A (mostly) local example of permission-based marketing

I'm fairly certain that Wally von Klopp of Pine Cheese Mart (a.k.a. Von Klopp Brew Shop) is not related to Seth Godin, the Elvis (minus the rhinestone jumpsuits, naturally) of Permission-based Marketing. But they do have certain important things in common. They're both dry-witted, gracious to the point of courtly, insanely knowledgeable about their business, and they both make their gelt selling things to people who don't feel in the least bit hustled when the transaction's done. Whether the transaction is in person, over the phone or via email is completely irrelevant.

So it's more than a bit ironic that the email Wally sent to my husband about this year's California Grape Crush languished in the spam trap until almost too late to RSVP. Why? Because neither of us would give a retail outfit anything but a Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail type email address. But over the years, the place we stopped for an ice cream cone en route to somewhere other than Pine Island became the go-to place for home winemaking supplies. It's been very gratifying to see Wally open a second location at the north end of Rochester. The second shop represents years of being a consultant rather than a shopkeeper, and I respect the living daylights out of that.

Niche retail outside of a metropolis is hardly the short road to riches--and I heartily doubt that the road is much shortened by setting up shop in a metropolis. Making a living for yourself and others working in a field you enjoy, however, eliminates much of the pressure to be all things to all people, to forever chase every newest new thing. Maybe some people would rather take the shortcuts and retire to their yacht and beach house as soon as possible. That's their preference. Me, I'd rather do business with someone I can both look up to and learn from.

No post Sunday or Monday

Company's due in on Sunday, and of course Monday is Labor Day. Have an excellent rest-of-the-weekend, all, and thanks for reading.

A requiem of sorts

I won't mention any names, partly out of respect for (work)days gone by, and partly because I didn't have the guts to dig for proof positive of my superficial impressions and cynical assumptions.

The back-story is that I needed to look up contact info. for a former employer this week--the one that offered me my first "real" I/T job, in fact. On the day of my interviews, I'd managed to lock my car in my garage, and ended up having to put a brick through the garage door window to make it there on time. It was worth it and then some: They were good to work for, even for a place that rented bodies during the dot-com boom. I jumped ship mainly because I knew that my options with the client would be either being laid off or doing the work of multiple people for a single worker's paycheck.

I'd kept in and out of touch with a few folks from those days ever since moving to La Crosse, but somehow gossip about the company itself never reached my little twig on the grapevine. Dispelling that ignorance was a depressing experience. For tasters, my branch office has ceased to exist. And when I called the corporate HQ number listed on the website, I wasn't even shunted into the usual touch-tone labyrinth: A somewhat British-sounding female voice instructed me to leave the usual name, number and brief message. That was yesterday early afternoon. I didn't hear anything for the rest of the day. Nor to I expect to hear anything, ever, if that's how the world--client, staff, media, etc. is greeted.

In one sense, I shouldn't be surprised. The business model of renting technically-trained brains to clients has been deeply affected to the proverbial race to the bottom. The bean-counters of the corporate world still fool themselves (actively abetted by the likes of WiPro, InfoSys, and any number of "American" firms like IBM) that they can buy Tiffany's quality/service at Wal-Mart prices. But I wonder at the wisdom of following the crowd into outsourcing--meaning bringing development work into company facilities rather than place people on the client site--while trying to maintain the illusion of higher-level services as the differentiator.

This next isn't my idea, actually. A blogger whose identity I cannot recall suggested years ago that Sun Microsystems might have served its shareholders better by simply liquidating while the company had deep cash reserves, and giving the shareholders their money to spend on other things. That didn't happen, of course. But given how there will be less carcass for Oracle to pick each day before it takes the keys, the idea seems tragically prescient. The case with my previous employer was slightly different. Although they were conservatively managed (i.e. no debt), they didn't have the treasure chest of patents that Sun could boast. Liquidating what we jokingly called "a body shop" would have yielded considerably less cash for the stakeholders.

For all that, I'm not convinced that it wouldn't have been the worst thing that could have happened--assuming, of course that it was done professionally and (for the soon-to-be-unemployed staff) humanely. The shell lives on; the "cut above" ethos that gave the company its soul is quite obviously gone. Perhaps someday I'll have to decide whether surviving into the next quarter, fiscal year, etc. trumps losing all or part of the company culture and standards. I honestly don't know how I'll react. But I do know that I won't consider a "business plan" complete without the corporate equivalent of a living will.

Frivolous Friday, 09.04.2009: Why do we root for the bad guy?

The latest DVD in our NetFlix queue, "The Good Thief," has been languishing for a bit, so it was time to give it its turn and send it back.  I'm not a huge Nick Nolte fan, although I give him big kudos for not getting by on his looks--or his voice, for that matter.  (If it hadn't been for the strong performances by Nolte/Sacchi/Paltrow in "Jefferson in Paris," I would have been throwing things at the screen for its dreckish screenplay and even more wretched grasp of history.)

Now, I never saw the original (French) version that "The Good Thief" covers; I'm only speaking to the relationship between money--as in great wads of cash--and morality that intertwine as confusingly (yet as prettily) as Celtic knot-work in the plot and subtext.  

Apparently, it's "okay" to rob a casino because, hey, we all know that the odds are always stacked in favor of the house.  And it's also "okay" to steal art from the Japanese who bought it (at inflated prices) because they're "cheating" by hoarding it in a private vault and flaunting impeccable fakes on the casino walls.  Mostly, though, I think we're more or less set up to root for Bob because he's tilting at the windmill that is the soul-less underbelly of a money-obsessed culture (in this case the Riviera).  I think, though, it's the honor among thieves is what suckers us in.  The underage junkie-prostitute Anne understands Bob well enough to say, "He doesn't want money; he wants what money can't buy." 

Hopefully, there's at least a little of that in all of us.  

Last post from Firefox?

Well, I might be crossing over to the Dark Side. Or perhaps, back to the Dark Side. Still staying with Linux, you understand, because the ability to watch Windows viruses bounce off the Teflon of UNIX--jeering all the while--is just waaaaay too much fun. Since I pretty much have to maintain a Windows computer for cross-platform testing anyway, it's just as easy to throw iTunes there for the weekly podcast synchronization.

But I have to say that I'm rather impressed with Opera 10's ability to play well with both the open- and close-source teams. Normally, I prefer to install software from the Ubuntu command-line because it's so much cleaner than downloading packages and running the included installer. Unfortunately, in this case, the "help" on the Ubuntu site was completely worthless. But, because I actually trust Opera's programmers to be competent, I rolled the bones with the download. Guess what? It hooked straight into the installer and I was up and running in minutes.

Opera was my browser of choice for several years: Even then, when you had to pay for a banner-ad-free version, it was totally worth it. Heck, Opera offered tabbed browsing in 2000, if not before. (I remember Internet Explorer 6 coming out and being absolutely gob-smacked flabbergasted that they still hadn't gotten the memo about tabs--like people were somehow grateful to chew up the taskbar with a multiplicity of IE tabs for the privilege of looking at more than one web page at a time.) Then, too, there was a certain contrarian satisfaction to walking The Third Way when the entire Web seemed to be living in a Cold War mindset dominated by the Netscape and IE superpowers. (Seriously, you'd visit a website that was doing all the browser detection b/c IE JavaScript and Netscape JavaScript were like apples-and-kumquats, and some websites would kind of freak out. It'd be like walking into the middle of a rumble between "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" partisans wearing a "Firefly" t-shirt...)

But here's what's sealed the deal for me. Several minutes ago, I tried tracking a package on FedEx's website. Firefox's Flash plug-in freaked out, so I had to use an alternate FedEx page. So, for giggles, I checked it out in Opera. Not a problem. Near-giddy with that outcome, I bopped over to java.sun.com to check out applets. And WAAH-HOO! No blank grey square when an applet was supposed to be. Why didn't I think of this when I was taking that Java Games Programming class at WTC this spring? [insert forehead smack]

Please understand that the point of this post is actually not to bash Firefox, which has any number of things to recommend it. Nor is it actually to laud a for-profit company (which is now apparently paying the bills by going upscale with "enterprise" software offerings, and more power to them). But an organization that can straddle the two worlds of open and closed source is definitely something to cheer on. And to make it so painless for someone who is still such a big-time poser when it comes to *nix operating systems? Wow. Just freakin' Wow. After Googling "opera browser Linux," the only thing I had to think about was whether or not my version of Ubuntu was Gutsy Gibbon or something more recent. After that, I was auto-magically directed to a download for the AMD-64 architecture, and it was off to the proverbial races.

Yes, it's awesome to be able to pull things apart and fix them--I was born in the hospital where my Dad worked in maintenance, a job he held until he retired, so it's sort of in my upbringing, if not actual DNA.

Yet even as a strong advocate of having an open source option, somethings I'm not interested in tweaking. The browser is one of those things. Why? Because I write a lot of stuff for the browser. Pulling it apart to make it work better with my software would be rather silly, as I can't expect the rest of the world to install my customized version. Not to mention that I'd then have to maintain my flavor of the browser as well as the software running inside it. You might be able to do that sort of thing inside a large corporations whose paranoia about cooties (in this case from unclean outside software) rivals that of Howard Hughes. Not bloody likely that I'll be nailing down a contract like that anytime soon. And by "soon," I mean "before I retire."

So, again, kudos to Opera for providing a polished product that doesn't treat an unfashionable (i.e. non-Windows/non-Mac) platform on an unfashionable set of hardware (i.e. 64-bit AMD) like a third-class citizen. Which makes me almost wish that they were still charging for the product, because I'd be more than happy to throw a few Jacksons at them for that.

An expanded tweet

Just thought I should probably nail down what I meant by a tweet earlier today, which was "Nothing seems to get results like being the kind of client someone wants to work with." In my vocabulary, at least, there's a distinction between "customer" and "client." Sure, they can overlap, particularly in the early stages of a client-vendor relationship. But, overall, the difference hinges on the longer-term relationship.

We like to think that the customer is always right, despite more than ample evidence to the contrary. In practice, everything hinges on the level of pain your displeasure can cause the organization. In smaller organizations, that level of pain will be more keenly felt, because those on the front lines (generally) have more pull. For organizations that peddle services, rather than tangible products, that's typically even more true. But at Wal-Mart? McDonalds? Not so much. And just try telling the prima-donna designers as Apple that sharp edged on a laptop case--in the vicinity of your wrists, even--is a mind-blowingly stooooopid idea. Lemme know how that works out for you.

But that's merely one side of the proverbial coin. The other side is understanding your value as a client. When you keep your ego--and especially the "The customer is always right" sense of entitlement that we Americans are raised believe is our birthright--out of it, some interesting things can happen.

Now, I'm not arguing that anyone should accept a shoddy product or a shoddy service. Not in the least. (Although if you pay for a MacBook with sharp edges and convince yourself that carpal tunnel syndrome is fashionable, you pretty much deserve what you get, IMO.) But when you look at yourself as an equal partner in making things right, it (again, in my opinion/experience) seems to resolve the problem much more quickly than making someone's natural defense mechanisms kick into high gear by screaming at them. Don't get me wrong: Sometimes there's a time and place for a well-timed, tactically-deployed hissy-fit. But it's almost always better aimed at a manager, rather than a flunkie.

The crucial part is explaining what you wanted and contrasting it with what was actually delivered. And that may take a bit of self-reflection. That just the way it works. If you can't take the time and effort to do that part right, you'll ultimately waste more time while the person being screamed at is trying to read your mind. Bad plan. Why? Because it's counter-productive in both the short- and long-terms. If you're a long-term client (as opposed to a short-term customer), you want the vendor to anticipate your wants/needs. Not--I repeat NOT--merely work to avoid being screamed at.

Now, that's what I call an upgrade path

First, big ups to @arstechnica for the link: Microsoft doubles food donations for IE6 to IE8 updates.

Technically, Microsoft is "doubling" the per-download donation, while continuing to cap the total donations at $1 million, so the title is somewhat misleading. But, hey, that's a million bones that food pantries didn't have before. And it's certainly more constructive--in premise as well as result--than 2005's ill-fated attempt by Opera CEO von Tetzchner's to swim across the Atlantic to "ante up" for one million downloads of the browser.

All the same, I couldn't help but be reminded of the email chain-letters I received in the late 90s, claiming that Bill Gates would donate $1 every time the email was forwarded. And I also can't help but wonder whether that memory would--in some small part--sabotage Microsoft's attempts to put IE 6 out to pasture.

It's an interesting concept, though, all the more interesting in that it has plenty of room for tweaking. 'S'matter of fact, I'll be upgrading on the rebuilt XP box before the evening's out.