Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Password blues

    Password blues

    “Johnny down the street hacked my Minecraft account!” is something almost every parent today has heard in one way or another.

    If you believed the kids, the schools are full of 12 year old hacking geniuses that can unravel passwords faster than a CIA super computer.

    Usually it turns out the “evil hacker” in Grade 5 had the password all along as the kids share their login details with all their friends.

    The New York Times recently pulled together story showing how teenagers are sharing passwords to show their affection. One wonders how many abusive relationships see the dominant partner control the other’s social media and online accounts.

    It isn’t just kids and teenagers who find themselves in trouble though, businesses make the same mistakes. Commonly sharing a password to important files and tech functions across the organisation.

    Thinking this is just a small business problem would be a mistake; Australia’s Vodafone made all their entire customer base available on the Internet thanks to single logins and shared passwords for each of their dealers.

    Over the years this caused major problems for customers and the honest Vodafone dealers as their unscrupulous competitors hijacked accounts and churned clients to new plans. The cost to Vodafone Australia must have been huge but impossible to quantify given they apparently had no tracking mechanism to figure out who had accessed accounts.

    In households and business, the main reason we share passwords is convenience – security by nature is always inconvenient. It’s convenient not to bother locking your front door or leaving your keys in the car.

    When you really value something, you lock it up and you don’t give a key to everyone in your neighbourhood. It should be the same with passwords, keep them strong and keep them secret.

    Our kids learn this the hard way, we shouldn’t have to.

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  • Scam 2.0

    Scam 2.0

    Invoice scams are as old as business itself, no doubt opportunistic cavemen tried to scam other hunters over made up debts and Phoenician traders had to deal with suppliers claiming they’d delivered an extra few hundred Shekels of chickpeas.

    Today we see these scams in all forms – imaginary invoices for web registrations, directory inclusions and local listings are just a few we’ve seen. As the web evolves, we’re seeing a new breed of tricks developing.

    Online scams can range from things like letters from deposed African presidents promising riches through to aggressive sales folk promising services they can’t deliver. The latter are part of the new breed.

    In 2009 Oakland’s East Bay Express alleged the review site Yelp’s sales teams were threatening business with bad reviews if they didn’t pay an advertiser fee. Four years later businesses are claiming this is still happening.

    Regardless of the truth of these allegations with Yelp these distatesful sales tactics from online companies are becoming more widespread.

    As social media services investors start demanding revenue to back their businesses and group buying sites reach the limits of their growth the sales teams of these organisations are desperately try to find new ways to meet higher targets.

    Small and local businesses are the obvious targets of the sales teams, as the web 2.0 business model has trained consumers into expecting not to pay for online services.

    Recently a fitness trainer told me how she was hounded into placing a group buying deal with one of the bigger sites; they convinced her that she should offer an 85% discount with the service taking the remaining 15%.

    She provided the service for free.

    Naturally the 85% off deal was successful, she was rushed off her feet and found herself working for nothing over the next month. Even had the cheap offer resulted in all the customers coming back, it would have taken her a year to recover her losses.

    Clearly she should have known better and investigated how group buying sites work and the strategies for using them effectively, but she was subject to high pressure sales techniques that took advantage of her ignorance.

    Many online businesses have been giving services away for free as they try to exploit the Silicon Valley greater fool business model. When the venture capital funds dry up they have to find to new ways of paying for their trendy offices with foosball tables and free organic staff meals.

    This means more cold calls to business owners promising “marketing opportunities”, “getting to the top of Google” and “getting positive online reviews”.

    Over time these sales calls will morph into fake negative reviews and bills for imaginary services rendered as these businesses attract desperate and unscrupulous operators.

    For businesses, this means it’s a time to be on guard by making sure any invoices received are properly checked before they are paid and any sales person’s claims are thoroughly checked out before you agree to go ahead with a service.

    If you hear of dodgy dealing like what Yelp has been accused of, then try to get the promises in writing and complain to your state’s fair trading department or complain to business agencies. In Australia, the ACCC is the first point of call.

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  • A blind faith in technology

    A blind faith in technology

    “How could this happen with all the technology these ships have?” is the first question many of us had when we saw pictures of the Costa Concordia lying on its side with a ripped hull.

    In an era where we have Global Positioning Systems, sonar, radar and sophisticated mapping technology it seems almost impossible that a ship could find itself in such a terrible situation.

    Every generation has its own blind faith in the technology of the day and almost a hundred years ago one of the greatest shipping disasters of all – the RMS Titanic – happened because of the same belief in that era’s technology.

    While the Titanic’s builders claim they never said the ship was unsinkable, popular belief held the vessel was the safest of all ocean liners with sophisticated steam engines, modern safety designs and better communications tools like the radio and Morse Code.

    Those technologies were part of the Titanic’s undoing; the improved performance of steam ships saw the shipping companies competing for the Blue Riband prize of the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, meaning captains took risks they wouldn’t have with less technically advanced vessels. This is why the Titanic found itself in an ice field.

    Once the ship was struck another problem with our blind faith in technology arose – we never foresee all the consquences.

    In the Titanic’s case there weren’t enough lifeboats – the safety rules of the day had fallen behind the capacity of the ships and, while the Titanic exceeded the minimum number required, there were barely enough lifeboats to take a third of the passengers.

    The Titanic’s sinking has some similarities in that today cruise ship companies are in an ‘arms race’ to build bigger and more luxurious liners, marketing them as floating resorts raising concerns among maritime experts that the capacity of these ships is too great for them to be evacuated quickly.

    Of course we have to be careful of drawing too many parallels between the Titanic and the Costa Concordia, the Titanic’s loss of life was several orders of magnitude greater than the Concordia’s and the Titanic happened towards the end of a period when technology looked like it would solve all the world’s problems.

    The sinking of the Titanic was also the peak of the Edwardian standards of “women and children first” and “for King and country.” Only one in six of the third class male passengers and half of that in second class survived.

    A few years later, the clash of Edwardian culture and modern technologies was starkly shown when millions died in the trenches of France, Belgium and Gallipoli as generals applied 18th Century cavalry tactics against 20th Century weapons. Another example of not understanding the effects of new technologies.

    Whenever we adopt a new technology there’s a risk we’ll get it wrong and blind faith in tools we don’t understand can lead us to a disaster.

    Even in a business we can’t just accept that because a computer says “yes”, the answer is yes. Sometimes we have to think.

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  • The end of the PC era

    The end of the PC era

    This morning a graph appeared on the web from analytics site Asymco showing the stalling of PC sales and the rapid catch up of Android and Apple iOS systems.

    Such graphs starkly illustrate how the industry is changing as people start using tablet and smartphones instead of their PCs but there are some caveats with making blanket comments about the death of the Windows based computer.

    Sales are still huge

    One important thing about the chart shown is it has a logrithmic scale – a doubling in height indicates ten times the sales.

    That point alone shows just how massive the lead Windows had over 15 years from the mid-1990s, something that is shown in a previous Asymco chart.

    Despite Gartner’s reported 1.4% fall in PC sales – the basis of the Asymco graphs – there are still 92 million personal computers sold each quarter so it is still a massive market.

    Tethered devices

    One of the weaknesses with smartphones and tablet computers is they are still tethered to the desktop. If you want to get the best experience from your phone or iPad you have to synch it with your home or office computer.

    For the moment that’s going to continue for most users, but not forever and the extended life of PCs means customers are using older computers to connect.

    Extended life cycles

    A bigger problem for the PC manufacturers is the extended life cycle of personal computers.

    Since the failure of Microsoft Vista, PC users have been weaned off the idea of replacing computers every three to five years and nearly half the market is using systems that are more than ten years old.

    On its own that indicates fundamental problems with the Windows and PC markets for Microsoft and their manufacturing partners.

    The irrelevant operating system

    One of the effects of increased computer life cycles is that the operating system has become irrelevant. Customers no longer care about what they are using as long as it works.

    This is one of Microsoft’s problems; the virus epidemic of last decade and various clunky versions of Windows Phones has left customers perceiving PC and Windows software as being clunky and buggy.

    Not yet dead

    While the PC market is now shrinking, it’s far from dead. There’s still a huge demand to cater for although the big growth days are over.

    For manufacturers whose business model has been based on fighting for market share in a growing sector, they now have a problem. They have to identify profitable niches and generate innovative products.

    Unfortunately for the PC industry, the market has moved on. Apple have captured the bulk of the high margin computer sector and the industry’s response of pushing “ultrabooks” to capture the MacBook Air customers isn’t going to resonate with consumers trained to buy cheap systems.

    Watching the PC industry over the next five years will be fascinating. Some companies will adapt, others will reinvent themselves and many will fade away as they cling to a declining business model.

    Despite the personal computer industry only being 30 years old, it’s already in decline which is something older industries should ponder upon.

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  • Are KPI’s a business evil?

    Are KPI’s a business evil?

    One of the cornerstones of 1980s management theories is offering staff incentives for performing to certain benchmarks.

    While the theory is good, it can go badly wrong. I encountered this personally when at PC rescue we started selling computers systems and, to encourage sales, offered our technicians a commission on any they sold.

    Quickly we started getting negative feedback from customers, some didn’t like what they perceived as a hard sell and some believed technicians were more interested in selling a computer rather than fixing the problems.

    In a few cases it turned out the customers’ suspicions were correct; we found some the techs had decided it was quicker and more profitable for them to sell a new system rather than to fix the problem they had been sent out to resolve.

    We had to change our KPIs and it taught me a good lesson about assuming how staff will respond to incentives.

    Courier companies are good example of what happens when incentives and performance indicators go wrong, all of us have had examples of deliveries going wrong because the drivers are under pressure to meet targets. In the worst case, you might get your computer monitor thrown over the front gate.

    The systems that encourage this sort of behaviour can damage entire industries, as we’ve seen with the used car industry. For individual businesses, poorly implemented commission based structures, like ours was, eventually build distrust which is one of the reason why electronic stores like Best Buy are struggling.

    Google’s recent changes to search are another illustration of what can go wrong with poorly thought out incentives with CEO Larry Page reported to have tied staff bonuses to “success” in social. As a consequence Google are prepared to damage their core business as employees scramble to meet their targets.

    The definition of ‘success’ is part of the problem with performance indicators, a government agency I did some work with defines successful worker as having a hundred meetings a year which has some predictable results in how that department operates.

    On the bigger level, badly thought out incentive structures are damaging our economy as senior managers are driven to deliver short term objectives while ignoring the long term growth of their business and sometimes even damaging the wider community in the process.

    Probably the ultimate level of damaged performance reward is the political system those of us in the ‘developed world’ have allowed to develop in the last fifty years; by rewarding politicians on being elected, we have a generation of leaders who are very good at winning elections but not terribly good at running governments.

    While there’s little we can do about governments beyond being careful with our votes, we can watch our businesses closely to see what indicators and rewards work best for us.

    Planned and monitored properly, bonuses and performance indicators can work well for a business blindly using inappropriate ones though often turns out to do more harm than good.

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