciless in her forward motion.

As I've spent some time in a few different organizations over the last year a pet theory of mine dawned on me repeatedly, so I figured I'd put it out for consideration.

As with the bounding physics post, this is about organizational physics. This first came to me while golfing. Given that I slept through both high school and college physics I had an "ahhh" moment when I found that my frequent slices didn't travel nearly as far as my lucky straight shots. It occurred to me that the reason was that the vector of force was going straight, but the angle of the head was tilted. So while the engine in this equation (Me) was putting out the energy, but it was being squandered at the point of contact. It struck me that this same dynamic happens in virtually every organization - all day - every day.

Translating this example to an organization looks something like this. A golf swing is made of various components in a coordinated effort to move the ball. In an organization, business or otherwise, we would have different people responsible for those elements that all need to be coordinated. Golf has a number of advantages for understanding the dynamic,

* It's performed by a single person
* It takes a fraction of a second to swing
* We can repeat it 100 times for $10/bucket
* Nobody dies

If we look at our golf swing example we have a series of phases to "project swing",

* Stance
* Back swing
* Down stroke
* Rotation
* Follow through

Viewed in project management terms, each one of these phases has a deliverable to the next and the success of each is dependent on all of it's predecessors.

All of this made me think of how organizations too often work. Let me describe a project in highly abstract terms. It is made up of 5 phases, each requiring 100 units of work. So we can see that the organization should have a total cost of 500 units to accomplish the project. In the scoping phase we find that some critical details were left off the initial documents, and that the owner of the project was in a meeting and couldn't attend. What wouldn't be unthinkable in this scenario is for both more than 100 units of work to be expended, AND it not being done in a way that is satisfactory to serve as input for the next phases. Due to poor management this seems to be an epidemic in all organizations. If an effort for expedience, urgency or policy, folk seem to execute on projects, task, etc. with the moral equivalent of a slice.

The organization isn't controlling the aspects of the swing with enough diligence to be able to routinely get 100 units of work done with 100 units of labor. As is evident from past posts, I am a tech guy. On this side of the house these things become grossly obvious in incorrectly scoped development projects. Through an inadequate process the business owner never really adopts it as their own. You see folks blow through huge amounts of time and energy and not get anything valuable accomplished. So in the strange way my mind works, all of this was obvious in the slice of a golf ball...four!

Lions, and Tigers, and SaaS! Oh my!

2007-10-31T00:31:00.000-04:00

The true colors of IT were on full display in a recent article in InformationWeek. In the article Growing Pains by Andy Dornan he makes the most accurate comment I’ve seen in the tech press in a long time. “Forget outsourcing. The real threat to IT pros could be Web 2.0/SaaS” And so it’s been said! From the magazine who’s tagline is “Defining the business value of technology” we see that it’s really in the business of providing apologist fodder for the new Luddites in IT.

As a clear example of the “threat” the author shows how Ken Harris, CIO at nutritional products manufacturer Shaklee, was able to improve services while cutting his IT staff by 20%. So to be clear, the threat is that the CIO will be worthy of his title as a CXO and show the business judgment to manage his area. This is beyond comprehension. The funny part is when IT then declares that it should be viewed as a business driver and not a cost center.

IT has pretended to be empowering business and discusses ROI, but I always get the sense of an alien lying under the skin. The scene from Men In Black with the person with a second set of eyelids blinking from the side gave away their true nature.

IT is to often not populated with a vision of progress and efficiency. Too many technology professionals are not enthusiasts, but retrained mechanics or accountants. They went to tech school, learned a trade and are now practicing it. Any change to technologies, or the dynamics of their jobs are seen as threats. People are in a field defined by change who fear it! It makes no sense to me.

As the article states SaaS is the cornerstone of this threat. SaaS is a threat because it does the unthinkable by removing technology from IT. Saas provides the software company's solutions directly to the business user. In doing this we eliminate the consultants for evaluate the need, the IT departments test and spec, the IT departments to deploy and the help desk to support. So while its massively more efficient and eliminated whole areas of concern IT views it as bad. This is truly alien to me.

While we’re at the early stages of the SaaS and Web 2.0 worlds some things are clear. These are the two most significant trends since the PC itself for empowering business users. SaaS allows the business user to interface with THEIR information. The business benefits of technology are the benefits of using business information better. Many IT organizations evolved to use technology to hinder the business users access to information. While adding the costs of technology, they also hindered the use of the information. SaaS is the answer to liberating businesses access to their critical information, and keeping IT honest.

I think the new tag-line for InformationWeek should be “Dogmatic non-sense for hire.”

The bounding physics of it all

2007-08-17T07:01:00.000-04:00

As life has progressed into my 40th year, it has grown increasingly clear that nearly every scenario has some of what I think of as bounding physics. As I discussed a few days back with email, the bounding physics was the requirement for ubiquity. As various folks tried to own the transport protocol they were in practice trying to violate the bounding physics of the matter.

Another example of the idea is one that uses physics itself, gravity specifically, to explain the bounding physics of a given problem. If we look at basketball without the presence of gravity, shooting a basket should work like shooting pool. One would simply aim at the hoop and shoot as straight as possible in order to get it in. This we know would work nowhere but outer space, for one of the bounding physics of basketball is gravity (most sports share this one). So while there is the clear opponent in basketball on the other team, there is also the third player on the court and she is gravity.

As one goes to shoot a basket, gravity is trying to knock the ball down. She is merciless. Every time, as soon as it's in the air she's knocking it down, and she won't go away-ever. So what we learn to do in learning the sport is to work with her, learn to accept her input and wishes on the way to the hoop. We add velocity and arc knowing that she'll burn off both. If we've calculated her correctly we'll find that we've played it perfectly...swish.

There appear to me to be natural forces, and laws in certainly every physical scenario, but also in every market scenario. Like gravity in basketball, these forces are not adversaries, but partners if they are understood. An adversary, at least a good one, will vary their tactics in order to create uncertainty, and force you onto your weak foot. The bounding physics are simply the laws in place in a given situation. Imagine playing basketball with an opponent that didn't understand that there was gravity...it would be a great day to bet on the game:)

So in a sales situation we can safely say that the maximum number of sales is capped by the number of potential buyers that know we exist, and what those that know we exist think about our offering. So we can look at awareness and perception as the bounding physics of sales, the gravity and friction of it.

As in the basketball, if we seek to understand the bounding physics of the situations that we find ourselves in, we can uncover the partner that gives us the unfair advantage.

Why I love Starbucks

2007-08-15T13:00:00.000-04:00

Many are sick of hearing my blather about how great Starbucks is, but I got another one. I'm lucky enough to have a drive-through one a minute from the house, so I'm there frequently. The other day there was clearly a newbie at the window. He was very flustered, and as we've all had our first job I understood what the morning rush was likely doing to him. After a long wait I was offered a handful of drinks that didn't look like mine and kindly passed on them. Finally I got one that appeared to be mine...100 yards down the road I determine that someone is drinking a plain iced coffee and I have their choca-mocha-boysenberry-frappé-crap. Anti-lock brakes are now applied.

As I return to the counter the manager sees me and immediately reads the situation. "I'm really sorry, what can I get for you?" He proceeds to get me my order in the highest speed available, while assuring me with the appropriate amount of "I'm sorry to waste your time." Finally I get my coffee and a nice little card that formally apologizes and offers me my next order on them. And that is what I love.

Everyone makes mistakes, period. There system of high quality interaction extends to the mistake. If they simply gave me my money back the economic implication of their act would have been the same to Starbucks Inc., but they didn't do that. By creating these little cards (a very nice fold over job that was cleverly designed) they told me that they understand that failure happens, that they know what form it's likely to take and have a process for addressing it. They also reinforce the brand messaging of quality, intelligence and service ideals. The manager didn't need to reinvent the wheel, an employee didn't need to go off script, they all simply needed to follow the game plan.

In modern life we all interact with countless organizations a week and experience numerous failures-it's no big deal. Starbucks took this normal situation and turned a failure into the best $2.36 (my coffee) every spend on marketing.

Why Gnostic?

2007-08-15T11:30:00.000-04:00

This post was in response to an email I exchanged with Lee Beachy with whom I recently reconnected with via LinkedIn. I figured I turn it into a post given the requency of inquiry on the topic.

On Gnosis, as you're likely aware it is simply the Greek root of knowing. Obviously the most common modern use is for the Christian gnostics, the gnostic gospels, Paul's stuff and the like. Perimeter's original name was CyberGnostic, as it "Knowing Technology", as you might imagine many thought I over thought the name:)

My use of Gnostic really stems from the Plato's ideas on forms. We know something to be a dog because it has the form of a dog. The world of forms was a transcendent world from which we came after crossing over the river of forgetfulness (or something like that). Similar concepts have been played out by many philosophers including more modern interpretations of the theme by Jung with his archetypes. Many philosophers argue that Plato's writings would ultimately shape Christian thought with the establishment of a world view possessing an ideal transcendent here after, which was a critical break from Hebrew teachings of the day.

Gnosis, as my mind thinks, is the ability to observe the logically necessary, and the logically necessary is the Ought, as in the way things "ought be". An example of that was various conversations around email circa 1990. Many organizations were trying to innovate the protocol for transfer, but that was simply a line of reasoning from the dogma of proprietary software that told them that the way to control the market was to control the protocol. This flew in the face of the fact that the critical bounding factor to the successful expansion of that technology was ubiquity and intern open protocols (in this case SMTP). Organizations spent billions of dollars in ignorance of the OUGHT only to have to adapt later.

My first week on the outside

2007-08-13T18:03:00.000-04:00

Eight months and ten years ago I had an idea that would become Perimeter eSecurity. From the lonely first days in the basement, to the original band of fools in the office next to the railroad tracks, to the leaking class d space to very corporate digs around the world that now represent the emerging force that is Perimeter it's been an amazing decade. Just as some folks get a seven year itch, as an entrepreneur with ADD I've had a itch that needs scratching for the last 8 years. So with the investments made, and great team in place at Perimeter I head out to other pastures.

Over the course of the first week on the outside I've realized that I miss all the great people that were and are Perimeter (I won't list you because I'm sure my legendary attention to detail will leave someone great off) and that the prospect of a new pasture being GREENER is unlikely. So for all the times, laughs, late nights, new clients, trade shows, arguments, plane flights and great conversations I say thank you, I miss you all and hope that our paths cross again.

The holy grail, the SMB

2007-08-05T18:53:00.000-04:00

For the last decade I've focused on the SMB market and in the end we ended up servicing about 4,000 clients. Over the years I've discussed this market with industry analysts, Fortune 500 company experts and the rest of the world. Clearly everyone has been quite interested in getting into the market because it's huge, at 8 million ish (+/- a lot), but for all the talk there has been very little in the way of progress for many, and virtually no progress for most.

Having talked with many folks about why this lack of success has been so universal, I wanted to share my .02.

To think about this we should first turn to the enterprise (Fortune XX). As we look at these organizations and why they can be sold (I'm talking about technology/tech services) through a single apparatus regardless of the industry that they find themselves in. As we dissect the enterprise we find a clear, and consistently structured, IT function and culture. This IT class is structured in standard silos, that align with research categories (chicken or egg I'm not sure), and technology marketers. The enterprise is large enough that the variation company to company is not significant to hamper the marketability of technologies into it.

So if we contrast the SMB to the enterprise we see the first generic distinction is that there are simply not enough resources to silo. With organizations in this category covering such a range of staffing levels the nature of the IT buying apparatus is virtually impossible to characterize. At the small end we have a small handful of generalists, up to the upper end of a few dozen technologists. What this results in is a group of technologist that, often, have no succinct strategy under which they're operating. And in the absence of strategy it's very difficult to know how to plan compelling marketing campaigns.

When we think about the continuum of size, makeup and focus of SMB IT it quickly becomes clear that the SMB IT market simply isn't a single market. By market I'm saying a group of consumers who's needs are consistent enough to be considered a group that can be address in common. The great epiphany for me is that the SMB market isn't. It's actually an amalgam of micro markets that need to be addressed individually.

If this hypothesis is indeed accurate then it leaves the largest organizations with a real challenge in addressing the SMB due to the limited scale of each of the micro markets. The Large scale vendor has global cost allocations that typically need to be spread across the various business units and the unit to address such small markets becomes a very challenging dynamic.

What conclusion do I draw from this? That the SMB is very fertile ground for mid-sized technology vendors and service providers. Translated differently...whoopee!!!

iPhone

2007-07-10T10:34:00.001-04:00

This was an old post I never pushed...

Wow! As a guy that's owned every smart device since the Newton all I can say is Wow!

From the moment I got my iPhone, 18.5 hours from launch:), I've been blown away. The major reason for that is the flexibility of the software to get ALL of the features out of the way and show me my 2-4 choices I need right now. As mobile devices have become more powerful they've gotten more buttons. The problem is that the ability to access any given function is in inverse relationship to the number of buttons. So the iPhones power is in the fact that it has a single button-home.

All that said, the real idea was that the world is no longer keyboard centric. Every computational device in the last 25 years has had a keyboard at the center of the user experience. This was a great development from the punch cards that preceded it, and it wasn't until the mouse that real enhancements were made. But since 1984 we've had the holy KVM trinity at the center of our UI universe. Attempts were made with the tablet PC's, but they didn't really reconsider the whole environment adequately to make it compelling. Then came the iPhone.

The iPhone UI brings the dream of the interface in the Minority Report from 2002 to life where Tom Cruise pointed, pushed and dragged information around a massive screen. An environment has been created that allows you to flick, pinch and drag your way through massive amount of information. The way this resonates to me is that it's fundamentally more human in nature. For me to annotate my thoughts there is no better tool that a pencil and a pad, and no I'm not a Luddite. The advantage of the pencil over a computer is that I don't need to pre-consider WHAT I'm going to draw/write, or IF I'm going to draw or write. Computer's have different tools for any given thing, but in the creative act I have no idea what I'll do to catalog or document a thought until microseconds before doing it. The pencil allows me to hold a single apparatus and simply think. Suffice it to say, the iPhones interface has gotten so many layers of interface paradigm out of the way and simply allow you to touch your information, which is fantastic.

What makes some cars special?

2007-02-13T19:36:00.000-05:00

I've found that the singular mark of GREAT automotive engineering is that I simply forget it exists and find myself hours later in the country wondering what the hell happened. As you might imagine, this quality is very hard for a spec sheet or the consumer reports folks to get their heads around.

It would seem to be very easy for engineers to focus on the,

Engine
Suspension
ETC

Being anal types, I'm sure checklists are involved. In any modern automobile there must be thousands of parts, and dozens of subsystems to optimize. All of this type of work is a necessary, but insufficient condition for greatness. And the modality on which it operates appears to be unable to find greatness with flashlights. To my way of thinking greatness requires an abstraction layer that many "car guys", and most car manufacturers don't get. As we saw with Socrates, the biggest sin these folks commit is that they don't even know they don't know.

I can only believe that greatness is the product of a single or small group of like minded people. A small group is critical because with the variables that exist in the interrelationship of thousands of parts there are clearly more ways to mess it up, then there are to make magic. It would seem more of an act of conjuring greatness out, but alas they do engineer it in.

It would seem that the root of greatness could be a simple one-stop thinking about the car. By shifting the focus from the car to the driver you make a significant alteration to the notion of what's being done. Greatness happens when an extension of a human is designed in the form of a car. The experience of greatness happens when the focus on the interactive components of a car are job 1. Do the interactive components communicate in a perfect manner. Are the physics of the driving experience communicated through mechanical energy? Is the communication in lockstep with the driving dynamic? Is the communication in lockstep with every other element being communicated at the same time.

Another point to understand, by my way of thinking, is that all of this communications is likely passing the frontal lobes completely and talking to the brain stem. Your doing something very similar to running or dancing. You are engaged in a very complex physical dynamic in which your body/mind are interacting with a massive amount of continuously changing data and making, potentially, life/death decisions. Frontal lobes don't work this way. As you are interacting with this machine any incongruity of input doesn't come off as "bad" as much as it simply communicates with you less. As such, for me a "bad" car is one that fails to communicate. With full communication I find that I simply forget the device exists, you are simply engaged in the driving dynamic with all core assumptions of the physics of the matter being supported by the driving device (aka-car).

It is with this line of reasoning that I can say the Z couldn't buff the tires of the s2000, or the Miata for that matter. The Chrysler 300 was the first US car to show hints of this dynamic, on a completely different level then the s2000 to be sure, but I'm in a stream of conscience mode and want to play with this idea so hang with me.

In looking at it, it seems to either be a breakthrough in my therapy or a stream of meaningless nonsense.