The San Francisco Chronicle is not exactly the planet’s leading source of technology news and analysis.  So many of you probably haven’t yet seen Deborah Gage’s excellent article today about Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s ambassador to Silicon Valley.  Dan’l is among our most important contacts (and favorite people) at Microsoft, and despite his high-visibility role, many people (including many entrepreneurs) still don’t understand the value he can bring to a startup.

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.

Tags: Digipede, Microsoft, silicon valley, startups, venture-capital

Releasing software is hard.

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.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, Microsoft, software, SQL Server, Visual-Studio, Windows Server

It’s no secret that multi-core computing is the future; Intel and AMD have told us they can’t make a single core go much faster, but they can pack more and more cores onto a single chip.

Current operating systems, compilers, and frameworks do little to assist the application architect or developer in taking advantage of this radical change in hardware. 

Digipede’s grid computing software is remarkably good at distributing application workloads — not just across multiple machines on a grid, but also across multiple cores on a chip.   Here’s a video I made this weekend that shows how we use the same exact technology to distribute calculations first across multiple cores on a single server, then across a larger grid.  Please have a look — I managed to keep it under four minutes!

    http://www.digipede.net/downloads/digipede_multicore_grid_demo.html

As a complement to this video, you may also want to check out Dan Ciruli’s earlier demonstration that shows the code changes required to grid-enable an application — just 20 lines of code!

   http://www.digipede.net/products/whitepaper.html  (scroll down to the “Videos” section)

I’ll have lots more about this topic in the coming few weeks. 

OK, if you’re reading about distributed computing, you’re probably already reading Serial to Parallel to Distributed by Marc Jacobs, but if you’re not, it’s time to start.  Marc is a former Digipede client (at a big secretive asset manager) who has since moved on to the elite financial technology consulting firm Lab49. 

Marc writes insightfully on a variety of issues related to grid and high-performance computing, and he’s recently finished his best and most comprehensive series to date.  It’s a seven-part series of posts based on a speech he gave on the state of high-performance computing in finance, at a Microsoft HPC event in New York earlier this year. 

I was fortunate to be at the HPC event, to attend Marc’s presentation, and to watch as the attendees learned a lot about the real needs of customers in this market.  Read, and see what I mean:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven

I will not attribute causality, but I will note that in the six months since Marc gave this presentation, Digipede sales are up more than 600% over sales in the year-earlier period, and that the majority of that increase is in financial services. 

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, high-performance-computing, HPC, Lab49, Marc-Jacobs, Microsoft

Digipede is growing again. While not yet the size of some grid competitors, we’ve hit a very interesting inflection point this year. There are many clear signs, but I’ll talk about one that may not be visible — except from my desk.

At my desk, the phone is ringing and my email box overfloweth — with consultants and systems integrators. A couple of years ago, when we launched the Digipede Network, I could not get a call back from an SI or IT consultant larger than two guys and a dog. Now, everybody from high-end boutique consultants to the world’s largest SIs are calling — for all the right reasons. They’ve got a customer. They want training. They need more technical details for a project they’re specifying. They need help responding to an RFP. They want, suddenly and very urgently, to be providing grid solutions that are radically easier to buy, install, learn, and use than competing offerings.

This sudden popularity comes from a at just the right time for us.  We’re adding staff (recruiters, please don’t call me — how often does cold calling actually work for you? It won’t work here…), but we’ve said from the beginning we don’t want to build a big staff for its own sake. We don’t want to be in the consulting business — I often refer to myself as a recovering consultant, and I someday hope to declare myself cured — and I’d much rather work with motivated SIs and consultants who WANT to build a great grid consulting practice.

How does the Digipede Network qualify as the most SI-friendly grid offering around? Well, let me count the ways. Price. Platform. Performance. Reliability. Security. APIs. Manageability. Support. Documentation. In other words — the same things that appeal to our rapidly growing customer base. That’s because good SIs want happy customers and painless implementations just like the rest of us. More importantly, they know that a successful grid project almost always leads to additional high-value projects with the same client. (This is in marked contrast to not-so-good SIs and consultants, who seem to want to milk a single grid engagement for every hour of consulting they can get — those guys can call our competitors, whose needless complexity often makes a great fit for greedy consultants.) 

My dance card at the upcoming Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver is rapidly filling up with more of the same — which is fine with me.   The market for the world’s only .NET-based grid computing solution is large and growing rapidly, and we have no interest in becoming expert in every vertical market or horizontal application to which we can sell our product. 

So meet me there, or call me here — we’re a partner-friendly organization, and we’re expanding our role in the Microsoft partner ecosystem.

Tags: consultant, Digipede, grid-computing, SI

Derrick Harris of GridToday wrote a nice piece this morning about Digipede’s recent momentum.  He’s been following us since we launched the Digipede Network almost two years ago, and he hits the highlights in his article today. 

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.

Tags: Derrick-Harris, Digipede, grid-computing, GridToday

So how did the Digipede Network become the grid computing software of choice for hedge funds?

The three primary value propositions that we’ve been emphasizing from the beginning resonate particularly well with hedge funds. For those of you who are new to the Digipede message, those propositions are: Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus. And if you don’t believe me, then go read what hedge fund CTO Paul Algreen is saying in GridToday. Go ahead — I’ll wait.
Now — Let’s look at how hedge funds respond to three bullets from an early slide we’ve used since before we released the first version of our software:

Performance: “The Digipede Network delivers dramatically improved application performance at any scale.”

Lots of people think “at any scale” is some sort of bragging about the ability to manage thousands or tens of thousands or gazillions of compute nodes — and of course it is. But just as importantly, “at any scale” means that we are able to scale DOWN as efficiently as we scale UP. Most hedge funds (even some whoppers) are NOT huge enterprises — they are small-to-medium businesses with some extremely compute-intensive applications. Our hedge fund customers have all found that they can get up and running with a “starter kit” of 10 or 20 nodes, verify the benefits of “dramatically improved application performance” at that level, and then scale up from there — adding more nodes, more applications, and more users as needed.

Simplicity: “The Digipede Network is radically easier to buy, install, learn, and use than competing grid offerings.”

That looks like marketing language, and it is. But before this sentence was ever used in marketing, it was an internal mantra at Digipede that drove literally hundreds of specific design and engineering decisions. (It’s still taped to the wall in our original conference room.) Hedge funds don’t have big IT staffs, and they don’t go for years-long big-budget “grid-enablement” projects. They need something that gets their best ideas for trading and risk management into the market now, not after they figure out how to implement some needlessly complex monstrosity. And they certainly aren’t going to wait while they re-train all their developers to learn new and alien programming paradigms. So hedge funds appreciate how naturally the Digipede Network fits with their current IT environment, and their current development practices.
Microsoft focus: “The Digipede Network is the only commercial grid computing product built entirely on .NET.”

And while THAT one raised some eyebrows when we first came to market (I’ve lost count of all the times I heard that there was “no such thing” as high-performance .NET computing), this has been a great decision for us. Hedge funds work in Windows, period. (OK, of the 10,000 hedge funds out there, I’m probably wrong about one or two. Deal with it.) There’s no room at a hedge fund for a “high-performance computing” group working on an entirely different platform than the “all the rest of the computing” group. Developers at hedge funds use a wide variety of tools and applications — .NET, COM, stand-alone executables, third-party libraries — but everything runs on Windows. Digipede’s early decision to let competitors pursue the false goal of “inter-OS” deployment while we integrated deeply at multiple points in the Microsoft stack has paid off well in this market.

So — it’s no secret. Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus. Simple, but effective — now to spread the word to those next 9900+ funds…

Tags: applications, Digipede, finance, grid, grid-computing, hedge-funds, Linux, Microsoft

Digipede announced another customer win today.  III Offshore Advisors, an innovative hedge fund that uses a lot of computing power in their pricing and risk management models, selected the Digipede Network for their grid.  You can read about it on our Web site; GridToday also picked up the story. 

Financial firms are famously competitive, and no niche is more competitive today than the hedge fund market.  While the secret to success of most hedge funds is just that — a secret — most start with a small core team that says:  We can do better.  We know (through math, intuition, research, hard work, or all of the above) how to make a better investment, a better trade, a better judgment than our competitors.  When we show what we can do, our investors will be rich — and so will we.

Many of the investment and trading strategies employed by these firms are developed through cutting-edge mathmatical modeling.  Some of the brightest minds in the world are drawn to this competitive and lucrative market, and regardless of the models employed, they all cry out for — more computing power.  And it’s not just for one or two applications.  In our experience with hedge funds (and we work with quite a few), even a small fund encounters computational bottlenecks in: 

• Risk management
• Fixed income pricing
• Trading analytics (including liquidity depth analysis, inter-portfolio correlation analysis, and more)
• Pricing of exotic derivatives, and more

Eliminating these bottlenecks can open up new trading opportunities sooner.  If putting in a grid this month lets you start trading in new markets next month — that’s an easy decision.  If putting in a grid this week lets you out-trade your competitor next week — let’s go. 

So how did the Digipede Network become the grid computing software of choice for hedge funds?  I’ll tell you in Part II.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, hedge-funds

I post a lot about our experiences as a partner and customer of Microsoft, and anybody who cares to go back and count knows that most of my posts are positive.  For whatever reason, my complaints / rants tend to get more attention, so I want to re-iterate – our experience with Microsoft is on balance largely positive, and we remain an enthusiastic Microsoft partner.

With that out of the way – LiveMeeting has to go.  It’s great software, and good, reliable service – with no understanding of business whatsoever.  The treatment our company  has received from the Microsoft Office LiveMeeting organization (still referred to within Microsoft by its old name, Placeware), has ranged from comical to appalling.  Today, we reached appalling.

In 2005, we started experimenting with LiveMeeting as a way of demonstrating our software to prospective clients.  There were pluses and minuses, but on the whole it proved to be an effective tool.  For a while, we mooched off a friend’s account at Microsoft, but by spring of 2006 we settled into a pattern of bi-weekly Webcasts, and got our own account.  My partner Dan Ciruli set up that account; the only form of payment they offered for this type of account at the time was to put the monthly charge on his credit card, so he filled out the necessary forms and received confirmation from Microsoft.  So far, so good.

Then, Microsoft never billed him.  Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time reviewing my credit card statement for transactions that aren’t there.  And apparently, neither does Dan.  So he did not notice that Microsoft was NOT billing us for this service.  And neither, apparently, did Microsoft.

Then somebody from Microsoft popped up in February 2007 and said to Dan HEY YOU HAVEN’T PAID US and Dan said “so take the money already!”  He completed a second credit card form, and was told (again) that everything was fine.  Then the exact same person from Microsoft popped up in March 2007 and said the exact same thing, as though he’d never had the previous exchange, and Dan forwarded all the exact same information, and got the same response – oh, sorry, everything is fine now.  It became a running joke in the office, wondering how they made any money.

And then in April, somebody new at Microsoft woke up and said HEY YOU GUYS OWE US A WHOLE TON OF MONEY.  Always a great day when that happens.  So Dan and I researched it and sure enough, we had been getting free LiveMeeting service for almost a year.  So I called the friendly and helpful person at Microsoft (all names withheld on this one) and asked if we could just pay by check (a) for the outstanding balance, and (b) monthly thereafter.  She agreed, and said she’d send (a) an invoice for the outstanding balance, and (b) a monthly invoice thereafter.  And everything was fine again.

Then, Microsoft never billed us.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time searching the mail for bills that aren’t there.  You put a valid invoice in my hand, I pay it promptly.  You don’t, oh well.  I pay a lot of invoices for other parts of Microsoft – most departments / divisions / business units / subsidiaries / whatever at Microsoft are pretty competent at getting a valid invoice to my desk, and I pay ‘em right quick.  But the LiveMeeting group apparently has not mastered this Business 101 concept. 

And of course, there’s only one way these things can end – we found our LiveMeeting account deactivated seven minutes before our scheduled Webcast this morning.  With attendees invited everywhere from here to India.  No warning emails, no onscreen notice that the account will be suspended in the future, no reason given on the Web page that says we’re dead, no “pay to reactivate” option, just — dead.  I don’t get real upset in the office very often, but I hit the roof. 

I called the toll-free number helpfully posted on the deactivation notice “for immediate service,” which presents a robotic phone tree with four options none of which are “TURN ME BACK ON NOW.”  I punch 4 to “talk with an attendant.”  I am transferred to Microsoft tech support, and am told I need to “talk to Placeware.”  I’m steaming now.  Four minutes and counting.  I call back and punch 2, “sales,” because in my experience humans usually answer when you talk to sales.  I get a human who is sympathetic, but says I need to call tech support; I get a new number to try.  Three minutes to go.  I call the new number, and find out the name of my account representative, and am transferred to him, but it turns out to be someone who sits near him, and eventually I reach my account representative.  Nope, I am assured that there is no way no how no human on earth who can turn my account back on in two minutes; my partner sends a note canceling the Webcast to all participants.  We look like idiots, and I am seriously pissed.

I stay on the line with my account manager, who asks many questions about who I had been working with previously on our account and billing issues (we find a couple of names, one gone and one still there).  I vent some more at him, and he’s sorry, and we’re done. 

The urge to open a WebEx account is now quite strong, but we suddenly realize we’ve got ANOTHER LiveMeeting with an important prospective customer later today.  Time for a deep breath.

I call the person who had previously promised to send me an invoice by mail, but never did.  I explain the whole situation again – she was “just talking with” my account manager.  I ask “did he mention that I ripped him a new one?”  She laughs nervously.  Between further apologies and digging into records, we eventually just put the whole bill on MY credit card, and she promises (really) to send me monthly invoices from here on.  Within an hour, the account is turned back on, and we’re good to go.

So – if customer service is “falling on the grenade,” these folks get a B+.  (To get an A, I had to be back up and running for the FIRST meeting we had scheduled.)  For processes and procedures – F.

Now we’ll see if I ever get a monthly bill – and yes, this is one I’ll be watching for.  And the Webex experiement begins in parallel next week.

Tags: LiveMeeting, Microsoft, Placeware

As promised, here’s the latest from my experiences with Velocity Micro.  When last we left my poor sick PC, it was on the operating table at Velocity Micro’s labs in Richmond, VA.  After a two-week illness here at home, when a house call did not do the trick, it went back to its birthplace for major surgery.  

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.

Tags: Growth, QA, randy-copeland, support, velocity-micro