Law #16 of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Trout and Ries states:

#16 The Law of Singularity - In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results.

This law could be called the law of the Bold Stroke or the Law of the Silver Bullet

The idea is that there is a single, most successful, bold stroke that must do to move yourself out in front of the pack and achieve substantial results.

This might be a little hard to grasp. Oftentimes we all believe that a good mix of different marketing strategies will get us the results we want. A little advertising here, a couple of webinars there, each executed well will win the day. Nope, not according to this law.

Each of your competitors is doing the same thing. A little here a little there. If you are bigger than they are you are probably giving them the opportunity to match your efforts, just a little smaller in size, which means that you really aren't gaining much of an advantage.

Let me give you an example from my own experience.

Bold Stroke At BrainShare

In February of 2003 I came on as GWAVA's VP of Marketing and was immediately put in charge of putting together the marketing effort for BrainShare...which was in 3 weeks. I had 22 days to get ready for the event.

With that short amount of time I didn't have time to do the regular stuff like I probably would have. You know, put together fliers, do a pre-event mailing, put an ad in the magazine, and have a bowl for people to drop in their business cards to win a cell phone.

Instead, I sat down and looked my goal. How to DRAMATICALLY increase the number of people coming to my booth so that I could capture the maximum amount of names. And how to do it without breaking the bank on marketing budget.

I realized that the best way would be to give away something BIG. That first year I gave away a trip for two on a Caribbean Cruise, as well as giving away $1,000 in gold coins. The theme for BrainShare that year was Pirates so these giveaways fit perfectly.

But, to make it even bigger, I didn't just make it my event, I made it the event for a dozen other vendors. I invited them to participate as well. The goal was for them to help spread the word about the giveaway. They benefited because they got to have more traffic with a bigger giveaway and I benefited for the same reason.

It was one of those single bold strokes that continues to deliver results today.

Novell's Boldest Stroke EVER

Novell understands this law of marketing as well. When Ron Hosvepian took over the reigns of Novell he was faced with the task of figuring out what to do to. How to compete in a tough market and how to differentiate Novell from everyone else. Like a General from WWII, he studied the battleground and came up with a bold plan. A single stroke that would stun the technology world.

The french proverb made famous by Patton says it well "Audacity, Audacity, Always Audacity"

Novell's bold stroke, its single move that has delivered the greatest results has been its decision to form an alliance partnership with Microsoft.

This is the Law of Singularity in action. No other action that Novell could have done would have delivered the same results. No amount of trying harder would have lifted Novell in one move to becoming the contending leader in the Linux Enterprise space.

Business-Driven Linux is the path Novell is taking and this was a perfect example of that.

Your own bold stroke

Look at your own situation. See if there is a single bold stroke that you can do with your organization that would lift it up past your competitors and set you apart. I'm sure it is there. If you want to talk to me about your ideas, drop me an email and I'm more than happy to see what you've got.

Richard Bliss

Please read the VAR Guy's blog. It contains a tremendous amount of good information every day. But today I find myself disagreeing with the VAR Guy.

I have complete respect for the VAR Guy, so I am writing out a response to his post Five Reasons Ubuntu Server Revolution Begins Today that allows me to explain my position and how it differs from him. It isn't criticism of the VAR Guy, it is a difference of opinion. I hope he sees it that way.

Here we go.

Five Reasons Why the Ubuntu Server Revolution will never happen

Recently Novell and Red Hat both announced they will not pursue the consumer linux desktop market. Many, including the VAR Guy, consider this a prime opportunity for Ubuntu to make its move.

When competing against an entrenched opponent, you must find a weakness that can be exploited, and then channel all your effort into hitting that weakness.

In today's market, it is about which company can better execute, not which one has the better technology.

1. Windows Vista Debacle: I agree here with the VAR Guy and everyone else that Microsoft has stumbled badly with Vista. That Microsoft has opened the door for everyone to begin to doubt the wisdom of all Microsoft all the time.

But...

I disagree that the opportunity is given to Ubuntu. Let's remember the Law #8 of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, The Law of Duality - In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race.

This means if a consumer is not happy with Vista and wants an alternative, they won't turn to Ubuntu first, they will turn to Apple. OS X is the #2 OS for the Consumer Desktop. Ubuntu is competing first with Macs and then with Vista. The Windows Vista Debacle is a prime opportunity for Mac to gain significant market share. Ubuntu will gain some, but it will be an extremely small piece without any chance of growth.

Also, when it comes to the competition, Ubuntu needs to be able to do something that Windows can't. It needs to find a niche market that it can dominate that Windows can't serve. This market just doesn't exist in the consumer market. When I can buy a new laptop from Dell for less than $650, it is hard for Ubuntu to lower my price and even if Ubuntu lowered it by a couple of hundred dollars, I still can't do anything with Ubuntu that I couldn't do with Windows. I don't gain any advantage other than learning a new OS.


2. Miscalculations at Red Hat and Novell: This one I disagree with completely. I will only speak about Novell, with which I'm extremely familiar. I know they have their own issues that they are overcoming, but they have been executing their Linux strategy masterfully.

They have staked out a unique position, Business-Driven Linux, that identifies them immediately as a serious player in the Enterprise. Their partnership with Microsoft, while controversial, has put them in the front for consideration of any organization looking to deploy Linux. They are dominating the Mainframe Linux market with 80% market share.

Focusing on the Enterprise and not getting distracted by the consumer market is the perfect action to take in the current market.

3. Server Consolidation: Server consolidation is happening and as the VAR Guy very well states in an additional post on his blog, virtualization is a major contributor to server consolidation. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't support Ubuntu as the winner. Quite the opposite, while Ubuntu is pursuing the consumer desktop, Novell and Red Hat are consolidating their positions as the Linux flavor of choice for Server Consolidation. This isn't David taking on Goliath, this is David taking on the 3 Goliaths at once.

Remembering Windows NT Advanced Server - You can't compare the success Microsoft had with Windows NT in the mid-90s. At the time, Novell dominated the server space and refused to accept that they needed to build an application server. Windows penetrated a weakness of Novell and then supplanted them. This was only possible because Novell absolutely refused to respond to the market changes until it was too late.

Today, the story is ironically similar but vastly different. While Ubuntu is pursuing their consumer desktop strategy, their hope of leveraging it into the server space is going to meet up with the harsh reality of a Novell and Red Hat already there and aggressively meeting the markets new needs.

4. Software as a Service Meets Open Source: Again I find myself completely agreeing with the VAR Guy but arriving at an opposite conclusion. SaaS is the future. All application vendors should be running scared because if they don't figure out how to turn their products into services they are history.

BUT

This again drives home the strategy of Novell and Red Hat and leave Ubuntu out in the cold. SaaS runs on Linux Servers, not on Linux Desktops. Ubuntu, by dividing their resources and their attention between the desktop and the server, will find themselves out maneuvered and outgunned by a vastly more powerful competitor and one extremely focused on the very space they are attempting to enter.

5. Intel: Intel isn't dumb and they have the luxury of being patient. They can back ALL the different flavors of Linux and still win. Working closely with Ubuntu isn't an endorsement from Intel. It is just Intel being smart and covering the bases.

If Ubuntu attempts to be the desktop, server and mobile linux solution, it will fail at all three. You must FOCUS, put all your resources into gaining a foothold in a specific market, dominate that market, and then expand. The linux consumer desktop is not a specific market becomes you can't dominate the desktop when there are two other vendors already there.

An Unpleasant Ending

Like most revolutions, unless you win and rewrite the history books, you usually end up swing from a rope. Ubuntu will not die, at least not right away. It will go along, always in the shadows, thinking its big break is just around the corner. But it will never come and one day it will be consumed by a much bigger vendor that focused and succeeded.


I want to thank the VAR Guy for his well stated post. He did all the work and I just rebutted. Again, please take the time to read his blog to compare his position to mine.

www.thevarguy.com is where you can find his blog.

Richard Bliss

or "Get the hell out of my sandbox"

Pop Quiz - You must answer this question with a Yes or a No. No hedging, no waffling, no maybes.

Ready?

Here is your question -

Is NetWare or OES2 a Collaboration product?

Remember, your answer must be limited to Yes or No.

Okay, what did you answer? If you are a normal person, and I asked several normal, well informed people before I posted this question, your answer is going to be No.

OES2 or NetWare is, according to a very well informed person I know:

"It's an operating system with associated services" or "Associated operating system and networking services"

It is definitely not a Collaboration product the way the real world thinks of collaboration products.

If this is the case, then why is Novell's CTO, in his recent blog about Novell's future roadmap, making statements like this:

Opening line for the road map of Collaboration:
"With OES 2 and GroupWise, Novell has a strong record in secure collaboration."

You can read the full blog here: Novell CTO Blog

A Naked Homeless man in my bed

Let me be blunt. I wasn't very popular when I was at Novell. Oh, there were a lot of people who liked me personally, but there were a whole lot of people who were p*ssed at me on a regular basis.

I was in charge of Novell's Collaboration marketing strategy. That included GroupWise and NetMail. I was, for most of my time there, a one man show. For a brief time I had the most amazing partner, Deborah Martin. If she is still there, she is what keeps things moving at that company...but I digress.

I was pretty much on my own running Novell Collaboration marketing. I was doing it on a shoestring budget and with almost ZERO resources from the rest of the company.

I've already blogged about some of this, having to pull in outside people to even man the GroupWise booth at a tradeshow.

A few days ago I blogged about NetWare, Novell's cash cow nearly killing the company. You can read that blog here: NetWare Cash Cow

The NetWare team stomped all over everything because they were the biggest and the baddest and got what they wanted. Which means I was left with crumbs and anything else I could scrounge up.

Then one day, the NetWare team realized they were in trouble. It was shortly after Chris Stone stating at the BrainShare keynote that maybe NetWare wasn't the future of Novell. Suddenly the NetWare team was scrambling. They had lost the confidence of upper management. They were in a free fall with their revenue. The product, version 6, had just launched and no one paid attention.

During this scramble, GroupWise was doing quite well. Revenue was up, GroupWise had just had one of its best quarters in the history of the product. We were getting some good marketing going using partners and vendors. Things were looking up.

It was at this moment that I had the most unusually event happen. Like the title of this blog, it was the experience of waking up in your own bed, only to find a homeless stranger laying next to you.

I was sitting in a large meeting, minding my own business, when the NetWare team got up and began to present their new marketing message and product road map. Honestly, I wasn't paying attention to it much until I heard and saw on the Powerpoint.

"As we represent the Collaboration Team here at Novell, we blah, blah, blah..."

Did they just say they were the Collaboration team? Sure enough. The NetWare team, looking for a reason to exist, had decided to climb into my bed and make themselves at home.

Homeless, penniless, and naked, they had looked at my snug little corner of the world and decided they were going to claim it for themselves.

And you know what? THEY GOT AWAY WITH IT! I tried to explain to everyone that NetWare wasn't a Collaboration product.

"Oh yes it is. You share stuff like file and print, that makes it a collaboration product" "People are collaborating"

I was out gunned, out manned, and out maneuvered. The good news was though, that it really didn't change anything for me. I continued doing my thing, just being careful to never really say that I was actually doing anything that was collaboration.

Today, it would appear from Jeff Jaffe's blog, the OES team is still trying to convince everyone that they are part of the collaboration market space.

It is this kind of internal struggle that is going to continue to cause Novell problems as they try to compete in the collaboration space for real.

Richard Bliss

Gert with GWCheck, the premier GroupWise community site, had a nice interview with Paul Bellchambers of Research In Motion (RIM).

You can view the interview here:

BlackBerry Solutions for GroupWise

Novell and Marketing

Novell does have a marketing message, even if they didn't have a marketing department they would still have a marketing message. Everyone has one, no matter how big or how small a company is, it ALWAYS has a markting message. A marketing department's role is usually to help define and communicate this message.

In Novell's case, they are beginning to get their marketing message right. They have abandoned the word "Open" as their marketing message and are looking for a new word to own.

Business-Driven Linux

This past week there has been some news with Novell.

Novell launches SUSE Appliance Program

rPath to OEM Novell’s SUSE Linux to reduce legal worries

Microsoft, Novell To Sell Linux Licenses In China (InformationWeek)

Novell Reduces Cost of Ownership for Linux on IBM System z

Novell CEO: Linux for the consumer desktop will take years

What is telling about these recent stories, is that they all have a focus on the business side of Linux. Especially the story of Novell's CEO stating that Novell isn't participating in the consumer side of linux desktop deployment.

This met with howls of protest from the Linux community, but it makes perfect sense and is a smart move by Novell who seems to have the longterm endgame in mind.

Novell is about business. All of its announcements, it partnerships, it market success are about business. None of these announcements have much to do with the Open side of Linux but have everything to do with the Business side of linux.

Even though Novell hasn't come out and said it formally, their marketig message is beginning to be heard.

Novell is about business-driven Linux.

Okay, the sharks are circling, Microsoft is getting hammered in the press, and there is blood in the water as people find the courage to stand up and say negative things about the Evil Empire.

Can Novell take advantage of this to promote their own cause?

Their announcement of slashing prices for their Linux on Mainframes got some good coverage. You can read about it here:
Novell Slashes Mainframe Linux Pricing

Blogger Mark Fontecchio discusses it a little bit here:
Novell Looks to Push its Mainframe Edge

What is interesting in Fontecchio's blog is that he identifies Novell SUSE Linux having 80% of the Mainframe business. I personally was surprised by that. How had Novell managed to establish such a large marketshare and why aren't they telling anyone about it.

This small piece of news is extremely significant. Novell, by establishing a solid leadership role in a niche market that has big exposure should be able to leverage that into gains in other markets. Here are some of the Laws of Marketing that this falls under (For coverage of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Trout and Ries, view my earlier blogs)

How Novell is winning by following the laws of marketing
Here is a quick look at how Novell is doing following the first 5 of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

Law #1 - The Law of Leadership - It is better to be first than it is to be better
Novell owns the Leadership spot in the Linux Mainframe market. Their decision to slash prices gets them good press and keeps the low end competitors at bay.

Law #2 - The Law of the Category - If you can't be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
Novell has struggled in its attempts to dethrone Microsoft from the Desktop. The Var Guy, in his daily blog, comments that he never sees it happening.
Where Novell Can Beat Microsoft but the VAR Guy does say that they can win in a specific category. Read his article to find out what category that is.

Novell might not be able to dethrone the Windows from the Desktop, but they are winning in categories other than the desktop. Good strategy

Law #3 - The Law of the Mind - It's better to first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
Novell has struggled with this one. They are first in the marketplace right now with the Mainframe Linux business but I'm not sure who is really aware of this. But I don't pay attention to the Mainframe business so it is possible that for those who pay attention, Novell is first in the mind. (but I doubt it)

Law #4 - The Law of Perception - Marketing is not a battle of products, it's a battle of perceptions.
This is one Law Novell has had to struggle to overcome. They must put aggressive effort into creating a new perception of the company that doesn't have people routinely writing them off. But, the Mainframe announcement is one way of changing that perception. Novell is winning in certain areas of the market.

Law #5 - The Law of Focus - The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect's mind.
This law is a tough one. Novell isn't focused exclusively on the Linux Mainframe market. And they aren't even exclusively focused on the Linux market...although they are doing a pretty good job of only talking about Linux.

What word would Novell own? If you say Mainframe Linux, you would hope that Novell would own that word. But I'm not sure they want that word to limit them.

My suggestion continues to be "Business-Driven Linux" as the word that Novell should be focusing on. Then, when they announce that they own 80% of the Linux Mainframe market and Red Hat owns 20%, it reinforces in the mind of prospects that Novell Suse Linux is designed for business-driven needs, since mainframes and big business go together in the minds of the prospects.

A Successful Strategy

Novell should be able to begin exploiting the Windows mess by focusing on areas where they are winning. Telling their story loud about those wins, and putting constant pressure on the media an analysts to think about what company is best poised for the future of business needs. Is it Microsoft with their tottering monolithic infrastructure, or Novell that is winning on many fronts and is focused on driving down costs, complexity, and management. Novell needs to be shouting these things out and positioning themselves against Microsoft.

My last blog I wrote briefly about the idea of killing the company's cash cow. Laura Ries, in her Ries Report argues that Microsoft Windows is a cash cow that needs killing. I will address that idea in the future, but for now I want to discuss how Novell's cash cow, NetWare, nearly destroyed the company and how Novell became a perfect case study for killing the cash cow.

We are all familiar with NetWare, the dominate Network Operating system of the 1980s and 1990s. We are all familiar with Microsoft's tactics of penetrating the NOS market with Windows NT by focusing on using Windows as an application platform.

We are also mostly familiar with Novell's blindness or inability to adjust to this market threat and allowed Windows NT to overtake them in the market and dethrone them as the leading Network Operating system.

What you might not be aware of is how late in the game Novell was still completely oblivious and unwilling to admit that they were no longer #1.

A short history

I worked for WordPerfect from 1989 until 1994 in the WordPerfect Office team (Now called GroupWise). I left about 6 months before the WordPerfect/Novell merger in 1994.

I went to work for an integrator in North and South Carolina who was focused on servicing law firms.

In 1994 WordPerfect was the #1 word processor for law firms and NetWare was the #1 network operating system for law firms.

I recall clearly a question that was put to me as I was preparing to leave Utah and move to South Carolina to begin working directly with law firms...someone asked me,

"What are you going to do about NT?"

At the time, I didn't understand the question and had a moment of panic attack. Oh no, what was I going to do? The answer was easier than I realized...Absolutely nothing...there really wasn't anything I could do. I serviced customers who had a vested interest in Novell and WordPefect. They weren't going anywhere and they certainly weren't moving to NT.

A Sea Change

After being there for about 9 months, the lead sales person and I started to grow slightly concerned about something we were seeing. Even though 90% of our customers were Netware/Wordperfect users, 75% of all NEW sales were NT. It was quickly becoming obvious to us in the field that in a very short time, the future customers would be running NT and NetWare would be only used by legacy customers.

Interestingly enough, when these concerns were brought to the owner of the company, that we needed to think about investing in NT expertise, he brushed it aside, assuring us that the large amount of cash and money coming into the company from NetWare/WordPerfect customers wasn't in jeopardy.

This was 1994 and it was obvious to me, living and working in the field, that the world had shifted dramatically, but it wasn't impacting the bottom line yet for those who sat higher up on the food chain.

Forward to the year 2001

I went to work for Novell in April of 2001 to head up marketing for GroupWise. What I found happening at Novell was shocking. Even though the world recognized that Windows had dethroned Novell from the Server market, you couldn't tell that to anyone on the NetWare Team.

The entire team continued to operate as if they were still number one. As if the entire shift in the market had simply not happened. They were blind and oblivious to the realities of the market place.

Needless to say, it was a little bit of an adjustment for me to deal with the NetWare team and their grand delusions of importance.

The reason was because within Novell, NetWare was still king. It continued to generate more than 80% of the company's revenue, and it was extremely profitable revenue. When the NetWare team wanted to do something, they always got their way. Smaller teams, like GroupWise, ZENworks, and Identity Management, were often stripped of resources, budgets, and face time with management simply because NetWare dominated all.

Stark example of disconnect with reality

At one point, it became painfully clear just how out of touch the NetWare team was with the real market.

Advisor, www.advisor.com, decided to do a trade show with Novell where GroupWise and NetWare both were to be presented. Novell paid for Advisor to send out conference brochures to their install base. Novell provided the names and contact information.

A few weeks later, Advisor contacted the NetWare team about what to due with the brochures that had been sent back due to customer no longer being valid.

The NetWare marketing person suggested that they simply throw them in the trash. Novell didn't really need them or want to update their databases.

That is when Advisor explained to the NetWare team that they didn't understand the magnitude of the issue. They weren't talking about a few hundred returned brochures...

They had more than 24,000 returned brochures. Several pallets of brochures were sitting at Advisor's offices.

BrainShare Keynote - Giveaway NetWare

Most companies at this point have a sad history. They traditionally hang on to their former glory, never giving up, always thinking that the market is about to turn itself around, fighting the media and analysts for their shortsightedness and ranting and raving against the technical inferiority of their competitors.

It certainly appeared Novell was heading down that path. And then Chris Stone gave a very interesting keynote at BrainShare. In his keynote he talked about the future being very different. That difficult decisions were going to be made. And maybe, just maybe, NetWare would be given away for free.

WHAT!?!?

It was a PR nightmare. Suddenly press were wanting more explanation, customer's who had just renewed their hefty maintenance agreements wanted to know if they could get a refund. No one knew what was going on.

What was going on was the beginning of the changes at Novell, changes that would prove extremely difficult for many longtime employees. The change was to basically take the cash cow out behind the barn and shoot it in the head. Shortly after that Novell announced their SUSE Linux acquisition, and the NetWare cow was beginning to be chopped up for hamburger.

It isn't over

In Novell's case, they shot their cash cow dead after their competitor had long ago turned it into a stumbling downer cow. The new management simply put the thing out of its misery. The problem for Novell has now been how to ramp up the next cash cow in time to keep the cash flowing. Normally the idea is to bring on the new cows before the old one dies. In Novell's case, management held on so long, that it has made a normally difficult transition that much more difficult.

The future is currently looking bright for Novell that they are making the right moves to change the company, to remove itself from the legacy of NetWare and to find a new future. But it isn't over and the competition is stiff.

In the future we will talk about the GroupWise cash cow.

Richard Bliss

You have often heard the term Cash Cow. A good definition is in wikipedia, where Cash Cow is defined as:

"A cash cow product has high market share in a slow-growing market."

Clayton Christensen, in his book Innovator's Dilemma, wrote that in order for companies to remain competitive, they must take their Cash Cow products and kill them off.

Not everyone agrees with this philosophy. Here is an interesting article that takes exception to the idea. Kill the cash cow before your competitors do. Really?

Laura Ries, in her weekly Ries Report put forth an argument for killing your cash cow.



The key to following the philosophy of killing the cash cow is the part where it says:

"Kill the cash cow BEFORE YOUR COMPETITORS DO"

The dangers of a cash cow

A cash cow becomes a dangerous product for a company when more and more of the companies resources are put into keeping the cow alive rather than putting more and more resources into finding a new cow.

Money is good, and cash is king, and every company looks at what products are bringing in the money that pays the bills and funds the many projects for the future.

But overtime, a company becomes beholden to the cow, when it must be protected at all costs, and a company removes themselves from a future market because they are so tied to the current market that they can't break away.

Interestingly, Christensen gives specific advice on how to go about killing off a cash cow from within your own company. It isn't easy.

Guy Kawasaki writes a great article about it here as well:

The Art of Intrapreneurship

My next blog I will discuss how Novell almost didn't survive the death of their cash cow.

The Var Guy, a blog I regularly read, recently posted about discussing Dell's decision to not support the upcoming server version of Ubuntu.
You can read the report here http://www.thevarguy.com/2008/04/10/dell-no-plans-for-ubuntu-linux-servers/

The reason Dell is hesitating is due to the the law of the ladder. Law #7 of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing states that there are rungs on a ladder in the minds of your prospects and there is a brand associated with each rung of the ladder.

In the Linux market, the top rung is held by Red Hat

The next rungs down on the ladder are a little murkier. The category, following Law #10, the law of division, which states that each category begins to subdivide itself, finds that there are two separate categories...Desktop and Server

The story being discussed by the VAR Guy is about Linux on Servers, and here, the vendor on the second rung of the Linux Server market is Novell.

It isn't clear who is on the third rung.

What Dell is doing is hedging its bets by following the 8th Law of Marketing, the Law of Duality: In the long run each market becomes a two horse race.

Dell, looking at the market, realizes that Ubuntu has a very small chance of unseating either Red Hat or Novell in the server market. Thus, Dell makes a wise business decision to continue to back the two leaders and wait to see what happens with Ubuntu.

I have been preaching for the past several months to my audience about the new power that exists in small passionate groups on the Internet willing to take the time to speak up and do something.

I blogged about its influence with the Ron Paul campaign. I've asked the Novell GroupWise community to show their support and solidarity by speaking up whenever something is mentioned in the press.

This week that passion paid off.

Media pulls inaccurate article on GroupWise

I saw an article this week about a scandal in Newfoundland and Labrador. The reporter was told by the government that emails couldn't be found because GroupWise was the problem. Within a few hours, dozens of people from all over the world responded to the article, pointing out the inaccuracies of the report. That GroupWise wouldn't be the problem and that it appeared excuses were being given by the sources to the paper and not legitimate issues.

Within the same day the article was complete removed without any reference to it whatsoever. But thanks to Google Cache it is still out there. If you would like to read it, you can do so here at this link:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.thewesternstar.com%2Findex.cfm%3Fsid%3D123270%26sc%3D506

Why this is important
The editor of the Western Star quickly discovered that their small regional paper is no longer limited to just the few readers in their small corner of the world. The Internet makes anything printed immediately accessible from anywhere in the world...AND...Google Cache insures that once posted it lives on forever.

It is also important to realize that a small focused, passionate group of people can make a difference. You don't need thousands or millions of people to be able to influence the world. A small number, tightly focused on one spot have the ability to create change.

In this case, an inaccurate article was removed, but even bigger, now pressure is being put on the government and the newspaper to come up with the true answer.

Long term goal and the new GroupWise marketing focus

The long term goal of this is to galvanize the GroupWise community. To use their passion to begin to fight back against the millions of dollars Microsoft has spent on their marketing campaign and also to push back against uninformed decision making that has hurt Novell so much in the past.

I have urged Novell to change their marketing tactics. To loudly proclaim each time a company moves off of GroupWise. To shine the light on the decision and show how fiscal irresponsibility is often at the root of the decision. To cause anyone considering deploying Microsoft to be forced to defend their decision in the face of the "Fiscal Irresponsible" label being attached to their decision.

Small win today
Having the Western Star pull their story was a small win today. The hope is that these type of stories will begin to be changed from a negative against Novell and form a strong wind of change for good.

Richard Bliss

This morning I read an article in The Western Star that was so completely filled with inaccuracies I couldn't help myself. I had to make a comment.

There is a scandal in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador inside the government. Okay, that isn't anything new, all government have scandals. The US certainly has their share.

But the investigation is being held up because the IT department can't seem to find emails. And they are blaming it on the fact that they have switched from Novell GroupWise to Outlook.

Okay, for those who read my column, you know that this is a red flag for me. Outlook isn't an email system, it is an email client that works with email systems like Exchange and GroupWise.

For the paper to report that the government is claiming that GroupWise can't find the emails and that they switched to Outlook to help them find the email 9 months later is crazy.

So, if you have a moment, do your civic duty and let the uninformed editor of The Western Star know that he or she got it wrong. Here is a link to the article:

http://www.thewesternstar.com/index.cfm?sid=123270&sc=506

And if you want to contact the editor directly here is his contact information:

THE WESTERN STAR
Richard Williams - Managing Editor
rwilliams@thewesternstar.com
Phone: 709-637-4668


I'm even willing to put my money where my mouth is. GWAVA is willing to fund the GroupWise portion of the investigation of the scandal in Newfoundland and Labrador just to show how quickly and easily it can be done.

Richard Bliss

This week I was in Las Vegas at CTIA. If you are interested in full coverage of the show, then I recommend Ewan MacLeod's site SMS Text News at www.smstextnews.com.

I was at CTIA for three objectives.

#1 Pitch Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server for an award as an emerging innovation.
Didn't win

#2 AT&T Fast Pitch for Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server
Didn't win

#3 Best of Show award for Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server
Didn't win

Okay, with my three top objectives deemed failures, I was able to get a bonus for the show. Ewan MacLeod was kind enough to allow me to post a few comments to his blog at www.smstextnews.com.

I feel that CTIA was a complete failure, not for me, even though GWAVA didn't achieve any of its objectives, no, it was a failure for the vendors at the show. I walked through massive halls with creative booths stuffed full of beautiful people. From that standpoint it was impressive. BUT...from all the people I spoke with I did not get any sense of purpose behind them being there.

I got a sense of extreme randomness. Vendors were there hoping people would pass their booth and stop and let them scan their badges. That seems like a lot of money to hope random people swing by the booth. One woman stopped me in the aisle and asked to scan my badge, they were giving away an iPhone. They didn't seem to care what I did or who I was, just wanted my name. What a waste of time and effort and a complete failure, in my opinion, by the marketing team, that couldn't figure out how to better qualify a lead than to just random scan people passing by.

LG Example

LG is a good example. They had a massive presence with a huge booth. They had a live band, a DJ, lots of girls standing around, nude mannequins, a life size replica of the new Iron Man, Pod Chairs with JBL speakers inside of them that let you listen to music, and a bunch of display cases with phones.

What were they attempting to say? "Hey, look at us! We are cool and tied into pop culture so we must be relevant!" Lots of people were in their booth but as I watched they seemed to be mostly taking pictures of the nude mannequins more than anything else.

They easily spent $1 million+ on the entire production, but failed to actually say anything about their company.

BrainShare comparison

I'm speaking from experience here since just finished with BrainShare in Salt Lake City a few weeks ago where GWAVA had the biggest booth in the place. Of course the show was much smaller but the lesson learned is still the same. I built a huge booth, with a massive presence of people, but failed to identify beforehand how big my audience was really going to be.

Of the 5,000 attendees at BrainShare, only approximately 400 were GroupWise admins. Less than 10% of the attendees were my perspective customers. My booth and my staff were out of sync with the actual number of prospects at the show.

The good news is that GWAVA's Sales team is experienced with BrainShare. They were able to stay fully booked for the entire show with pre-scheduled meetings that kept them all busy. This is a case where marketing and sales were able to cover for each other. Sales was able to exploit the 400 contacts even though Marketing had over built for the show.

Lesson learned

If you are going to be a vendor at a massive show like CTIA or even a small one like BrainShare, you need to go with a plan. Putting up a booth, hiring attractive women, and having a magician do card tricks is not a plan. It is a marketing team that is clueless about how to maximize your presence and lacks purpose.

Go with a plan. Know your audience, don't waste your time trying to cover up lack of planning with a large quantity of useless leads. This is a failure of a marketing team not doing their job.

In future blogs I will comment on what I've done over my career to make this effective.

This week I'm here at CTIA in Las Vegas, NV. I have two purposes in being here. The main reason is to help promote Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. But while I've been here I had a chance to stop by the Weather Channel Booth and shoot an impromptu weather forecast.

This is my report on Hurricane GWAVA off the coast of Las Vegas.



Tomorrow I will be pitching Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise server to AT&T for their Fast Pitch Competition.

For those of you who don't know what Retain for BlackBerry is, here is a short video that describes it:



In a nutshell, Retain for BlackBerry tracks SMS/Text/Phone Logs on your BlackBerry device, then makes that information available in a very easy to use interface that reports on all of the data that is passing through your BES from Texting, SMS, and Phone Logs.

My goal tomorrow is to pitch AT&T on the importance of this technology for their own customers.

If you get a chance be sure to vote for Retain for best of show by texting the code 543 to 868464. Like American Idol, GWAVA Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server has a chance of being voted best of show by all those text messages you are now sending in.

We are back to the 22 Immutable laws of Marketing by Trout and Reis.

Today, it is law #15, the Law of Candor. The Law of Candor states:

"When you admit a negative the prospect will give you a positive."

This is one of my favorite Laws. Very seldom does anyone like to admit they have made a mistake or that they are wrong or that things aren't as good as you would like them to believe.

We, as a society, have grown so cynical to the constant spinning that occurs that we embrace the law of candor as refreshing reality when we see it.

Let me tell you a story.

A long time ago in a in the previous decade and previous century I helped run an email hosted management company called Allegro. We managed organizations email for them and routed it to and from the Internet. We weren't an ISP, but we acted similar to one. Back then, in 1998, most everyone connected to the Internet via dialup, even corporations.

Allegro had approximately 3,000 customers dialing in every day to connect their corporate email systems to the internet. We connected Exchange, Notes, GroupWise, WP Office, cc:Mail, MSMail, and others to a large pipe we had that allowed email to come in off the internet, reside in our server farm, until the email server from our customer called in and picked it up. It was easy and simple.

One day, around November of 1998, someone began posting some messages on some bulletin boards that our service was failing. They complained that email was taking 30 minutes to get through out service.

At first, our company was in denial. How could there be anything wrong with our service? Then, during an analysis of traffic, we discovered that our servers were almost overloaded and email was taking 30 minutes to get through.

We held and emergency meeting to determine what to do and how to announce it. The decision was made by the president to immediately buy three more expensive servers and have them online before the end of the week as well as to open up even more expensive bandwidth to the Internet. That was the easy decision. The hard decision that caused a lot of arguing, was what to tell people. Did we admit that we had a problem and that we had to add more hardware. And should we say what we did to fix it.

In the end, my preference prevailed. We announced in a full press release that we had encountered the problem and expanded our service with the additional hardware and bandwidth.

I then took it one step further. During our analysis of the problem it was determined that the cause of our overload was the new use of attaching Christmas card files to email. Remember, this was 1998. An attachment back then of an exe file of bowling elfs, or dancing babies could bring a server to its knees, and we had 3,000 company doing it.

With this information, I launched a press release stating that we would willing block any corporations email that contained Christmas card files attached for free between November of 1998 and the middle of January 1999. The idea was to let corporations know that we understood that these files cause problems and we will actually step in a block them.

By taking the negative of these files clogging our system and turning it into a positive, it resulted in a large uptick in our business and it resulted in CNN to come calling. Marsha Walton, then editor of Science and Technology Week, heard about our offer and brought her camera crew to my office. We discussed the terrible things that Dancing Elves and Pornographic Snowmen can do to an email server and why it is important to keep them out of corporate customer's email systems.

I got my 15 minutes of fame that year with a spot on CNN and Headline News and CNN labeled me the e-Grinch of Christmas

It is Wednesday, the final few hours for the vendors at BrainShare to have a presence. Even though there are still three full days left, today is usually a extremely slow day in the partner area.

Each year I come to BrainShare with a marketing purpose. An attempt to practice many of the things I preach in this blog about marketing. Also, to see where Novell stands with their marketing, since so much of my effort is in direct response to Novell's actions or inactions when it comes to collaboration marketing.

What worked for Novell

For Novell, what worked was the content of the conference. I have not heard anything but rave reviews for the sessions and speakers. I have been following blogs and twitter accounts, and all of them seem to indicate that this year was an exceptionally good year for content of sessions, specifically GroupWise and Teaming sessions.

Also what worked appears to be new people here at BrainShare. A lot of new faces, new companies, new partners. And the new attendees are younger, a good sign for a Novell, since they are attempting to penetrate a market that is made up of a large number of young people well versed in Linux.

BrainShare is really about the attendees and training. The session experience is key to the success of the event, and in addition to the great content, the scheduling and registration process was very well done this year. Novell is executing the event well.

What worked for GWAVA

GWAVA has the largest presence at BrainShare every year. This is a direct result of the amount of traffic and business GWAVA received from BrainShare the previous year. Big Booth means big year, and this year was no exception.

Something else that worked as an experiment, was the introduction of GWAVA TV and using Twitter.

These tools are still in their infancy as a business tool, but I wanted to experiment with using them here, to learn how to better take advantage of emerging social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. Here are some of the things I learned:

GWAVA TV - It is extremely easy and extremely cheap to live video.
I've always wanted to broadcast live from BrainShare and this year I got to do it. We put cameras in the GWAVA Booth and did live interviews. We had a mobile unit and did on the street interviews with customers, attendees and vendors. We also were able to easily stream the keynote live, with good video and adequate audio.
We did the live video using a video camera on a tripod in the aisle during the keynote, hooked up to an iBook which was tied into the BrainShare wireless network, that broadcast the event across Mogulus (www.mogulus.com). It was set up at the last minute and worked extremely well.
The first morning we had 50 people tune into watch. I will consider that a success since it wasn't advertised, and wasn't actually set up and going live until after the keynote started. The team just decided to give it a try and see if they could do it. They could, they did, and it worked. Thanks to the 50 who tuned in. We measure success in the beginning with small steps.

Twitter - My media team, headed up by Lorri Randle of MediaJoltz, www.mediajoltz.com, was the driving force behind Twitter at BrainShare this year. We attempted to use Twitter to reach out and communicate with attendees in a way that hasn't been done before at BrainShare. It has been done before at other conference, but not here.
I will claim success on this one as well. Even though the number of participants is relatively low, the acceptance and networking that occurred worked exactly the way it was suppose to. People became connected and established relationships that normally would not have happened.
The challenge was teaching attendees what Twitter was and why they would care. Lorri created Twitter cards to hand out to people to get them to sign up and follow us at www.twitter.com/brainshare. We handed out a lot of cards and saw people begin to use it for the first time.

Great GWAVA Bug Hunt - What also worked was good old fashion networking. The Great GWAVA Bug Hunt is a traffic builder of most of the vendors in the partner hall. Three days of running around getting a piece of paper stamped, bringing it back to get a mouse, and then being entered for a drawing of an iMac works every time. This year was no exception. This year I also opened the traffic builder to those who are not normally part of the GroupWise community. Partners like XIOTech and Compucom. The traffic builder was a big success, specifically for the new vendors who saw a large spike in traffic to their booth.

What didn't work for Novell

The Monday morning keynotes fell flat. The twitter community was a bit ruthless in their expression of the dullness and flat out boring presentations. The presentations lacked enthusiasm and were disconnected from the audience. I won't say much more than that, since this morning at 9am the keynote presenters will have a chance to redeem themselves.


Also, the traffic in the vendor area was down. And not just a little bit down, it was way down. Normally I have nearly 1,500 people participate in the traffic builder. This year the number was closer to 600. Nearly a 1,000 fewer people through the booth Sunday through Monday.

I have no idea why at this point.


What didn't work for GWAVA

For GWAVA, our presence was too large for the amount of traffic we received. Many of the GWAVA employees who were here, stood with their back to the aisles, allowing customers, or potential customers to wander around looking for anyone to make eye-contact with. It was unacceptable behavior and one that will be remedied next year.
How do you remedy this next year? You don't bring those people back.

Also, my presentation theater didn't work out they way I wished. One reason is Novell. They did an excellent job of creating good content and keeping GroupWise customers busy, which means they weren't available for training in my booth. This is ironic, since I've created the training sessions because in the past quality training was lacking. This is where Novell did an excellent job and I will need to adjust in the future.

The biggest thing GWAVA did wrong was inadvertently pointed out to me by another company. They complimented me on the great job I did last year and explained how they adapted their own marketing to what GWAVA had done. And then this vendor said four words that he attributed to me..."Don't Confuse the Customer"
He had taken this advice from me a year earlier and then applied to his own marketing, his own booth, and his own efforts. The results for him were the best BrainShare he had ever experienced. He came over to find me and thank me for my comments from a year before.
Unfortunately this year I didn't listen to my own advice.

The GWAVA booth was/is spectacular, but if you don't know GWAVA then you don't know what GWAVA does. GWAVA has so many products and so many different stories that it is hard to know what and who to talk to in the GWAVA booth. This is a systemic problem that occurs with any company. Next year I will fix it. The way you fix it is to make painful decisions. You decide your top product you want to promote and you focus almost exclusively on that and abandon all other products. It is painful for the developers/product managers/and sales because they want to talk about each of their pet products.

Moving forward

Failure is much better than success when experimenting with what works for your marketing. You learn from your failures, you seldom learn from your successes. This year was a good year of learning for GWAVA and my marketing team. Hopefully it was a good year of learning for Novell as well.

Last night was the BrainShare Partner event. Ron Hovsepian, CEO of Novell, stopped by the GWAVA booth to get his picture taken with the local celebrity, GWAVAMan.

That's Ron on the right.

Erika Morphy interviewed me today. She is with E-commerce News out of Washington DC. She was looking for an opinion about the Supreme Court ruling allowing Novell to pursue the lawsuit against Microsoft.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/SC-Breathes-New-Life-Into-Novells-Ancient-Microsoft-Beef-62185.html

She didn't want to talk about my company or my products, or anything that I normally would have wanted to talk about to the press.

Instead, we talked about Novell, WordPerfect, Microsoft, DOS, and Windows. We talked about how the world has changed in the past 10 years. And as we talked I told her the story of what happened back in the old days, how WordPerfect was pursuing OS/2, how Novell acquired WordPerfect then sold it off. How Microsoft want to kill anything that kept people from moving to Windows.

We talked about the impact this ruling will have on things today...almost none. Novell and Microsoft are business partners that often compete. It isn't going to change that relationship.

We talked about the future and the impact this will have on the future.
I talked about what is coming in the future for Novell. How they will benefit from this ruling no matter what way it turns. Novell is relevant and companies are beginning to wake up and realize that what they thought they knew about Novell is probably all wrong.

Where does this leave us?

Under the leadership is new company, growing and finding its way but the future does look promising.

Howard nicely corrected me that he has 40,000 visitors a day and over a million hits a day. I incorrectly stated that it was 40,000 hits a day.

I want to thank Howard for his support at BrainShare this year. He came and had a great time, getting to ham it up with his life size comic creation, GWAVAMan.

Howard created GWAVAMan for me a few years ago, shortly after leaving Novell. You can read his GWAVAMan comic strip at www.gwava.com/gwavaman.