[Bloat] Motivating commercial entities? tell the sales manager (was: ping loss "considered harmful")

Tue Mar 3 16:08:30 EST 2015

On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 12:19 PM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 11:46 AM, David Collier-Brown <davec-b at rogers.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Bill Ver Steeg (versteb) <versteb at cisco.com
>> wrote:
>>
>> There are several efforts underway within this particular big vendor to
>> address bloat. Are these efforts crash programs to get code out the door as
>> fast as humanly possible? No. There are efforts underway, though. These
>> things take time?? To be frank, the best way to drive feature
>> development/deployment/adoption in most big companies is to have customers
>> ask for them.
>>
>>
>> Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> replied
>>
>> Creating understanding and demand has been my nearly f/t project for
>> several years now. I hope it is finally starting to work!
>>
>> However, along the way - in trying to work with everybody in all parts of
>> the industry, and to "get along" - I found myself in a deep moral and
>> mental hole where I realized I was no longer being true to myself or being
>> effective in what I had really set out to do by attempting to create this
>> open, shared project, where I had hoped we all would be working together
>> for a common goal.
>>
>>
>> Just a rather specific pointer: it's neither the technical staff nor the
>> support team that has the power to report and escalate a bug. It's the sales
>> team.  If you can elevator-pitch the head of sales for Honeywell* with
>> something that will avoid costing him sales, you'll get an informed and
>> motivated response from the business.
>
> I do fully understand that. However, in life, I have generally found
> that talking to engineers first about deeply difficult to describe
> technical problems and their potential solutions, is a way to get
> started.
>
> After that, 9 months to 2 years later, a mutated version of the same
> idea ends up coming from the marketing department, usually with some
> crazy crash engineering program suggested to get it implemented. It
> generally requires one vendor to have finally got it, and to be
> marketing their new idea or fixes, in order for the rest of the
> lemmings in the herd in sales and marketing at zillions of companies,
> to make it a priority.
>
> This is sort of what just happened with streamboost, every new top-end
> router I have looked at in the last few months features "Now! with
> traffic shaping!" prominently on the box, with each maker creating
> their own brand for it - kicked off first by the "streamboost gaming
> router!" and now, "Netgear, with Dynamic QoS", "Asus, now with
> Adaptive QoS!", etc.
>
> The fact that none of the now commercial, actively sold QoS/AQM/FQ
> system solutions I have tested so far actually work worth a damn, is
> of course, nowhere near as important to the company and marketing
> department as having a whizzy gui, and that blurb on the box, and the
> actual marketing to the target market(s) (gamers mostly, so far, which
> is sad, as small business *really needs this stuff* especially on
> cable) in play.
>
> We suck here at creating good, repeatable, postitive memes - with
> stuff like "netperf-wrapper", "sqm-scripts", "fq_codel", and even
> things like "AQM" or "Flow Queueing", that I have been considering
> engaging a marketing org to somehow find some set of useful phrases to
> use, with more positive connotations that "bufferbloat". Over the last
> 2 years, inbound web hits on the bufferbloat.net web site - despite
> all the SEO we have sort of done with the mailing list and elsewhere -
> has stayed constant at about 55,000 inbound links, according to
> google.
>
> And I do wish we had more stuff to correctly pitch at the sales
> department. But that's not my skillset, at all. I am in many ways, a
> lousy frontman for the bufferbloat movement, especially with being so
> deaf (which makes me anti-social) and partially blind (which is not
> helping) - and I keep wishing a - for example - Peter Diamadis or Elon
> Musk or Jim Zemlin would show up and help on our behalfs, helping get
> the right solutions "out there". I really admire in particular,
> peter's work in making the xprize concept (and ultimately the whole
> space program) take off.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Diamandis

I also have a few funny stories, from xprize's first days, when they
had nothing more than a single tiny check in the bank, and an
insurance bet against for 10 mil if someone succeeded in getting to
space in under 5 years.  but I don't think that is appropo' to tell
here here. I met peter back then, and I have borrowed since his
essential optimism and reality distortion field into as much of my own
personality as I could cope with.

Nowadays you can't get to him through a mountain of flappers.

I do note, that I have been organizing mountains of volunteers to do
interesting things off and on for decades! I have some great stories
about what I/we did to help out at the last two SpaceShipOne flights,
getting 30+ *seriously overqualified* people to drive down, take
tickets, and park cars, on the second attempt, and we got even more on
the third, after the kids from the university of illinois had to go
home.

Someone else wrote some of those stories up, and I can't find them on
the web now. sigh. In looking for that, while I am praising folk I
admired, I'd always admired Richard Branson:

http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2004/11/virgins-in-flight-gonzo-branding.html

and I had had a chance to give him a high five on that last landing as
he blew by on a golf cart. Everyone there, all 5000+ people, from all
walks in life, and all levels of income - had the same tears in their
eyes as we watched that first-ever spaceplane *finally land.* What a
weekend that was!

I really love getting groups of people to rise above themselves, work
together, and do great things! But that project only took 2 weeks to
put together, and complete, however. (I still vividly remember herbie
hancock playing piano all night long at those launches, and there are
tons of other fond memories)

I felt as much - or more - of the same emotions, when bql, sfqred,
codel, fq_codel, the fixes to htb, all landed -  and at long last,
cerowrt finally landed too! Haven't had a high like that in a while,
although wifi is looking good.

>
> I tried, at least, with "make-wifi-fast", and "cake" to get names that
> worked better.
>
>
>
>> If you talk to anyone else, they'll need permission from their director to
>> even report a bug, and an explicit blessing from a VP to escalate it.
>>
>> The same is true of most large companies, even if they're not very old.  If
>> they're market-driven, it the sales and marketing folks who report what the
>> market wants.  Techies and CSRs will only be asked after the "market"
>> speaks.

Incidentally, in my weekend spat with virgin media, my blog got over 2000 hits,
and 137! +1s.  (I have no idea how the +1s are generated, I just see
them on my blogger edit page)

http://the-edge.blogspot.com/

That's the most hits on anything we have had in half a year.

And there have been a few interesting conversations started as
fallout from that.

Out of that... Only one person that I know of (john gilmore, of the
EFF and many other wonderful things) actually bothered to download
netperf-wrapper, and try it.

His private comments on the usability and naming of the thing were
quite, shall we say "pithy".

>>
>> --dave
>> [* Honeywell no longer makes computers, so I can use them as a bad example
>> (;-)]
>>
>> --

-- 
Dave Täht
Let's make wifi fast, less jittery and reliable again!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb