One quote caught my attention if for no other reason than it exhibits the vanity of the tech media:

even as reviews have consistently lauded the gorgeous One and bashed the S4′s cheap plastic and comparably safe – even boring – design.

Shocking as it may be to tech reporters and the chattering class of Silicon Valley, consumers clearly don’t give a shit about the fact that the Samsung S4 has a plastic back cover that, like all it’s stamped aluminum competitors, will get covered with a case.

The HTC One has a beautiful form factor but comes up short in significant functional areas that give the S4 a real advantage, and the stripped down Android experience reflects that fact that HTC’s software development has been a problematic area for them more than a desire to deliver a strategic alternative to the market.

The S4, by comparison, delivers a “safe” design that is the successor to the already best selling Android smartphone on the market, the S3, so what did the reviewers expect Samsung to do. cast aside their success and start over? It is entirely illogical that you would take a current generation leader and rethink it. and point in fact the entire iPhone empire is built on product extensions that trace back to v1 in form factor, capabilities and user experience. Where are the critics when discussing that safe platform?

If you look back at my roles and responsibilities at Get Satisfaction over my tenure there you will see a progression that prepares me for where I am today:

• In my capacity leading product marketing we focused heavily on how we craft a position that spans the challenge of marketing a service that appeals to consumers but one which the economic buyer is a business. This new normal in enterprise software is here to stay and reflects the consumerization trend that has long been talked about, enterprise software buyers of all stripes are responding to user experience as a primary driver.
• With the work I did on plans and pricing, later enhanced and executed by other teams in the company, we were able to position to the market a consolidated portfolio of services that could be sold to SMB, mid-market, and large enterprise companies all off the same product platform. In addition to that, we maintained the commitment to freemium to serve the very small segment while contributing to the overall network growth that propelled the company in terms of powerful brand recognition.
• I led analyst and influencer relations, and with no budget early on and a limited one in just the last year we were able to garner positive coverage and affinity with traditional analysts and market influencers. We employed a different kind of AR strategy, one that relied heavily on social influence and less on economic relationships.
• I assumed leadership of the SMB business at a time when it had no leadership and with a small team of 2 we reworked the web presentation, instrumented for funnel analytics, A/B tested continuously, and impacted product development with a high priority initiative around the Getting Started user flow, from which the lack of an effective getting started flow contributed heavily to churn.
• The inflexible legacy billing system was rip-and-replaced under my watch, with a new homegrown subscription management app built as a separate Rails app in the infrastructure and hooked up to Chargify for transaction billing.
• Shifting over to business development, we broadened the strategic focus of our efforts to target additional CRM vendors, enterprise marketing applications, and resellers. My last official act was representing the company at SugarCon with new reseller and development partner DRI-Global. We also launched a highly innovative Marketo integration blueprint and a host of 3rd party app support. Resellers in Latin America started to produce revenue, a first for the company.

I feel good about what I accomplished at Get Satisfaction and rather than running away from the company I left running to something else. Enter Ping Identity, a company I have had a long association with as a result of my work at SAP Ventures. I have maintained a relationship with Andre Durand, the CEO/founder, and while catching up with him on general topics he highlighted the challenges they were facing as they moved to subscription economics while simultaneously delivering impressive growth through the traditional enterprise, and then using SaaS as a distribution channel to reach customers of the ISVs that were SAML-enabling their applications. Right up my alley.

The timing was perfect because I was coming to the realization that 2 things were happening in identity, the first being that a world without passwords was not only achievable but would also drive significant benefits for end users and vendors alike. There isn’t a day that goes buy without cringing at the experience of a login screen for which I don’t recall the password. While Facebook, Twitter and Google all offer compelling authentication capabilities they are not without limitations, principally in the manner by which entitlements and privileges are assigned. SAML is an approach that offers more extensibility and security integrity, and also spans workforce management to consumer identity.

The BYOD movement is also driving an interesting extended consequence related to bring your own identity. Consumer identity and workforce identity should merge in a federated state, offering portability and the ability to go beyond identity as an access and authentication technology to identity as profile management. Richer profile management drives future innovation in applications of all kinds as developers evolve to focus on user experiences that are highly individualized as a result of what people declare about themselves and what systems are able to infer about them.

Lastly, great identity access management should not be exclusive to large enterprises managing employee populations and public facing websites pre-occupied with the password protection alone. Businesses of all sizes and kinds should have available to them feature rich identity technology that is both affordable and business transformative.

This is where I cut to Ping. a recognized leader in a space that requires technical excellence and industry recognition in order be a leader. Identity is not the province of 2 engineers, a dog and a dream. which is why the landscape of companies in the space doesn’t look like a map of the stars. Ping offers cutting edge SAML-based identity technology to large enterprises for workforce management and customer identity, while also leading a charge into the cloud with PingOne, a unified platform for integrating single sign-on technology across hundreds of cloud apps.

I am leading the goto market for PingOne to SMB and ISV segments, which includes the web assets and self-service capabilities that cut into the product itself. My challenges in this role are well aligned to what I did at Get Satisfaction and if you look at the summary I detailed above you could pretty much check the boxes on all of them for my new role. I am excited on many fronts but probably most of all by the challenge of growing into a new space and working with a team of people who exhibit a team culture that is built on shared success and commitment to the mission with an appropriate sense of urgency about getting it done.

Removing the menu would probably have been a non-issue if the user experience of traditional and Modern designed apps were seamless but there is a critical distinction that makes this all but impossible to rectify, the current generation of Modern apps run in a dedicated focus, meaning they consume the entire screen and have no menu overlay that is omnipresent (the Charm bar gets close but you still have to swipe it to see it and those menus are almost entirely app focused). Meanwhile, for popular windows app like Office which run in the traditional Desktop mode the user spends most of their time not in Modern but in desktop mode. The result of this is that in order to access a different app you have to jump back to the Modern tile interface and run another app which takes you back to desktop (there are other ways to do this but that is the rough cut, it’s an extra step and a minor hassle every time).

I am happily using a Lenovo Yoga in laptop and tablet mode, and I have found that when I am in tablet mode I want to use the tile interface exclusively while in laptop mode all I care about is the desktop. The fact that Windows can accommodate both modes is itself no small feat and points to a major success point for the new Windows. but the forced convergence that resulted from removing the Start menu doesn’t work and they should bring it back. I don’t want Microsoft to become the new Apple, where the only way I can do things is the way that the ghost of Steve Jobs declares acceptable, I want options.

Much has been written about the decline of PC sales globally and almost without exception the blame has been pinned on Windows 8. I’m not buying that argument and here’s why, if Windows 8 were causing buyers to flee we would see large gains in competitive platforms, which for the sake of this argument is really easy to identify, Apple.

This is not happening, what is happening is that people are increasingly buying tablets, netbooks, and other alternative devices instead of new desktop and laptop computers. And why shouldn’t they when even 5 year old hardware performs good enough in a web browser dominated world? I feel no imperative to upgrade Windows and Mac hardware in my household (other than my internal geek factor) while we have been adding a never ending stream of mobile  devices to our mix, from tablets to the Logitech internet radio I bought a few months ago.

I am confident that Microsoft will turn the crank a few more times to tighten up Windows 8, and I am looking forward to new hardware innovations that blur the lines between mobile and portable, desktop and tablet, and I hope there will be more hardware that offers Android and Windows mode options, such as the big Asus tablet/desktop that was unveiled last month.

Back in January I wrote about my initial reaction to Windows 8 and highlighted a couple of aspects of the hardware experience that needed attention. The Asus Zenbook Touch is a beautiful piece of hardware that comes close to beating the Mac Air at its own game, it is blazingly fast, has a beautiful display, is thinner than an Air and better to look at. The Zenbook has fast USB 3.0 ports and a very compact power supply that is definitely inspired by Mac, and has a backlit chiclet-style keyboard that is comfortable and did I mention backlit?

The two shortcomings are brutal, the Zenbook touchpad is so awful they should never have shipped the computer with it, and the wifi is wonky, prone to going dark enough that using the USB Ethernet adapter is a good call. at least Asus gives you the connectors, unlike Apple. Based on the touchpad alone, I would not recommend the Zenbook to anyone.

I noticed a couple of other things in my foray into the world of Win8. The first is that the performance is really good across the board but battery life is highly variable. The Zenbook can be pushed to 5+ hours of battery life but I really want more than that because I often find myself unplugged for long periods of time. Most of the ultrabooks come with 4gb of RAM and 128gb of SSD, both are acceptable and Windows itself is remarkably high performing on 4gb but some apps (cough, Chrome) are not so well behaved and if you are like me and have dozens of tabs open, along with a wide range of apps. you will run into low memory warnings (which to Microsoft’s credit don’t cause erratic behaviors but you still have to close stuff). The 128gb of SSD is manageable because I store almost everything in the cloud, but I just wanted more to have the option of keeping things local for offline use.

The biggest issue with Win8 and touch is that you really want to use it as a tablet so unless your ultrabook has a removable display or can perform some unnatural act to become a tablet, you will be left wanting more. My choice for this was to buy the Lenovo Yoga with 256gb of SSD and 8gb of RAM (and yes, I did get it in orange!).

As a laptop this computer delivers and then some. It’s fast, very fast, and has a super comfortable rubberized coating on the palm rests. The keyboard took a couple of days to adapt to but is good to use, the battery life is in the 7-8 hour range, and most importantly, everything – including the touchpad – just works.

I do miss the wedge shape of the Zenbook, and would also suggest to Lenovo that they trim off 1/2″ off each side for a much more compact form factor because there is a lot of bezel that adds to the overall package. The instant on could be a little more instant but honestly it is a legitimate “instant on”. Lastly, even though the power supply is compact and svelte, it has a lot of power chord off one end and an unwieldy one on the other. pay attention to Asus and Apple on this point, their design direction is a good one. Another USB port would be welcome and why USB 3.0 on just one of the two ports? I do appreciate the HDMI output but had to buy an HDMI-VGA adapter, which is cheap enough that it should just come with the machine.

Folded over into tablet form the 13″ 3.3 lb tablet would not be my first mobile choice but I regularly use it in meetings, sitting in bed, and on airplanes (no seat back reclining into your open laptop!!!). It is a great way to use Win8 and of all the convertibles I have tried, this one is most natural and confidence inspiring with regard to build quality.

Folded into tablet form the keyboard deactivates but you still feel it, so I bought the sleeve that Lenovo sells and sleeve up the keyboard half of the package when using it as a tablet. This works great and is more confortable because the Yoga can generate some heat (maybe it is more appropriately named the Bikram) so the sleeve solves two issues without adding bulk or complexity.

As I wrote back in January, Microsoft really needs to get a handle on the integrated hardware/software value proposition for a better customer experience but what I really appreciate is that I am not limited to what Apple alone decides to build, as is the case in the Mac world. The range of hardware configurations and options is impressive and if one ultrabook doesn’t work for you then you can simply shop around and find something different. Windows 8 as a touch experience is compelling and while I would appreciate refinements that meld the old and new Windows better, as well as provide for more context switching and interoperability in the dedicated app focus mode, I am still very happy with Windows 8.

PS- as I was writing this I noticed for the first time the irony of going from zen to yoga.

This morning I was watching Squawk Box on CNBC and Richard Branson along with Virgin America CEO David Cush were being interviewed. Cush was asked about JCP and replied that the key lesson is that you don’t destroy your existing business model before ensuring that the new one works. This is good advice but I think it radically oversimplifies challenges at JCP and creates false comfort for business executives prone to thinking that methodical change is better than radical change.

JCP is interesting to look at from the standpoint of customer experience and Johnson deserves credit for doing things that ultimately will prove to be essential retailers in all segments. What Johnson got wrong is that brand doesn’t drive customer experience, but rather brand reflects customer experience and a new logo, splashy store displays and forward leaning messaging can’t overcome what happens when actual people interact with the environment you create and worse, interact with other people called employees. If everyone isn’t up to the new task you will end up failing and doing real damage, this is the lesson I took away from the Ron Johnson era at JCP.

Brand Keys is a company that measures brand engagement, specifically the emotional engagement that customers have with the brands they interact with. The 2013 survey was revealing on several levels in that across the 54 retail categories they survey, 39,000 consumers, several consistent themes are evident and all refute what Johnson actually did at JCP, which had a brand engagement score that s between 11-20 points below retail category leaders, they have been demonstrably failing at connecting with customers.

Customers today connect more strongly on brand values than at any previous time and this is critical because even in durable goods categories you don’t purchase things one-off. you come back and buy again, or make purchases of products in adjacent categories that reflect that brand experience you are striving for. Brands that have had consistent brand positions and deliver on that with everyday action also benefit from higher brand engagement, and companies like J. Crew, Apple, and Virgin America are good examples of this.

JCP is a mess and likely will not get better, they have lost connection with customers, who are now shopping at Macy’s and Kohl’s and unlikely to return. The physical retail experience is improved but the integration of digital and physical is weak, impairing their ability to convert customers from other brands, but most debilitating is the demoralized workforce that is the front line of customer experience. It’s a death spiral and I would not be surprised if JCP were acquired in the next 12 months. The new normal is unforgiving and punishing for brands that ignore it.

We have all had the experience in a public restroom where you do the hand wavy thing in front of the red dot and about 3 inches of paper spits out. so you do it again, and again, and yet again before you get enough to complete the drying part of the operation. It is obvious why businesses do this, they 1) never bother to adjust the machine when it is installed, 2) think they are going to save money on paper towels under the belief that we are too stupid to get the machine to give us more paper, and/or 3) just don’t care.

In-N-Out pays attention to the small details because they give you enough to dry off and it is representative of their entire operation, the small things add up and impact your overall experience. It may just be a burger and fries but they have set a standard for fast food that others covet so the next time you think something is too small to care about I would urge you to think about washing your hands.

While catching up on some reading two articles jumped out at me that really drove home this point, the first is really incremental in nature about Google Now coming to the desktop and the Chrome OS.

Google Now is something that snuck up on me and despite my initial cynicism it has grown on me. When I updated my tablet to Jelly Bean I stumbled on the Now feature when I held the Home button for a little too long. The cards are still pretty sparse but I really like how it pulls things out of my email and present additional contextual information like directions and time to drive, and package tracking information. This is really useful and unobtrusive. I don’t have to manage it, things just happen.

I only wish that Now would support multiple accounts.

The more interesting news piece I read this morning was about Microsoft’s research project, coincidentally (or not) called Bing Now. What is really fascinating about this is how Microsoft is looking beyond what you have on your device and realizing the greater vision of “an internet of things”.

Heavily invested in the vocabulary of crowdsoucing, I think this misses the point that it’s not about crowdsourcing but rather networked devices. Crowdsourcing implies co-creation, being able to find restaurant that isn’t crowded is incredibly appealing and not at all a function of crowdsourcing in the traditional sense of the word. Having said that, if Microsoft can deliver even just a small part of this they will have a winner.

“If you came into marketing because you didn’t like numbers, then you don’t have much of a future.”
-Beth Comstock, CMO at GE

Much has been written about the shift in spending from the CIO to the CMO, Gartner has been out front on this by forecasting that by 2017 the office of CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO function. Whether this proves to be true or not masks a more stark reality for professionals in marketing organizations, which is that their jobs are fundamentally changing.

The era of Mad Men in marketing isn’t over but the creative and communication aspects of the marketing function are diminishing in importance. Marketing can no longer exist as a siloed function, isolated from product, engineering and operations, and more significantly there is a substantial skills gap that marketing professionals will need to fill to respond to a complete shift to digital.  Traditional skills are not going away but the emerging reality is that data-centric strategies for engaging radically different customer behaviors and more complex buyer journeys will not be realized without retooling people.

The other reality that marketing teams cannot escape is that they alone cannot anticipate and develop all of the content that will be required to successfully execute on company objectives. More reliant than ever before on earned and sponsored content, marketing teams will need to better instrument and provide social incentives for the creation and re-use of earned media and that goes well beyond what is the norm today for social media engagements. However, the shift to digital also requires organizations to think beyond text.

Video has rapidly emerged as the new whitepaper, and this should not be surprising given that YouTube is the second most used search engine on the web. If you are tempted to raise your hand and say "hey Jeff you just said Mad Men is over!" let me stop you know and point out that video relies on 2 core strengths in addition to the creation skillset, which is the ability to drive distribution and more significantly instrument video for data collection that enables refinement of creation and distribution. Video is data… and then there is Pinterest which has it’s own unique dynamics but is proving itself to be a powerful contributor to digital marketing success.

Whether text, video or images, the common requirement is instrumentation of the content to measure the interaction and the impact. No piece of content exists in isolation, and just like you measure demand generation activities in the context of a funnel where each stage of development passes through, discards or recycles leads, marketers have to measure content through a parallel funnel that captures people according to interests and things they find curious.

The content funnel is more like publishing than sales development because it is all about building a sustainable audience that trusts you as a source of authority. Measuring the impact of content through social channels, time on site, and referral sources is a valuable technique for sourcing new ideas, concepts, and influencers in your market.

I came across a fascinating post that explores the concept of brand newsrooms as a marketing function. This is something my friend Tom Foremski has been writing about for a long time, the notion that brands are just another form of media entity and this post certainly reinforces that.

In the age of social media, overnight viral sensations and the constant flow of information and multimedia experiences, it’s not surprising that brands find the newsroom idea enticing. In order to keep up with the times and current media-consumption behaviors, brands are starting to shift towards higher-metabolism marketing that responds quickly to culture, much like how journalists in newsrooms act quickly in response to important events.

The Changing Role of Marketing Changes Everything

The fact that IT spending is shifting from CIOs to CMOs is interesting but not a full and complete story, and for vendors who will look at this trend and shift their strategies to selling to a different title miss the point and will ultimately fail. Marketing as a function has to become more integrated with other functions because, like customer service, it is on the front end of business processes that will ultimately prove to be game changers for how companies engage their customers, prospects and ultimately establish competitive position in their markets.

Professionals in the marketing function will need to become more data scientist, looking for every conceivable opportunity to instrument content and then use that knowledge to drive audience and participation. Marketing budgets, as a consequence, will become less campaign and project based, more process and systems based as a result. so while we all may be selling to a different title it may not matter all that much.

As I drive around I see a surprising number of the Tesla Model S sedans and with each sighting I find myself saying “I should get one of those”. I am at heart a gear head, I love cars and motorcycles, and for me factors like fuel mileage and cost of ownership are outweighed by g-forces and smiles per mile. I would rather go zero-to-sixty in 3.9 seconds than get 36 miles per gallon and when I walk out my door in the morning I want to look forward getting into my car. The Tesla offers performance and a really compelling aesthetic… the fact that it is an EV is secondary.

When I looked at the Tesla site I was inspired by the experience and the fact that the model that offers maximum range and performance is considerably more than $50k wasn’t a deal breaker. Installing the charging infrastructure in my house is non-trivial, but the cost is manageable as a result of recent renovations that upgraded our electrical system. I could make this work.

In the end what dissuaded me what the NYTimes article and Musk’s response. On one hand Musk demonstrated the scrappy action-oriented demeanor that I find inspiring about him, but more significantly he confirmed a key weakness in the EV paradigm, complexity.

The core problem that EVs face is that they will always be measured against the utility and convenience of internal combustion technologies. I really don’t want to have to condition the battery, plan my route and destinations to accommodate charging requirements, sit around for a hour while my EV fills up, and think about what accessories I use (e.g. heater, wipers, lights) in the context of how far I can drive.

Tesla and other EV manufacturers could end up with very lucrative niche products, and a much larger opportunity around industrial markets, but I simply don’t see how EVs can ever be mainstream.

When I switched to a Mac a decade ago I continued to use Office with one exception, Outlook on the Mac is okay but not great. I used Outlook for Exchange at work and Gmail web for everything else, later when I started working with companies that used Google apps (Gmail and calendar) dropped Outlook altogether. Powerpoint, Word, and Excel maintained mainstays in my toolbox.

With Office 2013 coming out I was actually pretty excited because with the new year I decided to become a Windows user again and with it picked up Outlook again. Having suffered for 9 years with the Gmail web interface I was pretty much done, it simply isn’t productive. in fact it is so deficient in high volume work environments that it becomes a drag on productivity.

Fortunately Google does offer a product called Google Apps Sync takes advantage of a protocol that Microsoft developed called Exchange ActiveSync. The entire purpose of this product is to plug into Outlook and sync Google Gmail, calendar and contacts with the respective counterparts in Outlook.

It works great and over the course of January I not only became a fan of Windows again but I also managed to work through 4k unread emails in my work inbox, organize my folders, and blow out about another 10k emails that were bits-and-pieces not worth saving. I was, in a word, stoked. for the first time in years I really feel on top of my email and not a single message goes unread and/or unattended at the end of my day. The reminders and flags are incredibly useful and plugins like GotoMeeting greatly simplify ordinary tasks like scheduling a conference call.

When I found the Office 2013 Preview release I jumped on it. The interface was slick in man ways but incremental in nature, the integration with cloud services was impressive, and that is pretty much where I was left with the question: It took how long to do this?

At the risk of criminally oversimplifying a complex development process, it really seems like what they delivered could have been done a lot sooner. I am sure that there are hundreds of improvements but isn’t that the problem in many ways? Maybe we are beyond the notion of suite-based applications, instead plugging together what we need when we need it.

This where Microsoft could have raised the bar for cloud services because for the first time in modern tech history the ability to connect cloud applications together reliably and without great pain and cost is upon us. Okay, whatever. I guess I can live with the big bang theory Office subscribes to, even though the subscription pricing model they are putting front and center is more than a little punitive.

Yes you can get boxed and subscription pricing options but it’s pretty clear that Microsoft is putting a preference on subscription pricing and over time this can add up to a pretty penny.

The deal killer for me, however, was the completely screwed up way that Microsoft and Google have behaved toward each other to the detriment of users. Google dropped EAS support unless you are on a premium GApps account, which we are, but the Google Sync product does not work in Office 2013. Google preferred solution is CalDAV and CardDAV protocols for calendars and contacts respectively, and IMAP for email.

Microsoft, for it’s part, has committed to CalDAV and CardDAV for Windows Phone but no schedule has been announced for Windows desktop. To add insult to injury, the IMAP interface in the Office 2013 Preview Release was completely wonky and didn’t work against Gmail.

Seriously. it’s not like Google and Microsoft operate in a vacuum completely unaware that they have customer constituencies that depend on the other guy’s products as much as their own.

As much as I would like to upgrade to the new version I simply cannot without effective integration with Google gmail, calendar and contact syncing.

What am I missing here?