Thinking aloud

I’ve been busy working on my third totally new web site in less than a year — and that doesn’t count the sites I simply helped update.

The one thing I’ve learned: no matter what technology you use, whether you use a CMS or you code the thing by hand, it’s an astonishingly complex and costly thing to create a commercial web site.

Everything — and I mean everything — is like riding on blocks. If your site looks good in Internet Explorer, it doesn’t in Firefox. If you try to avoid JavaScript, you can’t do squat for the user. The best-intentioned UI conventions become mush as you shoe-horn the content into them. Just proofreading the site requires the patience of Job and the skill of a novelist.

Worse, you can’t please everyone. So knowing how to please most people becomes the standard, and figuring that out before you have weeks of analytics to look at is more black art than science.

I think the solution is radical simplification. Set an arbitrary limit on the number of pages. 10, 15, whatever. Make the content fit the bucket you’ve created. Use a blog (how’d you guess we’d come back to that?) for everything else. People want fresh…a blog is fresh. You want to change your message on a dime, focus visitors’ attention on something? A blog does it.

Doing a standard corporate web site is like being run over by square wheels. The only thing that’ll round those wheels off is a complete departure from what corporate web sites have become.  And even I am not crazy enough to try that yet.

So, crush me with those edges…

Have you ever wondered if your blog reaches the people you hope it will? People beyond the immediate friends, family and business acquaintances that you are primarily blogging for? Have you heard people say that blogging is a flash in the pan…something that influences nobody…that has no impact? Are you one of my former blogging clients wondering why you should continue doing this now that our consulting engagement is over?

Well, check out this case study.

On Saturday, I blasted TIAA-CREF. Today, they’re all over this blog. And I’ve got the stats to prove it.

Here’s a a screen grab of activity from today (Monday, 2/4) from Clicky.  Almost an hour from a single IP address! (This may represent several users as I presume TIAA-CREF has routers and firewalls that share their public IPs.) And, there are multiple visits from multiple TIAA-CREF IPs that add up to more 90 minutes of time on this blog. That’s a long time for visitors to spend on a blog, even in aggregate.

Wonder who is at this IP address?

Yup, it’s proof positive of the power of blogging. Was it more forceful to blog about the Orwellian language in the price increase letter or should I have talked to a customer service representative by phone? Which do you think got more attention?

I hate obfuscation. This week, TIAA-CREF sent my wife the letter I’ve attached to this post as a PDF. It’s unsigned, unaddressed and clearly written by an attorney…but the marketing guys got into the act as well.

The letter is a notice of a price increase….but it never says TIAA-CREF is raising prices. It only says that “estimated expenses will increase by eight to ten basis points.”

Check out this copy:

The revised estimated expenses also reflect costs unanticipated at the time of the original estimate in the prospectuses, including expenses associated with operating two platforms to serve institutional retirement plans pending completion of plan conversions to the new platform and costs associated with processing delays and delays in realizing anticipated savings.

In other words, we have to raise prices because we have duplicate computer systems, neither of which serve you, the individual investor. We screwed up merging them, and not only didn’t we save the money we thought we would, we have to spend more. You get to pay for it. 

OK, I get it. This wealthy company, ostensibly dedicated to teachers, professors, nurses and other non-profit employees and hiding behind noble ideas like serving the ”greater good” and leveraging “the power of .org,” can’t simply say “we’re raising prices.”

Instead we get a long, apologetic argument about better service to “institutional clients,” (sales) visits to campuses, and a quote from Forbes backing up that when you call these people, they’re happy to sell you more overpriced investments. We also get some nice footnotes where the name should be of a human being taking responsibility for the price increase.

(I didn’t attach the expense ratios, but ranging from .48% to .905%, I hope many of the company’s customers will realize that there are far less expensive options available.)

A song that’s in high rotation on my iPod these days is the lovely duet Please Read the Letter from the unlikely pairing of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (yes, I know: heavy metal and bluegrass…who’d have thunk it? Go ahead and blow 89 cents on the song. You’ll love it).

TIAA-CREF’s marketing and legal people should listen carefully to some of the song’s lyrics:

…A fool could read the signs
Maybe baby
You’d better check between the lines
Please read the letter,
I wrote it in my sleep
With help and consultation from
The angels of the deep…

 TIAA-CREF to customers: please read the letter (if you can): Download (203)

After over a year of consulting, I’ve taken on a new role with Active Endpoints which returns me to my roots in application development. For many years before I went into marketing, I developed applications using what was then considered leading-edge technology.

What amazes me is that leading-edge developers today face the same problems as I did then: there’s too much “stuff” to conquer, too many technologies to integrate and too many piece parts to put together with duct tape.

Active Endpoints has created a new category of app dev software, what we call a visual orchestration system, or VOS. You can read more about it in a press release we issued today…there’s a lot more to come from us on this topic. (Those of you who know me aren’t surprised to hear that, I would assume.)

Anyway, I think this company can change — indeed revolutionize — the way applications are developed by helping the industry think large — as in programming in the large. This is in complete contrast to the way people think today, which is all about devolving problems to their smallest units to make them solvable, then trying after the fact to put them together in some coherent way. Any of you who have ever tried to build something from a kit knows how impossible this can be.

Given the size of the problem and the amazing technology Active Endpoints offers, once I got the chance to join I found it irresistible.

I am very late to the Chocolate Rain phenomenon. In case you are one of the remaining 50 people who don’t know about Tay Zonday’s famous (>13M views!) music video, I’ve embedded the YouTube video below. Be sure you also watch the related videos, including the Chad Vader spoof and Tay’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Back the to main purpose of this post: it’s time to bash the purported “weight loss” drug Alli again. Last summer, I both railed against and sympathized with the marketers of this “miracle drug.” I empathized with the plight of marketers who have to market a drug that, uh, “soils” your clothes with….here it comes…an ugly chocolate rain as it works. Then, I whined about those same marketers minimizing these effects on people.

Then, last week, I was in a Wal-Mart and was stopped dead in my tracks by the display captured in the cell phone photo above. Look at the bottom of the retail display. It says, “can you commit to this?” Cleanly designed and mostly white brochures that match the nice white packaging of the “starter kit” of Alli on the display explain that low-fat foods reduce, the…yes, I am going to say it again…”chocolate rain effects.”

The pun on commitment to achieving a diet goal strikes me as the most cynical marketing I’ve ever seen. It’s not about commitment to low-fat diets…it’s about commitment to a drug that makes you produce a nasty chocolate drizzle. After all, if you can commit to a low-fat diet, what the heck do you need Alli for?

And, yes, I find the minimalist, white graphic design of the packaging and the brochures offensive as well. This product, which in truth, makes you slightly ill by interfering with your ability to absorb fat, should be in a black box with big FDA warnings, or at least a very dark brown that matches the real value of Alli itself.

I wanted to make sure that readers of this blog check out an exciting new voice. My pals at Enigma have started blogging, and I think that their first post (at least the first post I didn’t write) is pretty compelling.

Clearly, I am involved in setting up their blogging efforts, but today when Joy and I were working on her post, I can tell you, I just sat back and watched it happen.

The blogging world is liberating for many software companies because it allows them to (finally!) express their raison d’etre directly, succinctly and forcefully. You can hear it in what Joy wrote today, and I hope there’s lots more to come from my new pals at Enigma.

One of my favorite New Wave tunes was New Toy by Lene Lovich which contained the memorable chorus “I want a new toy, Oh ay oh!” OK, so poetry it ain’t. But we loved dancing to it at Spit on Lansdowne Street.

Anyway, that chorus comes to mind tonight because I have just (finally!) upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3.1 and installed a cool, new widget-capable theme. I love WordPress. Oh ay oh.

Oh, and by the way, I got an iPod touch, too.

“I’ve got to have it all until I’m complete…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding…”

Here, in case you need an 80s flashback, is a link to a YouTube recording of this memorable song.

Whew…what a relief!

After reading this piece about being “Googley” in The Atlantic, I wondered if in fact the nakedly aggressive technology company was a thing of the past. I disagree with Joshua Green’s unsubstantiated assertions that we’re totally transitioning to the cloud and that Google doesn’t intend to do evil, but he does make a point that the tactics Microsoft used to crush everyone else aren’t as apparent as they used to be. What a shame, eh? It was a lot more fun in the 1990’s. I sure as hell learned a lot about how to be crushed when Microsoft destroyed us at Lotus.

I believe that if you are a start-up or small company and you aren’t dripping with testosterone in the marketplace, you lose. You lose because you cannot compete with the 600-pound gorillas in your space who can afford to be the nice guy. You need to get your message out, loud and hard. Otherwise, your secret sauce will go down the drain.

I was searching recently for a hosting company to host a vBulletin forum I am creating for a client, and came across Bluehost, which was mentioned favorably in some forums. 1and1, which I’ve been using for several years is just a disaster. Big, German, slow, rigid, German, insecure, German, ossified, German, I’d grown tired of never getting an answer to any question and being blamed 100% of the time there was a problem.

Come to discover that the CEO of Bluehost, Matt Heaton, has got the exact take-no-prisoners attitude I have been missing lately. Here, on winning, and even better (and more sneeringly) here on Microsoft, Matt has got the exact “stuff” going on in his company to win in a very competitive market.

And, by the way, his company backs up the bluster with good service and pricing.

OK, I am not sure if it’s a scam or not, but I am totally blown away by the Perfect Woman Project.

It certainly looks real…but of course it might be a huge scam of one kind or another. Whatever it is, it’s a fascinating idea. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of "submissions" yet. But all submissions are apparently reviewed by whomever is behind this and posted into categories like "sincere", "mean" and "dirty."

Some posters have tried faux erudite and are posting "poetry." I guess they think the site’s offer to "make a total transformation" into the winner’s "perfect woman" is real enough (or they are horny enough) to try blog-post-romance to win this thing.

Whatever…it’s a lot more clever than anything I’ve seen elsewhere lately, and I’d love to know who’s behind it.

I’m in the middle of an exhausting business trip to France. As anyone who’s been on these slogs knows, the hotel is your haven…a necessary place to be able to kick back and sleep off the long days and stress.

And wouldn’t you think that a Hilton next to the Eiffel Tower in downtown Paris that costs €450 a night would provide that?

Ah…wrong. I’m sitting here baking waiting for the tech to come turn off the heat and while I was hot, I wrote this nastygram to Hilton on its website. Now, I am going to post it here without further comment in hopes that unlike the travel websites, this review will get more search engine exposure from being a stand-alone blog post.

Take my advice: save your company’s money and stay elsewhere.

I am shocked at the condition and facilities at this property.

At €450 a night one would expect to be able to turn the heat on or off in your room. Instead, you are either baking or freezing because the heat cannot be controlled by the guest. A tech has to be called to do it.

There is no gym. The bathroom smells. The furniture is dinged. There is no voicemail for guests. The Wi-Fi charges are outrageous. Reception doesn’t answer the phone. The public areas are worn and shoddy.

Old style energy-saving CFL lamps that warm up — like oil lamps from the 1900s — are used in the room. This place is too cheap to even update to instant-on CFL lamps. The Honors lounge was freezing cold for three days in a row. There are no snacks in it after 9pm but it doesn’t close until 10:30pm. The breakfast in the lounge is poor quality.

I might be traveling to Paris often. I will never, ever stay here again. What a complete rip-off.