Category Archives: rants

The Dumbest Conversation I’ve Ever Had

When SI reviews a product, SI insists on a demo. It’s very simple. If you can’t show me a demo, then I have nothing to say. I’m not interested in your PowerPoints or your opinions about the marketplace or your scuttlebutt about your competitors. I have one question, and one question only: Where’s the Beef?

Two days ago, one of the largest independent vendors in our space offered to provide a demo so that SI could cover them. Then, yesterday, they insisted on an NDA. This is the second time I’ve had this conversation in a month. And I’m as dumbfounded now as I was last month.

As per the FAQ, SI will not cover any company that insists on an NDA. Please don’t tell us any corporate secrets, we don’t want to know them. What good are corporate secrets if they are revealed under an NDA and they cannot be written about? Furthermore, SI has no interest in them. SI is not a gossip column that hints around at this or that. That’s why SI can’t be manipulated by marketing people. We don’t care what you have coming next month or next year, unless it can be written about. We’re not going to “hint around” that we “know something important” about your product line or your future plans. That’s not what we do here. You can go to dozens of other sites for that.

At SI we are into reality, not fantasy. And in the real world a company’s released products are not corporate secrets.They are in the public domain. Everyone sees them. Everyone uses them. I am no different than anyone else who has seen the product. How on earth am I supposed to write about your product if you tie me up with an NDA? It would be the dumbest conversation ever, and the most worthless article ever published on SI. Not that worthless articles aren’t published daily on dozens and dozens of other sites, but as I said, you can go to those other sites if you like worthless articles.

Forgive me, but I am deeply suspicious of any company that won’t demo their product to me. (And I’m glad to say that there aren’t many that have officially refused. In fact, to date, only four companies have officially refused. However, the four that have refused are four of the eight biggest companies in the space. And that is worrisome.) SI is not in the business of product bashing — and if you look at my past reviews of dozens upon dozens of solutions, if nothing else, this one fact should be abundantly clear. I have great respect for anyone or any company that brings a product to market. Having done it myself a few times (as I am not your average liberal-arts blogger with no other marketable skill, but a CS PhD who has designed, architected, implemented, and brought a number of e-Commerce and e-Sourcing platforms to market), I know for a fact that it is not easy to do that. No matter what you might hear, it never is.

Take me up on my challenge! Every review SI has ever done is archived on the blog. The majority are indexed in this post (which is updated a few times a year). If the product solves a problem in our space, it will be written that it solves a problem in our space. Any product that has made it to market that actually works and actually provides value is a product that somebody somewhere can use. It’s SI’s job to let that somebody know about it. That’s what we do here.

I can’t figure it out. What are these vendors afraid of?

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Sometimes You Just Have to Shoot the Sacred Cow

With apologies to our Hindu and Zoroastrian friends, sometimes the sacred cow needs to be put down. If it’s old, weak, limping, and in pain, it’s not slaughter, it’s mercy.

So how do you know when it’s time to shoot the sacred cow? How do you know when it’s beyond it’s prime and on a rapid decline? Simple. You monitor it’s health and give every cow an annual checkup. When it’s overall health level starts to drop dramatically, you know it’s time.

This goes for every cow in your organization — the performance cow, the promotion cow, and the payments cow in addition to the marketing, legal, and advisory cows. This is very important because performance that was good enough yesterday might not be good enough today, different skill sets will be needed by the managers of tomorrow, and if it takes 57 days to process a payment, that’s a problem, even if it is within your 60 day limit.

So, just like this recent HBR article on “tackling the obvious” points out, if you want to stay alive, you have to continually ask what is good performance, whom do you promote, and are you focussed on change … because your supply chain can’t stand still and survive.

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A Purdue Philosophy Degree — Literally Not Worth The Printed Paper

I found this recent article on Daily Finance on how “eBay halts indebted Purdue Grad’s diploma auction” very amusing. While I feel sorry for the alumnus, it strengthens my belief that a degree in the philosawfical isn’t worth the printed paper you hand over for the printed parchment in return. As per the article, the graduate said that his philosophy degree has not given him the means to earn enough income to cover his $470 per month obligations to Sallie Mae.

A degree is only an investment if it increases your income — and since most liberal arts degrees don’t lead to a job, these degrees are just expenses. So if you can’t afford them, i.e. if you can’t afford to flush the 30K, 50K, or 100K down the toilet that some institutions will charge you for the privilege of obtaining the degree, don’t borrow. It’ll only end in tears, as it did for one pour soul (referenced in a New York times article on May 29, 2010) who racked up 97K in debt getting degrees in religious and women’s studies.

This Is Gonna End Well … NOT!

As pointed out by Dick Locke in his post from earlier this week on More Headlines You Hate To See, this is an actual headline from DailyTech:

Foxconn Makes Employees Promise Not to Kill Themselves

FoxConn is asking all of its “colleagues” to sign a “health and wellness” letter that includes, in one of the numbered clauses, a statement that

I will not harm myself or others

in response to Apple’s demands to do something about the “suicide problem” in a factory that has seen almost fifteen suicides in recent months. (KokuGamer.com) I think the nets that Foxconn chairman Terry Gou plans to build around the dormitories are going to be more effecitive. (source)

After all, how are you going to reprimand a dead employee? Flail him? He’s already dead, moron.

Hopefully Apple and Dell can figure out what failed and force Foxconn to fix the problem. (source)

More Reasons the Cloud is Not a Fluffy Magic Box

Soon after I told you that the cloud is not a fluffy magic box, I found this great post over on an Information Week blog on “3 things that could kill the cloud” which points out some more sobering realities of the cloud, which is just really an abstraction of the multi-tenant SaaS model where one provider provides the software and another provides the infrastructure the software runs on. The article has some good points that should be taken into account before you decide that the cloud is the answer. (Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.)

  1. Scalability is not UnlimitedFirst of all, at any point in time, the infrastructure provider has a limited amount of hardware and bandwith available. When that is reached, you’re out of scalability until the provider ramps up. Furthermore, even if the provider ramps up, there’s still a practical limit dictated by the software. Most databases start to fail miserably when you get to the Terrabyte range. Most analytics applications fail miserably when you ask them to process millions of records in real time. Etc.
  2. Security is not AbsoluteThe cloud does not inherently provide more security as some vendors would have you believe. In fact, it might even provide less. In reality, the security of any platform comes down to the knowledge and vigilance of the provider’s people and how well they are at identifying potential holes, locking them down, and keeping up with patches. If the software vendor assumes a certain port will be locked down and the infrastructure provider leaves it open or if the hardware vendors assumes the software vendor will patch core applications and vice versa, security is weakened.
  3. Prices can be HigherWhile up front prices are quite cheap as you’re primarily paying for energy costs (to run and cool the CPUs) and bandwidth, and while the Cloud will be cheaper for small-scale applications, the reality is that for large scale, high-bandwidth, applications, the total costs can be more expensive than running your own data centre as most providers don’t yet have the scale and expertise to beat in-house costs. You have to do the analysis.
  4. Your application can disappear in a puff of smoke.Thanks to the Patriot act, if a drug dealer happens to be using the same multi-tenant provider, in the US the FBI can sweep in and seize *every* server in the data centre, regardless of what else is on the servers, shutting down the entire operation of the infrastructure provider for an unspecified time — like they did to Core IP Networks in April.

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