WhatsUp Gold took the cake - and first place - in CRN's Network Managment Bake-Off this week! In a thorough CRN Test Center investigation, engineeers compared Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold with solutions from Solar Wind and Ad Rem in a dynamic, heterogeneous network environment. CRN also described each vendor's partner programs and the profit potential inherent in each network management solution. WhatsUp won kudos for features, price/performance and ease of use and the reviewer noted that "....WhatsUp Gold edged out LANSurveyor by collecting data without relying on probes..."

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It looks like another slow-moving thought has finally penetrated the big blue shield, sending a small army of blue deck chair arrangers into action. According to the good folks at IDG, "IBM shakes up sales organization to target SMB market"

IBM is realigning its Systems and Technology Group (STG), creating one sales group to sell to large enterprise customers and another to sell to SMBs, business customers with no more than 1,000 employees. It will also better integrate STG with IBM's Global Technology Service (GTS) group and with companies in its Global Business Partners Organization, and design products specifically for the needs of SMBs. ... A new level of sales management will be created within each of 220 geographic sales territories IBM operates globally.

IBM is right on one count - smaller businesses and their VARs shouldn't have to negotiate the complex alphabet soup of IBM's organization to get what they need. But neither should their larger customers. No vendor should make customers jump through such hoops to do business.

What worries me more is this part:

The sales reorganization coincides with the introduction of new products designed to appeal to SMBs, including blade servers, he said. IBM announced June 13 the coming BladeCenter S system that is packaged to include server, storage, input-output connections to a network and software integrated into a single chassis.

Sure, if SMBs need special organization, they must also need special products. That's been Ipswitch's view since day one. But do you really think IBM is going to be able to come up with products that are right for smaller businesses? This blade thingy sounds like a typical giant's misguided attempt to cater to the little guy, replacing a thousand points of contact with a single point of failure. SMB IT folks are sophisticated enough to choose best of breed solutions for each of their critical needs, and IBM should learn that in another 20 years or so.

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This afternoon, I'm off to San Diego to participate in Baptie & Company's Marketing Focus Conference, where I'm going to present on a panel called "How Web 2.0 Will Affect Your Brand Messaging and Communications."

In addition, I'll be facilitating workshops on Blogs, RSS, Podcasts & Wikis (oh my) and Engaging with External Blogs, Communities & Chatrooms. If the analogy holds, I bet the workshops will be even more interesting because - as with web 2.0 - there will be more viewpoints aired.

So I've been soaking in Web 2.0 more than usual lately to prepare. And right into my lap falls this story: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is revealed as the author of hundreds of anonymous posts on Yahoo chat boards boosting Whole Foods and trashing rivals. If that's not enough, it turns out that one of the rivals Mackey dissed is now the target of a Whole Foods acquisition attempt. And if that were not sufficient, Mackey even posted comments on his own personal attractiveness. Wow.

The regulators will decide if Mackey's actions were illegal, and it looks like that might hinge a lot on whether it can be shown that the comments actually moved the share prices of Whole Foods and Wild Oats, the acquisition target. An interesting test case for the impact of virtual communities on the so-called real world.

Illegal or not, this use of anonymity (apparently now called "sock puppetry") seems to me unethical and almost as bad, poor executive time management. If you're going to have a corporate initiative to spike your share price with dirty tricks, you should hire a professional to it, sort of a G. Gordon Liddy 2.0. Seriously, the board and shareholders of Whole Foods should have a hard think about the current strategy of sticking by their CEO's actions.

I'm looking forward to some lively discussion with my fellow marketeers at the Baptie conference. The multiplication and leveling effects of Web 2.0 might be overhyped, but they are changing the game. How do you like them apples?

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Just a couple of days ago, I blogged about Email Bankruptcy, where people just give up responding to email and delete it all to start over. Today, I read that Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey has quit email cold turkey. Here are two comments attributed to the emailless governor in the NYT article:

“We’ll go back to the 1920s, and have direct conversations with people,”

“It’ll slow processes down,” Mr. Corzine acknowledged. “We’ll just have to find another way to do it.”

So why the e-withdrawal? It seems that the governor has gotten fed up with legal and political attempts to disclose some of his email communication under New Jersey's Open Public Records Act.

This is a troubling trend and I bet this isn't the first or the last instance of somebody opting out of communication technology seemingly to avoid leaving a document trail that could be subpoenaed later on.

If I lived in New Jersey, I'd be pretty steamed that the governor was making a communication change that would in his own words slow processes down. And the appearance of proactive coverup wouldn't help my confidence either. Public officials are supposed to serve and are supposed to be accountable to the public, aren't they?

What's next? No more documents? No more taking notes in meetings? Maybe government officials will head off to Tommy's Holiday Camp.

Don't get me wrong. Email is far from perfect as a technology and a communication medium, and the laws around privacy and disclosure don't always make perfect sense. But Corzine's opting out of email makes about as much sense as his opting out of seatbelts did. I just hope it doesn't hurt the citizens of New Jersey as much as that awful accident hurt the governor.

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I've discovered an amazing high-resolution display technology. It requires no power to run, is almost unbreakable, has nearly infinite resolution, and has an amazing contrast ratio. I'm not talking about eink or MIT's HoloVideo, I'm talking about cork. Yes, cork. The humble wood product that keeps your wine fresh and stops you hurting yourself with your fork.

You see, in the agile development process, (see also here and here) we use a big corkboard wall to hold dozens or even a couple hundred index cards (another underappreciated technology - high powered execs can't live without theirs) that track the progress of tasks and features during the sprint cycle.

I've been pondering this lately because I heard that one of our engineers was going to write an application of some sort that would keep the sprint board contents in a database and do away with the need for the wall of cork. Seemed like a good idea, right? After all, there's no backup of the cork wall, and one clumsy passer-by could seriously mess up the team. And what if you're away from the office and need to refer to the wall? So the electronic sprint board is a noble goal, I agree. BUT, there are some tricks that toady's PC monitors still can't do.

It's just a matter of scale and resolution. Even a nice 1600x1200 monitor - let's say two of them - holds the amount of visual information of only 40 index cards. (3.5x5 card at 75 dpi = 98,438 pixels; two, 1600x1200 monitors = 3,840,000 pixels = 39.009 index cards to be precise) And that's crammed in right up against eachother.

On a wall-sized board, we can put all those cards in order, in a spatial relationship to one another that conveys information. We can look at the whole board and get a sense of where things are going or get up close to a part of it and read what's on each card. No even the iPhone can do that, I don't think.

So at leats for now, it doesn't look like electronic display technology, at least not the affordable kind, is up to the task of displaying a lot of complex information all at once. Maybe we'll figure out a clever way to stack the info on today's monitors, or maybe we'll keep sticking pins in walls. Me, I'm not ready to sell all my stock in Staples yet.

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Years ago, I had an appointment at IBM's Mother Ship HQ (designed by I.M. Pei, naturally) in Armonk, NY. While I waited in the glassy lobby, I took in a minor museum of mainframes and to my surprise, came face to face with Deep Blue, IBM's massive chess-playing computer. On display. Retired and unplugged. Looking rather sad, I thought. You'd think they could keep it plugged in and let visitors dash themselves against its power while they waited for a similar experience meeting with IBM brass.

Continue reading "A deeper shade of blue"

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Does this look like nirvana to you or does it strike fear into your heart?

To some people, a clean inbox is the ideal end of day situation, while to others, it means that nobody loves them. Some people achieve the empty inbox with a ruthless regime of dutiful responding and remoreseless deleting. And some achieve it more simply, through the practice known as Email Bankruptcy, invented or possibly discovered by Lawrence Lessig about two years ago. Simply put, this means deleting all your email and telling everybody that you did so and starting over. See also The Washington Post on the topic this Spring.

Continue reading "Tempted by the Fruit of Email Bankruptcy"

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As you may have heard, PowerPoint turned 20 recently. Love it or loathe it, it's part of business, no question. Maybe exiting it's teenage years, old PPT will mellow out and start being civil to its parents again.

In the mean time, just back from about 30,000 miles of travel and hours of presentation, I'll take a moment to recognize my favorite PowerPoint accessory, the wireless presentation remote. Nothing makes a droning presentation drone worse than being tied to the laptop or podium and not moving. A wireless remote lets you engage the audience more naturally and makes it less likely you'll fall victim to deep vein thrombosis while presenting.

My weapon of choice is the Mobile Edge Slim Line Wireless Presentation Remote, pictured here just about life size. It's small (stores in your laptop's PC card slot!), it's simple (only six buttons), it works anywhere, anytime (with a usb thingie built in), and it has a "laser!" What more could you want? You don't need full multimedia control, you just need to be able to advance the slides and make your point easily. And don't forget the power of the period key, which blanks the PPT screen so you can have a heart-to-heart with the audience without the distraction of the slides.

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