Incite 6/9/2010: Creating Excitement
Some businesses are great at creating excitement. Take Apple, for instance. They create demand for their new (and upgraded) products, which creates a feeding frenzy when the public can finally buy the newest shiny object. 2 million iPads in 60 days is astounding. I suspect they’ll move a bunch of iPhone 4 units on June 24 as well (I know I’ll be upgrading mine and the Boss’). They’ve created a cult around their products, and it generates unbelievable excitement whenever there is a new toy to try. Last week I was in the Apple store dropping my trusty MacBook Pro off for service. The place was buzzing, and the rest of the mall was pretty much dead. This was 3 PM on a Thursday, but you’d think it was Christmas Eve from looking at the faces of the folks in the store. Everything about the Apple consumer experience is exciting. You may not like them, you may call me a fanboy, but in the end you can’t argue with the results. Excitement sells. If you have kids, you know all about how Disney creates the same feeling of excitement. Whether it’s seeing a new movie or going to the theme parks, this is another company that does it right. We recently took the kids down to Disneyworld, and it sure didn’t seem like the economy was crap inside the park. Each day it was packed and everyone was enjoying the happiest place on Earth, including my family. One night we stayed at a Disney property. It’s not enough to send a packet of information and confirmations a few months ahead of the trip. By the time you are ready to go, the excitement has faded. So Disney sends an email reminding you of the great time you are about to have a few days before you check in. They give you lots of details about your resort, with fancy pictures of people having a great time. The message is that you will be those people in a few days. All your problems will be gone, because you are praying in the House of the Mouse. Brilliant. I do a lot of business travel and I can tell you I’m not excited when I get to Topeka at 1am after being delayed for 3 hours at O’Hare. No one is. But it’s not like any of the business-oriented hotels do anything to engage their customers. I’m lucky if I get a snarl from the front desk attendant as I’m assigned some room near the elevator overlooking the sewage treatment facility next door. It’s a friggin’ bed and a place to shower. That’s it. It just seems to me these big ‘hospitality’ companies could do better. They can do more to engage their customers. They can do more to create a memorable experience. I expect so little that anything they do is upside. I believe most business travelers are like me. So whatever business you are in, think about how you can surprise your customers in a positive fashion (yes, those pesky users who keep screwing everything up are your customers) and create excitement about what you are doing. I know, we do security. It’s not very exciting when it’s going well. But wouldn’t it be great if a user was actually happy to see you, instead thinking, “Oh, crap, here comes Dr. No again, to tell me not to surf pr0n on the corporate network.”? Think about it. And expect more from yourself and everyone else you do business with. – Mike. Photo credits: “Magic Music Mayhem 3 (Explored)” originally uploaded by Express Monorail Incite 4 U Microsoft cannot fix stupid – The sage Rob Graham is at it again, weighing in on Google’s alleged dictum to eradicate Microsoft’s OS from all their desktops, because it’s too hard to secure. Rob makes a number of good points in the post, relative to how much Microsoft invests in security and the reality that Windows 7 and IE 8 are the most secure offerings out there. But ultimately it doesn’t matter because it’s human error that is responsible for most of the successful attacks. And if we block one path the attackers find another – they are good that way. So what to do? Do what we’ve always done. Try to eliminate the low hanging fruit that makes the bad guy’s job too easy, and make sure you have a good containment and response strategy for when something bad does happen. And it will, whatever OS you use. – MR Fight the good fight – Apparently “Symantec believes security firms should eradicate ‘false positives’ ”. I imagine that this would be pretty high on their list. Somewhere between “Rid the world of computer viruses” and “Wipe out all spam”. And I love their idea of monitoring social network sites such as Facebook and online fora to identify false positives, working tirelessly to eliminate the threat of, what was it again? Yeah, misdiagnosis. In fact, I want to help Symantec. I filled out my job application today because I want that job. Believe me, I could hunt Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all day, looking for those false positives and misdiagnosis thingies. Well, until the spam bots flood these sites with false reports of false positives. Then I’d have to bring the fight to the sports page for false positive detection, or maybe check out those critical celebrity false positives. It sounds like tough work, but hey, it’s a noble cause. Keep up the good fight, guys! – AL Good intentions – I always struggle with “policy drift”; the tendency to start from a compliant state but lose that over time due to distractions, pressure, and complacency. For example, I’m pretty bad at keeping my info in our CRM tool up to date. That’s okay, because so are Mike and Adrian. As Mathias Thurman writes over at Computerworld, this can be a killer for something crucial like patch management. Mathias describes his difficulties in keeping
