Business conventions are important because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.
Since I got to so many, perhaps I'm not that valuable?
I got an email the other day from Canada's VIA Rail, advertising "Discover Canada by Train" and the chance to save up to 70%. When my son was younger he loved trains, and one of the videos he had was of a train trip on VIA rail across Canada. It looked amazing, and they hooked me. I clicked on the link to see how much this might cost. I'm not necessarily looking for a trip now, but I might in the future.
I don't know how I got on their list, being a US Citizen, but they piqued my interest. A good thing.
Note: this applies to how the software APPEARS for VIA Rail. It's something you ought to consider when you're marketing promotions to your customers.
I got to this page, which looked nice, but it was WHAT WAS IN THE EMAIL. Don't waste my time. At this point I feel as though you've shown me the same commercial twice. Not what I want to see.
As a comparison, here' s the email:
Both of them essentially are trying to hook me, but neither one shows me
That's a big mistake, and it starts to immediately turn me off. However I continued on to look at the next page, where they presented me with a map:
and below that a series of routes on which there were specials.
Again, I don't have a price, so I'm not sure I'm interested. But this is a promotion, and maybe they want me more interested. OK, I get that, so I click a few of the map locations and that limits the list of specials. I pick one of the interesting ones, Vancouver to Toronto, just to see. I figure I'll get a high price.
I find one I like
and click "Book Now, " which seems like a nice, highly visible link. There are booking instructions, but how many people click the instructions first? I'm hooked, I want to buy. I get...
OK, now what? My route is populated, but the dates aren't, and if you look at my choice, it has a date listed for the special. It also has a discount code, neither of which I have at this point. If I searched through and found a fare here, it wouldn't necessarily be the special they're shown me.
What's more, on the special, it doesn't list the time it takes for this journey, so I have no idea of what the return date should be.
It's a slow site, the search takes minutes, and were it not for the chance to write this blog post, I would have just bailed and not bothered to continue. But I'm curious at this point, morbidly curious, how bad things can get. I pick dates I want in September, the wrong ones deliberately, and continue.
When it does come back, which is literally 4 or 5 minutes later, I'm amazed. It didn't time out. I see this
Not bad, they moved my dates for me, but then I don't see the special fares. I do see the discounted berth, which was mentioned in the ad. I'm assuming this is more than a day's journey and I need to sleep, so I pick it and continue.
Eventually (another 5 minutes) it comes back to say that my return date is invalid. For eff's sake, can you not give me more than that? Clue me in as to the possible dates? What timeframe should I consider.
Curiosity is failing, but I go back, enter in the date on the discount (Oct 9), pick 3 days later since I think I remember from my son's video that it was 3 days to get across Canada by rail.
Minutes later, I get a return. I'm not sure how long because I'm writing this and doing other work, checking the page once in awhile.
The first thing I saw was just the "Upper berth" item in the drop down. At first I was confused why this was listed when I'd suggested the "upper and lower berth - discounted" item. It's annoying to me to see other listings here, but more annoying to show them as "sold out" I don't know if the search was too slow, or if there is a crappy design, and I'm really not sure if it's worth even searching. If I were seriously considering a train trip, I'd be very, very turned off now. Were it not for this blog, I'd have moved on.
I finally get the results:
I can't say I'm that surprised at the cost, though I am surprised it says "discounted" berth. What's the discount? And why is passenger one paying $2,421 and passenger 2 paging $2,265 ($156 less)?
I continue on, thinking that at some point I'll put in the discount code and see the discount. I enter my name, fake address, fake phone, and get to the payment screen where they want my credit card number. No discount, no letting me know what the discount is.
At this point I think they have horrible software developers, and are hiding something. They feel worse than the airlines to me.
Out of curiosity, I check on Amtrak and look over some deals they have. Their site was inifinitely easier for me to find specials, and get a price along with the results when I searched on dates. Not a lot faster at times, but definitely easier to use. I didn't compare prices at all.
I buy airline tickets 5-6 times a year, and at no time have I had as much of a hassle in finding a price as I did on the VIA Rail site. Likely I'll not be considering a trip across Canada by rail anytime soon.
Tia and I were moving dirt around the ranch this weekend. It was a chore that needed to be done, and we had some time to do it. Nothing was scheduled, no kid or family commitments, on a Sunday afternoon.
While we were working, a strange car drove up, and a lady got out with a package in her hand. Tia and I looked at each other, and since I was in the tractor, she walked over there to see what was going on. I finished dumping some dirt, and as I was walking back to the house, Tia came up to talk to me.
She showed me this:
The lady apparently takes photos of houses from the air, and then brings them around to sell. I'm not sure if she or her husband does this, but they offer the print for $119 or so, and then $30 for the frame.
Not a big money maker, but it can fund a hobby or some costs, and it's not a bad model. The power of showing a finished product to a client makes a big impression. While $120 isn't cheap, it's a nice photo, and is unique. I wouldn't, however, contract with them if they came by and said they'd go take a picture and bring it back.
I don't think that you'd ever earn a living with some hobby like this, but you likely could cover costs, perhaps even the fuel from flying your airplane around. If you had a similar hobby, woodworking, crafts, something where you can produce a customized product easily, making a sale can work well. Photography is easy: I see people taking pictures at theme parks, ski resorts, etc. and then selling prints later. It must bring in enough money to keep offering it year after year.
This is a nice example of funding a hobby by practically producing a product. Shareware people have done this for years, producing something on the side and then giving you something to see before you pay for it.
I hope this isn't real, but I suspect it is.
If this image disappears, I promise not to sue.
I saw this post on The Business of Software Blog about a use of Twitter to spread the word for a marketing guy. As an aside, I attended the 2008 Business of Software conference and it was outstanding. I’d recommend it to anyone in the software business.
It’s an interview with Dan Nunan, with whom I used to work, and it talks about how he handled a recent trade show. Pressed for time, they created a reconstruction of the Huson River plane crash that had occurred recently. What’s interesting, is how he used Twitter to spread the word and have a fairly wide reach.
It’s unclear if it was successful, and I think for many marketing efforts it’s a cumulative effect over time that determines if you’re successful, not the immediate response. Still I think it was a creative use of the medium, and a recognition of how the ripples can spread out from Twitter to mainstream media.
Why haven't I updated the build list for SQL Server 2008 with SP1? Read on...
Today I got a press release from Microsoft announcing that Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 was available. It was late in the afternoon, I was getting ready to schedule the newsletter, and so I immediately clicked on the link. My default browser, Firefox, popped to the SQL Server 2008 SP1 CTP page.
Hmmm, I was thinking perhaps a problem refreshing with an update, so I F5'd a few times, and then got annoyed. I sent a note back to the PR person that the link was broken, and then went to the Data Platform Insider blog, the place where lots of official SQL Server news gets released.
There was a link there to the download page for Microsoft, so I followed that and checked the "New Downloads" page. Sure enough, the link was there, I clicked that, got the download page, and looked for the release notes. Clicking that link got me a 404 error. Same for the README.
At this point I think something is wrong. So I try IE 7. There I click the link for the notes and get a Live Search error. The page can't be found. Why there is a Live Search when the page isn't available is beyond me. That's just annoying.
I refresh a few times, monitor Twitter, see a few more people are having issues as well. Someone even speculates that the SP got pulled for issues. I'd believe that, but there's no sign right now that's the case.
I have the KB number, so I search for that article. Not found. I think take another KB article, change the article ID and get a 404.
I get two more emails from the PR people at Microsoft, one with a new link (the main downloads page, not even the SP1 page) and another saying that the servers are syncing up and they should be working shortly.
After about 10-15 minutes, I give up. I've had enough messing around with this, and even though I might work too much at times, I need to schedule this newsletter and go cook dinner for kids. I'm basically done working for now and need to schedule the newsletter.
So the build list won't get updated until tomorrow when I have good links and I'm sure everything is working.
Who cares about SP1 being released today? Not a lot of people. Most people need to test the final release, they don't have a schedule necessarily, and whether they download SP1 today or next week it doesn't matter.
However there are some of us, journalists like me, consultants, MVPs, writers, that need to test ASAP against SP1 to keep work moving forward. Or people that have the CTP running on systems and want to move to the RTM version of SP1.
In other words, very good customers for SQL Server PR. These are the people that influence others, that Microsoft would presumably want to please. Yet a number of these people are exactly who got annoyed today with an announcement and pages not working.
Microsoft does some things very well, but this is just dumb. There is no purpose in waiting until the last minute to update the Microsoft web site when you have an announcement coming. What harm is there if they released SP1 to their web site, gave all the servers time to sync up with the download pages, verify everything is working, and then send out a press release tomorrow?
Does anyone think that the delay of a day of SP1 affects SQL Server sales or adoption? Heck, plenty of people would notice the download on a page, push it out through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The people that really care would know hours ahead of others.
Microsoft has a chance to get an easy win, let a few people "break" the news early, and then they make an official announcement later. Instead they either tried to time things too tightly or the PR people jumped the gun. In any case, a little delay would have made this process smoother.
I’m not sure how I feel about Amazon invoking the DCMA clause to prevent other e-books from being read on the Kindle. On one hand I think that if encryption on other books is being cracked to put them on the Kindle, that’s an issue for other e-book vendors, not Amazon.
However if this is to prevent Barnes and Nobles from selling e-books that can be read on the Kindle, I think that’s a mistake. In that case, Amazon isn’t pushing the e-reader as a platform, they’re pushing it as a service.
I can already get books from Mobipocket, or the Gutenberg project, or any number of other places and convert them on my PC, load them on the Kindle, and never pay Amazon for that privilege.
I think most customers that get a Kindle, will do so to buy books conveniently from Amazon. Lots of people won’t worry about saving $.50 to drive to a bookstore to get other books. Or bother going to another web site, downloading the book, connecting the Kindle, etc. It’s way more convenient to use Whispernet to grab books. I’ve done it both ways, and the convenience factor wins out for me 90% of the time.
Trying to get that last 10% of sales, or some similar percentage, will do more damage to the Amazon reputation than just allowing this to take place and pushing out more, and better, content from Amazon.com.
I went to get new business cards from VistaPrint recently. There are lots of choices and it took longer than I expected. I almost bailed out from the choices, but I had an issue recently with mine.
I needed to get some books sent back to my house, so I wrote out my address, printed labels, and then I handed out a business card at a trade show to a shipper. I got a call later asking if I was sending things to the Florida address. That threw me until I remembered the company used to be in Florida. I corrected them, but it made me realize my business cards were woefully out of date.
And I just realized that despite my quick design, they're still out of date. I got the main brand on there, but forgot one of the others. Oh well, after the holidays I'll get my artist working on a new one. In any case, I started as I always do with a quick Google search and picked Vistaprint, who was the first result, I've used them before, and they had a special on the front page, $3.99 for 250 cards. That's more than I need, and so I opted to go over there.
After working through the designs, I ended up clicking "checkout" and they showed me what I saved with their special, however the total was $22, which surprised me. I'd opted for some labels, but those were around $5. I didn't think a lot of it, moved on, and on the next page I saw shipping at $14, which all of a sudden made me rethink things. A couple interesting observations on the process.
Things I like:
From a business standpoint, I thought VistaPrint did a good job upselling me. They presented a number of options at each point of the selling process. An example below:
A few times I missed the red upsells, but that was my rush, and it could result in more sales for them.
They added additional, related products, with my customized logo. Here’s a couple they had:
There were many more, probably 3 or 4 pages worth of goods and services, including Google Adwords and a website, which made sense. This is a good time to add value for a customer, and since people probably don’t get business cards too often, the extra annoyance probably doesn’t hurt too much.
Things I Didn’t Like
There were a few things that I think bordered on sneaky or unethical. This might seem like a great deal:
but when I go to checkout on the next step, I see this:
Nowhere in the process was I ever informed of shipping costs (I went back and looked) and to offer me a deal of $4 for cards, but check $10 for shipping, something I might overlook, seems a little sneaky and disingenuous. I feel a bit like this is a markup on a service that makes no sense. A package like this should cost about $2-3 to ship, and even doubling that for handling doesn’t get me to $10.
It’s about managing their Q and I’m sure you’re paying for priority on the presses, but they present this as a shipping item, which seems a bit unethical. In the order for color cards, which I did the first time, the cost for Standard was over $13.
I checked a few other places and their prices aren’t too far off from what you might pay elsewhere, but the presentation is different. They make me think like I’m getting a deal, I’m not, and then I feel a bit deceived. If I plan to pay $20 for cards from somewhere else, I’m happy. Here I planned to pay $10 and feel ripped off when I end up with $20 of charges.
Lessons for Business
More and more people are becoming more informed shoppers. The average person that might hit your site has likely ordered something from Amazon or another online retailer and so they know what to expect with shipping.
While I like up-selling and convenience, deceiving people likely won’t pay off in the long run. People will move on to other businesses.
The exception might be if you have a niche like Vistaprint and you don’t look for a ton of repeat business. I likely wont’ go there again and will look for other companies to service my needs.
Last year I was in a bookstore and looking through some books with Andy Warren of End to End Training. I didn’t have the Kindle with me, and was waiting while Andy found a few books for his flight home. But I was still browsing since I hadn’t been in a bookstore in a long time and was enjoying the experience.
As I picked up a few books to glance through, I found a few that I wanted to buy later for the Kindle. It’s not that I don’t want to buy books, but the Kindle is very, very convenient for me. I had my phone, so I started to type in the title and author, but Andy suggested that I take a picture. So I did, actually a few pictures, and I ended up buying 3 of the books from Amazon later.
As we stood there, we talked about how if I had an iPhone, I would have just bought the books there with a very convenient and easy to use browser. I also mentioned that I saw an app for iPhones that would take a picture of the bar code and then search out pricing for you.
That’s cool, and I can see that it definitely makes things nice for bargain shoppers or those without much disposable income, but what if that practice and application became widespread? It’s an example of an idea that doesn’t scale.
If too many people were to “browse” for products, whether it’s books, toys, or auto parts, pretty soon the brick and mortar stores won’t be able to support themselves. If you go to a store, check out an item, and then decide you can save $10 or $20 by purchasing online, you are doing a dis-service to the store, and eventually you won’t be able to patronize or even check things out in the store.
I know I’m sounding more like a business person, but it’s also a common sense thing. The specialty stores, the local stores are dying out in many ways. They’ll never completely disappear, but even now there are many, many fewer of them. And it’s not just Wal-Mart, it’s also the pressures of purchases across the Internet. After all, how many of you can go to a store and check out music now? There’s some in Wal-Mart, and some in larger Barnes and Nobles or Borders, but I can see that disappearing. Browsing around, looking for music was something I used to really enjoy, just as I still do with books.
eCommerce can make things more efficient, but it can also get rid of some of the richness that we enjoy in this world. Browsing physical objects is still important in the world and I hope that businesses look to evolve to support both models.
Chris Shaw, owner of SQL Oncall, recently had an issue in his business. Chris provides DBA services on a remote basis to companies that need supplemental help or don't want to hire a DBA. It's a good business and I think Chris works hard to be fair to people. However one of his client's didn't want to pay and he talks about it on his blog.
One of the things I used to hate when I did one-off consulting, was the issues with AR, Accounts Receivables. In other words, getting people to pay you. The AP, Accounts Payable, is also a hassle, but that's on you, and it's easier to handle since you're sending out checks for other stuff, easier to pay bills for me.
However there are always people that don't see the value, or don't think they have gotten great value from your service and don't want to pay. We all experience this, often with doctors who we see for 3 minutes with a $20 co-pay (and a $200 insurance charge) or mechanic that wants $60/hr for all work, whether highly skilled like milling pistons, or low level like changing oil.
When you're a larger company, you can send this stuff to collections, and get paid some of what you're owed. You also have a staff (or a contract with a staff) to hassle people to pay, send out notices, etc. When you're one guy or gal, it's a hassle, it task switches you, you have to keep track of it, and you hate it.
At least I did.
I think Chris handled this well, perhaps better than I would have. Likely if I'd gotten paid, I'd have dropped the customer immediately. Once someone decides not to pay, they likely will do it again, though I'll acknowledge that you would have to see how they explained their thoughts.
I don't think IT people always earn their full bill rate for every hour, but I think that's part of issues with society in general. People don't work at a constant level or rate. However the good ones, the ones worth trusting will alter their billing, reduce hours or change the rates to be sure they've delivered good value not only for themselves, but for you as well.
While in Cambridge, I went to watch a panel talk about building a software business. Neil Davidson, CEO of Red Gate and organizer of The Business of Software conference was on the panel. He'd sent around a note a month or so back and since I was going to be in Cambridge, I asked if I could be booked. I'd enjoyed the conference last year, so I was looking forward to it.
I was late going, having forgotten about it, gone running after work and for some reason remembered it at 6:45 after it was starting at 7. Actually 7:15, so I had time to shower, figure out the directions to Downing College, and walk over from the hotel.
It was nice being back in academic environment, around old architecture, a lot of which the University of Virginia seemed to have copied. I got into the lecture hall just the panelists were being introduced. The host asked them to introduce themselves, talk about why they should talk about software business and then answer two questions, one of which was "Is now a good time to start a software business?" I can't remember the other one, but Neil started out describing himself and Red Gate and then said that it's always a good time to start a business.
However things went sideways from there, at least for me. The other panelists spent more time talking about their businesses or what they were involved in without giving advice. I didn't think it was possible to actually talk about your past without giving a useful anecdote, but I saw it done quite a few times.
It also seemed that the panelists lost sight of the idea of helping people setup a software business. They tended to get bogged down in their stories rather than keeping the central theme in mind.
They also seemed to talk about funding and venture capital, which are parts of the business, but they didn't give great advice, I thought. They walked the center line too much. I did like that my boss, Neil, came out against VC money and gave some specific alternatives.
There was a question on ideas, and I was hoping for some good advice there on finding ideas or evaluating them, but for the most part I didn't hear any/
All in all not a great session to attend, but I did like being back in an academic venue, much nicer than so many business offices where I've seen these things held. It was great to also see professionals out there taking time out of their lives to participate in these events and help others get started themselves.
The book is actually Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS and it was written by a retired UPSer that spent his whole career there. I picked up this book after being on the Underground Tour in Seattle. As an aside that was neat, but the guide mentioned UPS was started in Seattle delivering drugs (I never knew either one of them).
While we were in Seattle at a Barnes and Noble, I saw this on the shelf and took a picture of it on my phone. I don’t mind supporting Barnes and Noble, but I also don’t want to carry more books than I have to and this was a reminder to get a copy on my Kindle later.
The book starts with a bit of the author’s career and how he came to work at UPS and love it. He definitely shows his enthusiasm for the company and culture and his admiration for the way that the company is run.
From there it goes back and talks a bit about Jim Casey, the founder of the company, or one of the founders and how he got his start as a kid in Seattle delivering packages for retail stores at the beginning of the 1900s. Some interesting things I’ve learned:
I recommended this to my business partner, Andy Warren, and he wrote a review as well. He didn’t like it as much as I did (I think), but it’s a good read and I think it’s a good company. I’d like to build a company like UPS, though not exactly. I’m not sure I completely agree with all the things said about the company, but they have done things the right way from what I’ve seen.
The book isn’t all a rah-rah book on UPS. There are definitely some issues and the author does a good job of bringing them out, showing that he doesn’t like it, but it’s a part of the history.
I know my delivery guy loves the company and I need to see if he’s read the book.
XBRL is yet another use of XML, this time for financial reporting. It is supposed to be in place for large companies, and like most other requirements, it will eventually migrate down to smaller companies as more tools become available and cheaper. Putting the onus on large companies to implement new standards makes sense since they can better afford it and they often have the most complex reporting, so the standard and process truly gets tested well.
Mark Cuban had a great idea in that it should be used to track the bailout, which I tend to agree with. Make this information public, put it in a standard format like XBRL and then anyone can consume it, build reports, make it easier for the citizens of this country, who are funding this bailout, to understand what is happening.
More and more I am seeing new uses of XML, which are really just subsets of the structure that XML provides. A decade after I first saw XML being pushed at the 1998 Microsoft PDC in Denver, it truly is permeating information technology more and more. I thought it was an amazing idea, much like the ATM protocol in networking, but both of them seemed to have a lot of overhead and I wasn't sure they'd get truly widespread adoption.
I was wrong, at least for XML. ATM is used, but pretty much only by large, backbone telecoms, while XML is everywhere.
I think XML isn't suitable for all applications, but it makes great sense as an interface, especially an expandable one that exchanges data between systems or applications and needs some flexibility. It hasn't been a focus of mine over the years, but more and more I think I should dig more into XML and better understand how it works since it's likely to become integral in some part of most applications in the future.
One of Google's tenets is to "do no evil" as they run their corporation. This article questions their motives as they've changed the agreement for Chrome, their browser.
I don't necessarily think that Google is evil, and in many ways I think they've learned from Microsoft in how to not appear so. They're a corporation, striving for profit and trying to do a better job, but they're going to stumble. Naturally they want to promote their own products, which makes sense, and tie them tightly together.
That's what Microsoft wants as well, though they sometimes go too far in preventing alternatives from being adopted.
It's a fine line that you walk as a corporation, trying to grow, trying to make a profit, and it's hard sometimes to know if you're skirting the line and perhaps doing something unethical. In my ventures we've tried to be fair, but there are plenty of people that have disagreed with our decisions.
Personally I think this is where capitalism fails. As entities grow larger, become more popular, they gain power, and it's hard to not take advantage of that power to grow more. I think many times the most successful companies sometimes appear evil because they continue to do what has worked for them. And those practices often shut out or prevent smaller companies from competing, making them appear evil.
There's no shortage of evil companies, however, with plenty of people willing to make decisions and engage in practices they know are illegal or immoral, all to make a few more shekels.
It’s my boss, or rather the owner of the company I work for (yes I work for someone in addition to owning a company), but it’s still an interesting post.
Hiring Your First Employee
I don’t know when Neil hired the first person to work for Red Gate Software, but I think he’s got a great memory and he really gives you some good things to think about in this post at 47 Hats.
Some of the items are in making the decision to hire someone, but there are some good ones about picking the person as well. I especially agree with the part of getting a domain expert to help you (use your network to find someone) and also test the person on the task they’re being hired for, don’t ask them to talk about it, make them do it.
Worth the read.
