Dividends or Taxes?

Talking with a friend (Travis Cross, OfficeTone,) about technology adoption by small businesses and I ask:

What happened to the Technology Progress Dividend?

My answer:

It became a Complexity Tax.

No doubt: small businesses spend more money dealing with technology than they earn from adopting new technology. Think: password mahem, upgrades that go wrong, incompatible versions, security threats and training that never seems to be enough to improve productivity or enhancing skills.

Just a thought.

Solving the Candle Problem - Daniel Pink

Love this Daniel Pink presentation on what really motivates people to solve complicated problems. This is especially relevant to entrepreneurs working with knowledge workers in technology start-ups.

Like finding a place to pee

I love my toy poodle Flower. But I have found little consistency in her choice of places to pee. It is not completely random; she generally goes on the grass. She knows where she is going before I do.

After working on Windows servers for the past few weeks, it occurs to me that Microsoft's flagship server product for small businesses is like my poodle. You can lead it around, but it decides what to do for reasons that are neither consistent nor understandable.

I think Flower is much more lovable.

Further along the path to despair

News comes from the Krebs on Security Blog that hundreds of PCs on the network operated by the City of Norfolk have been rendered useless by a 'Time Bomb' distributed to them by malware that infected a print server. Clever. Nobody worries about a print server, cares about its antivirus subscription or manages its updates. Who knew it could be the vector for such scurrilous attacks.

The shadow knew!

Change for change's sake

Will consumers ever be left with software products that they simply use, understand and become productive with? Or will they constantly be upgraded, service-packed, hot-fixed and release-creeped until they are so frustrated they abandon computers altogether?

Have you grown weary of Adobe updates? Windows updates? Java updates? Is the counter to the right of the version number of whatever software you are using spinning like the odometer on a rental car you're paying for by the mile? Can't they just get this stuff right when they release it?

I'm suffering from IT Fatigue. I believe we've stopped producing software products and have just put software seeds on systems that constantly grow into weeds that smother productivity with empty promises of new features, better security and improved performance.

But to wish they would stop is naive. Not only are connected computers vulnerable to changing threats, but software businesses want to monetize their install base. You are an all-day sucker constantly generating the sweet liquor of recurring revenue. Those publishers know you are an easy mark for 'New and Improved' even if leaving well enough alone is better for you.

And don't get me started on app-jealousy! When subsequently installed applications hijack settings that make them your new-best-friend! Like when my wife installed Adobe Elements to get her new scanner to work and it 'adopted' her SD Media Card - effectively replacing Picasa - and upsetting her expectation and dependence. Old behaviors that she had become accustomed to and which made her computer understandable and predictable were replaced with confusion and frustration.

Where do I get off this merry-go-round?

Google for Non-Profits

I don't think enough people know about Google's dedicated portal for the free Non-Profit applications and services they offer.

We serve lots and lots of non-profits that should consider this option to traditional software, license fees and support options. It may not be for everyone, but how can you lose by giving it a try?

It's not a Virus - It's Malware!

Our customers have been tormented by rogue fraudware more than ever lately. Despite antivirus programs, operating system patches and attention paid to avoiding 'bad' websites.

I was interviewed by Channel 13 last week on the subject. What can you say in 15 seconds? So I wrote a brief article about Malware for a CEO Networking organization and posted it here. Hopefully you'll find it interesting and helpful.

Kim

The Complexity Tax

The growing complexity of our lives - a byproduct of engineered flexibility and abstraction of utility - operates like a tax whittling away at the value of a given object. Like this blog post, for instance.

Another Rotary Invocation

This Rotary Invocation was inspired by Ken Burns' The National Parks: America's Best Idea, in particular the scenic beauty it portrays of America's Southwest. It made me wonder about how inspired Native Americans must have been to live amongst such majesty. So I Googled for American Indian Religion and found this prayer:

Oh, Great Spirit

Whose voice I hear in the winds,

And whose breath gives life to all the world,

hear me, I am small and weak,

I need your strength and wisdom.

Let me walk in beauty and make my eyes ever behold

the red and purple sunset.

Make my hands respect the things you have

made and my ears sharp to hear your voice.

Make me wise so that I may understand the things

you have taught my people.

Let me learn the lessons you have

hidden in every leaf and rock.

I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother,

but to fight my greatest enemy - myself.

Make me always ready to come to you

with clean hands and straight eyes.

So when life fades, as the fading sunset,

my Spirit may come to you without shame.

Translated by Lakota Sioux Chief Yellow Lark in 1887

published in Native American Prayers - by the Episcopal Church.

Like Whitewater Rafting

The IT business today is like whitewater rafting. It is terrifying and exciting and the reality is we don't really know where we're going except wherever the river takes us; too fast and very scary.

It makes me crazy that our customers have PC problems like viruses, hackers, failed hardware, Windows calamities and Microsoft maladies like operating system 'upgrades' that few people need and nobody wants!

Like riding the torrent, we can't just choose to get off. We are being swept along and out of control.

1300 Setting in IE8 - not enough!

Our customers often feel abused and tormented by technology...it's just another rock in their backpack. So it was not surprising that I discovered today that Microsoft has built in over 1300 options in Internet Explorer.

In their own words:

There are approximately 1300 Group Policies for managing Windows® Internet Explorer® 8. Configuring these for the first time may seem like a daunting task.

How could a browser have 1300 options? OMG! What design purpose could be served by such complexity? Does the user want these options?

I spent over an hour finding and adjusting one of these 1300 options to allow QuickBooks to run for a customer logging into a session on a Windows 2008 Terminal Server. The default settings for Internet Zone security properties wouldn't allow QuickBooks to operate. OMG! Why does a bookkeeping program care about Internet properties? Can't I just use it to write checks and print bills? Obviously not in today's connected world.

Wake me up when the Windows 2008 nightmare is over. Can we just have DOS back?

Like practicing law in a corrupt country

We [maybe, nearly] finished the upgrade of a Windows Server 2003 Small Business Edition to Microsoft's latest, flagship product for small businesses: Windows Server 2008 Small Business Edition. This product is one of four Microsoft server versions to choose from. They are masters of monopoly marketing. Why look for an alternative if Microsoft offers everything you need?

This server will be used in a law firm with 12 employees. They have a dedicated web server, a dedicated VOIP system server and a dedicated Terminal Server. A Gen-X'er would say their technology was majorly tricked out.

But as a consultant I come away from the four day, 32 hr install-fest (that doesn't include the 8 hours of preparation,) feeling like a lawyer who practices in a corrupt country. The deck is stacked, the outcome dependent on the 'fix' that can only come from Microsoft. Your skills are irrelevant, your ambitions frustrated. If you're having trouble getting the system to work it must be because you are incompetent!

Windows 2008 is Vista on steroids. It is configured out of the box less like a Ferrari than a Fisher Price Pull Toy: you can drag it around your network but without serious Googling, support from friends and forums, and expensive phone calls to Microsoft, it doesn't do anything. Microsoft has recoiled into defensive server configuration mode that their server doesn't do anything without disabling, undoing and overriding 'features' designed to protect you from yourself.

If this experience is typical of hundreds of thousands of small businesses that are going to be prodded to upgrade from Server 2003 soon, we will all be able to share the young lawyer's experience in a dictatorship defending the rights of his client against the power of the state and a corrupt judiciary.

Finally, the Million Dollar Madness is [almost] over

The NY Times reported today that In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History. This couldn't happen to a more anachronistic habit of public education.

If we can save hundreds of millions of dollars on outdated, proprietary and increasingly irrelevant implements of education maybe we can start to spend more where it counts: inspiring teachers, personalized education plans and creating curiosity!

I hope Indiana catches on.

Progress?

My FileEngine product was the outgrowth of my frustration with increased functionality being peddled as improvement. We deal with lots of attorneys who still use Word Perfect. Truth be told, they'd probably still be using Version 5.1 or 6.0 if they could find systems that ran DOS!

Well, a recent post by Steve Lohr in the NY Times: Tech Payoff for Companies Remains Elusive, Study Finds, sums it up nicely. The 'more is more' philosophy just isn't paying off. We knew that - now we have proof.

Steve did an article titled: Tracking the World’s Appetite for Innovation in January 2008 that anticipated the conclusions of this study. We just don't want anymore. We have enough. Go away.

Now it would be easy to accuse me of being a Luddite, and I'm not so sure I'd be offended. I'd defend some advances in consumer technology...it's nice to carry books & music with you on an iPod or Kindle. And improved TV resolution is appreciated. But 200+ channels of crap in HD isn't progress. But how is it the government's responsibility to assure anybody with rabbit ears on their TVs can get a digital converter? Did they subsidize their upgrade to a DVD player from VHS when Blockbuster stopped carrying 'tapes'?

The real suffering is being felt by businesses who need to withstand a torrent of SPAM (or pay to have it filtered,) constantly worry about Internet borne threats and attacks that sneak into their network (and pay big bucks to innoculate systems or have them de-loused,) and worse: struggle with employees that consider broadband at the office just another entertainment option.

Another odd Rotary Invocation

My Rotary Club assigns the job of presenting invocations to volunteers like most clubs.  Our club is larger than most and with a diverse membership representing many faiths.  So when the duty came to me I wanted to do something different that the 'stock' Christian invocation we hear nearly every week.

My first invocation was based on a Masonic theme.   My most recent was on Karma.  Another was on Stoicism.  

A recent blog posting by Tim Ferriss titled: On The Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca really resonated with me.  I had read quite a lot about Stoicism but didn't know nearly as much about it as I did after I had read his post.  This is a 'must read' for anyone convinced that we are living in unique times, with unprecedented challenges and confronted by post-modern issues of meaning and relevance.  Get over it!  It's all been done before, thought before and reasoned before.  Our best course is to take advantage of this great work and benefit from it.

With humility, I present the invocation I delivered at the Indianapolis Rotary Club on January 29, 2008.

"In the third century BC a philosophical movement known as Stoicism was conceived in Greece by a philosopher named Zeno.  His teachings ultimately gained popularity thoughout Imperial Rome.  Much of what we know about Stoics today we have learned from the diary of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.  

In those days, religion wasn't helpful to mark the path to a desirable "good flow of life".  Philosophers literally gave such lessons on porches - the Greek name for which is stoa - thus the first teachers became Stoics.

Stoics believe that all that is necessary to have a happy life is to 'live in agreement with nature'  This included practicing prudence, wisdom, justice, courage and moderation.  These are purely internal prescriptions.  Virtue is the sole good.  Humans can exercize their power of choice and decide to be happy.  Stoicism shows them how.  The way may be hard, but the rules are simple.  A person who achieved the pinnacle of Stoic virtue was called a Sage.''

Like our Rotary Four Way Test, a Stoic life emphasized Ethics.  In addition to truth, they believed that to conform our affairs with nature demanded consideration of the concerns of others.  Sounds like 'Fair to all' and 'Beneficial to all concerned' to me.  Over 2000 years before Paul Harris was born, Stoic philosphy anticipated the words 1.2 million Rotarians would use to inspire our thoughts and actions.

Least important to a happy life were external attributes that include wealth, possessions, status - even health.  They called these 'indifferents'.  As if, with the proper internal focus, these common measures of success were unimportant to true happiness.  So should we believe today.

Many of you may not have heard of the Stoics, or of their philosophy.  The agreement of their views with our Rotarian mottos should give us confidence in their timeless relevance.  But most of us *have* heard of this prayer that unmistakably encapsulate Stoic beliefs.  It's called the Serenity Prayer:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.  Amen."

Why my Twitter avatar is Nicola Tesla

Entrepreneur Inspiration

Found this video on Technorati in a story on Blogtrepreneur

I cried.

Perfect doesn't matter

People are busy. Attention spans are short. They don't care nearly as much about whatever you are saying or doing as you think they do or should. Except maybe for your mother.

There are many conclusions that can be drawn from this inference. But the one that makes the most difference is in your effort to delay an introduction of a product or service until it is perfect.

Remember the 80-20 rule? It is a Universal Constant! Most of your customers don't care about 80% of your features. They don't read 80% of your website or user manual. They don't hear 80% of what you say. So don't sweat the details - throw it out there in reasonable form and make an impression!

BUT: sloppy isn't good. Misspellings are symptoms of carelessness or worse: illiteracy. So just keep it simple, brief, functional. As the guys at 37 Signals would say: "We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many promises."

Get it out there. Perfect doesn't matter.

Note to a friend

An old friend (30+ yrs) is an avid bicycle enthusiast. I don't see him as much as I like, but I think of him often.

Randomly browsing the web turns up interesting links. I occasionally share them with friends. This one popped up today. So I sent him a message with a link.

"Could either of us have predicted that 30 yrs after we met we would be able to sit on our porch, type a few commands onto a system with a VDU (color & high res!) running on batteries, with a wireless connection to servers (millions of them!) with content uploaded with all manner of content (including video!) of stuff that was simply interesting (not corporate!) by normal people from all around the planet??"

Poincare's beauty of science

A friend (Woody Hill) recommended a quote by Henri Poincare regarding the beauty of science and the delight of scientists who spend their lives in the pursuit of discovery.

I thought the quote was a bit simple.  Poincare was a polymath, a genius and I'm not.  So my criticism should be treated with some suspicion.

But I thought about science and beauty and all that and decided to try my hand at describing a feeling that we both share.  Here's what I came up with.

"The Scientist, armed only with curiosity and experiments to tease truth from Nature, is driven to make sense of the world for himself as he pushes back the shadow of ignorance on behalf mankind.  With each discovery, he assembles a part of a vast puzzle; the whole of which can never be known to one man, but the significance of which is core to our ambition as a species.  When, by chance, a part is thought to be 'understood', (whether by the scientist alone or an entire culture,) Nature exchanges joy for mystery and at their nexus beauty is born."

How do you think I did?