Cook 'em Dan-O

Product Managers on the Road, Capitol Edition

One of our largest customers, a group of agricultural research centers, held the annual meeting of their IT Managers in early May, in Washington, DC.  I was invited to attend so that I could provide an update on a pilot Active Directory project we were conducting, and to give a talk on Microsoft's direction with respect to cloud computing.  Naturally, this meant an opportunity for another "Product Managers on the Road" edition!

Travel Day.  Flight leaves at 6 AM... yeesh. At least I have a car taking me to the airport.  Brian's with me, since he came out to make a surprise visit to Sean during Sean's chemotherapy treatment.

After saying goodbye to Brian (he's on a different flight back to DC) I head to the gate.  Okay... it's a 737 with only paid amenities.  Time to stock up on some nuts and dried fruit for the flight. I send a couple of text messages to Sean to see how he's feeling.

It's a full flight, and naturally everyone is attempting to carry their life's possessions onto the flight.  They were taking volunteers to gate-check bags; a great way to check your bags for free.

On the plane. The passenger ahead of me is falling asleep, and keeps snapping her neck as her head drops forward.  Reminds me of me at the opera.

Good news: there's a monitor in the seat back.  Bad news: I can't turn it off.  Welcome to six hours of the same Lincoln car commercial.  Or I could pay to watch network TV shows, with commercials. Wait, what?

Dante, who's traveling with me, finds the oldest Peruvian restaurant in DC.  I get to experience aji, a kind of all-purpose hot sauce.  I stupidly ask Dante if he's ever had Peruvian food, forgetting that Dante is from Peru. 

Niner fans--you never know where they'll turn up. 

Meeting Day One.  At the IT Managers meeting.  I learn a new term when one of the IT Managers says he is going to “throw a spanner in the works.”

Many of the IT Managers here are European.  Maybe that's why they commented that today's hot meal is "a real lunch" compared with yesterday's cold sandwiches.  I also notice a reluctance to eat in the meeting room, even though there are more places to sit there.  This is certainly different than a startup!  There's also a bit of the "Microsoft as Evil Empire" feeling in the room.  How long until Google attains that status?

Good news: the Golden State Warriors' playoff game is on TNT! Bad news: there's no sound.  I get to watch the entire game, including two overtimes, on forced mute.  Steph Curry's face at the end of the game says, "can we just get this over?"

Meeting Day Two.  During one of the smoking breaks (!) I observe the commotion as a group of people are trying to feed/protect a duck they find nesting in the flowers.  The contrast in attention paid to the duck vs. the homeless guy panhandlng nearby is perfect.

Yes, that's a duck nesting in the planter outside the building I was visiting.

Dante and I get to leave the meeting early.  So I take Dante to see the Capitol Building.  We're walking, and when I feel the first couple of raindrops we head for shelter.  Good thing--the skies open up for 10 minutes or more.  We end up taking a taxi the rest of the way to the Capitol building.  Of course, the rain stops as soon as we arrive.

This is outside the World Bank, one of our customers.  But I took the photo because the logo reminded me of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Huh?

Looking for a cab after out Capitol visit.  Thanks to a kind taxi driver, I learn where to stand (and where not to stand) if you're looking for a cab, in the rain, at 5:00 PM.

Evening off.  Brian and I had planned to go see the Washington Nationals play, but I already have one experience getting rained on while watching them, so we change plans.  We end up getting some great seafood, including, oysters we've never heard of before, at Hank's Oyster Bar in Georgetown.  Then it's over to a 60s style bar for a drink.  I feel like I'm in some sort of James Bond movie.

Day Three.  Visiting another customer, have some time before my appointment.  The weather's cleared up a bit, so I take a stroll near the White House and then back to where I had been staying.  I decide I'd better eat now, since I may use up all my lunch time walking back to my hotel.  I grab a hot dog and find a bench to sit and eat.

I can only imagine the advice McKinsey gave this vendor: "diversify!"

Now back to the hotel, to check out and go to my next appointment. 

I found the food trucks.  Too bad I already ate lunch!

A great meeting with my customer, now on to the airport and back home... As Brian had told me, Thursday afternoon is the worst time to fly out of Dulles; all the Congress-people are headed back home for the weekend.  So everything takes longer, and my plan to change into casual clothes before the flight is for naught.  I have just enough time to get to the gate and hand them my ticket.  And who do I run into (almost literally) at the gate? Jackie Speier.  Brian interned for Jackie when he first went to Washington, so it was great to catch up with her and let her know what Brian is doing these days.

Late-night arrival in SFO.  Fortunately, I have a car taking me home so I can doze off.  Great trip, great fun with Brian and co, great customer interactions!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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33 Things I Love About My Wife

Honey,

Is is that time again? Seems like time is speeding up.  That (and Eisntein's Theory of Relativity) would explain my weight gain.

So as I contemplate another anniversary, I thought I would share some of the things I love about you.

1. You always know what I need, even when I don't.
2. Your smile.
3. Your sassy attitude.
4. Your no-nonsense business approach.
5. You cried when you saw the whales off the Big Sur coast.
6. You took up scuba diving so we could do something together, even though you were scared out of your wits.
7. Your laugh.
8. You convinced me that getting out of bed at 4:30 AM to work out was a good thing.
9. You took up yoga and meditation.
10. You love to cook. And eat. And drink wine.
11. You continued to dive, even after getting tossed around in the waves at Monastery Beach.
12. You like to ride bikes.
13. You know just what our boys need.
14. You read "potato chip" novels to unwind.
15. You've changed directions in your career more than once--and by your own choice.
16. You never wavered about Sean's recovery: "he's going to be fine" has been as much a command as a prediction.
17. You got your degree from San Jose State while you were pregnant with Sean.
18. You flew to Boston, got an apartment and got a job in three weeks, with no resources.
19. You managed to get a speeding ticket in our clunky Dodge Duster.
20. Glenn Frey seemed to be hitting on you during an Eagles concert at the Cow Palace.
21. You've talked your boys--and me--"off the ledge" many times.
22. You've been a role model and inspiration to your nieces and nephews.
23. You introduced me to The Poker Girls, and their husbands.
24. You got me to buy a house before I was ready.
25. You herded the horses back into the barn when you had to.
26. You always demonstrate the importance of family.
27. You're consistent about making me sleep on the left side of the bed.
28. As soon as your uncle said, "don't make a sharp turn in the dune buggy" you went and did it. And popped the front tire.
29. You've always picked me up when I felt like crap.
30. You never let me feel like crap for very long.
31. You never apologize for who you are.
32. You take care of your needs.
33. You said "I do". And continue to say it.

Happy Anniversary honey.

YAH

Microsoft Pushes Office Web Apps Forward

Microsoft recently announced that it is accelerating its development on Office Web Apps.  In the past, Microsoft's strategy for offering Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) functionality through a browser seemed to be "just do the minimum."  Now, Microsoft appears to have embraced the idea that offering Office functionality through a web browser--any web browser--actually expands its available market opportunity.

Not only is Microsoft expanding the feature set for Office Web Apps (such as support for document co-authoring in Word Web App), it is planning support for Android as well.  Having already expanded support for iOS, this means Microsoft is targeting all relevant device platforms, not just Windows.

As I said in a recent talk on this subject, Microsoft's "web first" strategy underscores its "no Plan B" strategy when it comes to making Office, Exchange and other services available as cloud-based services.

Burn the Ships

Did you see the recent news?  Adobe has announced that the latest version of its hugely popular Creative Suite software will be the last one available as installed software.  From now on, Creative Suite will only be available as a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering.

This is big news, really big news.  I’ve been party to a number of discussions over the years that centered on how to move forward with the “next generation” product or service without killing the “current generation” service.  There was always a lot of hand-wringing, a certain amount of denial, and a lack of certainty about how to achieve two goals at once:  make the new service a big success while keeping the current service around.  This is the essence of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, which I’ve written about in the past.

I recall in reading a history of Mexico that Cortes, upon landing with his troops, ordered his ships burned.  (This was apparently not an unusual act for the time.)  His reasoning was that if the troops knew there was no possibility of escape, no way to turn back when things got tough, that they would have more motivation to fight when needed.  If you narrow the options down to “find a way to survive” and “die” it makes the decision easier.

That’s what I thought about when I read the news about Adobe.  In essence they are saying, “We are going to make this work, or die trying.”  You have to admire the commitment needed to make that statement.  I hope they succeed.  They’ve already taken the hardest step.

Don’t Blame Your Salespeople

I read yesterday that Oracle blamed its latest quarterly earnings miss on a "lack of urgency" by the sales force.

Anytime you blame the sales force for missing revenue or earnings targets it's usually a bad sign. But in this case, Oracle's CFO may be right… although not in the way she meant.

Oracle's cloud-based revenues, which it had forecast to increase by three percent year on year, instead fell by two percent. Oops. To be fair, Oracle was affected more by its declining hardware sales, but it was the cloud-based revenue performance that caught my attention. I recently attended some Microsoft Office 365 partner events and I got to hear from partners struggling to adapt to a subscription revenue model. That experience made me think of one explanation for Oracle's situation.

What I heard from partners at these Office 365 events was that they were accustomed to making a good deal of the revenues in any deal from the sale of software licenses. Now, with the subscription model (and given the current structure where Microsoft has a direct billing relationship with the customer), these partners are seeing a big chunk of up-front revenue disappear, to be replaced by much smaller commission payments, spread out over time. It was clear to me that these partners recognized that their business model had to change to adapt to market acceptance of cloud-based services. But they were trying to understand how they would replace the revenue they were losing from up-front software license sales.

So how does this apply to Oracle?

First, understand that sales people are not stupid. And the best ones would never be characterized as having a "lack of urgency". So what gives? It may be a simple matter of economics.

You're an Oracle sales rep. Which would you rather sell to your customer?

• $50,000 worth of software, where the customer pays up front
• A three-year subscription for a service for 100 users, at $20 per user per month

In the first scenario, you make $50,000 towards your revenue goal for the quarter. And (depending on your commission rate) you make a nice sum over your base salary. In the second scenario, your up-front commission is much lower and (depending on how compensation is set up for selling cloud-based services) your contribution to quarterly revenue goals might be much lower. There's a saying that "salespeople are coin-operated," which I always took to mean that they well understand their marginal revenues and costs and act accordingly.

So it wouldn't be a surprise to find that Oracle reps are favoring on-premise vs. cloud-based applications in their selling efforts. This just illustrates Clayton Christensen's thesis in The Innovator's Dilemma, that it can be very hard to make the shift from one disruptive technology to the next one. Oracle no doubt understands that it has to change its business model. Understanding what's needed and executing, however, are two different things.

So maybe Oracle's sales reps don't lack a sense of urgency. Maybe they just understand math.

Product Managers on the Road, Weekend Edition

Note: I started this post a week ago, as I was on my way to New Mexico for a one-day ski trip.  It was written sort of as-it-happened so don't expect too much literary refinement!

So I'm on my way to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'm headed there to meet up with my son Brian for a day of skiing in Taos, about two hours away. It's my first trip since I renewed my passport, and my first flight in maybe a year. So, on with the random observations…

• SJC is quite different than I remember it, at least getting to long term parking is different. First, it's called "Economy Parking." OK, that explains the lack of "Long Term Parking this way" signs. And no, I can't circle around the north end of the runways to get to the long-term parking lot I usually go to; that one's only accessible from De La Cruz/Coleman Ave.
• So glad I printed out my boarding pass on Southwest Airlines ahead of time! I was able to skip the lines and go straight to baggage check (FREE baggage check, thank you Southwest!).
• Had to be told to remove my shoes before going through the metal detector. Rookie mistake!
• People are wondering why I'm carrying around my down jacket, aka Puffy or Puff Daddy. Hey, maybe I don't need it in San Jose or Las Vegas, but I will in New Mexico!
• Our gate is directly across from the Illy espresso bar in Terminal B… torture!
• I must be like a dog… I never noticed the "order here" and "pick up here" signs at Jamba Juice because they're way above my head.
• SJC offers free Wi-Fi (after you watch a commercial). The iPass business model continues to erode.
• So my flight to Albuquerque stops first in Las Vegas. That explains all the bachelorettes, fraternity boy groups, folks trading stories about where to get the best drinks and cheapest food, and the abundance of women with surgically enhanced breasts waiting to board my flight.
• Judging from her makeup, I'm pretty sure the San Jose gate agent is moonlighting as a Las Vegas showgirl.I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on this flight who won't be getting off the plane in Las Vegas.
• We haven't even boarded and I've already heard a "lost wages" reference.
• There are nine of us going on to Albuquerque. So it's guaranteed that the other two people in my row are among them.
• When the pilot said it would be "bumpy" going into Las Vegas, he meant, "We're going to re-enact that part of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea where the SSRN Seaview collides with the giant sea creature."
• Always interesting when the airport shares a runway with the local Air Force base, as is the case in Albuquerque.
• Brian's hotel is full of college students attending an indoor track meet at the convention center next door.  Reminds me of basketball tournaments at the (then) Reno Hilton.
• Why am I always nervous before I go skiing?
• Special thanks to my hairdresser for telling me about the Bavarian House in Taos.  It was definitely worth the long ski run to get to it!
• As we sit outside at the Bavarian House, I realize that my beer is getting colder as it sits waiting for me to drink it.
• Skied down several mogul runs… not by choice.
• Perfect timing: we're both ready to stop skiing at 2:30, just as the snowfall picks up and the mountain disappears under the weather.
• Even at 25, I still have to talk Brian off the ledge occasionally.
• The New Mexico highway rest stops are nothing to write home about.
• Bighorn sheep crossing—now that's cool.
• But our favorite: the "cow crossing" signs with added "UFO crossing" decals.
• You can't beat New Mexico architecture.
• Either there are a lot of empty houses around, or there are a lot of people that only spend the summer in New Mexico.
• It's odd that the food in New Mexico is great, but there's really no "fine dining" experience.
• There's Mexican food, and there's New Mexican food, and they're not the same thing.
• Your basic choice: do you want red or green sauce with that?
• Who knew there was a local New Mexico wine industry?
• Brian (after we've driven through Santa Fe and the snow is blowing sideways): "Siri, get us the hell out of here!" Siri: you should take up your existential questions with someone more qualified than me, preferably a human."
• As the weather front descended on us while driving back to Albuquerque, Brian and I both thought of the alien space ships from Independence Day.
• The turn-by-turn navigation app clearly has not mastered Spanish pronunciation.
• Why does the female voice in the Albuquerque Doubletree elevator have a British accent?
• Leave it to Brian to know the names of the New Mexico congressional delegation, and be able to pick them out of the list of people waiting for a first class upgrade on his flight back to Washington.
• You can't beat traveling with your adult children.
• The storm has passed through Albuquerque and is headed east. Me, I'm headed west thank you!
• Ah, San Diago, whales va….
• I can't wait to do this again.

Out With the Old

I realize that most people don't get sentimental about telephones; I'm just a little weird that way.

This little gem, a Meridian M2616 phone, has been my companion at CGNET for the last year or so.  And the Nortel Meridian 1 Option 61 it's connected to is one that I helped CGNET pick out way back when.  They needed a system that could handle more than a dozen Primary Rate Interface connections, to support a voice-over-frame-relay service they were offering.  And since I was the guy in charge of PRI at Nortel, I had a vested interest in seeing this baby work.

Good times, yes.  But all that talk of "multimedia convergence" from back then has caught up with CGNET.  In today's lingo, it's "Unified Communications."  

And so we've installed our Microsoft Lync 2013 system, which provides for instant messaging, "presence," and audio and video calling.  So my phone, pictured above, is being retired in favor of a Jabra headset and Lync software client:

 

The sentimental part of me hates to see the Meridian gear retire.  But I have to admit, I love the new Lync capability.  For instance, I was just on the phone with a business partner and was getting ready to say, "I'll have our tech lead call you."  That would have delayed getting the information he needed to get something set up for me, something I wanted to start Monday morning.  Instead, I checked my Lync client, saw that our tech lead was available, and clicked a button to conference him into the call.  We had our discussion, and everyone has what they need to keep our project going.  I love it!

I can already foresee the death of that phrase, "I'll try to transfer you now but in case I lose you..."

http://cgnet.com/dissecting-the-latest-office-365-news/ My latest on Office 365 announcements

Surviving College Reading

I wandered across this post the other day and wanted to share it with anyone in college, or knows someone who is in college.  

I was fortunate enough to be taught the lessons in the post when I took a class in Marxist Anthropology (yes, that dates me).  We were assigned five books each week to read--and Marxist philosophy is not the most lightweight of subjects--so understanding how to get to the essence of a piece of writing was an important survival skill.

As the author of the post acknowledges, these lessons may apply more to students of social science than other subjects.  But I've used these skimming techniques ever since college, and they've served me well.

If you have favorite ways to quickly read for content, do tell in the comments!

One Simple Question

Sometimes you have to learn via experience; that was certainly the case for me. In solution selling, you're taught to focus on understanding the customer's problem. Why?

• You need to connect with what's really bugging them, which may not be what you think.
• You need to know that your product or service will actually help the customer solve their problem.
• If you know what kind of pain the problem is causing, you can use this information to craft a compelling message about the value of your solution.

Sounds great! The problem is that it's so easy not to start there. It's much easier to start with your solution, your product. "Let me tell you about ___" we all want to say. That's understandable—we're excited about our product—but it's not as successful as listening first.

As I said, I had the chance to experience this during a recent sales conversation. My prospect wanted to know about Office 365, Microsoft's cloud-based mashup of Office, Exchange, SharePoint and some other cool services. As I explained what was in Office 365, my client kept focusing on SharePoint Online. She said that they had a SharePoint site that didn't work very well, especially for sharing information with partners outside her organization. As she asked question after question, I kept getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with SharePoint Online. Eventually, she suggested that SharePoint might be too complicated for her.

That normally would have been the end of the conversation; "thanks, but no thanks." Fortunately, I stopped (finally!) to think, and asked her a question: "what is the problem that you're trying to solve?" One simple question.

The prospect proceeded to say that their real issue was sharing files, especially with partner organizations. They often couldn't do this via email, because the files included audio and video content, making them too big for most email servers to process. They were using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and Secure FTP, but that required IT intervention, and my prospect was only a part-time IT administrator and didn't want to spend the time messing with FTP server management.

I had recently been checking out ShareFile from Citrix and suggested that she might want to give it a try. It didn't have all the capabilities of SharePoint Online, but it did file sharing very well, and had a very easy-to-use interface. She thought that might be a good solution.

I was able to get her set up with a trial of the service, and she quickly signed up for it. I knew her users found the service valuable because she called me a couple of times, asking me to extend the trial until she got payment and contract details sorted out.

Now I always remind myself to ask that one simple question at the beginning of every sales conversation: "what problem are you trying to solve?" It's a winner for me.

Let me know what question you've found to help the most in engaging with your customers and prospects!