Craig Burton

Is it just me? If I were a vendor with a Mozilla plugin, I would have had compatibility done a long time ago. Half the plugins I use everyday don???t work with the new  release. What are these people thinking?

IE is still so lame. The IE beta is Flaaaaaky!

To the left you have a Qarbon Viewletpoll. Here are the stats for that poll.

To the right you have a similar poll generated by Polldaddy. Figure 1 displays the statistics from Qarbon.

Figure 1???Qarbon Viewletpoll stats

Note that are still only fourteen people who have voted on the Viewlet Poll. However, the Qarbon statistics are very detailed and show the number of views and visits. As soon as 100 people look at it, it shuts down for the day. Part of the deal for a free Viewletpoll.

Figures 2 and 3 display the statistics from Polldaddy.

As you can see, I made some more distinctions to the Poll. The top Poll asks if Twitter has changed your blog writing habits. Poll number two asks if Twitter has changed your blog reading habits. I realized that my first poll was mixing those two questions.

The graphics are nice at Polldaddy, but are not as detailed as Qarbon. You can upgrade at Polldaddy and find out location information of your voters.

Figure 2???Polldaddy statistics

Note that Polldaddy already exceeds the number of voters in one day that the Viewletpoll has had all month. That has to be a factor of the uptime. Polldaddy doesn’t care how many votes per day or how many visitors there are.

Figure 3???Polldaddy statistics

I will post the results of the new poll after there has been some activity.

As a sidenote, I received some tweets asking me why I was antipatriotic. This must of been as a result of my "Long Live Obama" jest. Let me be clear. I am not telling you my politics here. I am poking fun at politics. Voting in specific. I am not judging you or your politics. I don’t care who you vote for…as long as it isn’t that warmongering twit McCain.

OK. It seems that part of the problem is that Qarbon has a limit of 100 views per day. Maybe my viewers are just looking before they vote and then can’t because Qarbon has shut down viewers for the day? Do you think?

To test this theory, I have added a poll—as you can see—to the right. The poll questions are the same, the poll host is now http://www.polldaddy.com which I am liking so far. It is free and does not have a limit on the number of views or votes per day.

I think the CSS is just as nice as Qarbon. The only difference is that Qarbon uses flash. Who cares there eh? A little animation is ok, but for most just gets in the way.

Look at that. Yesterday I posted that the traffic was high and that no one is bothering to vote. Immediately I went over my view limit. And only one more person voted. LONG LIVE OBAMA!!

Maybe all my viewers are republicans?

I have had this poll on the left up for a month or so.

Since then, over 2000 people have looked at it. Since I am using Qarbon’s free trial, I exceeded my daily limit many times since it was posted. And yet, 13 people have voted. This is probably a good reflection of what we can expect at the polls this fall. Lot’s of talk and views, but no action.

Here are the stats on the Poll listed to the left here.

Question: Do you read blogs anymore?
Brief stats since last reset (5/20/2008)
Views: 744
Visits: 410
Votes: 7 (1.71 % of visitors)

Hmmmm. Lots of views (mine don’t count), a fair number of visits, the vote count is dismal. God forbid your opinion be known. I don’t keep track of who you are, just what you think.

cb

Essay Note

The Burtonian Methodology in 10 Essays. Today, I begin a series of essays. The Burtonian Essays. There are 10 essays. Each essay has two or three parts. Here is the first part of essay number one. As far as a schedule goes… I will post them when I post them.

The Mythical Three Tier Demographic Model

Introduction

One of the most common mistakes made by technology companies stems from confusion about technology customer demographics. This leads to a mythical limited demographic perspective. I am not saying this perspective is wrong. It is just too limiting and does not address the realities of the market. Vendors need to rethink how they approach the potential customers by expanding the demographic thinking beyond the mythical three tiers to include the Technology Adoption Life Cycle demographic.

The Mythical Three Tiers

The traditional thinking is that designing demographics for targeting customers is done by dividing the customers into size. ???How many people are in your company???? is the discussion.

This is an easy discussion; it categorizes the target customer into simple definitions that make it seem easy then to build products that match the demographic.

We have our ???Standard Edition??? for the small business, the ???Professional Edition??? for the medium size customer and the ???Enterprise Edition??? for the enterprise customer. It also keeps the pricing relatively simple???one to 10 licenses for the standard edition, 10 to 50 licenses for the Professional Edition and call your sales rep for Enterprise pricing.

Figure 1???The Mythical Demographic displays the common approach taken by new and old technology companies when they try to identify their customer demographic.

The thinking continues even further in the narrowness of this approach.

One school of thought usually says:

???There is no money in the ???small to medium??? business, therefore the only viable target customer is the enterprise. All we need to do is get a few sales in the Fortune 1000 and our job is done! Let???s find a really good direct sales bull dog and bring in the big-bucks!???

The Mythical Demographic

Figure 1???The Mythical Demographic

This thinking has been the undoing of many a would-be successful startup.

At the other end of the mythical spectrum is the vendor that pursues this line of logic. ???The enterprise customer is dominated by the big guys. We can never take the business from them. Let???s focus on the SMB (Small to Medium sized Business) market???the Fortune ???eight Million??? as opposed to the Fortune 1000.??? This type of company then pursues a product, pricing, and channel strategy focused on the SMB customer. Again, I am not saying this is completely wrong, I am saying that it is extremely limiting as a lexicon to describe the target customer and what is happening in the market place as it relates to technology.

Mr. Matrix Says

Grimace

The ???Enterprise??? is not the holy grail!

Every time Mr. Matrix sees a product with “Enterprise Edition” or “Consumer Edition” in it, it causes him to  grimace…   The next post will make it clear what I mean by this. I will also show Mr. Matrix again.

I guess that requires me to introduce Mr. Matrix. Mr. Matrix is a poser avatar that is capable of an extremely broad variety of poses and expressions. Not only facial expressions but body expressions. I am planning—I guess starting right now—to use Mr. Matrix to exhibit the Burtonian analyst perspective on things. I won’t introduce his physical features or dress quite yet, but here is what he looks like normally. The grimace is subtle.  

Mr. Matrix  is sensitive, and doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but to display just how he reacts to certain views.  Mr. Matrix—like me—has no problem saying what he thinks (yes he can talk, and he will talk soon for you) he is just more subtle than I am. He is British and has excellent manners and a strong opinion.

Welcome aboard Mr. Matrix!

Just read the first few paragraphs here, if you have been following identity at all, you will want to read more. I have no idea who this guy is, Jamie Lewis sent me the link. Jamie is just too busy to blog anymore. (yeah yeah, lazy butt.)

Hankering For A World Without “Identity” or “Federation”

Author’s note: this is not a white paper. This is an opinion-piece, possibly a polemic. In it I expound what I believe rather than making an argument for you to believe it too; however if through it you arrive at a technical question or desire clarification, then please leave a comment using the tool provided. Also, there are footnotes annotated in square brackets. They are worth reading as you go along. Once I have had more coffee I’ll get round to making them into hyperlinks. Sorry.

Abstract

This posting began as an standalone article to describe my tussel with “Identity” in all its various forms, however it has evolved into a companion piece to Adriana’s musings on identity - not only because upon reading her posting I found us using like words and like metaphors to much the same conclusion, but also doubtless because it was she who singlehandedly provided me an alternative to a world without (or with much-reduced) “Big I” Identity.

However I wish to spell out my beliefs rather more bluntly, so here we go:

I believe that Identity is bunk.

I believe that the technologies of Identity are founded upon and perpetuate an outdated model of a passive user who lacks both the critical authority and the ability to participate in an authentication transaction, and further I submit that Identity’s commitment to this model inhibits its further evolution in the modern era.

…but before continuing I want to address a few potential misconstructions to aid later clarity - so for contrast I shall begin by listing a selection of identity-related topics which are emphatically not bunk:

dropsafe : Hankering For A World Without “Identity” or “Federation”

Ok. So a provider abstraction layer architecture isn’t exactly new. But it seems we have forgotten its significance. Almost all of the architectures coming out for the web are silos. From the Google App Engine to the Twitter. These services are only accessible from applications that write specifically to those services. Why is that? No abstraction layer.

Let me give you an example. When Novell decided to become a hardware independent operating system vendor, a driver for every network adapter had to be hand written. Finally someone inside said “enough, let’s ‘abstract’ this thing.”

Of course, only an engineer talks like that, but it takes an engineer—for the most part—to think like that. But this event was significant for all involved. It meant that Novell was able to free up significant engineering resources by pushing out the responsibility for making a NIC (Network Interface Card) work to the manufacturer of the NIC. This is as it should be.

For all of you historical buffs, the notion of the NIC abstraction was so important that Novell and Microsoft/3Com had a huge fight over whose abstraction design would win out. Microsoft/3Com  won that battle, as it should have. The abstraction is known as NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification).

Ok enough for now. There is much more to say about this. hehe. Can’t wait.