Established in 2007, Backblaze has built the world’s lowest cost cloud storage for both consumers and businesses.

On this infrastructure, the company offers unlimited low-cost laptop and desktop cloud backup for users of Windows and Macintosh computers. In 2016, the company expanded its services to cloud object storage with B2 Cloud Storage. B2 competes with Amazon’s S3, but is 1/6th the price. Unlike competing low-cost data storage services, data on B2 is available for immediate download. Its affordable and straightforward pricing plan makes costs clear and predictable. B2 is suitable for a wide range of data storage and retrieval uses due to numerous integrations with third party software and hardware as well as developer APIs.

Roderick Bauer joined Backblaze as Content Director in June of 2017.

Backblaze

Common Cause is a nonpartisan grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. We work to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest; promote equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all; and empower all people to make their voices heard in the political process.

Rod Bauer is a Ford-Mozilla Fellow in Media & Democracy, advocating for a free, open and accessible Internet for all, slowing media consolidation, and transparency in politics and the media.

Common Cause

My portfolio on Medium.com

https://medium.com/@rodbauer

The Bauer Marketing Group excels in helping clients attract, convert, close, and delight their customers through expert content creation, educational offers, blogging, calls-to-action, SEM, and lead nurturing programs.

I’m an Early Adopter. I like to be among the first to try out new products and services. If you were looking for me on the Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle—the bell-shaped curve that’s a favorite of product managers—you’d find me on left side of the curve, just after the truly courageous Innovators but before the onset of the rabble of the Early Majority. (Image below from Wikipedia.)

Being an early adopter means that sometimes I’ve been left in the lurch when a product or service I adopted early failed or was pulled inexplicably from the market. Were you also a user of Pownce, Yahoo Photos, or Google Notebook? Everything has a natural lifecycle, of course, and I have to expect that some of the products I (perhaps too eagerly) embraced will not survive. Since I’m an early adopter, I’m likely to see more products and services fail than other people, who are a bit more conservative and are located farther to the right on the Rogers curve, maybe in Late Majority or even Laggards.

Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle

Recently, however, we’ve seen some products seemingly abandoned by their creators. These vendors have just stopped talking to their customers. As you might guess, this is a bad sign. I compare this to a relationship. Early on, your boyfriend or girlfriend tells you everything about themselves—what they like to eat, their favorite songs, their dreams and the minutiae of their daily lives. Later, if things aren’t working out, you’re lucky to hear if they decide not to show up for a date.

I eagerly purchased the Dash Express last year, an innovative device and service that brought two-way Internet connectivity with live traffic reporting to mobile GPS. Recently however, Dash announced it was discontinuing sales of the Dash Express device to concentrate on licensing their application and service to unnamed device manufacturers. The last post on their blog is dated November 3, 2008. There’s been a flurry of comments asking for more clarification, but Dash has kept mostly mum. I hope for the best but am expecting that soon I will have to select another GPS for my car.

Dash, are you stuck in traffic somewhere?

I use GrandCentral for my business phone number. Their service was extremely promising: a VoIP solution that gave you a number of great services and one phone number in the area code of your choice that could be forwarded almost anywhere. When Google bought them, I thought they would be around for a while. But their last communication on their Web site is dated April 22 of last year saying they are “working hard every day on the next great version of GrandCentral and a ton of cool new features.” Then, nothing.

GrandCentral, you never call.

I haven’t heard from Dash or GrandCentral that they’re pulling the plug, but I’m bracing myself for the news. If good products like Pownce, I Want Sandy, Stikkit, Yahoo! Photos, Google Notebook, and Jaiku can be cut, how do I know what will be next? GrandCentral promised me a phone number “for life.” Truth is, I never really believed that. I still have the checkbook from a defunct California bank that promised me “free checking for life.” They neglected to say that they meant their life.

These are tough economic times and I have to expect that even my favorite vendors will be cutting back on less-than-successful products and services. I understand. I just wish that you would talk to me sometimes, just to tell me what’s going on with you and that you’re still OK. I’ll just sit here by my computer or phone, waiting for your tweet or call or e-mail or SMS telling me we can be friends, even if, you know, we’re not actually together anymore. If you called, you’d probably say that it’s about you, not me. That’s OK. I’ll understand, really I will.

I coached a senior advisor to President Barack Obama to prepare him for a presentation he delivered to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and developers.

The Bauer Marketing Group has worked with leading corporate and non-profit executives, as well as government and education leaders.

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Media Training — Communicating Your Story Through the Press

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Just about every tech leader in Silicon Valley says they admire Steve Jobs, but when it comes to following his lead, where’s the love?

Visit any hacker hangout, tech firm, or investment company in Silicon Valley, and you’re sure to hear people say how much they admire Steve Jobs. They’ll say that he was the most effective CEO, the best innovator, the strongest motivator, the most ruthless negotiator, and the person with the clearest vision in the valley of where tech is going. Sure, he stepped on people’s toes, and sometimes was unfair to coworkers, but what counts is how successful he was, right?

I first met Steve in a humanities seminar at Reed College. We were discussing the Parthenon frieze, and Steve told me my opinion was full of shit. This seventeen-year-old with the shock of scruffy hair, who looked like he had been sleeping on a couch (which he probably was), told me that if I wanted to understand art, I needed to get out in the world. He was shaming me to reject received ideas and to think for myself, and he seemed willing to kick my ass to get me to do it.

It is this attitude that Jobs turned into a creed and brand at Apple, epitomized by the “To the crazy ones” commercial and the famous 1984 launch ad for the Macintosh. It is easy to admire and pay lip service to Steve Jobs’ rebel image, but why do so few in the valley today follow Steve’s lead, and why are his most important lessons largely ignored by the people who claim to admire him?

Lesson #1 — Creating great products requires patience

Steve was known to chasten product teams with instructions to chuck everything and start over. The cost was high to Apple, but the result was that Apple succeeded when others failed. Microsoft had tablet hardware and software years before Apple, but it took Apple’s iPad to make the category mainstream. Other companies may offer more features in their products, and release them sooner, but user satisfaction studies show that consumers often prefer Apple’s solutions.

In an era when most follow the lean doctrine of releasing a product early, and letting the market dictate product direction, Steve spent time refining the product internally until he felt it was ready to release. That requires time that most companies don’t want, or can’t afford to invest. Steve’s approach took vision—and yes, arrogance— to think he knew better than others, plus the willingness to look beyond the horizon and envision products that customers did not know they needed yet.

Lesson #2 — Think big

What would Steve think of today’s timorous innovators creating the umpteenth find-your-friends app, social sharing site, or cloud storage solution? For every Elon Musk who makes tackling three big, crazy ideas before breakfast seem easy, there are thousands of others who come to the valley to launch any project that an investor will put money into, worthwhile or not. Steve dared to shake things up, and thinking small was not part of his character.

Lesson #3 — Focus on your strengths

Many admire how successfully Steve cut projects and saved Apple when he returned as interim CEO in 1997. Steve learned a few things while he was exiled from Apple, and when he returned he focused the company on what Apple was good at and would attract customers back to the company. That required knowing his own and his company’s strengths and weaknesses, and understanding Apple’s customers. Yet, we still see companies squander energy and resources in too many directions. They should revisit 1997 and learn from Steve’s example.

Lesson #4 — Think different

When it comes to people per square mile trying to profit from others’ success, Silicon Valley rivals the heydays of the California Gold Rush. You can’t throw a USB flash drive in the Valley without hitting someone who wants to advise you, mentor you, teach you to code or pitch, or tighten up your growth hacking skills. Steve would tell you that listening to others is the route to mediocrity. You can’t “think different” when you’re taking your lead from the same people as everyone else.

Lesson #5 — Technology by itself is not enough

This is where we in Silicon Valley most fail Steve. Steve was a college dropout, but he valued learning and culture, and applied what he knew of music, calligraphy, design, and architecture to projects at Apple.

Today, young programmers and entrepreneurs in the valley are encouraged to drop out of college, or not pursue higher education at all, so they can focus all their attention on writing code or learning how to run a company. What value is Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Manet to someone who spends twenty hours a day on a computer? Apple’s products are beautiful to many because they are not only useful, but strive for something transcendent in their design and concept. The products might not always achieve that, but the effort reminds people of their own dreams.

As Steve said at the iPad 2 launch in March of 2011, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology, married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

If Steve were around today, he’d kick our ass.

White Paper: The Silent Battlefield — America’s Alarming Vulnerability to Cyber Attack

PDF: The Silent Battlefield

The Bauer Group has provided speeches and presentations to leaders throughout the world. Our clients include:

• Bill Gates
• A senior advisor to President Barack Obama
• Perugina S.p.A.
• Adobe
• Profium Oy
• Ulead Systems