If the Democrats truly want to end the war after George Bush’s veto of their time-lined withdrawal/funding bill, just hold off the next funding bill and blame the president loudly for holding our troops in Iraq unfunded. There’s no reason for the Democrats to hold back. They were put in office to end the war. Bush will be left with no choice but to remove our military from Iraq or hold all the blame for leaving them there without the funds they need.

Recently I had a situation where I had to install and use Vista. I’ve had a little experience with Vista and knew I didn’t want to put it on my primary work computer. My wife wasn’t quick to donate her box either (believe me I tried to sell her on how Vista was the latest greatest!). She did come up with a great idea though. We have a Mac we use for testing at work and she suggested putting Vista on there. I thought it would be a lot of work but read about Boot Camp and decided to give it a shot.

First its extremely easy for an advanced computer user to install Vista on a Mac. Just download Boot Camp and print out the instructions and follow them. What’s more important is how well this fits into Apples business. I’m not a normal Mac user but I can certainly agree that their hardware rocks. Boot Camp is an awesome way for Apple to allow PC users to take advantage of their hardware. Apple doesn’t lose anything by allowing a user to install another OS on their hardware and they have sales to gain. They even get the opportunity to expose you to OSX albeit a brief one if you never boot it again.

Apples sales model makes one wonder why a company like Dell isn’t trying to get ahead by marketing similar hardware. People certainly are willing to pay a premium for nifty hardware packages like the Mac mini. And to be honest, it seems amazing we are still buying towers when all that same hardware can be placed in a much more tidy and pretty package.

I’ve noticed at work that Vista and Firefox play horribly together. On several installs of Vista with Firefox 2, Firefox loads some websites very slowly. You can open IE and load the same website in a snap.

Naturally any normal user just wouldn’t deal with that problem and switch right over to IE. Microsoft gets more users back on IE quite simply like this. Fortunately for the geekier users out there, a quick search for “Firefox Slow Vista” reveals the remedy. Checkout Rob Garret’s site which is the top match in Google for how to fix the problem.

Apparently something called auto-tuning is what causes the problem. Doesn’t that sound a little backwards? Auto-tuning sounds like something that should be helping not hurting Firefox. I have no clue what auto-tuning is and don’t really care what it does as long as Firefox works. I do however wonder if this was a purposeful “problem”.

Democrats are big wimps. The new phrase from the white house is irresponsible. Bush and his team are calling Congress irresponsible for letting our troops in Iraq continue unfunded. I have news for Bush and the Democrats. It’s irresponsible to leave our troops in Iraq unfunded. If there’s no money left for them, bring them home! Why aren’t the Democrats jumping on this?

Bush probably knows he’s gonna have to bring them out of Iraq against this congress. He’s gonna end up making the Democrats look bad throughout the process. The Democrats just need to stand up and fight back the rhetoric of the White House. What better backing do the democrats need to act than a majority in the house and Senate given to them by the people of the United States?

I recently read Guy Kawasaki’s article on Money as a Social Barrier. He refers to a study on how people react when they are pre-exposed to money then are asked to do a puzzle where they may ask others for help. The study concluded that those who have money on the mind are less likely to ask for help or help others. Guy goes on to compare this study with paying your customers a commission when they find you a new customer. He concludes that “If a company brings money into an evangelistic relationship with its customers, it could create barriers and instead of incentives.”

I couldn’t agree more with Guy on this one. And why would you pay your customers when they are perfectly willing and in fact may feel obligated to do it for free. Customers I have worked with seem to love the product I support for them and seem to always try to find us more customers and refer them to us. Sometimes before we can even ask them for anyone they might know who would be interested. I think this is a result (At least I hope!) of a good product doing its job for the customer. A lot of times when I speak with customers it seems like they feel they owe us (If any of our customers read this please let me know if I’m wrong). Maybe it’s cause we charge to little or maybe it’s the product changing their lives so much that they want to help change others’ or help us in return. Either way they are doing it for us for no monetary compensation and we greatly appreciate it.

I wrote this mostly to confirm what Guy is getting at but also to suggest to those paying their customers for spreading the word to think about using that money to help the product instead. This makes the money you spend potentially twice as effective. Your product is getting better and your customers will start to spread the word on their own.

I was hard at work in the home office this evening and shortly after dinner I was interrupted by someone at the door. I opened the door and there’s your usual guy out there peddling something I probably don’t need. He politely asked to speak with my wife and in my usual smart ass tone I use with sales people I inquired to find out why he needed to speak with her. It turns out it was Sam Liccardo a prosecutor running for city council in San Jose. I delightedly call my wife over knowing she would have something to say to him.

I was surprised with the encounter thinking normally people send out grunts to do this kind of work and what is this guy doing here? Second of all, it seemed like he really wanted to know was what he could do to help San Jose. Naturally my wife and I tried to let him know a few things that would help. We mentioned problems with crime and a lack of a cool downtown. He responded with his goals of getting more business downtown and the building of condos in the area as well. Seemed like he was there to listen and naturally he threw in a little pitch about why we should vote for him and even allowed a little bit of questioning. I would like to publish his response to a specific inquiry I made about his past as a prosecutor as it was very good but I don’t want to run the risk of not quoting him properly. I will say his answer was very logical and encouraging. My wife seemed pretty satisfied with his approach as well.

Needless to say this kind of grass roots campaigning impressed me and after researching Sam Liccardo a little more he has earned my vote. I even offered him my help with his campaign. I am curios to see what kind of response I get from him, if at all, and what sort of things his campaign team would have a volunteer like myself do.

I bet campaigning door to door takes a lot of time for Sam but on the other hand, he can count on me mentioning him to anyone I know voting in San Jose. I would hope that candidates for positions in small localities would attempt the same tactics. Meeting your constituents face to face to earn their votes makes a lot of sense in a real representative democracy. Now I feel a lot more certain I will actually be represented if Sam wins his seat in the San Jose City Council.

Thank you Sam for coming by and listening to what we had to say…

I’ll post updates on this as to what actually happens with my offer to help Sam out. You can read about Sam at his campaign website samlicardo.com.

Customer loyalty seems to be coveted by many organizations. Naturally it’s important if repeat business is important to a company’s survival. What irks me is when organizations achieve customer loyalty through coercion rather then through superior product or service. I see a bright future for a new wave of business which preserves their relationship through paying attention to their customer’s needs rather then penalizing them for leaving or before they even start.

The contract

Contracts tend to go along with services. When you ask me to sign a contract your really telling me that you don’t think your service is good enough to keep me around. Many companies counter that they need to have a contract to protect from losing money from a short membership yet tout the best service around. If they have the best service why would their customers leave them and why do they contractually obligate their customers to stick around?

Comcast is a fine example of a company which understands contracts. They provide reliable Internet service with no contract and at a reasonable price. Very simple plan and I must admit their excellent service is making me more then loyal. I tell people they should use Comcast for their Internet provider too. On the other hand SBC, whom provides a competing DSL service, demands a contract or pay them a lot more for a month to month agreement. After using their service for a couple months I came upon the opinion that this service was below standard and not worth it. Being stuck in a contract I had to pay an early termination to get out. I won’t be using them ever again and I advise everyone I know to avoid them as well.

The contract may be useful in some industries but it seems to me that it only opens the possibility to leave a bitter taste in your customer’s mouth. Furthermore it can actually drive away some potential customers. It seems like a much safer bet to preserve your customers through good service.

Startup Fees

Startup fees seem to be a tactic to make you want to stick around till you’ve spread that startup fee over several months of time. Many times a startup fee is charged and there is no apparent added value gained for paying that fee other then the fact that you can now pay a recurring fee and use the service. When people ask me for a startup fee I immediately want to know what I am getting in return for this extra payment. Usually you get nothing and if you do get something you aren’t really paying a startup fee. Your paying for installation, labor, equipment or something. Business’ should never call these startup fees but rather bill for exactly what they are selling. Customers feel a lot better when they see they are getting something in return for their money.

Again if you are trying to preserve your customer subscriptions by charging a hefty up front fee think again. Fees make a great deterrent to most people. You might have exactly what the customer needs and are just scaring away a stream of recurring revenue. If you won’t make enough money without the startup fee then drop the fee and raise your membership fee. As usual if you want to keep your customers around just make sure you serve them the best you can.

No Contract or Fees

As odd as this might sound its difficult to get some customers to understand a no contract or fee service. I’ve sold a service for some time to customers and when they find out we have no contract or fee they are confused and ask repeatedly about it. They think suddenly a huge hidden fee is going to pounce on them that I was secretly hiding until they sign up.

This leads me to believe a lot of people get screwed over by contracts and fees. Furthermore a lot of people must get hidden charges dropped on them that they weren’t told about. I find this shocking and think a consumer revolt is in order. There’s no reason we should buy from companies that don’t trust themselves to keep us around based on their quality of service. Unless of course there is no other option out there. So join me in my boycott of companies who are not willing to constantly compete for our business with great service. Let’s force companies to serve us not themselves. Without us they would have nothing.

If you know of a great no fee service please comment on it below…

Web based tools should be important to anyone who spends most of their lives “connected.” For me, it is important to keep as much of what I do as possible online. It just makes life easier when I use machines other then my own. Even setting up a new machine is a lot easier since so few tools need to be installed. Most of the tools I need and use regularly can all be found on one website or another. So it wasn’t long till I realized my bookmarks should be as accessible and online with everything else.

del.icio.us fits the bill perfectly. I wanted to see if there was anything better out there and found a lot. But the only other one that stood out as simple and as useful was Google Bookmarks. So naturally I had to do a shoot out between the two. I spent a few days bookmarking in both tools to see which one came out on top.

Both del.icio.us and Google Bookmark are nearly identical in tagging pages. They both provide easy bookmarking directly from the web browser. del.icio.us even goes so far as to have a nice plugin for Firefox which adds del.icio.us to the search bar, provides a tagging button, a link to your bookmarks in your menu, a del.icio.us toolbar menu, and tagging from context menus. This doesn’t really set del.icio.us apart from Google but it does provide for a more streamlined setup with access to a lot more then just tagging pages.

If you compare the pages used to bookmark/tag a web page, they look almost identical.

At this point It’s rather difficult to see which product provides any advantages. So let’s take a look at how to access bookmarked pages from the respective website. Google hands down has the superior looking layout. It’s simple, organized, and quick to adapt to. del.icio.us doesn’t really give that same feeling. But it’s not bad.

Searching

The key in using either of these tools is in the tagging (Google calls theirs labels but they act just like tags.) We can bookmark hundreds of pages but finding them later is the problem and that’s where tags help. The other important aspect to finding bookmarks is searching. Google naturally provides superior searching of bookmarks compared to del.icio.us. That’s what they try to be best at after all. The main reason I say this is Google indexes everything about the bookmark. So if you do a search it can match anything having to do with the bookmark such as label, title, note etc… del.icio.us on the other hand, only provides searching for tags. This is not bad but it’s not great. It just emphasizes the importance of good tagging when using del.icio.us. If you use a bad tag that doesn’t relate well to the link you might be out of luck.

Why I picked del.icio.us

There are two reasons why del.icio.us has won my vote. The first is that the community can contribute to del.icio.us and help each other. The second is that everything that del.icio.us has at stake is in web based bookmarking/tagging. Google has a several (at least!) projects to worry about.

The community factor helps give del.icio.us a giant boost. You can label bookmarks for friends. This is handy for showing a buddy a page you are interested in without calling him up and forcing him to take a look immediatley. It just shows up in a section called, “links for you” which really means links for you from other people. You can also add your friends entire list of bookmarks to your network. So if they are willing to share you can see all the pages they are interested in. Finally you can run a search for items from the whole del.icio.us community. The relevancy of these searches is through how often pages are bookmarked rather then some other algorithim. It seems to work really well so far. I’m sure I am missing a few other cool collaborative features and it looks like they are working on more.

Google has a lot going on. del.icio.us is built around one product for now. This makes a compelling argument for del.icio.us. For instance there isn’t even a sign of the ability to share bookmarks in Google while del.icio.us is continually improving their own service. That’s all they got to work on and it’s as simple as that. While there may be a team dedicated to Google Bookmark I doubt the company’s success is hinging on that product. Some may argue del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo. But I have yet to see a Yahoo logo on the del.icio.us site. Looks like Yahoo is doing the right thing and letting del.icio.us maintain its autonomy.

Check them both out at:

http://www.google.com/bookmarks/

http://del.icio.us/

Also please comment and let me know about anything I’ve missed.

TiEcon 2006 was a show not to be missed. TiE stands for The Indus Entrepreneur. Being Indian however is not a requirement for attendees and if you are shy you shouldn’t be. The atmosphere was very welcoming and open. It was even a good opportunity for some cultural exposure.

Excellent speakers included John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Guy Kawasaki, Sashi Tharoor, and Larry Brilliant. Topics not only covered entrepreneurship but world affairs such as poverty, health, and environment. My personal favorite was Guy Kawasaki. The most entertaining speaker of the show with some of the best advice.

Networking was an important theme for the show as well. Plenty of people were buzzing around with smiles ready to engage in conversation. This show is mandatory for anyone who would like to meet fellow entrepreneurs and people who can help each other.

I will be attending next year after this great experience and I recommend this event to anyone who would like industry exposure or has interest in entrepreneurship. If you have any questions, please email me and I would be more then happy to provide additional info.

For show details visit the website at http://www.tiecon.org/