Smoke and Mirrors

So I might as well reference something from salesforcewatch.com again.

Check out their implementation of a system status page.

Cool, and clean IMO.

Remember this?

Now check this out: Siebel CTO joins Salesforce.com.

(courtesy of Salesforcewatch.com)

This was a conversation with one of our developers. Let’s call him “rAndy” to protect his name.

Dev: Hey Rick, I have a simple solution to this problem. It would only take me a few minutes.
Rick: Could you add this one thing on it? The client needs to access it this way.
Dev: Ok I’ll check.
[10 mins pass]
Dev: Can I rebuild the ark? Noah did it and it only took him a couple years, what with gathering up all the animals and what-not.
Rick: Uh, what?
Dev: I want to redesign this thing. See it’s written all wrong.
Rick: Uh, what?
Dev: It would be simple, I’ve already got it all mapped out.
Rick: Uh, maybe next year. Can you check on the simple solution?
Dev: Aw, do I hafta?
Rick: Yes. Can you just check on this one thing? I know it doesn’t work now - how hard would it be to change.
Dev: Wha?
Rick: I wrote the code, I know it’s in there.
Dev: Show me.
Rick: Ok here it is.
Dev: Ok. Looking at it now.
[5 minutes pass]
Dev: I figured it out. It doesn’t work that way now.
Rick: I knew that already. HOW HARD WOULD IT BE TO CHANGE.
[10 minutes pass]
Dev: Real hard. Sorry, no way we can do that.

For the love of Pete! If this change is hard, how hard would his redesign have been

Blue Nile | InternetStockBlog.com:

Second, during December, we saw extremely aggressive increases in the cost of online advertising. Our cost per click on Google, for example, rose by over 50% from a year earlier.

Does this point to weakness in search marketing in general, or just weakness in marketing high ASP items online? I suspect a little of both. Earlier in the call, the CEO mentioned that jewelry had a bad Q4 online. So which is it?

Our marketing efforts during the fourth quarter were skewed toward search engine advertising. Given our experience over the past few years with paid search, this seemed like a prudent decision entering the quarter. However, with increased costs for paid search in Q4, we were unable to drive as much profitable traffic as we would have expected.

This one is really interesting. The CEO views search as a worthwhile core competency to develop rather than hire an agency. This is an important trend I think. eBay, for example, has been making similar decisions. To me, this means that folks in the SEO/SEM space that are providing technology solutions have a brighter future than folks who are just providing “bodies that bid on keywords”.

As far as the first part of the question, we don’t use an agency; we do all of our own work on search. We’ve used agencies in the past, and overtime we’ve just built that capability up in-house. We feel it’s strategically an important thing to have in-house. So we have, both on the marketing side and the technology side, resources dedicated to analyzing and bidding for online keywords. And we will continue to play in that market.

Here’s a very interesting datapoint (IMO) about the international search market. Still really really early to call this one on the paid search side. This might indicate a lot of revenue upside at Google and the other players in years to come.

We do very, very little today in search internationally. Our website in the UK, we are quite happy with our website in the UK, by the way. It has got just a trickle of traffic coming into it, but it’s converting very, very well and it has been scaling. Again, it’s a relatively small base, and you can put out very large growth numbers when you’ve got a small base of sales. But we are very happy with how that has been happening. As far as competition, I think, as you get into some of the markets outside of the US, there’s almost no competition. And that’s one of the reasons we are in the UK trying to build that business. And I look back at 2005, and potentially in 2005, it was even early for us to go international.

I spent some time on Sunday trying to convert a Powerpoint to a Flash file for free.

My lesson: don’t bother! It was a huge pain and none of the software I tried worked very well.

The closest I got was using OpenOffice.org’s Impress product, which can read in PPT and output some limited Flash. Hmm.

No big deal I guess.

Conversation with Salesforce.com VP of Development Regarding Recent Outage | BillBither.com

I find it somewhat hard to believe that Salesforce.com has only one datacenter and are just building their backup now.

One thing he says which I don’t necessarily believe:

On the question of whether On Demand CRM software is the best thing for small software companies, I think that still remains open for debate.

If the alternative for a small company is to install some huge bulky software they will have to maintan themselves, I think on-demand is definitely a better option for most small businesses.

QUOTED OFTEN, FOLLOWED RARELY - December 12, 2005

Fred Brooks interview. This is great, particularly this section which I think I will frame and put in my cube:

What advice would you give to one of those young managers?

The best single advice … “Never uncertain, always open.” Sometimes the first part is put as saying, “You can’t steer a ship that’s not underway.” … sitting still in the water waiting to decide which way to go is the wrong thing to do.

The other was when I was a new IBM employee and heard Vin Learson, a VP …, “The problem is not to make the right decision; it’s to make the decision right.” …

I came to understand that he was talking from an executive-level point of view. As decisions bubble up they are first 80/20 decisions, then 70/30, then 60/40, and then they are 49/51 decisions. At that level the arguments on each side are pretty strong; going either way can be made to work, but it’s very important to pick one and then go whole hog. … Whatever you’re doing, you’d better go do it.

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Innovation

Another cool post here. Money quote:

Think digital, act analog. Thinking digital means that companies should use all the digital tools at its disposal–computers, web sites, instruments, whatever–to create great products. But companies should act analog–that is, they must remember that the purpose of innovation is not cool products and cool technologies but happy people. Happy people is a decidedly analog goal.

Re-Introducing the Real Windows Vista (Updated x3) at Tauquil’s Blog

This is a hoot. It shows the Windows Vista CES presentation voice-over done with a Mac OS/X video demonstration.

For those folks who follow the comings and goings of Salesforce.com, you might appreciate this blog: Salesforcewatch.com.

It actually doesn’t look like a splog. Just someone who keeps close track of all the things Salesforce is doing. Neat.

Subscribed.