So I went to my first School Open House (As a parent that is)

An in the music room there they sat. 3 Apple IIc's. Next to them were the LC machines. For those of you not familiar with the history of computers the Apple II was the machine I learned as a freshman in HS. So these machines are about 20 years old. The c in the name stand for color! They were covered in the nice plastic slips and really in mint condition.

My first thought was "What in the world could someone use this ancient technology to teach with" Then I saw it. In all it's fake metal shine. Plastic hinges and sounds like a hair dryer. Using so much energy, it alone is probably responsible for 10% of the energy used in Kansas. The DELL laptop purchased last year.

I suddenly understood why someone would keep this 20 year old technology. They needed a computer that would work. Clearly the DELL could not get it done.

This just proves, sell quality, not quantity. Otherwise the future of our children will suffer. I wept last night from the thought of children being deprived of a true computer education. I am haunted by the erie sound that Dell made...

Damn you DELLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

You have to check it out

Its official, I am now a guest blogger! (not sure that anyone cares)

Check out my guest blog at

http://blog.brainybunch.net/

Please leave some comments like people care what I write...

Please?

Is that too much begging?

Please

Why are blog readers good marketing targets?

?Blog readers are 11 percent more likely than the average Internetuser to have incomes of or greater than $75,000

Starting (And updating frequently) a company blog can be a great way of capturing new and quality business? I have to add though you can't just update it monthly, it has to be a on going effort.

***Note, by no way is this blog associated with the company I work for. :)

Unique marketing opportunities?

91% of advertisers haven’t figured out how to integrate social networking into their planning.
OnMedia NYC 2008 Survey (via Parmet)

Marketing What Works?

I have seen many businesses not market, I believe this is a huge mistake. How do you keep your business name at the front of mind?

So what is the best method of getting this done?

Telephone and e-mail produce the highest response rate at 2.60% and 2.45% for direct marketing media channels for generating leads.--Direct Marketing Association, November 2006

Basically, the personal touch is still most effective.

Yesterday's post

As I mentioned yesterday, we had a couple of customers that had data loss. I also mentioned that we had provided solutions for backup prior to their loss.

I have to say that I was extremely happy that we were proactive as a sales group to provide these solutions. It seems like in the past, we would have been ask by the customer why we did not provide this? So not only can service be proactive but so can sales. This must be a evolution of the sales group.

Next we have to sell that proactive solution. The sales lesson is that sales can also be proactive and we are as responsible as anyone to keep the customer aware of their risks.

Would you jump without a reserve parachute?

Hard drive rate of failure is documented between 3 and 13% (http://lwn.net/Articles/237924/ is an example of many that can be found) But lets face it, if it was only one failure in a million, would you still backup you critical data? I would. As I have written before I have a Windows Home Server. I keep family photo's, videos, website and more on it. Sure, it duplicates data to different hard drives, then I backup that onto a usb hard drive, then I have a copy at work and on a networked PC. These are just family photo's.

If I was dealing with my businesses data and I was responsible, I would probably sleep with a copy under my pillow!

Still this week, two businesses we deal with had failures on their server. Both had NO BACKUP!. I mean none. They weren't even trying! Guess what COMPLETE DATA LOSS. What takes this to even a higher level is that we had suggested backups in the last several month! What gets me is that since we have provided a couple of solutions and one customer has done nothing (And is planning nothing)

I guess I do not understand this. Are we not educating customers enough about the risks? Is it "Too costly?" I would think that losing the data would not be acceptable. If anything it would be terms of losing your job.