Serendipity cubed.

Just the other day I mentioned “Nexialism” to a friend of mine. We rabbited for a while about the idea and A.E. van Vogt’s awesome, seminal SF work, Voyage of the Space Beagle, in which the concept was first posited.

Then I come across a post at Memepool to pictures of cover art from various editions of the book, including the copy I remember first seeing on Dad’s bookshelf waaaaaay back in the early 70’s.



This sends me off to Google for “nexialist”, where I find a whole bunch of links to other people who remember van Vogt’s stuff too. I particularly liked the intro to nexialism from "Milo Mindbender".

Somewhere on the Web you can guarantee there’s an underground of practising believers for just about any half-remembered idea from the early days of Sci Fi. I haven’t searched yet (scared to follow the thought to completion), but I bet there’s even a hardcore of nutters out there who, like the Klingon-speakers at Trekkie conventions, have taken the mysticism of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land literally.

Just as long as they’re not following the Martian Diet, they can grok whatever the hell they want to grok, for all I care…

One more serendipitous data point: van Vogt died last year on my wife's birthday.

Requiescat in pace.

Archives still not working, I'm afraid.

I went through the appropriate discussion threads at blogger.com and found a bunch of pointers to Michael Paige's excellent hints & tips.

Followed his instructions to the letter and it kind of worked. I reset my template, republished, checked the archives - everything was there. Put my own template back in, instead of the default one and oof! No archives again.

This bites.

Last time I sent an email to Blogger support, I heard nothing back. Ever. Last email I sent to anyone in management at Blogger went unanswered for 10 days.

Maybe Dan Bricklin's money will help sort things out with Blogger, but right now the call of Manila gets stronger and stronger every day...

Great event this morning.

Went to a Compaq StorageWorks seminar and had the immense pleasure of listening to the almost legendary Chet Jacobs. Chet’s been working in the storage business, with Compaq and elsewhere for almost as long as I’ve been on the planet.

Chet’s like a cocktail of 100 proof pure grain alpha geek shot through with a triple dose of evangelist. He’s a sharp enough architect to be able to design mind-numbingly vast storage solutions for huge companies, yet he’s also one of the best presenters I have ever encountered (and I’ve heard a lot of ‘em). Entertaining, educational and engaging as heck. If you ever, ever get a chance to hear this guy speak, crawl across broken glass to get there. Trust me. The StorageWorks events are touring North America. If the show comes to your town, take 2 hours of your time to go hear Chet's pitch.

He spoke for around 40 minutes this morning on the subject of SANs – Storage Area Networks. Prior to Chet’s pitch, I would have told you that there could not possibly be anything even remotely interesting to say about SANs, but I’m telling you the guy was hilarious.

He’s also a great user of factoids – illustrating key points with lively anecdotes and a liberal sprinkling of bite-sized infonuggets. Here’s a sampling:

“In the next three years, more new data will be stored than all the data stored since computers were invented.”

“75% of IT infrastructure spending by 2003 will be dedicated to storage.”

“Information and networks are the two things in your business that gain value over time” That’s a deep one – I’m still thinking through the numerous ways in which this claim can be demonstrated to be true.

“Servers in the future will become almost like peripherals. If the data isn’t there, all the server technology in the world won’t matter. Users accessing storage – that’s all you need.”

And much more in similar vein…

One of Chet’s most amazing anecdotes was taken from his work with Celera, the company that shared the credit for cracking the human genome. He was brought in to consult with them on a storage solution that would support their wish to share the genome decoding models with scientists and research labs around the world. The result of their capacity planning showed that, to do what they wanted, they’d need to add 7 terabytes of storage a day. That’s like a million dollars spent on storage every single day.

One word: Yike!

Ok, this is definitely odd.

Just checking out the blog stats, I noticed one of the most recent referral pointers to my site came from a search someone ran at Sympatico-Lycos. Nothing entirely unusual about that, you might think. Except that the search string entered was this:

"I won The East Cost Top Model Search"

I'm not making this up. Honest.

I have no way of interpreting what this means...

Ouch

Broke the blog yesterday. Sorry about that.

No idea what I did, but when I hit "publish" late last night, everything went squirrelly on me and the machine just shut down. Quite dramatic, in fact. When I rebooted I couldn't get the blog back up but republishing everything this afternoon seems to have fixed it.

Tea break's over, back on yer heads...

Hey! "Nothing to see here. Move along." - what a great blog title!

Maybe I'll drop the palindrome...

"Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast."

Indeed. Time to balm this hurt mind...

I have no idea who Erica Lucci is...

I've never met, spoken or even exchanged email with her. But I know instinctively that she's a refined and talented person of remarkable taste, discernment and insight.

I can tell all of this from the fact that she not only carries a link to I Love Me, vol. I from her own fine blog, but she even went so far as to say: "This is quickly becoming my favorite blog to read."

*blush*

The only valid and appropriate response to this, IMHO, is to insist that you all (er...both of you) stop reading right now and head over to Erica's site - not leaving until you've studiously perused each pixel, consumed every photon, and grokked the entire archive in fullness.

Click here.

Do it. Go on, now.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

The chintzy little "Senior's Home" I drive past on the way back from work most days has a signboard outside that bears a weekly "inspirational message" from the inmates. Starting with "Our Residents Say..." there's usually some cringeworthy platitude underneath that makes me long for the feel of a cold steel barrel pressed hard against the temple.

Yesterday's new message, however, actually raised a giggle. A new one to me, and worth sharing, I thought:

"Our Residents Say: Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."

Well. Nearly funny anyway.

OK. Reeeeeeaaaalllly busy.

Lots going on. Lots I should be writing about here. But until I figure out a way to make this blog part of my billable r/t existence, I have to keep the priorities in order.

Some excellent dialogue of late with other bloggers and blog vendors. Recent work has opened up all sorts of interesting avenues and conversations with people surely too cool to really exist other than in email. I'll tell all soon, I promise.

Meanwhile, delivering on an earlier commitment, I had a minor vent published in Strategy ("The Canadian Marketing Report) a couple of weeks ago. Like many things one writes on deadline, this piece was never really completed - it just ran out of time. In particular, I could have done a much better job of crediting some worthy sources (Quoting one is plagiarism. Quoting many is research). By way of amends, I'm posting an enriched version here. As usual, if you agree with any of this stuff, let me know (email address above). If you disagree, well, you're fully entitled to be wrong and I won't hold it against you ;-)

============

All very interesting, but what’s the story?

High Tech PR for a Post Dot-com World

With so many tech companies feeling the sting of the market meltdown, it’s appropriate to take stock (pun intended) and look at what tech PR should be doing in these post dot-com times. The truth is that this long overdue “market correction” is simply a signal that the technology sector is finally maturing as a market. That means, of course, that technology companies will now be treated as grown ups, and should start behaving more maturely in their public relations too.

Let’s be honest: the giddy times at the close of the 20th Century were incredibly exciting, for tech companies and their agency partners alike. With the markets at an all time high and the whole “Built to Flip” mindset at it’s peak – it seemed that just about any Web-based business idea could get financed and promoted. And we all bought into it – we all helped make it happen. The Internet bubble was largely inflated by hot air pumped in through the worst kinds of PR excesses.

Everyone was swept up in the frenzy – vendors, agencies, even the most sober media outlets joined in celebrating the excess. Now it’s like waking up the morning after a night of dancing on the tables to “Hi-Ho Silver Lining”, and remembering you’re 37 years old and not really built for that kind of life any more.

B2B now decodes to “Back to Basics” – for tech companies and their agencies alike. A winning business model and a SuperBowl ad do not a dream IPO make. The market expects revenue, profits, and (here’s the rub) some clear idea of what you’re really in business to achieve – for the long term.

So in this more cautious, more conservative climate – what should your PR efforts focus on? Blowing thousands on the flashiest, best-catered event is not likely to impress these days. You’re more likely to alienate your customers, irritate your shareholders and completely underwhelm the hardened media who’ve seen it all before (only the other guys took them to Hawaii and had it catered by Alice Waters). How do you get your story across, when stunts, hype and tchotchkes just aren’t enough?

The first thing, of course, is to figure out what your story is.

It’s the single most important thing to do, in every aspect of communications: tell a story. This is so simple, so obvious; I’m almost embarrassed to even say it.

Doc Searls, influential senior editor at Linux Journal, had it right when he said: “Nothing is more interesting than a story. In fact, just about everything interesting is a story of some kind.” Yet so many tech companies forget this basic fact and continue to pepper the newswires with non-stories, in the vain hope of lifting their stock price out of the doldrums.

Remember: the main reason you write news releases is to get coverage, right? If you don’t have enough “news” to make for an interesting story in tomorrow’s paper, you should think long and hard about even issuing a release.

Most (surviving) tech vendors do have terrific stories to tell – but they often let the buzzwords and business-school speak get in the way and end up with nonsense. Even after the meltdown, tech journalists are still drowning in a jargon-salted sea of “e-business solutions”, “P2P exchanges” and “leading global innovators”. Fall into the trap of trying to tell your corporate story with these paper-thin terms and you might as well pump Novacaine straight into your audience’s brain stems – the dulling effect will be at least as pronounced.

News releases do not exist to make the company feel good about being at the cutting edge of business model innovation. The job is to inform, educate and interest an audience - whether that audience is from the media, investment, analyst, client or partner communities. If your news release gets the management team nodding in heated agreement that you've described your company's present reality and "willed future" in motivational, inspirational terms - well, great. But if no one outside the company can understand your story - all you've served is your own corporate ego.

This is a persistent challenge with many PR initiatives. I know exactly how it happens: everyone gets into a room, loaded with caffeine and sugar, and brainstorms the right things to say about the company. In the best cases, you end up with terrific rhetoric - full of strongly phrased, truly powerful statements, pared back to the minimum short form description to fit the limitations of the medium. In the worst cases, you end up with “end-to-end P2P e-business solutions portals”, or some such gibberish.

The problem is often that the context of the discussions and longer explanations end up left behind on the meeting room floor. Anyone reading the resulting news release, who doesn't have the context from working with the team in that room, is left trying to figure out what the strained language of the shorthand description means.

The purpose of marketing communications is to demonstrate that you fully understand and can clearly talk to your marketplace. You want the media to help as a vehicle to relay clear and powerful messages to your customers. You want the target audience to quickly “self-identify” from reading your coverage, and pick up the phone to find out more.

Get too clever with the jargon and you’ll mumble the story. Expose too many possibilities for alternative interpretations of what you mean, and your market will never cut through the confusion to find you.

To bring it right back to basics (and borrowing from Doc’s excellent and accurate observations again) all stories anchor around exactly three ingredients: character, problem and movement (towards a resolution). Or, put another way:

Who are you & who are your customers? (character)
What pain or opportunity do you address? (problem)
How do you make things better & what’s the benefit? (movement)

The best possible communications for any company should try to combine these elements in succinct, simply worded paragraphs.

One of the single most important, defining strengths that many tech companies have, of course, is their people – “character” in the most literal sense. In the new economy, Human Capital is the first most important thing about any organization. “Character”, in PR terms, is also where you define the nature, purpose, personality and behaviour of the company. Without spilling over into egotism, your PR efforts should celebrate these aspects. Give us human voices saying human things: that’s interesting.

Defining the “problem” is where you illustrate what's wrong with previous models of operation, or name the pain points of your target clients, such that they can easily see you’re talking about them and you understand their needs. “Movement”, of course, is your opportunity to trumpet your services in addressing the problem domain.

Start with these three elements in your news releases, ruthlessly trim the B-school flummery, and stop trying to claim you’re a “leader”, and you might start getting your story across.

Further to Greg Michetti’s inspired invective, below, railing against the excesses of high tech PR, he forwarded a terrific email he’d received in support of the original column. With permission, I’m reproducing the entire, brilliant screed here.

This rant comes courtesy of one Adam Cunningham, a fellow PR flack, whose career to date seems curiously similar to mine – started in life as a struggling thespian before flipping into the shiny world of high tech corporate communications. I’ve not had a chance to compose a decent reply to Adam’s terrific, witty, entertaining email yet (sorry mate – I’m working on it), but I can at least hold up his message to Greg as a shining example of at least one other PR professional who, to quote Adam again, refuses to “drink the kool-aid just because they’re told to”.

Here it be:

Hi Greg:

I just stumbled onto your column, and, as a high-tech PR person, I couldn’t agree with you more. The tortuous process of producing a press release has become a flagellation ritual in the high tech environment. It’s like companies can’t help themselves. It’s the high-tech equivalent of dark-ages bloodletting - a company is feeling run down? Sales depressed? Let’s go for the jar of leeches and devote massive time, energy and political capital to a vapid announcement - that will make us look like we have momentum!

And, although I don’t exonerate PR people, for many of us add to the problem with utter abandon - you’re right again when you point the finger at client companies - they wouldn’t hear of a press release that doesn’t describe them as an industry leader or anything less than revolutionary (have you ever seen a release that began, “UUU Company, Inc., the industry laggard in providing wireless solutions to multiple-location enterprises. . .”?). They hide the slimness of their differentiation, or the arcana of their technology, or the wing-and-a-prayer that’s really their technology platform, behind a few magic phrases and shibboleths that are supposed to evoke gravitas in a company just by uttering them. It’s frankly embarrassing that an industry so supposedly grounded in the sober process of building a new economy cheerily falls prey to vanity-inspired jargon that’s as capricious and cheesy as the ever-changing fashion in hemlines.

I’ve done positioning exercises with startups younger than Britney Spears’ breasts. I ask them to describe themselves, and, invariably it’s, “we’re the premiere provider of this,” or “we’re the best-of-breed that.” Really? How did you attain this lofty perch with no customers, no products and a shaky business plan? I swear, it’s like deprogramming a life-long cult member to get these folks to part with the “my-baby-really-WILL-be-president-someday” syndrome.

It’s a product, I think, of a number of things: the industry’s love of argot, the influence of simplicity-challenged engineers, one-upmanship that borders on the hysterical, the level of noise already in the pipeline, etc., and, of course, the vanity of more Silicon Valley denizens than you can shake an end-to-end, turnkey solution at. And, yes, the journalists contribute in their own way. From the mid-nineties until the Internet bubble burst, journalists were in the catbird seat, entertaining ever-more rabid attempts on the part of companies to get even a sliver of attention, and a few key influencers knew their decision to write about a company - or not to - could have a direct effect on that company’s fate. So it’s like a classroom full of second-graders. The teacher asks a question and you finally, finally know the answer. But everyone else’s hand is also raised in the room. How are you going to get the teacher to pick you? Make sure he or she knows your answer will be thought-leading, shift the paradigm, leverage the synergies created by your knowledge base and achieve mission-critical functionality with unprecedented speed and accuracy, of course.

I often expect to see a company come to me saying, “Our product is completely different from the other 45 players in this niche. You see, they all change the way people live, work and play. We, on the other hand, change the way people work, live and play. Get it? Get it?” And they sit back and wait for the light bulb to go off in our heads.

Well, I’m waiting too. Until then, Hamlet put it best when Polonius asked him what he was reading: “Words, words, words,” he replied.

Loverly. ROTFLMAO

I’ve never met Adam, but you just know I’m going to like him.

I wrote a similar, albeit more reserved diatribe for one of the marketing magazines recently, which I'll post here when I have a moment.

We picked up some free samples of this at a kids function at the local Y recently.

“Kids just CAN’T RESIST those crazy little noodles and tangy yellow broth”

Right.

Check out the ingredients:

“NOODLES (duh), SALT, CHICKEN FAT, HYDROLIZED PLANT PROTEIN, CORN STARCH, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL (MAY CONTAIN PALM OIL), MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE, DEHYDRATED MECHANICALLY SEPARATED COOKED CHICKEN (ee-yuw), ONION POWDER, FLABOUR, SPICES, DEHYDRATED PARSLEY, DISODIUM GUANYLATE, DISODIUM INOSINATE, AUTOLYZED YEAST EXTRACT, COLOUR, SEASONING AND TORULA YEAST.”

Guck, gick and more guck, indeed.

In particular: SALT? SALT!!

Am I overreacting to be so bothered by a product marketed chiefly at kids that has SALT as one of the primary ingredients? Makes a change from sugar, I suppose, but still…

Don’t you wish they’d at least come clean and name the vile sludge appropriately: “Lipton Salty Noodles In Fat”. Or “Salt With A Hint Of Chicken”.

I tasted it. My face actually, literally turned inside out. I am not kidding.

Front of the packet says: “Happy Lunch Guaranteed”. Perhaps they could add: “Dehydrated toddlers gagging for juice guaranteed.”

“Peeling your kids down off the ceiling guaranteed”

*phweef*

Gag me with a soup spoon.

I wanna be sedated

This is sad news. Joey Ramone is dead, at 49 years old.

I remember first hearing these guys at the tender age of 13. At first I thought it was complete junk, then I realised: of course! the very fact that it was junk was the entire point.

The opening chords of "Rockaway Beach" are my aroma of madeleines - viffing me back through rich strata of memory to some of the best moments of school and college. I still cherish my old 12" copy of "Road to Ruin". Banana yellow vinyl - most appropriate.

Wish I still had some rip-kneed Levi's and Ray Bans to wear in mourning...

I know just how he feels

The inimitable Greg Michetti - one of Canada's most entertaining tech writers - has the right attitude about the hollow, absurd rhetoric of the typical corporate news release. He vents in style, with some great examples, here: "Stop the press release insanity!!!"

Good, if biased, piece on Thomas Bayes - unwitting 18th Century father of much of the KM industry:

"Centuries-Old Scribble Sparks Computer Revolution"

Steps to a balanced existence.

Today:

Up early with the kids.
Drank a large glass of filtered water, followed by fresh orange juice with a big spoonful of flax oil.
Downed a small handful of Greens capsules - concentrated veggies, minerals, algae and other weirdness.
20 minutes light Tai Chi in the early morning sunlight streaming through the french doors.
Cooked breakfast for Charlie & Lily - fresh baked croissants.
Shower...
Then devoted most of the rest of the day to loading up on barbecue, heavyweight "Unibroue" Belgian-style beers, coffee and chocolate, chocolate, CHOCOLATE!!!
*burp*
Reading to the kids, then playing Animal Families card game with Charlie after Lily's bedtime.

Bloated but centred, dammit.

**UPDATE - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED**

Thanks to all that responded to this afternoon's plea for help. Job done.

The indomitable Chris Locke came through with the straight scoop - helped me close the connection with the Cisco dude responsible for bringing Blogger into their corporate intranet.

One happy journalist friend. One very happy Michael. Thanks Chris :-)

Where traditional approaches fail, where corporate PR departments let you down: the power of RageBoy wins through every time.

**URGENT – MEDIA LEADS NEEDED**

OK, blogfans – we need your help.

I've turned a journalist friend on to the blogging vibe. Got her and her husband hooked on the whole thing, reading both my own blog and many others too.

She's sold the idea to the editors at one of Canada's better print publications. (Strange that the blogging art has been fairly well covered in the US, but zip in the Canadian media to date). So - she's now writing a piece about blogging and is looking for leads from the corporate world.

Her particular angle is to explore how Blogger, and technologies like it, can be used to support Cluetrain-stlye theses of employee collaboration. She thinks (and I hope she's right) that blogging is close to the tipping point: about to spill over from popular personal web tool into widely-deployed corporate intranet use.

This follows a line from Ford, et al, giving PCs with web access to all employees, then giving everyone their own personal intranet "About Me" page. Is the next logical progression to sanction widescale bloggery within and, one hopes, without the firewall?

We’ve uncovered a number of references to Cisco licensing the Enterprise Blogger technology for intranet use. If this is so, is there anyone out there who would be happy to talk to a journalist? We’ve tried going through corporate PR at Cisco and have hit a brick wall, alas.

If not Cisco - do you know if there's someone, anyone using Blogger, Manila or whatever in a corporate intranet environment who we could talk to?

Or how about a senior technology exec who blogs outside their day job, and would be willing to talk about it?

Or yourself - what are your views on the future of blogging as a corporate collaboration tool - would you like to talk about this? Maybe you are the source we’re looking for.

The bad news: we've tried a lot of different leads here, so far to no avail. The deadline is closing down on us - she has to file this by Friday, the 13th, first thing. She's a very experienced, tenured journalist, BTW. Knows her stuff and writes good, crisp, interesting pieces.

If there's any leads you can give me I'd be very, very grateful. As I gave my friend the idea in the first place, I feel accountable now to help her complete the story.

Now is the time for all good bloggers to come to the aid of the continuing global blogfest.

Email me at the usual: michaelocc AT sympatico DOT ca.

Ta muchly,

Michael

I had a half-baked idea to write a lengthy piece for SFM - kind of a “when memes collide” thing, interweaving Cluetrain with Blue’s Clues. Then I realised, of course, that this wouldn’t have been either particularly witty or remotely interesting. Ah well, it was nearly an idea.

95 Theses:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. We need to find a paw print.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Bow Buh-wah Wuh Wow.
5. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
6. You can do anything that you wanna do.

That kind of thing. Told you it wasn’t funny.

Matt deserves better than this, particularly after SFM led to my most recent Web ego-trip, getting picked up by E*Prairie, the “Midwest Technology Business News” zine, no less.

Now it’s time for so long…

Had a nice message a couple of days back from someone who signed themselves “inu inu” and ended their flattering email with a link to http://feralliving.blogspot.com, which I’m assuming is this bloke’s blog.

Whoever’s responsible for it, there’s some smart and spiffy stuff up there. Including the “Chaos Coefficient Calculator”, which I loved. You enter the number of pets and family members in your household, it calculates your Chaos Coefficient - the amount of nuttyfunstuff in your daily life.

Mine is 729 – counting Sausage, the bairns, Nozzle the World’s Biggest Cat and an approximate tally for the sea monkeys (they count as pets, don’t they?). Seems remarkably low.

However, soon as I add in parents, siblings, sibling offspring, and immediate in-laws, the number jumps to 6.878229928704558e+31.

I was tempted to give the calculator one more run, this time including all of the many aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, great aunts, third cousins twice removed's sister’s next-door neighbour’s stick insect’s friend-of-a-friend’s priest’s delivery boy’s uncle’s plumber’s housekeeper's chicken's vet. The full extended Irish family thing. But the bloke who keeps the blog at this site seems like a nice enough chap and probably doesn’t deserve to have his calculator melted.

BTW: when I first read the URL for this blog, I glossed the second “L” in the middle, and heard it in my head as “Fer a living”. I had high hopes before the site loaded that I’d find stories from one who blogs “fer a living”. Now there’s a neat job.

Wish some one would pay me to do that.

David had a mini-bogus contest going on about this kind of URL trap, way back whenever in JOHO.

On the subject of generally illegal things, there’s a terrific, detailed piece at Marshall Brain’s How Stuff Works, that’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the science of lock-picking. Tip o’ the balaclava to Geekpress for pointing to this one.

One of the things I do as part of my real world life is media training – teaching people at tech companies how to improve their chances of giving their best possible performance every time they get in front of the media.

We cover a lot of ground in these sessions: how various the media work, what journalists look for, what makes a good story, differences between the structure of print and broadcast news stories, the important differences between news and feature coverage, what public relations is all about and how to use an agency…lots of good stuff.

I always try to use real examples and anecdotes to illustrate points in these sessions. Couple of days ago I used the story of the United Airlines seat safety card as an example to illustrate a point about poor, value-free communications. No one in the room had ever heard this story before, yet I’m sure that I’m neither the first nor the only person to have choked on this one. I checked around the office and no one else seemed familiar with this example either.

I still have a liberated United Airlines 737 safety card in my briefcase – back when I used to speak at conferences a lot, I’d often use it as an example of how the corporate communications office can get in the way of communications. Came in handy to get a laugh when the demo crashed onstage at Upside's Showcase a few years back (this particular ignominy still appears to be available online, thank you ZDbloodyNet - you can take it down now).

So anyway, here’s the scoop:

In fairly large print, at the top of the safety card (in seven languages, no less) is the legend:

“If you are sitting in an exit row and you cannot understand this card or cannot see well enough to follow these instructions, please tell a crew member.”

No, I’m not making this up.

As if this worse-than-useless drivel wasn’t bad enough, they hammer the stupidity home further down the page. You’re instructed to: “Please ask to be reseated if you: (amongst a list of other things) Do not understand the instructions in this brochure.”

OK, my head hurts already. But then the small print at the foot of the card tips over into insanity:

“Federal regulations require all passengers, regardless of where they are sitting or their physical condition, to review this card, for the safety.”

Er…so let me get this straight: if I can’t understand the card, I have to alert the crew. But I can’t understand the card. So I wouldn’t know that. And either way – whether I know to tell the crew or not, I’m still going to be in breach of federal regulations anyway. Because I can’t read the card. But I can’t tell you that. ’Cus I don’t know I’m supposed to. Which means I’m breaking the law.

Shoot me now, officer.

Of course, someone will no doubt point out that removing the card from the ’plane was also an offence. Sosueme. Could be worse. I could be a sad safety card collector.

Grateful thanks, btw, to Michel Benevento, writing from Amsterdam to point out the error in my blog that caused everything to go squirrely on me for the last couple of weeks.

Turns out the problem with the blog spilling over the edge of the screen was self-inflicted -- something incredibly stupid to do with a single line of text that was longer than the entire screen width, with no spaces. Nothing wrong with the HTML template at all, as it happens.

*Mighty, resounding forehead-smacking sound*

I’m totally embarrassed.

Long time no blog. Busy week, with birthday celebrations and much media training and general work stuff keeping me gainfully occupied.

Thanks to everyone who sent b'day greetings, btw. Figured out that by the time Charlie (currently 3 and 3/4) is the same age as I am now, my age will be a palindrome of his. If you see what I mean.

And so to bed...

Catching up on the weekend's book review pages, stumbled on this nice piece by Kevin Chong in the Post - a review of book reviewers and their often lazy approach to reviewing. Entertaining, and knitted together out of lovely, luminous sentences like this: "...As most books fall somwhere betwen life-altering and fish-wrapping, it is not hard to find positives and accentuate them."

Kevin sounds like a smart guy. He has a first novel coming out soon - looking forward to it.

OK - I admit to abject HTML defeat here.

Can someone please tell me what's going on with my template? I can't get it to keep the text within the visible screen limits - it keeps messing up somehow and spewing everything out the sides. This is a real pain to read or print.

I've posted a few messages to the discussion boards at the Blogger main page. Meanwhile, if anyone out there has a clue (I'm sure it's probably something really dumb and simple) I'd be eternally grateful.

TIA.

If this is part of my fifteen minutes, can I get a recount?

Delighted to report that Matt Herlihy's inspired and inspirational Sweet Fancy Moses site - a waggish ezine - just published one of my more loopy pieces, here.

This site bills itself as the “online journal of wit”. Clearly, in choosing to publish my material, they’ve proven themselves half right.

Precis: 90% of all high-tech marketing is an afterthought – something that kicks in only once the plan to build a product is already cast into stone. In fact, many high tech companies throw the marketing switch only after the product is already built. This is one of the reasons so many product ideas end up gathering dust in the great Fry's remainder bins of life…

A typical course of events in a tech company looks something like this:

- Someone (often a switched-on geek) gets a cool idea for a new product or new product feature.
- The idea sells internally, the product gets built.
- The company turns around and tries to find someone to buy the new product.
- Someone in management kicks the marketing drones into action: "Oi! Wake up and do some advertising or sumfing, willya?!" (for many high tech companies "advertising" is synonymous with "marketing").
- The marketing dept. realises that they have no idea if a market even exists for the new product, so they have to start down the whole path of "identifying the buyer", "building the message", "presenting the ROI", etc. etc.
- No one buys the darn thing, so they start working on version 2.0
- Lather, Rinse, Repeat...

This kind of behaviour would be absolutely unthinkable in any traditional marketing shop.

Imagine General Motors unveiling a new production car, based entirely on some R&D guy’s idea of "cool". It has three wheels, a joystick, runs on methane and is capable of doing over 300 mph.

Then no one buys it. Because no one bothered to check whether "the market" actually wanted a superfast, drive-by-wire, 3-wheeled roadster.

Of course – this would probably never happen. Bricks & mortar companies like GM still do masses and masses of traditional market research, requirements analysis, product planning, even focus groups (argh) – the full (real) marketing-before-the-fact kind of thing.

In the tech business, however, we all know that the pace of innovation is often the most important driving factor. "Time-to-market" is all – often regardless of whether or not a "market" actually exists. Frame the whole thing in "Internet Time" and the situation gets even worse. Time to market becomes almost moebian – disappearing up our own fundaments long before we’ve even shipped release 1.0.

BTW, I’m convinced this is why so many marketing pitches are so light on “benefits” and confuse feature-pitching with storytelling.

Think about it: how many completely clueless product presentations have you sat through, where Mr. or Ms. shiny product marketing person introduces a slide with: "Now, let’s look at some of the benefits of our solution" -- only to bring up a list of half a dozen tedious me-too technical features of the technology?

Moments like this always reduce me to a frothing, touretting maniac. The calmest response I can muster is to ask: "Yes, very interesting, but so c*#$!*%ing what?"

So your product can flip a zillion quantoflops a nanosecond - what does it do for me?
So you use a peer-to-peer collaboration model – how does that make my life easier?
So you offer XML-based remote administration - why would I need one of those, then?

For years, high-tech companies have been building products that really don't quite do what customers want them to do.

For years, these same companies have been desperately trying to market their almost-but-not-quite-useful ideas on the basis of retrospective identification of some perceived "need" in their target market. Build a product, then see if you can find someone who needs it.

Large sections of the industry, numerous “ground-breaking” products, entire technology categories have sprung forth fully formed out of a vacuum of zero market contact.

Want proof? Think of Lotus Notes. I mean: what a pile of pants. Really.

Pretty much the entire product plan for this thing was: “1-2-3 got us to the top of the dogpile, now build me another killer app”.

Magellan hadn’t done it for them (shame – cool product, ahead of its time, looking to fit a market need that didn’t quite exist yet). They needed a new strong revenue driver.

From what I recall of the whole kickstart (I attended the UK launch), when Notes first shipped, no one (Lotus included) had the faintest idea what the hell it really was and what in the name of arse anyone might need it for.

It was a perfect example of a "cool" idea that didn’t actually fit any existing need.

Not quite a 4GL, sort of like email, not quite workflow, kinda sortofa DMS. Fat, buggy, counter-intuitive and defying most by-then-accepted UI standards (like: right click to close a window, fercrissakes - I ask you).

But they got lucky. Almost accidentally, it seems, a few people at some of the top sys integrators and Big 6 (as there still were, back then) realised there was a huge services opportunity helping Global 2000 companies figure out what the feck Lotus Notes was all about.

E&Y and others signed big noisy deals for shedloads of Notes licences (their logic: “if we throw enough copies at our consultants and force them to start playing with it, maybe some of them will work out how we can make money out of it).

The rest is history.

Customers even got swept up in the giddy exhilaration of it all: signing enterprise license deals right in there alongside the sales guys, high-fiveing like crazy, pumped and energized by the sheer mad momentum of it all. Only to come abruptly to their senses several months into the implementation, when they realised they’d blown millions and squandered countless man hours building something nobody wants, no one can use, no one can support, no one even likes.

The Standish Group did some research into large scale software implementations a while back. Scary stuff: “31.1% of projects will be canceled before they ever get completed… 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimates."

What’s wrong with this picture?

Oh, and please – don’t start me on the whole “solutions” thing. Next time someone describes their latest widget as a “solution”, demand that they show you the problem.

In six words: What. Specifically. Does. Your. “Solution.” Solve?

Just try saying this to a software sales guy without tacking the thought "you greasy wanker" onto the end.

“Solutions”, in the mouths of the many-too-many hucksters, is a completely devalued word that simply means: “another clueless product with a nod in the direction of over-priced services, maybe wrapped up in an implementation methodology, if you’re really lucky.” Give me strength.

I’ve been in the meetings where these things get dreamed up:

"People aren’t buying enough of our product.

"We’ve done all the same things as our competitors: loaded the product with pointless features, made sure that it bloats out once installed to consume all available resources, introduced enough bugs to keep the maintenance revenue rolling for years – but still we’re not shipping enough.

"People can’t figure out why they need our product or work out how to justify the expense to the higher-ups.

"Ergo: we need a professional services team and a bunch of implementation partners to build solutions".

It’s at this point that someone inevitably mentions Geoffrey Moore and the whole thing really starts to go pear-shaped.

And oh yeah – ”software maintenance”, that’s another good one. Incompetence tax.

“Our stuff’s rubbish, please pay us two year’s cretin insurance, in advance, so we can hire some decent people to fix it.”

OK, calm down. So, there are exceptions, of course.

Some software products are still designed, from scratch, with a reasonable idea of what the market wants or what gaps in other products exist that REALLY need to be filled. These are often the products built by the users, with the users, for the users.

Some products even work. Really well. Many of the best products on the market have come directly from engineers with no market input.

The problem is it takes a ratio of about 1500:1 to get that single great idea.

The remaining 1499 are just so shamefully, woefully bad, the industry should stand in the corner with its head down for the next 30 years.

OK. So. Lot’s of energetic invective – but do I have any answers?

Going back to The Standish Group thing, the most telling section in their research was the analysis of why software projects so often fail. The top two failure factors were: “lack of user input” and “incomplete requirements & specifications”.

In other words, a lot of software is junk simply because it doesn’t do what people want and the people developing it are kept too far away from any ability to understand what they should be building.

In the last two years we’ve seen entire companies built like this -- conceived with no realistic understanding of specific user requirements and little connection to what the market actually wants or needs.

The stem of the problem is simply the lack of involvement of customers in the early stages of requirements gathering & system planning. This is real Product Marketing 101, for goodness sake.

Requirements, baby – it’s all about requirements. Here's a clue (sit up there at the back, this is the money shot):

If something is not required, don’t build it. If you know what users require – build that.

“If you build it, they will come” simply doesn’t work in the real world.

Closer to the truth, in many cases, is: “If you build it, no one will show up unless they really need it (even if it’s funky as all heck)”.

I could go on in this vein for many pages more, but even I’m starting to tire of the rather shrill tone of this piece.

Just please, do me a favour: next time you get a great idea to build a new product – stop.

Go out into the world first. Find some people who do something for a living beyond “use software”. Talk to them. Ask them what they actually need to make their specific jobs easier.

In the old days, this would have been called “market research”.

That is: not collecting analyst numbers on the size of the “market” in revenue or seat counts, or shifting yerselves ever north-eastwards through some vapid magic quadrant, but rather actual research into whether or not a market exists for an idea. It may seem like a great idea, but does anyone actually need it? Apply some marketing aforethought.

If you find something people want, by all means build it. Build it well, and keep checking that your engineers and customers are communicating without too many translation layers. You need to reality check user requirements of course, but you also need to make sure that genuine human requirements can actually make it into the products you create.

Then we might actually start to see things that resemble “solutions” to some of the problems we've created for ourselves.