The bottom line is, if PR firms insist on embargoes, which are very easily dealt with by pre-scheduling your posts (which I sometimes do 10 – 15 minutes before press time), then the only answer is exclusives, which many 2nd-tier bloggers, like myself, despise. Exclusives go to big blogs, run by pro bloggers. Engadget, TechCrunch, etc. But that’s the alternative. If it’s not embargoes, it’s exclusives. See ya tomorrow.
Check out this bit that Sheryl post on her Facebook (regarding the recent addition of a Unified Communications category to AllTop), and then read my story that follows, as it’s very similar:
The other day I had a discussion going on twitter. The discussion sort of detoured and something came up about how we can’t expect people who are celebrities to engage us. My response, though directed toward that topic was really a bigger answer and one that I live daily.
Many people live their lives accepting life as a social hierarchy. They don’t ask questions and don’t have expectations. I’m not like that. I live daily attempting to live in the here and now and engage my larger community. Instead of just accepting life as it is, accepting that people won’t engage me I always ask the question, “Why not?” “Why aren’t I worthy of engagement?” Why should I just expect my opinion or my thoughts are not important enough for someone to pay attention to them?
I have a good example of why my perspective is valid.
Today Ken sent me a message and said Unified-Communications is on Alltop. Why does that matter? Well, not to toot my own horn, but I sent Guy Kawasaki a note on twitter and asked him why it wasn’t there. We proceeded to send messages back and forth ending in email and me researching links for Unified-Communications for them to put on Alltop.
The answer then to my why not question is simple. “Indeed! Why not?”
Sometimes it feels like stretching upward and outward into the social status quo may feel like beating your head against the wall. I know this primarily because I’m a salesperson as well as a consultant. I do have to find customers, after all. This is why I spent 2 1/2 hours at a council meeting tonight trying to get a misguided city I.T. appropriations ordinance overturned in my 60,000-person town tonight instead of watching the Browns get spanked on Monday Night Football, which I’d much rather do.
Needless to say, like the Browns trying to cope with the superior Philadelphia Eagles, I went to this meeting expecting my pleading to fail, but hoping I could convince enough people of the silliness of the proposed ordinance that maybe, just maybe, I might have a chance of getting the vote to fail.
Well, it’s 17 to 3 Eagles in the second quarter, and as I’ve just arrived home from the council meeting, put my kids to bad, and cracked open a Miller Lite, I’m feeling like the Browns. I got my butt kicked tonight. The measure passed by 3 votes. I only got one Nay vote I wasn’t expecting. So I lost and lost hard.
But it doesn’t always have to be like that. And I was encouraged by Sheryl‘s post, because it reminded me that I had a very similar experience a few years ago.
I had just been laid off from a very cushy job as an I.T. manager for a construction firm, and I was pretty upset about it. Long before I’d ever entertained the notion of surviving (forget about thriving) as a consultant, I’d been a full-time I.T. manager, and the job meant almost everything to me. I loved the company, the people, and the work. It was devastating to me when I lost my job.
A few weeks prior to being terminated, I’d been looking for books to help me with a VoIP project I was working on for the company. I turned immediately to O’Reilly Media, whose epic masterpiece Sendmail was probably the only reason I was able to succeed in the I.T. field back when I lived in Detroit. O’Reilly didn’t have a book about Voice over IP, so I thought to myself, who can I e-mail to find out when O’Reilly’s VoIP book would be published? Who better than the publisher himself?
At the time, Tim O’Reilly was an absolute icon. Perhaps more of a rebel than now, Tim O’Reilly was the freewheeling open-source fanatic that I knew I could count on to publish just the right VoIP book, and I was certain he had one up his sleeve. So, while still employed with the excavating contractor (the fifth-largest in the country), I e-mailed Tim a quick note to ask him when such a book would be forthcoming.
A week went by, then another week. And I thought, bah, the guy’s busy. I understand.
Lo and behold, one day prior to my termination, I get an e-mail in my inbox from Tim referring me to one of his networking editors. They informed me that they hadn’t identified an author as of yet to write the O’Reilly VoIP book. Me being an English hack (I spent many hours writing poetry and short fiction instead of attending chemsitry class in high school), I volunteered myself to write the book, expecting Tim and Mike Loukides, the editor, to turn me down almost immediately.
But that’s precisely the opposite of what happened. Not only did I get a contract to write the book, but it provided me with much-needed income during my time of unemployment and the extremely difficult divorce that followed. The book went on to be the most successful book of its subject (aside from O’Reilly’s Asterisk-specific book, which came out about a year later), but I also got a second book contract and began to roll with a whole new group of folks. My first book, Switching to VoIP, had its seventh printing two weeks ago.
My status as an honest-to-goodness thought leader was secured, despite my periodically goofy thought patterns (ask anybody who reads this blog regularly, LAWL), and I was able to transition that thought leadership status into a consulting business, of which I recently purchased the sole stake.
The point of this story is that, if I wouldn’t have the mustard seed portion of faith required to e-mail Tim O’Reilly when I was an absolute NOBODY, I would’ve missed out on an awful lot. Today, I get to say I know folks like Ken Camp, Jeff Pulver, Alec Saunders, and Andy Abramson. I get to run my consulting business with an authority and gravitas I would’ve never thought was possible for a poor kid from inner-city Detroit. I started to actually see some of my dreams come true. I could do it.
And then, I realized, I could suddenly do a whole lot more.
So when Sheryl wrote about how she reached across a genuinely invisible social barrier to reach Guy Kawasaki, and got something positive out of the interchange, I totally, totally, totally get where she is coming from. She made a connection that perhaps she didn’t expect to yield much, yet it yielded something very positive indeed. That’s my story as well.
And you should take this to heart. No matter where you’re at: if you want it, it’s a matter of going out and getting it.
Having the balls. Believing you’re more than what you appear to others to be.
Make those connections. If you’re in a council meeting expecting your business opportunity to be pummeled by a bunch of uninformed politicians, GO ANYWAY. If you’re the Browns and you’re competing for last place with the dregs of the AFC, go anyway. Be bold.
People will eventually appreciate it.
When I started my company, I used to jab that I was “bringing Silicon Valley thinking to my own backyard”, which, at the moment, is Lorain County, OH. My firm, Best Technology, has its office in the county seat and the crown jewel of Lorain County (ask anybody) is a community college called LCCC.
The county seat, and home of the college, is the City of Elyria, and tonight I attended a council meeting during which the 11 council members were deciding whether or not to establish an official I.T. Dept. and increase the number of I.T. staffers from 2 to 7. Of course, the city is also considering Police and Fire layoffs, so this issue is a natural hot potato.
The vote came up to tonight on Council’s agenda. So I donned my best charcoal grey suit and purple tie, jotted down five pages of notes assembled from the talks I’ve had with various councilmembers and the city’s two I.T. managers over the last six months, and addressed council in a speech that went 6 minutes over my allotted time.
In my pleading, I wanted to know: where did they come up with 7 staffers as the ideal?
The Mayor responded by telling me, and all present, that the software consultant ACS, a Minneapolis-based firm that specializes in municipal line of business ware, was instrumental in coming up with the 7 number, and so, apparently, was the college. OK. Free consulting MUST be superior.
The city wants to hire a full-time web developer to work on its 5 web sites–again, while considering laying off public safety officials. The Police Chief was on hand, glock-in-holster, to let Council know that he could cut nothing except people at this point, if asked to shrink his budget.
Haven’t these guys ever heard of WordPress? It’s pretty hard to justify a $80k guy when you can get a consultant to do a Parks and Rec template on Joomla for a grand or less. Not that I would take that sort of work. But here’s where it got fun: when I dropped the term, “content management”, I could just FEEL the wind getting sucked out of the room. Nobody had the faintest clue what I was talking about.
And then it dawned on me. Municipalities like Elyria have been left behind. Little midwestern towns have been convinced that I.T. is what it was 30 years ago: expensive, inflexible, and inaccessible to people with more than 5 grey hairs on their heads.
Another local municipality, North Ridgeville, also in Lorain County, which runs its servers on a certain formerly-dominent networking product that now runs only on Linux, just can’t justify putting out the money to go with Windows and Active Directory, despite 95% of the world having moved to Windows Server some years ago.
How in the bloody heck will I ever be able broach the subject of VoIP with these guys?
These organizations are Tech Hostages, made inept and held to zero progress because their decision makers are committees that spend 39 minutes reading identical ordinance description over and over and over with a chairman saying “first reading” after each iteration. It’s like listening to paint dry. No, it’s worse. I’m very much a democracy supporter, but if we can’t get these folks to innovate in the democratic process, how can we expect them to use technology more fervently, more effectively?
That, dear friends, is the job of Ted Wallingford. Convince the Midwest that, at least when it comes to the silicon part, it’s OK to emulate Silicon Valley.
As pal Om Malik writes this weekend about the layoff woes at Alcatel-Lucent and the delisting danger at Nortel, many of us in the industry are experience what I call the “Heartburn Chuckle”. Or, as I try to put an ironic spin on Jeff Pulver’s famous Purple Minutes expression by calling negative achievements in the telecom industry as “Brown Minutes”, I can’t help but laugh at how empty the promise of unified communications has turned out to be.
This is Brown Minutes and the Heartburn Chuckle all wrapped together. But I can tell you why this telecom crash is occuring. Remember, once an industry is scaled to its max, like the telecom industry, the only way to succeed is to generate profit through new innovations. Merely recycling established ideas with different pricing and bundles may be good for short-term cash grabs but has little to do with the sustainability of long-term profit. Just ask Yahoo. They’re dying because of that axiom right now.
The Manufacturers
Companies like Cisco and Nortel have done too little to move the VoIP revolution beyond the customer’s demarc, while tradeshow talks about SIP trunking and a spirit of cooperation in using the Internet to replace the PSTN have all been hollow talk designed to please the audience of the day. True, end-to-end VoIP still isn’t reality unless you’re willing to sit in front of your PC and run Skype. To say Skype carried out the VoIP vision more successfully than Cisco and Nortel ought to be greatly humbing to those companies, but it’s really true. Skype got it. Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya didn’t.
The big manufacturers continue to be the only powers with enough leverage to move the carrier giants away from circuit-switched technology, yet the manufacturer’s own uncertainties about recooping licensing fees and retaining customer-base (through lock-in rather than innovation) have scared them away from issuing the carriers a real challenge: build an all-IP global voice network or we will.
The Carriers
The carriers are firms like AT&T, Windstream, Verizon, BT, and so on. Their obsession with the billing unit (the almighty minute) has made them helpless to see the possibilities of a software-rich, application-based global ecosystem. Consequently, the most successful apps to arrive on the carriers’ networks, the ones most embraced by the public, overwhelmingly have one purpose: to steal billable minutes from the carriers. The innovation disappeared and the scrappy new players in the market, the ones with the power to transform the public’s thinking about telecom, instead got stuck doing the same old thing the big telecoms do to put bread on the table: bill minutes.
The Government
In the United States, deregulation under President Clinton in the Telecom Act of 1996 went in all the wrong directions and didn’t do enough to create entrepreneurial freedom in telecom. It failed to recognize that the Internet was going to eclipse the PSTN in terms of consumer participation, and as a result, it positioned the carriers to remain in their highly subsidized comfort zone.
Further mistakes were made when the FCC became distracted by lobbying for Network Neutrality legislation. As with many things, the passage of time revealed that Netnoot was a solution in search of a problem, more often than not. Apparently nobody at the FCC realized that the free market would provide for the needs of consumers who didn’t want to participate in a 93-octane Internet. So the FCC spent a lot of time looking at issues that were overstated and geared to bolster the chances of a few admittedly excellent Silicon Valley content startups who didn’t want to get choked out by the carriers.
Shame on us for not recognizing that the carriers are too inept to succeed in the content business anyway. And shame on the FCC for wasting all that energy when they should’ve been looking at ways to encourage greater adoption of end-to-end IP technology.
The Conclusion
So, when you have three willing participants in a massacre, you get a massacre. The three power players in our industry–boxmakers, regulators, and networkers–are playing the same tune. Protect revenue by doing nothing. The fruits of that labor are now obvious. Like the automotive industry, which has a frighteningly similar situation on its hands, the answer now is the same as ten years ago: innovation. Put on those thinking caps, MIT grads and garage tinkerers. We’ve got an even bigger hole to think our way out of now.
If previous observation is any indicator, Sony’s 3D social network, Home, was bound to attract a specimen of user whose weakness for video games seems to parallel a considerable thirst for virtual sex. In its heyday, Second Life was plagued by a very open sex culture, where users would participate in virtual sex acts, build giant sex costumes for use in-game, and so forth.
(Editor’s note: I told you so.)
So it certainly makes sense that Home, a free online virtual world geared around selling other PS3 titles, would rapidly become filled with greasy, horny kids. And since it’s not a Wii title, Home’s remote control citizens are demographically lopsided in favor of males. What do you get when you combine a legion of aggressive, pimply guys with a small number of curious gals?
Well, it certainly is offputting to women, no question. Not to mention–neither my son, nor my daughter, 11 and 13, will be allowed to use Home.
So is the answer turning Home into a police state, a la Brittania in 1984, where sex was essentially illegal? Perhaps we should redefine online sex as what it really is: laughably poor behavior. Problem is, Big Brother can’t monitor everybody. Even in 1984, he couldn’t. Winston, the main character, and his woman still found a way to do the deed–and Winston, with everything to lose by breaking the law, was a brainwashed comrade.
So self-obsessed teenagers with nothing to lose aren’t likely to cooperate should Sony drop the hammer.
Making international long distance calls on your iPhone just got a whole lot cheaper, courtesy of those clever cats over at Truphone. Interestingly, while this new iPhone app does use minute-stealing to connect calls at a cheaper rate to overseas destinations, it apparently does NOT steal minutes using VoIP or 3G on the iPhone itself. Instead, calls are routed to a local phone number operated by Truphone first, and once inside Truphone’s network, are routed to the international destination using Voice over IP.
Truphone users will be prompted, at the time they dial an international number, whether or not they’d like to use Truphone to handle the call. Very clever.
As if we really need ANOTHER social networking tool, this time geared around, ostensibly, advertising Blu Ray discs with video games on them in a virtual world called “Home”, Sony is launching their virtual world on December 11. We previously covered this in a post that provided one of the first public glimpses of the Home beta.
So what IS Home? Well, it’s a subset of Second Life with shorter learning curve, better graphics, and no built-in economy. It seems that Sony has decided to launch a virtual world that has none of the annoyances of Second Life, but also none of the intrigue. What determines the success or failure of this thing is how well Sony can integrate Home with other titles. But I think I smell a flop cooking.
I ran across this study by Pew and read the entire 5 or 6 paragraph teaser. As I did so, my brain was saying, “check, check, check,” as if I already knew all of the information in the study. All the research, as it were, seemed to confirm the obvious: the vast majority of adults are only casual video game players, and the older you get, the less likely you are to invest waste your time playing video games.
Since I’m complaining, how about asking for an abvious answer on an entirely different subject? Does anybody else agree with me that Steve Ballmer is essentially a PR liability for Microsoft?