I’ve been meaning to write the bulk of this post for weeks and weeks and finally got sick of it running round in my head and thought it best to put it down.

The “Blue Monster” is a little project that Steve Clayton (Microsoftie) and Hugh Macleod (of GapingVoid fame). The back story is here and it centres around this little cartoon:

I’ve followed Steve and Hugh separately for a long time and even had the pleasure of meeting Hugh years ago at a Joi Ito meet-up in London and it’s been funny to watch the two worlds collide. If you’ve not heard of the blue monster then go read the back story and come back before you read my thoughts. Otherwise, read on!

My interpretation of the blue monster runs along some thoughts that I’ve had for years about the concept of “Cow paths”. I can’t remember the source of this story but I think it was told by one of the Gillmor Gang on their weekly podcast. The story goes that one university in the USA decided after building its new campus to not lay any paths around the site, between buildings. Instead they let the students walk whichever way was quickest for them. They then returned a year later, looked around and saw the “cow paths” (worn tracks) and laid paths on those. Now the way I think this fits in with the blue monster is that for a long time now people have created pathways at Microsoft and its time for the next generation to make their own. Abandoning the paved stones for the rough grass. Now I’ve recently started walking a new way to the train station that takes me through a patch of grass which for some bizare reason has a wonky cow path on it that doesn’t take the straightest route and I’ve been pioneering a new one and I think its beginning to take shape. However, I have to be careful because people walk their dogs on the grass and though they wouldn’t let them poop on the path, they do let them in the rough. So my take in a nutshell: Make a new cow path, mind the poo.

Now this story takes on another twist today because you may recall my story of trying to get an evangelist job with Microsoft a short while ago. Well I never got round to writing that I didn’t get the job… rejected! Reasons were “not enough experience with the latest version of SharePoint” and “not enough experience taking to groups of 300 plus”. Which I personally thought were very poor reasons… a good evangelist can get their head round almost anything, it’s a personality type, not tied to a specific piece of software.

However, another large software company who I’ve also worked closely with for the last few years thought I was good enough and offered me an evangelist role. That company is Symantec and I start in a few weeks as a “Sales Development Specialist”. It’s going to be very interesting because if Steve et al think Microsoft have a way to go on their transparency then Symantec are miles behind them. I’m yet to discover the boundaries of my open-ness in the new role but as one of the groups I will be charged with enthusing is the channel (partners by another name), I can’t see that being successful behind closed doors. I’m sure I have many lessons to learn, mistakes to make, and frustrations to overcome but I’m really looking forward to it.

I wonder if Steve Clayton will be good enough to meet me sometime and swap tips… How far does the Blue Monster go? (and how often does he check Technorati to see who’s talking about him!)

technorati tags: symantec, blue monster, microsoft, steve clayton

Sometimes I’m amazed at how incompetent large companies can be. Example:

1. Take a large UK based hosting company which claims to be the biggest in the UK
2. Set-up an email only account with them because they do nice cheap Exchange boxes
3. Decide you’re happy with them so open another one for a related company
4. Decide you’re happy with that too and want to add hosting to the domain too
5. “Sorry sir you can’t do that. You have to create another account, delete the old one, re-set up the old mailboxes on the new one, and apply for a refund because it’ll charge you again for the mailboxes”
6. Decide that seeing as they’ve not started using the mailboxes and won’t loose anything its worth the hassle.
7. Do it.
8. Phone the “Customer Service” team to get the refund
9. “Oh no sir they’re different accounts, we don’t give out refunds for that as a policy”
10. “But the man in sales said you would”
11. “No the person is sales would have said you ‘could try’”
12. “Err no”
13. “I’ll put it through to management as a request and we’ll have to take it from there”
14. “Can I make a friendly request that you can put to whatever person you do internally that you make it possible to upgrade an ‘email only’ account to include hosting?
15. “No we can’t do that because they’re different systems. Different servers do different things. So even if we wanted to we couldn’t”
16. [try and explain that it's not a server problem but a problem with their system]
17. “No sorry you need to understand its not possible”
18. [silence as you contemplate if its worth fighting an idiot]
19. “OK. So you’ll but that request in for me?”
20. “Yes”
21. “OK, thanks. Bye.”

I can so see why the point I mentioned before sits so well:

… some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!

technorati tags: fasthosts, hosting, business, incompetent, customer, services