Most of the posts here have a technical spin, and well deservedly, but this one is a little different. This is my version of an open letter to the CEO of Starbucks and any other CEO out there who is messing with my daily life by putting the idea of “conquering the world”, over the needs of the people that will get them there — the consumer. So here goes my rant:
Dear Mr. Starbuck’s (aka Howard Schultz),
As a frequent patron of your fine establishment for many years, covering many locations in multiple states and multiple countries, I need to ask a personal favor. PLEASE stop messing with me, with the idea of me being anyone other than ‘big business’. See I live in Dallas, Texas and this past weekend I had the urge to actually forego my normal $5 cup o’ java at any of the 50 Starbucks within the 4 mile radius of my house and actually go to a local establishment that has some great beans. I wasn’t going for a cup, but I was going for an actual bag of beans that I might be able to take back to the house and brew a random cup of sissy coffee (the flavored coffees that actually make hair fall off your chest, rather than put it on there like the SENOMA blend from the aforementioned Starbucks). BTW, for you Dallas’er’s my preference for my random sissy coffee fix is a Cafe Brazil.
Location aside, I drive past the 50 Starbucks in route to the closest Cafe Brazil which is about 5 miles away. My coffee of choice is the ‘Snickerdoodle’, so I was thinking I will big bag it and get a pound, maybe two, to ensure my fix is completely covered. I walk in to the aroma o’ joy that comes along with a coffee house. To an addict of caffeine, it’s kind of like Vick’s to a cold! All employees eye me and my girlfriend as we smile our way to the counter. As we are walking up, something just isn’t right and we can tell immediately something is amiss. Where are the bean’s that all of the other locations have? Where are the grinders? Being sure they are in the back or on the other side of the restaurant, I say with confidence, I want the biggest bag of beans I can get my hands on. The response, without a bat of an eye, was “not here sir, Starbucks forbids it!” WHAT THE $!%$? Again, the CSR at the counter say Starbucks told the landlord that they forbid anyone else in the shopping square to sell Coffee Beans to- go and went as far to tell me that he could not even pour me a cup of the coffee in a to-go cup, as per this was also forbid by Starbucks. This disappointment was seen in both of our faces and the CSR could tell that tears may be near, so the obligatory ’sorry’ was thrown out with a ‘can we do anything to make this right’ comment?
This is unacceptable to me. As the loyal readers of theinnerlayer and all of the employees of Softlayer can attest, Caffeine in any form is like the blood through the veins of this company. Pound for pound, employee for employee, I would challenge the caffeine intake of Softlayer against any other company in the world. Pot after pot of, yes Starbuck’s, is brewed hourly, if not minutely. Literally, cases of Monster are brought in weekly to support the efforts here. With the new JAVA Monster, the numbers may just fly right off the charts. Hence, the frustration
Mr. Starbucks, as one of the founders here at Softlayer I can tell you that all of us think about dominating our segment of the world, planned for it and expect it. Surrounding myself with the smartest people I have ever been around gives me a comforting feeling that all of these goals will be achieved. With the support of these smart people I refer to, we all have a standing order internally that to get to our stated goals; the idea of alienating customers by self serving goals has to nipped in the bud. We are a services company to the masses which means we believe that natural competition is healthy and that continuing to strive to build the bigger, better solution, customers will always be the winner in the equation. If we believed that exclusionary practices and pure heavy weight domination was the proper way to win, we would have thrown our money that way, but the open market allows us to stay at the top of our game, remain cutting edge and push for innovation and automation that will allow us to grow our customer base because we have a better solution for the customer, not because we don’t allow the customer to have any other option. I/we may be a small fish in the pond so to speak, but I think you might be able to learn something from my statements. I’m off to get my fill of caffeine, but not sure Starbucks will be my first choice for the next short while.
Sincerely,
One un-caffeinated, unhappy customer
(Sean Charnock)
ISPCON Update: Blogging/Social Marketing Impact – Do ya Digg?
With ISPCON starting today I thought it would be interesting to hear what companies and individuals in the ISP space are talking about when it comes to social medias, blogging and any other real user experience methods that are taken to attain and retain a customer base in the ISP world. After all, Softlayer is a cousin (be it distant cousin) of the ISP world and most of our executive management team has all lived the ISP experience at one time in our careers.
The session “using social networking and Web 2.0 to market your business” started off with an extremely interesting video that can be seen here:
Since it was voted one of the more famous YouTube videos, I might be one of the only ones that had not seen it yet, but nevertheless it is a cool look at Web 2.0 (and much more).
There are a few key themes that were driven home during the discussion.
Web 2.0 in its simplest form is user-generated and manipulated content. In technical terms its AJAX, Feeds and Simplicity. The Myspace, Facebook and Youtube phenomenon are drivers of this and we are seeing a huge influx of follow-on companies that are utilizing the common theme of user-generated content to monetize applications throughout the internet. An example of this would be the Facebook open API being used to build gadgets. One gadget cited is a whiteboard application allowing multiple users to collaborate in Facebook and through ad-generated monetization, an obscene number of nearly $100,000USD per month was being attributed to the creator.
Blogging is the real Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Living in the world of Buzz words, it’s hard to read any tech publications these days without stumbling across SEO. What is it? Well, no one really knows, but it’s some magic that companies are buying into which get them to the front of the search line, so to speak. The concept that blogging is the real SEO is because blogging is very close and very niche to the topics that are being blogged about. If I am a used car dealership in Dallas and I blog about my weekend sale in Dallas, it would make sense that when someone searches for used cars in Dallas, that you cannot get more directly connected. It all makes sense, now it’s just how the information is dispersed which leads me to the last point that was driven home.
Tagging is critical to all socialization, blogging, and web 2.0 applications that you may be trying to publish for mass consumption. Since the eyeballs are critical it is key that the use of tagging and linking are used to increase the reach of your user generated-content. For example, the use of Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us are
key drivers of eyeballs to your content. Tag it all, Tag it often and the eyeballs will follow.
So, when I publish this blog I am sure to Tag it with; Softlayer, Webhosting, Web 2.0, etc. Let’s see if my social experiment will pay off and someone out there will Digg this!
What in the world is going on? There are people out there who are always determining that we must be labeled something. The Early 2000s was the dot.com era, then there was the bubble bursting era and it seems now that we live in the “Web 2.0 Era”. Whatever label is put on any era there are always head-scratchers out there who catch someone’s eye and this has definitely caught mine. In a recent article on webware.com, one of the brightest, high-flying Web 2.0 companies is now up for sale oneBay. Per the listing, these are the following attributes that make Xcellery an excellent Acquisition target (outside of the “buy on the cheap from ebay” thing):
The startup was ranked among the Top 5 at the Office 2.0 conference.
Approx. 10,000 subscriptions include paying customers on SalesForce.com/AppExchange
Huge waiting list for Xcellery Enterprise Edition (XEE) customers
State of the art technology: C#, ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX, MySQL/SQL server
Two years development time was invested to build Xcellery
Xcellery is integrated into SalesForce.com/AppExchange including a payment system with PayPal
www.xcellery.com has reached a PR five and is in the top three when searching for “Online Excel” and others
The founder team is interested to stay on board and help continue the venture
What this tells me is that no matter how technology changes our lives and how optimistic we are about conquering the world, underlying fundamentals of business are the key to any company’s success. We (Softlayer) host a tremendous number of web 2.0 firms and are excited to see the growth and opportunities that are presented to many of these companies. After all, our customers’ successes equate to a long-term relationship with us, so we are rooting for all of you.
So Web 2.0′ers, as we all set our sights for greatness, don’t forget — old school business-fundamentals drive a lot of the abilities for us to be innovative and ground breaking!
One of the broadest and most challenging topics in any company is capturing a customer’s full attention at all times. In its simplest form, this seems pretty easy. First, you address the market that you are vertically aligned with, such as finance, technology, manufacturing, etc. and then you establish what you want your user experience to be leveraging your knowledge of these markets and dedicated your full resources to marketing to that niche. As the internet changes the traditional marketing principles into this new “never never land” of instant feedback through forums, blogs, RSS feeds, etc. the landscape of the user experience is definitely changing.
So what happens when your markets cross all boundaries, have no verticals and can range from an individual to a fortune 10 company? How do you create an environment that captures a unique experience for the single man consulting shop, while maintaining a completely different, yet equally impressive, environment for a company outsourcing their internal IT infrastructure needs completely to you? Obviously, this is extremely challenging and it’s the position that we sit in daily here at SoftLayer.
The user experience really seems to be a philosophy that has to be adopted from top down in any organization. I found an older article that really seems to capture the essence of the user experience. In the article it talks about companies such as Dell, Amazon, Nordstrom’s, Jet Blue, etc. and it breaks down the user experience into 4 simple categories:
Comfortable
Intuitive
Consistent
Trustworthy
With these 4 categories in mind it has me thinking and challenging the entire SoftLayer team internally to think about how we fit into these. SoftLayer is largely comprised of engineering talent and, to no fault of theirs, they often keep there heads down for hrs/days/weeks at a time and look up time of project completion and forget that there is anything else going. It’s the nature of the business and our engineers and developers are world class, so I tread lightly on my ‘rock the boat’ comments, but it’s definitely a topic of conversation internally as we are constantly focused on enhancing the experience of SoftLayer for our customers.
The SoftLayer team has many stated goals when it comes to cutting edge technologies, changing the landscape of the dedicated hosting market, and really adapting and evolving our products and services to ensure that we meet the needs of all of our customers. Our customers are the driving force for enhancement here and we listen very clearly. We have been fortunate to have built such a tight knit community here which is something that we believe drives a difference between us and others in the marketplace.
As a continuous exercise I would like to reach out to you, the customer, and ask for feedback on items that you think could enhance the ‘user experience’ here. Much like the cliché about the CEO having an open door policy at work, I want to let everyone know that our doors are open and we want to hear what you have to say. Are we doing a good job in the four characteristics listed above? Do you have ideas/thoughts that you think can be globally impacting to us?
As always, bizdev@softlayer.com is an open line to share thoughts with me directly and the great part about my job is I am cross functional throughout the organization, so my lines goes from the top (Lance) through all of the groups be-it development, operations, sales, finance/accounting, etc. We are here to listen, so speak up!
The term “Digital Super-Highway” seems to be quite prophetic as the monetization of the internet seems to be exploding from all angles. Monetization of the internet is something that we are always focusing on here since a good portion of our customer base turns our underlying infrastructure into a revenue-generating engine for them, be it through Value Added Services, enablement of SaaS business models, e-commerce activities or whatever focus our customers have (which are too many to list).
I always knew the monies on the web were staggering, but I was caught off guard the other day when I came across an article in Business 2.0, “The Man Who Owns the Internet“. The article is about Kevin Ham, who has built a $300 Million Dollar portfolio of domain names. $100,000 for Greeting.com, and $31,000 for Christianrock.com and so on. He’s a domain name mogul.
In a technology world, this seems to be the “day-trading” of the internet. The other portion of this article that struck me is the monetization of the typographical errors in domains, referred to as “Typo Squatting”. We have all accidentally fat-fingered a key here or there and after closing the 85 pop-ups, the monies are moving like a slot machine with triple 7’s across the board. In an article referring to the monetization of Typo Squatting, companies have built multi-million dollar producing firms on capitalizing on a misspelling here, a lack of dash there, etc. Just for reference, it seems that www.softlater.com is already taken, which means my dream of typo squatting my way to retirement has taken a drastic turn.
With the tools we have put in place through the API and the private network we have really streamlined the enablement of the monetization of the internet, which when we talk to our customers it’s at the forefront of both of our minds. The successes of our customers ensure our success, so putting these tools in place are essential. Not to give away the secrets of others, but I have peeked into the private back-end network and seen things like credit card processing gateways, server to server data transfers, licensing gateways and numerous other activities that are surely streamlining the money making processes for our customers.
So I am not sure that when the term “Digital Super Highway” was coined that we ever thought there would be toll-booths along the way, but its clear that these are here to stay.
As a side note, if anyone is interested in sharing their monetization stories, feel free to drop me a line at bizdev@softlayer.com
I’m only kidding, but with the recent announcement for Microsoft’s Surface, total integration across product platforms has serious backing from within Microsoft, as evidenced by Bill Gates’ support. The idea behind “surface computing” is to capture all tangible applications that are data-driven and integrate them into a portal that allows cross-sharing no matter what the product is (a phone, a camera, a personal computer or whatever). The commonality of this all lies within centralization. As one analyst writes in a recent Business Week article:
“It will be at least a few years before a consumer will be able to buy a Surface Computer and bring it home. To get there, Microsoft will need to create an ecosystem where software developers are motivated to write must-have applications. ‘This thing is only cool if it works seamlessly,’ says Roger Kay, president of market research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates. ‘If it works well, it’s game-changing.’ Should those stars align, Kay says, sales could reach into the low billions of dollars in five years. ‘Individuals are going to want this much faster than Microsoft is going to be able to deliver it to them,’ he adds.”
When the team here at Softlayer started, we all had a very similar view as it pertained to the dedicated hosting and utility computing markets. With a tremendously successful track record behind us building companies spanning most everything internet-related, we looked at these markets with a simple question to answer—”How do we merge the physical layer with the virtual layer?” If we could answer this question, this would be our game-changing moment. After our recent announcement of the world’s first API in the dedicated web hosting environment, we are certain the game has changed. The API has certainly started to answer our simple question of merging the physical and virtual environments and now with the introduction of the SoftLayer Development Network, we have opened doors to what is sure to be some really exciting applications to come in the next few days, weeks, and months. Our Eco-System is now one that resides both internally at SoftLayer and with our customer-base. We feel we’ve just barely touched the “Surface.”
A few days ago Dell made a splash by telling the world they had established a partnership with Wal-Mart to sell their computers and other products throughout Wal-Mart’s 3,000 stores worldwide. This marks an interesting milestone in Dell’s corporate existence. Dell has always been acknowledged as an innovative and cutting edge company through their direct sales model which took a layer of distribution (in this case retail) out of the sales process and allowed customers to “have it their way”, so to speak.
With the competitiveness in the PC market and Dell’s admission of trailing behind the likes of HP and IBM, the motivation for this transition in their sales channel is clearly predicated on increasing overall volume to boost the market’s perception of their thriving company and the goal of being #1 worldwide in the PC market. Obviously, this has sparked a debate on their ability to maintain a differentiated strategy in the branding of “Dell”, which has generally been perceived as a higher quality because of their direct channel strategy.
In hearing the news of this new marriage between Dell and Wal-Mart it reminded me of an article that I ran across at fastcompany.com entitled “The man who said no to Wal-Mart” and it hit home with the story of Jim Wier, CEO of Simplicity (owner of Snapper Lawn Mowers) who was at a crux in his company’s life cycle where he would have to choose a path that would shape the course of his company going forward. Was he going to choose a path of high volume, low margins products or high quality and sustained margins product sets at levels that his company needed to maintain its proper corporate health? To the surprise of many, including Wal-Mart, Mr. Wier respectfully choose the path that many others had not in the past — the one without Wal-Mart. Although two unique industries here with technology and durable consumer goods, the thoughts have to be the same in the minds of both management teams. It’s a fascinating article and I would encourage anyone who runs a business that struggles with pricing and volume levels to read.
There is no doubt Dell has been one of the most influential companies of the last 20 years in the technology industry and their management teams, through addition and attrition, have paved the way for tremendous success both financially and technologically over those years. Not many other companies have the ability to coin a phrase such as “Dellionaire“. With this shift, I trust the powers that be have thought long and hard regarding the pros and cons of the retail markets, primarily in the retail technology sectors. If volume is what they want, then volume is what they are likely to receive. The real question lies in “at what price?” and which of these two corporate giants has a bigger muscle to flex in the room, Dell or Wal-Mart?
