I have worked all my career in enterprise IT, either as a sysadmin, or for vendors of enterprise IT tools. There are many annoyances in big-company IT, but one of the most frustrating is when people miss key aspects of what makes corporate IT tick.

One area is the difference between a brand-new startup whose entire IT estate consists of a handful of bestickered MacBooks, and a decades-old corporation with the legacy IT that history brings. Case in point: Google is stealing away Microsoft’s future corporate customers.

Basically, it turns out that - to absolutely nobody's surprise - startups overwhelmingly use Google's email services. Guess what? Running your own email server for just a few users is not a highly differentiating activity, so it makes sense to hand it off to Google. Big companies on the other hand have a legacy that means it makes sense to stick with what they have and know, which generally means Microsoft Exchange.

So far, so good. The key factor that is missing in this analysis is time. What happens when those startups grow to become mid-size companies or even join the Fortune 50 themselves? Do they stick with Google's relatively simple services, or do they need to transition at some point to an "enterprise" email solution?

It is now clear that Google does deep inspection of email contents. So far, this appears to be done for good: Paedophile snared as Google scans Gmail for images of child abuse. However, if I were in a business that competes with Google - and these days, that could be anything - I would feel distinctly uncomfortable about that.

There are also problems of corporate policy and compliance that apply to proper grown-up companies. At the simplest level, people often have their own personal Gmail accounts as well, and with Google's decision to use that login for all their services, there is enormous potential for bleed-over between the two domains. At a more complex level, certain types of data may be required to be stored in such a way that no third parties (such as Google) have access to them. Gmail would not work for that requirement either.

Simply put, startups have different needs from big established corporations. The impact of full-time IT staff on small startup is huge. The alternative of doing your own support doesn't work either, because every hour spent setting up, maintaining or troubleshooting IT infrastructure is an hour that you don't spend working on your actual product. For a big corporation with thousands of employees, on the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to dedicate a few to in-house IT support, especially if the alternatives include major fines or even seeing managers go to jail. The trend Quartz identified is interesting, but it's a snapshot of a point in time. What would be more interesting would be to see the trend as those companies grow and change from one category to another.

Corollary to this is that business IT is not consumer IT. Trying to mix the two is a recipe for disaster. Big B2B vendors end up looking very silly when they try to copy Apple, and journalists look just as silly when they fail to understand key facts about the differences between B2B and consumer IT, and between small-company IT and big-company IT.

Image by Philipp Henzler via Unsplash

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

– Niccolò Machiavelli

So¹ I'm in a corporate strategy exercise. A fellow participant was searching for an analogy to make his point, and took the iPhone as an example. So far so normal - the iPhone is now deeply embedded in the enterprise, to the point that there was only a single BlackBerry holdout in the room.

The interesting thing is that my colleague went on to list ten features of the iPhone - and did not include voice calling! POTS² is no longer the most important feature of these devices, or even the most frequently used one. I know I use Phone.app an order of magnitude less than Skype and Lync even for voice communications. FaceTime still lags slightly, because I mainly use that for video calls and those are not always appropriate.

When is a phone... not a phone?

I read an article entitled How Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe hacked Metcalfe’s Law, and thought: Wouldn't it be nice if that were all there were to the story? "Genius co-founder drives her startup's app to success with ground-roots marketing campaign?"

Instead of course it's yet another nasty story of tech-industry sexism, he-said/she-said and what looks like the nightmare scenario of a breakup with a co-worker gone about as bad as it could possibly go.

We're better than this. Aren't we?

Image by Forrest Cavale via Unsplash

Give yourself some credit. Your doubt comes from your expertise.

— Garrick van Buren (@garrickvanburen) July 10, 2014

There is a division in marketing between "professional" marketers, who have come up through the ranks, and subject-matter experts or SMEs, who wound up in marketing as a way to get their ideas out there.

You can see this division played out in public if you go looking for blogging tips, or SEO, or social media ninja tips, or anything in that general area. The people sharing the tips tend to be industry insiders; they are never sharing how they became the number one blogger on ice-cream flavours, they are sharing how they became the number one blogger about blogging. It all gets very incestuous and inside-baseball very fast, and many of the "tips" run directly counter to SME communication.

In both contexts, the content is assumed to be the easy part. If your objective is to bang out a blog post a day and hang the quality, it's easy to come up with yet another variation on "how to write a subject line that trolls Metafilter". If your objective is to send fifty tweets a day, it makes perfect sense to connect an RSS reader to your Twitter account. If your objective is to get Facebook likes, there are any number of variants of fortune pre-seeded with databases of "inspirational" quotes.

Meanwhile, actual SMEs struggle with impostor syndrome. For this group, putting something out there that is less than fully thought out is anathema. The content is the objective; "reach", readership and so on are validations of the content, but not primary objectives.

So far, so good. When the two groups collide, usually the worst that happens is that SMEs get frustrated by their inability to find tips on increasing reach that are not written by professional "social media ninjas" for an audience of would-be ninjas.

However, social media is now more or less recognised as a professional category, and so the collision can now happen at work. The social media expert wants to keep a certain tempo, and starts asking for increasing numbers of "gated deliverables" and such horrors. They might even suggest an ebook. SMEs, having an inkling of the effort required to create a proper book on their subject, understandably balk. The ninjas become frustrated. Ebooks are the current thing; why are the SMEs being difficult?

Content done right is not easy. Sustaining a tempo in social media is important, but if your objective goes beyond mere noise and volume, a high-quality piece of content tomorrow beats a poorly thought out mess today, every time.

If you hire a Cordon Bleu chef, don't then look over their shoulder, second-guess them, hurry them and jog their elbow - and if you do, don't be surprised if they come after you with the carving knife!

Images from Morguefile, which I am using as an experiment.

There are fashions in IT (and don't let anyone tell you us nerds are all perfectly rational actors). That goes double in IT marketing, where metaphors get adopted rapidly and even more rapidly perverted. If you need an example, look no further than the infamous "cloud computing" itself.

There is a new trend I am seeing, of calling cloud "the elephant in the room". I heard this the other day and went off into a little dwam, thinking of the cloud as an actual elephant.

There's an old story about six blind men who are asked by a king to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.

The king explains to them: "All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned."

Cloud is much the same. All the rival "cloud experts" are blind men feeling up different parts of the cloud elephant and describing radically different animals. Here is my little taxonomy of the Blind People¹ of Cloud.

Public Cloud Purists

There is no such thing as a private cloud!

If I had a euro for every tweet expressing that sentiment… well, I could buy my own Instagram for sure. I have already set out my own view of why they have got hold of the wrong end of the elephant (TL;DR: Must be nice to start from a clean sheet, but most people have datacenters full of legacy, and private cloud at least lets them use what they have more efficiently).

SaaSholes

Servers are out, platforms are in! Point and laugh at the server huggers!

Alright, clever-clogs: what do you think your "platforms" run on? Just because you are choosing to run at a far remove from the infrastructure doesn't mean it's not there. SaaS is great for getting stuff done fast with fairly standard business processes, but beyond a certain point you'll need to roll your own.

Cloud FUDdy Duddies

The cloud is insecure by definition! You can't use it for anything! The NSA and the Chinese military are vying with each other and with Romanian teenagers to be the first to take your business down!.

Well, yes and no. I'd hazard that many traditional datacenters are quite a bit less secure than the big public clouds. Mostly this is a result of complexity stemming from legacy services, not to mention lack of sufficient dedicated resources for security - but does that matter for every single service? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no.

Cloud Washers

Email with a Web UI in front of it - that's cloud, right? Can I have some money now?

Thankfully this trend seems to be dying down a bit. It's been a while since I have seen any truly egregious examples of cloud-washing.

Cloudframers

I was doing the same thing on my Model 317 Mark XXV, only with vacuum tubes! Now get off my lawn!

Sorry, mainframe folks - this is a little bit unfair, because the mainframe did indeed introduce many concepts that we in the open world are only adopting now. However, denying that cloud is significantly different from the mainframe is not helpful.

Flat Clouders

My IT people tell me all the servers are virtualised and that means we have cloud, right? When I send them an email asking them for something, the response I get a couple of weeks later says "cloud" right in the subject line…

Cloud is not just an IT project, and if it's treated as such, it'll fail, and fail badly. However I still hear CIOs planning out a cloud without involving or even consulting the business, or allowing for any self-service capabilities at all.

This elephant is pretty big, though, and I am sure there are more examples out there. Why don't you share your own?

Periodically something happens that gets everyone very worked up about privacy online. Of course anyone who has ever administered a mail server has to leave the room when that conversation starts, because our mocking laughter apparently upsets people.¹

The latest outrage is that Facebook has apparently been messing with people's feeds. No, I don't mean the stuff about filtering out updates from pages that aren't paying for placement.

No, I don't mean the auto-playing videos either. Yes, they annoy me too.

No, it seems that Facebook manipulated the posts that showed up in certain users' feeds, sending them more negative information to see whether this would affect their mood - as revealed, naturally, through their Facebook postings.

Now, it has long been a truism that online, and especially when it comes to Facebook, privacy is dead. The simplistic response is of course "if you wanted it to be a secret, then why did you share it on Facebook?". This is, of course, a valid point as far as it goes. The problem is that the early assumptions about Facebook no longer hold true.

Time was, Facebook knew about what you did on Facebook, but once you left the site, you were free to get up to things you might not want to share with everybody. Then those "Like" buttons started proliferating everywhere. Brands and website operators wanted to garner "likes" from users to prove their popularity, or at least the effectiveness of their latest marketing gimmick ("like our site for the chance to win an iPad!").

It turns out that on top of tracking what you actually "like", Facebook can track any page you look at that has a Like button embedded. Given that the things are absolutely everywhere, that gives them probably the most complete picture of any ad network out there.

Then Facebook changed their news delivery options. It used to be that "liking" a page meant that you would see all their updates. Now, it means that about 2% of the people who "like" the page see the updates - unless the page operators choose to pay to amplify their reach... Note that these pages do not necessarily belong to brands and advertisers. If your old school has a page that you "like", in the expectation that you will now receive their updates, you're out of luck. Guess you'd better arrange a fundraiser at your next reunion to gather cash to pay Facebook. On the plus side, you have a built-in excuse for poor attendance at the reunion: "ah, I guess they were in the 98% that Facebook didn't deliver the notifications to".

And now Facebook have gone whole-hog, not just preventing information from reaching users' feeds, but actively changing the contents of the users' feeds - in the name of Science, sure.

This is far beyond what people think they have signed up for. There is a big difference between being tracked on Facebook, and being tracked by Facebook, everywhere you go. The difference is not just moral, but commercial. After all, tracking users across multiple websites has been standard operating procedure for ad networks for a long time now. If you've ever shopped online for something and then seen nothing but ads for that one thing for a month thereafter, you have experienced this first-hand. It's mildly creepy, but at this point everyone is pretty well inured to this level of tracking.

Being tracked by ad networks is different from being tracked by Facebook in one very important way. So far, nobody seems to have figured out a good way to make money with content on the internet. A few people do okay with subscriptions, but it tends to be a niche thing. Otherwise, pretty much everything is ad-funded in some way. Now, banner ads can be annoying, and the tracking can get creepy, but at least the money from the ad impressions is going to the site operator, who provides the content that keeps us all coming back.

The "like" button subverts this mechanism, because it's just as creepy and Big-Brotherish, but none of the money goes to the site's operator. All the money and data go only to Facebook, who are even now trying to figure out how to modify your feed to make you want to buy things. Making you feel bad was only step 1, but not everyone goes straight to retail therapy as a remedy. Step 2 is hacking our exocortices (hosted on Facebook) to manipulate the "buy now!" instinct directly.

If you enjoyed this article, please like it on Facebook.

I've been blogging a lot about messaging lately, which I suppose is to be expected from someone in marketing. In particular, I have been focusing on how messaging can go wrong.

The process I outlined in "SMAC My Pitch Up" went something like this:

• Thought Leaders (spit) come up with a cool new concept
• Thought Leaders discuss the concept amongst themselves, coming up with jargon, abbreviations, and acronyms (oh my!)
• Thought Leaders launch the concept on an unsuspecting world, forgetting to translate from jargon, abbreviations and acronyms
• Followers regurgitate half-understood jargon, abbreviations and acronyms
• Much clarity is lost

Now the cynical take is that the Followers are doing this in an effort to be perceived as Thought Leaders themselves - and there is certainly some of that going on. However, my new corollary to the theory is that many Followers are not interested in the concept at all. They are name-checking the concept to signal to their audience that they are aware of it and gain credibility for other initiatives, not to jump on the bandwagon of the original concept. This isn't the same thing as "cloudwashing", because that is at least about cloud. This is about using the cloud language to justify doing something completely different.

This is how we end up with actual printed books purporting to explain what is happening in the world of mobile and social. By the time the text is finalised it's already obsolete, never mind printed and distributed - but that's not the point. The point is to be seen as someone knowledgeable about up-to-date topics so that other, more traditional recommendations gain some reflected shine from the new concept.

The audience is in on this too. There will always be rubes taken in by a silver-tongued visionary with a high-concept presentation, but a significant part of the audience is signalling - to other audience members and to outsiders who are aware of their presence in that audience - that they too are aware of the new shiny concept.

It's cover - a way of saying "it's not that I don't know what the kids are up to, it's that I have decided to do something different". This is how I explain the difficulties in adoption of new concepts such as cloud computing¹ or DevOps. It's not the operational difficulties - breaking down the silos, interrupting the blamestorms, reconciling all the differing priorities; it's that many of the people talking about those topics are using them as cover for something different.

Images from Morguefile, which I am using as an experiment.

So you have an idea, and you kick it about with some people and refine it, until it's time to take it out into the world. Now that insight gets paraphrased and simplified and reduced to sound-bites, and those sound-bites get passed around by people who don't necessarily understand all of the context behind the sound-bite. In fact, I wrote about this process already: SMAC My Pitch Up.

In what we laughingly call "software engineering", the current favourite delaying tactic to postpone the onset of cargo cults is the two pizza rule. The rule was coined by Jeff Bezos of Amazon: if a team couldn’t be fed with two pizzas, it was too big¹.

The problem with the two pizza rule is not that it doesn't work. Small teams can indeed get a lot more done in a hurry than big teams, which inevitably get bogged down into management by committee. The problem is that very quickly you end up with many two-pizza teams, all eating in different rooms and not talking to each other.

Sooner or later, some bright spark will suggest that there should be a committee to manage the interaction between the various teams. In accordance with the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, the requirements of communication proliferate until people in the individual two-pizza teams are spending more time on formal communication processes than on the original purpose that they sat down to thrash out over pizza.

Congratulations: your two-pizza team just reinvented the org chart. As tempting as it may be to set sail in your own pocket battleship, it's generally better to figure out a way to achieve your goals within the corporate structure, or without upending it entirely. Revolution sounds fun, but evolution actually gets results.

The three stages of technical learning. 1. Why? 2. How? 3. Why?

— Leon Bambrick (@secretGeek) June 12, 2014

@secretGeek 4. Why God, WHY?!??!

— Kevin Dente (@kevindente) June 12, 2014

@kevindente @secretGeek And finally, 5. WTF?!?!

— Rachel Appel (@RachelAppel) June 12, 2014

@RachelAppel @kevindente @secretGeek you forgot 6. You have got to be kidding me.?

— Denny Cherry - mrdenny@techhub.social (@mrdenny) June 12, 2014

@mrdenny @RachelAppel @kevindente @secretGeek 7. I could do this better.

— Thomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar) June 12, 2014

@SQLRockstar @mrdenny @RachelAppel @kevindente @secretGeek 8. Here is my blog post about it.

— Kenneth Fisqher (the q is silent) (@sqlstudent144) June 12, 2014