Customer service – You’ve been Zappos’d

When I first ordered from Zappos.com and they screwed up with the packaging, craming a $200+ dollar jacket in a shoe box, so much so I had to have it professionally steamed to get the creases out, I was prepared to forgive them. After another order they put me on their VIP list, free shipping both ways[read shipping included in the price, since they are anything but cheap.] Zappos is an Amazon.com business.

My 3rd order was for some shoes, I ordered a 12, they shipped an 8. I returned them free, instead of a refund, I got a credit note. I’d have happily accepted the right size, but they didn’t have them. I did do at least one more order, but have backed off recently.

Then late last week I got an email telling me they’d been hacked, some of my data and my password had been compromised, they’d reset my password and I should logon and change it. So I tried. Their system responded “”We are so sorry, we are currently not accepting international traffic. If you have any questions please email us at help@zappos.com”.

Here is my summary email sent back to them today. What’s clear is that their customer service, average under normal circumstances, is less than what I’d expect, VIP or not.

“No wonder you got hacked. Let recap, please read carefully…

1. You got hacked
2. You write to me telling me to change my password
3. Your system won’t let me change my password because I’m overseas attending my father’s funeral.
4. I ask you to remove my account and ALL my data
5. You write back telling me to change my password
6. I write back telling you that wasn’t what I asked, and to delete my account and remove all my data
7. You write back telling me to deactivate my own account
8. I can’t. See #3
9. I write this email back pointing out how useless you are.”

Simplicity – It’s a confidence trick

My friend, foil and friendly adversary James Governor posted an blog entry today entitled “What if IBM Software Got Simple?“

It’s an interesting and appealing topic. It was in some respects what got in our way last year, it was also what was behind the 1999 IBM Autonomic computing initiative, lets just make things that work. It’s simple to blame the architects and engineers for complexity, and James is bang-on when he says “When I have spoken to IBM Distinguished Engineers and senior managers in the past they have tended to believe that complexity could be abstracted”.

There are two things at play here, both apply equally to many companies, especially in the systems management space, but also in the established software marketplace. I’m sure James knows this, or at least had it explained. If not, let me have a go.

On Complexity

Yes, in the past software had to be complex. It was widely used and installed on hundreds of thousands of computers, often as much as ten years older than the current range of hardware. It was used by customers who had grown up over decades with specific needs, specific tools and specific ways of doing things. Software had to be upgraded pretty much non-disruptively, even at release and version boundaries you pretty much had to continue to support most if not all of the old interfaces, applications, internal data formats and API’s.

If you didn’t you had a revolt on your hands in your own customer base. I can cite a few outstanding examples of where the software provider misunderstood this and learn an important lesson both times, I would also go as far as far as to suggest, the product release marked the beginning of the end. VM/SP R5 where IBM introduced a new, non-compatible, non-customer lead UI; VM/XA Migration Aid, where IBM introduced a new, non-compatible CMS lightweight VM OS; and of course, from the X86 world, Microsoft Vista.

For those products a descision was taken at some point in the design to be non-compatible, drop old interfaces or deliberately break them to support the new function or architecture. This is one example where change brings complexity, the other is where you chose to remain compatible, and carry the old interfaces and API’s. This means that everything from the progamming interface, to the tools, compilers, debuggers etc. now has to support either two versions of the same thing, or one version that performs differently.

Either way, when asked to solve a problem introduced by these changes over a number of years, the only real option is to abstract. As I’ve said here many times, automating complexity doesn’t make things simple, it simply makes them more complex,.

On Simplicity

Simplicity is easy when you have nothing. Get two sticks, rub them together and you have a fire. It’s not so easy when you’ve spent 25-years designing and building a nuclear power station. What do I need to start a fire?

Simplicity is a confidence trick. Know your customers, know your market, ask for what it will take to satisfy both, and stick to this. The less confident your are about either, the more scope creep you’ll get, the less specific you’ll be about pretty much every phase of the architecture, the design and ultimately the product. In the cloud software business this is less of an issue, you don’t have releases per se. You roll out function and even if you are not in “google perpetual beta mode” you don’t really have customers on back releases of your product, and you are mostly not waiting for them to upgrade.

If you have a public API you have to protect and migrate that, but otherwise you take care of the customers data, and as you push out new function, they come with you. Since they don’t have to do anything, and for many of the web 2.0 sites we’ve all become used to, don’t have any choice or advance notice, it’s mostly no big deal. However, there is still a requirement that someone that has to know the customer, and know what they want. In the web 2.0 world that’s still the purview of a small cadre of top talent, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Williams, Page, Schmidt, Brin et al.

The same isn’t true for those old world companies, mine included. There are powerful groups and executives who have a vested interest in what and how products are designed, architected and delivered.  They know their customers, their markets and what it will takes to make them. This is how old school software was envisasaged, a legacy, a profit line, even a control point.

The alternative to complexity is to stop and either start over, or at least over multiple product cycles go back and take out all the complexity. This brings with-it a multi-year technical debt, and often a negative op-ex that ,most businesses and product managers are not prepared to carry. It’s simpler, easier and often quicker to acquire and abandon. In with the new, out with the old.

Happy New Year! I Need…

I need…

I had planned a long year end post that was around of all that happened in the past year, including some important updates on some of the software development that’s been going on here at Dell. Suffice to say the complexity of writing something that wouldn’t get me in trouble either for disclosing too much, or making it sound like finger pointing, which it wouldn’t have been, meant it never got written.

I had a great end of year Christmas trip back to the UK, the main reason for the trip was to get a new US Work visa, since my change of status, Permanent Residence aka Green card hadn’t been approved. After a few days in the West End dealing with that, I decamped to Islington and spent a few days out there including a great trip out to Stratford and the site of the 2012 Olympics. While in East London I caught this track a few times, called, I need – performed by Maverick Sabre who is now from Hackney, East London.

Maverick was of course one of our software project code names, the words made me laugh, “I need sunshine, I need Angels, I need something good and I need”. The irony won’t be lost. Enjoy.

The first Maverick Sabre album, Lonely are the brave, will be out Feb 6th, 2012.

openstack in Boston

Fidelity and Dell are hosting the the second in a series of Openstack User Group meetings in Boston on November 29th. They’ve been running in Austin for a while and they have been growing in size and scope on a monthly basis. The most recent, held at the Texas Ranch Start Up incubation center,  had standing room only.

The group were recognized by meetup for having over 100 members of our group. Here is link to meetup registration: http://www.meetup.com/Openstack-Boston/

Dell are looking to sponsor an Dallas in near future, and San Jose area early next year.

Are PDF’s where information goes to die?

An extract from the PSH Terminal 4 PDF map

Yesterday I wrote a rant on my triathlon, travel blog about an “information” problem I’d had at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, you can read it here. Really my point was simply with mobile and tablet devices, PDF’s are hugely restrictive platform for the display of information.

Since PDF’s cannot really be dynamically updated, and are almost always a copy of some information created and stored elsewhere, they are often overlooked when the information is updated. Now adobe are moving away flash for websites, it’s about time that websites abandoned PDF’s, especially for simple graphics like this. While there remains some justification to use them as vehicles to transfer facsimile or “exact” copies of documents, for the most part as a form of information display, the PDF is a place information goes to die.

Anyone home?

I got an email today that indirectly reminded me I hadn’t posted for a while and they wondered what I was upto. mea culpa.

Actually I’ve changed direction for a while and am busy working on a few “mobile” related projects. We’ve got an MRD that includes a mobile UI for our embedded management, but is lacking a few key features to make a compelling “use case“. So I’ve been digging around both trying to come up with some new IP, as well as getting all the ducks lined up to make this happen. Add to that a couple of pretty interesting corporate business development projects and the BAU stuff and thats where I’ve been.

I’ve had a few web pages bookmarked to share via a blog post when the time was right, that time appears to be now.

Dell AIM Integration Pack for Microsoft Opalis

The Integration Pack for Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) is an add-on for System Center Opalis that enables you to automate procedures and processes in the Dell AIM environment. This version of Dell AIM IP (v1.0) supports only Microsoft System Center Opalis 6.3 and works with AIM version 3.4.1 [Download here]

In The Press

Next up is an online interview with Sally Stephens, a colleague and VP, PG Enterprise Platform Marketing and some of our top guys in India. In the interview the discuss both cloud and virtualization and makes some important and interesting points. [Read here]

Amongst the coverage of our[Dell] FORCE10 acquisition, this is a useful summary of what I’ve not discussed over the past few months. Notably and most interesting is the inclusion, post acquisition, of FORCE10 into the vStart program. [Read here and here]

Dell vStart 50 – Start simple… stay that way

One thing I’ve think I’ve been fairly consistent about is taking the complexity out of IT. Seems to me that one of the big wins that people are getting from using public cloud based apps, systems, is that they are easy to get started with. PaaS, Saas etc. offer the options of quick deployments, not just flexible utilization deployment and elastic resource consumption.

Since it will be a very long time before cloud is the de facto deployment environment, and especially while virtualization continues to gain significant traction across the spectrum of businesses, I was delighted to see the formal announcement of the Dell vStart 50 which is a significant effort to deliver that same simplicity of deployment into small and mid-sized businesses.

We’d previously announced the Dell vStart 100, and Dell vStart 200 but they were firmly aimed at larger businesses looking into what’s become known as private cloud, and a virtualization fast start. It is a classic example of what we use to describe as a server consolidation solutions, with the pre-validated, pre-wired vStart system, which can integrate nto your existing infrastructure.

Apart from the smaller physical, logical and virtualized size of the Dell vStart 50, it continues the simplification thread, delivering a package  that delivers both servers, storage and switch configs. The Dell vStart 50 will be sold in two versions – vStart 50m with support for Microsoft Hyper-V, and vStart 50v with support for VMware ESXi. The main dell.com web page for additional information is http://dell.com/vstart

Windows 8 and is change ever good?

The tech sector thrives on change, it is what lets the next generation discover the mistakes of older generation, except in a new context. It is also why there are still thousands of new patents every year, same invention different context and use. People in all walks seem to be afraid of change, just recently the South Congress merchants association fought the city of Austin as they felt it would harm their businesses, drivers complained as it changed the “user interface”. Yet a month or so on and it seems to be working perfectly.

And so it’s no surprise to find Microsoft having to re-assure people over the upcoming UI change in Windows 8. This reminds me of almost every other big change, making sure people know you have not forgotten or overlooked what is important for them.

And so it will be with Windows 8. I had a version of the metro UI installed for a while, but I never really got to use it much. None of my apps exploited it, I never really put in any time to learn how to operate it, with a mouse since I don’t have a touchscreen laptop, well apparently thats the same as Mary-Jo. Introducing new interfaces, either user or programming, is always problematical. Ultimately something will end up going into “sustaining mode” and become pure cost to maintain compatibility. The only question is which it will be, the new or the old?

And there’s the rub, maintain two entirely different and to a degree incompatible sets of interfaces, is an entirely different game. When they are on the same platform, even more so. The question is will there be enough benefit over time to drive PC users to use the new interface exploitation, or should Microsoft just gone with the new UI for the new platform/form factor tablets?

This is what Apple have done fabulously well on. Picking the form factor device and building around it. As I’ve posited a few times in the last week, Steve Jobs wasn’t the best innovator, he didn’t deliver any earth shattering new technology. What Apple did under his recent reign was to deliver on a set of previously established technologies, but deliver them in such a way that the user experience was as good as it could be, even when that meant forcing change.

An interesting question for all those change loving technologists, are we reaching a point where the technology is good enough, and getting it right is more important than changing it?

I guess that depends on what change is. I’ve nailed my colors to the mast pretty much, simplification isn’t change, removing complexity is one of the most important things we can do, and it is one of the biggest barriers to entry.

VM Master Class

As is the way, the older you get the more entangled your life becomes. My ex-Wife, Wendy Cathcart, nee Foster, died of cancer recently, such a waste, a fantastic, vibrant woman and great Mother to our children. After the funeral the kids were saying how they’d hardly got any video of her. I had on my shelf, unwatched for probably 10-years or more a stack of VCR tapes. I’d meant to do something with them, but never got around to it.

I put the tapes into Expressions in video here in Austin, they were ever so helpful and were able to go from UK PAL format VCR tapes to DVD, to MPEG-4. Two of the tapes contained the summary videos from the 1992 and 1993, IBM VM Master Class conferences. And, here’s were the entanglement comes in. Wendy never much got involved in my work, we went on many business trips together, one of the most memorable was driving from North London to Cannes in the South of France. I had a number of presentations to give, and the first one was after lunch on Monday, the first day. I went to do registration and other related stuff Monday morning. I came back to the room to get the car keys and go and collect my overhead transparencies and handout copies from the car. Unfortunately for me, Wendy had set off in the car with a number of the other wives to go visit Nice, France and my slides and handouts were in the trunk/boot. D’oh.

Unlike this week where my twitter stream has been tweet bombed by #VMWorld, back in the 1980′s there were almost no VM conferences. IBM had held a couple of internal conferences, and the SHARE User group in the USA had a very active virtual machine group, there really wasn’t anything in Europe except 1-day user group meetings. My UK VM User Group, had been inspirational for me and I wanted to give something back and give other virtual machine systems programmers and administrators and chance to get together over an extended period, talk with each other, learn about the latest technologies and hear from some of the masters in the field.

And so it was that I worked through 1990 and 1991 with Paul Maceke to plan, and deliver the first ever VM Master Class. We held it at an IBM Education facility, La Hulpe, which was in a forest outside of Brussels, Belgium. As I recall, we had people met at the airport and bused them in in Sunday and the conference ran through Friday lunchtime, when we bused them back to the airport. Everything was done on site, meals, classes and hotel rooms. Back in the 1970′s and 1980′s in was required for computer systems to be represented by something iconic, for VM it was the bear. You can read why and almost everything else about the history of VM here on Melinda Varians web page, heck you can even get kindle format version of the history.

So, when it came to the Master Class we needed a bear related logo. Thats where Wendy came in. She drew the “graduate bear”, for which Paul got not only included in the folders, but also metal pins, what a star. Come the 1993 VM Master Class, Wendy did the artwork for the VM Bear and it’s Client/Server Cousin sitting on top of the world and as I remember, this time Paul actually got real soft toy bears. Thanks for all the great memories Wendy, the videos on youtube also remind me of many great people from the community, who came you name? Please feel free to add with comments here to avoid the Youtube comment minefield.

I’ll start with Dick Newson, and John Hartman, couldn’t be two different people, both totally innovative, great software developers and designers.

HTML5 and App stores, more…

This week we’ve seen Amazon launch their HTML5 Kindle “online” book reader, aka the Kindle cloud reader. Simon Phipps summed it up nicely on Computer Weekly here. David Gerwitz over on ZDNet also has a good perspective.

I most enjoyed Jonathan Eunice, from Illuminata, tweets. I hope Jonathan won’t mind me quoting them here:

• Not every app can be a web app. But many can. Dear Apple: Your toll collection booth for iOS devices is in danger.
• When Apple undermined Adobe Flash, it hid behind “openness” and “ensuring quality,” not “collecting the vig.”
• Instead of Flash, Apple pointed to HTML5. Now that HTML5 apps are here, Apple’s “only through our tollbooth!” requirement less viable.

Silicon Valley Engineering jobs – Engineering Technologist Distinguished Engineer at Dell

http://jobs.dell.com/silicon-valley/engineering/jobid1525994-engineering-technologist-distinguished-engineer-jobs hmm looks like we are getting serious about networking…

App Internet and the FT

Walled Gardens

former Colleague Simon Phipps reports on the FT(Financial Times) move to escape the app trap, that I discussed in my earlier App Internet post. Simon useful covers a number of points I didn’t get to, so it’s worth reading the full article here on ComputerWorld(UK).

This is a great example, they’ve clearly done a great job based on their web page feature list, but since I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, couldn’t try it out.

Simon makes an interesting point, that the FT is incurring some risk in that it is not “in” the app store, and therefore doesn’t get included in searches by users looking for solutions. This is another reason why app stores are just another variation of walled gardens. Jeff Atwood has a good summary of the arguments on why walled gardens are a bad thing here. In Jeffs 2007 blog, he says “we already have the world’s best public social networking tool right in front of us: it’s called the internet” and goes on to talk about publicly accessible web services in this instance rather than app stores.

One of the things that never really came to pass with SOA, was the idea of public directories. App stores, and their private catalogs, are directories, however they have a high price of entry as Simon points out. What we need now to encourage the move away from app stores is an HTML5 app store directory. It really is little more than an online shopping catalog for bookmarks. But it includes all the features and functions of walled garden app store catalogs, the only exception to which is the code itself. In place of the download link would be a launch, go, or run now button or link.

We’d only need a few simple, authorized REST based services to create, update, delete catalog entries, not another UDDI all encompassing effort, although it could learn from and perhaps adapt something like the UDDI Green Pages. This is way out of my space, anyone know if there are efforts in this area? @cote ? @Monkchips ? @webmink ?

OSGI and simplicty

from my conversation with James Governor after my flying visit to London for Dell Tech Camp, I’d known James was interested in OSGI from our conversations when it was an emerging technology and I was still at IBM; I hadn’t realized how much though until our recent discussion, and his blog entry for today, James quotes Kevin Cochrane, VP of marketing, CEM at Adobe. Kevin says of OSGI:

“There are 3 OSGi use cases relevant to customers:

1. updates. ie bug fixes to customer production systems. there is no need to bring them down.

2. extending new services. you might have 12 services, and a huge user community – you can still roll out extensions with no downtime.

3. discovery of new services. find a pre-packaged piece of code. browse, integrate and deploy.”

And yes, those are the key benefits that I can see us exploiting and delivering direct customer value through what they enable, rather than simply what they are. OSGI has many other “technical” benefits in the architecture and development space, but these three deliver the most value to the customer.

Image from @kkirk.com

Dell Tech Camp London wrap

Talking, Talking, Listening

I’ve been meaning to just say “hi” and thanks to everyone who stopped by Dell Tech Camp last week.

The picture shows the Design center team which included a complete cross section of our design team across Enterprise and Consumer groups. Tom, Scott and myself were there from Enterprise. I must admit, Tom and Scott outclassed me as they were from the h/w design side of the team and bought “things” along for touch and feel. If I’m going to do this again next year, I need to think through how we show off some of our software. Having a play penof inanimate objects and mock-ups works great for hardware.

The event itself was actually 3x separate events. A Customer event, a Press/Analyst event, and on the last evening, a Team Dell event. The good news about being the software guy, no parts or demo’s to break down when it was all over. Over in the Virtualization zone, they had our delivered stuff covered, they had a pre-release version of vStart, our all in one rack based virtualization solution; Running on it was a virtualization stack from our partners, and DELL Advanced Infrastructure Manager(AIM), plus a number of other simulated software demos.

Each of the “events” were very different. For the customer events I got to talk to some great folks about what they are doing, where they are with virtualization, perhaps the most interesting was with the folks from a UK Government agency who didn’t use virtualization at all. We had a great discussion about how they could gain greater flexibility and optimization while not compromising on their important data analysis mission.

Now I remember how I dislike standing up all day

The Press/Analyst briefing was more formal, the Dell AR had grouped the attendees into interest groups, and they were cycled through every 45-mins. I had some great discussions with the guys from the451 Group and IDC as well as a number of others on our use of agile, some of the technology selection and challenges in working towards being more visible(as opposed to embedded) software company. We also talked about how we were approaching some of the complicated issues in the automation and orchestration of work to deploy and manage multiple hypervisors and physical servers and storage.

I had a frantic last day, up early and run in Regents Park, shower, pack, check-out and hoped on the London Underground over to Liverpool St station to meet and have coffee with James Governor of Redmonk aka Monkchips. James had been at Dell Tech Camp, we acknowledged each other across a briefing and left the catch-up for today. As always our discussions ricochet’d all over the place, but as always around our common interests, data center efficiency and complexity vs simplicity. Then it was back on the Underground, pick-up my case from the the hotel, Underground, Paddington Express and then the familiarity and comfort of the AA Flagship lounge and AA service back to Austin.

It was great meeting folks again, either to argue the pro’s and con’s of what we were doing, or to hear what they were doing. I’d forgotten though how hard work being a “booth babe” was, and how my lower back hates me for it.

Dell Tech Camp Europe 2011

I’m looking forward to heading to London, specifically to the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm for next weeks Dell Tech Camp. The event is invite only for customers, Press and Analysts, but at least according to the briefing I got yesterday is jammed and for the opening session the Dell employees will have to watch from an adjacent room.

Tom Garvens a Director from the Dell Server hardware design group and I will be in be in the design lab section of Tech Camp to talk about innovation, our approach to design for both software and hardware. We’ll have some examples of what we’ve been working on, both past, present and future.

If you are coming please come find us and say hello. I can’t promise it will be as exciting as the last time I was at the Roundhouse, and I certainly won’t be getting wet to entertain…