The ClueTrain Manifesto

"We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal. " Theses #85 Clue Train Manifesto

I read the Clue Train Manifesto some time ago, but recently re-read it and found some interesting insights into Web 2.0 in the book.

The Clue Train Manifesto was written by marketing specialists Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger and first posted online in April of 1999 and then published as a book in January of 2001. It proclaimed the coming of the internet and the end of business as usual. Their premise laid out 95 theses that proclaimed markets are conversations, conversations among people, conversations that can't be controlled by business, conversations that change the old mass marketing strategy of control and replace it with the new Web marketing strategy of influence.

The Web has enabled these conversations to happen in ways simply not possible in the era of mass media. The Internet makes it possible for everyone to participate in the "great converation". For business the opportunity is fostering, learning from and understanding these conversations than slicing and dicing these conversations to drive business growth.

The ClueTrain Manifesto states:

"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. "

The ClueTrain Manifesto goes on to warn the business owners unwilling to change.

"You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation. "

As Jacob Nielsen puts it a little more drastically:

"The ClueTrain Manifesto lists 95 reasons Internet business is different from traditional business. Much overlap with my own comments on Web design over the last five years. Despite the fact that this manifesto and my own writings are online for everybody to read, I predict that most big companies will still not get it because their internal management structures are too well built and capable of resisting customer-centricity until it's too late. 80% of the Fortune-500 companies will be gone in ten years (unfortunately I don't know which will be the 100 companies to change in time)." useit.com: Spotlight link March 27, 1999 — Jakob Nielsen

The ClueTrain Manifesto was certainly an insight into the phenomenon of Web 2.0. Although Web 2.0 is hard to define let's look at some of the definitions and how closely they resemble the principles of the ClueTrain Manifesto.

According to Tim O'Reilly,
"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

An IBM social networking analyst, Dario de Judicibus, has proposed a different definition which is more focused on social interactions and architectural implementation:
"Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generate content that is published, managed and used through network applications in a service-TR

So what we have learned is that if you own a business you have to understand that Web 2.0 is about conversations. These conversations can be about your company, about your employees, about your products or about your products in a blender. Web 2.0 is about product and service offerings that foster conversations. FaceBook (this is who I am), YouTube (video communication) , LinkedIn (this is my network) all of these Web 2.0 phenomenon foster conversations. Microsoft has come great sites that foster conversation for their developer community at Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/ and home user community at Channel 10 http://www.on10.net/Default.aspx, I think the Channels go up to 11, where you can find a remake of Spinal Tap.

If you are an existing business than your challenge is making your current products available for conversations or creating new products that will foster conversations. A favorite example of a successful company that has made the transition to Web 2.0 is the Motley Fool. The Motley Fool has a simple stated goal: to educate, amuse, and enrich their readers and help them make better financial decisions. Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, the privately-held multi-media company today has nearly 200 employees in the United States and UK and is a top provider of investment advice and financial information. Recognizing the early power of the Internet, the Gardners moved The Motley Fool online to AOL in 1994. Three years later The Motley Fool migrated to its own award-winning website, http://www.fool.com/. Today The Motley Fool reaches millions each month online through its own site and partnerships with such leading portals as Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.com.

The Motley Fool introduced a new feature on their site called CAPS targeted at the market conversations behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon. I believe CAPS stands for Capital Asset Pricing System.

Motley Fool CAPS operates from a simple premise: Working together, we can improve our investing results. This revolutionary new service pools the resources of the Motley Fool Community to help you identify the best stocks at the best times to buy them -- and which stocks to avoid, too!

I am a user on CAPS and it really has all the attributes of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

So how does CAPS work? (this taken from their site)

1. Players rate stocks.
At the heart of CAPS are thousands of predictions. Players predict whether stocks will outperform or underperform the S&P 500 and over what time frame this will happen.
The Fool compiles the data, showing all the picks you have made and all the picks for individual stocks.

2. The Fool Keeps the score.
As stocks change in value, they evaluate players' predictions. Players receive an accuracy percentage, indicating how often they make correct predictions and a score, which is the percentage by which their picks beat the S&P 500.

3. Players receive CAPS ratings.
Based on the performance of their picks, CAPS players receive a percentile rating (from 1 to 100). This rating indicates the percentage of people that player is outperforming. The higher the rating, the better!

4. Stocks receive CAPS ratings.
A stock's CAPS rating is the aggregation of every prediction for that stock. The rating indicates whether or not players think that stock will outperform the S&P 500.
Important concept to follow... pay attention!! Here it is:
Players with higher ratings have more influence on a stock's rating.
If you're a great investor with a great track record, than you are weighted heavier than others what you think is very important. So, your given more weight. However, if you don't know the difference between a stock and a parking ticket, your not going to affect the company rating very much.

5. CAPS gets smarter
Every CAPS rating is updated every five minutes. And with each additional prediction, CAPS recalculates and recompiles the data, constantly refining the community sentiment.
Over time, the best investors will naturally work their way to the top and will gain more influence over the stock ratings. Conversely, the less successful players will have less impact.
And then the cycle repeats. Players make more predictions, which affect their player ratings, which affect the stock ratings, and so on. The result is a service which will help you find better stocks and follow the best investors.

This is a great example of a company navigating the Web 2.0 world to introduce a new product offering. The Motley Fool has created and is fostering an ongoing conversation with CAPS. This is a conversation in which their customers are fully engaged and has legs to expand into many different areas.

Web 2.0 is also about access, access to your company and products to enable conversations. I'll talk about this in the next blog but some technology to check out before then MS Astoria and MS IM bots.

The Importance of Passion

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
Friedrich Hebbel (German Poet and Dramatist, 1813-1863)

There is no greater motivator for the workplace than to create passion around people's work, that's when great things are accomplished. And the deepest passion comes about when people feel that the product or service they are working on helps the customer in some tangible way.

Out of college I worked for a software start-up that developed tax preparation software for both consumers and businesses. The founder and owner of the company was one of the greatest people I have ever met on many different levels, his name was Jim Petersen. One of his most important skills that contributed to the success of his company, was an ability to create passion around people's work.

We were all young, right out of college, all of us wanting to make a mark on the world but not knowing exactly where to start. We didn't mind working late into the night. We would to gauge the level of dedication using a metric called 'turn around time', this was the time it took you to go home, grab a quick bite to eat, shower, maybe grab a little nap and get back to work. It was grueling and motivation was the key to sustain the tempo.

Part of the passion for the work Jim generated was by sharing in the experience, just being there showed the staff that this was important to him, so important that although he couldn't make the product happen himself, he could be there to cheer people on and share in the experience. Jim would always be there checking up on the activities into the late night and early morning hours. Sometimes he would just sit in the hall and chat with people as they walked by. At other times he would walk in with a couple bags of snacks to refresh the snack table. At the beginning the snack table was always stocked with high sugar snacks and candies. As we began to put on weight and exhibit the other side effects of too much sugar there was a general revolt against the snack table offerings, I was chosen as the leader to inform Jim that we wanted, no demanded, health food to replace the sugar snacks. Needless to say he was surprised but more than willing to make the changes. At the end of the project we ended up at a happy equilibrium between apples, tea, and and nuts on the health food side, with M&M's, sodas and taffy to balance it out.

For the most part, Jim would generate passion through his pep talks, sometimes coming out in some strange segway in a meandering conversation. From Jim’s soap box a simple tax preparation program became something that would change thousands of peoples lives helping parents to send their kids to school with their tax refunds, a payroll program made it possible for people to pay their bills and feed their families, and a fixed assets application enabled companies to grow and create new jobs for the unemployed. Granted at times it was a stretch, it created a passion in everyone's work that was above and beyond the work at hand. For young people trying to make their mark and do something important, this was very powerful stuff. (to read more about Jim Petersen see my blog entry here).

There is an old saying, "When we are passionate about what we do our passion gets translated into creativity, into the amount of effort we devote to the business, and into many other factors big and small". Passion has a beneficial impact to our success and in the end the success of the businesses we work for. So if you want to be successful in your project or business find a way to create passion around the work you and your staff are doing.

“There is no greatness without a passion to be great, whether it's the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson.”- Tony Robbins

Training Completes Effective Customer Support

“...to better train our customer base will drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and reduce long-term support costs.” James Hanley

Training is an important component of an effective online support offering.

1.Enhances Customer Support

• Educates the customer to answer their own questions before they open a ticket.(“How do I questions…”)
• Educates the customers with “just-in-time” training on changes and how these changes are implemented and can be used in the applications, avoiding calls.
• Educates customers on “what’s new” in the application at release time, avoiding calls.

2. Drives Customer Success

• Customer training enables buyers to effectively utilize BNA Software products. The better a customer understands how to use our products, the higher their level of success and overall satisfaction.
• Customer training increases customer retention, new training is a reason to stay in contact with customers, and a reason for customers to come back.

3. Increase Sales

• Customer training enables buyers to deeply understand how to use, apply, and customize products. As they better understand the details of the products, they identify new opportunities to buy more and they become advocates within their organizations.
• As new product features and models are announced, highly trained customers can more rapidly adopt them

4. Makes Money

• Customer training is a high-margin business itself. IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Lawson Software, and hundreds of other high-technology companies use their customer training businesses as a profit center. Education offerings are viewed as “products” – some are high value, high priced products; others are given away to enhance customer satisfaction. Every software company can and should promote a premium support offering

5. Reduce Costs

• Reduce Issue Management Costs – training drives down issue management transactions by educating the customer first before the call is made.
• Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs – training is a compelling offer to use in promotion campaigns

Keep your Customers Close - Online Support

"In an era in which the competition is one mouse click away, the need to solidify and deepen relationships with valuable customers has never been more important. This need is creating enormous opportunities in the market for customer relationship management applications."
Mary Wardley, director of IDC's Customer Relationship Management Applications research. "

Online Customer Support software is quickly becoming an even player with sales automation and marketing automation in the triad of offerings making up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. Both sales automation and marketing automation are critical to modern business management but now Customer Support is coming to center stage. Customers are taking advantage of and expect all available technologies to be made available to them for problem resolution and self service.

In addition everyones customer base will be changing drastically in the next 10 years with Baby Boomers retiring and the technology astute Millenial generation replacing them. This new generation is comfortable with new mobile and internet technologies and expects to interact with companies in a much different way than past generations.

Here is a case for implementating Online Support and Training (which I argue in my next entry must be an integral part of support) if you haven't done so already.

Business Drivers:

1. Online support lowers average cost of support resolution.

The cost per transaction is this:

• email $28.57
• phone $27.68
• web $3.75.

*The Economics of Online Support published by The Association of Support Professional

2. Online support optimizes resource usage.

This optimization occurs because online support drives problem resolution and other tasks from telelphone channels to self-service channels. Enabling self service and providing answers to common questions result in customers binding their own answers and avoids the calls to support they would have otherwise made.

With a reduction in calls, customer service representatives are freed up to:

• concentrate on higher-value tasks and issues
• contribute to revenue generating product features
• keep up with application domain changes and stay current with customers and how they use the applications in their business

3. Online support increases customer satisfaction

• Increasingly more and more customers want online support as an option. ­Demographics show the Baby Boomers retiring and the Millenial generation taking over who are comfortable with new technology and expect different online support technology.
  
• Customers value an option off hours and online support eEnables real 24/7 support operations. Customers can self service 24/7 by using Knowledge Base, FAQ’s, Open a Ticket item to get into queue.
  
• As online support use increases, phone support is decreases and phone lines become available for those customers requiring phone support

4. Online support improves the Top and Bottom Line.

The Bottom Line - Cost reductions:

• With each phone transaction avoided cost reductions are realized.
  
• Online support enables other cost savings support options – chat and instant messaging Chat and IM offer a less-expensive solid alternative to the phone. Many customers prefer it as their next line of support after online self-service support. A Customer Support Representative can handle multiple chat sessions simultaneously, speeding time to resolution for a larger number of customers.

The Top Line - Revenue increases:

• The top line improves through increasing revenue by redirecting support agents to revenue producing work. Increase in customer satisfaction positively impacts customer retention and additional sales. Online support can be used for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and enables targeted marketing campaigns.
  

5. Online support increases Customer Intimacy

Online support enables options that provide an opportunity to make customers part of the BNA Software community – Forums, Surveys, Feedback etc.

Customers can make contributions:

• ­Improve support processes
• ­Improve the content
• ­Develop better products and services
• ­Find opportunities for new products and services.

Collaboration with customers creates truly customer driven products and services increasing sales and customer loyalty.

Reduce Risk – Online support enables the understanding and anticipating of the customer’s interests providing insight into where markets are headed. Efforts to enter new markets are based on clear insights, drastically reducing the risks of entering and competing in those markets.

In a Web 2.0 world, you should be leveraging the Web to not only reduce your support costs by giving customers other options besides placing a call, but also to learn what your customers are saying.

Knowing When to Pull Your Head Out of the Sand

"To learn more and more about less and less, until eventually we shall know everything about nothing." Motto of the Bonehead Club of Dallas

History is littered with spectacular business failures caused by bonehead managers (BMs). Most of these failures come about by BMs refusal to come to terms with business reality, which many times requires them to admit to making a mistake. BM's don't like admitting to mistakes, or dealing with problems caused by their mistakes. BM's also don't like being caught with the deer in the headlights look when they are informed they have missed a major paradigm shift in the market or recieve the news that their competitor has just introduced a new product or just completed an acquisition to capitalize on the paradigm shift. No, BM's like to look smart and competent at all times even if the ship is sinking they won't flinch until the water reaches their eyebrows.

The most common way BM's cope is to put their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong. There is positive reinforcement here, because 9 times out of 10 the problem is minor and goes away, they can eventually return to the surface and resume their BM activities.

But it's that one time out of 10 where the spectacular failure happens. This is the major strategic issue that needs immediate attention, the bad organizational change that is causing rot from the inside out and has to be fixed fast or any one of the multitude of other serious issues which if not addressed with clear, honest and intelligent thought will inflict a mortal wound.

“We can't put our head in the sand and ignore it. By the time we emerge, our world will have changed beyond recognition...” Alan Johnson

Let's take a look at a few examples in recent history.

AOL-TIME Warner Merger

This was the future, the convergence of new technology and old media that would revolutionize the business world.

"By joining forces with Time Warner, we will fundamentally change the way people get information, communicate with others, buy products, and are entertained," America Online founder Steve Case said of the merger of his Internet pioneer with old media publisher Time Warner in January 2000.

Two BM problems here, first not dealing with the reality of the situation after the merger. At the end of the day the companies weren't really compatible, Time even refused to use AOL as their E-mail provider. There was a significant failure to realize synergies anticipted in the deal. Second, the deer in the headlights look when there was a complete collapse of the online ad market and the AOL model/vision of how users would evolve with the internet.

New Coke

Coca-Cola executives concerned about the market errosion being caused by Pepsi and well aware of the fact that their overall market share was nearly half of what it was in the 1950's came up with a plan to introduce a Pepsi competitor, New Coke. Within hours of its rollut it was clear something was wrong. The BM's response was to put their heads in the sand, they call such compaints "relatively insignificant". Within 3 months there were 400,000 angry calls and letters. New Coke was quietly removed from the market.

XEROX

"Future Days" 1977, the product of nearly a decade of study at the company's Palo Alto Research Center was introduce for the first time to Xerox's top managers.
The paperless electronic typewriter that displayed text on a screen, could store it with a click of a button, and send it around the office for review and edits, and print our hard copies.
The managers didn't get it and turned it down, leaving Xerox out of what would become a trillion-dollar industry.

Meanwhile Apple Computer's founders copied most of the technology in their Macintosh PC. And for those who worked at the Palo Alto Research Center like Bob Metcalfe, who had invented the Ethernet local area network, they were understandable PO'd and left and started their own companies.

IBM

The remarkable popularity of the Apple II computer forced IBM to rush their own PC to market, so fast that they decided no to build it from scratch but build it with off-the-shelf parts. They needed an Operating System and Bill Gates was happy to help them.

The first BM move wasn't by a manager at all but by Kildall's wife who sent IBM packing after refusing to sign their multi-page nondisclosure form. So Gates told IBM about his friend across town that had a "quick and dirty operating system" called QDOS. What they told IBM was out of a Dr. Seuss movie, according to Steve Balmer "We just told IBM, 'Look, we'll go and get this operating system from this small company, we'll take care of it, we'll fix it up, and you can still do a PC".

MS purchased QDOS for $50,000 with unlimited rights, made some minor modifications and sold it to IBM for $80,000. MS only provision was that they would retain the right to sell the renamed MS-DOS, IBM had no problem with that, they couldn't imagine who else would want the operating system.

By the way if your looking for a BM award to use in your office you can purchase it here. This is a picture from their catalog, the bone for whatever reason actually glows in the dark.

Running with an Anchor

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer quotes (American Writer, 1902-1983)

In a software company with mature and aging products, selling into competitive and saturated markets where new unit growth is restricted to partnering and integrations, the once heralded flag ship applications, the cash cows, can become anchors to growth. These companies also become favorable targets for venture captial firms and competitive acquisitions who value the cash flow of an existing customer base but also understand the weight of the legacy technology. They understand that the investment needed to rewrite or otherwise reinvent the cash cows in modern technologies is out of the reach of the companies financial capabilities, to survive they have to sell.

The pace of technological change increases with time, and the time between a technology being deprecated and then unsupported is becoming too short for slow moving companies to respond effectively. Software companies that have not incrementally invested to keep their products up to date may find themselves isolated on an island at high tide, with the bridge washed out and no where to go.

In addition, technology refresh projects are difficult to justify, frequently there are no visible differences between the old technology and the new and they seldomly generate any new revenue, so all you are left with is cost. Justifications that are sound and tangible only to the engineers, such as upgrading a vendors technology because it will be unsupported by the end of the year, fall on deaf ears.

Cash cows can become anchors when the industry trends dictate that an application be capable of some capability that is only available in a modern technology. Software as a Service (SAS) or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is an example. In a saturated market, where new units are flat, partnerships become the focus of the business development activity.

When the partners products have been developed in modern technologies, which is usually the case for innovations that happen around the cash cow as it sits stale in an continually growing and changing market, the proposal for integrating is based on modern technologies and practices. To have the cash cow act as a service or engine in an overall workflow or solution may be impossible since the cash cow has been written in a closed architecture. There are no integration API's, there is a proprietary data model, the business model, ui and controling logic are coupled to each other, the application is an island. So the partner will most likely walk away. New business development activities become useless as there are partners interested but none of them are interested in a clunky integration.

Now the cash cow is an anchor, the weight of neglect and outdated technology and architecture prevent it from evolving into new markets and opportunities. The company finds itself ill equipped to live in the new world, with it's cash cow still perfectly equipped to dominate in a world that no longer exists.

Icebergs in the Water

Big ships in general turn very slowly. Changes in direction can be imperceptible when sampled in the short term. An inability to change directions quickly would seem to dictate a need for far sighted vision to avoid collisions. But business history is littered with the downfall of large successful organizations that lacked the far sighted vision to makeup for their inability to change direction in a competitive landscape. But even the clearest vision of the path ahead can be misleading as the Titanic discovered on it's fateful voyage. Iceberg's in the water require the ability to change direction quickly to avoid what cannot be seen, to avoid what cannot be anticipated.

As a CTO I have been fortunate to work in a multitude of organizations, small start ups that went on to become medium sized businesses before completing an IPO to grow even further, and large enterprise organizations where stability was favored over growth. There is a correlation between organization size and the ability to execute and absorb change and the level of risk that is acceptable in any new venture proposal that responds to change. In general the larger the organization the slower it is to change direction and the higher the aversion to risk. I say in general because there are always exceptions, Microsoft and it's response to the Internet comes to mind as an exception to this rule. It's important in my job to understand these dynamics in order to successfully propose and execute changes in direction and manage to an acceptable level of risk in the process. In larger organizations venture activities generally take two forms:

1. Business Case
   
   The most common form is putting together a business case for a venture.
   
   Let's say you work for a media company that is very slow to change, in fact in the last 2 years they have come to the conclusion that they have to come up with a strategy for the Internet. Most of their content is currently delivered in print or online in text formats. You have market data showing that 75% of your customer base will retire in the next 10 years to be replaced by prospects (hopefully to be customers as well) coming from the XY Generation. These prospects have a very different relationship to technology, they live and breathe it, and they are accustomed to information being delivered in multimedia formats. What is needed here is a new venture to move the companies products to the next generation technology. This will be a significant investment and involve many touch entrenched and slow to change members of the organization. This fits the business case profile, where a positive ROI will have to be demonstrated to many stakeholders in the organization. You should expect the business case process to take some time.
   
   First the appropriate business case has to be developed, than the decision makers / stake holders have to be identified. The value proposition, or the specific highlighted value proposition, may change depending on the stake holder(s) audience.
   
   Second the funding source needs to be identified. Even though the stake holders have been identified, or perhaps there is an Investment Committee that serves as the stake holders, the funding source may be a different set of people. In large organizations the funding source isn't necessarily an account sitting at the bank with a stack of cash in it, it may be a business unit whose investment in the venture comes at the expense of the bottom line, with the organization as a whole sanctioning the investment by relieving the requirements for budgeted profit contributions. A prototype and market verification is usually required, especially in risk averse organizations. This will necessarily be a limited, fraction of the final investment but will drive risks associated with the venture to the lowest level possible.
   
   Finally, attention should be given to budget cycles. Large organizations rarely take on unbudgeted investments during the year, waiting instead until the next budget cycle to include them. This could mean failure for ventures relying on time to market and sales windows with defined calendar cycles. Even though the prototype and market verification are a resounding success and prospects are beating down your door with preorders, if you are out of the budget cycle you may have to wait until next year to request the funds. During the funding of the prototype it's always good practice to request an earmark in the budget for the full funding should the market react positively to the prototype.
   
   
2. Skunkworks
   
   This from Wikipedia - Skunkworks is a term used in engineering and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.
   
   Or alternatively a skunkworks is a team that works on a project in a way that maybe outside the rules and maybe under the radar of management, they do it by leveraging their expertise to achieve success for the company for which they work. A good example of a skunkworks that had a huge impact on a large organization can be found in an excerpt from the book Inside Out , a book written by and for Microsoft employees that highlights the products, people and culture that transformed Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's vision for personal computing into reality. In this excerpt titled ""I Found a Cool Little Problem That I Just Couldn't Resist Solving", David Weise, Project Leader, Microsoft Research recounts the skunkworks project that led to the ground breaking introduction of Windows Protected Mode. As he puts it "...putting Windows into protect mode was more of a personal project. Hey, it was Bill and Steve's company, and if they had wanted a protect-mode Windows, they'd have asked for it. But they didn't. My scheme was to get it running, then tell Steve, and if he wanted to kill it, he would."
   
   Skunkworks projects don't necessarily circumvent all of the bureaucracy that causes large organizations to change direction so slowly, but it does jump start the process and acts as a catalyst for change, moving the ball much farther down the field than if the venture were proposed in the business case approach.
   
   "When you are finished changing, your finished", Benjamin Franklin

Mobile Technology...A Bridge Too Far?

“We are told never to cross a bridge until we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have 'crossed bridges' in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.”
Author Unknown

The Digital Divide splits the world in half, those people who 'have', and those people who 'do not have' access to digital information technology. Or put it another way, the 'haves' are those people around the world who have the:

1. Wealth - to afford devices to access the Internet
2. Education - to operate those devices effectively
3. Opportunity - to live near or be able to commute to an area that has access to the Internet.

In his paper "Wireless and Mobility Defined", Adam Kornak defines mobility this way: " The application of mobile devices and wireless technology to enable communication, information access, and business transactions from any device, from anyone, from anywhere, at anytime." So how does mobile technology offer a bridge for the Digital Divide, a bridge for the 'have nots' to access the infinite resources of the Internet.

1. Wealth - Mobile devices are less expensive than personal computers and so are much more affordable and available for subsidized mass distribution.
2. Education - Mobile devices, in part because of their low cost, can be tailored for specific functions, take the Fed Ex driver and his mobile package scanner as an example. This enables them to deliver high quality functionality with intuitive and simple to operate user interfaces.
   
   Physical World Connections (see my ddj blog 'RingTones') enable realworld objects to be connected to information about them on the internet. 2D barcode tags can easily hold enough information for a url and parameters to a web service. This empowers people that may not understand an operating system or desktop to simply point their camera phone at an object, take a picture and have the device connect them to the world of information. An aid worker in the plains of Africa can point their camera at a medical supply bag dropped from an airplane and get information on how to distribute, apply and help the villagers with the medicine. The tag may even connect them to a live online physician.
   
   The education deficit is all but eliminated.
3. Opportunity - Mobile coverage will extend to more than 90% of the global population by 2010. In the GSM Association's white paper "Universal Access" the paper states "There will remain, however, some areas that will never be economically feasible to serve. In most countries this will be the last 2–5% of the population, which corresponds to 20–30% of the geographic area."

Mobility has the promise to bridge the digital divide in even more meaningful ways. Try this, launch iTunes, go to Podcast's, select Education from the Categories menu, than select Higher Education from the More Education Menu below. Now look at the list at the right "Today's Top Podcast's", as I write this there are entries from lectures given at Yale, Harvard, Standford, Chicago School of Law and the list goes on. When I was growing up the only way you could listen to a lecture from one of these professors was to be there. This is liberating stuff for the 'have nots', now armed with an iPod for less than $200 they can learn Spanish, Math, Reading or enter into the world of higher education and be taught by the best.

In fact the only thing the iPod lacks that keeps it from being a real Digital Divide bridge is wireless connectivity. If the iPod could access the iTunes store on it's own and sync the iPod with any updated content or subscription feeds it would be a digital divide killer. Than you could really have students in an impoverished area of Africa downloading the latest lecture from Harvard Business School and sitting down to listen to it as they watch the sun go down over the plains.

Of course mobility has many other touch points in business and consumer life but its capacity to bridge the digital divide is very real and happening now.

It's All About Good People

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.”
Harvey S. Firestone (American industrialist founder of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.,1868-1938)

Software companies, especially start-ups and fast growing companies, depend on good people to keep them going and growing. It's always amazed me how many good people are attracted to these companies. It may be that the 'nine to fivers' see too much risk or too much work to seek out employment in these organizations. The individuals attracted to these companies are eager, energized to compete and win, to work for growth and reward, these are the conquerors, the winners who see the promise of a small organization with no where to go but up. More importantly they see the American Dream at work in these companies, a way to share in the rewards that come with growth if you work hard to contribute to that growth.

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
- Plato (427-347 B.C.)

Good people know how to act (they don't need a 'code of ethics' stamped to their forehead), they know respect for each individual is critical to team work, and they know debates/arguments are healthy among individuals that respect each other. Good people are worth training in those areas in which they lack experience or education, and it is critical you enable them to train others in those areas in which they have experience or education.

Good people don't wait for the ball to hit them in the head to know it needs to be picked up. Good people don't meander around with the ball and put it down somewhere and forget abou tit. Good people not only pick up the ball and run with it, they go find the ball.

One of my business career mentor's once told me "you don't have to like the people you work with, it's not a marriage, it's a business relationship". I have found that good people almost always are people who will confide in you and you will feel comfortable confiding in them, good people are friendly people.

Good people stand on their own, they are defined by their achievements and level of effort. They don't stand on other people's shoulders without proper credit to those who lift them up.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675

Good people don't covet or steel others achievements. They don't scheme and plot, they are not political, they are simply good people.

Good people are hard to find, and hard to keep if you are not of the same ilk. Good people are not attracted by mediocre managers, the only situation in which you will find good people working for mediocre managers is when mediocre managers inherit good people as a result of a poorly designed reorganization or as a result of blatant cronyism.

To better describe what good people are all about I have included an eulogy for a good person that has impacted my business career, he sadly passed away from a brain tumor, prematurely ending his life and contribution to the human experience. I hope that through my expression of respect for this good person there may be found a definition of what a good person is.

A mentor in my life, James "Jim" Petersen, founder of Best Programs Inc. Jim established Best Software in 1982 with the goal of developing business software solutions that would capitalise on the power of the emerging PC. Under his direction, the company grew from a start up to a leading provider of corporate resource management solutions. Today more than 50,000 businesses throughout the world are using Best Software's products to better manage their people, assets and planning.

A publicly traded company with annual sales approaching $100 million, Best Software was typically first to market with innovative, business application software solutions distributed through a variety of sales channels. In March 2000, Sage Software acquired Best Software for approximately $445 million in cash. I was Chief Technology Officer for Best Software.

Jim was a good person, better than most, but he new that good people were the secret to success in business, and he knew that respecting, mentoring and growing good people was "the highest calling of leadership".


My eulogy to Jim:

It’s both an honor and a great challenge to be asked to speak about Jim Petersen today. It’s an honor because Jim was such an important figure in my life. To me he was a mentor, a courageous leader, a gentleman, and a friend. It’s a challenge because its difficult to summarize Jim’s impact on my life, it happened on so many different levels.

Jim had a special kind of charisma that attracted extra-ordinary people to him, people of high character and impeccable integrity like himself. If you look around you these are the people that fill this room, the people you don’t know would probably become your fast and good friends given the opportunity to know them. I know this first hand, because I fell in love with and married one, my wife Sarah, we met at Best in its very early days, and our mutual friend was Jim.

Jim was one of those rare leaders loved by those he led, and his presence was always embraced in a great deal of respect. His genuine concern and respect for the teams of people that worked long hard hours to deliver on his vision, fostered a level of effort that went far beyond the norm. He was a good listener, an honest broker and always went the extra mile to ease the strains of working in a start up. He didn’t have to do many of the kind things he did, but it made all the difference to a young team of people working late into the night.

Jim was a tough leader. He was always dealing with the plague of start ups that expenses always rise to meet revenues. He made tough choices but he was always fair. He didn’t hesitate to let you feel the heavy responsibility that comes with great opportunity.

You would never find Jim on the sidelines he was always in the game. Jim had a contagious energy about him, he bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked around the office, you could gauge his excitement level by the height of his bounce. When there was a success he didn’t stop at a pat on the back. His face would light up, he would break out in a smile, and sometimes he would clench his fist in a victory sign, if he had a football he would spike it. We all shared in Jim’s vision for the company that he freely shared with us, and we all climbed the mountain because he was always up ahead of us challenging and cheering us on.

Jim was a master at encouragement. Many times late at night Jim would show up and sit down with the team and set the efforts at hand into an almost glorious context of a much larger goal that impacted not only the company, but sometimes he made it seem like we were changing the world.

From Jim’s soap box a simple tax preparation program became something that would change thousands of peoples lives helping parents to send their kids to school with their tax refunds, a payroll program made it possible for people to pay their bills and feed their families, and a fixed assets application enabled companies to grow and create new jobs for the unemployed. Granted at times it was a stretch, it was effective and encouraged the team to succeed so others could succeed. For young people trying to make their mark and do something important, this was very powerful stuff.

In thinking about what to say today, I came to the realization that Jim’s greatest gift to me was opportunity, the opportunity to participate, to work hard and to succeed. There isn’t a greater gift. It’s a difficult gift to repay…in fact, the only way to repay it may be best described by the words so aptly placed in today’s program, you have to pay it forward. Jim was an entrepreneur and a visionary, a dreamer, a believer in the impossible, and his place in history is firmly with that elite group of entrepreneurs that have fostered and made the American Dream possible for so many. Jim’s life was like the American Dream, it was a tide that lifted all ships, and how fortunate were we to be lifted up by the life of Jim Petersen.

For a good article on the traits of good people for startups see "The Blue-Chip Blues" by Jeff Dennis.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. (Will Rogers)

Flotsam and Jetsam generally describe debris floating around the Ocean traveling in whatever direction the tides take them. Although this sounds quite relaxing if you are on a float in a pool, this is quite a dangerous state to be in if you are a software company. In many cases companies ( or teams within companies )organizations in this stasis are unaware problems may exist. Quite to the contrary, companies in this situation may feel they have conquered the mountain and only need to sit at the top.

As an example consider a Technical Support organization within a software company. Customer comments and surveys about the support provided by the organization are consistently positive. In fact, internal employee interviews about the organization are consistently positive. The organization and it's leader feel the reinforcement for the direction and service they are providing, which unfortunately leads to stasis.

The organization has not changed processes or support systems for years. New modern service offerings such as online support or customer self service support are never considered or proposed at the annual planning cycle to bed funded. Projects with software engineering to implement just in time help to reduce technical support calls are never initiated. Proposing to become a profit center by packaging some of these new offerings into premium customer support, is never considered. Implementing technologies into the orgranization like the WebEx remote support application never gets off the ground.

The company may also be faced with a scalability challenge with the organization. As the company grows and engages in new opportunities it will require an increased bandwidth in Technical Support. How fast can the organization grow without modern tools in place?

So in the end the company loses these important revenue growth opportunities, opportunities to improve profits by improving efficiency and the opportunities to establish a modern foundation that is ready for future growth.

What about the market, is it really supportive? Around the fringes of such an organization you may find that the current customers are very happy with their support, especially if they have been customers for many years, they may be the squeaky wheels, these customers are accustomed to what is being offered and are happy with it. But what about the prospects, the XY generation, the customers yet to be sold? Are they happy with having to use the telephone? Does this factor into a buy no-buy decision? Would they be willing to pay for premium support?

Will Roger's got it right, there may be many environmental clues pointing to the fact that an organization is on the right track, but any organization will get run over if they just sit there.

Or to put it another way if you're not busy growing, you're busy dying.

Herding Cats

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. (H L Mencken)

Managing in a software company, especially a start-up, can be challenging. People attracted to a start-ups are either ambitious overachievers, where winning is everything, or they are right out of college and they are all about winning. It's no surprise that there is such a gaming atmosphere around start-up office environments, with the arcade machines and table top tennis in the hall for a quick competition fix.

So these are the overachievers, the 120% crowd, the people that don't take the ball and meander around with it, they go look for the ball and find it and score the touchdown. These are not the 9-5'ers these are the "it ain't over till the fat lady sings", "what ever it takes", part of a bigger team, a bigger ambition, a bigger picture than, "I'll be late for dinner". These are the people that don't bring problems to the table and complain and ask what is to be done, these are people that mention the problems that lead to the solution they are putting on the table.

These are the people that build something from nothing. These are the people that build teams where there was nothing but a place holder. These are the people that build companies, create jobs, and provide families a way of life.

These are the people that don't focus on whether the technical support line is working but think about how they are going to get live online support working and just in time help into the applications and provide a package of premium support that can help grow revenues.

These are the people that are thinking 10 years ahead of their competitors 3 year strategic plan. These are the people that produce market leading products. These are the people who have to be #1. These are not the people who think it's OK to be #12 if everyone is happy in the company.

These are the winners, the entrepreneurs, the job creators, the fabric of the American Dream.

So why is managing in a software company challenging? Because managing in a growing software company means hiring staff as you grow. Hiring staff is a complex problem, and returning to Mencken's quote, for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. For every hire you make there is probably one right person, that is how rare they are, and everyone else is clear and simple and wrong.

Strategy and Tactics

In a software company strategy provides a framework for work to happen. This is critical because "work happens" in software companies. New opportunities, features, bug fixes, partner integrations and opportunities, customer customizations, technology changes, new operating systems, all make work happen.

If you don't have a strategic framework within which to make decisions to prioritize or more importantly even consider engaging in work you will run into problems.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Sun Tzu (Chinese General and Author, b.500 BC)

Without strategy at best you will make the right decision for the wrong reasons, at worse you will make the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons. The problem with both these results is that the decisions won't contribute to long term growth, they also won't add to the historical record of decisions upon which you can reflect to help make future decisions. They are as Sun Tzu puts it "the noise before defeat". Or as Thomas Carlyle said "Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight".

Scrum and the Customer

Agile Development /Scrum is a great process for many reasons some of which are indirect and not really apparent when you are reading about the process and considering implementing it into your own organization. One of these indirect benefits is the forced improvement in customer management, especially in the area of customer expectations.





In many development shops the urge to make the high profile, or in some cases the high maintenance customer happy side tracks development cycles and introduces schedule risk that are hard if not impossible to audit in the post mortem for the project. Product Managers/Product Owners are quick to point out the product shipped 4 weeks late but exhibit a surprisingly short memory about events that caused the schedule to slip. Pulling off an engineer to fix a bug and deploy it for a customer for 1/2 a day adds up. It also derails the performance of that engineer in the development cycle. A good rule of thumb is take the amount of time the engineer was derailed and multiply it by 4, this is the real cost of the bug fix not the actual time it took to fix the bug and deploy it for the customer. It might be smart to build this into the estimate to fix the bug, quoting 2 days to fix the bug rather than 1/2 a day may cause the bug to be deferred until the next development cycle, which is probably what should happen in most cases.




The factor of 4 takes into account the engineers intensity in the development cycle, let's call it in "the zone" level of performance that produces optimal efficiency and quality for the engineers work. When this is derailed it takes time for the engineer to get back to where they were and back into "the zone". In development shops where this is common practice, schedules are rarely met as the estimates that made up those schedules didn't include the interruptions. It's also important to consider the issue of the ROI of fixing the bug. Now in the case you have 2 customers the math is easy, losing 50% of your customer base makes the case a 'no-brainer'. In the case where you have 2000 customers, fixing the bug and derailing the development cycle for the 1999 customers who haven't complained about it doesn't make sense.


So how does Scrum force the improvement of customer management. One of the immutable laws of Scrum and one that becomes apparent to all the stakeholders, product owners included is that you never, ever, interrupt a Sprint.





The nature of Scrum is full body contact. Everyone involved in the Scrum is fully involved, including the Product Owner. He has ranked the Product Backlog Items to make sure the most important items are considered in the planning meeting first. He is involved in the planning meeting so he understands which items made it into the Sprint and why others couldn't be included because of effort and time constraints on the Sprint. He can understand that it may take a few more Sprints before the full feature is complete. But he is also comforted by the knowledge that he may chose to forgo some of the later Sprints containing the lower ranked Product Backlog Items so he can ship the feature earlier. That's because of another immutable law of Scrum at the end of every Sprint the Product is shippable.


So a pleasant side effect of Scrum is that the Product Owner is forced to manage the customer, rather than the other way around. If a customer calls with a bug or enhancement request, rather than hang up the phone and walk into the Software Engineering Managers office to request work start right away, the Product Owner manages the customer and informs them that it will be a high priority for the next planning session but it can't be addressed immediately. Even then the Product Owner may not commit to a date because he is mindful of taking away time in the next Sprint that could be used to implement his next stack of Product Backlog Items.


By managing the customer, the Product Owner improves the efficiency of the machine producing his product, getting features and other enhancements out faster. This can be a win for the customer as well, by managing the customer expectations they are satisfied they have been heard, they have been told it will be given priority and worked into the development schedule, and they will be pleased to see new features and enhancements coming out in the application faster than they were before.

The Four Fundamental Laws of Change

Before we get into The Four Fundamental Laws of Change let's consider another law, The Common Sense Law: Every 10 years or so we get to a point where there's something we can assume…we can build our software on top of a richer platform - Bill Gates

I once put together a flash piece to introduce a project to rewrite a major but old commercial application in response to changes in technology. It was meant to be an informative and entertaining piece that was delivered to the entire company. I have provided a link to the flash pieces and accompanying presentation here:

My website http://www.avoreid.com/, you can find the presentation and the flash pieces in the portfolio section or you can launch them here.

Project Presentation (PDF)

Project Start (Flash)

Project Success (Flash)

If your an Independent Software Developer (ISV) or develop software in IT you know that software development is dynamic place and things change so frequently and fast that you find yourself continually questioning the technology on which you have built products, continually learning new ways to build better products, and at times dumping things you've learned or products you've built onto the trash pile of technologies past.

To drive the issue home I came up with The 4 Fundamental Agents of Change:

1. Moores Law
   Affordable computing power increases exponetially over time.
   
2. Evolving Operating Systems
   New operating systems take full advantage of improved and affordable computing power.
   
3. Powerful Development Tools
   New development tools support creating applications that take advantage of faster hardware running more powerful operating systems. Support for old systems, tools, and practices disappears.
   
4. Increased Expectations
   User capabilities and expectations rise accordingly.

These powerful forces are inescapable, and have been influencing the development of Software products from the beginning.

Periodically, they have created paradigm shifts, mandating changes in products and practices.

This presentation was about the rewrite of a product originally developed for the "HP Calculator", yes that's right, the "HP Calculator", here's a picture of the original product.

The post HP Calculator product was written in Quick Basic, then ported to Visual Basic 16 bit although Quick Basic was still used as a meta language for calculations and validations, this meta language was then converted to 'C' for performance using a proprietary language converter that translated the QuickBasic to 'C' and generated several header and meta data files for the running application. It was then ported again to 32 bit and landed on my desk. Not only was the multiple languages a concern at the time of the rewrite the 3rd party components used in the application were very outdated, in some cases the vendors for the components were no longer in business.

One obvious point from the brief history outlined above was that this product, despite it apparent lack effort to keep it updated and current, had been updated several times as a direct response to technology changes. Here is a graphic timeline taken from the presentation, at the bottom are the product changes caused by the technology changes described directly above them.


The last entry ET.NET in 2006 is the rewrite project. What were the technology changes that created the pressure to once again rewrite this product? There were several, first and foremost the action Microsoft took to put VB6 out to pasture. The introduction of the .NET platform sealed this fate as the only path to .NET was through VB.NET which wasn't VB6 by any stretch and essentially required a re-write anyway. If you have a meaningful VB6 application run it through the migration wizard and you'll see what I mean. And finally it was the direction the industry was taking to support .NET, third party vendors, partners, were all moving to .NET.

Evolution and Dead Enders

Technology is continually changing, sometimes evolving, sometimes just mutating with no apparent advantage until it finally dies off, leaving it's happless followers scrambling to find a way forward.


In the animal world this would be the equivalent of the Passenger Pigeon. I know you may not have heard the tragic tale of the Passenger Pigeon so read this carefully, pay attention to the numbers here. The Passenger Pigeons were so numerous at their peak that they would turn day into night as they shut out the sun when they passed overhead in enormous flocks. Estimates put the peak population in the US at as many as five billion passenger pigeons. The enormous flocks, during migration, could span a mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long, taking several days to pass and probably containing two billion birds.


The species went from being one of the most abundant birds in the world to extinction during the 19th century when gluttonous, would be hunters, took their sport by shooting aimlessly into the clouds of pigeons with their shot guns, leaving the dropped birds where they fell. The Passenger Pigeon being a gregarious animal could not sustain it's population once it fell below a critical threshold. It needed lots of company to be healthy and breed, a serious evolutionary flaw.

The last Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo at about 1:00 pm on September 1, 1914. How is it possible that something so prevalent, so ubiquitous that it's flocks blacked out the sun and turned day into night, could disappear from the face of the earth? The take away of this story is simple, ubiquity is not a guarantee of longevity, and there are plenty examples of ubiquitous technologies and platforms that have disappeared.

The killing off of a technology is much less tragic, although to those affected, those that have "invested years and tons of manpower developing an application" in say Visual Basic, it can be very tragic but there is always a way to dig yourself out, as long as you have the investment capital as a shovel.

So a clear success factor for any CTO is being able to tell which changes are dead enders and which are ones to follow. Looking back over recent history it's clear there are no fool proof guidelines for weeding out the dead enders from the evolutionary changes. But the example of Visual Basic or VB6 as it is known provides a good example of a technology that became very popular but in the end took on the characteristics of a dead ender.


This from the Microsoft site: "The Mainstream phase will be in effect for six years after the product's general availability date. Visual Basic 6.0 was generally available in January 1999. Mainstream support will end March 31, 2005". If you are not aware of the fire storm created by this edict see http://classicvb.org/.

The Yin and Yang of Technology Change

A prime responsibility of a CTO is to continually monitor new technologies and assess their potential to: 1.) become new business opportunities or 2.) become new business problems. More times than not the two potentials are not mutually exclusive, in which case the new technology is commonly referred to as a 'disruptive technology'. If the famous author of the Tao De Ching, Lao Tsu, was a alive and working as a CTO today he might say:

Disruptive Technology does not overtly display itself, so is clearly seen,
Does not justify itself, so is recognized,
Does not boast, so is credited,
Does not pride itself, so endures,
Does not contend, so none contend against it

Disruptive Technology Happens. The light bulb wasn't invented by the candle industry as a new improved product, it was a serious and sudden business problem for the candle industry. Owners of established technologies, like the candle makers back then, tend to focus on making incremental improvements to their product technology, avoiding potential threats to their own businesses by competition. But as our fictitious Lao Tsu says Disruptive Technology does not content, so none contend against it, Disruptive Technology Happens. Disruptive technologies not only create new industries but eventually change the world.

Clayton Christensen, a professor of business administration
at the Harvard Business School, introduced the principles of disruptive innovation in his book, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (1997). The book helped managers understand how an organization that does everything right—listens to customers, keeps a close eye on the competitors, and invests heavily in technological advancements—may lead itself down a road to failure.

Being too 'customer intimate' can blind your organization to the undercurrents of a disruptive technology. Businesses must be 'customer intimate' but not at the expense of losing touch with the trends of the larger prospect market, don't be a candle maker that launches a new improved product line in response to the light bulb. Your customers have expectations that have been tempered by their relationship with you. A symbiotic relationship with your customers can be profitable but it doesn't shield you from the Darwinian Natural Selection market forces that favor evolution over stasis. Your prospects expectations are constantly mutating and are selected by the environment in which they live. A prospect's environment is not controlled like yours, it is wild and open to new disruptive technologies. So you must continually question your product's viability in the changing environment, how you can adapt to survive, you have to 'Think Outside the Box' you may have created for yourself.

'Thinking Outside the Box' was coined by consultants in the 1970s and 1980s who tried to make their prospective clients feel inferior by presenting them with the "nine dots" puzzle.

The challenge is to connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines, and never lifting the pencil from the paper. The puzzle is easily solved, but only if you draw the lines outside of the confines of the square area defined by the nine dots themselves. Thus, the phrase "thinking outside the box" was born.

'Thinking Outside the Box' should be a liberating excersise, nothing is sacred and breaking the rules is healthy.

I work in the media industry. The company I work for produces both software and expert content (news, analysis, information) for professionals. We are basically a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal and we have lots of reporters covering the daily activities of the Federal, State and local Governments.

When we think outside the box, we see alot of potential but we also see some disruptive trends and technologies that we must address. As an example, we see 2 disruptive technologies operating in one of the markets we serve, the Tax and Accounting market, they are:

1. Increased focus on training, it is a top priority for all firms.
   
   Graying of the work force
   75% of the workforce will be eligible for retirement in the next 10 years, the new workforce has very different expectations for information and training delivery.
   
   Talent War
   Firms are in a talent war making recruiting, staff retention, on-boarding, knowledge transfer and succession planning a top priority.
   
2. Mobility is one of the most important and dramatic ‘mega trends’ in modern history changing the markets expectations on how and when they get their information and training.

These are disruptive technologies and trends that require a response. I put together a business case for a new product offering to address these disruptive technologies and underline the problems they presented for our company. In this presentation I included the following bullet point:

• What we found makes us believe that at this time the product offering may be required to remain competitive.

I won't go into the details of the poduct offering, my intent here is to underline a prime responsibility of a CTO which is the topic of this entry. To understand technology trends, understand the market, understand the sign posts, and communicate the road map. Sometimes this means you have to put forward a business case for a new product or an investment in a current product. One last important note, when you do put that business case together, make sure you shoot the puck to where the market is going to be when you ship, and not where it is now.