A while ago I posted on how I was trying Checkster.com as a tool for doing a 360 degree evaluation. It seemed like a great tool, although it also seemed like it had some odd limitations, namely a maximum of 10 people can be invited, at least 3 have to respond before you can see any results, and there is a 7-day limit on time to respond.

The bottom line is that this doesn’t work very well. 10 people max with a minimum of 3 to see results means you have to have a 30% response rate, which is pretty darned high. For example, my experience with Linkedin is that about 10% of the people I invite, who I know, who I’ve personally invited in person with an explanation of what Linkedin is actually join. Expecting 30% of the people who receive an email asking them to spend 5 minutes describing a coworker’s strengths and weaknesses to actually follow through is extremely optimistic. Unless, of course, you only invite folks who are your friends or who work for you, but then what’s the point?

The 7-day limit is also silly. A week is not very long, especially in summer when folks are on vacation. A month or even 90 days would be much better.

Lastly, while there is a “resend email” button for each person you’ve invited, you have to do each one manually. That’s a heck of a lot of work.

Here’s what Checkster needs to have to be a real tool with real usefulness:

1. Ability to invite more people. One hundred would be a good start. Let us upload the list in .csv format.
2. Send tickler emails automatically every week to those invited to respond, with an option for the individual receiving the invitation to say they’re opting out.
3. Ninety day limit on checkups rather than the 7 days they have now. If the fear is that too many checkups will be going on, then limit us to two per year.
4. This may already exist - I wouldn’t know because I haven’t gotten a checkup to complete - but give us a link to the results that we can send to others.

In the mean time, does anyone know of a tool that has these features?

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Digital printing is growing very rapidly, and it’s getting a ton of buzz in the print community even though despite huge growth the overall business is still quite small. Most people I talk to believe that digital print will overtake everything eventually, the question is how long it will take.

Our president, Karl Fritchen, raised an interesting point the other day. Apparently, the digital press folks have chosen the office copier business model when it comes to toner. That is, the press manufacturer supplies the toner and the customer has to buy it from them. This is way different than ink, which is sold by entirely separate companies. Naturally the printing company doesn’t want to be stuck with a single source, so they are resisting this business model. They want the offset/gravure/flexo model where consumables are sold by many companies, and they retain more control. Off hand, I don’t blame them.

But is innovation the real product of the future?

More and more, it seems that innovation is the real product of the future. It isn’t good enough to make a great product, you have to keep improving it. Open source software is a great example of this. The software is free, but it still produces revenue streams for people who implement it for customers, maintain it, etc. Offhand you might think that really the customer is paying maintenance, but really they are enabling the continuous innovation of the product. Even proprietary software usually involves a maintenance fee to ensure upgrades, and really, isn’t that fee paying for the development of the upgrades?

For those who don’t innovate, someone will duplicate the functionality of their product, either illegally as an exact copy or legally as in ways that don’t violate IP laws, and offer it for a lower price. They can only retain their share through attempts at rights management (see Sony) or by innovating fast enough to maintain their superior value.

And remember, software companies have pretty low incremental cost for each copy shipped - the cost of goods sold. Think about hard goods and their costs of goods sold.

The “big iron” style printing presses don’t evolve that rapidly. The technologies change, but not at the pace of higher tech products. So the model of investing in a new design, and then selling copies has worked. Enough copies of a design can be sold to pay for the development. But, are digital presses closer to software? I’m no expert on digital presses, but I do know that there is a tremendous amount of technical wizardry that sits between my pdf file and a printed piece of paper, most of it existing as software in one form or another.

But how do you pay for that innovation?

I remember an R&E Council meeting a long time ago - 1999 maybe - where Harry Quadracci ranted a bit at the manufacturers. He was upset because we’d given printing nothing really innovative or new. Not enough money was being spent on R&D, and because of that printers had no new equipment worth buying. I think he was right.

So, if software companies can’t really afford to keep developing new products without ongoing maintenance revenue, and they have very low costs of goods sold, how are the folks who make equipment doing it? Especially when more and more of that equipment has complicated computerized control systems that run on software? If you take the consumables revenue from these companies, which almost certainly is where a lot of their income comes from, how will they fund development?

The nice folks at Xerox have invited me to attend an event they’re hosting at OnDemand. It’s a roundtable/focus group about what will be important to commercial printers and their customers when it comes to the transition to digital. About a dozen folks from the industry will be there from various backgrounds. I’m really looking forward to it, and discussing issues like this.

One of the things I love about computers is their ability to keep the most trivial details in order. I’m not a detail person by nature, so I’m grateful for technology that fills that gap.

So, when it doesn’t, life really sucks. Apparently, since my company is a hearty drinker of the Microsoft Kool-aid, life is gonna suck between March 11th and April 1 of this year. You see someone decided to change the dates that daylight savings time begin and end on, and it’s making a lot of Microsoft products go a little Kaflooey. Our calendars may show meeting times an hour off. There will be no indication that it’s an hour off, we get to find that out the old fashioned way.

Here is the advice that we got from our IT department:

Since this is the first year for the change, there are a few very important things you need to know about your Outlook Calendar:

• Some of your meetings may appear an hour later during the three weeks between March 11th and April 1st. During those three weeks, you can either meet at the time shown in your calendar or change the meeting time.
• If you plan to change the time, check the resource first. It may already be booked by someone else.
• Only change the meeting time if you organized the meeting. If you were invited to the meeting, do not change anything on your calendar.
• If you make no change to the time of a meeting, all attendees will see the meeting exactly as it shows up on your calendar.
• If you have recurring meetings during those three weeks, the meetings may also appear an hour later. If you decide to reschedule the meeting, be sure to select only the individual occurrences, not the meeting series, when you make changes.
• Confirm all your meetings with external customers or vendors since you don’t know if their e-mail system has adjusted to the new Daylight Saving Time.

At first I wanted to fire off an email to the IT folks asking why a patch (of course, there surely is a patch, right?) wasn’t installed. First I decided to look at the instructions. Jesus. It’s like John Cleese wrote them. There are several different sets of instructions for Exchange Server alone, depending on, among other things, whether users “Make lots of recurring appointments using Outlook Web Access”. No wonder we got the instructions from IT. They’re probably looking at the instructions and thinking they won’t be able to get them done by April 1st.

Does anyone know how the various Linux distributions and apps are fairing with this change? I did a brief search on Ubuntu, but all that came back was stuff for Western Australia. This article leads me to believe that Linux may not fair any better.

Can you imagine if all the crap that people thought was going to happen at the turn of the century, but didn’t, happened instead on March 11th? All because we decided to shift daylight savings by 3 weeks to save a little energy.