Technology and Context

cross-posted on medium and LinkedIn 

 This blog post will be the first installment of a multi-part series on technology, data, self-optimization, and context. Context is the often overlooked constant required for any level of optimization or understanding of a data-based problem.
I’ve worked in product capacities in the technology space for over ten years as a technologist and a go-to-market expert. I was taking products to the market and the market back to the product to create customer-centric solutions.
In that time I had the privilege of creating products and use cases to enhance the workflows used by tens of thousands of people every day and also creating products to create self-optimizing ecosystems. We will dive into the concept of context today to understand the importance of this often-overlooked variable in a contained system. Then look at it in other environments later. We will also talk about location and why location in many use cases is the ultimate in context.
Because this topic does come somewhat close to my day-to-day job, I should go ahead and say that this is my personal blog; the opinions are my own and may not represent my employer’s views. I hope to provoke you to look at more problems in terms of context and not just focus entirely on the data.’ Data is driven and explained by context.

PCWorld Interview on Redfish

I met up with Joab Jackson from PC World at Interop NY a couple of weeks ago. Joab ended up writing a nice article quoting me on Redfish as a result available here.

So what is Redfish? 

Redfish is a new datacenter API that I'm confident will eventually replace IPMI and possibly SNMP as well as numerous other APIs currently in use in the data center. It's the result of an one year plus collaboration between some of the most experienced and largest players in the data center industry including Dell, Emerson, HP and Intel.

I was fortunate to be part of the product management and marketing team for the venture, hence the interview. 

SAD 2: Or why I chose a Samsung S4

So the two additional factors that led me to the S4 over the HTC One. And let's again admit it, the HTC One is a much better looking phone. It doesn't have the generic Samsung feel of the S4.

Corporate Support

HTC has had some troubles lately. Chief Product Officer, CEO of Asian Operations and the COO have all left. That's what I found with a 30 second Google search. I'm sure if one started a lot of sleuthing at LinkedIn the story would become even more damning.

The number one gripe of the Android ecosystem? Fragmentation. Good vendor support, reduces (not removes) this issue. Samsung is better than most at pushing up to dateish OS upgrades. That's not saying much since most non-Nexus owners have resigned themselves to (or are ignorant of) the fact that their operating system is not going to be the most recent version of Android. It's probably ignorant off...

But that doesn't really matter because...

Community Support

I use CyanogenMod anyways. So essentially what I bought was a raw piece of material with a fast processor, great specs, nice display to run a custom cut experience of Android... and I love it. TouchWiz acts like 20lbs weights attached to the phones running shoes, take those off and the device flies.

Now CyanogenMod isn't totally stable and sometimes things break...

One time the mute button had broken in a nightly build... fast forward to a phone conference... brushing my teeth with the phone on speaker phone, obviously 'muted'... I didn't live that one down for a while. I

But overall CyanogenMod and the hundreds of other customer rom developers out there do a decent job at providing a nice experience with up to date OS for almost any Android phone out there. But again I felt the S4 was just going to get a little bit more attention because of its massive marketing share numbers.

How my phone acquisition disorder proved my customers' points

My PAD (phone acquisition disorder) has struck again with the purchase of a new Samsung Galaxy S4. It was a tougher decision than normal because the HTC One is one solid piece of equipment:  gorgeous and it feels high quality. The Galaxy S4... it doesn't. Yet, I still opted for the Galaxy S4.

Why is that? Ironically, once I thought about it, it was for similar reasons to why many of my customers opt for my company's products:  market share, as well as future corporate and community support.

Market Share

Why does it matter?

As a former owner of a T-Mobile G2X (aka the worst phone ever made and the last LG product I'll ever buy), I understand why market share matters. It's because other manufacturers create products that interact with the market leading products. That's true in the data center and that's true with phones. Other manufacturers want to support and latch onto the market leaders.

Result?

Yes, that's 65,695 results for the terms! Now, there is probably a lot of keyword littering going on with unrelated products. So let's clean this up and just include Amazon Prime items:

Ok, 3,857. Much more realistic

Let's compare it with the my go to whipping boy, the G2X. Same policies.

Yep, that's 334 results. That's actually surprisingly strong for the G2X but still illustrates my point. Larger market share = more compatible products.

Tomorrow I'll cover community and corporate support.

Phone Blogging: MY LG G2X dies... good riddance.

The phone that could have been

When I first saw the data sheet on the LG G2X it looked like a sure winner. It had just come out  as T-Mobile's first dual core device available. A beautiful large display, Tegra 2 processor (even though I don't mobile game) and what seemed like a nice and solid build factor. My assumption was that this device might become the new enthusiasts phone with wide spread ROM support etc. What happened turned out to make the G2X the last product from LG I will have ever bought.

I had decided to wait a couple of months for my upgrade though before signing my soul away for a ridiculously overpriced phone. That idea died when my trusty Nexus One was stolen. Being in sales at that time I was forced to act immediately and get a new phone. My living was directly tied to my ability to make and receive calls. So I went ahead and I purchased an early upgrade T-Mobile G2X . It was love there for a little while.

The psychology of sales force compensation models

There is one thing I can say with absolute certainty: there are so many different theories on compensation for sales reps in the market place, that it is hard to say with any type of authority what approach really works. Obviously all of them 'work' to a degree. In today's climate of escalating sales costs and compressed margins, what is the optimal way to extend psychological and monetary reward?

The three dominant compensation theories I will cover in these posts are: 1.) straight commission, 2.) salary + commission/bonus & 3.) salaried + annual raise. I'm also assuming that the companies have open territories.
If we are dealing with assigned territories the world looks quite different. Over the next week or so, I will give you my thoughts on these sales compensation programs. Am I 100% correct? No, probably not, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Straight Commission
Many straight commission jobs these days start with a draw or a 'clip-down' program. Some people argue that the draw immediately puts the rep behind the eight ball. Some companies realize that in today's market a sales rep won't be making them money in any type of sophisticated sales for six months at the very least (heavily relationship based sales up to two years). If they value training and quality new hires, then they understand that hiring a sales person is a long term investment. Or they don't understand that and they just continue to throw people at the problem until one of them sticks. My advice? Don't do that. Nothing will hurt customer good will as much as seeing a new sales rep every couple of months.

Now what can you say about the old-fashioned straight commission rep? A lot of senior sales reps I respect share a common characteristic: greed. Greed motivates them to work harder and excel. The old timers also tend to be quite eccentric and usually have a partially adversarial relationship with their employer. They are the mercenaries of the sales world and while many of them have been with companies for 30+ years they feel more like a contractor than an employee.

I wont ever forget the first time I really saw one of these adversarial relationships in action. An older rep came to a sales meeting with a copy of the previous month's orders in hand. Then, he went through his commission report line by line, meticulously checking each entry and the company's math. I must have looked stunned, but the rep just smirked and said that he'd been 'cheated' out of 10 dollars once and he was going to be damned if he ever let that happen again.

"Sales" for commissioned employees is as they are quick to point out "a contact sport." Sure, they'll go and buy the new guy a couple of beers at night, but if the conversation turns to shop and leads are discussed, these guys will run you over on the way to the A-list potential you were dumb enough to tell them about the night before.

The Positives
So while saying all this, why is it the time tested methodology for paying sales reps? It keeps the rep hungry: he has to work or he doesn't eat. The company takes very limited financial risks. A definite benefit of this compensation structure is that people essentially self-fire by not being able to provide a living for themselves. Want to keep your unemployment claims low? This is how. Your sales rep wants a raise? He can get one today by making a sale. You pay for performance and reps are paid for performance.

Psychologically this is the system where your reward center is tickled every day. Every day's performance brings rewards. Did you write $600 of commission today? Feels good doesn't? Want to keep feeling like it? Continue making it happen!

The Negatives
Unless you have a solid nestegg or support, getting into a straight commission job can be a very bad idea. You aren't guaranteed a salary. You could and you probably will spend days at the beginning working 12 hours per day and not earning a dime for it, and the next day you may work 3 hours making $500 that day in commission. That also explains why a lot of banks would rather not give straight commission sales reps with under two years under their belts a car or house loan. They are naturally risk adverse and you have risk written all over you. After a couple of 'bad days' you might ask yourself why am I even leaving the house and burning $4 per gallon gas for nothing? If you can't overcome this feeling, at this point it becomes self-fulfilling, and you should probably think about a job outside of sales or in a supervised office environment.


Conclusion
For a sales person, this is the highest risk/reward compensation model. For the company, it is the lowest risk. Sure they may pay a little more in the long run, but they never risk real money. The other issue is that this often does lead companies to chew through new sales people and alienate customers. If you feel comfortable doing this and can take a draw and have enough money saved away that six months of being poor doesn't scare you... well go for it!

I miss the Web 2.0 boom

Do you remember three years ago? It was a glorious time. Everyday brought a new webapp for... well you name it but odds were it was some sort of a calendaring, to-do list and GTD centric monstrosity. I LOVED IT!

It was similar to taking a test drive in a new car everyday and by observing their processes and looking at the logic behind them you could actually quickly pick up tidbits to improve your own personal work flow. It was fun. You saw great ideas that were implemented well and you saw great ideas whose implementation drove you near tears. You saw polished UI on systems that lacked any discernable use and you saw blatant rip offs other peoples functions and designs. The wild west of the web development. Eventually natural evolution disposed of the primordial slime and showed us the real winners.

The problem wasn't that most of the webapps that got dumped on the market were crap (but they were), barely functional (the new meaning of BETA) or that the market quickly became over-saturated, or that it was obvious that no one with business experience was involved in half the ventures. Or that no one had done any test marketing to see what price the market would carry. No, the problem was simply that these products were developed to cash in rather than solve a problem.

37Signals and Remember The Milk stand out as companies that not only survived the commodification of the productivity webapp market but thrived in it.

The 37Signals Story is well explained in their book Rework (shameless affiliate link) which is a good read but I wouldn't go ahead and fire your MBA management staff just yet. The reason they succeeded is because their products were the results of internal needs, it had a built in test market and opening it up to the public really brought very little risk for a company whose core-competency at this point had been custom development for 3rd parties.

It was simple, it was pretty, it was affordable and they made the lack of features their selling point. "Sure, you can get Salesforce.com but not only would you pay 10 times as much per seat license but you would be drowned by a sea of options that the average small and medium business user will never use. Think of the training cost you'll save... the tech support...".

I'm convinced the real 37Signals products are as much of a success as they are is due to the way its development came about. They identified an internal process that they could optimize with software. They developed the software for it, it fulfilled its mission and did it well. At this point they decided that it was good enough to go into the market place. Contrast that with Joe Q Doe looking at the plethora of GTD webapps and deciding to add another one to the mix to cash in on the fad. And sadly it really was a fad as most of the sites have since vanished.

Video of the day 2/11/11

You ever take on a project and said 'Don't worry I know what I'm doing' just for it to blow up in your face? Well this one is for you!

The great Gawker suicide.

Among my many sins is 15+ years of working with HTML and developing websites.
My approach to a website is not unique in that my first priority is ALWAYS usability. I'll wireframe, layout a site 10-15 times over, have that critiqued and then go to coding one of them. It's important to make an attractive site but no matter how good it looks usability is King. Especially when the good you are selling is information and your site is now making it harder to access said information.

Go check out the redesign for Gawker. Click here. Go! I'll wait.

Still waiting...

See! SEE! That's what I'm talking about!


Now that's what one would call all flash and no substance. It's barely usable, I'm sure it'll up the number of ad exposures for them because it now requires 70 clicks to go through a days worth of posts.

I've not checked Gizmodo or Lifehacker today. The layout just makes my teeth grind. I'm assuming their UI guy was kidnapped and is being held at an undisclosed location, I can't think of any other explanation.

Qualifying: AdWords

Smart companies know that today marketing and R&D have to be attached at the hip. Why is that? It's simply because you have to make sure there is a demand for the type of product you are trying to produce and that there is a cost efficient way to create a marketing mix for the product or service.

I'm involved in working with a small nutritional supplement company on their first product launch. Other than preparing their website and on-line infrastructure AdWords became very important to us before there was even a product.

Video of the Day 2/3/11

This is by far the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Quite simply amazing.