Web based applications are definitely becoming popular.  One issue I see is that there are a lot of small hosted applications that offer some pieces of functionality for free.  I think there’s a temptation for small companies to try to take advantage of these free applications to replace traditional software applications. The problem is that you may end up with the same data being entered into multiple applications.  This makes keeping your data updated difficult.  Making sure changes migrate across multiple hosted applications becomes an extremely manual and tedious process.

Another thing to consider is whether you want to run your small business using an ad supported software package.  There are numerous “free” hosted applications that deliver ads to monetize the application.  Some of them offer some impressive features and are quite usable but are the ads too distracting?  While many will not object to seeing ads in their application there are those of us that would rather not deal with ads, even if it means we can’t get something for free.

The real benefit of a hosted software application is, of course, the ability to work anywhere.  This is one feature I make particular use of.  I travel frequently or decide to work out on the deck or at the local coffee shop.  Web enabled applications and hosted applications in particular make it easy for me to do so.  Having said that, the choice of subscribing to a hosted application or hosting one yourself (there are numerous great open source projects that you can host yourself — Sugar CRM, SQL Ledger, etc), is largely personal.  It will depend on the infrastructure you have available, cost and your ability to support the hosted application.  That much hasn’t really changed.

The real difference between now and when I first wrote this article several months ago is that there are now a large number of free applications aviailable.  In today’s world, a small business could conceivably (If they didn’t mind ads, etc) run all their software as free hosted applications.  I think this speaks to an overall trend of software becoming a commodity and the Internet making hosted applicationa ubiquitous.  I hope this is a trend that continues and that the quality of such hosted applications also continues to improve.

SoundExchange also argues that Internet radio stations could do a lot more to increase their revenue, become profitable, and pay their (arguably high) fees. As much as it pains us to say it, there may be a point here.

I think a bigger issue here is whether the music industry really represents musicians anymore and how disconnected they are from modern paradigms.

 Sound Exchange justifies higher rates to Intenet radio stations (rates that are almost double what satellite radio stations pay) by claiming that there are larger volumes of songs being played on Internet radio.  This is due to the capability of Internet radio stations to customize their play list per listener.  But is this really a good justification to charge more?  It seems to me that this is an opportunity to expose listeners to more artisists in a similar genre, a genre that you know the listener likes thanks to Internet customization.  Wouldn’t it seem logical that this would translate into more opportunities to sell music to listeners?   This would be music that the listener would never have heard before.  I know that when Radio Free Virgin’s goth channel was free, I discovered several new artists that I liked and I purchased CDs by those artists.

 This seems to be yet more in the same vein of strong arm tactics like the RIAA lawsuits and the war against file sharing.  While these tactics may make some short term cash for the music industry, I think it does long term damage to their image and ultimately hurts the artists the most. 

What I think this will lead to is Internet radio stations becoming the new record labels.  Artists will no longer need or want to deal with labels who will be perceived as bullies and “old school”.  In fact, among Indie artists, I think this transition is already happening.  Intenret radio services like Pandora and music buying services such as iTunes are making it much easier for artists to put their music out there for consumption and to allow the consumers to decide what sounds good.  The old days of dreaming that a label will sign a contract with your band may be gone.  Popular law and technology blog Groklaw reported the other day on the publication of The Indie Band Survival Guide, a book that teaches bands how to directly take their music to the masses. 

Maybe the next few years will see the music industry finally “fee” themselves to death.  Then we’ll have Internet radio stations like Pandora where we can listen to artists without dealing with the middle man and the artists will have more control over their work.  It certainly seems like we’re heading that direction. 

My point here is if you’re going to use Windows, use Windows.  This particular environment has replaced the usual Windows login with a Novell one, then removed that to use a single sign on mechanism with the hard drive encryption system, replace the change password feature with a third party one (that seems to have been developed in house).  It’s no wonder my laptop doesn’t want to start up.  It’s launching multiple third party applications to replace existing Windows functionality before it even begins to load my personal settings.  Microsoft doesn’t fully share all the details regarding their API.  The result is that third party programs are often less stable than their Microsoft counterparts.  Replacing core utilities (like the password change tool), seems like trouble waiting to happen.

When going to the site to add a sitemap, the user is presented with a simple form.  The form asks for the web site address, the address of the sitemap, how you want to verify ownership of the site (the usual meta tag or by uploading an xml file), and the webmaster’s email address.  Seems simple, right?  Not so fast!  Entering http://www.julianhilltech.com gives an error that says “Invalid web address”.  Dropping the http:// at the beginning yields the same result and adding a “/” on the end yields the same result.  Putting http://www.julianhilltech.com/sitemap.xml as the location of my sitemap yields an error that says my sitemap must be in the root of my web site.  Huh?!  Did you look at the URL? 

A quick review of the help file linked to this page yielded no help.  (Quick, show of hands?  Who here has ever found what they were looking for in a Microsoft help file?)   Next, I went to the community forums for webmaster tools.  I didn’t find a fix for my problem but I saw this problem being frequently reported.   Interesting.  Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo but they can’t even create a system to identify a valid web site address? 

The real problem for Microsoft is this–web users aren’t captive to them.  Microsoft’s been able in the past to get away with releasing products that weren’t quite up to snuff because they had a decent monopoly on the desktop operating system.  The web is an entirely different ecosystem.  Live Search is that popular.  Google and Yahoo both outperform Microsoft in terms of traffic and popularity.  Getting webmasters to help feed data into their search engine would be a good move.  Better and more thorough results would greatly help Microsoft’s search engine.  But rolling out “tools” for webmasters to help make Microsoft’s product better that don’t work will only frustrate the very people Microsoft is trying to woo.  They’ll go elsewhere, because they can.  I currently feed my sitemap to both Google and Yahoo.  Will I attempt to add it to Microsoft again?  Probably not.  This is where Microsoft is losing the online battle.  It’s entirely too easy for people to go somewhere else when their products fail to work. 

This experience started, like so many of them do, with a phone interview with a human resources person in the main office of the company.  That went well and the hr person I spoke with was very professional.  He called back to schedule the interview and after we selected a time, he said he’d send email to confirm once the interviewer accepted the appointment.  This ended up taking a few days which should’ve been a big red flag. 

On the day of the interview, I took my lunch from my current position to go over to their Columbus office.  When I walked in, there was no reception area.  I waited several minutes until someone walked by and asked if I’d been helped.  I told them who I was there to see and they went off to presumably find them.  Another person came back and told me he was in a meeting and would be out in about 10 minutes.  Fifteen minutes after, my interview was supposed to have started, the person I was to interview with came out and ushered me into a conference room.  I was offered something to drink which I declined and then he excused himself to go get something.  Fortunately, I’d brought a copy of my resume because he didn’t have one.  He talked for most of the interview about what the job entailed and why he didn’t think I could do it because my background was in the ISP industry and ISPs “run their budgets very loosely and informally”.  It was quite possibly the most insulting and rude interview I’d ever attended.  At one point, he asked me why I’d left one of the companies I worked for “besides the stupid name”.  I left the interview saying to myself, “No way in hell”. 

 Well, I didn’t get the job.  Not too surprising considering the interview.  I know that I didn’t get the job, not by the friendly phone call telling me that they selected another candidate, nor by the email saying thanks for interviewing but we went with another candidate, nor by a postal letter saying “thanks but no”.  I know that I didn’t get the job because I saw the position reposted on Monster two days after I interviewed.  No one bothered to contact me to let me know either way.

Before I get into this too much on why I think this kind of behaviour and attitude is bad for business, I want to make a small disclaimer.  This isn’t just big corporate behaviour.  I’ve seen small businesses engage in this type of “people are disposable” behaviour too.  In fact, I’ve worked for some smaller companies that just really treated people poorly all around.

So why’s this so bad?  I think this says a number of things about a company and there are a number of reasons why this kind of behaviour is a symptom of bigger problems.  First of all, I’ve often heard company managers and owners bemoan the lack of employee loyalty.  Turn over creates a series of costs and hardships for companies so naturally they want employees to stay on.  What doesn’t seem to register is that if you want loyal employees you need to be loyal to them.  This is something I’ve always sought in every company I’ve had an ownership interest in or was a manager at.  Treat your employees well and stand by them, and they’ll stand by you.

Secondly, job hunting is difficult.  It sucks out there.  Don’t make people sit around waiting and guessing whether they got a position.  It’s sometimes hard to decide when you might have multiple offers.  No one wants to be waiting on a position they’d prefer and then never hear anything.  This kind of behaviour sends a signal that you just don’t care about the person.  They didn’t make the cut so they don’t matter.  What every business manager that interviews potential employees needs to realize is that people do matter.  Putting aside the more esoteric reasons, let’s focus solely for a moment on the practical, financial business reason.  That person that you interviewed and then left hanging, will eventually get a position somewhere else.  And here’s the part that’s interesting, at that somewhere else, they may be in a position to influence whether their new company purchases your products or services**.  I’ve often held positions where I made vendor selections.  I’m sure I will in the future.   I know what those companies won’t be using for teleconferencing. 

Why should a company’s treatment of potential employees matter to anyone else?  Here’s why.  A company that views people and their time as having no value, probably see their customers in a similar light.  Think about it.  This type of behaviour towards employees and job seekers is usually indicative of a philosophy towards people.  This philosophy is going to colour their approach to their customers.  They can’t help it.  It will in some way manifest in their service. 

Corporate couresy is dead.  But it doesn’t have to be.  If you’re a business owner or a hiring manager, take the extra time to treat your potential employees with respect.  After all, an interview is really a two-way process– the candidate selling him/herself to you and you selling your company to the candidate.  Treat it as such.  How you treat potential employees says alot about your company and your corporate culture.  Make it one that values people and you’ll see that translate into success in other areas.  It has always worked for me.  In fact, I’d say that I’ve had some of the most loyal employees working for me. 

Update(04/01/2008): Ironically I got an email form letter this morning stating that they’d decided to pursue other options.  It was a generic letter and sent through Monster not from the HR person I who originally contacted me.  Highly impersonal and interesting coincidence that I received it the morning after I posted this.

* While I won’t name names, I’m not above linking to them.

** Beside the potential harm of an interviewee later being a decision maker elsewhere, there’s always the potential that they’ll blog about you and then whenever your customers google your name, they’ll see what schmucks you are in dealing with potential employees.

Julian

CEO: Noun meaning a very lifelike robot. British. Generally an unfeeling bastard but usually friendly enough.

I love my employees.  They’re so creative. 

I’ve had my Paypal debit card for years and I like it. No problems. Sometime in 2007, my Paypal debit card expired. They sent me a new one which I tucked into my wallet. I’ve used it many times but always in person, never online. Boy was I surprised the first time I tried to use it online to create an iTunes account (yeah, I’m a really late adopter here but I’ve been using and loving eMusic
for a long time). When I flipped the card over to enter my security code, I noticed that my card had 666 as the security code. Now those of you that know me are probably laughing pretty hard by now. I looked again to make sure I was reading it right. Yep, 666. So I entered it. And iTunes told me it was an invalid security code.

See apparently, somewhere in the iTunes code a developer decided that rather than spend the few cents to hit a gateway and verify the security code, they’d rule out “obviously” invalid security codes. I’d guess that probably 123, 999 and others would also be flagged. This is a huge design flaw if card issuers actually use numbers like 123, 999 or in my case, 666. Consumers will be unable to buy from those merchants even though they have perfectly legitimate cards. (Of course, the other possibility is that iTunes is correctly designed and that Paypal misprinted my card with the incorrect security code. I kind of doubt that though. I guess I’ll try using it elsewhere online and see).

So what have I learned from this little experience? Two things really. The first is that more care needs to be taken in gathering business requirements when it comes to techniques for stopping fraud. If a requirement states that something is invalid simply because it mimics what people might normally enter as “dummy” data, without a corresponding business rule to never issue data that looks like “dummy” data, that requirement is faulty. The second lesson I learned is that Paypal thinks I’m the antichrist.

Let me state for the record, I’m pretty liberal in most of my views.  However, global free trade certainly isn’t on of them.  When US companies began shipping our manufacturing overseas to cut costs (How’d that work out, Mattel?), we were told that it was nothing to fret about.  After all, America was retooling as an information economy now.  People who lost their jobs in manufacturing would just retrain for the new information economy.  In some ways, that seemed reasonable.  Then they began shipping our call center and IT jobs overseas to cut costs.  So what are we all going to retrain to do now?  Is America building a great fast food economy? 

I’ve always believed that offshoring was a huge IT movement that was based on extremely short sighted and poor analysis of the real costs involved.  I’ve seen a number of offshored projects that went poorly or experienced excessive delays.  When these additional costs are factored in, I highly doubt that offshoring is saving the money some MBA types would have us believe.  I also maintain that exporting American jobs is one of the primary reasons for our current economic slowdowns in this country.  Now that the infrastructure to that area of the world has been disrupted, companies are finding some of their critical operations disrupted.   With repair estimates that range for 1 to several weeks, this will certainly cost companies that have heavily invested in offshoring.

While I freely admit to a touch of schadenfreude at these company’s expense, this situation highlights just how shortsighted much of the analysis and planning involved in offshoring has been.  Many of these companies have no backup plans for the functions that they’ve offshored.  Offshoring seems to have been something that’s largely been done in a haphazard way without adhering to IT (and business really) best practices in regards to backup and disaster recovery.  I think Dan Farber and Larry Dignan of ZDNet summarized it quite nicely in their blog when they said:

Postscript: I’ve conducted a few searches for information on contingency plans for offshore operations and didn’t find a lot of information (whitepapers, stories and otherwise). The lack of information that turned up was a bit stunning given that one cable could sever access to your call center. Reading between the lines it could be that disaster recovery isn’t given much thought before making a decision to go offshore.

I couldn’t agree more.  In my opinion, disaster recovery, long-term effects on the economy, security, and real costs aren’t given much thought before making a decision to go offshore.