FW: 180 From The Inside Out

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>]

http://www.revenews.com/jimmydaniels/2006/03/180_from_the_inside_out.html

I also blog about stuff on RealTechNews.com <http://www.realtechnews.com/> ,
the blog of former Cnet editor Alice Hill, and in one post about
180solutions called 180solutions Blows More Smoke
<http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2731> Up.. I was told by a former
employee of 180solutions to

Keep your attacks to the company as a whole and it's leadership and you're
opinion will be respected quite a bit more by everyone, even 180 employees.

So I emailed him and asked him for an interview about what it was like to
work for 180solutions, here it is below.

Jimmy:I am kind of curious about the atmosphere there, it must be weird,
reading stuff in the press about the company you work for, do the employees
talk about stuff like this, or just ignore it and go on? 

ex180:I don't think most people know about Google alerts so they don't know
about the majority of the criticisms 180 receives. (if most people do know
about Google Alerts then far fewer talk about it as a percentage than I
thought). I personally had no idea how much criticism was out there until I
discovered Google alerts and turned them on. It was quite an eye-opening
experience. There is a company meeting every Monday morning hosted by Keith
or Dan during which they talk about stuff coming up, but _normally_ they do
not cover negative stories. From what I understand even the CDT
recommendation to the FTC was not talked about, though they may have
eventually said something that I'm not aware of. I know they didn't talk
about it the first week or two. Sometimes Edelman is talked about, but it's
usually in the tone of: 'they're zealots and we will never be able to change
their minds, so we're not really trying', and 'a lot of these people are
making money off of attacking us'. 

For the employees that do know about the blogs and complaints it's not
discussed too much. It's interesting to see what's brought up by management
and what's not, but I know in my department very little discussion took
place concerning what was being said. I know that's a long winded answer to
a relatively simple question, but I thought it best to separate what
management says compared from water cooler talk. 

I will say that the people that do pay attention and do talk about it aren't
overly proud of it. Occasionally a few people will get together and express
real anger over the spin put on by management, but that's on the rare side.
Personally, when if someone asked what 180 did after I told them who I
worked for, I just said 'internet advertising'. If it was someone who
already knew about 180 I felt like apologizing immediately. Not everyone is
like that of course, I remember one guy that sent out a wide distribution
email vehemently defending the goal of the company, (it was sent to most if
not all of the company). He really believed it. 

Jimmy: What is the general feeling about adware? Do you all use the 180
software on your computers?

ex180Well, honestly the general feeling was surprise when you found someone
actually running zango in non-management positions. People looked at me like
I was an idiot a couple times because I tried to be a supportive of the
company and run it on both my work and home machines. I eventually had to
uninstall it however, the volume of ads got a bit too high. It even
boomeranged on me about two weeks after I was out of the company. The
company doesn't demand that it's run, but obviously they want people to run
it. There were several projects being followed that could have lead to a
much higher value proposition for the software but the company's negative
image seemed to kill most of them before any development really took place.
It's a bummer because a lot of that negativity came from rogue distributors
that 180 didn't want out there at all but can't stop until they know about
them. 

As for adware in general, if you buy into the 'content economy' and 180's
vision then adware is a good thing, and some people really feel that way but
it's not a common subject of discussion. I was on the technical side and I'm
pretty sure that no one in my department below management felt that way,
then again, I didn't talk with many people in sales or marketing so I
honestly cannot say if they really believed it or just remained silent when
the execs talked about their vision. The content economy is a nice concept
and some people really like the sites you can access with it, but by and
large I never saw any content that was really worth having it installed
except that game 'David vs. Goliath'. (for about four hours) Marketing
ensured there would never be another good game however. 

Jimmy: You've said 180 doesn't want those rogue distributors out there, why
is that?

ex180In the early days the execs didn't really care. They were getting rich
and that was that... this is prior to 2004. in 2004 they started 'the year
of the consumer' and started paying attention to all the complaints. (they
were multi-millionaires then... you can afford to listen when you're at that
level.) The damage was done however and most people hated them. The effort
became cleaning up the image and the primary problem with that is people
like Edelman finding rogue/silent installs everywhere. 180 cannot be a truly
reputable company until this stops, so big deals, really big ones, won't
happen. Hence, rogue distributors and hackers are enemy number One. Once
people like Edelman stop complaining the company's reputation will become
better, at least to the really big companies that they want to work with.
Make sense? Shutting down these rogue distributors turned out to be a lot
more difficult than they expected though. When you lose them, your daily
installs go down drastically and the revenue goes to hell. The layoff in
September could be laid directly at the feet of this effort. (And
marketing's constant pressure to upgrade clients to zango from 180SA or
n-case... some people believe the deeper problem was marketing re-messaging
users constantly causing them to get sick of us rather than reducing bad
players.) 

Some really big, potentially very lucrative deals were lost due to 180's rep
(or so I've heard), so it's obviously something that needs to be fixed.
Other initiatives included no longer allowing distributors to write their
own activeX install packages and the current S3 stuff. They are hacking
around all of it of course, but 180 doesn't even get the credit for having
tried. Of cutting off that really big distributor in October(?). According
to the execs they were cut off specifically because they refused to police
their installs and content providers. 180 cut them off to stop those
installs, but all we heard from outside was something about our distributor
network being so corrupt that we should just start over from scratch. (On
the other hand, in a PERFECT example of the omission I mentioned, a few of
us found out about a week later that the distributor in question was about
to be sued, or we were threatened with lawsuit for allowing our software to
be distributed by them... something like that. The story: "We simply cannot
do business with them anymore; they aren't working with us"; reality: "If we
don't stop working with them we're screwed". I was pretty pissed off by the
spin. It supported my decision to leave.) 

As for people not wanting 180 on their machines... opinions vary. If you
believe the actual respondents to the surveys and if you do not cast a
suspicious eye, then something like 60% - 70% of people are happy with us
and the number of users that don't know us or didn't know we are there is
dropping consistently. Stop laughing. This is the kind of number that the BI
or SI team (or whatever acronym they had that week) put out. Yeah, everyone
that really thought it through said 'bullshit'. I think a couple people
actually got offended that they tried pawning that off on us. It wasn't
Keith, but he certainly didn't step up and say 'Guys, this sounds a bit
fanciful to me'. In fairness, we did start a website that allowed people to
enter search phrases directly specifically due to user requests. (back in
2003 I believe) But usually the requests are left in the form of
profanity-filled voicemails and bomb threats. A couple of them I thought
should have been reported to the police... one guys actually threatened to
come to the office with bombs and guns and start blowing people away...most
employees never hear those, however. 

My last thought on this... keep in mind that when you clean a friends
computer and you see 'Zango', what do you tell them about it? Even if they
have no idea what it is because their son installed it to see Sir Mixalot's
website, you tell them 'this stuff is crap, spyware, adware, and slows
you're compute down'. Of course their happy to have it gone... you just
informed them that this is one step oboe a virus and is distributed by
virii. And it may very well be back next week when the mom visits
bettycrocker.com (Or whatever forum site she checks her recipes on). Not
all, or even most, of 180's installs are rogue, most are from people who
just want to access the site and they don't care about some popup that's
easily dismissed with a click on 'yes' or 'accept'. You may not want to
believe that, but I'm just about as suspicious of the company as I can be
(while having good insider knowledge), and I know it's true.... unless there
are so many, many more rogue distributors than anyone comes close to
suspecting. Don't get me wrong... I still got irritated enough to wipe it
off my machine every few months... I didn't want it there either. I also
never visited a website that had content worth installing it to see. 

Jimmy: Being on the technical side of it, I would imagine you've had to
uninstall 180 many times from family and friends pc's, as I have. Got any
good stories there?

ex180: Uninstalls? Yeah. I've taken it off my neighbors computer a couple
times He has three girls and it finally got so bad that I rebuilt his laptop
and installed vmware, then decreed that he was the only person in the house
allowed to use the computer without starting vmware first and surfing from
it. He backed it up and has been happy ever since. 

I remember my first embarrassing experience was my fifth day at the
company... I got a call from a non-technical co-worker at my previous job to
help her uninstall n-case. She knew who I went to work for and it was before
the uninstallation stuff was so widely available on the web. That was
humiliating... I was like, "wow... people warned me about this place before
I came and here's so-and-so needing help to get this crap off her machine".
Ouch. 

It's true that I didn't _really_ know what the company did when I went
there, but I know enough to know that it wouldn't be a retirement gig unless
it went public or started making me rich with pre-ipo stock. I even told my
friends that before I left my last company... two - three year gig, no more.
I was definitely the subject of mockery as a smut peddler (they were just
joking of course, no one was serious), when I left. When I told them I was
leaving I received many 'haha's. 

As for the normal experience of working there... normally it's really just
like any other job. Had it not been for the layoff and my belief that the
company will be going under in the next year, I'd still be there. _Most_ of
the blogs are either filled with so much venom that it's a fanatic, or they
seem to have misconstrued events because they don't have access to the
inside information. I think that 180's PR department really sucks in that
they don't offer complete, and I mean complete, transparency to
non-fanatical bloggers. Let people like you, or others, see the very real
efforts being taken to remove rogue distributors and stop drive-by installs
and maybe they'd get some slack. Maybe when Sean or Keith says "We're really
trying here", the criticism will be less vitriolic. 

Instead they take this arrogant, us-against-them stance that hasn't served
anyone well at all. I think it's understandable if you view the whole
situation and history with emotion, but not productive. That last PR blast
was... unprofessional... in my opinion. 

Jimmy: If you could change 180 yourself, what would it be, how would you
make it better for you all, and for everyone else, or even if you think it's
possible to make it better for users. 

ex180: One of the questions I asked during the interview process way back
when, was if they were going to stick with adware or if they planned on
branching out and having non-ad related income. The answer I received was
that adware (not the word they used), was it. All future projects were
relating to it in some way, and there were no non-advertising products
planned. I was a bit worried about that at the time because I could too
easily see the day when that wouldn't work. I still went with them because I
needed experience doing the job I was interviewing for, but the company
itself has gone in about the direction I envisioned then, though for
different reasons. 

If I were in charge I'd use the capital they currently have (or half as of
about 12 - 18 months ago), to launch a completely different project of some
sort. They were very profitable, had a crap load of developers and a very
solid infrastructure, it was the absolute perfect time to say 'we have our
very own RE-startup capital, so let's re-start'. A iTunes alternative
perhaps for TV shows? (before Apple did it of course, or maybe just in
competition with Apple) That's what I would change. Use the foundation they
have, but branch out in a totally different field that's 'clean'.

I can only hope that Wayne's latest post, here
<http://www.revenews.com/wayneporter/archives/001646.html>  is true and not
an April Fool's joke.

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