meJoe.com

I wrote this text for a business class. It takes the perspective of a Sony executive in June 2008, soon after discovering poor sales of the Playstation 3, especially when compared with the Wii and XBox 360.

At Sony we gambled that consumers would seek out the next generation in entertainment delivery mechanisms: the Blue Ray. With its high definition playback and super capacity, the technology represents a ten-fold incremental increase in the capabilities of the standard DVD. The Playstation 3 was meant to give consumers this technology in both their content consumption (movies, music, etc.) and gaming. This strategy closely ties our three core sectors: electronics, games and entertainment into one system (especially as outlined in our 2005 press release on corporate strategy).

Why don’t consumers see the obvious technological superiority over the Wii? The industry has flipped on us–the basis of competition has moved from faster and more life-like to slower and child-like. I have never in my career encountered such a regression.

In my search for answers, the article Strategic Dissonance provides me with some evidence for what went wrong. Here at Sony we are a well oiled machine. Our strategic intent and action are totally in-line. Our distinctive competence is making consumer entertainment electronics and content that people want to buy. In 2006 we even tweaked our internal strategy selection environment by clearing out unprofitable product lines.

We were ready to push the latest and greatest technology on to consumers… and totally missed the consumer’s need.

Nintendo saw change coming that we didn’t.

How did we miss this? I remember working as the Product Manager for the first Playstation. It was faster and more life-like than our competition. We had a great team, and are all now running gaming and electronics.

Our strategy has not changed—and there lies the source of our problem. We kept doing what we knew well. In our minds, the Playstation had cojones, and what else could you possibly need out of your gaming (except more cojones!).

Enter our Strategic Inflection Point. What next? Purchasing Nintendo, which is at a market capitalization of about 10 Trillion Yen or $111 billion, is obviously not an option.

I think we can beat them at their game. With Sony Pictures and Sony Music, there are a lot of opportunities to exploit our content for sole Playstation use. Additionally, we need to have some hard debates.  Do we drop the Blueray as primary Playstation functionality in order to lower the price? Do we release a functionally scaled down version? I will be reworking our strategic intent, and completing the third aspect of Strategic Recognition.

Fast Company, “Sony’s Risky Game”, http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2006/11/sonys_risk.html

Sony.com, “Sony Corporate Strategy Press Release”,  http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200509/05-050E/

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Note: The views I express here are mine and do not represent my employer, Rackspace.

The classics never go out of style, even in technology.

I just read The Art of High Technology Management (unfortunately its not free), a little excerpt from a technology management text book, circa 1984. Authors Maidique and Hayes highlight what successful tech companies are doing right, and aptly dub it “an art”. Their analysis was sound, a definite piece of the alphabet in the language of technology management. That however is not what evokes my entry. The haunting part of this read, was the sense that I was peering over the shoulder of a youthful Rackspace senior executive. Before me lay part of the blueprints of the near billion dollar company I work for today.

Authors Maidique and Hayes followed a number of companies in biotech, pharmaceuticals, computers, semiconductors and aerospace of various sizes ($10 million to $30 billion). They wanted to answer one question: “What strategies, policies, practices and decisions result in successful management of high-technology enterprises?” The answer to their question uncovered a challenging paradox: continuity and chaos. These two words aptly describe the dichotomous workplace I live every day. The article expands on the polarity of continuity and chaos through six themes. These themes hauntingly mirror Rackspace’s CORE values.

Continuity

1. Business focus - The drive behind continuity is discipline.  Discipline in technology specialization, focus on core competencies, consistent organizational objectives and real business results - the traditional work values that our grandparent’s generation embodied through companies like Ford and it’s Model T. At Rackspace we call this Results first, substance over flash.

2. Organizational cohesion - At the heart of continuity is people and their relationships. A strong tech company emphasized collaboration, communication, job rotation, multidisciplinary projects, and long-term employment. Executive open door policies at companies like IBM, generated a sense of hierarchical flatness and equality–permitting a free flow of ideas. Cross-pollination of knowledge and relationships occur as employees move throughout the organization into different roles and projects. My fellow Rackers refer to this as Treat fellow Rackers like friends and family.

3. Sense of Integrity - Hi-tech companies exhibited a values system that held ethics and trust above profit. Humility and self understanding are also characteristics that were encouraged throughout. Today I had an encounter with our Chairman Graham Weston. I asked him for some assistance and information on an issue.  Within 20 minutes I had everything I needed. Graham pioneered the strengths based culture at Rackspace. Every employee receives an analysis of their natural talents and is coached on how to develop them in both their professional and personal lives. During tough times, we exercise full disclosure to our customers and each other - Keep our promises. Bad news first, full disclosure.

Chaos

4. Adaptability - Change is the name of the game. Great tech companies knew when to change strategy and had the organizational flexibility to make the tough changes. In my four years at Rackspace, I have worked in three different roles, for 3 different VPs in 3 different buildings — all these changes occurred at different moments in time. Adopt change for excellence.

5. Entrepreneurial culture - Small scrappy teams, decentralized R&D, and FAILure tolerance are pillars of success. Everyone in the company has to feel ownership, a sensation that their work will “save the company”.  HP and Texas Instruments regularly split divisions into small groups. On the topic of decentralization, “IBM has found that rebellion can be good business.”, commented an executive about a secret endeavor to develop a new line of hard drives. At Rackspace, nearly 1/3 employees is a tech or an engineer. Everyone of these rackers are creating solutions to solve customer problems. This is the most important Rackspace value - Fanatical Support in all we do and Passion for our work.

6. Hands-on top management - This is about a highly engaged leadership team. Executives of this caliber are technically competent and prefer receiving direct updates from project members. They are comfortable asking lots of questions (even dumb ones) and are extremely involved in the high value aspects of the company. At Rackspace we do not have a CORE value to describe this, but I see it regularly.  Recently, Lanham Napier, our CEO, called one of my team members to ask some questions about a particular project. I can’t imagine this happening at a traditional company.

Balancing Continuity and Chaos at Rackspace

I have found that change and stability come in cycles at Rackspace. We will often see a 2 to 3 month period of significant chaos followed by an 8 to 12 month period of stabilization. Again, Rackspace leadership is on par with the researcher’s findings:

The successful high-technology company firm alternates periods of consolidation and continuity with sharp reorientations that can lead to dramatic changes in the firm’s strategies, structure, controls and distribution of power, followed by a period of consolidation.

The everyday Racker deals with this continuum in very different ways.  Some folks get frustrated with the chaos, others thrive within it. As a manager for a software team, I understand both perspectives. I am in the unique position of having to garner agreement on business processes and priorities among different teams. Describing my work as “Herding cats” is a true understatement. Rackers are also highly empowered to give feedback - and express frustration. This empowerment combined with technical and business expertise requires an open, servant style leadership that is probably uncommon in other firms.

My next task is to ask some of our VPs (they sit in cubes all over here) where our CORE values came from, and whether, as Picasso once said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

“A little revolution now and then is a good thing.” - Thomas Jefferson

In case you don’t follow me on Twitter (@mejoe), I can’t seem to finance a home purchase. With good credit and cash on hand, I was denied a loan. I was told the problems were caused by the private mortgage insurance companies — they do not want new loans. I think there was more to the story.

I’ve been speaking to my new loan officer and done some research. He mentioned that the big shops simply don’t have the funds they did previously because they can not find investors to buy their loans. Banks like Countrywide have 100s of millions of dollars used to originate loans. When the loan is funded, they turn around and look for an investor to purchase it.  When a buyer is found and the loan is sold, they take the funds and move on to the next home buyer.

The big banks are middle men in a fat supply chain of mortgage debt.

I found the following quote on Bankrate.com to support this notion:

Rates will go largely where the Fed drives them, but there are some structural problems with the mortgage business that are making it difficult to fund loans quickly. One is the enormous decrease in the size of total warehouse lines. Mortgage banks and operations such as ours — which is a “net branch” model (a mortgage bank which only takes business from its branches and not brokers) — depend on warehouse lines of credit from commercial banks to fund the loans which we then sell. According to the MBA (Mortgage Bankers Association), total warehouse capacity has decreased from $200-$250 billion to $20-$25 billion. The problem here is that refis occur in spikes when rates dip and there is not enough gross capacity to meet the demand created by dips in rates. Perhaps it is time for the Fed or Treasury to guarantee warehouse lines in the same manner in which it backed Commercial Paper.

- Dick Lepre, senior loan officer, Residential Pacific Mortgage, San Francisco

Warehouse lines? Sounds like a basic inventory problem to me. There is simply not enough used mortgage buyers visiting the lots. The Fed should have a talk with Crazy Dave’s Used Car Lot down the street.

Check out The Credit Crisis Explained in Simple English. It is a good source for understanding how we got into this mess.

Stumbled on this rant. Amazed he’s had such bad luck finding work. Usually I dismiss these rants as immature, a reflection of its writer. A typical case of a person looking for the problem everywhere but home. But this guy has a solid reputation. I’m definitely interested in building my knowledge of RoR. Are the prospects not so good?

His comments on ThoughtWorks also make me nervous. We are working with them on some pretty big projects. It’s good though that they are considered amoung the best consultants.

There are a number of things that can improve your search rankings. They all settle around three things:

1. Convincing other sites to link to your page
2. Including lots of relevant content in text format
3. Coding your page appropriately

Links to Your Page
Getting incoming links is very important. Every time somebody links to your page, it is considered a vote by Google. The more “votes” your site has, the hight it will rank it. To see a list of sites that link to your site that Google knows about, type “link:” before the URL to your site. My website is mejoe.com. So in Google, I would type “link:http://www.mejoe.com”. This will give me a list of these sites.
Relevant Content
You can’t fake a good website. If you want people to visit your site, you have to give them a good reason. The reason should be lots of text based content. This means articles, blog entries, etc. It should be text because the search engines will analyze your page for the appearance of related key words and their relevance on the page. Don’t grab copyrighted material or use gibberish. Search engines are very smart at identifying cheaters. If you are identified as a cheater, you could get blacklisted.

Proper Coding Techniques
This is a matter of changing how you design your web pages. A lot has been written on the web about this topic. The best advice I have is to make your pages accessible to blind people as the search engines are as well. Some key points:

1. Use semantic markup. That means using HTML tags as they were intended. The first heading on your page should be <h1>, the second <h2>, etc.
2. Avoid using images in place of text. If you must do this, then place the text in the ALT parameter. Search engines can not read text in images.
3. Avoid unnecessary JavaScript. Don’t use it to link to a page. Avoid it in your navigation. Search engines can have difficulty with this.
4. Name your links appropriately. Instead of “Click here for information about learning english at our center.” use “Learn english at our center.”
5. Give your page a proper title (<title></title>).
6. Keywords in your meta tags don’t matter that much. It’s to easy for people to spam these. Put what is relevant to the page and then focus your page on the actual content.

Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidlines. They give away all the secrets. Google also offers a Webmaster Help Center.

This has been an interesting topic for me recently.  Some stuff I’d like to check out:

Community 2.0: Measuring the Success of Online Communities

Anything on the Community 2.0 Conference this past year.

I thought it would be a cute title.  The Tenors I refer to however are not the favorite singers, but the advocates of accessible web design practices.  These are the three groups that for some reason have a stake in creating Web sites that intentionally or unintentionally meet best practices for accessible Web design.

Some background on accessible design.   Accessible design essentially refers to making websites that can be accessed by a wide variety of users with varying degrees of abilities.

The three bed-fellows are:

• Web developers - It makes the code maintainable
• Marketers - Search engine optimization
• Accessibility advocates - It is ethical

I love to think about accessibility in this way because it almost always allows me to discuss accessibility from a viewpoint that matters to my audience. The developers love to use techniques that enhance their code.  Business people are concerned with reaching customers.  Accessibility advocates have those with disabilities in their hearts.

The funny part is that really each group has their own name for about the same set of practices.  They are standards based code development, search engine optimization and accessibility.

I had wanted to implement something at work that few others were doing. But I think we missed the wave of first adopters.

I work at a pretty cool place. We’ve been debating the ups and downs of exposing aspects of our organization to the world. A favorite topic is the customer forum - incredibly useful for customer feedback, a tight rope walk for your public relations. Imagine that one upset customer that posts to no end how much he is disatisfied with your service. How can we give customers the visibility they crave without risking our hides?

As I work in product development, we talk features all day. A favorite tool of ours is the feature voting system or “suggestion voting board”, a darling of the democratic style characteristic of the open source community. The feature voting system can address topics more quantitatively than forums. Should we move that widget 50 pixels to the left? Red banner or grey? Vote now!

Unfortunately, Yahoo, Webmail.us and I’m sure many others have beaten us to it. Yahoo’s “suggestion board” looks just like Digg. Webmail.us uses Pligg, an open source content management system.

To illustrate the impact of such a tool, imagine your phone company. You are tired of having to pay your bills via snail mail. You want to setup an automatic payment option that will enable the company to deduct the amount once a month from your account. If the company were progressive enough (and most phone companies aren’t), you could visit the suggestion voting board and see that hundreds, maybe thousands of other customers would like the same. Surely the company wouldn’t ignore such feedback.

How can the phone company lose? At first glance, its cheap product research. However, making this stuff public is scary. The motion of the masses is to the short term–customers inherently see only tactical improvements. If you build your entire business from such improvements you’ll be left with a product that lacks focus and direction. So we’ve always said to manage the customers expectations, they need to understand that you are the experts on the business and will do whats best for the strategic long run.

Last night I was watching the news. An airline industry analyst from Malaysia was interviewed about government regulation. He said, “The government is doing the right thing by taking measures to eliminate inefficient competition.”

Inefficient competition? What the heck is that? Doesn’t efficiency equal competition? Is this the same as saying non-competition?
I think inefficient competition can mean three things:

1. No competition
2. Competition in industries where commodities prevail
3. To describe entities that could be saved by moving to a new market to compete

Items 1 and 2 are easy to grasp. Number 3 is tougher. I had to think about it for a bit, but the concept could make sense.

First, this phrase must be analyzed from the point of view it is expressed. After all, the term “efficiency” is relative to the perspective. An environmentalist might not view competition in the logging industry as efficient. For point of view, we will choose the Malasian government. It is in Malaysia’s best interest for its companies to thrive.

The analyst was probably recommending that government provide incentives for airline companies to move into markets that did not require them to compete so directly. This is about reacting more effectively to other sources of demand.

I probably should think about this some more…

The other day I tried to sneak the word “spiffy” into some official communications. I said, “Check out our spiffy new graphs!” I knew the work would be reviewed by a savvy editor, so I took a chance. The audience would have been mostly technical server-admin-types. You know, business-speak weary folks who’d rather read slashdot than the latest business book top seller. My thoughts, “This is so witty, they’re gonna want me to write even more!”

Nope.

“Spiffy!?” accompanied their (editors and marketing types) perplexed expressions. I couldn’t tell if they thought I was foolish or something else–like derailed by my creativity (maybe?).

“Dang”, I thought, as I back-peddled, “Sure spiffy, you know, I used it to emphasize to y’all the importance of using an informal tone”. Good save? I’ll stick with my ignorant bliss on this one.

Looking for the private last word, I jump to Merriam Webster:

Spiffy: adj. - fine looking: smart. spiffily, adj.

I’m on to something… there has to be more though…

Hacker Slang (answers.com)
1. Said of programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. “Have you seen the spiffy X version of empire yet?”

and:

2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to 1.

This is one of those words whose meaning flips based on “tone of voice and context”! What a bad word! All geeks can appreciate a dose of that.

How bout ‘dem apples!