There.  I said it.  Being a typical guy the "L" word is not something I give up easily.

I know she is not perfect.  She is basically flat, and for that all of the other girls make fun of her.  To say her fashion sense is lacking is an understatement.  She has been pretty much wearing the same getup for the last decade.  When the web came along for a time she had nothing to wear at all.  When she finally did get dressed she just did not look right, with twisties and other things that nobody else was wearing.  Finally she has XPages. None of us have the heart to tell her that the others have been wearing something similar for years now.  Although I liked it at first, some days I wonder if blue and yellow go that well together.

It has been almost 15 years ago since I first met her.  She was only 2 at the time, but even then I knew she was different.  She was easy to talk to, was as at home in a group as she was talking one on one, and she could do things faster than the other kids.  She spoke several languages, and what she said was so obvious, it seems odd that some people just did not understand her.  They would talk behind her back, saying she could only do this or that, was not dependable, and could not do any  any kind of heavy lifting.  

She is getting on in years.  She has had some work done on her backend recently.  In some ways it looks better,  but its fatter than it used to be.  Even still she still moves better than most of the others. She puts a web server, application server, security and workflow engine, and a full development environment in one small package, and takes it everywhere.  Some of the girls would need a flatbed truck to do the same thing.  She may be a bit of a cougar, but I still think she is hot. Full of Barcardi and Botox, I still think she is hot!

I thought about leaving her a few times over the years, but I have hung in there.  A lot of her old friends are gone now.  They have moved on to the younger girls, the ones that tell you they give it away for free.  I have talked to them too, but it does not take too long to realize they can only promise what NSF delivered years ago, and if you want anything but the basics, its going to cost some serious cash.  

In some ways I feel sorry for her.  Her parents sold her, and the new ones have treated her badly.  Whenever someone would come calling for NSF they would make sure they introduced them to her step sister first.  Once they even dressed the step sister in NSF's yellow dress, hoping people would not notice the difference.  We all recognized it was not her, but for some reason, maybe because we did not want to piss her parents off, we never said anything. I felt bad about that. Still do.  They recently had another  big birthday party for her, and seem to be giving her a lot more attention, but I wonder if they have some hidden agenda in mind.

Time has really flown by, and I am realizing that we have grown old together.   I guess we will continue to do what we do until one of us is gone for good.

Pardon me. "Yellow" by Coldplay just came on www.last.fm.  I need a moment.  

Sitting in my office way from home. That is a William's coffee pub. Brilliant marketing. Offer the internet for free and sales people gather, and buy things while they work.  Beside me are two guys, one obviously the sales manager, the other obviously the sales rep, who obviously is not hitting his sales target.  Not a pleasant conversation, and not a lot of love being flowing from either side.

I remember when I decided the oil patch was not where I wanted to be.  It was the middle of a recession, 1984 I think. Not a lot of jobs to be had in the tech sector for a guy that worked on oil rigs.  The only job I could find was sales, and I did not want to be a sales guy.  I associated sales with the guy who followed you around the car lot nattering on and on about the shiny car you happened pause by.

Finally out of desperation I held my nose and took a sales job with Microage Computers.  I thought sales support was a better place to be, maybe I could move to a bigger firm once I got some experience.  It was there that I ran into Ed Belitzki.  Ed was a professional sales guy, and I made a comment about his chosen profession that got his back up. He told me "nothing ever happens till someone sells something.  No training, no support, no shipping...nothing."   It was at this point I started to understand the role sales plays in business.  I made up my mind that if I was going to do this, then I would only sell something that made sense.  I got onto the Computer Aided Design bandwagon, and helped a lot of companies out of the dark ages of drafting and design. It felt good. Notes came along, and it made sense too.

Fast forward many years.  I am not sure if it is the times, greed, or what.  I see time and again sales reps calling customers or reseller and resellers because it is the end of the quarter, and they want you to sell something, the customer to buy something.....anything.  We stopped being a software reseller for that very reason. I could not take the constant pestering to push the sale through, to make the number, regardless of the value to the customer.

Lately I have had some of our own partners tell me that they demonstrated a product, and it lacked in many areas in comparison to ours, but the lead came from ABC and they felt they had to pitch that product to make their numbers and keep people happy so they would feed them more leads.   Man...how can you do that?  How do you face your customer?  How can you stand yourself.  You should be ashamed.   Sales needs to be more than that.  You are lucky Ed is not around.  

Sigh...my rant for today.

How many times have you initiated a search looking for something specific, get a long list of results returned, and spend a lot of time scrolling through them to find what you are really looking for?  In some cases even attachments get searched and the search criteria, although technically correct, is out of context.  In some cases way out of context.

An alternative is take advantage of visual search techniques. This web 2.0 technology is being used on many sites and you may be familiar with it.  Check out www.flickr.com as an example.  We have taken this and applied it to a corporate environment in a unique way.  Rather than have the results show everything in terms of meta data, we will be allowing users to define how the search is carried out,. Specifically what meta data is searched and the order it is searched. This is will be all integrated with our powerful "Perspectives" for shaping up data in a way that is meaningful to the end user.

Here is a quick flash overview of a prototype.

http://www.docova.tv/Videos/CloudTags/cloudtags.htm