This month, we are all learning (often to our dismay) just how connected our financial well-being is to decisions made by far-off strangers.  We can see now that poor decisions in New York and London can lead to financial pain around the world – and in our local communities.

But fortunately, the opposite is also true – a few good decisions locally can lead to great benefits around the world.

Early this year I heard about an organization called Kiva, which helps to organize loans for small businesses in developing countries – a practice known as “microlending,” part of the growing area of “microfinance.”  What interested me about Kiva was its funding source – individuals, recruited through its Web site.  I checked it out – and was soon lending money to store owners in Tanzania and farmers in Peru, a few dollars at a time.  I recently made my 100th loan on Kiva – many of which have already been repaid in full, and none of which have defaulted to date.

Through a combination of their growing army of individual lenders and their association with local microfinance organizations, Kiva has opened up a new way for entrepreneurs in developing countries to access the capital they need to grow their small businesses.  And those connections start here – I’ve seen other lenders on Kiva.org from my own home town of Lafayette, and from other nearby communities.

I really like what Kiva is doing – but more than that, I also really appreciate the fact that many, many organizations throughout the world are not waiting for a government bailout, are not intimidated by the scope of the problems they face, but instead are bringing innovative solutions to every corner of the globe.  As a result, while we may be connected to AIG and Lehman Brothers in ways not of our own choosing, we can also choose to connect to a store owner in Tanzania or a farmer in Peru.

In a single sentence containing at least three significant understatements, Ms. Gage writes:

Microsoft still gets criticized sometimes for being slow to the Internet or hard to do business with, but Lewin has won praise over the years for his courtesy, efficiency and ability to connect outsiders to the right people inside Microsoft, which is not an easy task.

Whew.  Let’s parse that.

“Microsoft still gets criticized sometimes for being . . . hard to do business with . . .”  There is no question that doing business with ANY huge company is hard.  Building a close relationship with Microsoft (or any tech giant) is not for the faint of heart.  Microsoft presents some special challenges that I could go on about at length (oh wait, I’ve done that multiple times…), but let’s just stipulate that some of these criticisms are justified while some are not.

“…but Lewin has won praise over the years for his courtesy, efficiency and ability to connect outsiders to the right people inside Microsoft…”   Bingo.  Dan’l Lewin has done more to expose the helpful side of Microsoft to startups, entrepreneurs, and VCs than anyone would have thought possible just a few years ago.  His Emerging Business Team is the API for startups that want hooks into Microsoft.  Digipede has received numerous tangible and intangible benefits from working with the EBT; the group brings the attitude that they can’t wait to help interesting startups, and it’s Dan’l who sets the tone and agenda for that critical group.

“…which is not an easy task.”  No kidding.  I’m back to my API analogy.  If you would rather to try to reverse-engineer the Microsoft org chart from the outside, good luck — but a single call to the EBT can get you to the right person within Microsoft faster than any other method I know.

The Bay Area is teaming with “experts” who would have us believe that Microsoft has become irrelevant.  In my experience, entrepreneurs ignore Microsoft at their peril.  Far better to understand what they’re doing and why than to pretend they aren’t there.  Dan’l and his team are great resources for entrepreneurs who want to understand and work with Microsoft.  So — good job, Ms. Gage, for profiling Microsoft’s local champion of innovation.  Well worth reading.

Sure, the individual steps like specifying, developing, testing, documenting, and planning support for new software features are difficult enough — but the discipline of knowing when to STOP adding features, and to focus instead on finishing a complete, polished, release-ready product is tougher than it sounds to those outside the industry.

In any software organization worthy of the name, there are more good ideas than can possibly be put into any specific product release. There are also just a stunning number of bad ideas competing for inclusion in shipping products (I am notorious within Digipede for proposing needlessly specific bad ideas. Mercifully, my partners of 20 years have honed their skills in talking me out of the worst of them.)

We decided early on at Digipede that our feature set would be guided by three principles: Performance, simplicity, and a focus on adding value to the Microsoft platform. Over the past five years, these principles have helped us make decisions on what to include (and as importantly, what to exclude) from our software.

Last month, we reached general availability of the latest release of the Digipede Network, Version 2.1. You can see what’s new in this release on our Web site, but now that our customers have had an opportunity to upgrade, let’s look at a few of the specific new features to see how we did in sticking to those principles:

Job concurrency: The improved Digipede Agent software can manage different applications running simultaneously on multiple cores of a single compute node, maximizing utilization of compute nodes on the grid. Users can set Job Concurrency values to allow the Digipede Agents to work on multiple jobs simultaneously: designate which applications can safely run with other applications, which applications can run side-by-side with themselves, and which applications are not compatible for concurrent jobs.

Performance! This one is just amazing. As new machines ship with more and more cores inside, I am continually baffled at the lack of attention from ALL the major vendors out there about how to take advantage of those cores. Sure, Intel talks about compilers and Microsoft talks about Parallel Extensions and so on — but in shipping products in 2008, there’s just incredibly little help for users and developers who want to take advantage of multi-core processors. What we shipped in Version 2.0 last September is still miles ahead of other software options in terms of both development patterns and execution modes for multi-core processing. With Version 2.1, we’ve extended that lead significantly — if you want to take advantage of dual-CPU quad-core servers and desktops TODAY, you need to take a look at how the Digipede Network handles concurrency. Watch the 4-minute video that shows how, then get an evaluation copy of the software and try it yourself!

Management APIs: New management APIs give developers programmatic ability to create, modify, and delete resource pools. (Available in Professional Edition only)

Performance (specifically, scalability), and Simplicity (of grid management). A browser-based UI for grid management is great — for small grids. As our customers deploy larger and larger grids, they need both the browser-based UI of Digipede Control and a wider range of tools for the programmatic manipulation of grid resources. It is vastly simpler to take advantage of thousands of grid nodes through simple extensions to our management API.

Risk-free sharing: “Pool Rank” permits risk-free sharing of resources: you can add your servers to the enterprise grid and ensure that they always work on your jobs first. That means that by joining the grid, you can only improve your application performance. You can donate your cycles when you are not using them without worrying that your application performance will degrade, because you are always guaranteed that your machines will work for you.

Performance and Simplicity. We’ve also referred to this feature as “Selfish sharing.” We hear from other grid vendors about how users “must” get over the practice of “server hugging.” We try not to be so arrogant; we’ve never found that scolding our customers is good business practice. If customers want to preserve unconditional priority on their own servers, we say “good for them.” So we’ve built a straighforward way to preserve absolute priority for the resource owner, even when they offer to share surplus resources. From what our customers tell us, we think this approach encourages efficient resource sharing far more than lecturing ever would.

First Grid Computing Solution Certified for Windows Server 2008: We followed the long and winding road of the Early Adopter program to become the first grid solution to obtain this important certification, so that customers can be confident that our software works not only with the Microsoft products they use today, but with all the latest improvements Microsoft is bringing to market now.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus. By aligning with Microsoft’s technology and strategy, we help our customers create a truly dynamic IT infrastructure. Server 2008 brings many benefits in performance and manageability, and we’re confident that our customers will be upgrading quickly (more quickly than, say, to Vista); we want to be sure they can use our latest capabilities on Microsoft’s best OS platform.

Let me be candid here; these benefits do not come free to ISVs. I have considerable anxiety over extending yet further the number of versions of Microsoft products we support — for example, while I think Server 2008 is great, and Visual Studio 2008 is great, and the new SQL Server 2008 will be great, staying current means we’ll have to start enforcing our requirements by turning away requests for support of Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000. The combinatorics for testing on multiple OS versions, .NET versions, SQL Server versions, IIS versions, and upgrade paths for our own software versions get out of hand quickly. I’ll have more on this issue another day. For now I’ll just say I’m happy with our decision to stay current — mostly.

Automatic Failover Package and Integration with NLB: Failover has long been a feature of the Digipede Network Professional Edition but with the optional Automatic Failover Package, organizations can now have complete out-of-the-box integration with Windows Server 2008 load balancing, giving “hands-free” failover to mission-critical applications.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus — yes, even this advanced capability was guided by our goal of simplicity. While automatic failover is often considered a complex requirement, we made some basic decisions to keep it as simple as possible. First, we made automatic failover it’s own SKU, so customers without the need for high-availability configuration don’t even have to think about it. Second, we did away with a lot of the manual scripting that often slows implementation of failover solutions — you can have it running very quickly. Finally, we left as much as possible to popular existing technologies — SQL clustering and NLB — so the implementation steps will be as familiar as possible.

Reports Package: Assembles critical information about the use and optimization of the grid, with easy-to-understand charts and graphs, flagging of critical information, and drill-down capability, giving enterprises fully integrated optimization of grid performance, with tracking of who contributes to and who benefits from grid resources.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus — In larger systems, simple and informative visual tools are essential for wringing the most performance possible from a grid. Users and administrators become far more productive in their routine monitoring functions and troubleshooting activities with this new package, which plugs directly into Digipede Control (our admin UI). And by building on SQL Reporting, we’ve created a framework for future extensions.

Overall, I’m pleased with the extent to which we have driven the improvement of our product by staying focused on the three principles described above. To be a little less self-congratulatory, I wish we had stopped adding features at least two months earlier and brought most of these capabilities to market sooner, rather than piling quite so much into a single release (and there’s certainly more than I’ve had a chance to discuss here).  Perhaps another day, I’ll have a chance to discuss some of the things we (purposely) left out!  Now that V2.1 is in the market (and getting rave reviews from our customers), I’m eager to see what great new applications our imaginative customers create and deploy on our latest platform.

Oh, we love to travel — I’ve always been a big advocate of getting in front of customers and prospects as often as possible. But it’s far better to make two trips than one on the same budget.

Which brings us to the New York problem. If you travel to New York, you know — some cities are expensive, and then there’s New York. A very, very ordinary hotel room that might cost under $100 in another town can easily cost $300 in New York – and far more if you don’t book WAY in advance. And often I don’t. Yet some of you see me in New York quite often these days.

So what’s the secret? Priceline? Hotwire? Nope. Those work great in some cities, but in New York, when the supply of rooms gets tight (i.e., almost always), these don’t save that much and you can end up in some highly dubious rooms.

No, the secret is the Pod. The Pod Hotel (formerly called the Pickwick Arms hotel) requires some attitude adjustment (unless you think like a startup!). Basically, if your college dorm had the same advertising agency as Apple, it would be the Pod Hotel.

The rooms are quite small, the beds are small (OK, they’re twins, but I’m 6’4″), you don’t get your own bathroom (there are four per floor), and there’s no room service (but come on — you’re in midtown Manhattan! Go out!). But the whole place is newly refurnished, very clean, comfortable, equipped with a nice little flatscreen TV plus a clock radio with a dock for your iPod, conveniently located in Midtown (on 51st Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues) — and even if you book just a few days ahead, it’s $129 or less per night, including free wireless internet access.

The startup mentality says hotel rooms are for sleeping in — the rest of the day is too valuable to spend in the room anyway — so if you can give up a bit of space and luxury, you can save a bunch of money for the next trip.   Now you  know.

Derrick interviewed me by phone for the story, and I guess I must have let slip that the Digipede Network Version 2.0 will be out this summer.  So watch this space in the coming weeks for more leaks and details on this important release, as we build on the momentum we’ve generated over the last year.

They just featured us in a success story on their excellent Web site.  I think the story  came out well.  The only thing I regret is mentioning how many paying customers we had when their writer interviewed me — because we’ve got a LOT more now!

If you’re a startup looking to partner with Microsoft, run do not walk to the Microsoft Startup Zone.  Lots of good advice, provided by people you should get to know.

If you want to go deeper into this topic, a good place to start is the Dr. Dobb’s article by Robert Anderson and Dan Ciruli.

I ran into Tom Groenfeld who has moved on from Windows in Financial Services, dedicating more time to some direct projects with Microsoft and his excellent blog; if you’re following Microsoft and its partners in this market, it’s a must-read.

Speaking of Windows in Financial Services, they caught up with me for an interview and (no guffaws please) a photo shoot. They’re doing a special HPC edition this summer, which should be out sometime in June; watch for it.

Maybe the most controversial guy at the event was Harvard Professor David Platt, who teaches .NET classes through his firm, Rolling Thunder Computing. He’s an excellent speaker — funny, smart, polished — and his emphasis on championing a simple user experience was certainly a breath of fresh air at this event. He was plugging his book, Why Software Sucks…and what you can do about it, and I may pick up a copy for more of his humor.  Frankly, his presentation offered more problems than solutions (i.e.,  examples of why something sucks, without recommendations about how to fix it), but he’s calling attention to a really, really important issue.  While we pride ourselves on ease of use, it’s clear we can make many further improvements.

Kudos to the whole Microsoft event team, especially the folks I worked with most directly — Asli Bilgin, Laura Leedy, Kathy Ross, and Michelle Ledesma for putting together an event that went off without a hitch.

I look forward to participating in this event again!  

What the hell am I doing waving my hands around all the time? Probably had too much caffeine….

Editor’s Choice: highlights from Digipede’s interview and demo

Demo of building a grid with Digipede

Talking about Digipede’s grid technology

After my comment on the Velocity Micro blog, and my long entry here, Velocity CEO Randy Copeland intervened and said it was time to build me a new replacement PC.  The Velocity team sprang into action, built me a replacement, and tried to bring it to life as a near-replica of my original system, so I would not lose too much data or time.  And here our saga enters a new chapter.

Anyone who has attempted to migrate from an old PC to a new PC knows this does not work as well as it should.  Yes, there are tools, some from Microsoft and some not, and a quick Google will tell you of the mixed experience users have with these tools.  Even the migration from HEALTHY old PC to new PC is uncertain; the migration from SICK old PC to new PC is fraught with peril. 

Guy Five at Velocity Micro was put in charge of the operation, and things began well enough.  As previously reported, Velocity places a high priority on customer communication (even BEFORE the CEO intervenes), and Guy Five was no excecption.  So I learned relatively early in the process that Windows was badly currupted on my old machine, and that transferring applications and settings would be essentially impossible (although they thought probably they could at least move my email settings, which would be a start).

So — build and test a new machine, copy my files onto it, ship it, and it’s up to me to restore the applications and settings.  OK.  Not what I was hoping for, but at least this shouldn’t take long, right?

Ten days.  Randy’s CEO intervention came on 2/11/2007, and my new machine arrived 2/21/2007, with my data and without my applications, accounts, or settings.  Every step of the way I got daily emails and occassional phone calls documenting progress and setbacks. 

• Everything looks good. 
• Uh oh, the D drive has bad sectors and is causing crashes — better replace it. 
• Everything looks good, if all goes well you’ll have it by Saturday (2/17). 
• Yup, still looks good, it will go out Friday, you’ll have it Saturday. 
• Hmmm, ran into some trouble with the TV tuner software, caused some crashes, we want this thing stable, better keep it running stress tests over the weekend. 
• Oh, yah, kind of a long weekend, but you’ll have it Tuesday. 
• Oh, didn’t actually go out until Tuesday, you’ll have it Wednesday.

And indeed, it did arrive on Wednesday, and it worked right out of the box (no, the email settings weren’t restored, but I can do that along with the rest). 

So from time of first crash to the time I got a working system back under my desk — thirty-four days.  And it will be longer yet before it’s back to the personalized state that makes it “my” PC — I still have a few applications to install, settings to tinker with, and so on.

But it seems stable, it’s fast as can be, and it works, and it’s backed by a company that clearly is trying to serve its customers. 

So would I buy another Velocity Micro machine?  Frankly, I’m glad I don’t have to decide that today.  On the plus side,

• Their PCs are fast and appear to be intelligently designed
• Their staff is professional, courteous, and intelligent
• When things go wrong, they tell you, and admit their mistakes
• Their CEO is willing to engage openly with customers (although frankly I’m disappointed that my comment on Randy’s post on Velocity’s blog was not published)

On the minus side

• I had hardware trouble after just two months
• They could not fix it with a house call
• Their shipping department whiffed on promises at least twice, resulting in frustrating and needless delays
• Getting a replacement system took longer than expected, even after raising a fuss
• Based on my experience, I have to question their QA — I believe that their team eventually identified problems with the graphics card, TV tuner card, original motherboard, RAM sticks, and D drive (not to mention Windows getting corrupted).  But all that stuff shipped to me after “burn in” of my original system.  Was it working when it left their shop the first time?  Possibly.  Did it all die at once at my house?  Who knows?

So it depends what happens now.  If I have a long and happy relationship with my computer from here out, yes, I’d probably still go back.  Even after more than a month of trouble, these guys have managed to stay mostly on my “good side.”  Why?  Because in more than a dozen interactions with their staff, I was never once treated like an idiot.  I know this shouldn’t differentiate them from other vendors, but sadly, it does.  If you’ve ever had trouble with a Dell (and I have, and we have at work as well), you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Nobody asked me to try rebooting, nor tried to walk me through a fifty-step process unrelated to my problem.  Everyone was clearly trying to identify and solve my problem, in a way that would work for me.  That matters. 

So hats off to Randy and his crew for screaming hardware and smart, supportive staff.  Iron out a few processes that I would attribute to growing pains, and you’ll have a happy customer and a winning company.

The first example comes from, of all places, my new home PC.

Last summer, my reliable old Gateway began to suffer from the same fate that eventually afflicts every PC — it was getting old, slow, and cranky.  I limped along with it until late fall, but enough was enough.  Five years of use and all the associated waxy buildup had brought it to the end of its useful life as the Top Dog computer in the house.  Oh, it’s still useful (I’m typing this on it now, more on that later), but it was time for a hot new PC.  I shopped around, decided not to go boring / mainstream, and settled on an “upper-middle” performance PC from boutique vendor Velocity Micro.  A little pricier than a Dell / HP / Gateway / whatever, but they got good reviews, looked cool, and claimed engineering, attention to detail, and support far above those of mortal huge companies.  And their blog, to which CEO Randy Copeland contributes, proclaims in the heading:  “Velocity Micro — Obsessed with building the perfect PC experience.”  I decided to find out.

The buying experience was quite good.  I configured my machine online, placed the order, and began receiving timely updates on progress — order received, released to production, built, shipped.  The steps took a few days longer than forecast, but that can happen, and at least communication was good.  My machine arrived, set up and ready to rock — and it rocked.  Fast, beautiful, quieter than expected, NOT overloaded with stupid trial bloatware (are you listening, Dell and HP??), very nicely built.  Ahhh.

I went through the (non-trivial) migration process to put all relevant files and applications on the new machine.  Then I reformated the old Gateway hard disk, did a clean install of Windows XP, and sent it off to a corner to serve up music files to the house network.  The Velocity Micro box took its place under the desk in the den as Top Dog computer in the house, where it performed flawlessly — for about 60 days. 

Then, quite suddenly, it suffered some type of misfortune (most likely some sort of hardware failure, more on that below) that caused frequent application and OS crashes.  Frequent as in every hour, then every half-hour, then every few minutes.

OK, that can happen.

My first call to tech support was excellent — smart guy, can-do attitude, did not treat me like an idiot — and we worked out a plan.  I got a memory test utility, which I ran overnight, and sure enough, found many, many memory errors.  A couple of quick experiments moving RAM around made it seem like it wasn’t the memory sticks but the motherboard.

OK.  That can happen.

My second call to tech support was excellent — I reached the same guy (we’ll call him Guy One), and he agreed that it was most likely the motherboard, but said he’d have both a new motherboard AND new RAM sent out right away, just in case.  When the parts came, I could schedule a tech to come out to my house and fix the whole thing (I can swap RAM, but I’m not going to mess with replacing a motherboard.)

Wow, things are going great.  I would NEVER get support like this from Dell or HP or Gateway (yes, I know this from personal experience).  No wonder Velocity Micro is experiencing “triple-digit” growth (to quote CEO Randy Copeland on the company’s blog).

But — and here comes the tie-in to my earlier “growth” comments – the parts were never sent.  I called three days later, got a different guy, who found that despite Guy One’s best intentions, “Shipping” had never bothered to send my parts. 

OK, that can happen.

But it shouldn’t.  This is where the growth-induced strain in Velocity’s internal systems and culture began to show.  Guy Two is also smart, has a can-do attitude, and did not treat me like an idiot, and he was clearly upset that his company had failed to deliver for a customer – but at this point the customer (me) had lost interest in the difference between “Guy Two” and “Shipping.”  The customer wants Velocity to function as one unit and to deliver — instead, I was learning about how somebody I could NOT speak to was screwing up the life of the guy I COULD speak to.  Quite possibly, to handle triple-digit growth in orders, Velocity’s processes and systems for coordinating customer support and shipping have changed; I imagine that both functions have grown, new people are working both new systems, and some person, process, or system had slipped, and my parts were just sitting around in Richmond as a result.  Guy Two went off to kick some ass, but my good will was rapidly being used up.

So pretty soon my parts arrived, and the process of scheduling a tech was amazingly quick and smooth (thanks again, Guy Two), and the tech came out the next day (a Saturday). 

Wow!  Things are going great again!

But wait.  The tech swapped the motherboard, and everything still crashed left right and sideways.  Not exactly the same way as before, but close enough.  He spent over three and half hours here, reached the end of his troubleshooting skills (and far more than the end of the hours alotted to the problem), and he threw in the towel. 

OK, that can happen. 

It’s notoriously difficult to troubleshoot hardware from 3000 miles away, and it’s possible that this was not a problem with the motherboard, or RAM, or that the new parts were defective too, or, well, you get the idea.  But it’s also possible that the tech (not a Velocity employee) was not quite the right guy for this type of problem, or did not bring all the diagnostic equipment / software / skills / whatever to my house on a Saturday afternoon for a full-blown troubleshooting session.  I don’t know — I’m just the customer, I don’t build or repair computers for a living.  As the customer, this was another disappointing interaction with Velocity, because I had to spend Saturday afternoon at home while my problem was not getting fixed.

And on Saturday night, Velocity support is closed, and I had to leave on a business trip on Sunday.  No main computer for the Powers family this week. 

Guy Three at Velocity called while I’m away.  Velocity decided it was time for the machine to come home to Richmond for factory troubleshooting and repair.  Sadly, I agreed — there’s no point sending out random parts so that non-Velocity techs can turn my desk into a test bench.  On my return, I called to make arrangements for shipping.  Guy Four said they’d email me a UPS shipping label, and that the process for this happens mid-day each day, so I should get it by email the next day.  I said “OK, but if I don’t receive it I’ll be shipping it anyway and billing Velocity,” and he agreed.

The machine was backed up relatively recently before the crashes began, which is not the same as saying it’s current.  I at least wanted my email identities and recent documents and so on backed up before I shipped the beast away.  I spent hours and hours and frustrating hours between crashes and spontaneous re-boots trying to get a decent backup of those files, and only partially succeeded.  I pulled the old Gateway out of music-server status, re-installed Office, and re-commissioned it as the main household computer.  Email files are out of sync, a bunch of other settings could not be recovered from the Velocity Micro box — life sucks, but goes on.

Next day, no shipping label.

I decided to wait one more day because it’s a hassle to go to the UPS store and figure out all the options, so I packed it up and got it all ready. 

Next day, no shipping label.

I grumbled down to UPS to ship it myself, and notified Velocity of this, and faxed the receipt to the person they designated. 

Two days later (as the PC was arriving in Richmond), sure enough, I got a shipping label via email from UPS.  (I’m inclined to believe Guy Two’s assessment of where some of the problems may be — are you listening Shipping?  How about you, Randy?)

I emailed this information back to Velocity so at least they don’t have to pay UPS twice.

My computer arrived in Richmond as scheduled, and my machine now sits on a bench there on life support; today is its sixth day in intensive care.  Guy Two (I’m back to him now) calls daily to explain that it’s still failing, and we discuss various theories and chat about the difficulties of troubleshooting hardware, and how a hardware failure on Part A can cause Part B to fail, and when you replace Part A, Part B can cause the NEW Part A to fail, and so on.  I like Guy Two, he’s smart and connects well with customers and no doubt has a tough hardware problem on his hands — maybe next time I’m in Richmond, I’ll go get a beer with him.  Or not.

It was after one of these status calls that I saw Randy Copeland’s February 5, 2007 blog post, called “Watching the PC Industry.”  In this post he takes a few shots at his competitors, points to Velocity’s own “triple digit growth,” decries industry trends that he feels do not serve the customer’s interests, and generally pounds the table insisting that Velocity has it right while everyone else has it wrong.  I was particulary struck by the assertion that:

A simple formula of premium components, fair pricing, and my dedication to the ultimate support experience have made our company a national contender.

On another day, I might have considered this type of post a great example of the sort of entrepreneurial optimism and assertive attitude I often admire (and sometimes project).  But given the circumstances, it struck me as self-congratulatory and out of touch.  The premium components failed, the pricing can only be considered “fair” if the machine lives up to its billing (which it has not), and the “ultimate support experience” is, well, documented above. 

Listen Randy — my $3000 machine has done no useful work in over three weeks.  I know the status of my machine pretty much every day, which is good (seriously), but not good enough.  This is the Main Computer for the Powers household, and it’s been out of commission since January 18.  I’ve twice had multi-day delays in the repair process attributable to snafus in basic systems and procedures.  While your team is filled with smart, hard-working, technically competent people who understand the importance of customer communication, they are struggling with your rapid growth to deliver on their promises.  And no one has offered a date on which I can expect to get my machine back (or a new machine with my old drives in it, for example). 

Velocity can still recover.  I still remember the attractive box, the apparent build quality, the great performance, the positive references from other customers, and the positive interactions I’ve had with individuals on the Velocity team.  I am favorably impressed by the professionalism, intelligence, and customer focus of everyone I’ve spoken to at Velocity.  But none of that means anything if I don’t have a working computer.  I’m happy for your triple digit growth, your industry awards, and your obsession — but you have not delivered anything close to the “perfect PC experience” for me. 

So the next few days are critical — if I get a reliable high-performance PC that I can use for years to come, then the memory of the past few weeks will quickly fade.  If the slip-ups continue, and I remain unable to use the PC that Velocity sold me, well, our relationship will end badly.

As for lessons at Digipede, our own triple-digit growth company is hard at work reviewing QA and customer support systems and processes.  Have we slipped up?  Yes indeed.  And we recently had a customer call us on it.  (And now, all is well with that customer.)  But we also all (and I mean all) see the opportunities and the peril, and are working steadily to maintain the highest levels of quality and service as we grow.  The good news is we have been here before — the whole Digipede management team has experienced very rapid growth before, and we’re ready for it.  We are committed (I use that term advisedly) to getting it right for our customers, and in creating the “perfect grid computing experience” for them.  And if we don’t, let me hear about it!