Does John Dvorak think Microsoft has jumped the shark too?

I came across this post on PC Magazine's website. Its an interesting take on what's happening at Microsoft and given my thoughts on what's happening there I thought I'd add the link here:

Wintel, Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts

Here's the link to my piece on this topic:

Has Microsoft Jumped the Shark?

Here we go down the Yellow Brick Road because there's a Pot of Gold at the end of the Rainbow

This is the first in a series of many posts on the changes that are happening at the site of one of my clients based in Brisbane.

They have been successfully running a mixed environment of UNIX (AIX and BSD), Linux (Red Hat), MacOS X, Windows XP and 7 for a few years. Kept their costs down while keeping the availability up.

The company has 10 sites on the eastern seaboard of Australia and about a hundred and fifty users.

Recently their Group Financial Controller convinced the company management to ignore the advice of their in house IT guys and move to a Windows mono-culture. The reason she did this was because in her extensive experience with IT this was the only environment that worked and would deliver huge benefits to the business, short and long term.

They asked me to get involved and help 'guide' the in-house IT guys with the change.

Now personally I don't think this is going to be a smart idea, or a cheap one or that it will deliver any of the huge benefits to the business that she's claiming. That being said I think its going to be an interesting journey for us to follow.

So lets saddle up and see where the yellow brick road is going to take us.

Where have all the good sales guys gone?

You know years ago I used to rue the cold calls I'd get from sales guys "out there" trying to sell me stuff, stitch me up for the latest boondoggle or otherwise trying to get their figurative foot in the door.

I know that cold calls are just a part of doing business but it used to piss me off no end.

Oh how I wish the good old days would come back.

Over the last four weeks I have been called at least once a day by third rate telcos telling me that they're going to save me 50% on my current rates while I strain to hear them make the pitch over a third rate VoIP system that's been installed by a fifth rate technician using gaffer tape and baling wire.

The amazing part is that these calls are all coming from Vodafone, so maybe its not a third rate VoIP system, maybe its the kind of quality you get from their prime grade mobile network?

The thing about this is that the caller isn't trying to sell me the product, they're trying to sell me the salesman. The call usually goes like this once they've given me the savings pitch; "One of our sales staff will be in your area next week. They'd like 10 minutes of your time to show you our offering. What time can I book you in for?"

Here's the thing. If they're such a good sales person why aren't they making their own cold calls? If they're not such a good sales person and you can't trust them to make their own cold calls why are you sending them to me?

With this sort of approach I'm being told that we aren't an individual customer, I'm a name on a mailing list and just part of the great sales chocolate wheel, round and round and round she goes where she stops nobody knows but when it does stop on your number we'll call you.

How can any organisation that tries to pitch customer service as a key differentiator take this approach...oh...sorry...we're talking about Vodafone...strike the customer service comment.

The caller usually doesn't know a thing about the company, our needs, requirements and so on so how can they offer us anything other than a standard pitch that will promise the world until you read the fine print that, translated from legalese, means "doesn't matter what we tell you because what you need might make this offer worthless and non-binding".

Here's a tip for all the companies that use this type of bottom feeding sales approach:

Either let your sales staff make their own calls, or, if you can't trust them to hit their numbers get new sales staff who can build a relationship with your potential customer.

Call centres making ten minute appointments for a "consultant" who will explain the latest greatest deal is no way to build a relationship with anyone, and here's the trick, no relationship equals no sale.

And one last note to Vodafone. If you can't tune your CRM system to make sure I don't get 5 calls a week from 5 different call centre operators then I can't trust your technology with something as critical as my phones.

Has Microsoft Jumped the Shark?

Not so long ago Microsoft wasn't the largest software company in the world. Lotus was. Now they're a footnote on IBM's financial statements.

Not so long ago Microsoft didn't own the corporate networking market. Novell did. Now they're a footnote to the accounts of a private equity firm, chunks of their business belongs to Attachmate and a whole bunch of companies are picking over the bones of their patent portfolio.

Is Microsoft next?

One thing that was common to the slow, painful decline of Lotus and Novell was their attempt to get into non-core space. They lost focus.

Lotus built Symphony, bought cc:Mail and got into 'something'-ware with Notes.

Novell bought Digital Research and got into the DOS business and then they bought WordPerfect and a couple of products from Borland and got into the Office business.

Now Microsoft has bought Skype, melted Bing and Yahoo, provided seed funding to a failing Nokia and had a Wall Street type call Ballmer 'the biggest overhang on Microsoft stock'.

Now Redmond is showing off Windows 8. An OS that can scale across phones, tablets and desktops, but, is it going to be enough?

The radical shift in interface is going to piss a lot of people off. Yeah, I know that you'll be able to make it look like Windows 7, but, you'll also find that like they've done in the past,  going to the old interface will involve compromises.

I just wonder if this is the onset of panic. Their phone OS isn't setting the world on fire, in fact the defenders are starting to sound like Apple fanbois did about 10 years ago. The less said about the Kin debacle the better. The Zune wasn't exactly a screaming success.

I don't know something has changed in Redmond. The juggernaut has stumbled.

This kind of reminds me of Lotus 123 V.3 - it was the dog that marked the start of the decline.

For Novell it was WordPerfect Office, UnixWare and DR-DOS.

What's it going to be for Microsoft?

Under attack from all sides they need to smack one out of the park. Linux is chewing into their server market. Apple has bitch slapped them in the tablet and phone market and IBM just leap-frogged them to be the second largest tech company by market cap.

Where will Microsoft be in 10 years from now?

The Most Stable Operating System in the World

(Play the music to the Twilight Zone over and over while you’re reading this)

Imagine if you will an Operating Platform that always does what you expect, never crashes, reacts instantly to your every whim and shows exactly what you want on the screen, impossible you say, not when you enter the Powerpoint Zone.

Okay, enough of the Twilight Zone thing and all jokes aside I’m going to go on record here and say that Powerpoint sucks sweaty equine gonads!

Anyone who’s shocked by that hasn’t sat through as many excruciatingly abysmal Powerpoint presentations as I have over the years. For the more literal minded among you this can be equally applied to any other presentation tool.

A few years ago I watched a Powerpoint presentation introducing a new product from Microsoft, that was “due for delivery so soon that you’d be crazy implementing something else since it’ll own the market”.

Well, the product never showed up...ever even though the demogod doing the presentation said the product was “so good its not user friendly, its user seductive”...

Not a word of a lie he called a software product “user seductive” which brings up a whole lot of unwanted mental images about what this guy did in the privacy of his own home with empty software boxes. If the product was so ’seductive’ how come it never hit the market? I’d say because the best operating platform for this product was Powerpoint.

Now lots of people have written lots of stuff about Powerpoint both good and bad so I may end up repeating some of it here, but, I’m also going to go over some stuff that you may not have heard before.

They key thing to get out of the way up front is that 99% of the population do not know how to use Powerpoint. At all. Ever. In any way.

The strength and corresponding failure of Powerpoint is that it is very easy to use. In fact its so easy to use that after a couple of microseconds you can put together a presentation - what Powerpoint is spectacularly bad at doing is helping you to put together a good presentation.

A good presentation is about storytelling and entertainment and the speaker engaging with the audience, not with the speaker reading what’s on the screen. Most presenters are not natural storytellers and there are a very few that are so astonishingly bad that their presentations are like overdosing on sleeping pills. Time slows down, seconds become hours, your attention is drawn to a slowly melting ice cube because its more interesting than the talentless drone with the captive audience.

Have you ever noticed how your bladder starts to work overtime during bad presentations?

I remember one of my friends in the industry saying that he’d sat through the worst presentation of his life at IDG’s 2009 CIO Forum in Sydney, to the point where he told me he wrote on his response form “Please God, don’t ever let this man present to anyone ever again and warn me if he’s going to present at any other event that I’m going to so that I can stab myself in the eyeball with a blunt pencil to have a more enjoyable experience.” 

Now I worked with one CEO who proudly said “I’m so good at using Powerpoint that I can bang out a presentation in about an hour”. His presentations were amongst the worst I’d ever seen, he couldn’t communicate his message to save his life.

One of the best presenters I’ve ever met gave me this little gem of information, “Run your presentation silently, if someone who hasn’t seen it can get all the details and facts without a word being uttered you’ve just written a document and your presentation will suck.”

Now you might ask what the hell has this got to do with getting to a 1% Spend? Its simple, presentations represent the best ways to get your message “out there” to the rest of the business. A good presentation will help you get your message out. A bad presentation will just hurt you. In your favour is the fact that most presentations are so bad and you’re competing against such a low base that just a few small improvements will make you look like a master communicator.

Your other advantage is the self-delusional belief that most people have in their presentation skills and their unparalleled ability to use Powerpoint.

The fact that you’ve gotten this far and haven’t been offended to the point of stopping means that you figure there may be something to learn here.

Just remember 99% of the presentations you’ve seen are living, breathing examples of how not to do presentations. Watch all the bad presentations you can and learn from them, watch a couple of Steve Jobs’ Apple Keynotes to see how to give good presentation.

There’s a few more blog entries about presentations soon, going into a lot more detail and pointing out some good resources for you as well.

Retreat to the Future!

Welcome to the cloud.

I’ve just gone back to the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s...and no its not a bad acid flashback!

Recently I had a chance to sit down with a potential customer who wanted to drive down their technology costs by “moving our applications into the cloud, consolidate our server farm onto a smaller number of virtualised servers that we’re going to co-locate in an off-site data centre where we’ve rented rack space”.

I nodded at him when he asked “Have you done any of this sort of thing before”?

I smiled and said “Yep. The first time I did this was about 25 years ago.”

I got a smug response saying “No one was doing this 25 years ago, in fact no one was doing this 10 years ago. This is cutting edge technology.”

This is the point that I know that I’m dealing with someone from the shallow end of the gene pool who’s “drunk the kool-aid”.

Let’s get one thing straight here and now - this is 60’s technology that’s been dressed up to appeal to the new techno-hip who think everything with any technological cachet has a lower case “i” in front of its name.

Just like a filler on Rocky and Bullwinkle lets saddle up with Sherman, Mr. Peabody and the Wayback machine and travel back to the swingin’ 60’s to have a look at this wonderfully new invention called the “cloud”.

Here we are in Armonk New York around 1964 when some charcoal suited IBM guy signs off on CP-40 which evolves into IBM’s VM in 1972 and is with us to this very day as zVM and rips along on IBM mainframes delivering virtual machines up the wazoo to all and sundry for the past 38 years.

Suddenly its cost effective for companies to buy a mainframe and lease VM’s to customers on a machine that’s hosted in their data centre (usually housed in some nondescript building in an industrial park) and the terminals in the customer office all connect back to a box called a “cluster controller” that then connects back to the mainframe via a line leased from your telco.

In current techno speak we’ve got blade servers in a high availability virtualised configuration co-located in a data centre with high speed tails into the telco cloud connected to a router which connects to the machines downstream from it in the enterprise.

In essence these two solutions split by nearly 40 years of technological advancements are the same.

Now let me prognosticate about what will happen in a few years.

As the business matures and costs drop, margins shrink and the guys in the business of delivering “cloud-based, virtual machine environments in co-lo data centres” will begin to let their service levels drop to protect their margin and EBIT. Then some genius in a university somewhere will come up with some ground breaking idea on how to better share computing resources “in-house” and suddenly the “cloud” will become disappearing wisps of water vapour. Everything will come back into the local premises and some marketing genius will come up with a new term for it (in the late 80’s it was a LAN) and a whole new generation of attention span challenged techno-literati will again “drink the kool-aid” and the roller coaster will go off onto its next trip around until someone comes up with a new version of the cloud...

This isn’t new or ground breaking as marketers and the press would like you to believe. Its a slow evolution of established centralised computing technology that’s driven by valid economic reasons that will lead to another evolutionary change in distributed computing that will change the way corporate computing is run taking it back to being locally hosted and run.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

It’s true what they say about history and being doomed to repeat it...

Another Bad Presentation

Last week I was at a Telstra function.

One of the speakers was from Cisco and it was a really, really, really bad presentation. Half an hour of rambling with no point, no start, no middle and no end.

I walked out of the session wondering if anyone at Cisco actually sat through the presentation before they let this guy loose on an unsuspecting public. The presentation was delivered by the guy who claimed he was going to drive Cisco's push into the SMB market with reasonably priced, high performance equipment, blah, blah, blah...

I mean even the Microsoft presentation, long and wordy as it was held my interest far more than this Cisco thing did, it had a focus. The Cisco thing, didn't, it had no focus and I didn't know what was being pitched. It was a bad presentation and there was no other way to look at it.

There was no story to compel me to listen. There was no "here's the problem and now let me show you how we're going to solve it for you".

It was just a bland recitation of fact.

I left the session with no new information and no new insights other than feeling like I'd wasted half an hour.

In reality I blame Telstra for this. Where were their guys checking on the quality of the presentation before having it inflicted on the invited customers?

This is no way to drum up new business.