I'm not going to trust my precious Excel pivot tables to a web app given how crappy the current generation of browsers is (I've lost count of how many times Firefox crashed on me) but this is impressive:

For people who don't see the value in pivot tables, I'll say this: do you really know where your revenue is coming from? We've met our revenue plan for the first four months of the year with uncanny precision (just a couple of grands above it) because we know how to split and dice our sales data in many, many ways. I don't know how you can be a business leader and not be a spreadsheet jedi. Not that everything happens in the spreadsheet of course, and without people skills you have nothing. But you need to be able to make the numbers tell you all their little but important stories. They show you the hidden weaknesses, point to potential for greatness.

Hilarious email from HP today:

"On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service. We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.

Please accept our sincere apology for this unanticipated interruption of your access to the Upline Service. We appreciate your patience as we launch this new service, and are working hard to minimize inconvenience caused by this service interruption.

If you are a resident of the United States, your subscription will remain in effect and you will be able to continue using the Upline Service for the duration of your subscription period once the Upline Service is operational again. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to providing you with the HP Upline Service.

If you are not a resident of the United States, we regretfully must inform you that the initial launch of the HP Upline Service was intended for United States residents only. Unfortunately, our filtering tools did not adequately screen for subscribers residing outside of the United States. We thank you for your early adoption of the Upline Service, and look forward to being able to provide the HP Upline Service to you when we launch it in your country of residence. Since the HP Upline Service is presently offered for use within the United States only, we will be discontinuing your current subscription."

So let me get this straight. Any fledging start-up worth its salt goes global right out the door, but a behemoth like HP can't? FAIL. Memo to HP: stick to hardware and stop embarrassing yourself on the web. Too bad, I was considering subscribing.

If they really do have 2,000 Pro members at $49/mo or $399/year, that's around $1M/year provided there's not egregious churn and depending on the monthly vs. yearly mix (I suspect there's a majority of monthly subscriptions). Those are their self-reported numbers but the service seems well executed and I have no reason to doubt their data. Impressive in just a year (here's a post about their premium launch), as is the conversion rate out of their 70,000 member base. They do a good job at spelling out the value of their subscription product, in fact I might give it a shot. It's refreshing to see people who don't buy the hype about ad revenue trees growing to reach the sky. See also some notes on how they built up traffic those last couple of years.

The fine people at EllisLab have a quite interesting post on how they see feature requests. Generally speaking, I like their voice. Unlike many web 2.0 companies, they're not delivering the usual pandering bullshit: "it's all about you the users and the comm-you-nih-tee." Yeah right, like we can't figure out the part about UGC economies of scale in your pitch to VCs.

EllisLab is saying, look we do appreciate your feedback, but it's our job to maintain the product's sense of purpose, stay the course and deliver. It's refreshing, it's honest, and it's the right thing to do. You need the courage to say no to a lot of requests, whether externally or within a company with your internal users by the way. You also need to execute on some of those ideas, or people will just see the whole thing as an exercise in futility. Maintaining a transparent dialog about why feature requests make or don't make the cut is key. Easier said than done as sometimes you'd rather just sit down and ship product.

Salesforce is doing a great job with its IdeaExchange (here's their blog about it). There are ASPs (Oops, sorry for the 90's wording, surely it's more hip to say SaaS) such as BrightIdea too, and of course, a blog dedicated to idea management systems (what topic doesn't have its blog this days, carrot juice fetishism maybe?). If you can educate internal and external users about trade-offs and cost/benefit decision making, I think given enough scale (i.e. you need the manpower to handle the firehose) these systems have real potential.

In August 2005 I wrote The Microsoft Office I Really Want. When I tried to engage Robert Scoble at the time on the topic, he showed he relied too much on speed reading to properly address my points and/or was quickly out of his depth (I'm betting on a combination of both factors). I don't want to turn this entry into a personal attack, my point is the openness and dialog through corporate blogging act is hard to get right. Nonetheless the conversation at the time really pushed me to pay attention to Salesforce.com, which we finally adopted in December 2006 (we've been real happy customers ever since). SFDC recently added inline editing which speeds things up and helps deliver on the product vision I had outlined at the time.

There's also a new generation of software companies that try to push the envelope when Microsoft is sleeping, such as Tableau, Blist, EditGrid or Proto. Watch the demo, I'm glad to see Blist delivering on my half-baked high level spec from 2 years and a half ago. I tend to think it's not a coincidence that it's led by a former Microsoftie who probably got tired of the lack of progress within the behemoth.

As an aside, two of these four companies are based in Seattle, one in New York and another in Hong Kong. Atlassian is kicking ass out of Australia. People who think you have to be in the Silicon Valley to innovate crack me up. The truth of the matter is that the Valley is currently producing a wave of useless crap almost as high as the one it delivered a decade ago. If Twitter is the best they can do... not that Twitter is necessarily a bad application, but I've been using it and I'm not overwhelmed by the value creation there (unlike Blogger, which I instantly liked). We're past the time when people confused products with companies, we now see people confusing features with companies, and not very compelling features at that. Businesses start with customer problems and needs, end of story. I know Salesforce.com is in Nocal, but it's also eight years old. Silicon Valley is a washed out whore with occasional flashes of brilliance (Splunk comes to mind). It's too focused on consumer fads and reflects the extractive mentality California was build upon. You get 100 gold diggers for one builder. That's fine. What's tiring is said gold diggers self-portraying themselves are entrepreneurial geniuses. The only people you guys are fooling is your peers and the occasional gullible journalist.

Lately we've been struggling with Wordpress and its HTML shenanigans. Not that they are new but we're more actively pursuing a number of bugs that have been open for a while. Even after you remove TinyMCE, WP will insert closing paragraph tags within an entry if the visual editor checkbox is selected in user settings. Not cool, Wordpress. Then there's the whole concept of the Loop, the way WP filters things in the background, and poor documentation. And don't get me started on plugins or security.

Besides, and this is more important for us, Automattic is pulling a SixApart circa early 2007. It's all about pageviews at Wordpress.com and how they're one of the biggest sites in the universe. Look, decide once and for all whether you want to be in the GeoCities business or the software business. It's irritating when giants such as Microsoft or Google pretend to be everything to everyone, but it's downright ridiculous from start-ups, even if they're well funded (how can a company get so much funding when it doesn't even know what it wants to be when it grows up boggles the mind). I thought we'd throw ten grand at Automattic for a support contract but got cold feet when I saw them starting to chase consumer social fads. At least SixApart divested LiveJournal, got a new CEO and seems to be tightening their focus a little bit these days.

We're just starting to research options to complement WP for some projects, and maybe replace it altogether eventually (no, Anil, we're not going back to MT!) On that front, I like the philosophy behind ExpressionEngine:

"This is really a philosophical issue. Should it happen when a page is rendered or when it is delivered into the database? I’ve always considered it a bad idea to have formatting inserted into the database. If you need to re-purpose content for some other platform, say RSS, then you need to have clean content to deal with."

You read it first: Google is going to acquire Splunk in the next 18 months, and it's going to cost them. They'll ship it as an appliance for enterprise customers as well as give no-nag freebies to (geek) consumers. Well, I don't know that they will, but they should. Splunk 3.2 just got released and looks quite promising. We started using 3.1 about a week ago and we're just noobies so far, but it's already obvious this is essential software for system administration, security and QA purposes. I can see ahead the same kind of learning journey I started with Google Analytics last year. GA by the way still resists me stubbornly in some areas, with campaign tracking and site overlay only partly working. OK we have some sites with three different GA profiles, goals, filters, transactions and whatnot, but we have relatively small sites and this shouldn't be rocket science. The problem is, web analytics implementations are tedious and slow to debug, especially Google because it lags by several hours (last year it took 24 hours for anything to show in reports).

This type of software can be frustrating to master, but the level of visibility and understanding they bring is a key component to running an online business. I know you're not supposed to build lasting competitive advantage on operational efficiency alone, but I do believe there are going to be winners and losers in this race. How well do you know what's going on with your online business? How fast and how decisively can you act? Ourselves, we're just getting started, but I'm sure it's an effort that will be well worth sustaining. Right now I'm mainly assessing our level of non-quality, and it's not a pretty picture. But at least I know what's not running properly with a tool that scales (though from my limited experience, be careful with data exports with Splunk running on a production server).

PS for the Splunk team: please redirect the old Splunkbase links to their new URL.

I'm a small business co-owner, but we're also a growing business, and ambitious at that. Dear "Enterprise" software vendor that desperately tries to look mightier than it is, understand that I'm making sure it's in our DNA to filter out your opaque, overly complex sales processes from the get-go. Not only will we not look at your product that won't tell its price publicly, but I've made it company policy that anyone foolish enough to waste time with such vendors will see their contract terminated. I'm not an OSS zealot by any measure, but if your price is not public, you're pretty much admitting your product is weak and overpriced.

We will not tolerate this crap and we will protect our productivity from your pre-sales BS. I bet that more and more businesses have been coming to similar conclusions these last few years. You want to see a company that gets it? Check out Atlassian (I'm not even their customer but these guys seem to do a lot of things right, from marketing to hiring).

I'm looking at security software in a couple different categories and bumped several times into this very brand of company that really, really doesn't want our business. I guess they're preying off bloated big companies because of widespread incompetence and CYA insecurity. These past few years, I think UltraDNS was the most egregious offender in the way they tried to sell to us. Those guys were really hilarious. We told them to never contact us again and eventually switched to Nettica for DNS management. Costs us $50 a year too for what I'm pretty sure is the same service.

It's surprising how often the proper answer is just, "give me a break."

As much as I think Chile can be world class in some areas, its web sites are usually a parody of bad mid-90's layouts and broken code. Exhibit A: popular starting page chile.com (competitor sitios.cl isn't much better). However, a few people stand out and clearly know what they're doing. Not only is Skybox running geo-targeted ads in Facebook, they're also combining geo-targeting with seasonal themes and quite likely, content targeting too. Exhibit B: lingerie ad on Adrants. The landing page could have been better customized to the ad unit, but as far as internet marketing savvy goes, I'm nitpicking and these guys are a decade ahead of most businesses in the country. Seeing an Axe skyscraper in Spanish on Facebook that mirrors the outdoors ads currently displayed here in Reñaca was similarly impressive.

There's sound, healthy skepticism about crazy conspiracy theories ("George Bush paid Mossad to blow up the Pentagon with a missile and make believe it was a plane"). Then there's plain stupidity. People dismissing speculation about what caused the backbone cable cuts leading to massive outages in the Middle East and India as "tinfoil hat thinking" are massively deluded about how nation states behave. (Fun way to know for sure it happened in the first place: a former World of Warcraft guildmate located in Bahrain told us he had huge latency for days). I have no idea who's behind these cuts, but there's just very little chance it's a bunch of unrelated accidents. The most ludicrous theory is that it was just the unfortunate result of trailing anchors.

Take this from someone two degrees from the people who sunk the Rainbow Warrior: this stuff does happen outside of movies. My father in law is an engineer at the DGA defense procurement agency while my father is a retired Army officer. What we were told when we grew up was: "I'm not telling you details about what I know and what I'm working on so that bad people can't get information out of you." It shapes and informs your view of the world! Part of it was specific to the Cold War, but terrorist threats were also hanging over Western Europe since the 70's in various shapes and forms.

It's funny to see people thinking they're being all smart and educated and rational actually demonstrating one thing: they don't know jack about what they're talking about and are very, very naive. Yes, people are spouting all sorts of nonsense on the internet. Yes, you want to ignore most of it as idle speculation or even outright stupidity. No, it doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy out there.

Bottom line is, after massive virus outbreaks these past few years, attacks against Estonia last year and now this, we think the chances that a massive Internet slowdown lasting weeks might happen in the next five years is not insignificant. I don't want to pull a Bob Metcalfe on you, but we're looking at what parts of our business may be made resilient to such an event. It may come from states, terrorists, organized crime, bored teens, or a combination of the above. If you're managing servers I'm sure you're routinely getting pounded by DDOS and scraping and all sorts of crazy behavior just like we are. This ain't fun.

The Internet is designed for resilience, but if you look at backbone maps, there are failure points and the liability is there that the whole thing is made barely functional for significant lengths of time. You don't even need to blow all interconnection points. Once you've removed some of them, the rest can slow down to a crawl through bottleneck effects. In theory you're still connected. In practice all you get is time outs, you can forget about using web apps, let alone VOIP or streaming video. Maybe you can get load a 30kb web page once in a while. Not the end of the world, but a tough ride if 100% of your income is based on the assumption of smooth, fast, always-on broadband everywhere. The fact companies such as Google have their eyes on the backbone may in part be a hedge against such doom scenarios.

Got the worst and best out of Macy's today. It didn't start that well. They have a clearance right now but when it was time to pay on their site, they wouldn't take my debit card. Since I have a Visa with a US bank that I order with on American web sites all the time, that wasn't expected. I IMed one of their reps to ask what was going on, and that was the first good surprise, as someone who knew how to properly spell English spotted in 30 seconds that I was ordering through a non-US ISP, which macys.com won't allow. The rep pointed me to a phone number which I called a couple hours later.

Over the phone, another rep took my order very nicely and patiently, though we were both bitching at macys.com extreme sluggishness by then (must be the clearance). She found extra discounts on pretty much every product I wanted to order and threw free shipping on top of it though I was under the $150 that qualified for it. I paid $107 for 5 brand-name sweaters and a jacket!

Macy's, kudos for your rep training and your pricing flexibility to save face, protect your brand and make a customer happy. Macys.com, get bigger servers to handle clearances and rewrite your error messages, thanks.

Steve F., web developer, Maine USA: "I gotta go help my girlfriend with the snow blower, her car's stuck."

Olivier T., COO, Central Chile: "Sure. Meanwhile I'll go walk along the beach to ogle the hotties in thongs hired to promote bear and cheap perfume."

I'd post a picture but it would turn my blog into an R-rated publication. Anyway my wife keeps me on a short leash so I can't take the best pics. Sideways glancing while walking is a vital skill for married men.

Walls is one of those albums showing that two decades in, electronic music still has legs. There's really good stuff coming from Germany these days. I haven't been in Berlin since about 18 months after the fall of the wall (crap, I can't remember for sure whether I went there in the summer of '90 or '91). By then civilians drove through from West to East unimpeded, but since my father was in the military we had to check in through checkpoint Alpha at the start of the Autobahn. It was the weirdest thing to lose 20 minutes to what was obviously an obsolete remnant of the cold war, what with the thousands of cars driving by freely and Charlie gone. Already different from the experience related by another "military brat" in 1988. In the fall of 1989 I remember feeling elated for Eastern Europe but thinking it would take a generation for Germany to reunite. It was only mildly comforting for my self esteem to be proven so wrong in company of people such as Mitterrand, the French president at the time.

East Berlin at the time was still a ghost town in some places, with drab buildings showing ugly WWII scars, grey figures looking at us through heavy curtains, Trabant testaments to Communist ineptitude. Cranes were starting to rise though and I'm sure it's a very different city now. Berlin is a sprawling city ten times the size of Paris for just 50% more people, which makes it hard to wrap your head around, sort of Europe's LA, giving you the cold shoulder and not caring one bit about you.

Remembering this trip makes me think of my late uncle André. It's going to be two years on March 21st. I've had a blog post in the making about his death since it happened but never got around to it. I have to come to terms with his loss and write that post.

Excellent post last month on the Google Gears blog. We have a few people that like to live in the countryside where all they can get is high-latency satellite broadband. I'm myself considering buying land here in Chile where the best internet access I may get for the foreseeable future is 3.5G (UMTS/HSDPA) (not sure what the latency is, but probably not too good). Waiting 10+ seconds between each salesforce.com page load for instance is a real productivity killer. Google Gears is important infrastructure stuff that Microsoft should pay very close attention to.

We've started to (carefully) explore to what extent there might actually be value in the current crop of social networks. We were involved in earlier waves - from Ryze to the now defunct Soflow - with little to show for it, so we chose to sit out of Facebook and Twitter for a long time, mostly for signal-to-noise issues. Feverish hype or not, I think the jury is still out, but I admit there seems to be staying power here.

Anyway, today's weird FB discovery (in the sense that I just stumbled on it), or maybe it is telling, is the group named El Mar de Chile no Se Regala!!!! which loosely translated is this post's title (though I'm using my own bewildered punctuation). 3,169 members to support Chile's position in one of its territorial disputes with its neighbors! I wouldn't have thought people would create groups around rather arcane geopolitical issues, and that's before Facebook has even been localized. Peru's FB network is half as large as Chile's, which I guess reflects its smaller online population (broadband is expensive in Chile in PPP terms, but I think it's much worse in Peru). The El pisco es Chileno group seems more at home on FB, since the dispute between Chile and Peru over paternity for a regional drink is more of an informal joke of an issue to rant about over a pisco sour. Speaking of which, I like this cocktail but also highly recommend amaretto sour. How's that for a conclusion about world affairs seen through the lens of social networks?