John's Music Blog

I recently had the pleasure of reading a draft of Dave Hitz’ new book (title intentionally withheld, so as not to play the spoiler).  Dave is one of the co-founders of NetApp (nee’ Network Appliance), and he wrote the book, at least in part, to give current NetApp employees a view into the early days of the company.  At recent growth rates, I suspect that substantially more than half of the employees have been with the company fewer than five years and missed not only the startup days, but the turnaround days, post-2001. (more…)

I spent an hour today with an Onaro customer and through the conversation learned a little bit about how different companies handle the separation of duties in IT processing.  I met with the customer to better understand the critical decision criteria that were behind his choice of Onaro, what features were most valued and what alternatives were considered.  Turns out, at the time of his decision several years ago, he didn’t see many alternatives.  Onaro, which was an independent software supplier at the time, was recently acquired by NetApp, a storage systems company.

This customer originally licensed Onaro’s SANscreen offering to ensure that the company’s IT change-control process was being followed in the storage network.  SANscreen maps the entire data path from the host bus adapter (HBA) in the server, through the cables and switches, ultimately to the storage array.  Anytime someone makes a change to the configuration of his fibre channel storage area network (FC-SAN), he gets a notification.  If the change hasn’t been authorized through the change-control process, he investigates.  As we were talking he showed me several alerts, that he had just received on his Blackberry, regarding changes that had not been authorized. (more…)

I did a couple of customer-satisfaction interviews today.  I won’t tell you the company or describe the product.  It’s not important to the discussion, but in case you are wondering, it’s not one of the companies or products I represent.  It is important to note that both individuals that I interviewed want the product and the company to succeed.

In the first survey, I got a lot of feedback.  Almost an hour’s worth.  There was some very positive feedback about certain components of the offering, but I heard many more negative comments, such as:

• They are barely keeping up with free alternatives.
• The leadership was great for a startup, but needs to step aside if they are to get to the next level.
• They are not listening to their customers.
• They treat everyone the same, and don’t listen to the different needs of different customers.
• No one thinks their product or their service is adequate.
• I have to go to a third party to fix the problems they aren’t addressing, and I know other customers who are doing the same thing.
• I shouldn’t have to pay someone else to do the job that they should be doing. (more…)

My recent blog post on Skype and Logitech inspired one of Skype’s bloggers, Villu Arak, to locate this history of picture phones.   If you look through the history, you’ll notice several different jobs that were being proposed for the picture phones: business communication, grandparents staying connected with grandchildren, soldiers calling home.  While AT&T’s initial implementations failed, the jobs still needed to be done.

This post by Villu confirms that fact, as he writes about some of the ways that Skype is being used today:

Distant lovers enjoying dinner — and each other’s company — over a free video call.

Local-government officials replacing meetings with multichats.

Homesick soldiers keeping a line open with their families. (more…)

RyanAir is in a lot of businesses, but they are definitely not in the airline business.  The airplanes they fly are simply the delivery mechanism for a lot of other services.  And since the airplane is the method of delivery, RyanAir has done everything they can possible do to reduce their per-plane cost. For example, they have

• Maximized seat density, making it impossible for anyone with an inseam greater than 32″ to slouch in the seat.
• Eliminated the removable safety-instructions card and replaced them with laminated labels on each seatback.
• Eliminated the seat-back pockets so passengers won’t put trash in them, thus reducing the time to clean a plane.
• Boarded and deplaned from both the front and the rear of the plane, thus reducing the airport turnaround time to about 25 minutes.
• Standardized on a single style plane, the Boeing 737-800, to reduce pilot and crew costs.
• Arranged for landing rights and terminal gates in the lowest-cost locations in Europe.

You may be asking, “If RyanAir’s not in the airline business, then what business are they in?”  Well, here’s a hint… (more…)

It’s been just over a year, since I left IDC to form Walden Technology Partners, Inc. with David Burmon.  While I didn’t expect to continue spending so much time in the storage and data management industry, that is how things have worked out initially.  All of our current clients are involved, at least in part, in some aspect of information protection, storage, or management.  And with the continued growth in information and content, a growth that is relatively immune to the effects of economic conditions, it should not have been a surprise to me. 

Note that I said that the growth of content is relatively immune to economic conditions.  The market for storage hardware and information management software has been proven many times to be highly affected by economic conditions.

Problems in information management have been around forever, and will persist far into the future, as this YouTube video documents.  You’ve got to watch it.  Really.  And it’s not a product pitch.  (more…)

My goal when I started this blog almost a year ago was to:

1. Create a resource for entrepreneurs and inventors
2. Have a conversation with those entrepreneurs (or entrepreneur wannabes) on strategies, tactics, and best practices.  

On the second goal, I feel like I’ve fallen short.  There’s not enough dialogue.  (more…)

I like an occasional beer.  I don’t drink a lot, but when I have a beer, my taste tends towards darker microbrews such as HE’BREW, the chosen beer, or a good stout, such as Guinness, properly poured.  I realize that by saying that, I’m not making any fans in St. Louis, home of Anheuser-Busch, brewer of beers that are quite a bit cheaper than HE’BREW, other microbrews, or Guinness.  

Recently the Carlsberg Group  introduced a $400 beer.  That’s $400 for 375 ml, which is about 30 times more than I pay for even the best micro-brewed six pack.  In 2006, Carlsberg, which sells beer in over 150 countries, generated 41 billion Danish Krones in revenue from sales of 102 million hectolitres of beer and 19 million hectolitres of soft drinks.  For the record, one hectolitre is equivalent to about 176 British pints.  So they are definitely not a microbrewer. (more…)

I had a call yesterday with a guy (I’ll call him Julio, because that isn’t his name) that is responsible for storage decisions at a very big company (I’ll call the company Acme, because that isn’t the company’s name).  I can’t name the company or the guy for reasons that are obvious to anyone who works in a large public company.   But I can share the gist of our conversation.  The part that is interesting to startups is the conversation we had around supplier management, environment complexity, and supplier support.

Julio’s at the end of a purchase decision cycle, and he told me which way he was going.  “We’re going with Sun, at least for now,” he said, “because they provide great service, we’ve worked with them for years, they understand our environment, and quite frankly, I don’t want to add another supplier.”  (more…)

When I was interviewing candidates for analyst positions at my former employer, I would often engage in a friendly exercise of “cognitive estimation.”  We all use cognitive estimation  to answer a question, when the exact answer is unknowable, or difficult to know without expensive or difficult measurement.  Clinical neuropsychologists use normed tests of cognitive estimation to evaluate the impact of brain injury, dementia,  and Alzheimer’s disease in patients.  Back at the market research company, I made up my own examples to assess the “common sense” and thinking process of applicants. Here’s an example: 

“How many gallons of ice cream were sold in Massachusetts in the month of July, 2007?”  

You could spend a lot of money with research houses, point-of-sale tracking systems, or field observers, and come up with some rather precise numbers.  Or you could take the total number of Massachusetts residents, multiply by some reasonable estimate of daily ice cream consumption on warm days (something more than a spoonful and less than a quart, I’d guess) and multiply that by 31 days, and get to a good-enough, back-of-the-napkin answer.  This back-of-the-napkin analysis is exactly what seems to be missing in some startups, and it’s exactly the kind of analysis that marketing needs to be doing before product development engages too much engineering talent.

(more…)