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As a customer with a technical background, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to troubleshoot an issue that the vendor already knows about and won't publicly acknowledge. Being burned in hte past has led to placing about as much trust in sales and marketing types as I would in a mob lawyer turned politician.

The things I look for as a prospective customer are:
- Openness and transparency with regard to support.and development.
- Responsible handling of security issues.
- Openness and transparency with regard to pricing. If I have to deal with a salesperson to get pricing, I will take my business elsewhere even if it costs ten times as much.

If any of those things are lacking, or if I'm forced to deal with salespeople - or even worse, salepeople posing as support, my 15 years of IT anger and bitterness are going to drive me straight to your competitors.

More importantly, hiding issues doesn't protect your "dirty laundry" anymore, it just (eventually) makes it even more public, with plenty of time to sour beforehand. I suggest pointing management (and your sales and marketing people) to this wonderful essay from 1999, The Cluetrain Manifesto, which although a bit dated, perfectly foreshadowed where we are today with social media. Your product's issues are going to be public, sooner or later. The question is whether they are going to be public under a site your control, where the people finding their way from search results can see that you are aware of the issue and working on solutions - or even have already solved the issues, or are they going to find it in the form of some rant on twitter/facebook/linkedin/blogs that probably doesn't even reflect the current situation, and doesn't give the company the opportunity to respond.

Canonical is doing what Nokia did, and will pay the same penalty.

I wrote some years ago about how Nokia was missing the point, having developed a pocket computer before knowing what they had done. Their blinkers said "phone" on them, so they never saw the giant road sign that said "computer". As one veteran of a firm then free-falling out of the Fortune 500 put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."

Now Canonical have developed another Maemo/Meego: a life-size OS that runs on a pocket device. And Mark Shuttleworth seems to have inherited Nokia's set of blinkers that say "phone", and Lo! and behold! he too cannot see the sign that says "computer". As I said in that article, 'the current pox of "partnerships" is a particularly Good Clue, because it means management is spending more time schmoozing on the golf course than down on the shop floor making or selling.'

I truly hope this doesn't apply (mutatis mutandis) to Mark Shuttleworth, but if you have invested your money, time, or life in Canonical, you need to consider if your forecast of the future concides with theirs.

"the world would be a whole lot better off. No pressure calls (just to touch base, yeah right) would mean people would only buy what they needed, not what they were talked into buying."

You're describing a large-scale movement from "push" technology and marketing to "pull" mechanisms. I advise you and OP to read Cluetrain: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html

If you haven't already

Alright there's a nonzero chance that you don't need a blog. But I think companies in general ought to wake up to the fact that markets are conversations and it's obvious to the "consumer" when the other party in the conversation is not an actual human being, but a marketing/PR committee.

I meant no offense

The key thing I want to know about any "viral marketing" is WHO engineered the virus in the first place? Was it a stealth marketing shill trying to "subvert the cluetrain", or was it a truly grassroots meme like the Mentos+Coke thing?

If it's the latter, I'm fine with it, because it's genuine, but the former is just dirtier than even massmedia ads because the manipulation is sneekier and you KNOW the bastards are laughing all the way to the bank. At least with conventional ads you know someone's trying to sell you; with viral/stealth marketing it *could* be authentic, but it's more likely to be just some smirking jackasses taking everyone for a ride.

Few companies want to actually let their employees share their thoughts with the general public.

Traditional companies, maybe. Companies of the future will have to support at least the appearance of openness. See blogs at Google, Red Hat, Amazon... See also the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Take the standard computer-industry press release. With few exceptions, it describes an "announcement" that was not made, for a product that was not available, quoting people who never said anything, for distribution to a list of people who mostly consider it trash.

Dishonesty in PR is pro forma. A press release is written as a plainly fake news story, with headline, dateline, quotes, and all the dramatic tension of a phone number. The idea, of course, is to make the story easy for editors to "insert" in their publications.

But an editor would rather insert a crab in his butt than a press release in their publication.

They need to get on the Cluetrain!

http://www.cluetrain.com/

Cadmann

I thought the Cluetrain has arrived a few years ago...

You need to go take a few MBA classes to see just why all of this is a "good thing". I'm sure its good, this sort of protection is clearly documented in ivory tower text books as being good and never annoying the customers to the point where they jump ship. Of course I bought my last cisco gear and I'm not looking back. (Anyone got dumps of the nvram for a 2621xm? mine is all FFFF and with not service contract, there is no way to get it repaired according to cisco)

Maybe its time for the idiots to take a ride on the Clue Train

HP has recently been making the rounds promoting their new company blogging efforts.
[...]
So imagine my surprise when I tried to legitimately leave a comment critical of HP at David Gee's HP blog and had my comment quickly erased and my HP passport (required to leave comments) revoked.

First they don't want us to buy/sell EQ merch over ebay. Now they want the exclusive contract. TOTAL CARP. Haven't they read Clue Train? By now it's a standard or at least it has to be...

"True, I think bloggers in general don't have credibility (because I can become a blogger right now and spout out the same nonesense as this Om Malik).."
You're confusing credibility with barrier-to-entry. Go read the cluetrain manifesto. Blogs do for information what the free market did for money: they cause the cream to more reliably rise to the top.

You could become a blogger right now, but I wager you couldn't immediately get an FPP on slashdot. And say what you will about the quality of slashdot, it is read by a *lot* of people. So I think Om Malik has a little more credibility than you, neh?

Personally I stopped getting my news from the mainstream a long time ago. I'd rather get my information from a lot of people of varying credibilities than from a few self-professed beacons of objectivity who are more open to temptation and corruption because "everyone reads them."

And no, I don't have a blog. Perhaps I will once I learn to avoid run-on sentences.

At what point did "manifesto" replace "common sense"?

Ohhh, sometime around 1997.

This reminded me of the Cluetrain Manifesto; it certainly covers a lot of similar ground.

See also: The Cluetrain Manifesto. It came first.

Sweeping generalization from the cluetrain-R-us department -- invert most big company slogans or names to get the truth. Hmmm... "Creative Labs"... "Copy-cat Fabs" maybe?

Maybe someone high-up over at Sony had a read of The Cluetrain Manifesto? :)

I'll go off on a wild tangent and suggest The Cluetrain Manifesto. The student will probably be saying "but this is all obvious" at least once per page. Understanding how and why it's not obvious to 99% of organisations is a really important real world lesson that your course proabably didn't cover. ...and it's a free download, so throw in something fun like Endger's Game (already recommended elsewhere) that way you won't look like a cheapskate.

• Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

14. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

Or how about when you go around to a new colleages house for a BBQ, to get to know them. Do you eat the free food there ?

Or go to a party where everybody has to bring food or drinks. Do you eat the free food there ? Would you be offended if other people don't eat the free food that you brought ? If they don't, aren't they saying that you are untrustworthy ?

Free doesn't mean you can't trust something.

You are overlooking social and reputational consequences of providing something at no cost that has intrinsic value. I know you know about this idea, as you posted your own example earlier. In your case, it was software you paid money for. You still threaten social and reputational consequences if the product fails, which for a commercial company has financial consquences. For people who provide software for free, social and reputational consequences are far more costly, as the only increase in value they get from providing the software for free are social and reputational.

In fact, this is one of the fundamental truths of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The Internet provides the ability for social and reputational consquences to travel much further and much faster, which increase the impact of those consequences.

I'm sure if BIND wasn't good enough, the readership of Slashdot would know about it pretty quickly. We already know when an exploitable bug is discovered, the day it is discovered. That is likely to be one of the major origins of negative comments about BIND in Slashdot forums. The Slashdot community is a large technical community, who usually are in positions to select one DNS server implementation over another.

If ISC care about their social position within the Internet community (I'm sure they do), and want to avoid reputational consquences when they can't be relied upon (I'm sure they do), they can either try to out market the negative messages, or try to do the right job. It is almost a sport for techos to spot marketroids, so I'm confident they will try to do the right job.

* Best of class sound quality

...and instantly my BullShit Detector went off because of the overused "best of breed/class" marketing phrase. The rest of your list is mostly on the human-voice cluetrain though. :)

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I cant figure out what any logical person could have against outsourcing.

I fail to understand why any company would put contact with their own customers into another organisation's hands. They are your customers, and are your asset. The goal is better serve them, to better understand them, and to get more of them.

Other things matter a lot less. A company would be silly to grow its own coffee, or make its own furniture or do its own landscaping and gardening(*). Those can be 'outsourced' and 'offshored' since they don't really matter that much. But your customers?

However all of this is good news for the rest of us in the industry. It opens new opportunities for us to listen to customers and take them away from the big companies who seem to hate them, and we will be on top of what the customer needs actually are, and the best new products to come out with.

(*) The obvious exception is companies that are actually in those businesses. Silicon Valley realised the importance of "eating your own dogfood", as should everyone else.

Here are some good articles on the subject:

• From Tog himself
• The ClueTrain, departing daily

I have no objection, to companies that do want to outsource and offshore. They can legally do stupid things. I do think that at the governmental level there should be some constraints in place. If a company isn't allowed to make stuff here by poisoning the environment, using child labour, or treating their employees as slaves, why should they be able to so in other countries. To a certain extent that is up to other countries to decide. I think the simplest solution is to impose a tax on imported goods and services that is based on the difference between how the foreign country treats its employee and citizen rights, as well as its environment.

They claim it isn't a marketting ploy, but right here, they paraphrase The Cluetrain Manifesto calling it the Channel 9 Doctrine. What a transparent grab for positive press. If they really wanted to "Learn by listening. When our customers speak, learn from them. Don't get defensive, don't argue for the sake of argument. Listen and take what benefits you to heart." Microsoft would have fixed the glaring security holes that the open source community has been pointing out for years a very long time ago. Instead, they keep opening up new ones.

You got that right. The cluetrain was ahead of its time.

I can't understand why people still think that "professional" must mean putting on a boring, impersonal face and communicating in corporate monotone; Google is proof otherwise. It's so sad to see small businesses -- who still have a soul -- attempting to emulate their souless idols.

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This is what's changing the world. Everyone remembers those old IBM ads about global e-business or some other buzzword. Now we're seeing the reality: a relatively small business can greatly increase the scope of its market and compete with big boys. The trick has always been to overcome the power law effect and move up the curve. Google is a phenomenal equalizer in this respect: write a good ad, put a good site online, and (most importantly) have a well-run business that does its job well, and you can go somewhere because, externally, you can give the same or better impression to customers as your larger, less-savvy competitor. The .com boom and bust didn't disprove this plan, it only made it more clear that at the root of the business there has to actually be a business.

It's like the Cluetrain Manifesto is proving itself out after all.

The great thing about Bayesian filtering is that it's adaptive. So they would have to dramatically increase the rate at which they discover and use filter-killing tricks for this to work.

But I worry that eventually, some companies that advertise via spam will learn to speak in a human voice. Surely this is possible for some products or scams. Advertisements don't have to look like advertisements, especially if they are only trying to pique your interest in a product that you will then go buy (or vote for) offline.

Even you will have to read the message carefully to realize that it's unsolicited bulk email. In such cases, we can't expect good accuracy from Bayesian filters, and the message will take more of your time.

Basically, advertisers adapt. A parallel example: If we get too good at zapping TV commercials with our TiVOs, they'll switch to more insidious product placement in the shows, so that the commercials are indistinguishable from the content.

Collaborative spam-filtering methods like Vipul's Razor might hold more promise. But the character of spam could shift to evade these filters, too. Spam might eventually come to resemble a bigger form of junk snailmail, or telemarketing -- where there are lots more advertisers but each one does a better job of targeting to a smaller list of customers (thanks to database companies like Experian). By flying under the radar with smaller lists, an advertiser might be able to stay out of the database of known spams. (With a small list, few recipients may bother to report the spam, so you can't distinguish it from solicited bulk mail that has been accidentally or maliciously reported as spam by several people.)

In the long run, I think we have to solve spam in the email architecture. I've always thought hashcash was the most promising idea, and it is now being pursued at Microsoft Research. There are also more radical proposals like Tripoli.

I know the meme has been retired, but the cluetrain manifesto is still relevant. People don't want to deal with bland, PR-washed, faceless megacorps that pander to the lowest common denominator, they want humanity.

The saddest thing to see is small businesses who act like these megacorps early on because it's deemed "professional" soulless behavior.

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It's actually very easy to be loyal to smaller companies that still have a human face. As companies grow they usually jump off the cluetrain and become impersonal assholes in order to extract maximum profit. Google is set to do that.

I'm sure COSCO is your kind of company though... cheap slave-products.

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the cluetrain effect.

http://www.cluetrain.com

Here is a blast from the past - the ClueTrain Manifesto

Enjoy the ride...

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies

"In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why."

2003? They should have hopped on the fucking cluetrain four years ago.

"too cultural", you say? I fail to see what's wrong with having some authentic culture show through VS. the alternative: boring corporate bile.

Much better to offend a few anal drones like yourself, than to put everyone to sleep with an impersonal, unoffensive lowest common denominator.

(And to spout an outdated meme: Get with the Clue Train.)

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So future generations will pull content to them? that's why you're reading slashdot, right?

Like nobody will: start up a website "myindyfavs.org" post their favorite bands add message board start getting ad&tshirt money work a deal with some VC who hopes the bubble is back grow a bunch become music geek central and then turn into a crusty ol business once they shift from "this is what I like" to "this is what they like" to "this is what I'm getting money to tell them they like"

• Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations

And to show that I walk the walk, I invite you to read my recent article, "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" parts I, II and III.

If he's not reflecting Sun's official position, he needs to be smacked down.

Go read the Cluetrain Manifesto.

This site is a reprise of some of the themes that were in their book from a few years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto. It is still available online. I think of the internet as a kind of infrastructure that nobody owns, like a highway. The potential perils are of a takeover of large companies that want to make you carry p(Assports) or "pay tolls" to cross into certain parts of it. They are the ones who, in the words of the book, believe in "engorging people with material goods so as to make them poop out dollars". The internet has another potential that is not so crassly commercial: for self-expression, for the acquisition of knowledge, to be able to connect with others wherever concerning almost anything. People have the ability to turn away from the crassly commercial, if they choose to see something else of value besides what the popular culture puts before them.

Sounds like you've read (or absorbed) The Cluetrain Manifesto: 95 Theses. A rereading might be in order for the boardroom.

Is it just another trend? I think people are buying these things because they are in the shops to replace their 1.5 yr old dead phone and its the "best model" so they think it will last longer. My top of the line Nokia 8310 has developed connection problems just weeks after its warranty expired. Peole keep asking me if I'm going to get a new Nokia phone since mine worked well for a year. My answer is that its a crap phone and next time I'll try a different brand. Its jsut like the last pair of junk Nikes I bought... they were over priced junk and I haven't even considered "their brand" in more than a 1/2 decade. Maybe its time some more of these compaines were visited (or run over) by the Clue Train

If anyone is interested in the web phones, I've got 130+ of them I would love to unload... Make an offer... they will display most pages that netscape 4 would display.

It looks like BellSouth missed the clue train.

The Cluetrain is leaving the station!

No, I certainly made no claims about productivity.

theres relatively fixed number of people in software development, its not increasing exponentially. pretty much everyone who would work on open-source is already working on it.

This is clearly false. More people than ever are using open-source, and more people are involved in all phases of development as well. For the student of technology, there is nothing better than to get your feet wet with these projects. I'm sure SourceForge has some good statistics on this if you are interested.

the rest of the developers have real jobs and get paid real money to work on a real product.

Not everyone working on free/open source is working for nothing. For many well paid academics, it is an important part of their research work.

This all ignores the fact that Free Software and Linux exist in an economy/jungle and is not a math problem.

No, it isn't, but that is not what I said. Jungle? That's one metaphor. War is even more common, but also not the only one. I like the suggestion that "conversation" is a better metaphor in the present context (see Cluetrain Manifesto for hints).

Insects and bacteria also have exponential reproduction rates, but they do not automatically take over the world.

Simply demonstrating that a system has exponential growth is not sufficient to predict that it will succeed.

Of course, there are limits, but what are the limits for open/free source. Until we hit the limits of Moore's law, there will always be a very strong demand for technical skills, so the pool of potential participants goes up. Cheap hardware, networks and more projects means that people who wouldn't get the opportunity to learn technology can.

The only really limiting factor is competition, but these projects don't really compete in the traditional way. Why do you thing MS is so scared? They can't just introduce a competing product and either buy them out or cut off their oxygen. It's making them nuts because they can't figure it out, and they will probably ruin their business fighting it.

In any case, time will tell.

I wonder if it'll ever get to the point that being a stealth shill is a career choice. "Yeah, I'm majoring in Mental Engineering too!"

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Somebody needs to hit the EPO over the head with a cluetrain.

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I'd say that his manager needs to read items 1 through 95 of the Clue Train Manifesto. He seems to be under the mistaken assumption that preventing conversations maintains the secrecy of the Guy Behind the Curtain, when in fact all it does is point out that he has no clothes on.

(Woohoo, a new low in mixed metaphors! *grin*)

I hope popups and cookie abuse and all that crap is coming to an end, but I don't think that spells the end of doing business on the internet, which I am not opposed to. Think of this, over at kuro5shin Rusty puts out a call for some emergency funds--and it works! Meanwhile portal sites like Yahoo are getting uglier and more useless by the week, "content providers" like Salon and nytimes.com just don't seem to ever learn. Sooner or later I think the sites that don't get on the cluetrain will go under. Even the giants, because they cannot sustain a losing business model forever. It will take time, but for those that can stick it out, there will be financial rewards for those outfits who understand the internet and work with it. Well, that's my hope.

I've just read the United Linux FAQ.

It's obviously written by a marketing person who hasn't read the Cluetrain Manifesto. The answers all read like ``United Linux is wonderful, the sun shines out of it's arse''.

There is no discussion of questions that no doubt will be frequently answered, such as:

• Which configuration tool will it use? (Yast2 perhaps)
• How with the different companies make their versions of United Linux different from each other? Will they each use proprietary software to do so?
• If the different companies do differentiate between their versions of United Linux, each including different software as ``added value'', won't this be a return of the Unix wars of the past?