Author: spierzchala

Joi Ito, at the ICANN meetings in Brazil, has posted some interesting comments and links regarding the exhaustion of the IPv4 Space. [here]
The growth in private IP Spaces has helped stave off this exhaustion, even through the massive growth in the home broadband and mobile markets. I forsee a compromise coming shortly where IPv6 is used between Network Transit Providers, while IPv4 is reserved exclusively for customer-facing usage.
Just another of my hare-brained ideas…

Damien Katz says:

“Reading code is WAY harder than writing it”
I’ve heard that before, and I read that again today on a discussion board. My experience is the opposite, but then I’ve read a lot of code over the years, my brain is trained to do it. And writing good code isn’t easy, it takes planning, discipline and meticulous attention to details.
But perhaps my world is different from most developers. Do people generally think that’s true?

[here]
I can’t code my way out of a paper bag, but reading well-written code is very easy for me. Can’t explain.

I am impressed that my underpowered Web server survived the onslaught of Gomery-hungry Canadians.
And thank you very much to the folks who made donations to contribute to maintenance and bandwidth costs.
Looking forward to watching the Liberals suffer in the bear pit of their own heritage.

Wired is the latest to flame this thrashing monster in the Google family.
Courtesy of Dave Winer.

My heart bleeds… [here]
…NOT!
This is one company I will not not miss.

More Siebel commentary here.

Being neither Jewish nor Buddhist, I still found these funny.
I add one more to the list…
What is the sound of one hand clapping? And how will you reach enlightenment with hands that dirty?

Scott Jones links to an article from Accenture that once again highlights that CRM software is not the problem, it’s the planning and expectations that revolve around CRM solutions where the the industry fails.
It’s 3 years old, but still relevant today.

Given the amount of flack that I have been giving the folks at Apple lately (great products; arrogant marketing), it was refereshing to read this by Nick Wreden over at Fusion Brand.

Which are more valuable – your brands or your customers?
The choice represents an important strategic issue. If you answered brands, then youÂ’ll no doubt devote attention to increasing the value of your brands. YouÂ’ll pay homage to such concepts as “brand equity,” “brand image” and other buzzwords. You may even pay consultants who promise to refurbish your “brand architecture,” defined by David Aaker as “that which organizes and structures a brand portfolio
by specifying brand roles and the nature of relationships between them and their markets.”
Unfortunately, that answer is wrong.

Ouch! Nick hits the whole Apple conundrum in a short article. Reading David Sobotta’s comments on Apple’s failed attempts to sell to the Federal Government helps to highlight the fatal flaw in Apple’s marketing plan: you will buy our stuff because we say it’s cool.
Sorry, your customers and fanatics are what drive your business and allow Steve Jobs to tear down historic houses to build modernistic monsters in Woodside. And if you can’t sell to the federal, state, or local governments, the average consumer is all you have left, isn’t it?

Back in November, I mentioned that I was working on the idea of new ways to benchmark the success of online businesses in today’s more mature operational environment. I am still working on the base ideas, but a colleague of mine has helped me coalesce some ideas, and they are now forming the foundation of the concepts my company will begin using internally to more deeply understand the various Web performance benchmarks we monitor.
For those who use the existing Web performance benchmarks to determine the success and failure of your online business, you understand how thin the veneer is on these benchmarks. They do not provide true insight into the operational success of an online business, and they are more likely to sow the seeds of distrust between IT and Business operations in the long-term by creating an artificial standard which becomes the goal.
If an online business truly wants to achieve and maintain exemplary Web performance numbers, it has to start with a strong foundation, and build on it. Why? The team I work with spends a lot of time trying to understand and reverse engineer the broken processes, designs, and architectures that were laid out in order to get big fast. After 3-4 years of technical starvation and underfunding, these online businesses are beginning to show strain; the temporary fix has become the permanently broken process.
The rush into the Web analytics space in the last few weeks is a key sign that companies now see value in and want to exploit the vast quantities of data that they collect on their traffic daily. Web analytics is an astoundingly complex field, but most people boil it up to a single concept: How many Unique Page Views did I get?
Unique Page Views is an outdated Web server analytics metric. It does not tell me anything about the business, other than it has a lot of traffic. Back in the “eyeballs are everything” period, this would have been a big deal. Now, I say so what, and start asking:

• From where
• Dialup? Broadband?
• How many were able to successfully complete their transactions?
• What paths are most visited
• Average spend by connection type?
• Average spend by hour?
• etc.

Like Unique Page Views, the average Web performance and availability of a Web page or transaction does not accurately represent the overall health of any online business. Within the large populations of data that exist at the Web measurement firms, there is a wealth of data that could be used to clearly expose more important benchmarking statistics.
If you are from an online business, you already understand that the average performance over an artificially-defined period of time is a very inaccurate way to measure the success of the online business. However, it is the accepted standard in the field. Underlying those aggregated values, there are clearly-defined statistical methods which can be used to extract even more meaningful information from the mass of measurement data.
I would discuss more of the ideas and concepts that we are working on, but I know that I do get visitors from our competitors, so I will have to keep our ideas under wraps for right now.
But I want to hear yours. What does your online business use as a benchmark for success? Standard avergae performance and availability? Or something more complex that examines the performance data as a complete population, as opposed to an aggregated summary value? Does your firm tie business goals and objectives into the performance benchmarks so that people across the company can understand how the business is succeeding, and how delivering a good, bad, and downright awful online performance experience can affect the bottom line?
This is an exciting time to have access to large amounts of data on the health of the Internet.