Speaking Human

by Joel Trammell
This article has been revised and expanded from its original version as published in order to serve our recently expanded readership from our mention on Slashdot.
From our beginnings in 1999, when I looked at this industry, one of the things that was very obvious to me was that there was not a great deal of expertise in this area. There wasn’t a whole lot of awareness of many of the concepts of managing the network for application performance.
As an educator, my first instinct was to try to educate the market. Not just on our products, but we believed there was a lot of room to educate the market just on the general concepts, and that if people understood the important concepts, then, given our fair shot, we’d sell more product because of that.
This blog is part of an overall strategy to make information available to people, to educate them in this area. Businesses have not been running large distributed networks with applications running across the wide-area network for a very long period of time, in the grand scheme of things.
I mean, the world has only been doing this whole “ubiquitous Internet” thing for ten years or so. A lot of the client-server or Web based applications – software-as-a-service – are relatively new and there’s just not a lot of experience in running these large infrastructures. So, we felt we needed to take a leadership role in educating the industry.
(Continued…)

I think the biggest change that’s occurred is the expectation that whether you’re a business, a political candidate, or any way that you want to communicate with an audience, it’s going to be done on the Web, at least as one mechanism. You have to have a Web site, basically. A lot of people expect to go to the Web as their first source of information. So, that’s certainly a change when historically, the first source of information might have been the phone book or to do something else. That drives huge adoption of the Internet in everything.
The NetQoS corporate philosophy is based around the idea that our business will only succeed if we solve customer problems, and provide the software, appliances, and services that can do so. I want this blog to help our customers solve problems as well – from serving as a meeting place for peers, answering questions, and providing insight.
There’s many books written on the collective intelligence of the masses that turn to blogs for information, including Jeremy Wright’s Blog Marketing, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinberger’s Cluetrain Manifesto, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, and so on. The simple truth is this: everybody who is any sort of expert on blogs, blogging, and the blogosphere tends to agree on one thing: If your company acts childishly, it will get spanked.
If companies misrepresent themselves, (or as a 5 year old would put it: “fib,”) as “Wal-Marting Across America” shows, they get found out. When Alienware threatened to refuse computer review site Hexus access to their systems for coverage (or as a 5 year old would put it, “I’m taking my ball and going home,”) they got tons of negative publicity and a story on Digg.
I don’t think we’re somehow going to look “unprofessional” if we start talking less like the corporate style of speech that comes out in most corporate communications. While corporate-ese has been the language of business, and NetQoS is a business-to-business business, it isn’t always the most effective way to communicate. It’s certainly not the most personal.
So let’s put away the childish fear of speaking from the heart – let’s put away the idea that somehow our products or our professionalism are maligned if we don’t use the latest buzzwords. This blog will hopefully help its readers be more informed because it’s written in English… no, not just English, but Human.
From time to time, this blog may contain posts that have too much “marketing lingo” or “technical lingo” or any number of other “lingos.” It may go too far in the other direction and seem “disingenuously hip.” If you think something could be phrased a better way or is irrelevant, or is too complex, or too simple, then please, let me know. If this blog fails to provide new information, if it fails to make ourselves understood to you, then it has failed in the primary mission of any blog – to communicate.
If you have a question, fire away in our comments section and we’ll do our best to answer. And if NetQoS ever does something stupid, call us on it.
Joel Trammell is the CEO of NetQoS
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