All of this navel gazing on the new “World Headquarters” is very telling. While Doug is building new facilities for himself, your competitors are spending their time building new facilities for their customers (and yours for that matter). Your competitors put out press releases announcing new products. The Planet puts out press releases announcing that you can add ram to servers. In short, The Planet has lost focus. Turning the company over to people who don’t know that they don’t understand the business will do that.
Doug, whenever you get done satisfying your edifice complex feel fee to get back to the business of competing in the marketplace.
You bring up some interesting concerns in your anonymous critical comment “jamesn.” Clearly your decision has been made regarding how you see our move to centralized locations, but taking Doug’s excitement about the building without the context of how it changes the way The Planet functions shows an incomplete understanding of the situation.
We have several posts about this move because it’s an important step in our company’s continual growth and development. Rather than having a fragmented team across several Dallas and Houston spaces, we’ve got everyone working together and in close proximity with the other departments in the company. Scoff if you’d like, but by fostering better communication internally and improving the work environment for our staff translates directly into improved service to our customers. The intent of taking five minutes to speak with Doug was specifically to give our customers the vision for how it will affect them (which is your main concern).
Our press release about the expanded configurability of our low-end servers shows the growth and development data center operations, product management, and provisioning groups since they are now better able to accommodate the customers seeking a customized lower-end solution.
I posted the video a day late, so there should probably be a little additional clarification: We all came in with our families on Sunday to unpack our offices so we could hit the ground running bright and early on Monday morning “competing in the marketplace.” The Houston half of The Planet’s employee base moved out of our old offices last Friday afternoon and were completely ready to work on Monday (including a warm hand-off of tech support from the old call center to the new call center).
From an outside viewpoint, this location consolidation is very interesting from a business strategy standpoint. At a time when the Internet and social networking are allowing people to transcend physical locations and have more effective and intimate communications, this organization feels the need to keep employees in a central geographic location.
For business today, distributed workforces and customer bases are the norm. Just look at the thriving professional services firms – accountants, attorneys, and consultants. The workforce is distributed geographically as are the customers. Look at ecommerce companies – their customers and suppliers are widely distributed geographically, and likely globally.
For my 2 cents (take it for what it’s worth) I would have used a different strategy with the resources used to build the new headquarters. Since this company is in the business of enabling its customers to transcend physical boundaries to grow their businesses, I would keep the workforce distributed. Then, when communication is less than optimal, I’d have the folks find solutions to the problems and roll them out to the marketplace as a business offering.
I can’t imagine how many millions it took to build the new headquarters, judging from the pictures. From a strategic standpoint, I would have poured the money into retrofitting the data centers which have been in operation from the late 90’s if I understand the histories of EV1 and The Planet correctly. Maybe you have allocated resources for this already, but with the age of your data centers, some massive upgrades will be needed in the not too distant future to keep them relevant to the rapidly developing best practices in the marketplace.
I will hope that your new building allows some out of the box thinking because I don’t think that most people would consider the ability to add/subtract components from low-end servers as being innovative. Now, working with your vendors to do something like adding breakers to multiprocessor motherboards so that you could hot swap processors for an upgrade would be creative.
Finally, congrats on a seamless weekend move complete with a warm handoff between call centers because competing in your marketplace doesn’t start bright and early on Monday mornings – it’s a 24/7/365 competition.
This is Bhuchung Gungpa, System Administrator of Central Tibetan Administration Of H.H. The Dalia Lama, based at Dharamsala, INDIA. I was really moved by the untiring work that you had done for the betterment of this Planet.
I wish you good luck and take care of your health.
[...] I’ve got a few pictures for you contrasting our upgraded workplace with our old offices. Doug explained why we made the transition to a new, consolidated office, so you can consider this post a [...]
December 19th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
All of this navel gazing on the new “World Headquarters” is very telling. While Doug is building new facilities for himself, your competitors are spending their time building new facilities for their customers (and yours for that matter). Your competitors put out press releases announcing new products. The Planet puts out press releases announcing that you can add ram to servers. In short, The Planet has lost focus. Turning the company over to people who don’t know that they don’t understand the business will do that.
Doug, whenever you get done satisfying your edifice complex feel fee to get back to the business of competing in the marketplace.
December 19th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
You bring up some interesting concerns in your anonymous critical comment “jamesn.” Clearly your decision has been made regarding how you see our move to centralized locations, but taking Doug’s excitement about the building without the context of how it changes the way The Planet functions shows an incomplete understanding of the situation.
We have several posts about this move because it’s an important step in our company’s continual growth and development. Rather than having a fragmented team across several Dallas and Houston spaces, we’ve got everyone working together and in close proximity with the other departments in the company. Scoff if you’d like, but by fostering better communication internally and improving the work environment for our staff translates directly into improved service to our customers. The intent of taking five minutes to speak with Doug was specifically to give our customers the vision for how it will affect them (which is your main concern).
Our press release about the expanded configurability of our low-end servers shows the growth and development data center operations, product management, and provisioning groups since they are now better able to accommodate the customers seeking a customized lower-end solution.
I posted the video a day late, so there should probably be a little additional clarification: We all came in with our families on Sunday to unpack our offices so we could hit the ground running bright and early on Monday morning “competing in the marketplace.” The Houston half of The Planet’s employee base moved out of our old offices last Friday afternoon and were completely ready to work on Monday (including a warm hand-off of tech support from the old call center to the new call center).
December 19th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
From an outside viewpoint, this location consolidation is very interesting from a business strategy standpoint. At a time when the Internet and social networking are allowing people to transcend physical locations and have more effective and intimate communications, this organization feels the need to keep employees in a central geographic location.
For business today, distributed workforces and customer bases are the norm. Just look at the thriving professional services firms – accountants, attorneys, and consultants. The workforce is distributed geographically as are the customers. Look at ecommerce companies – their customers and suppliers are widely distributed geographically, and likely globally.
For my 2 cents (take it for what it’s worth) I would have used a different strategy with the resources used to build the new headquarters. Since this company is in the business of enabling its customers to transcend physical boundaries to grow their businesses, I would keep the workforce distributed. Then, when communication is less than optimal, I’d have the folks find solutions to the problems and roll them out to the marketplace as a business offering.
I can’t imagine how many millions it took to build the new headquarters, judging from the pictures. From a strategic standpoint, I would have poured the money into retrofitting the data centers which have been in operation from the late 90’s if I understand the histories of EV1 and The Planet correctly. Maybe you have allocated resources for this already, but with the age of your data centers, some massive upgrades will be needed in the not too distant future to keep them relevant to the rapidly developing best practices in the marketplace.
I will hope that your new building allows some out of the box thinking because I don’t think that most people would consider the ability to add/subtract components from low-end servers as being innovative. Now, working with your vendors to do something like adding breakers to multiprocessor motherboards so that you could hot swap processors for an upgrade would be creative.
Finally, congrats on a seamless weekend move complete with a warm handoff between call centers because competing in your marketplace doesn’t start bright and early on Monday mornings – it’s a 24/7/365 competition.
December 26th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Thanks for the video, Doug! The new office looks great and I look forward to seeing how the Planet grows and improves in the new surroundings.
January 9th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Dear Doug,
This is Bhuchung Gungpa, System Administrator of Central Tibetan Administration Of H.H. The Dalia Lama, based at Dharamsala, INDIA. I was really moved by the untiring work that you had done for the betterment of this Planet.
I wish you good luck and take care of your health.
Please keep up the good spirit.
Bhuchung
January 10th, 2008 at 10:03 am
[...] I’ve got a few pictures for you contrasting our upgraded workplace with our old offices. Doug explained why we made the transition to a new, consolidated office, so you can consider this post a [...]