The Skynet is falling The Skynet is falling!

How many times have we heard this? Y2K Armageddon, XP end of life, Criptolocker, and now 2003 end of life. Just because we haven’t had a major crash, does that mean we should just keep drunkenly driving down the pothole filled road?

The Internet is falling!

There were all kinds of wild speculations about what “Could” happen do to the Y2K issue. Everything from toasters not working to nuclear meltdown, and what did happen? Wikipedia tells us the following:

·        In Sheffield, United Kingdom, incorrect Down syndrome test results were sent to 154 pregnant women and two abortions were carried out as a direct result of a Y2K bug. Four babies with               Down syndrome were also born to mothers who had been told they were in the low-risk group.
·        In Ishikawa, Japan, radiation-monitoring equipment failed at midnight; however, officials stated there was no risk to the public.
·        In Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight.
·        In Japan, at two minutes past midnight, Osaka Media Port, a telecommunications carrier, found errors in the date management part of the company's network. The problem was fixed by 02:43           and no services were disrupted.
·        In Japan, NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT DoCoMo), Japan's largest cellular operator, reported on 1 January 2000, that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new         messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up.
·        In Australia, bus-ticket-validation machines in two states failed to operate.
·        In the United States, 150 slot machines at race tracks in Delaware stopped working.
·        In the United States, the U.S. Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country's official time, gave the date on its website as 1 Jan 19100.
·        In France, the national weather forecasting service, Meteo France, said a Y2K bug made the date on a webpage show a map with Saturday's weather forecast as "01/01/19100". This also occurred on other websites, including att.net, at the time a general-purpose portal site primarily for AT&T Worldnet customers in the United States.

Now whether there were fewer problems due the millions of dollars spent to make the required changes or the problems wouldn’t have been much worse will never be known. We can make an educated guess that adding all of those “00” to countless databases had some positive impact. I’ve never been sorry when I’ve been proactive.

The United States Navy still uses Microsoft’s Windows XP, they were not proactive. The decision to use the obsolete operating system costs the Navy $9 million every year and the total bill could be nearly 30 million dollars. For procrastinating. New figures from migration specialist Camwood show that 11 million machines are still running Windows Server 2003. As I write this there are 4 days until end of life of server 2003. Why are these 11 million machines not updated? Is it the cost of the software? The manpower cost to install and migrate? Apathy?

How many of your clients are still running server 2003? Are you pushing them hard to upgrade? Are you going to purchase extended support at $600 a server? (about the cost of 2012 R2) Are you having them sign documents releasing you from responsibility if they get hacked or infected? Are you adding additional measures to stop potential infections? Making additional backup and business continuity plans?

Just because the sky hasn’t fallen in the past is no excuse not to look up to make sure it isn’t going to hit you this time. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Unified Communication

There were a couple of communication related stories today. Hotmail got a reboot, and looks very clean. It is now called Outlook.com and I logged in for the first time in 7+years. Yahoo email and messenger had some outages today, welcome Marissa Mayer. Twitter reinstated Guy Adams Twitter account. What do these three stories have in common? They show us what is good, bad, and ugly in communications.

Hotmail is now Outlook.com

First Outlook.com. Hotmail may have been my 2^nd or third email service and if I recall correctly I created it to log into Microsoft support sites… It was a mess. Typical email client where no thought was given to how the interface would be used by people. I remember how excited I was to get my early invite to Gmail and how clean the page looked. How…usable it was. Now, so is Hotmail umm, ah, Outlook.com. This is the good. Taking something less usable and making it better.

Yahoo Email and Messenger

The bad. Yahoo. One of my friends posted today he didn’t know which was worse, not getting email from Yahoo, or admitting you still use Yahoo for email. It is showing the problem of the company as a whole. Something that doesn’t work that well, even if you wanted to you it. They have a lot of work to do to raise themselves to the level of a bad provider.

Twitter Killing themselves

The ugly. Twitter has again shown ways it can’t be trusted. Due to its business relationship with NBC, tweets were being monitored and when a Twitter user included an email of an NBC executive, the Twitter staff alerted NBC and suggested they file a complaint, which they did, causing the Twitter users account to be suspended. The problem? The email address is on NBC’s website, it is public. Another problem? Monitoring tweets for content. Enough of an issue was raised that Twitter reinstated the account and apologized, but not for why or how they disabled the account. They continue to state the post was a violation. This will be great the next time people start tweeting about the next uprising in the Middle East and Twitter shuts them down for the content of their tweets. Ugly.

We all learn every day and especially in the always on global social media pool. But whatever your platform, it has to be on, it has to be usable, and it has to be open or you might as well open a telegraph office.

Samuel Morse Telegraph

Commoditization Commode

What makes you or your company unique? What services or products do you provide that are really different? Have you added products and services just because the other guy has them? What makes you stand out from the herd?

I have noticed a trend in the IT Services/Managed Services space that I find disturbing. Not disturbing like childhood obesity, disturbing like we are making it harder for the consumer to tell us apart. It is a bad case of the me toos… You do that? Me too! You sell that? Me too! You have a widget? Me too!

http://www.zazzle.com/i_hate_thinking_me_too_postcard-239189165718421518

I understand that imitation is the highest form of flattery and if something is working for one vendor in the industry, it should work for another, however... If you are adding a marketing plan, Facebook page, Google+ page, Pinterest, training, or anything else because the other guy is doing it, you need to stop, take a breath, and make a good business decision for your own business.

Maybe following the herd leaders isn’t the right thing to do, and maybe is. They may have discovered the tried and proven path to market. If so, still try and be unique. Do not become a commodity. When you buy milk, do you always buy the same brand? 2%, organic, in a paper carton, but whose? I don’t generally care, and that is their fault for not making me care, or telling me why their milk is better and worth the extra 45 cents a gallon.

So what is the real issue here? Money. It is easy to extract higher profit from a client when you wrap products and services together is an easy to pay subscription model. Unless, brand X seems just like yours and it is 15% less… Once you are perceived as a commodity you will be shopped.

This is the huge trend in IT Services and the rush of products moving into the cloud only makes it easier. Bad news, all the major players are spending millions marketing their solution to your clients via mass media. Your solution is being compared to what they think Microsoft, Cisco, Apple and Google can offer them, how are you different? Better? You better have an answer when your prospects ask you.

Don’t allow you and your company to be flushed with the other companies acting like commodities out there. Know your clients, know your products, know your services, know your costs, and know your uniqueness.

Windows 8 Buzz

Buzz or buzzen’t or ah doesn’t? I love being a geek and maybe I’m a little post geek now as my job doesn’t require I be hands on months before anything get released, but what is Microsoft doing with Windows 8?

I think what they are doing is brilliant. We all know computing is changing. Most of us use a laptop and a tablet and a phone. Most of us use devices with different operating systems, no common applications or functions. Windows 8 seems to be the Operating System that can bridge all of those devices. Now do I feel it is perfect for all of them? No, I don’t. But it is early. Who remembers Windows 3.1 or the first version of Office?

Concept first. Perfect later. I like that process. Good often works for 80-90 percent of people. If I had a common platform for every device that was 90% of what I wanted, I would be so sold. Right now the vendors, Apple and Google have 2/3rds of it down. Apple with iOS on the iPhone and iPad. Google, kind of with Android, but all the flavors makes it had to be cohesive. Both of these have forgotten the desktop, and I know Apple has OS X and Google has a netbook, but this is not the same.

Microsoft is the first to be on all three platforms in a real way and I expect this to be the trend. Will they win? Not sure, but they are damn sure leading the way...

New Year New Post

This is my first post of the new year, even though it is the 4th day of the month. What does that mean? I’ve been damn busy. Most of you know I took a new position at the end of 2011, let me tell you a little more about that and how it fits my predictions for 2012.

2011 worked out the way I saw it, more cannibalization, more competition, more mergers, less profit. None of those issues were caused by the big guys. Microsoft didn’t screw the MSP with 365, Google didn’t put you out of business with a Chromebook, Dell didn’t sell to all your customers. The MSPs need to look in the mirror to see the problem. Too much setting prices without knowing costs.

So my predictions for 2012? Some of these trends will continue, especially in Mergers and acquisitions. Small guys want to get big, big guys want to get bigger, customer wants it cheaper. Security will go to the front of the new trends, especially in the mobility segment. MDM will get pushed hard by vendors, and not add as much true network security as we need.

So why am I so busy? The position I took with Bradford Networks is growing our partner base in the MSP and SMB space for our Bradford.cloud SaaS NAC offering. The interest has been more than we can keep up with, and we are not even out in the channel yet.

The ability to help partners add and deliver enterprise grade NAC to their clients put Bradford on the leading edge of the mobility security concerns. These are concerns that current solutions cannot meet.

So feel free to contact me if you believe you need to add NAC security to your offerings, and add to my workload.

Allison Hasn't Stopped...

When should you ever stop? That is a little open ended, so when should you stop growing your career and skills? OK, sounds stupid, everyone one say it together, NEVER! But for real, when is enough, enough?

I started thinking about this when I saw that Microsoft CVP Allison Watson was starting to Blog again. My first thought was cool, she will have great information. My second thought was, WTH! why would she need to write a blog? She is a VP at Microsoft. I have had the honor of watching her speak from the main stage at a Worldwide Partner Conference, what more does she want? Then it hit me, the word is need.

Why do I write my blog? I needed to. I had things to say and blogging let me do that. I haven’t spoken to Allison, but my guess is, she needs to blog as well. When it is all said and done, we keep getting better and taking on more work to challenge ourselves and to grow as people. While I don’t consider my blog work, it is a challenge to write 5-6 a week.

So while I might not reach CVP at Microsoft, I’ll keep climbing and growing, and of course blogging, because I need to.