Jul 24

@I @surrender @to @social @media

By Alex Neihaus General musings 1 Comment »

Last weekend, I attended PodCamp Boston. It was incredible. And there are two things I learned. First, my fellow vps of marketing in Boston, who at their networking event three days before Podcamp Boston indicated they’d never heard of this major event happening in their backyard, will remain with their heads totally stuck in the sand.

Second, even I haven’t gone all the way. This blog’s URL was www.alexneihaus.com, representing my old-style Internet persona.

Now, as the more observant of you will notice, we are at www.yobyot.com. (Toyboy spelled backwards.)

What’s the difference? At PodCamp, people signed their badges with their Twitter handles. I’d been dabbling in Twitter — not quite getting it — until PodCamp, when I met people who tweeted they’d met me while we were talking. The number of people I follow and those following me exploded (relatively…I am still building contacts there).

So, the only right thing to do is to lose the web 1.0 persona and become all I can be.

@I @am @now @yobyot

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Jul 08

The first cut is the deepest

By Alex Neihaus General musings No Comments »

the-first-cut-is-the-deepest

This is a post about product liability. Or, more accurately my fury at Whirlpool for making it nearly impossible to lift their refrigerators without slicing off your fingers.

Short version: we’re renovating the kitchen. Today, stainless steel appliances are all the rage. This despite the fact that they collect fingerprints, dent easily and cost more. Still, we do what we’re told by the kitchenistas and we dutifully bought a stainless steel fridge.

Through a series of mishaps, it turned out that the general contractor, the tile guy and I ended up having to lift this 600 pound beast up the three stairs to my front door and then into the kitchen to install it.

I was on the left side of this thing, trying to lift it up on the count of three. “One….two…three!” Bob shouted and we all heaved up and towards the door. I had my shoulder against the bottom and my left hand under the left side.

On step two, I looked down and was gushing blood. The damn stainless steel cabinet’s un-smoothed-off bottom edge had sliced deeply into three fingers of my left hand. It was painless (then) and so I was sorta detached from all the blood literally pouring from my left hand. (I am left handed by the way).

We finally got the behemoth into place, and as I was taking off the last of the shipping material, I considered whether or not to tilt the monster back and wipe the blood off the bottom edge that had so nearly severed my fingers. “Nah,” I thought. “Let the next owner mix his or her DNA with mine.” (Don’t anyone tell Tricia I left a souvenir on her now stained stainless steel cabinet. This is our secret.)

Today, as I sit at work and try my level best to type emails and collateral, I’ve considered calling a torts attorney (aka an ambulance chaser) and suing Whirlpool. It’s idle, but appealing, thinking (the cuts will heal). But one or two more steps, and I think the first use of the fridge would have been to chill my severed digits in preparation for surgical reattachment.

Had that happened, I’d have had a whole new career: torturing Whirlpool through the court system.

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Jun 05

Right Hemipshere: still grasping at straws

By Alex Neihaus General musings 6 Comments »

Let me say right off the bat that I know that I really should get over it. I should stop being so competitive that I am willing to blast former business competitors for things that no longer matter to me (or the descendants of the original competition).

But I can’t help it. It’s just part of me. I still like to throw an occasional lighted one at Microsoft (I’m still brooding over the 1990′s battle between Notes and Exchange) or Autodesk (we got a blessed divorce in 2002).

Today, it’s Right Hemisphere’s turn. These are the guys who took government money from New Zealand, then took money from SAP, undoubtedly turning their cap table into a cross between the Auckland and Walldorf phone books, then called themselves a startup and hired a marketing team whose first apparent deliverable to the marketplace in 2007 was an 18-page glossy brochure. (Now, I know some people love brochures, but they are both expensive and passe. Ask RH how many of those are sitting in boxes collecting dust in the marketing group’s area at HQ.)

When I was with Seemage, we never really considered RH much of a competitor, what with their message being….well, what exactly was their message? Can’t seem to remember it. Think it had something to do with Adobe, then SAP, then servers all over the place. OTOH, at Seemage it was simple: we were about CAD reuse on the desktop without the heavy costs of PLM.

OK, so what’s the proximate cause of this screed? After all, Seemage is gone…and I’m no longer consulting for Dassault. In a word, it’s RH’s new “blog.” After a couple of years, it looks like RH finally wants to try to grasp the power of community….by copying the old Seemage formula of an in-your-face blog.

At Seemage we had 3dmojo.com. And for a while, it was all we had. But we poured our hearts out. And it was an incredibly effective way for a great product (and a pretty damn good company, IMHO) to get noticed. No fancy stuff…just a direct conversation with the 3D CAD community, who listened intently (and who still do).

We said what we meant and we weren’t afraid to say practically anything (a representative sample is here), as long as we passionately believed in it. A sales rep crashed a competitive trade show using an iPod to show what was then called Seemage (now 3DVIA Composer). It was such a success that we started a podcast that goes on today. Traffic built because we had something to say that was intelligible and cogent.

So, now imagine you are RH. You’ve got questions: your brochure is gathering dust…people come to the seminars at the Capital Grille for the steak, not the software…and little ole Seemage went on to greater glory inside DS. What was the magic about them? Ah ha! It had to be their blog. Gotta git me one of them! Voila: deep3d.com.

A more banal corporate blog I don’t think I’ve ever seen. They have nothing to say. Rehashes of trade shows from the vp of marketing. An SE kowtowing to Adobe Flex (big surprise there). The CEO reprising their SAP deals. (I’m beginning to feel the warm excitement of SAP as a new target…check out the stunt we pulled at SAPPHIRE.)

In short, the reason people who are imitated don’t usually feel flattered by the imitator is that, by definition, imitations lack inspiration. Go ahead, RH: paint a happy face on your toy blog. The only thing apt about it is that the name is somewhat onomatopoeic: this blog is going deep6d very quickly.

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May 15

Riding the rails

By Alex Neihaus General musings No Comments »

acela in New Haven

OK, so this isn’t going to be the most scintillating post I’ve written. Even I — (in)famous for the bitchin’, blastin’ blog post — need a little banality break now and then.

The motivation to blog this morning is that I’ve written this post and uploaded it from an Acela train stopped in New Haven on the way to a business meeting in NYC. I’ve got my ThinkPad plugged in and my Internet connection going over an incredibly slow (but serviceable) T-Mobile Internet sharing connection on my cell phone. (Why it’s taken T-Mobile until now to launch 3G is beyond me. And the 3G network they are launching uses trash spectrum nobody else in the world is using.)

Back to the post…I remember when a stop in New Haven on a Northeast Corridor train necessitated a switch from electricity to diesel. I remember when you couldn’t hold a cup of coffee on the train because the rails didn’t understand parallel. I also remember when “on time arrival” meant “sometime on the scheduled day.” And, the general condition of the car I am sitting in isn’t terrible, as far as public accommodations in the US go. So things are improved. And the Acela, for all its problems, really does beat an airplane ride for a Midtown meeting.

But does this train — after all the investment and tax money — compare to the Shinkansen or the Inter-City Express or even the TGV? In a word, nope. No matter how much train buffs (a subculture I brushed up against when I was technology manager for the now-defunct Boston & Maine RR) wish it could be, this train isn’t even close. The cars are a little too run down. The service is a little too infrequent (why not Acela trains every 30 minutes in the morning and evening?).

But the major problem? It’s a number: 3:16. That’s the published time from Route 128 to Penn Station. Even the Big Dig has been completed (at an astonishing cost and loss of life). But Amtrak’s promise of a 2:30 trip from Boston to New York hasn’t been realized…and I doubt it ever will.

It’s a metaphor for the decline of American technology and capability. If ever there was a train route in the continental US that could support high-speed traffic, this is it. What a shame.

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Apr 21

Deelip drinks Autodesk’s Kool-Aid

By Alex Neihaus Digitoy, General musings No Comments »

After Revit was purchased by Autodesk in 2002, I spent a grand total of a few months there. I’ve not written much publicly about my experiences there because they have a reputation for long institutional memories. I am sure that this post isn’t going to make them love me any more than they already don’t.

Before Autodesk bought Revit, I always wondered about the apparent favorable bias among the CAD press towards them. In my time in the industry, they were pushing their boots into customers’ and partners’ heads (something I suspect they’re still pretty good at) but portions of the CAD press always seemed to give them a bye. Truth be told, there were some CAD journalists who hated them unreasonably, but by and large, they got a pass.

Still, the “professional” CAD press was careful to hide it. Very careful. But it was there. In an incident that blew up on Autodesk, a letter that Revit sent to ADT consultants ended up in the hands of a journalist who told me Autodesk’s PR department had faxed it to him. They were simply reprinting whatever they were sent by Autodesk.

But now, and for the first time, we got ‘em. Dead to rights. Check out this quote from Deelip Mendez, one of the arrivistes in the CAD press, a blogger who would have little traffic if not for the fact that Ralph and Roopinder have been promoting his blog:

But I know that Autodesk Marketing is the best there is and when they say something, I listen and wonder.

This comes in a long, unfocused post in which Deelip tries hard to make something out of nothing between Dassault and SolidWorks. But there it is: the slavish, unthinking bias that Autodesk is…wait for it…a thought leader. And that that leadership comes from…squeeze your eyes shut in case you are blinded by the revelation…the marketing department.

In being so overt, Deelip has blown everyone’s cover, the thin veneer of independence that has been carefully nurtured for a long time. The CAD world is a small place…there’re only so many vendors to bill. Between dissing startups as irrelevant (they said that about both Revit and Seemage) and kowtowing to ADSK’s marketing department, it must get monotonous drinking the same flavor of Kool-Aid all the time.

 

Apr 18

The sweet smell of retaliation, or how a great blog can really mess you up

By Alex Neihaus General musings, WordPress No Comments »

retaliation

At work, we use Clicky web analytics to supplement our web statistics. It’s a great service, and Sean at Clicky has always answered my questions quickly and personally. In short, they’re exactly the kind of people you want to work with.

So, I can imagine how furious he must have been when he had to deal with Linksys "technical" support on a blown switch.

You can read the story here, but the real point is that Sean got smart: he used his blog and his knowledge of SEO to make damn sure Linksys will pay and pay. Just check out the searches Sean posts. If I were looking for a switch, I’d search for exactly these terms and walk, no make that run, away from this particular switch.

The moral: not only is blogging the ultimate version of Consumer Reports (minus the holier-than-thou-1930′s Socialist slant), but the sweet, sweet satisfaction of really stickin’ it to mega-roadblocks like Linksys delivers catharsis and helps others.

Right on, Sean. And thanks for the warning, though I wish you had some Netgear stuff to trash. I want them to suffer, too, but my blog isn’t as well trafficked.

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Apr 01

Never one to let an Internet fad go by, it’s my turn to say…

By Alex Neihaus General musings 1 Comment »

Ha ha! You’ve been Rickrolled!

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Mar 06

Hey, guys, want to know what a feminist writing in the The Atlantic thinks of you?

By Alex Neihaus General musings No Comments »

what women want

In one of the worst examples of misandry posing as journalism I’ve read in many, many moons, Lori Gottleib writes in The Atlantic that women should just “settle” for men they don’t necessarily love in order to get married.

Guys, you gotta read this article. Initially, you get the feeling that you are being given a peek inside the most mysterious organ on the planet: the romantic pathways of an American woman’s brain. Gottleib writes in a “let’s just dish” style that I imagine will resonate with women. That tone lets you feel like you are about to be enlightened about what’s really going on inside as women deal with the tough balances of marriage, family and work. You keep hoping that Gottleib will recognize the real value of marriage: the roles fathers can play in their children’s lives.

But it’s not to be. Turns out this all about Gottleib. Her penis-and-a-paycheck feminism turns out to be simple narcissism and personal regret at single motherhood posing as “don’t make the mistake I made” pseudo-advice. Check this out:

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.

Uh, “infrastructure??” Is that some kind of new term for a human male?

Using that all-important cultural touchstone, the sitcom, as a reference point, Gottleib declares, “So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long-married couples are having much sex anyway?” Uh, sorry, Lori. If you knew much about men, this wouldn’t be a question.

Gottleib goes on and on and on and on about…herself. Her son, someone that should’ve figured prominently in the logic for settling, gets short shrift:

Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover. Never-married moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”

It’s all so disingenuous. At the end of the day, this article devalues men and objectifies them in ways no male writer could ever hope to get away with when discussing women. It’s a damn shame The Atlantic is so important a magazine. Someone might actually believe this tripe.

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Feb 27

Learning to love square wheels

By Alex Neihaus General musings 2 Comments »

therehastobeabetterwaytocreatewebsites

 

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…

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Feb 04

TIAA-CREF to Alex: we’re reading your blog about us

By Alex Neihaus General musings No Comments »

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.

tiaa-cref visits to alexneihaus.com

Wonder who is at this IP address?

tiaa-cref ip address visting alex neihaus.com 

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?

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