TexasPundit

if this article is to be believed, then soon FIOS users will enjoy some really fast speeds…  I have to say that I’m personally disgusted (I used to be a FIOS user in Dallas, but here in Houston I’m stuck with 5Mbps) but happy for my FIOS using friends.

Interesting stuff… Hitachi has announced it’s new hard drives leading up to the CES show next week. Quoting the article:

With a price of $399, the Deskstar 7K1000 comes in at an attractive price for consumers. That works out to $0.40 per GB–a competitive per-gigabyte cost for a hard drive today, and not much of a premium over previous models. By comparison, a 500GB hard drive today costs about $0.45 per gigabyte, as does Seagate’s 750GB Barracuda drive (down from the $0.79 per gigabyte it cost when it launched last spring).

I remember fondly the first hard drive I ever had on a computer - a 5 1/4″ 10MB Winchester drive. It cost an ungodly amount of money back then - and MTBF on those things wasn’t very long. That was about 25 years ago (wow I’m getting old!).

Hitachi Introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive - Yahoo! News

At dinner tonight with some coworkers, we were talking about SNL and some of the funny skits we’ve seen over the last few weeks. I find this one especially funny:

I have to hand it to Alec Baldwin. He should only do comedic acting - he’s hysterical.

Because of my job, I end up discussing Google a lot. I believe that their story is amazing - and while I am often on the opposite side of the issues they champion, I do admire them for at least putting their money where their mouth is.

That being said, I’ve often found many of their tools to be nothing more than a collection of neat gadgets to play with. However, I do have to admit that Google Reader is one of the best online tools I’ve used in a long time. My RSS reader of choice had been Sage (a plugin for Firefox), but I got tired of having to redo all of my subscriptions every time I setup a new workstation, tried a new OS, or just decided to start over again. Yes - I know I can export the settings and re-import, but it just got to be a hassle. So I decided to give Google Reader a try. I’ve been using it for about 2 weeks now, and so far it’s been a nearly flawless experience. The best thing is no matter where I’m at, I can access my feeds.

Check it out yourself.

I made a resolution that I’d make a real effort at this… But I have to admit that it’s harder than I thought it’d be. Besides the fact that I’m working a 60-70 hour work week and finding time is generally harder than I thought it would be, I find that of the 100 or more RSS feeds I subscribe to very few have topics that I find interesting enough to write about. I’ll also confess that I’ve decided to make this endeavor an experiment as well - more on this at a later date…

In the spirit of the political shift in Washington, I’ve decided to post something about the latest book I’m reading. Generally, I try to read 3-4 books a month. I must thank my father for subscribing me to a book club when I was younger, because over the years I’ve realized that the gift of reading is as precious as any gift you can give. It forces you to open your mind to new ideas. But I digress…

I picked this book up after reading about it somewhere - it’s a fictional novel about a US civil war that breaks out because of the political divisions that exist in the country. So far I’ve enjoyed it - it starts off quickly and doesn’t seem to deviate too far from the plotline. I’m about halfway through this book, and I’d encourage others to give it a try.

Amazon.com: Empire: Books: Orson Scott Card

Late last year, I began searching for a spam filtering appliance to offer to our customers. I’m sure everyone has heard one of the advertisements for the Barracuda spam firewall on the radio (God knows I have - ad nauseum) - well we’ve used this appliance internally and I have to say that I’ve been less than impressed with it’s ability to effectively block spam. I stumbled on a competing product (can’t remember how) from a company called IronPort. I read through their web site and some of the whitepapers they’ve made available and it looked interesting enough to fire off an email and see about evaluating the product. A day or two later I was contacted by them, and we agreed to touch base after the new year to start working through the evaluation.

So - this morning I’m working through my to-do’s and I fire off a follow up email - about 10 minutes later, the press wires start filling up with articles about Cisco buying Ironport. Ironic no?

Anyway - I have to give Cisco some props. It took some serious balls to pull the trigger on an $830MM acquisition in a space that they’ve got zero presence in. I think this one is gonna pay off for them.

Light Reading - Cisco Buys IronPort - Telecom News Analysis

I would encourage anyone looking for an appliance like this to check the company out. I haven’t touched the box yet, but everything I’ve read indicates that it’s a solid platform. So take a walk on over to Ironport’s home page.

Post-note: I spoke to a friend today and he was kicking himself because he turned down an opportunity to work for this company a year or so ago… I learned a lesson a long time ago when I opted not to take a job with Broadcast.com - sometimes you have to be willing to risk it all and take a chance to get ahead.

During the course of my work, I often am presented with problems that seem simple to solve.

1. Identify the issue
2. Isolate the cause of the issue
3. Address the cause of the issue (typically a breakdown in a process)
4. Test to verify that the process changes have fixed the issue
5. Congratulate yourself for solving the issue so efficiently

Seems simple doesn’t it? But it’s become more and more apparent to me that some issues can’t be solved by simple process or organizational changes. Customer support is a perfect example of this.

My company has been struggling with this issue for a few months now. I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about this over the last few days and I’ve come to the conclusion that no amount of process changes or organizational changes will result in improving customer support. What is necessary is a cultural change, in which customer support becomes the focus not just within the support organization, but across the entire company and all the groups.

A good example of this is Rackspace. They market their entire company not on technology, price, or facilities, but rather on “Fanatical Support”. I admire how they’ve made customer support such a big part of their culture - and ask myself the following questions:

• Do they offer better facilities than my company? No.
• Do they offer better network connectivity than my company? No.
• Do they have technology that is vastly different than what my company offers? No.
• Are they cheaper than my company? Absolutely No.
• Are customers more confident that they’ll receive better support from Rackspace? Absolutely Yes.

A couple of years ago, I might have argued that our support was just as good as Rackspace’s. Why have things changed? Some of our customers think it’s because the people we hire aren’t as good. I don’t agree. We’ve invested time and money into training our employees so that they’re equipped with the knowledge to tackle the issues our customers have. We’ve also over the years learned to vet potential hires better, so we have less failed hires than we used to. Ultimately I think the issue really comes down to the fact that when you’re a small company, there’s a mentality that permeates the team that they are important, and have the ability to make differences in a big way to impact the company’s success. They’re excited about working for a new company that’s growing quickly, and being part of that success. As companies grow larger I believe that the new employees that come in lack this excitement and enthusiasm, and only view their job as just that - a job. Because we’re bigger, their ability to have a big impact on the company’s success seems diminished.

So the big question is - how do we break this mentality and build a culture that values customer support above all else? My views:

1. Indoctrinate your new hires. Spend 2 weeks hammering into them the importance of customer service in our industry. Make it part of the employee orientation so that they know from the first day that they start working here that we value our customers, and we do not tolerate employees that do not. Make them excited about working here.
2. Reward employees for service excellence. This means making sure that the proper systems are in place to track employee performance, and customer surveys are done following issues to get feedback on not just the employees performance, but the company’s performance as well.
3. Don’t punish creativity. If an employee breaks a few rules or processes to solve the customer’s issue then be willing to look at why he had to break those rules or processes in order to remedy the problem. Maybe the rules or processes shouldn’t be there in the first place?
4. Provide career paths to the entry level and mid level support technicians so that they don’t look to leave the company once they’ve acquired the skills necessary to do a good job. Partner with our vendors to train and certify our employees - and reward them when they achieve these certifications. Well trained and intelligent employees will be more productive than warm bodies.
5. Reinforce across all groups that we are a services company. We are not a technology company, or a software company, or a hardware company. We are a utility company to many of our customers. They rely on us to provide services 24/7/365 (that’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year) and their livelihoods depend on us delivering the services they are buying from us. We need to feel the pain they feel when they’re having issues and work with them to resolve their issues as quickly and accurately as possible.

I’ve probably missed some things here, but my point is this: Customer service is a mindset, not a process. Unless you change the mindset of your company, all the organizational changes and process changes in the world will have little if any impact to your overall performance in this area.

Our industry has very few differentiators between competitors. The hardware pricing is basically commoditized, and the key differentiators are facilities, network infrastructure, management tools, and customer service. I believe that we are the leaders in the first 3 key areas, but that we have a long way to go on the last.

OK… I believe in Karma when it comes to things like this - but I thought this article was a good example of why carrier neutral datacenters are a much smarter choice than a single carrier one. Good sense dictates that when you engineer a network you build it with DIVERSITY (isolated fiber paths in the building on different cable bundles, etc) so that you don’t get network isolation in the event of a circuit failure or fiber cut. To quote the article:

“Please be advised,” said the message, “that the SAVVIS data center facility team has reported that the Boston data center is isolated due to a circuit related issue. At this time equipment is not reachable. SAVVIS is working with the local Telco vendor to restore connectivity. An estimated time of resolution is unknown at this time.”

My last company had a similar failure (after I had left) at a Boston facility which resulted in a day long outage for the customers in that datacenter. The big dig made the economics of getting redundant and diverse fiber paths into that facility ridiculously expensive, and so the business decision was made not to spend the money. I can’t fault them for not spending the money. But a carrier like Savvis - which prides itself on the facilities that they operate - should spend the money. I can say that for some reason, customers of the hosting industry accept outages as a fact of life. C’est la vie.
Read the entire article.

My wife was lucky enough to be at a Wal Mart before Christmas when a PS3 arrived in the store. After 3 intercom calls announcing that they had a PS3 available, and if anyone was interested in it she decided to walk back to the electronics section and see what was up. When she called me to ask if she should buy it, my natural instinct (being geeky and all that) was to tell her “Hell Yeah!”. So - $600 later I’ve got a really slick video game system connected to the LCD TV in my bedroom at 1080p resolution with one game (Madden ‘07) and two controllers. I’ve been to several stores looking for new games for this baby, and I’m horribly disappointed in the selection that’s out. It’s made me wonder if Sony hasn’t really screwed the pooch with this one. Sure - the graphics are amazing, the UI is great, and it’s really pretty in general - but without games worth buying and playing what’s the point? On top of this, I’ve been looking at the selection of Blu-Ray DVD’s that are available (yes - this thing is also a HiDef DVD player) and the selection here is pretty pathetic as well. To top things off, there’s a format war for HiDef DVD supremacy (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats) and there’s no guarantee that even as an HD-DVD player this thing will have any longevity. I guess I just have to cross my fingers and hope for the best. I will say that the PS3 store is really nice, and being able to download game demos has at least taken some of the sting out. I’ve been addicted to MotorStorm (Baja-like racing game) and look forward to it’s release (so I can play more than one level and 2 vehicles!).

Enough ranting…