Very Clever, Google

For those who don't get why this is funny, you should know that AdCenter is Microsoft's competitor to Google's AdSense.

7/11/2007 12:24:50 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

More Than Meets The Developer Eye At Amazon

I had an interesting meeting with my old friend Mike Culver this morning. Mike and I worked together back at Microsoft when he ran the evangelism efforts for the mobile developer platform and I was the .NET Compact Framework product manager.

Early in the conversation, Mike asked me if I was familiar with Amazon’s developer platform. Years ago I had dug a bit into their commerce Web services, so I figured I could bluff my way through the exchange. After all, SharpLogic is The Developer Marketing Company, right?

Wrong. Mike now works as a developer evangelist at Amazon. He knows when I don’t know.

Sure enough, Amazon’s platform has grown way beyond what I would have expected. Among the various services available, the two that became immediately intriguing were the Simple Storage Service (aka S3) and the Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2).

In a nutshell, you can use S3 to cheaply store and serve a virtually limitless amount of data and EC2 provides virtualized servers (Linux-only for the foreseeable future). The neat thing about these is that you can scale up and down as much as you want and you only pay for what you use. Each EC2 node, for example, costs $.10 per hour. If you only use an hour a month, you only get charged $.10 a month. If you happen to have a huge load for 24 hours, you can continue to add more and more nodes, and then turn them off when the load is gone. You can even upload your own OS image. Amazing.

Microsoft and Google have some interesting offerings in a similar vein, but I haven’t seen anything public to meet this head-on yet, so Amazon is out to a huge advantage. I’m excited to see where this goes.

5/30/2007 3:46:52 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Asking The Right Questions

I find that most upstream project errors occur due to simple misunderstandings. Although I always try to ask all the relevant questions early on, there are almost always gaps in what I’m really trying to learn, and sometimes there are subtleties in terminology that mean very different things when being translated from business requirements into technical specifications.

Last week, we had a project extended slightly to support an additional locale. The engineer responsible for the project gave me two options: one simple (but inelegant) and the other sophisticated (but time consuming). I asked the client if they had a preference between the two, but rather than explaining how this impacted the business aspects, I pretty much laid it out as “hack vs elegant”. The client opted for the more elegant approach, which we began.

I took a walk to ship something from the UPS store. On my way back to the office, a car pulled up next to me and a woman asked “How can I get out of Redmond?”

Being the helpful citizen, I replied, “Pick a road and don’t make any turns.”

She smiled—patiently—and asked me how to get to SR-520, the nearest highway. After all, this was the question she really wanted answered. She was two blocks away, so I obliged and gave her the info she really wanted. I’m pretty sure that worked out fine.

Anyway, I rushed back to the office and called the client again. This time, rather than asking the “hack vs elegant” solution, I explained how the decision we were making now would impact the way we would extend the project in the future, and asked the client where they saw the project evolving to. As it turned out, the client had upcoming features I hadn’t accounted for, and the “hack” approach was actually the more elegant option because of the feature requests we would receive once we finished off the current round.

The moral is simple: ask the question you really want answered. It makes life a lot easier down the road.

5/1/2007 10:02:13 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Perpetually Sandbagging Expectations

A lot of companies I call often have a message that says “We are experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes” when I call their customer service line, which I assume is to set expectations that they might leave me on hold for a long time. In most cases, I’m able to get to a representative within 5-10 minutes, which is kind of what I expect under normal circumstances.

Anyway, I happened to be up around 4AM this morning (Easter Sunday in Boston) when I noticed I had a mail from Expedia saying that I needed to call them because an itinerary for an upcoming flight (several months in the future) had changed. To my surprise, I received the “high call volume” message, even though someone picked up immediately after the message was finished. Unless one call is “higher-than-normal”, I suspect that Expedia leaves up this message permanently.

This practice is known as "sandbagging" and parallels the use of sandbags to weigh down hot air balloons. If a balloon needs to rise rapidly, the sandbags can be easily thrown overboard, resulting in a reduction of weight that gives a temporary boost to the balloon’s ability to rise. In this case, Expedia wants me to believe that it will take a long time to get around to my call so I won't be unhappy if it takes a long time. In the event that they get to my call faster than expected, I probably won't be unhappy since it's to my benefit.

A lot of businesses sandbag in their own ways. Sometimes it’s important to pad a schedule for unexpected issues, and sometimes it’s useful to smooth revenue for the perception of predictable growth. Individuals are the same way in both business and personal relationships. However, once you get a reputation for being a perpetual sandbagger, you begin to lose credibility, and that’s never a good thing. We all know someone who is perpetually "slammed" or "doomed" with work

Last week, for example, I needed to book a last minute flight from Toronto to Seattle (“last minute” as in “in a cab on the way to the airport”), so I called American Express travel (and likely paid a hefty premium) because I knew that Expedia always had “higher than normal” call volume and didn’t know if I would be able to get through in time. Ironically, I probably wouldn’t have had any problem getting through to Expedia, but I knew I couldn’t trust the message to indicate whether the call volume was actually high or not, and five versus thirty minutes would make a huge difference. Although this is probably a rare case, it’s one where perpetual sandbagging can come back to hurt business credibility. Then again, Expedia is run by very competent people, so it’s very likely that they have weighed the costs of one-off business losses like this versus the customer satisfaction benefit of being able to exceed customer support expectations. After all, it’s not like I don’t use Expedia—I just don’t use them when I need high quality support, which is actually what they want me to believe.

4/8/2007 1:06:24 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  

Expression Blend & Web With MSDN!

This is awesome. I haven't really played much with Expression Web, but I've done a ton of stuff with Expression Blend and it's a great tool.

4/3/2007 8:05:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

The Microsoft Blogger Movie Casting

Dan posted the casting results for the upcoming Microsoft blogger movie. Check it out.

In hindsight, I wish I pushed harder for my own casting. It would be nice if people had actually heard of the guy who was going to be playing me.

2/27/2007 8:17:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  

Who Protects You From The Better Business Bureau?

We first joined the Better Business Bureau in late 2005. I’m not sure why we did. I guess it was for the plaque. I’ve always liked the concept of the BBB, so I figured it would be cool to join the membership. Unfortunately, all we really got out of it were quarterly sales calls asking for more money for special opportunities to promote our business in the BBB’s informational materials (aka advertising). The salespeople were nice, but it never made sense to do, so we always declined.

When I received the renewal invoice from the BBB this year, I decided not to renew. After all, they wanted over $100 per employee for membership and there were no benefits that would really help our business. I could also use the time ordinarily spent dodging sales calls restocking our fridge with soda.

Within a month of our neglecting to renew, I received a voicemail asking me to call them to discuss our membership cancellation. Wanting to support the BBB, I called them back and left a voicemail thanking them for everything but making it clear that we were not renewing.

They continued to call us, and one day I decided to put an end to it. We spoke for a few minutes where I confirmed—without doubt—that we were not renewing this year. They made a bunch of offers regarding discounted renewal fees, etc, but I made it clear we weren’t interested. Finally, I conceded that they could email me more info in case I wanted to change my mind (in their words).

A few weeks went by, and we didn’t receive anything. Life was good.

Earlier today, I received another call from the BBB. Just like the others, this was another pressure pitch to renew our membership. I had a few minutes to burn, so I figured I’d stretch out their telemarketing playbook and see how they reacted to the various reasons I didn’t want to renew. The following is a paraphrase of the conversation from my memory:

Act 1: Introduction

Me:  “Ahoy-hoy?”

BBB:  “Hello, this is <person> from the BBB. I was calling to discuss some of the BBB features you’re not getting the most out of from your membership.”

Me:  “Actually, we’re not members. Our membership was over a few weeks ago and we told you we didn’t want to renew.”

BBB:  “Well you didn’t speak with me, and I’m the only person you would have talked to.”

Act 2: Protection Money

BBB:  “It would be a shame for your company to cancel now when you received over 90 inquiries last year alone, which is great because your business is in good standing.”

Me: “How does this change if we don’t renew? Will you start telling people bad things about us?”

BBB: “No, we’re an objective service, so we only provide factual reporting.”

Me: “Then we’re okay as long as we keep doing a good job.”

Act 3: The Best Customers Use The BBB Web Site To Find Vendors

BBB:  “Being a member in good standing helps your company stand out on our Web site so our users will find your company more easily.”

Me:  “We’ve never gotten a lead because of our BBB membership.”

BBB:  “But there were over 90 inquiries last year and over ten already this year.”

Me:  “Yes, and the yield rate has been 0%. We’re going to need at least twice as many inquiries to make money at that rate.”

Act 4: The Web Seal

BBB:  “As a member in good standing, you’re allowed to put our logo on your site and have it link to your report on our site.”

Me: “Can’t I just say that we’re in good standing with you on our site?”

BBB: “Yes, but then you couldn’t use our seal and if your status changes you’d have to change it on your site.”

Me: “So then the benefit for me is only if we do something to get ourselves out of good standing?”

Act 5: Your Customers Will All Leave You

BBB:  “What companies do you work with? They might be members as well.”

Me:  “Almost all of our work is for Microsoft.”

BBB:  “Microsoft is a member and they look for vendors who are also members.”

Me:  “That’s not true. I’ve never seen any corporate policy that indicated that BBB standing impacted Microsoft’s vendor decisions or spoken with anyone who checked the BBB before contracting a project.”

BBB:  “I didn’t say they require their vendors to be members, you’re putting words into my mouth.”

Me:  “You just implied that we would have improved chances of closing deals with Microsoft if we paid you for membership.”

<we bitch at each other for a few minutes over this>

Act 6: Conclusion

Me:  “I’m really sorry, but there’s no way we’re going to renew now or ever. I really don’t appreciate the browbeating and thought you guys existed to protect people like me from tactics like this.”

BBB:  “You’re the one that’s browbeating me.”

Me:  “Well, I gotta run. Thanks again for the call. Please don’t call again.”

I want to emphasize that this paraphrased conversation was from memory, so the grammar, etc, aren’t exact. I also think it’s very possible that my recollection of the conversation could be mistaken such that the salesperson seems to have been more dishonest than they actually are.

I’m also still a big supporter of the BBB for what they do. Although I think it’s a huge conflict of interest that they try to extract lots of money from the companies they monitor, I don’t think that impacts the validity of their services.

2/20/2007 1:18:41 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  

Installing Adobe Reader 8.0 On Vista

I’ve had to install Adobe Reader 8 on a few Vista machines and always run into an issue. After downloading AdbeRdr80_en_US.exe from adobe.com and running it, you get a dialog asking you to confirm that you really want to run it. If you allow it to run, it’ll expand the files correctly and then launch the actual Setup.exe file to install the app itself. Unfortunately, running it may result in either of the following errors:

1 - "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not installed correctly. Contact your support personnel for assistance."

or

2 - An error regarding the temp directory being inaccesible, out of space, or other unlikely problem.

To get around this, run the AdbeRdr80_en_US.exe app and wait for it to finish expanding the installer files. You’ll know it’s done when you see the Setup.exe dialog:

Leave the dialog alone for now. Instead, navigate to “C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\LocalLow\Netopsystems\temp\Adobe Reader 8.0” and run AcroRead.msi directly. It should allow you to install everything fine. Afterwards, you can hit cancel or whatever to dismiss the original dialog. Note that when you dismiss the dialog (whether to cancel or run to failure or success) it’ll remove the files in the temp directory.

Hope this helps.
2/5/2007 1:01:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [3]