#they can be differentiated and i think most of those complaints come from folks who don't like alicent anyway

[alicentzwaitinglady]

alicent's relationship with her mother is so special to me. it's alicent praying to feel closer to alerie and wearing blues when she's sad or feels like nothing is going well. it's the flower embroidery on them. gods i love alerie florent and the way she haunts the hightower/targaryen family. gwayne speaking of being motherless at 8yrs old bc that's when they probably left for king's landing. otto speaking of her with such fondness and not marrying after her death.

[ibijau]

Wrote some more Concubine NHS, this time the first meeting :3

The banquet, of course, is perfect.

Nie Huaisang has never been one to settle for anything less than perfection, and he knows tonight is important. Not necessarily for his father, nor for the guests (it’s just the Jiangs and they are old allies who hardly need to be wooed and impressed anymore). But for Nie Huaisang himself it is a chance to finally prove himself. He organised this whole thing after all, his very first time being given such a responsibility, although not the last one if his father is satisfied with his work. 

And so, Nie Huaisang does his best to ensure everyone has a wonderful time. He ordered for Lord and Lady Jiang’s favourite dishes to be prepared, he made sure the entertainers know songs that even the ever grumpy Jiang Cheng will enjoy, he takes care to have special food arranged for Jiang Yanli whose health demands it. He even brought a certain wine that Wei Wuxian favours, because while he is of unclear status, it always pays to please him. Besides, between children of servants, they need to stick together. Wei Wuxian's status is lesser than Nie Huaisang’s, but their situations remain at once similarly precarious and likely to rise if they play things well. 

The banquet goes fine. Sure there is a downpour outside, but even that can’t ruin it. Nobody has any serious complaints, Lord Nie half smiles at Nie Huaisang when Lord Jiang compliments the wine they’re being served.

They are starting on desserts when Madam Yu asks to see a certain blade that Nie Mingjue took from a defeated Wen general some weeks before during one of their incursions. Lord Nie is of course only too happy to show off the proof of his son's military skills, and since Nie Mingjue is still absent, he sends Nie Huaisang to retrieve the weapon. 

Although he would never admit it, it's something of a relief to get away from the banquet, even just for a moment. It's an honour to have been put in charge, but it's a damn pain in the ass as well. He'd rather be free to drink and laugh with Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, but… such is life. 

As he walks toward his brother's quarters, Nie Huaisang notices a certain agitation among the servants and the soldiers. It's odd, but he blames it on the presence of guests, on the rumours of the Wen preparing another attack. Word is an army will be raised for a proper campaign soon, and that Nie Mingjue took the young Emperor to the frontier so he will understand the situation, grant them funds and men.

War is unpleasant but necessary. Hopefully now that he has come of age, his Highness will ditch the pacifism prescribed by his advisors and give his full help to those who guard his frontiers. Nie Mingjue, who spent part of his childhood away in the imperial palace as a companion for the throne’s heir, is hard at work to make sure his Highness understands how the real world works. 

Sometimes, Nie Huaisang is half bitter that a stranger got to have his brother more than he did, but… even at seventeen he understands politics, he knows some things can’t be helped. And once the war is over at last, Nie Mingjue will be rich and covered in glory, and he’ll come home for good.

Distracted by thoughts of a happy future, Nie Huaisang barges into his brother’s bedroom without care for his manners, convinced it will be empty. 

It is not, in fact, empty.

Nie Huaisang freezes for a second at the sight of a young man standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, wet and dirty from the heavy rains, wearing mismatched robes, one of which Nie Huaisang recognises as one of his brother’s. He looks shocked to see Nie Huaisang, but not scared or worried and shows no sign that he doesn’t think he has every right to be there. In spite of his pitiful look, he exudes grace and elegance in that particular way people from the capital do.

As soon as he recovers from his surprise, Nie Huaisang smiles and bows very low.

“This humble servant is sorry to disturb this lord,” he says. “I was not aware a guest was present. May I be allowed to finish my errand? Of course, only if it pleases Young Master…”

“Lan,” the young man informs him.

Well, Nie Huaisang could have bet on that one. There’s a certain look to members of the imperial family. He’s seen a few over the years, either guests of his father or friends Nie Mingjue made while away, and there’s this… there’s something about them that differentiates them from other folks. A touch heaven, Nie Huaisang might say publicly or if he feels kind, although in private he would tell his brother it’s mostly a touch of self importance.

“Young Master Lan, may I go about my business? I won’t disturb you long.”

“You may,” the young man allows in a tone that makes it sound like a great kindness done to Nie Huaisang. “Did Young Master Nie send you?”

So Nie Mingjue is back. That explains the agitation of the servants, Nie Huaisang figures as he starts searching the room for that sword. It’s likely that nobody will care about it anymore, not if Nie Mingjue and the damn Emperor have joined the banquet, but Nie Huaisang needs to obey orders. He has to find that sword and quickly go back to make sure his banquet is still going well, that he won’t be scolded for preparing something that isn’t worthy of the Emperor’s unexpected arrival. 

“I did not know my brother had returned,” he answers with as much cheer as he can when his mind is racing in every direction at once. “I was sent by Lord Nie to retrieve something. My apologies for disturbing Young Master Lan, I will try to be quick.”

“Oh! Are you Nie Huaisang?”

There is a touch of excitement to the young man’s voice that stops Nie Huaisang on his tracks. That, or the surprise that anyone might have heard about him. His father has only recently legitimised him, and sometimes they still get guests asking who he is.

“That would be me, Young Master Lan. This humble servant is honoured that you have heard about them. But of course, Young Master Lan must be close to Young Master Nie, or he would not be wearing his robes when they do not match with anything else of his.”

That did not come out the way Nie Huaisang intended, and he starts panicking when the young man gapes at him, shocked by the insult to his fashion choices. It’s not… Nie Huaisang didn’t mean to mock anyone, but sometimes his mouth works quicker than his brain. He’s been scolded for it more than once by his father, although Nie Mingjue tends to find him funny.

Apparently, the young master in front of him agrees with his brother. He lets out a soft huff of laughter, which coming from an imperial relative is the equivalent of a roaring, crying laugh.

“It is not… the most elegant,” Young Master Lan admits. “There was a little trouble on the way, I found myself forced to borrow from a few people.”

Looking closer, Nie Huaisang can tell that indeed, some of the barely visible inner layers also don’t quite match. It gives the young man a funny air, making him look a little more human than most imperial relatives he’s met so far.

“There’s always trouble if you’re with Nie Mingjue,” Nie Huaisang states, resuming his search for that stupid sword. Why can’t his brother be organised? “If he can’t find it, he’ll make it. Were you part of that expedition to the border, then? Ah! Sorry, I suppose I should not ask that. Please forgive this humble servant for his curiosity.”

The young man only smiles, which is something Nie Huaisang thought wasn’t allowed to members of the imperial family. They’re always stern, even the few children he’s seen. But of course, if this one is close enough to Nie Mingjue to have been told about his bastard brother, he’s got to be different from the rest.

“It’s fine,” Young Master Lan assures him. “Yes, I was on the border with your brother. He went to notify Lord Nie of our arrival, I believe.”

“Uh, I wonder if I really should bother looking for that sword,” Nie Huaisang mutters to himself. “Father will probably drop the Jiangs and want to talk with the Emperor.”

“He most certainly will,” Young Master Lan replies, his smile dropping. “War has become… unavoidable.”

Nie Huaisang startles. It’s one thing to have heard rumours of a campaign, and there’s been skirmishes for years of course, but a full war… He hopes Nie Mingjue will be safe, that they won’t lose too many men, that they can really win this. The Wens are terrifying opponents, or so he’s been told. He’s never yet been allowed to join his brother on the border, although he expects he won’t escape it much longer. Another downside to being legitimised.

“You should not share such information so lightly,” Nie Huaisang distractedly scolds the young man, searching more feverishly for the sword. He wants to return to the banquet, he wants to see Nie Mingjue, he wants to grab this last moment of peace before everything explodes. “Young Master Lan, only his Highness can announce war, and if such a thing is to happen, we will want to avoid rumours, won’t we?”

At last, Nie Huaisang finds that damned blade, hidden in a corner under a pile of junk. So much for it being a prized spoil of war. Though in fairness, now that he sees it, he can’t blame Nie Mingjue. The quality of that sword is shockingly low, no matter how fancy it tries to look. It’s shameful, and a general with such a bad weapon deserved to be defeated.

Having found what he came for, Nie Huaisang looks back at Young Master Lan to find him staring at him, smiling once more. There’s something almost mischievous to his expression and it makes him look… Handsome isn’t quite the right word, because like all imperial relatives this young man is handsome by default, but there’s something about that smile that catches Nie Huaisang’s attention more than it should.

If not for his father and their guests waiting and the looming threat of war, Nie Huaisang would be tempted to stay and gaze at the young man a little longer.

But life is what it is, and Nie Huaisang isn’t stupid enough to waste time that way. Father is already likely to scold him for taking so long. So he bows again to the young man, just as low as before, and smiles.

“I must now take my leave, Young Master Lan. Apologies once more for disturbing you.”

“You did not disturb me in the least,” Young Master Lan replies, sounding shockingly earnest. “I understand you are busy, or else I might have asked you to stay longer. I hope we can meet again someday.”

“Young Master Lan honours me! I would love nothing more, truly. Perhaps if someday my father sends me to the capital… but that is unlikely. Still, I am pleased beyond words that my company pleased you. May I retire now?”

That mischievous smile on the young man’s face grows a little more impish, as if he knows something Nie Huaisang does not. It’s a little worrying now, but Nie Huaisang does not dwell on it. As soon as Young Master Lan allows it, he leaves the room and dashes back to the main halls. Just as he feared, he gets scolded for the delay, but that is quickly forgotten when Madam Yu, Lord Jiang and Lord Nie start criticising the sword he brought. Then, after a few more moments, Nie Mingjue finally joins them and with that, the banquet is over. 

Lord Nie and Lord Jiang disappear together with Nie Mingjue, never mentioning the Emperor. This leaves Nie Huaisang to accompany the rest of the Jiang family to their quarters for the night. Once their guests are settled, Nie Huaisang goes to check on the servants, give orders for cleaning up and for how to handle breakfast. 

It unsettles him that he still doesn’t officially know that the Emperor is in their home because he can’t give any order about that, and it’s going to be a mess in the morning if he cannot provide the required fineries, but he also cannot alert to his Highness’s presence in case it is meant to remain secret for the time being. 

When at last Nie Huaisang gets to climb into his bed, he wraps himself tightly in his blankets and longs for sleep, in vain. The future feels both too vague and too clear all at once now that war is certain.

All he can do is hope that they will come out of it victorious, and that the cost to his family will not be too great.

[thaumaturtles]

Epilogue Thoughts

So, I finished the epilogues at around 11 AM on 4/21 and spent the better part of today mulling over it internally. Overall, I think I liked ‘em. Don’t get me wrong, they were brutal and tragic and ripped my heart out, but this is my garbage and I’m allowed to enjoy it. I was planning on liveblogging the epilogues but constantly pausing to jot down my feelings detracted from the overall experience. This is probably gonna be pretty scattershot, since I have neither the ability nor the desire to order my thoughts properly. Now, without any further preamble, let’s get into it.

Jane

 A lot of people said they didn’t like the treatment of Jane in the epilogues, and, fair enough, she was pretty awful and Crocker stans have every right to be pissed. But to anyone saying it came out of left field or didn’t make sense, I’d have to disagree (for the most part). Jane was brainwashed by the Condesce for the first 16 years of her life, and we see the effects of this when she goes Crockertier. She’d almost certainly have baked-in presumptions about how trolls were “meant to be” (ie super violent) even before she was consciously aware that trolls as a race existed. Jane was also always really in denial about having been brainwashed by the Condesce and I can definitely see adult Jane flat-out refusing to do any self-analysis and just assume there are no remaining effects of the brainwashing and she’s “totally cured” now or whatever. Jane’s also not super progressive? Like the conversation where she discovers Dirk has a crush on Jake and that Jake might even reciprocate was pretty uncomfortable to experience, and she starts a business on Earth C even though there’s no real need for corporations in a world with infinite resources. This shows that she’s still stuck in the belief that capitalism is inherently good/necessary for no reason other than “it’s what i grew up with.” All in all I could totally see Jane as someone who’d grow up to become xenophobic and have this colonizer mentality of “I have to regulate the Other because they’re not capable of functioning without me”

As for the non-consensual/rapey stuff... I’m actually not gonna touch that shit with a six-foot pole. The narrative is very explicit in the fact that Jane is an abusive partner and what she’s doing Is Bad, but like if she’s your favourite character you probably aren’t going to be all gung ho about seeing her do all the things that she did, which were admittedly very upsetting to read. I completely understand if you couldn’t read past those parts because they were pretty rough.

The Epilogues do get pretty unpleasant to read though :/

The Epilogues are highly antagonistic towards Homestuck’s readers. This is a fact. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to interpretation, but it is at the very least not a new thing. Listen to Kate Mitchell of the Perfectly Generic Podcast and YouTuber OptimisticDuelist for more in-depth analysis than I could possibly provide on this, but one of Lord English’s greatest weapons is his ability to get people not to care about Homestuck, or even better, to revile it. That’s what the aspect of Rage represents: Plot Contrivance. As Karkat says,

THERE ARE OUTCOMES THAT ARE EVEN WORSE THAN THE COMPLETE ANNIHILATION OF EXISTENCE ITSELF. FORCES MORE DAMAGING TO THE INTEGRITY OF REALITY THAN THOSE CAPABLE OF TURNING IMAGINATION INTO PURE VOID. THEY ARE FORCES WHICH IF HANDLED RECKLESSLY WILL NULLIFY THE BASIC ABILITY OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS IN ALL REAL AND HYPOTHETICAL PLANES OF EXISTENCE TO GIVE A SHIT.

This is repeated, by Hussie himself no less, later on during his smug self-insert, found here. After Hussie dies and loses control of the narrative, LE is free to try his hardest to get you, the reader, not to give a shit. Rose, in the Epilogue’s Prologue, says that if people stop caring about Homestuck, reality as they know it will break apart, which is exactly in line with LE’s plans. So the fact that the Epilogues are very hostile towards the reader is basically par for the course. That said, I can see how it kinda sounds like I’m being all “oh it’s SUPPOSED to be shitty you wouldn’t underSTAND,” but that’s. literally what’s happening. and there’s evidence for it in the text.

Of course, in the past, when the narrative would pull things like this it would be under the guise of, say, Homosuck, which is very obviously meant to be bad and is presented in a fun, satirical way. The Epilogues, on the other hand, are downright upsetting. They’re presented in a much grittier light, which can obfuscate to what degree it’s Actually A Joke, if it even is a joke in any capacity. The fact that they’re tragic, though, should not be seen as evidence that they’re bad.

Some stuff I Liked

Both routes had some really top-notch interactions in them. A lot of folks seem to be overlooking how genuinely good the writing was. I said the phrase, “they’ve still got it” ALOUD to myself once or twice because the dialogue really did have that good ole Homestuck Charm. The Dave/Karkat/Jade interactions early on in Candy (before everything went to shit) were pretty great, as was basically everything that came out of English’s mouth. I dunno who the Antiquities Consultant was, but they did an excellent job at mirroring Jake’s usual speech pattern. I find that a lot of people, when writing Jake, just kinda throw in as many random old-timey words as possible and as a result it feels kinda disjointed, but the writing team for the epilogues managed to make him feel very... would light be a good way to put it? Sort of airheaded I guess. Just very goofy idk

We got to see Rosemary and they were married and raised a kid and it was the best! Rose was really well-written, as was Kanaya; I really loved seeing those personalities balance each other out again. It was nice to see them be good parents in the Candy-verse. The Vriska they raised was such a fucking scamp too! It was nice to see a Vriska who had a positive home environment but still had that same spunk

Also, Dave. Just, all of Dave. He was really solidly written throughout the whole thing. I fucking love his interest in the economy holy shit. I got to hear Dave Strider say the phrase  “neoliberal austerity measures.” That’s the best. “Economically Aware Anti-capitalist Dave” is rivaled only by “Karkat (True Leftism)”. I’ve seen a few complaints that Dave’s interest in the economy was also OOC, but for one thing he’s an adult and can cultivate new interests if he likes, and for another Dave is a pretty clever kid, and very numerically-minded. (Is that a term? I mean he’s good at maths and such). Don’t forget, not only did he manage to accumulate all the wealth on LOCAH in the span of three days by taking over their stock markets, but he also used the hash map modus in his day to day life, showing that he was able to do calculations in his head as quick as breathing. As shown here, the hash map modus is pretty complex and requires you to come up with a word that has the same value as the thing you wanna use in order to use it. That’s not easy to do on a dime and yet he uses it in his rooftop battles with Bro. All of this is to say, he’d certainly learn to be very good at economics if he wasn’t already. It just suits him.

Oh and I also love that Dave still makes SBaHJ and Karkat has a bunch of sockpuppet accounts he uses to defend Dave’s honour. it’s very cute.

Karkat also had some lines in the epilogues damn. I hadn’t realized how starved I was of VantasRage until I read a few of his rants. Also we finally got to see Badass Rebel Leader Karkat and he’s just as great as we all knew he’d be

The davekat kiss in Meat was great too. It was very gratifying to see after all the narrative cockblocking that went down in Candy.

John realizing in the Candy universe that he isn’t responsible for everything and that they’re all still just people with their own autonomy was good. Much as I have problems with the Candy universe on a whole I liked this specifically.

Also, roxygen! I love roxy/callie as much as the next guy but John and Roxy were very cute near the end of the comic and I liked seeing them grow up and have a kid. John names his son after the guy from Night Court because he’s a massive dweeb. Love it.

We got some great Terezi writing as well. The johnrezi at the end of Meat was nicely written and made me feel a whole host of emotions despite me not even having shipped them that hard beforehand.

OH MY GOD THE OBAMA SHIT. I almost forgot to put this in because I was focused on other stuff but my word the whole Obama Situation was beautiful I loved every second of it. It was so over-the-top in the best way and it simultaneously carried airs of being So Serious And Important To The Narrative and being just the dumbest load of crap. I loved it so much

Also, I was very happy with Roxy and Callie coming out. Roxy talking about how he’d already come out as dating an alien with a green skull for a head and how it felt like maybe he was being “selfish” by also wanting to come out as trans was a great illustration of something that already-out LGB people often feel when realizing they don’t identify with their assigned gender. Additionally, Calliope coming to terms with the fact that they don’t have to identify as female just to further differentiate themselves from Caliborn was great. It really helped to show how far they’d come from just being Caliborn’s foil into being their own person. However, this leads into:

Some stuff I didn’t like

Speaking of Roxy and Callie’s transition, Dirk also came out. As a transphobe. Which was disappointing, to say the least. He made a point of misgendering Roxy as often as possible and was pretty dismissive towards NB people when he learned about Calliope’s identity. (You could make an argument that Dirk is being thoughtless by misgendering Roxy and not intentionally malicious, but I don’t see Dirk as the kind of guy who slips up very often. He’s very careful with language.) I always headcanoned Dirk as trans, as I’m sure most people did, so having him just up and become transphobic was kind of the worst. I intend to talk about Epilogue!Dirk a lot more in a later post but yeah. Not a fan.

EDIT: I’ve thought about the Dirk thing a little more and he does eventually start calling Roxy by the correct pronouns, albeit in kind of a “see see look at how openminded im being youre such a manly dudely stud bro” way. Dirk’s initial discomfort with Roxy and Callie’s identity more comes from his own egotistical belief that he should have already known about it than it does from genuine animosity. That aside, he does still say “She probably would have loved being a “they” when she was a teen,” which sorta rubs me the wrong way. I might just be being oversensitive though.

Also, in the Meat universe, Rose and Kanaya split up! I’m very upset about that. Ultimate Power be damned, I want happy, married lesbians! It sucks that we either have Rosemary OR Davekat but not both

On the topic of davekat, Jade really got done dirty by both Epilogues, huh? She was used as a narrative device in one and was an intrusive presence in the lives of Dave and Karkat in the other. TBH I was never a fan of davekatjade for a lot of reasons but I would have preferred they be in a happy poly relationship than what actually happened in Candy.

Actually, the only two polyamorous relationships in the Epilogues both turned out awfully. I doubt any of the writing staff had anything against poly people; I’m sure it was just a coincidence but either way it’s pretty unfortunate. I have a bit to say about this but this is running too long as is.

Gamzee

Fucking Gamzee.

Unanswered Questions

Will there be any further updates? I sure hope there will, because the ending was not very satisfying and creates more questions than it answers. I can sort of see where it might be going but they left way too much up in the air and it feels very much like it’s unfinished. V has referred to it as “the whole thing” on twitter, so it might be finished for good, but i really hope it isn’t

Why did Rose say the session they’re creating will be the most important session of SBURB ever played? Why couldn’t they play it on Earth C? Surely Earth C’s inhabitants would be more used to seeing alien life forms and would know the basics of SBURB, thus making it more likely for them to survive it. Why go to the trouble of seeding a whole new planet? I’m curious.

Can a character be said to be “Out Of Character” if the character’s own creator wrote those actions? What if they passed on the actual writing to someone else but still had to verify it themselves? What does OOC even mean? Does it mean “this doesn’t fit my headcanon” or “there is no evidence for this” or “the author wouldn’t write them like this”? If it’s the last one, can an author merely saying “this interpretation is correct” absolve ANY action from being deemed OOC? I like that I’m being made to think about this kind of thing now

To what degree is each universe truly “Canon”? I’m aware that Candy lost its canon-ness when John decided not to fight LE, but the two universes are intrinsically linked: we see characters from one universe travel to another and it’s implied that Terezi has spoken to both Johns. How canon is Meat, even? Are either of them even still bound by the need to be part of the Alpha Timeline anymore, since Lord English has been created? What does anything mean?

Final Musings

I understand completely if you don’t like the epilogues. Maybe you think they’re too dark. Maybe you just don’t agree with portrayals of the characters. Maybe you hate that they gave jade a fucking tail when she never had one in the main comic. There certainly were bits of it that I wasn’t a fan of, but there are also parts I really wanna go draw fanart of right now. I like the Epilogues, but if I write fanfic or make dumb joke posts about Earth C, I’m probably gonna ignore large swaths of it (such as, I’ll probably keep both John and Dirk alive, and make them kiss a lot)

There has been a great deal of vitriol directed specifically at Hussie about the epilogues despite the fact that other people worked on them. It’s difficult to take these criticisms in good faith when so many people are blaming solely Hussie. I’m aware that he had total control over actual plot elements and wrote a bit of dialogue, but the bulk of the actual text was written by V. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people’s attitudes towards the epilogues are very much like the general attitude towards Act 7 when it first came out. I’ll admit, I left the Homestuck fandom in like 2014 and didn’t return until mid-2017, but people’s Jimmies were definitely still Rustled even then. There was a general atmosphere of “I hate Hussie, and you should too! The ending was bad and no one asked for it!” but as time went on, and people started analyzing the ending and making meta posts about it, everyone sort of grew acclimated to the ending. Suddenly, the general consensus was that Homestuck was Good Again Finally and the ending was Amazing and The Fandom Loved It. I feel like maybe that sort of thing’s gonna happen again with the Epilogues. I really hope that, as it continues to update (if it does), everyone will sort of chill out about it

[bronzeflower]

Who The Fuck Writes A Ten-Page Rant?????

Chapter 19: A Big Ol’ Birthday Party

Given that it was kind of ridiculous to try and wrap a goddamn coffee table, you just woke up earlier to replace the old coffee table with the new coffee table.

You were feeling a little anxious while wondering if Kanaya would like your gift, but you tried to rationalize it because you worked hard on that coffee table and Kanaya hated the old coffee table. She would definitely love your gift.

You ignored your worries by starting to cook some of Kanaya’s favorite meals-cluckbeast eggs made over easy with grubsauce, along with spicy sausages and toasted baguette bread with raspberry jam.

You did you best to cook the meal, but the over easy eggs turned out a little more over medium, and the sausages turned out a little burnt, but the bread turned out well, and you didn’t manage to burn that at all, which you were very proud of.

You put the meal on a plate with some jam and grubsauce on the side along with a glass of orange juice. You brought it to the table, where you made yourself a similar meal so that Kanaya wouldn’t feel bad about getting special treatment.

You added some flowers to the vase on the table and went to go wake Kanaya up. You honestly would rather let her sleep, but she hated sleeping in and she was really excited to set up her party.

So you went to her room, carefully opening the door and tiptoeing over the Kanaya's recuperacoon, where Kanaya was sleeping peacefully and somehow wasn’t woken up by all the pots and pans that were banging around in the kitchen while you were cooking.

“Hey, Kanaya,” You whispered as softly as you could which honestly wasn’t all that soft. “Wake up, I’ve made breakfast.”

Kanaya opened her eyes kind of blearily, blinked a few times, and looked a bit more awake after that.

“You made breakfast?” Kanaya asked, her voice a little groggy and rough from sleep. “I will rid myself of the slime currently covering me and get dressed before joining you.”

“Alright,” You left the room and put the last few finishing touches on breakfast and the table.

Kanaya soon entered the eating block. She was wearing her pajamas, which trolls don’t actually need, but they function as pretty comfortable clothing. Kanaya would probably change for the party, but, for now, comfy.

“This looks lovely,” Kanaya said as she sat down at the table.

“I did my best,” You responded, allowing Kanaya to start eating before you dug in so that you could see her reaction.

Kanaya went for the sausage first.

“How is it?” You asked a little nervously, hoping that you didn’t fuck up completely.

“Tasty,” Kanaya answered, and you felt pretty much all worries fall to the wayside.

The both of you ate your respective meals in relative silence, absorbed the food and the comfort of the atmosphere, both of you completely comfortable with the other’s company.

The food was better than you expected-the eggs weren’t burned, just cooked a little more than you meant to. The burned part of the sausages gave them a little extra flavor, and, of course, the toast tasted the way toast should taste. Obviously, the things that were sore-bought like the grubsauce, jam, and orange juice all tasted delicious as well.

Overall, it was a very nice breakfast.

Kanaya helped you clean up despite your protests that she shouldn’t be doing work on her birthday. But she insisted, so you begrudgingly allowed her to help out.

“Are you ready to get everything prepared for the party?” Kanaya asked after you were finished doing the dishes.

“One second, I have to give you your gift first. Or, well, show it to you because it was a little too big to properly wrap up and hand to you in any kind of practical way,” You said. “So, like, just kind of follow me to where I put your gift.”

“Alright, lead the way.” You guided Kanaya over to the living room and sort of dramatically gestured to the coffee table that you spruced up.

“You replaced the coffee table!” Kanaya exclaimed. “And the new one matches the decor! Oh, Karkat, this is beautiful. Thank you.”

“You flushed from the praise, and, feeling a bit bashful, muttered out a ‘no problem.’

After showing the gift, you and Kanaya began decorating for the party.

The both of you had previously picked out ‘Birthday Party’ decorations, which included streamers, balloons, fake animal corpses, and passive-aggressive signs telling people to clean up after themselves. Some of the decorations were more traditional for Wriggling Day parties, but that didn't really matter all that much because it was Kanaya’s party, and she could decorate in whatever way she chooses.

So you put the colorful streamers up, and you put balloons in random places along with the fake animal corpses. The passive aggressive were taped onto trash cans and tables, with particular attention paid to the snack table for those people who exclusive hang out by the snack table and then refuse to clean up after themselves.

After you and Kanaya decorated, the two of you started working on the food. You filled the snack table with cupcakes and salads and grubslices and potato chips and many other options, along with a large punch bowl in the center that someone would almost certainly spike with something. Because people loved to get trashed, regardless of the sign that said “If You Spike The Punch I Will Divide You In Half With A Chainsaw,” which was more aggressive than passive-aggressive, but that never stopped people from spiking the punch.

The main variable would be whether the punch was spiked with soda or alcohol. Probably both, if enough people decided that they wanted to get trashed. If a person gets too trashed though, you were going to kick them out. However, you did add a drink cooler in case people didn’t want to risk the punch.

The cake, of course, was kept in a separate spot from the snack table so that a big reveal could occur.

Soon, one person arrived. Then another and another and another until the party was in full swing. Many of Kanaya’s business associates were there, along with friends and friends of friends. Basically, there were lots of people that you did and didn’t know.

You opted to go talk to some people you did know, and you saw two people that you knew.

It was Stelsa, a fashion designer known for her unique and bold fabric and color choices, and Tagora, Kanaya’s textile supplier.

“Karkat! It’s been a long, long while! Why don’t you come chat with us?” Stelsa yelled. You liked her because she, too, had absolutely no volume control.

“Hey, Stelsa. Hello, Tagora,” You greeted, and Tagora offered a sleazy smile your way. He was a little weird, but he made the best quality and most ethnically-made textiles out there, which was part of the reason why his prices were so high.

“Greetings, Mr. Vantas. A pleasure to meet you once again,” Tagora said.

“Oh, cut the shit,” You rolled your eyes. “I already see you basically monthly to get new textiles from you. I’m pretty sure we’re far past these sorts of fake-as-fuck pleasantries.”

“Oh, wow, you’re much nicer when you’re at work,” Tagora pointed out.

“No shit, you soggy pile of cheese. I know about basic fucking decency.”

“Doesn’t seem like you know about ‘basic fucking decency' based on your current interactions.”

“Oh, go fuck your kismesis.”

Tagora blushed a bright teal. You knew that he does actually have a kismesis, and they’ve been in a committed relationship for a long while. You have heard many complaints about him, and it validates your skill in helping people with their relationships.

“Hey! Stop fighting!” Stelsa ordered. “I thought you two were friends!”

“We are,” You and Tagora chimed together.

“It’s just a friendship where we insult each other a lot,” You explained, and Tagora nodded.

“It’s completely platonic. After all, I am currently in a very committed black relationship,” Tagora said.

“Well, I know that, Tagora. Why do you think I was so concerned that you were suddenly fighting with Karkat of all people, who has been nothing but kind to me.”

“Stelsa, I really don’t feel that way about you,” Tagora mentioned, causing Stelsa to blush from embarrassment.

“I don’t feel that way either! I was just making sure you didn’t feel black for Karkat!”

“I don’t, no offense, Karkat.”

“Some taken,” You responded. You figured it was about time to stop this argument, although it was basically done already, so you said bye and wandered around to look for other people to greet.

You found Kanaya talking to Lanque Bombyx, who was one of the most famous models out there. Honestly, at this point, this almost felt like a networking event rather than a Birthday Party. Also, Lanque was kind of dramatic. All the time.

Regardless, you decided to go over to the two in order to join in the conversation.

“Kanaya, Lanque, how’s it going?” You asked.

“It’s going well,” Kanaya responded. “Lanque and I were just discussing classic literature with each other.”

“Which classic literature?” You LOVED classic literature. While you would always prefer your romance novels, there’s something special about those books you read and analyzed while in high school. And you absolutely believed that analysis was important to learn because it assisted in critical thinking skills which are necessary for the world of today.

“We’re talking about the Great Gatsby,” Lanque answered. “I’m quite interested in the fashion of the book, and how it’s used to illustrate the downfall of the wealthy.”

“And how the fashion is also used to differentiate between old money and new money?” You said, fully prepared to have an extensive conversation about the motifs used in the Great Gatsby.

“Hey, folks, mind if I steal this cranky boy way?” Terezi showed up, grabbed you, and you were suddenly whisked out of the conversation.

“Hey!” You yelled. “I was in the middle of a conversation!”

“Well, it’s done now,” Terezi responded. “Also, we need to get to a dark corner because I wasn’t really invited to this party.”

“Terezi, practically no one had an invitation to the party. That’s why we always set out a bunch more than we think we need for the folks we invited just because so many fucking people arrive because they see that we’re having a goddamn party and decide to just let themselves in.”

“Kanaya always invites the most stuffy people though. Her parties always feel like a networking event before all the uninvited people come,” Terezi reasoned. “I’m just making the party a bit more interesting by being here.”

“Did you spike the punch?”

“What! No! I would never do that!” Terezi grinned. “The punch was already spiked before I got here. The only thing I did was bring a date. Speaking of which, I should probably go find her.”

“What was the actual point of dragging me over here if you’re just going to run off anyway?”

“You looked hungry,” Terezi cackled as she shoved some random snacks into your arms before running off to find presumably Nepeta.

Slightly pissed off, you awkwardly but angrily open a chip bag and munched on the chips with as much fury as you could muster.

You slowly became less angry as you ate, and you realized that you were actually kind of hungry. You took a minute to wonder if Terezi was pale flirting with you or if she was just concerned for your health like any good friend would be. Or if she was actually going to tell you something then panicked last minute.

“Hey, Karkat, watcha doing all the way over here in the dark corner by the snack bar?” Dave snuck up on you while you were deep in thought, and your bones almost escaped from the skin and muscle surrounding them.

You took a moment to realize it was only Dave before you responded to his question.

“Terezi sentenced me to this corner to eat snacks because I apparently ‘looked hungry,’” Your finger quotes were done pretty awkwardly because of the amount of snacks that you were still holding. “Here, have a few. I don’t think I can actually eat all that she gave me, and also all of this is kind of getting difficult to hold.”

You shoved a few snacks into Dave’s arms, and he seemed to get a bit redder than usual.

“Are you sick?” You asked. “You seem a little red.”

“You put the snacks you were holding onto one arm and held the back of your free hand to Dave’s forehead. His face became redder, and you almost saw the sweat going down his face.

“Ah, no, no, I mean, no, I’m not sick. At least, I’m not aware if I am. I feel pretty fine. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only thing sick about me is my sick beats,” Dave rambled. “It’s probably just because it’s really warm in here. There are so many people in here, you know? Lots of people, lots of body heat, who wouldn’t be feeling a little hot in here?”

Dave attempted to fan himself but failed due to the snacks in his arms.

“I can show you a place with fewer people if you're really that warm,” You said, even though you could see Dave's bullshit one hundred miles away. Despite this, you still thought he would appreciate getting out of the crowd.

“Yes, please,” Dave responded, and you guided him over to your own room which was locked to prevent random people from going in there and having sex. You certainly remembered one of the first times you didn't lock your door at one of these parties. You shuddered at the thought and locked the door behind you and Dave.

You dumped the unopened snacks into the desk and sat down on the bed. Dave also placed the snacks in the desk, but he turned the desk chair around and sat in it.

“So,” Dave began but failed to say anything after that.

“Yeah?” You encouraged. You could hear the music from the party blaring outside the room, along with the multitude of people conversing, but your room muted the sound.

“Did you know what Terezi wanted from you?” Dave asked. “Like, yeah, obviously she thought you looked hungry but was that really all she wanted to talk to you about?”

“I have no idea,” You responded. “Who even knows what's going on in her head at any given time. She barely even gave me a single clue on what she actually wanted to talk about.”

“Maybe she chickened out,” Dave suggested. “Like it was important and all, but she just couldn't muster up the courage to talk to you about it.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“I don't know, man. Terezi has issues that she doesn't really talk about at all with anyone, so it’s not really something I would put past her.”

You thought for a moment. You wondered exactly how close Terezi and Dave really were and why you never really picked up on that. Maybe you were just so blinded by your crush on her in middle school that you didn’t notice then, and after you got over your crush, you were too awkward about your former crush to actually get to know Terezi better.

“She should probably get a moirail,” You said, deciding not to voice your personal concerns.

“She should absolutely get a moirail,” Dave agreed.

The two of you spent a few seconds in an awkward silence all while struggling to find something to talk about.

“So, um, how are those videos going?” You asked because it was the first thing you thought of.

“They're going well, you know, or, at least, pretty well. I’ve been uploading a bunch of shit, and the audience is eating it up, loving that good ol’ ASMR. Wasn’t the original purpose of the videos, but if it helps me get more money, then who am I to not give the audience what they want.”

“What what videos have you been releasing?” You asked. You already knew the answer to this question, but you’ve got to make some kind of conversation.

“I’ve been making a bunch of food videos lately, but honestly, that’s mostly because food is perishable, so I’ve got to get rid of it pretty quickly. Which reminds me, do want some mangos? I accidentally ordered way too many mangoes, and they’re all pretty ripe, so I can’t really eat all of them by myself. I’d get sick of mangos, which is really a shame because mangoes are delicious, especially fresh mangoes.”

“...mangoes.”

“Yeah, mangoes. It was for a video testing out a bunch of different fresh food boxes, and I ended up with so many mangoes, and I don’t really know what to do with them.”

“Make mango sorbet. It’s pretty simple to make, and it only requires three ingredients, and it tastes best with fresh mangoes.”

“I don’t really have an ice cream maker-”

“I do. Bring the mangoes tomorrow. We’ll work together to make it.”

“I feel vaguely like I’m making a drug deal,” Dave said.

“There’s no drugs involved. Only sorbet. I would offer to do it today, but there’s a big party going on right now, and I can only assume we want all the sorbet to ourselves.”

“Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of letting a hundred people get into the ice cream my bro and I worked so hard on. That shit is off limits.”

“God forbid so many people find it that we don’t even get any,” You responded, and Dave put on a worried expression.

“No!”

“Yes!” You said, mostly out of reflex. “They’ll eat it like a five-star meal, and they hadn’t eaten in a week.”

“Like they haven’t eaten in months.”

“Maybe not months. The still have to be alive in order to eat the sorbet.”

“Maybe they’re zombies,” Dave suggested.

“Why would zombies want to eat mango sorbet?”

“They’re craving those mangos. Got to get that Vitamin C, man. Otherwise, they’d get scurvy, and that’s not fun for anyone.”

“Zombies wouldn’t care if they got scurvy. They have no pain receptors-they wouldn’t be able to feel anything.”

“Counter-point-they’re constantly in pain and trying to do anything they can to relieve it. They feel hunger, don’t they? Actually, do brains actually satisfy that hunger? Are they just a bunch of empty calories and they don’t actually have to eat brains, but, since eating brains is how they reproduce, that’s something they biologically want to do?”

“You bring up solid points, but, if that’s true, then there’s means to wonder if what zombies feel is actually hunger,” You continued Dave’s rambling. “I still say they don’t feel pain, but I see your point. But do zombies feel at all? Have they lost that ability? I doubt they feel love or hate or even basic emotions like happiness or sadness. Although, I guess it depends on what part of the brain is left uneaten.”

“Guess so ‘cause it’s, like, different parts of the brain are responsible for different things, so it would stand to reason that zombies are different depending on what parts of their brain had been eaten.”

“Unless the zombies systematically eat brains an a way that causes only parts of it to be eaten, leaving the other brain functions alone,” You argued.

“I guess that would give reason as to why all zombies are basically the same. That, or it’s because the movie industry refuses to show us disabled zombies in a classic case of ableism.”

“Light movie industry give us the zombies in wheelchairs and the zombies with chronic pain.”

“Go further, where’s our depressed zombies? Our zombies with anxiety?” Dave responded. “Where are the zombies who can feel love. Found family zombies, romantic zombies, gay zombies.”

“Holy shit, gay zombies.”

“Hell yeah, gay zombies,” Dave confirmed. “Going to be the best romcom of the century-two zombies against the world.”

“They fall in love at a coffee shop while one of them is trying to eat the barista’s brains. The barista shoots one of the zombies and the other dramatically and carefully takes care of them as the two of them slowly fall in love.”

“I can see it on the screen now-’Sweet Bro and hella Jeff: Zoompies in Loev,’ comically misspelled, of course.”

“That’s a horrible name,” You argued. “I suggest the much more elegant name, ‘In Which Two Zombies Named Bro and Jeff Meet at a Coffee Shop Where in Jeff is Attempting to Eat Barista #1’s Brains and the Barista Shoots at Jeff, Hitting Bro Instead and Jeff Retreats with Bro to Take Care of Him and a Relationship that was Originally Just Between Strangers Soon Delves Into One Between Loves and They Struggle to Survive the Dangers of Living People While Maintaining Their Relationship.’”

Dave stared at you. He kept staring at you. The thrum of the part outside of the room was the only thing breaking the silence. Snacks still sat on the bed and desk, still begging to be eaten, but both stomachs were full. There was a careful stillness to the room.

Dave breathed in and breathed out. He repeated the action before putting his hands together as if in prayer.

“Karkat,” Dave disrupted the calm. “That’s a terrible name.”

“It’s a working title!”

“A working summary, maybe. At least mine was ironically bad.”

“Well, shit, that makes it so much better, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“I’ve got some fucking news for you then-something being purposefully shitty is equally, if not more shitty than something that was accidentally shitty,” You yelled through the virtue of being completely unable to have your voice be quieter.

“No, making something purposefully shitty is better because it makes it ironic.”

“I think you need to reevaluate what the meaning of irony is, you shelled peascod.”

“What the hell is a shelled peascod?” Dave questioned.

“It’s an empty peapod-it’s like your brain.”

“Oh, shit, I am feeling so insulted right now. I think I’m gonna need some cold water for that burn. IN fact, you’re gonna need a shovel to bury me in the ground. Wait, not burial. It’s such a good burn that I’m being cremated, and you’ll have to get an urn for my ashes.”

“Are you sure you even deserve an urn?”

“You’re absolutely right-I deserve better. Turn my ashes into a gemstone and use it to make some kick-ass jewelry. Give it to my great-great-grandchild and say ‘Hey little Jimmy, here is a haunted rock’ ‘why, who’s it haunted by?’ Jimmy says like that’s the most important thing to be worried about in that situation. ‘Why, it’s haunted by your great-great-grandfather, little Timmy.’ ‘Dope,’ says little Timmy, who pockets the gemstone only to accidentally break it later and unleash the full force of my haunting power. Rattling shit around and makin’ spooky noises and all that fuckery.”

“Is your great-great grandson’s name Jimmy or Timmy?” You questioned, deciding not to get into whatever nonsense Dave just said.

“His full name is Jimmy Timmy STrider, and if that’s not the best fucking name in existence, I don’t know what is.”

“Hmmm,” You considered this for a moment. “I think literally any other name would be better than that festering pile of shit.”

“Wow. I can’t believe you would say that.”

You suddenly heard someone attempting to open your door before they started knocking. Three consecutive knocks, a short pause, and then three more knocks.

Well, you knew that knock anywhere. You went over to unlock the door and let Kanaya in.

“It’s good to see you again, Karkat. I see Dave is in here as well.”

“Yes, how was your conversation with Lanque?” You asked.

“It was certainly interesting. After you left, he started talking about the history of telescopes. I remember nothing from the conversation save for the fact that past telescopes were extraordinarily long, with one such telescope reaching around one hundred and fifty feet long.”

“Holy shit-that’s one long telescope,” Dave interjected. “How did they even hold it up to the sky? God, how heavy was it? That’s insane. Can you imagine a telescope that big? Wait, wait-I should do commentary for my channel on an astronomy documentary.”

“I am certain that there would be someone who would appreciate that, although I’m not sure if it would be something that I, personally, would enjoy,” Kanaya responded, and Dave kind of lit up, seemingly unaware that Kanaya lowkey insulted the idea.

“The real question here is how the formatting should be,” Dave began to ramble while you and Kanaya ignored him and had your own conversation.

“Karkat, I was somewhat worried that you were just holing up inside your room all alone, so I came here with the intent of offering you some company, but I suppose with the inclusion of Dave here, it might be more appropriate to ask if you want food.”

You looked over to the piles of snacks on your desk and bd. Kanaya glanced over as well before staring expectantly for an answer.

“I think we’re good on food. I won’t say no to having your company although are you sure you don’t want to continue partying? Or mingling with friends and coworkers.”

“I’m sure,” Kanaya answered. “I’m a little tired and was looking for a reprieve from socializing.

“And here I thought you were an extrovert,” You joked. Kanaya laughed.

“Shush.”

“I’ve never shut up in my life, and you know it.”

“What coincidence, neither have I,” Dave interrupted.

“Shit, I never would have guessed with the amount you run your mouth. It’s like you’re constantly about to die, and you desperately want your last words to be the worst thing that anyone could possibly conceive. Your last words will likely be reminiscent of the idea that you want to such a ghost’s dick, which you’ll only be able to do if you perish.”

“Now I’ve got to make those my last words. It’d be the greatest thing in existence. Your last words would be something super cheesy and nice, like how much you love your friends and shit. Nothing wrong with that, but it certainly is kinda boring. Big tearjerker though.”

“This coming from the ghost fucker.”

“Would you not fuck a ghost?” Dave asked. “Get up good and close to that gussy.”

“I’m going to make those your last words,” You snarled, the empty threat making Dave laugh.

God, he had a really nice laugh.

“Let’s go to the dance floor!” Kanaya interrupted. “I think we would all benefit from a bit of fun dance time.”

Kanaya dragged you and Dave outside the room and left you two alone.

“You had no idea if Kanaya was auspistizing between you and Dave or if she was helping out. Regardless, some gray feelings overlapped with your pale feelings for her.

“...Was Kanaya trying to do stuff in the clubs quadrant?” Dave asked, voicing your own question.

“...I don’t know,” You answered. You looked over towards Dave, who appeared to have a dusting of red over his cheeks and ears.

“So, uh, are we, are we gonna take Kanaya’s advice? Dance the night away and all that?”

“Yeah, why not?”

You and Dave then proceeded to dance until the both of you were too exhausted to continue and went to your room to watch movies until the both of you passed out.

[managementstrategy64477]

ManagementStrategy

This will incorporate stock and asset stocks, cash reconciliation and accounts payable. Money reconciliation means the quantity of money owned by the company is right compared to income and expenses. Auditing accounts receivable signifies checking that payments are currently going to go to the company or individual. All these ought to be cross-referenced against all financial statements both inner (accounts section ) and outside (banks).Educate personnel on contemporary internal management procedures and methods. Internal controllers, such as other facets of company evolve. Your workers maintain them educated and of any QualityManagement . A lack of instruction and knowledge is an integral reason behind management failures. Evaluation workers' comprehension and maintain review sessions through personnel training.Monitor your inner management personnel. By people doing the management risk assessments are created. Running or Tracking testimonials permits to determine flaws team or the individual set up has missed. These may vary itself into these controlling its oversight. An auditing company typically performs inspections. Companies have connections with trusted there common complaints Are there some breaches of management? If quite a few clients report exactly the product failure, including a button that is faulty, it is possible to work backward through your company's processes to obtain the issue. This would normally mean estimating, in reverse order, shipping, assembly, fabrication, testing and design.Are that there regions of the company who are becoming worse or aren't improving as expected. Such problems might be due to other variables but may also indicate some type of controller failure. Reports will need to be tied to reflect the company; although each section is able track and to control exactly what it will. The atmosphere gage locate some leaks within a product can ascertain QualityManagement of a component or the outside or interior diameter, ascertain the imprint requirements, and check the thickness or depth of steel. Air gages come in various kinds like hand held air gages, assembly line atmosphere gages that mechanically check the component, seat type air gages where the contractor puts the component into the air flow, and a few atmosphere gages are automatic but will need to have the component placed to it until it assesses or inspects the part.Quality control inspectors utilize bore gages to assess the size of a component, any grooves within the component, amounts of any measures found within the part. A Gage that's moving parts to assess the interior of a component is used by inspectors. Electronic bore gags utilize electric current read and to check the dimensions of a component part. Air bore gags are much like atmosphere gags, but just examine the interior of a part.The excellent control inspector uses distinct size calipers to measure every component of the merchandise; it matters not whether the component is square, circular, oblong or some other form. The calipers are a device that quality control inspectors record the data on a review list to be sure the component is within tolerances and examine. 

Calipers are from the English dimension or in metric based on the tolerances first design.Quality inspectors utilize a colour detector apparatus to ascertain the suitable color mix of clothes, painted or cloth part. The color mix that is right is essential with each colour change, and also the sensor is used by the builder. This detector uses three colour versions: green, blue or red. These 3 colours can produce most colours, and the colour sensor assesses just how much of each colour is in the item to guarantee a consistent colour scheme.Quality is a significant element when it comes to almost any service or product. Quality management is vital to building a thriving company which provides products that meet or exceed clients' expectations. Additionally, it forms the cornerstone of an efficient company which functions in high levels of productivity and reduces waste. To be able to keep or improve the QualityManagement of the offerings, producers use two methods, quality management and quality guarantee. Both of these practices be certain the end product or the support matches the quality demands and criteria defined for the solution or the service.There are numerous methods followed by associations to reach and maintain required degree of quality. The criteria usually specify the procedures and process for organizational actions and help to keep the quality in every part of organizational functioning.When it comes to criteria for quality, you will find many. (International Standards Organization) is among those dominant bodies for differentiating quality criteria for various businesses. Many organizations attempt to stick to the quality demands. Along with this, there are lots of different criteria that are particular to several industries.Since criteria have become a sign for merchandise and service quality, the clients are now keen on purchasing their product or the support from a certified maker or a service supplier. Thus, complying with standards like ISO has become a requirement when it comes to bringing the customers.Every company that practices QC must have a Quality Manual. The excellent guide summarizes the goals in the business and the high quality attention. The excellent guide provides the top quality advice to functions and departments. Consequently, everyone in the business has to know about her or his duties mentioned in the caliber manual.Quality Assurance is a extensive practice utilized for strengthening the quality of merchandise or solutions. There are various differences between quality assurance and management. In QualityManagement assurance, there is a continuous effort made to improve the excellent practices. Therefore, constant improvements are anticipated in quality functions from the company.When it comes to our own attention, we know that quality management is a product-oriented procedure. Quality guarantee makes certain the process of producing the item does adhere to criteria when quality management makes sure the end product meets the quality requirements. Consequently, quality assurance could be identified as a proactive process, whilst quality management could be mentioned as a responsive process.As sooner HBR articles have highlighted, quality management is a vital role within a business which markets services. However, is quality management precisely the thing at an agency company as at a concern? And what exactly does management need to do to set it? In this article a leading executive of one company shares his company's knowledge with other small business leaders.Since this article is about individuals, I will start with a narrative about someone I know. The objective of this narrative is to offer a reference point for the discussion and analysis that follow, for in each case the applications to be described have to be assessed with regard to how well they fulfill the requirements of specific individuals who, such as the topic of my narrative, have contradictory motives and desires.Ten years past a worker whom I will call Tom Simpson went into his supervisor, one of our vice presidents, also declared that, though not disappointed with all the progress he was making, he'd shortly be departing Marriott to combine a competitor.Simpson was assistant director of a large restaurant at one of our key resort properties. He had made QualityManagement and had been in his twenties. 

His document was clean lukewarm tests that may cool the excitement of superiors, of these pesky as they leaf through records. Quality management of performance and employee attitude is merchandise quality management for a manufacturer's equal. Computer makers, as an instance, point to a roomful of hardware that's been quality controlled to spool and the core. The support company has nothing. It counts on impressions made because of services rendered on clients. Everything is dependent on"quality management" of employees. Since J. Willard Marriott, the founder of the company, has stated many times, at the service industry you can not make joyful guests with miserable employees.After great individuals are screened and trained, it's vital to maintain them. When he declared his resignation, Simpson has been interviewed many times by executives. He ensured he could anticipate a livelihood with responsibilities, informed he was presumed to possess outstanding talent and promise, and had been requested to reconsider. But he held to his conclusion and joined a brand new company that has been only going into the restaurant business.Six weeks after we composed Simpson requesting that he send us a constructive review of the company. He requested him to inform us about complaints which he had about usand to inform us exactly what he believed to be helpful about Marriott. Now that he is back, we believe he can be a person because of his expertise with a different company. We try to not feel nostalgic when they depart, and we constantly feel complimented if they return.One QualityManagement behind the death of our supervisors is that the unusual number of entrepreneurial dream among men and women in the meals and accommodation industry. It appears like, deep down, everybody in the business wishes to start his own restaurant. This speaks well of the degree of individual vision, but it is a troublesome thing for your company, and it is a issue not entirely shared by any other business I can think of.Another reason behind great folks leaving usand thereby damaging our quality management program--is dislike to the physiological needs of our company --the extended hours of physically demanding work, the weekend and holiday responsibility, etc. After all control professions can you consider in which the most heavy work load comes on family holidays such as Easter and Thanksgiving? Another reason for losing people is your attractiveness of a position with a competitor. This is a manifestation of the extreme competition for great employees within our sector; the issue is most severe for business leaders.Because of pressures such as those we pursue an elaborate"rescue" performance for our great direction individuals.

[stompsite]

This Is (Not) A Review Of Dishonored 2

Dishonored 2 is the game you get when a team of the world’s most talented creators at the height of their powers put their heart and soul into something. This is a game that, through my entire run, never ceased to surprise and delight me. I didn’t know what “couldn’t put it down” meant until I played Dishonored 2. If I had a review score system in place, I’d be giving Dishonored 2 a 10 out of 10, because it’s a game that anyone interested in playing great video games should play.

There are a billion reviews out there, so I don’t want to waste too much time repeating what they’ve said. Dishonored 2 is an action game in the stealth mode. The levels Dust District and A Crack in the Slab are a brilliant one-two punch of level design, but to be honest, I can’t think of a single bad or unmemorable level in the game, except maaaaybe the final encounter. The stealth is good, the mechanics are empowering in the best ways, the enemies are superb, and the heart remains one of my favorite mechanics in a video game ever.

If you liked Dishonored, then you’ll be happy to know that Dishonored 2 is so good it makes the first Dishonored look like Superman 64, and Dishonored is one of the best games of the entire Xbox 360 generation. Dishonored 2 is Extremely Good Stuff, a stratospheric improvement in most ways on one of my favorite games ever.

Why?

First, you’ve got the narrative angle. A lot of games focus on Stuff That Doesn’t Matter, like lore or whatever. Too many developers obsess over all the wrong details; they want to tell you about how the economy works, or the political relationships between various factions, or what have you. They’re too busy trying to be George Lucas on the Star Wars Prequels to get to the stuff that actually matters: drama and motive.

Dishonored 2 is focused on the important stuff. The game begins, immediately, with a coup attempt. You are happy, everything is fine, and then an impostor to the throne shows up, turns someone into stone. If you choose to be Corvo, the Lord Protector and protagonist of the last game, this means that you want to save Emily from being turned into stone. If you choose to be Emily, the Empress, you want to save Corvo from being turned into stone.

I was playing Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 recently, and that game’s like “dang, everything blew up. Now you need to go recruit people for a suicide mission against an unseen foe that’s killing humans for some reason.” Bioware just kinda expects you to care because the people you’re saving are members of the same species. Dishonored 2 brings the father/daughter relationship established in the last game to bear: you want to save your family member because they’re you’re family member.

You’re also in the throne room when you’re deposed, giving the whole “return the rightful ruler to the throne” objective more juice because you get to see what you’ve lost. I’ve played too many games that take something from you without giving you a chance to connect with it. They’re just not as compelling as Dishonored 2. Oh, and Delilah, the pretender to the throne, is a mystery, so figuring out just who she is gives you yet another great motivation.

So, there you go, off like a cannon shot, fighting your way out of the palace and onto a boat, powerless and alone. You have questions that need answering, and you want revenge. It’s a great way to start a game.

Every level is incredibly dense in the best possible way; they’re ‘small’ in the sense that a game like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto V is much larger, but there’s so much detail in these levels! I completed the first level in an hour or so. A friend of mine spent hours there, exploring literally everywhere. According to the super helpful post-mission screen, I missed a lot of stuff in that first level. This is one of Dishonored 2’s best features, by the way, because Dishonored is a series about making plans, and letting you know you missed something is a great way to get you to start formulating new plans. It offers plenty of tools and positions you in just the right way to give you plenty of opportunity to make plans and execute them.

Wait. No. That’s… well, it’s true, but not quite right.

Dishonored 2 is a game about questions.

You start a level overlooking an area. Immediately, you start asking yourself “...can I do…” and working out whether or not you can. You assess the tools at your disposal, both the ones you came in with, and the ones you didn’t. Sometimes, the questions are narrative: who is this person? Other times, it’s about solving puzzles; overhear a conversation that tells you about some shady figures, and you start wondering who they are and where to find them.

Sometimes, it’s just the way the level obscures things from view. What does this lever do? What did this look like in the past? How can I break in there? Where does that path lead? What was that sound? Other times, it’s the mechanics. If I do this to this guy, what will that guy do? I wonder if I can put this razor mine here and lure one of the witches over there…

You get the idea.

And the great thing is, the game has big and small scale questions. You might want to wonder what’s through that door on the ledge, so bam, you blink up there and head on through. Or you might have the bigger, juicier questions, like spending an hour trying to solve the game’s Zebra Puzzle.

Maybe it’s not fair to say Dishonored 2 is about questions.

Dishonored 2 is about drama.

Drama is basically this: the protagonist wants something, but something else is in the way, so the protagonist must engage in conflict to achieve their goal. You want to get from point A to point B, but there are guards in the way, so you must be sneaky about how you get there. Delilah has stolen the throne, so you must find a way to take her down in order to return it.

Motive is the impetus, drama is the fuel. So you’ve got this amazingly compelling level design, great mechanics that work well within it, and this constant series of big and little questions that need answering. You’re always moving forward; no moment feels wasted.

The icing on the cake is that the levels are all unique in some way. There’s always an interesting hook. Plenty of games have something to differentiate each level--back in the day, a game would have its cave level, its water level, its lava level, and its stealth level, for instance--but Dishonored 2 is smart. Rather than just having visually distinct locations, or breaking up the gameplay with a mandatory sequence where the rules change (like a forced racing sequence), each level provides an opportunity to use the tools in different scenarios.

One level’s geometry shifts. Another level has you picking which person you’d like to assassinate. The tools and abilities remain the same, but the context you use them in change. I love Doom, but its encounters wore thin because the context rarely changed: it was a perfect combat loop in a diverse series of locations, but once I knew how to play, nothing changed. I love Ratchet & Clank, but not for its forced hoverboard sequences; it’s a completely new way of playing the game that is just kinda forced on you part way through the game.

Most reviews talk about graphics. In fact, some time ago, a developer did some research and found out that graphics were the single-most talked-about thing in reviews. Since this is my blog, and I can talk about things however I want here, I’m going to avoid talking about them so I can avoid being like everybody else. All I will say is that: holy crap, this is the best water in a video game ever, and I was so busy playing the game that I couldn’t stop to take pictures of its art, which is too bad, because this game’s art design is phenomenal. It was the best art design of 2016, and I can’t see anyone else coming close this year either. I was too busy staring at the game to take pictures of the game.

Dishonored 2 never breaks its established rules. Breaking into Jindosh’s workshop or Stilton’s mansion means thinking about using the same tools you’ve mastered differently. Maintaining a consistent set of rules over the game really helps it feel great.

Since this is supposed to be a review, I’m trying to avoid spoilers. This is a great game. You should play it. It accomplishes almost everything it sets out to do with jaw-dropping perfection. It’s a game that, months after its release, I’m still thinking about. Can Arkane’s next game, Prey, live up to the lofty expectations set by Dishonored 2? I hope so, because I wish everything was as good as Dishonored 2.

“But Doc,” you might be asking, “I heard that the game had a lot of technical problems!”

I didn’t encounter any, so I can’t really talk about them beyond saying that yeah, it looks like about a third of people had some serious issues early on. Those issues, as best as I can tell, have been resolved with patches. You should buy the game right here and now. It’s better than most everything that has come out since. I like it more than Zelda: Breath of the Wild, folks (and I have way more performance problems in Breath of the Wild too!).

Do I have problems with the game? Yes.

These problems can be divided into two categories: the first is about actual problems I had with the game, and the second is about what I wanted the game to be and how I felt it didn’t live up to that. The first category are legitimate complaints. The second category is more about me. So. Keep that in mind.

As for actual problems I had with the game, from a gameplay perspective, I felt like enemies detected me a bit too quickly. Like… several times, I found myself in a situation where enemies would start to detect me, but I couldn’t break line of sight without continuing to move slowly through the level. I could get up and run, moving quickly, which would get me caught for sure, or I could continue to move slowly, eventually getting caught before breaking line of sight. I don’t feel like I had this problem in Dishonored, so experiencing it in the sequel was a source of frustration.

A couple times, I killed people accidentally. One target spawned some bugs whenever I knocked her out with my knockout darts, and the bugs killed her, and I could never figure out how to knock her out, undetected, and get her over to the nonlethal objective I wanted to.

Some of the line deliveries weren’t very good. I was disappointed with Stephen Russell’s work here. There’s one line where he’s like “I’m going to kill you all” in a deep, growly voice, “...and save Emily,” he adds, almost like an afterthought. It’s a weird delivery. I had a similar problem with the last game; they had all this amazing voice talent, but the actors often sounded bored and strange. It’s better in Dishonored 2, but still not quite there.

At the end of the game, I got the worst possible ending, and I felt like I didn’t deserve it. There are a couple reasons for this: I killed some people the heart told me were bad. Like, one dude was an unrepentant murderer, so I put him down, because no one else would stop him, and in doing so, I saved lives. To me, this is a net positive.

My thought process was like, hey, I was a magical assassin in Nazi Germany, maybe I would kill some Gestapo. Wouldn’t it be better to kill Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes’ character in Schindler’s List) than let him live? This is what I felt Corvo was doing whenever he killed, and I made sure he killed sparingly. Here I am, fighting a one-man war against an invading force.

One scene in the game has Corvo suggesting he didn’t know how bad things had gotten in Karnaca, and he resolves to improve things after he saves the empire. Then, a few levels later, the game’s over, and apparently Corvo decides to rule with an iron fist. It just didn’t make sense to me.

Part of the issue could have been that I killed every single witch in the game. I believe this was the right course of action to take. A friend got Extremely Upset with me for this, which I found surprising, so let me explain my reasoning.

Witches are women who’ve been given supernatural powers. Their universal response to this is to torture, maim, and kill literally everyone they see who isn’t a witch. Worse still, they seem to enjoy it. I mean, when I enter a museum to find out the staff’s been horrifically murdered, and witches are laughing about it, my instinct is to stop them. The thing about witches is that they have powers, and to my knowledge, there is no way to strip them of their powers, incarcerate them, and put them on trial.

Having power makes them dangerous. Using that power to kill people makes them evil. Enjoying the act of murder makes them monstrous.

So, of course, I killed every single one of them. Dishonored 2 routinely shows you the effects of their power, and there is no case where this is portrayed as a good thing. Okay, so one of the witches was set up to be married to a guy she didn’t want to get married to. She had a sad life. I get that. It sucks. I’ve had people abuse me. I’ve had people try to get me to kill myself. I’ve had people do an awful lot of terrible things to me. But y’know what? If someone came along and offered me super powers to go murder a bunch of innocent people, I don’t think I could be a good person and take that deal. I don’t think I could ever justify it.

So yeah.

Corvo, Lord Protector of the Empire, the only law enforcement left in the world, put down a bunch of awful monsters who’d rejected their humanity in favor of slaughtering innocents. I acted in accordance with his role as a character, and believe I picked the morally correct option. Because the only other option was to let them live and watch them kill more innocent people. How could I protect anyone if I let them kill people?

Sure, it would have been nice to have some sort of magical cure--one enemy can be cured of her crazy--but the game did not give me the tools to take those actions. So I killed all the witches, and the game punished me for that.

Your mileage may vary.

So, if you’ve stuck with me, you might go “this sounds awfully nitpicky,” and you’d be right. It is awfully nitpicky. I think the game should treat witches like rats and I wish the stealth detection was a little bit better. With those two tweaks, I think Dishonored 2 would be essentially perfect.

But then there’s the… “I wish it was…” part of me. I’m only talking about this because I like ruminating about video games. This does not reflect on Dishonored 2 or Arkane so much as it reflects on me. The review’s over. If you liked what you read above, please go buy the game, support me on Patreon, do whatever.

If you want more, well… here we go.

I think Dishonored’s biggest weakness, in both games, is its morality system. The games are engaging and brilliant because they encourage you to plan. But if you’re constantly thinking about “well, if I do this or that, I might get the worst ending,” then you’re thinking about gaming the system, and you’re treating the game like a game. When you’re wholly engrossed in the world, making decisions as you think your character would, it’s so much more satisfying.

I have a similar problem with Ghost Runs in stealth games. When I focus on ghosting my way through a game, and I mess up, and I immediately load up a save to get that perfect run, I’m treating the game as a game, and I’m no longer part of the experience.

In film, this idea is referred to as suture. The audience and film make an unspoken contract. Both will treat the experience as real for the duration of the work. It’s why we feel powerful emotions when characters do things--if we think about fast-forwarding this or knowing the actor didn’t really die in that scene, the movie stops feeling real, and the power of the experience is lost.

By telling us that our actions will influence the outcome of the game, then reminding us of this throughout the narrative, the Dishonored games break suture, and I, personally, wish they would not do that. You may feel differently.

There’s also the fact that my morals don’t necessarily reflect the game’s morals. I think killing Gestapo during an invasion is the right thing to do in a situation where there is no better option (like incarceration). To me, the French Resistance during WWII are heroes. They killed people. Dishonored’s stance seems to be “killing people, no matter what, is wrong,” and… like, that’s a valid stance to take, but I feel it ignores reality.

Years ago, I was told that BTK, a serial killer active from the 70s to the 2000s, targeted my family for death before he was caught. I still think about what would have happened if he wasn’t caught. I like to think I would have fought back. If he tried to kill us, and I fought him, and I killed him, would I be just as evil as he is? No. He killed for sexual pleasure. I would have killed in self defense.

To me, by suggesting that all kills are equivalent, Dishonored is not only breaking suture, but it’s resorting to Gray Fallacy, which is the idea that two people who have done a wrong are equally at fault. A person who said “you’re a jerk” to the mugger who stabbed them and stole their wallet is just as guilty as the mugger.

With kills as the primary determining factor in the whether the game’s ending is good or bad (and let’s be clear, the games have a ton of endings based on all of the actions you perform; Dishonored is super responsive to what you do! This is just one specific aspect I don’t like!), Dishonored, especially Dishonored 2, is taking the stance that any kill is morally equivalent.

Killing bad, not killing good.

One of the reasons I loved Dishonored was because often, not killing someone was a fate worse than death. Plenty of games have non-lethal kills, which are functionally identical to a kill. A few truly great games, like Bioshock 2, allow non-lethal choices that change your relationship with characters in the game, which is brilliant.

Dishonored let you carry out justice. Like, hey, here’s a guy who’s been using Dunwall’s religious institutions to hurt people, so you brand him a heretic, which means he gets see what it’s like to be the people he’s been persecuting this whole time. Some fates aren’t so cruel: I spared Daud the assassin. Other fates are worse: Lady Boyle was turned over to her stalker. It’s a gross and horrifying fate, and we could argue about whether or not she deserved it, but to me, that’s what made the game so interesting.

So many developers make games where you can be lethal or nonlethal, and the nonlethal ending is treated as the morally superior option no matter what, regardless of the outcomes. Dishonored required you to think about making the right choice; does Lady Boyle deserve to be killed? Does she deserve to be given to this horrible man?

Subverting the tradition of “nonlethal good, lethal bad” is part of why I found Dishonored to be such a great game, but in Dishonored 2, the nonlethal options are… pretty much always good? Off the top of my head, you can either kill someone or cure her of the mental illness that’s making her bad. You can kill a guy, or you can knock him out, which prevents him from going to a thing, or you can let him go to the thing and he goes crazy. You can remove a witch’s powers. Not send her to jail, not stop her from assisting Delilah in any ways. Just… take away her super powers, which is crappy, but it’s not much more than that.

It felt like Dishonored 2 was a lot nicer to its villains. Killing them is bad, saving them is, well, nice to them, but isn’t tied with justice or mercy. It just kinda lets you feel good about yourself for not being a murderer. The harder choices were few and far between. And to me, that’s a problem. To other people, I’m sure it’s quite fine. All I can do is illustrate my own position.

I’m not one of those people who wants everything to be an equal shade of gray, right? I hate when games give me options, and both options lead to equally bad outcomes. But at the same time, I do like making tough choices, and with Dishonored 1, I felt I should spare some and kill others. With Dishonored 2, I always tried to spare people.

This extends to Delilah herself. The game clearly demonstrates that she is a bad person, but it sabotages itself in explaining her origin story. It’s constantly trying to make her sympathetic--she was a bastard daughter of the Emperor. An argument could be made that the throne belongs to her. She was wronged by so many.

But you have to remember that she also killed a lot of people, ruined the empire, tortured people, destroyed the local economy and ruined lives, and on and on it goes. Life under her is bad. But the game sort of leaves that in the background. When it talks about Delilah, it talks about Delilah the victim, Delilah the woman who took power for herself. It quietly shows us what she has done, but it shies away from explicitly stating “this is who Delilah is. She is a monster.”

As someone who’s been through hell, I firmly believe that you are the person you choose to be. Delilah is despicable because she chose to become a monster, but I felt as though Dishonored 2 kept trying to go “well, it’s not really her fault that she’s a bad person, because a lot of people were mean to her.” No. No. We shouldn’t let her get away with murder, torture, turning people to stone, and destroying Dunwall.

(from here on out, all screenshots are from the first Dishonored; I wasn’t joking when I said I was too busy staring at Dishonored 2 to actually take screenshots)

I think I would have liked the game a lot better if it hadn’t tried to justify her actions. It’s like playing a game set in World War II that keeps trying to characterize Hitler by telling us about how he had a rough childhood, or explaining how the unjust Treaty of Versailles made the Germans angry at the world, or all this other stuff. Like, hey, you know what? No matter how human we are, some people are just plain evil. We don’t need to sympathize with them.

Delilah has no redeeming elements. Her actions speak volumes, but Dishonored 2 keeps drowning it out by telling us about her past. She brought murderous monsters into the world and turned both Karnaca and Dunwall into dystopias. She doesn’t deserve to have her story told. She rejected any claim she had to compassion a long time ago.

Again, it’s that Gray Fallacy problem. The game seems to treat the injustices done to her as being equal with the monstrosity of her regime. She’s literally trying to use magic to destroy everyone and the game’s like “well yeah but, you know, she was rejected by her father and taken advantage of by other folks, so it evens out I guess.”

If you’ve played the game, maybe you feel differently. That’s cool. This is just how I perceive the game.

If you’ve forgotten how much I love this game, remember that my first sentence was literally: “Dishonored 2 is the game you get when a team of the world’s most talented creators at the height of their powers put their heart and soul into something.”

This is totally minor stuff, but it’s complicated, so it takes a lot of words to get through. Even writing it, I’m like “dang, am I being too negative?” because the sheer bulk of the words makes it feel like there’s more negativity than there is. Honestly, if you have thoughts about this, you can message this tumblr by clicking “ask us anything” up there at the top. I’ll reply and we can chat about it. Talking about how games handle morality is super interesting to me.

Right, so, that’s the morality stuff.

I have some mechanical complaints too.

So, Dishonored 2 is an immersive sim. An awful lot of people have a lot of different ideas about what that means. Like, I’ll tell you that there’s no way in heck that Gone Home is an immersive sim, but Steve Gaynor will (and he’s wrong!).

At GDC, Steve Lee, one of the level designers on Dishonored 2, did a great talk (which you should watch if you can) that got me thinking. Something he said got me thinking about how I’ve heard several times that Arkane’s very tool-focused. Like, Arkane’s approach to game design is basically giving players lots of interesting tools to do things. That’s Arkane’s idea of the immersive sim.

It’s a philosophy I’ve heard from a lot of folks, not just people talking about Arkane, but it’s also one I can’t help but feel is wrong.

See… when I first played Dishonored, it actually took me a while to get into it. I kept trying to play it like a Looking Glass game, and something just wasn’t clicking with me. It wasn’t until I really started thinking of it as being very Player Tool Focused that things started clicking with me. “Ahhh, this is a game about making plans and using the tools to execute them. Now it all makes sense.”

Far Cry 2 takes this approach as well, and I know a lot of people who feel like Far Cry 2 is a true immersive sim as well.

So, look, I know I’m just a dude sitting on a couch in my apartment looking for a job somewhere, and not someone who could be considered an authority on the subject, but I’d like to make an argument that this tool-based definition is an incomplete picture of the genre. In fact, I think most every definition of ‘immersive sim’ that’s out there is… uh…

You know the story about the blind men and the elephant? Each blind man thinks the elephant is something else, because he’s only touching part of it? I feel like that’s what the immersive sim is.

A long time ago, I was listening to a podcast with Paul Neurath. You might know of him as the guy behind Looking Glass, the studio that invented the immersive sim. Dude knows what he’s talking about when he talks about the genre. One thing I’ve heard him say several times, over the years, is how he wants to make sure that people who play his games can treat the situations as if they’re real.

Watch the Kickstarter video for his latest project, Underworld Ascendant. Note how there’s this common theme about the game being about how you can be in this place and relate to it in a natural way.

When I play Far Cry 2, I’m very aware of the designer’s hand. Every single safe house is the same thing. There’s a formula to it, a kind of repetition. The bases are all functionally identical. So much of Far Cry 2 is this sort of… discrete, repetitive thing that feels artificial. Yes, you have cool tools, and yes, you can do neat things with those tools that surprise and delight, but because the game’s so darn gamey, it’s… just you, sitting at your computer, playing with fun tools.

Looking Glass games were so much more than that. Far Cry 2 runs together in my memories. The Dishonored games stand out more because they have impeccably unique scenarios, but there are so many times when I feel like… I’m still playing a game. The morality system is a big part of that, which is why I’ve spent so much time talking about it. It pulls me out of the game world, makes me think about gaming the game, rather than being a person reacting naturally in the space.

With System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and Thief, I always felt like I was inhabiting my character, making choices because they made the most sense to make. It’s about being there. When I read about how Looking Glass applied the logic of flight simulators to the RPG and birthed the immersive sim… it makes perfect sense to me. I grew up with flight simulators. For most of my teenage years, flight sims were the only games I was allowed to own. My personal priorities lean super heavily towards simulation.

I could be another blind man, groping the elephant, but I feel like maybe my background in flight simulation (when I could program, I used to mod MSFS all the time; even rewrote the game’s smoke system so I could fire weapons in it) means I ‘get it.’

Gone Home is a game with nondiagetic audio in a house that makes no naturalistic sense. It’s not an immersive sim, it’s an art installation. Far Cry 2 is a really cool game with a unique systems focus, not an immersive sim. Dishonored 2… sometimes it’s an immersive sim, and sometimes it isn’t. In those moments when I’m engrossed in the world, making decisions because I have become Corvo and these are the decisions Corvo makes, it’s sublime. When it yanks me out of that, tearing the suture, to let me know my decisions are gonna be tallied up at the end, I get frustrated, perhaps more than I should.

(As an aside, I think the only game that ever reached Looking Glass heights was STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and maybe Clear Sky. Definitely not Call of Pripyat, because that’s the game where GSC Game World decided to listen to the fans and make it extremely gamey, rather than creating a simulation)

I think having simulation elements are a really important component of the immersive sim. Not a simulator, mind you--I’m not talking about a boring game about real life behaviors--but a simulation. I think when people create a living, breathing world, one where the inhabitants (there must be inhabitants) respond to you in naturalistic ways, even if they’re fantasy creatures in a magical world, they’ve created an immersive sim.

Tools aren’t so much the focus as a necessary component of the simulation. Breath of the Wild is, in some ways, the best immersive sim in years. Fire burns wood because fire burns wood. Heat rises, because that’s what heat does. Tools exist to take advantage of the game’s naturalism. Metal Gear Solid V is another game that heads down this avenue. Tools are means of enhancing naturalism, and that’s what creates the sense of immersion in the simulation, giving us the immersive sim.

Like, it’s cool that I can turn into rats or teleport or whatever in Dishonored 2, but I feel like an immersive sim takes things a lot further. It’s one of the finest games ever made. I stand by that. My passion for it hasn’t faded. It’s a masterpiece, a literal masterpiece, but… I don’t know, something in my head doesn’t quite want to say it’s an immersive sim? It still feels designed. Immaculately designed, for sure.

I am so profoundly grateful for the trust that Arkane puts in me as a player. I love that they’ve given me so many amazing tools to work with, rather than exercising an intrusive authorial control over my experience. I literally cannot express how much I love this game. It’s so good, ya’ll, everyone must play it.

Whether or not it’s a ‘true’ immersive sim is one of those things I’d like to hash out with people over a good barbecue. I’m meandering, I know. And I’m sure lots of people who’ve played or made more immersive sims than me have thoughts about it.

At the very least, what I can say is that what I personally value out of immersive sims isn’t here in Dishonored 2.

I know it’s a bit gauche to make a food analogy, but… if Dishonored 2 is the world’s greatest Texas barbecue, all I’m saying is that it’s not Kansas City barbecue. Yeah, it’s barbecue. Yes, it’s literally flawless. But it’s just a tiny degree removed from what I think about when I say “I want barbecue.” People who say it’s barbecue aren’t necessarily wrong, but we’re talking about distinctly different things.

So that’s Dishonored 2. One of the best video games I have ever played, in so many ways. A game that, from a pure gameplay perspective, is unmatched in its brilliance. I would love to see the next Elder Scrolls game borrow from its combat system heavily, not gonna lie. I do have some quibbles, but most of them are personal and relate to my opinions about morality and genre classification.

This is a review, so. Hey. Buy it. I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.

[anerdquemoraaolado]

Through Chrissie’s eyes

Still Complicated Romances

After leaving work on a Thursday afternoon, I drove quietly but with some anxiety to Richard Branson's office. I parked, got off the car, and walked there, trying to look as relaxed and friendly as I could. Friendly? That I could be, Bri and my friends would say yes. Relaxed? I could never get relaxed outside of a family environment, even though I had already come here. The problem was what I had come to do there, which made me nervous. I just put on my best face of "Mrs. May, wife of Queen's guitarist", I went into the reception and found just who I wanted to see.

"Chrissie, hi!" Dominique greeted me, leting out the serious air of the job for a brief moment "is everything okay with you? You brought some complaint from Queen to Mr. Branson?"

"Oh no?" I was scared, already preparing myself for the worse, thinking that the boys had done something bad again.

"I'm kidding, I'm sorry to scare you" she clarified at my state and smiled.

"Well, in that case I'm doing well, we all are" I stolled a bit "I actually came to talk to you."

"With me? That's rare" She turned her attention to me curiously.

"I came to invite you to a meeting at my house, you know?" I relaxed as I explained "we have this tradition of watching movies whenever the boys have a break, and if Queen didn't traumatize you too much, it would be nice if you came."

"Wow, I ... I don't know what to say, thank you for the invitation" Dominique hesitated, but thanked me politely, sincere "there's a long time no one invites me to something like this ..."

'That ain't true, and what about Roger's invitation?' I thought, but then I understood what she meant, paying more attention, I realized she felt alone. And technically I was inviting her to a meeting between friends, while Roger asked her to a date, which was two different things.

"It will be a pleasure to go," she decided at last, "and don't worry, except the way Roger and I started with the wrong foot, the Queen boys are perfect gentlemen."

"With a few exceptions," I said playfully, "look, so I won't disturb you any more, give me your contact number and I'll call you to explain where I live."

"Oh, yes, all right." Dominique took a piece of paper from a notepad that was on the table and wrote it down, handing it to me right away "call me at night, that's when I'm home."

"I will call you" I smiled at her "and thank you for accepting the invitation, Domi."

"You're welcome" she returned. "Bye, Chrissie!"

"Goodbye!" I waved and went out, returning home.

That same night, before I called Dominique, Brian and I got the folks home. While Mary and Freddie were quiet, arguing about one detail or another of their wedding (most of the time it was her trying to stop his most extravagant ideas), John and Veronica were a little tense, which was very unusual for them. They were always quiet, but the same thing was worrying them, I was almost sure. I offered camomile tea to the bassist and his beloved in an attempt to calm them down, since I wasn't in the right to ask them directly if they were all right. It was obvious they were not well, but if they didn't want to tell, I would respect that. Veronica and John were grateful for the tea, and they were drinking, still worried.

I nudged Brian back into the living room and sat next to him, tried to make a gesture that didn't catch everyone's attention, to follow me. My husband came after me at once, understanding what I meant.

"What happened to John?" I asked Bri when we were in the kitchen "did he say anything at the rehearsal? Is it something with Veronica? Because neither is well. Sorry to be curious, I care about them ..."

"No, I know you're worried," Brian understood. "We are, too, he's like that, quieter than normal for a long time, but one time he'll tell us, just don't press."

"They know they can count on us, don't they?" yet I doubted if at any time they would tell what was bothering them.

"Of course I know." Brian hugged me to the side, laying my head on his chest "If it's between them, they'll come to understand eachother."

"All right" I sighed and agreed not to interfere, and in the meantime, I remembered another problem involving another (supposed) couple "I have to call Dominique."

"Richard Branson's assistant?" Brian was confused "Oh, yeah, you promised Rog that you were going to invite her to spend the night with us, right, but you think she and Roger ... I don't know, does he have any real chance?"

"I don't know, Bri" I shook my head "I think it's in her hands now."

I kissed Brian's cheek before pulling away from him and went to the telephone, which was in the hallway that separated the living room from the dining room.

"Hello? Dominique? It's Chrissie" I smiled as I heard her voice "so can I give you my address now?"

She confirmed and I dictated as she noted.

"Shall we meet next week then?" I waited for Domi's reply.

"Yes, yes, I will be there" she confirmed "Look, will Roger be there, too?"

"Well" her curiosity about the drummer has kept me on alert "why, if I may ask?"

"It's just ..." I felt Dominique's hesitation and embarrassment, she sighed in a nervous smile. "I don't know if I should be telling you, but it's just ... I think he's a nice guy, and what the girls talked about him, I mean the good things, I realized that he really is like that. And there's also ... the way he looked at me after I did those pranks, I thought he was going to want to kill me, but he laughed! No one has ever reacted like this to my pranks, and after that, the way he has given himself to apologize and start over, he cared about my feelings, and when I talk to him ... he looks at me like I'm the the only girl in the world. And look, I know it's true, I know how to differentiate womanizers from real love. Maybe he's a ladies man, but he's acting different with me ... Ah ... I don't know Chrissie ... maybe I like him too."

I heard all that confession with a racing heart and a smile at the whole statement, happy for Roger. Even with him himself, whose face appeared right in front of me, making faces, curious to know what exactly I was reacting to.

"So maybe you ..." I tried to hide it so he wouldn't guess what the conversation was about "can come here and talk to him."

"I'll try," Dominique said, "thank you for listening to me, Chrissie."

"Don't worry, I'm here for this" I smiled "bye!"

I turned to Roger after putting the phone back on the hook and placing my hands on my waist.

"You came here and listened to the talk because you heard me talking to Dominique, didn't you?" I raised my eyebrows at him.

"It was her? I knew it!" his anger was quickly replaced by insecurity "did she speak of me? Did she ask about me? Is she coming here?!"

"Ouch!" I let go, with my hands up "Calm down, Taylor. Yes, it was her, she asked if you were going to be here the day she is coming, I said yes, and she said she'll come."

"Anything else?" he begged with puppy eyes.

"Roger, stay calm, it's going to be okay." I tapped him on the shoulder.

"How can you be so sure?" Roger still doubted it.

"I just know!" I smiled, and made my best smarty face.

For every heart Roger had broke, his heart, suffering for true love, could wait a little longer to be rewarded.

[topicprinter]

There is a common myth I hear from entrepreneurs.“I need a unique business idea that no one has done before.”Stop making entrepreneurship harder than it needs to be.Here’s the truth: You do not need a new idea to be an entrepreneur. You do not need to be first to market. And you do not need a new business model.I've been in marketing/growth roles for the last four years in SaaS.If you’re an early-stage business, you need to learn how to do your own positioning because whether you hire a product marketing agency or branding company, they will charge between $4,000-$12,000 a month. A cash-strapped startup can do this on their own, as I’m about to give you an over-the-shoulder view of my process.Trying to Reinvent the (Business) Wheel = Difficulty Level: AsianEverything has been done to death.Thankfully, that doesn’t matter. Because you can still make a fist full of cash-money without being 100% unique.Facebook wasn’t the first social media network. MySpace, LinkedIn, and hi5 all came before Facebook.Google wasn’t the first search engine. Remember Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Dogpile?Apple wasn’t the first computer company. IBM and Hewlett-Packard came decades before.Even a company like Uber borrowed its idea from taxis.How have these companies become so successful in competing in saturated markets?In a word: positioning.Each of these businesses knew how to differentiate themselves from the competition.Differentiate, if your goal is to grow.Differentiate, if your goal is to be valuable beyond your price tag.Differentiate, if you want others to care about your product or service as much as you do.Cookie cutters are for baking, not businesses.How Facebook, Wealthfront, and QuickBooks became successful, even though they weren’t first to market.No brand can afford to simply arrive. You must be vitally relevant. Be impossible to ignore...Before we look at these businesses, I want to point something out. Your definition of success may not be to create a billion-dollar startup.Maybe it’s earning enough money to quit the rat race and support your family. Or maybe you are looking to create the next silicon valley unicorn. Either way, the principles work the same.Positioning FacebookWhen Facebook began in 2003, Zuckerberg did not open up his platform to everyone. And unless you had a Harvard email, you could not even get in.How effective was this strategy? Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up.How did Zuck do this?Simple. He began by positioning Facebook as the social network for Harvard students.Once he captured a sizable market, he expanded into a nearby market. In 2004, Zuck opened Facebook’s doors to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale students. After that, Facebook became the go-to social network for all ivy league school, then all colleges, and finally it was open for everyone.Positioning WealthfrontWealthfront took a similar approach to Facebook.Andy Rachleff thought of a wealth management tool which would allow everyday folks to invest as millionaires do.But Rachleff did not start by opening up to everyone. First, he created Wealthfront for Facebook engineers. Then for LinkedIn engineers. Once the product served each mini-market, he opened up to a nearby market until it became valuable to everyone.Positioning QuickBooksContrast this with QuickBooks. Not only were they not first, but it’s also estimated there were 46 other competing products before them.Rather than hyper-niching, QuickBooks began by becoming obsessed with their customers.They became famous for following customers home and asking them to use their product. This allowed them to find out what problems they had, unique use cases, and what they wished the product could do.These three businesses have three principles in common:They solved a problem in a different way than their competitors, not necessarily better.They made it easy for people to know, “This product is for me.”Once they reached a tipping point, they expanded into a new market.So how would I position the businesses of everyday entrepreneurs?Positioning Lessons from Everyday Entrepreneurs (Plus A Behind-The-Scenes Look at My Process)The ideal goal of positioning is to have your business be in a niche which is either:Able to become the #1 or #2 in the market.Create a new market, and become #1 in the market.Why?Because of the power law. The power law states “a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in another.” In other words, the #1 and #2 in the market will capture the majority of the business.You can still have a successful business without becoming #1 or #2. But the competition to get more customer attention and sales is much more fierce.In the interest of transparency, before I dive into the positioning lessons from everyday entrepreneurs, I want you to know where I’m coming from…Decibite is a client of mine. I’m using them as an example so you can see my full process, and because I know what they were like before and after positioning them. Seeing the transformation will help you know what to do in your business.Podia and BoldCommerce are not clients of mine. But I’ve interviewed the founders to learn how they got their first 1,000 customers on my blog, so I’m familiar with their industry. With Podia, you will learn how to improve a strong market position. And with BoldCommerce, you will learn how to position a company with a range of product offerings.Positioning Decibite to Compete in a $32 Billion Industry by Offering a 15% or Faster Hosting Speeds.Decibite is a web host which helps non-technical entrepreneurs get faster hosting.Reuters estimates web hosting is a $32 billion industry. So it’s no surprise Decibite is competing against giants like:Google (Cloud)Amazon (AWS)Microsoft (Azure)GoDaddyEIG (BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster, etc).Before I began working with Decibite, they were a cloud hosting company for “everyone.” WordPress hosting. Python hosting. DNS hosting. And as any smart entrepreneur will say, a company which attempts to be “the best” for everyone becomes the best for no one.Step 1. Talk to customers: To differentiate and position Decibite, I first began to talk to their customers. I began to learn about their experiences with Decibite and their competitors, asking questions like:What is your biggest challenge you are currently facing? (This answer becomes “$PROBLEM”).How valuable is it for you, in terms of your current urgency and importance, to overcome $PROBLEM?What have you previously done to address this problem in the past? (This answer becomes “$SOLUTION”).How satisfied are you with $SOLUTION?What do you like about $SOLUTION?What do you wish were better about $SOLUTION?Have you hired anyone to help you with $PROBLEM?Have you bought any other $SOLUTIONS to solve $PROBLEM before?What is your ideal outcome you would like to experience?What other $SOLUTIONS have you used in the past? Please tell us their names. (This answer becomes “$COMPETITOR”, but asking questions for each competitor).What did you like most about $COMPETITOR?What was your biggest complaint using $COMPETITOR?What are the top three reasons you chose Decibite instead of another product?How do you feel product is different than other products out there?I took notes of every word customers said (this will be needed in step 7).Step 2. Synthesize the results: After talking to customers, a lot of Decibite’s customers loved three things about the company:Customers loved that Decibite was fast.Customers loved that Decibite offered a ton of security features to remove the technical headache, but were not sure what all they did. (Note: This told me I needed to describe Decibite’s security by creating feature pages). Turns out their competitors charge between $392-$4,951/year for these security features, another potential way to differentiate themselves.Customers loved that Decibite felt like a partner in business.Step 3. Survey the market: Each of those could be a phenomenal opportunity to position Decibite. But I needed to survey the market to make sure these desires were not isolated. So I opened up the tool Pollfish and invested in getting some survey results.Please note that if you’re doing this yourself on a low budget, you will want to talk to more of your customers. The more customers you talk to, the greater chance the way you differentiate will matter (and not make you just look weird).Market research tools are expensive, but worth it. You can also take the data and publish your original research, which is a great opportunity to get links for SEO (which is for another post).This research confirmed a lot of people wanted fast hosting and fast technical support. Some also wanted better security and scalability. But again, I did not want Decibite to attempt to do everything the best. Just one thing.Step 4. Do competitive research: Researching the competition feels like being James Bond. You learn their every move so you can be one step ahead. I listed out every competitor by doing Google searches (“$COMPETITOR alternatives”), browsing Reddit, and looking up articles on the competition in Wikipedia.Because it was a big market, I separated everyone out into different niches. Like Zuckerberg, I wanted to pin-point who would be the best first customer. There were three major niches:Generic web hosts (think GoDaddy, BlueHost, and 1&1).Cloud hosts (think AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud).WordPress hosts (think WP Engine, Kinsta, and Flywheel).There are smaller markets too. But this covers the majority of the hosting industry.Step 5. Positioning Decibite: Of the three niches, I picked generic web hosts as the best audience for Decibite to serve. Specifically, we would serve non-technical entrepreneurs with fast hosting.Why did I think Decibite would best serve non-technical entrepreneurs with fast web hosting?People were complaining the loudest about generic hosts. You can find this information out by searching your competitors on Reddit and finding out what people say about them. If people hate what they are using, it’s easier to get someone to switch.More entrepreneurs know the value of fast hosting. Faster website speeds mean better SEO (search engine optimization), better CRO (conversion rate optimization), and better UX (user experience).Non-technical entrepreneurs had extreme pain. When starting, many entrepreneurs start with shared hosting. What they may not realize is if they’re successful, they face two major problems. 1) Companies can throttle shared hosting, which shuts down their website. 2) They now need to upgrade to VPS, which feels way more technical than they want to deal with.Step 6. Creating Decibite’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP): You can get all the market penetration in the world (e.g. traffic to your website). But if you don’t have a USP, customers will not understand what makes your business unique.Since customers wanted fast hosting, I wanted a specific reason to make the switch. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I took GEICO’s USP and applied it to Decibite.GEICO’s “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on your car insurance” became “Get 15% or faster web hosting” for Decibite.Other USP examples you can fit to your business include:M&M's "melts in your mouth, not in your hand."Colgate toothpaste "cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth."Anacin, a headache medicine for fast relief. (Yup, the same USP Advil borrowed 30 years later).Domino’s pizza. “Fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it's free.”Head and Shoulders. “Clinically proven to reduce dandruff.”Step 7. Improving the website’s messaging: This step is simple.Take everything customers told you in step one and put it in some form or fashion on your website. Start with the USP you created in step 6.If someone does not know something you believe is “obvious,” this means you need to communicate this better on your website. You may need to create a few web pages or update them. I created over 120 pages, but you’ll likely need only 7-15 for a bare bones website that’s “good enough.”This best copy will come from your customer’s mouth. Literally. Every powerful word or phrase from step one became the foundation for Decibite’s website.A common question I get asked that you might ask is, “Aren’t you losing out on getting technical entrepreneurs? Why would you niche so specifically?”First, your target customers you want to serve best is not the same as your total market. Technical entrepreneurs love Decibite because they outsource their technical headache. It’s almost like having a technical co-founder you can outsource smaller work for $10-$25/month.Second, it’s better to create a product a few people love than a mediocre product everyone thinks is okay. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, made this statement famous. And Y Combinator made startups like Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Gusto, and some site called Reddit famous by keeping this principle in mind. When in doubt, make something fewer people love.Takeaway: If you’re competing against big companies, pick the niche which has the most people complaining. Then become ultra-specific to who you are serving.Positioning Podia With Powerful Particulars.Podia provides the easiest way for creators to sell digital products online.Len Markidan is the CMO at Podia. He’s consulted with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups like Prudential, Jet, Groupon, Chegg, and Booz Allen Hamilton. Previous to Podia, Markidan ran marketing at GrooveHQ for five years.All that to say, the marketing team at Podia knows a thing or two about what gets results.Markidan is also a huge advocate of talking to customers to improve and inform the marketing strategy. This is often the low-hanging fruit entrepreneurs and marketers too often forget.Yet even with all Podia is doing right, there is room to strengthen their position in the market.Looking at their homepage, Podia focuses on making it easier for creators to sell online. Ease is an excellent benefit.According to Invesp, shopping convenience, time-saving, and easy to buy are three of the top seven reasons people buy online. By providing this value to creators, the creators’ customers will be more likely to buy too.So how can Podia improve their positioning?They need specifics to enhance their position with a USP.I was driving to a Bible study the other day and saw the most compelling real estate billboard. The realtor claimed he could sell any home in 39 days or less. And if he failed to do so, he would pay the mortgage until it sold.Notice the realtor did NOT simply state he could sell a home the fastest. Instead, he gave a specific claim about how fast he would sell a house. Then he went a step further and added a risk reversal: if the house doesn’t sell, he’ll pay for the mortgage out of pocket. That guarantee conveys confidence in his promise.Podia claims they provide “Everything you need to sell online courses, downloads, and memberships without worrying about the tech.” Excellent. But how specifically does Podia help creators do this?Could they claim how fast the average Podia customer makes their first course and sale?Is there a way to reverse the customer’s perceived risk beyond a 14-day free trial?How fast does the customer support team respond to a problem?What if Podia displayed their average net promoter score (NPS) to show customer satisfaction?How much money does the average Podia creator make?These specifics can remove anxiety and increase customer confidence.FedEx claims, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” Decibite claims to speed up your website by 15% or more. Dominos offers fresh, hot pizza, delivered to you in 30 minutes, or it’s free.Once Podia finds the right claim by talking to customers, they need to stick their flag on the hill and defend it.Takeaway: Once you find a position, make sure to back it up with specifics. Any bold claims you make will need to defend with more specifics.Positioning Bold Commerce With a Suite of Products.Bold Commerce offers a suite of Shopify Apps for eCommerce owners.There are 21 apps they’ve built to serve eCommerce owners. Additionally, they offer development, design, digital advertising, and conversion rate optimization services.If you have a line of products, then you need to position each product and the overall company. To keep this simple, I will show you how to position Bold Commerce as a company.There are two main places to find a company’s position:Meta title in Google, which is, “Bold Commerce | Shopify App & Development Experts.”The H1 on the homepage, which is, “Own your commerce. Over 90,000 merchants ____ with Bold”The blank space shows words which shows what their suite of apps help eCommerce entrepreneurs do. For example, “Over 90,000 merchants sell wholesale with Bold.” Or, “Over 90,000 merchants promote their products with Bold.”(By the way, a blank space which rotates between words is a sign you have a weak position because you are attempting to be all things to all people).I would bet Bold is attempting to become the go-to resource for all eCommerce growth needs.If this is true, Bold needs to sell this benefit in their positioning. And while they can fit everything they do into a complete story, right now they lack clarity. For example:When I read their meta title, my first thought is that they create custom Shopify apps.When I read their H1 description, my first thought is that they help me own my business. Which I have no clue why this is a benefit. And doing some quick research, I’d bet no one feels this is an actual problem.What can Bold Commerce do instead?Without talking to their customers (which I would NOT recommend you attempt to position your company without talking to customers), here are three ideas looking at the top posts on Reddit’s Shopify sub:Bold Commerce: The Fastest Way to Make $1,000/Day on ShopifyBold Commerce: Shopify Apps & Ads to Tell Your Boss “Goodbye”Bold Commerce: Proven Shopify Apps & Ads to Grow Your eCommerce Business (original idea).In whatever way Bold Commerce positions itself, each product should emphasize how it fits this main position. Additionally, their articles should also flow from this position.Takeaway: If you have several products, start by positioning your business. Then use that to position each product to the main benefit. If you can’t, you should spin this off into a separate business.Competition is nothing but a sign of market demand with money to make customers sell, and traffic to direct to your website. All the good stuff you need to run a profitable business.Embrace it. Run with it. Just do it.I built a product marketing agency in a very competitive market with established players. In a sense, I’m competing against copywriters and digital marketing agencies.Digital marketing agencies are everywhere.Startup marketing agencies are also a dime-a-dozen.But even fewer focus on helping entrepreneurs from idea to scale.So I positioned my agency as the go-to product marketing agency for entrepreneurs on their journey from idea to scale.Don't try to reinvent the wheel or look for some new, untapped secret no one has done before.Look at what's already making money. Copy 80%. Then differentiate yourself from your competition so you can rise above the noise.That's all you need to differentiate yourself. And then once you make more money from customers or raise a round from investors, you can hire a product marketing agency to expand on what you've done.​If you're interested in proof of who I am, just Google “growth ramp.”If you have any questions about talking to customers, positioning your startup, creating a USP, or anything like that fire away and I'll respond!

[thisdaynews]

Trump's plan to shrink NSC staff alarms some

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trumps-plan-to-shrink-nsc-staff-alarms-some/

Trump's plan to shrink NSC staff alarms some

But whether a smaller, O’Brien-led NSC will have more influence on the president is far from clear. Trump has long chosen his gut instinct over policy advice. And NSC staffers fear the impeachment process, which focuses on whether Trump tried to pressure Ukraine to investigate a political rival, will make the president even less trusting of the U.S. bureaucracy than before.

Several NSC officials have already given damning testimony before House committees, and the whistleblower who first flagged the president’s phone call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is reported to be a CIA employee previously detailed to the NSC staff. President Trump has likened the whistleblower, and the officials who spoke with him, to spies.

For now, O’Brien, who took over in September from ousted conservative hawk John Bolton, appears confident in his approach.

“We’re streamlining the National Security Council,” he told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We don’t need to recreate the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security over at the White House. We’ve got great diplomats and soldiers and — and folks that can — that do that work for us in the departments.”

POLITICO spoke with several current and former Trump administration officials, as well as outside experts, to get details on the changes. Most requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, although O’Brien himself has been fairly open about his plans.

The NSC is supposed to act as the body that coordinates U.S. national security and foreign policy across the executive branch. Depending on the administration, its influence has varied.

Trump administration officials say the goal is to reduce the NSC’s policy staff to fewer than 120 people by January. According to O’Brien, the number is coming down from 174. The figure does not count technical and support staff at the institution, which are not expected to see many cuts.

O’Brien has said he’s aiming for a policy staff figure similar to what existed at the NSC during the first term of then-President George W. Bush. Those numbers kept growing – and often exact figures are not revealed – to the point where under President Barack Obama, there were more than 200 policy slots.

The Obama team shrank the body somewhat in its final years, and Trump has continued that.

Much of the shrinkage under O’Brien will be through attrition: Most NSC policy staffers are detailed there from other agencies or departments, such as the Pentagon, typically for a year or two. As their details finish, fewer can expect extensions. Their roles will stay vacant.

The NSC sections slated to lose the most slots are the so-called “functional directorates.” Functional directorates deal with topics unbound by geography, such as human rights or counterterrorism.

At least two functional directorates – strategic planning and emerging technologies – are being phased out, current and former NSC staffers said. The international economics directorate, which previously reported to both the NSC and the National Economic Council, will now report only to the NEC.

An administration official said the strategic planning division had already fulfilled its main mission: crafting Trump’s National Security Strategy. The person who ran that directorate, Kevin Harrington, has been named O’Brien’s strategic counselor, and he’s been tasked with “doing a net assessment of all of our strategies to see how effective our strategies are,” the official said.

Emerging technologies, which in theory tackles topics such as artificial intelligence, was seen as underperforming and duplicative of other parts of the government.

Shifting the international economics directorate is in part about clarifying who’s in charge of what, current and former NSC staffers said. There have been complaints that when the people on that team had a dual reporting structure, in interagency discussions they would play up one or the other depending on what benefited them.

O’Brien also has no plans to revive the Homeland Security Council, which essentially exists only paper now after initially being a major office under Trump.

The counterparts to the functional directorates are the regional directorates – ones that deal with Europe, the Middle East or South Asia, for instance.

O’Brien, who is Trump’s fourth national security adviser since he took office in 2017, has signaled that he will prioritize regional directorates over functional ones, a decision that has alarmed some NSC staffers.

One concern is that de-emphasizing functional directorates could lead to different U.S. policies for different regions of the world. And because U.S. officials who deal with regions are highly invested in maintaining relationships with other governments, there’s also a concern they will de-emphasize issues such as human rights or ending corruption.

“The U.S. should, for example, have one approach to democracy and governance globally, not different ones regionally,” one NSC staffer said.

John Gans, author of “White House Warriors,” a book about the NSC and its history, added that other governments may find it disconcerting if in the long run the U.S. doesn’t take the lead on issues that cross national boundaries.

“The transnational stuff — a pandemic, financial crises, climate change — will also still happen but the White House will be less equipped to handle,” he said.

But other observers of the NSC downplayed such concerns, saying that proper communication and coordination can help avoid pitfalls, and stressing that the functional directorates are not being marginalized. Making sure there’s a proper balance, though, will fall to O’Brien and his top deputy, Matt Pottinger, they said.

“I don’t see it as the regional directorates have a greater say — it’s that they must be consulted when they do the work,” a former NSC staffer said.

O’Brien’s decision to promote Pottinger, formerly a senior Asia hand, has been met largely with praise among NSC staffers. O’Brien also has brought over a senior Foreign Service officer, Matthias Mitman, to serve as the NSC’s executive secretary.

Such moves are intentional and differentiate O’Brien from Bolton, who hired several people from outside government to populate the NSC’s top ranks. “If you bring in outsiders, it looks like you’re expressing a lack of confidence in the organization,” the official said.

O’Brien is a lawyer by training, and he first joined the Trump administration as its special envoy for hostage affairs.

O’Brien also has already held several Principals Committee meetings. Such meetings bring together Cabinet members and other top U.S. officials who focus on national security. Bolton was criticized for not holding enough of those gatherings.

Thanks to the impeachment inquiry, the mood at the NSC directorate that deals with Europe and Russia is of special concern to the new NSC leadership. (The current NSC staffer described that directorate as “radioactive.”)

Current and former staffers in that division are among those who’ve had to testify in the impeachment inquiry so far. They include Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, a Ukraine expert is expected to remain at the NSC until July. The senior director for that division, Tim Morrison, recently quit.

He’s been replaced by Andrew Peek, previously a deputy assistant secretary of State for Iraq and Iran. Peek has had relatively little experience dealing with Europe, but he was chosen in part because of his closeness to O’Brien, which should give staffers in that directorate some confidence and comfort.

“He’s a natural leader,” the administration official said of Peek. “He’s going to take care of those guys. The best thing he can do is make sure they’re well represented in the policy process.”

Like several who filled the role before him, O’Brien has mentioned Brent Scowcroft as a role model for the role of national security adviser.

Scowcroft served in that position under both Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. His model has been described as the “honest broker,” meaning he presented the president with the views of U.S. agencies instead of trying to usurp them with his own.

Aides to Trump, however, concede that although the president likes to solicit a wide range of opinions, ultimately he goes with his own gut. It’s tough to imagine O’Brien changing that, even if he does make the NSC more efficient.

“I think he’s doing the right thing by taking a fresh look at the NSC — what was working and what didn’t,” a second former NSC staffer said of O’Brien. “I think any new national security adviser would do the same thing.”

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[toomanysinks]

Salesforce at 20 offers lessons for startup success

Salesforce is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. The company that was once a tiny irritant going after giants in the 1990s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market, such as Oracle and Siebel Systems, has grown into full-fledged SaaS powerhouse. With an annual run rate exceeding $14 billion, it is by far the most successful pure cloud application ever created.

Twenty years ago, it was just another startup with an idea, hoping to get a product out the door. By now, a legend has built up around the company’s origin story, not unlike Zuckerberg’s dorm room or Jobs’ garage, but it really did all begin in 1999 in an apartment in San Francisco, where a former Oracle executive named Marc Benioff teamed with a developer named Parker Harris to create a piece of business software that ran on the internet. They called it Salesforce .com.

None of the handful of employees who gathered in that apartment on the company’s first day in business in 1999 could possibly have imagined what it would become 20 years later, especially when you consider the start of the dot-com crash was just a year away..

Party like it’s 1999

It all began on March 8, 1999 in the apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the site of the first Salesforce office. The original gang of four employees consisted of Benioff and Harris and Harris’s two programming colleagues Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. They picked the location because Benioff lived close by.

March 8th 1999 Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, & I showed up at 1449 Montgomery Street & we started a company called https://t.co/GcJjXaxGXz & introduced the end of software (now called the the cloud). Congratulations ⁦@parkerharris⁩ on 20 amazing years! pic.twitter.com/qIbpbBl2C6

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 5, 2019

It would be inaccurate to say Salesforce was the first to market with Software as a Service, a term, by the way, that would not actually emerge for years. In fact, there were a bunch of other fledgling enterprise software startups trying to do business online at the time including NetLedger, which later changed its name NetSuite, and was eventually sold to Oracle for $9.3 billion in 2016.

Other online CRM competitors included Salesnet, RightNow Technologies and Upshot. All would be sold over the next several years. Only Salesforce survived as a stand-alone company. It would go public in 2004 and eventually grow to be one of the top 10 software companies in the world.

Co-founder and CTO Harris said recently that he had no way of knowing that any of that would happen, although having met Benioff, he thought there was potential for something great to happen. “Little did I know at that time, that in 20 years we would be such a successful company and have such an impact on the world,” Harris told TechCrunch.

Nothing’s gonna stop us now

It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that Benioff and Harris had connected. Benioff had taken a sabbatical from his job at Oracle and was taking a shot at building a sales automation tool that ran on the internet. Harris, Moellenhoff and Dominguez had been building salesforce automation software solutions, and the two visions meshed. But building a client-server solution and building one online were very different.

Original meeting request email from Marc Benioff to Parker Harris from 1998. Email courtesy of Parker Harris.

You have to remember that in 1999, there was no concept of Infrastructure as a Service. It would be years before Amazon launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, so Harris and his intrepid programming team were on their own when it came to building the software and providing the servers for it to scale and grow.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world,” Harris said. It wasn’t a matter of building one CRM tool for a large company and scaling it to meet that individual organization’s demand, then another, it was really about figuring out how to let people just sign up and start using the service, he said.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world.” Parker Harris, Salesforce

That may seem trivial now, but it wasn’t a common way of doing business in 1999. The internet in those years was dominated by a ton of consumer-facing dot-coms, many of which would go bust in the next year or two. Salesforce wanted to build an enterprise software company online, and although it wasn’t alone in doing that, it did face unique challenges being one of the early adherents.

“We created a software that was what I would call massively multi-tenant where we couldn’t optimize it at the hardware layer because there was no Infrastructure as a Service. So we did all the optimization above that — and we actually had very little infrastructure early on,” he explained.

Running down a dream

From the beginning, Benioff had the vision and Harris was charged with building it. Tien Tzuo, who would go on to be co-founder at Zuora in 2007, was employee number 11 at Salesforce, starting in August of 1999, about five months after the apartment opened for business. At that point, there still wasn’t an official product, but they were getting closer when Benioff hired Tzuo.

As Tzuo tells it, he had fancied a job as a product manager, but when Benioff saw his Oracle background in sales, he wanted him in account development. “My instinct was, don’t argue with this guy. Just roll with it,” Tzuo relates.

Early prototype of Salesforce.com. Photo: Salesforce

As Tzuo pointed out, in a startup with a handful of people, titles mattered little anyway. “Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder,” he said. The coders were stashed upstairs with a view of San Francisco Bay and strict orders from Benioff to be left alone. The remaining employees were downstairs working the phones to get customers.

“Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder.” Tien Tzuo, early employe

The first Wayback Machine snapshot of Salesforce.com is from November 15, 1999, It wasn’t fancy, but it showed all of the functionality you would expect to find in a CRM tool: Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Forecasts and Reports with each category represented by a tab.

The site officially launched on February 7, 2000 with 200 customers, and they were off and running.

Prove it all night

Every successful startup needs visionary behind it, pushing it, and for Salesforce that person was Marc Benioff. When he came up with the concept for the company, the dot-com boom was in high gear. In a year or two, much of it would come crashing down, but in 1999 anything was possible and Benioff was bold and brash and brimming with ideas.

But even good ideas don’t always pan out for so many reasons, as many a failed startup founder knows only too well. For a startup to succeed it needs a long-term vision of what it will become, and Benioff was the visionary, the front man, the champion, the chief marketer. He was all of that — and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Benioff: Every VC in Silicon Valley turned us down

Paul Greenberg, managing principal at The 56 Group and author of multiple books about the CRM industry including CRM at the Speed of Light (the first edition of which was published in 2001), was an early user of Salesforce, and says that he was not impressed with the product at first, complaining about the early export functionality in an article.

A Salesforce competitor at the time, Salesnet, got wind of Greenberg’s post, and put his complaint on the company website. Benioff saw it, and fired off an email to Greenberg: “I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Greenberg said that being a New Yorker, he wrote back with a one-line response. “Take your best shot.” Twenty years later, Greenberg says that Benioff did take his best shot and he did end up convincing him.

“I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Early Marc Benioff email

Laurie McCabe, who is co-founder and partner at SMB Group, was working for a consulting firm in Boston in 1999 when Benioff came by to pitch Salesforce to her team. She says she was immediately impressed with him, but also with the notion of putting enterprise software online, effectively putting it within reach of many more companies.

“He was the ringmaster I believe for SaaS or cloud or whatever we want to call it today. And that doesn’t mean some of these other guys didn’t also have a great vision, but he was the guy beating the drum louder. And I just really felt that in addition to the fact that he was an exceptional storyteller, marketeer and everything else, he really had the right idea that software on prem was not in reach of most businesses,” she said.

Take it to the limit

One of the ways that Benioff put the company in the public eye in the days before social media was guerrilla marketing techniques. He came up with the idea of “no software” as a way to describe software on the internet. He sent some of his early employees to “protest” at the Siebel Conference, taking place at the Moscone Center in February, 2000. He was disrupting one of his major competitors, and it created enough of a stir to attract a television news crew and garner a mention in the Wall Street Journal. All of this was valuable publicity for a company that was still in its early stages.

Photos: Salesforce

Brent Leary, who had left his job as an industry consultant in 2003 to open his current firm, CRM Essentials, said this ability to push the product was a real differentiator for the company and certainly got his attention. “I had heard about Salesnet and these other ones, but these folks not only had a really good product, they were already promoting it. They seemed to be ahead of the game in terms of evangelizing the whole “no software” thing. And that was part of the draw too,” Leary said of his first experiences working with Salesforce.

Leary added, “My first Dreamforce was in 2004, and I remember it particularly because it was actually held on Election Day 2004 and they had a George W. Bush look-alike come and help open the conference, and some people actually thought it was him.”

Greenberg said that the “no software” campaign was brilliant because it brought this idea of delivering software online to a human level. “When Marc said, ‘no software’ he knew there was software, but the thing with him is, that he’s so good at communicating a vision to people.” Software in the 90s and early 2000s was delivered mostly in boxes on CDs (or 3.5 inch floppies), so saying no software was creating a picture that you didn’t have to touch the software. You just signed up and used it. Greenberg said that campaign helped people understand online software at a time when it wasn’t a common delivery method.

Culture club

One of the big differentiators for Salesforce as a company was the culture it built from Day One. Benioff had a vision of responsible capitalism and included their charitable 1-1-1 model in its earliest planning documents. The idea was to give one percent of Salesforce’s equity, one percent of its product and one percent of its employees’ time to the community. As Benioff once joked, they didn’t have a product and weren’t making any money when they made the pledge, but they have stuck to it and many other companies have used the model Salesforce built.

Image: Salesforce

Bruce Cleveland, a partner at Wildcat Ventures, who has written a book with Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame called Traversing the Traction Gap, says that it is essential for a startup to establish a culture early on, just as Benioff did. “A CEO has to say, these are the standards by which we’re going to run this company. These are the things that we value. This is how we’re going to operate and hold ourselves accountable to each other,” Cleveland said. Benioff did that.

Another element of this was building trust with customers, a theme that Benioff continues to harp on to this day. As Harris pointed out, people still didn’t trust the internet completely in 1999, so the company had to overcome objections to entering a credit card online. Even more than that though, they had to get companies to agree to share their precious customer data with them on the internet.

“We had to not only think about scale, we had to think about how do we get the trust of our customers, to say that we will protect your information as well or better than you can,” Harris explained.

Growing up

The company was able to overcome those objections, of course, and more. Todd McKinnon, who is currently co-founder and CEO at Okta, joined Salesforce as VP of Engineering in 2006 as the company began to ramp up becoming a $100 million company, and he says that there were some growing pains in that time period.

Salesforce revenue growth across the years from 2006-present. Chart: Macro Trends

When he arrived, they were running on three mid-tier Sun servers in a hosted co-location facility. McKinnon said that it was not high-end by today’s standards. “There was probably less RAM than what’s in your MacBook Pro today,” he joked.

When he came on board, the company still had only 13 engineers and the actual infrastructure requirements were still very low. While that would change during his six year tenure, it was working fine when he got there. Within five years, he said, that changed dramatically as they were operating their own data centers and running clusters of Dell X86 servers — but that was down the road.

Before they did that, they went back to Sun one more time and bought four of the biggest boxes they sold at the time and proceeded to transfer all of the data. The problem was that the Oracle database wasn’t working well, so as McKinnon tells it, they got on the phone with Larry Ellison from Oracle, who upon hearing about the setup, asked them straight out why they were doing that? The way they had it set up simply didn’t work.

They were able to resolve it all and move on, but it’s the kind of crisis that today’s startups probably wouldn’t have to deal with because they would be running their company on a cloud infrastructure service, not their own hardware.

Window shopping

About this same time, Salesforce began a strategy to grow through acquisitions. In 2006, it acquired the first of 55 companies when it bought a small wireless technology company called Sendia for $15 million. As early as 2006, the year before the first iPhone, the company was already thinking about mobile.

Last year it made its 52nd acquisition, and the most costly so far, when it purchased Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, giving it a piece of software that could help Salesforce customers bridge the on-prem and cloud worlds. As Greenberg pointed out, this brought a massive change in messaging for the company.

“With the Salesforce acquisition of MuleSoft, it allows them pretty much to complete the cycle between back and front office and between on-prem and the cloud. And you notice, all of a sudden, they’re not saying ‘no software.’ They’re not attacking on-premise. You know, all of this stuff has gone by the wayside,” Greenberg said.

No company is going to be completely consistent as it grows and priorities shift,  but if you are a startup looking for a blueprint on how to grow a successful company, Salesforce would be a pretty good company to model yourself after. Twenty years into this, they are still growing and still going strong and they remain a powerful voice for responsible capitalism, making lots of money, while also giving back to the communities where they operate.

One other lesson that you could learn is that you’re never done. Twenty years is a big milestone, but it’s just one more step in the long arc of a successful organization.

Salesforce wants to reach $60 billion revenue goal by 2034

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/salesforce-at-20-offers-lessons-for-startup-success/

[fmservers]

Salesforce at 20 offers lessons for startup success

Salesforce is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. The company that was once a tiny irritant going after giants in the 1990s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market, such as Oracle and Siebel Systems, has grown into full-fledged SaaS powerhouse. With an annual run rate exceeding $14 billion, it is by far the most successful pure cloud application ever created.

Twenty years ago, it was just another startup with an idea, hoping to get a product out the door. By now, a legend has built up around the company’s origin story, not unlike Zuckerberg’s dorm room or Jobs’ garage, but it really did all begin in 1999 in an apartment in San Francisco, where a former Oracle executive named Marc Benioff teamed with a developer named Parker Harris to create a piece of business software that ran on the internet. They called it Salesforce .com.

None of the handful of employees who gathered in that apartment on the company’s first day in business in 1999 could possibly have imagined what it would become 20 years later, especially when you consider the start of the dot-com crash was just a year away..

Party like it’s 1999

It all began on March 8, 1999 in the apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the site of the first Salesforce office. The original gang of four employees consisted of Benioff and Harris and Harris’s two programming colleagues Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. They picked the location because Benioff lived close by.

March 8th 1999 Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, & I showed up at 1449 Montgomery Street & we started a company called https://t.co/GcJjXaxGXz & introduced the end of software (now called the the cloud). Congratulations ⁦@parkerharris⁩ on 20 amazing years! pic.twitter.com/qIbpbBl2C6

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 5, 2019

It would be inaccurate to say Salesforce was the first to market with Software as a Service, a term, by the way, that would not actually emerge for years. In fact, there were a bunch of other fledgling enterprise software startups trying to do business online at the time including NetLedger, which later changed its name NetSuite, and was eventually sold to Oracle for $9.3 billion in 2016.

Other online CRM competitors included Salesnet, RightNow Technologies and Upshot. All would be sold over the next several years. Only Salesforce survived as a stand-alone company. It would go public in 2004 and eventually grow to be one of the top 10 software companies in the world.

Co-founder and CTO Harris said recently that he had no way of knowing that any of that would happen, although having met Benioff, he thought there was potential for something great to happen. “Little did I know at that time, that in 20 years we would be such a successful company and have such an impact on the world,” Harris told TechCrunch.

Nothing’s gonna stop us now

It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that Benioff and Harris had connected. Benioff had taken a sabbatical from his job at Oracle and was taking a shot at building a sales automation tool that ran on the internet. Harris, Moellenhoff and Dominguez had been building salesforce automation software solutions, and the two visions meshed. But building a client-server solution and building one online were very different.

Original meeting request email from Marc Benioff to Parker Harris from 1998. Email courtesy of Parker Harris.

You have to remember that in 1999, there was no concept of Infrastructure as a Service. It would be years before Amazon launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, so Harris and his intrepid programming team were on their own when it came to building the software and providing the servers for it to scale and grow.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world,” Harris said. It wasn’t a matter of building one CRM tool for a large company and scaling it to meet that individual organization’s demand, then another, it was really about figuring out how to let people just sign up and start using the service, he said.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world.” Parker Harris, Salesforce

That may seem trivial now, but it wasn’t a common way of doing business in 1999. The internet in those years was dominated by a ton of consumer-facing dot-coms, many of which would go bust in the next year or two. Salesforce wanted to build an enterprise software company online, and although it wasn’t alone in doing that, it did face unique challenges being one of the early adherents.

“We created a software that was what I would call massively multi-tenant where we couldn’t optimize it at the hardware layer because there was no Infrastructure as a Service. So we did all the optimization above that — and we actually had very little infrastructure early on,” he explained.

Running down a dream

From the beginning, Benioff had the vision and Harris was charged with building it. Tien Tzuo, who would go on to be co-founder at Zuora in 2007, was employee number 11 at Salesforce, starting in August of 1999, about five months after the apartment opened for business. At that point, there still wasn’t an official product, but they were getting closer when Benioff hired Tzuo.

As Tzuo tells it, he had fancied a job as a product manager, but when Benioff saw his Oracle background in sales, he wanted him in account development. “My instinct was, don’t argue with this guy. Just roll with it,” Tzuo relates.

Early prototype of Salesforce.com. Photo: Salesforce

As Tzuo pointed out, in a startup with a handful of people, titles mattered little anyway. “Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder,” he said. The coders were stashed upstairs with a view of San Francisco Bay and strict orders from Benioff to be left alone. The remaining employees were downstairs working the phones to get customers.

“Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder.” Tien Tzuo, early employe

The first Wayback Machine snapshot of Salesforce.com is from November 15, 1999, It wasn’t fancy, but it showed all of the functionality you would expect to find in a CRM tool: Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Forecasts and Reports with each category represented by a tab.

The site officially launched on February 7, 2000 with 200 customers, and they were off and running.

Prove it all night

Every successful startup needs visionary behind it, pushing it, and for Salesforce that person was Marc Benioff. When he came up with the concept for the company, the dot-com boom was in high gear. In a year or two, much of it would come crashing down, but in 1999 anything was possible and Benioff was bold and brash and brimming with ideas.

But even good ideas don’t always pan out for so many reasons, as many a failed startup founder knows only too well. For a startup to succeed it needs a long-term vision of what it will become, and Benioff was the visionary, the front man, the champion, the chief marketer. He was all of that — and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Benioff: Every VC in Silicon Valley turned us down

Paul Greenberg, managing principal at The 56 Group and author of multiple books about the CRM industry including CRM at the Speed of Light (the first edition of which was published in 2001), was an early user of Salesforce, and says that he was not impressed with the product at first, complaining about the early export functionality in an article.

A Salesforce competitor at the time, Salesnet, got wind of Greenberg’s post, and put his complaint on the company website. Benioff saw it, and fired off an email to Greenberg: “I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Greenberg said that being a New Yorker, he wrote back with a one-line response. “Take your best shot.” Twenty years later, Greenberg says that Benioff did take his best shot and he did end up convincing him.

“I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Early Marc Benioff email

Laurie McCabe, who is co-founder and partner at SMB Group, was working for a consulting firm in Boston in 1999 when Benioff came by to pitch Salesforce to her team. She says she was immediately impressed with him, but also with the notion of putting enterprise software online, effectively putting it within reach of many more companies.

“He was the ringmaster I believe for SaaS or cloud or whatever we want to call it today. And that doesn’t mean some of these other guys didn’t also have a great vision, but he was the guy beating the drum louder. And I just really felt that in addition to the fact that he was an exceptional storyteller, marketeer and everything else, he really had the right idea that software on prem was not in reach of most businesses,” she said.

Take it to the limit

One of the ways that Benioff put the company in the public eye in the days before social media was guerrilla marketing techniques. He came up with the idea of “no software” as a way to describe software on the internet. He sent some of his early employees to “protest” at the Siebel Conference, taking place at the Moscone Center in February, 2000. He was disrupting one of his major competitors, and it created enough of a stir to attract a television news crew and garner a mention in the Wall Street Journal. All of this was valuable publicity for a company that was still in its early stages.

Photos: Salesforce

Brent Leary, who had left his job as an industry consultant in 2003 to open his current firm, CRM Essentials, said this ability to push the product was a real differentiator for the company and certainly got his attention. “I had heard about Salesnet and these other ones, but these folks not only had a really good product, they were already promoting it. They seemed to be ahead of the game in terms of evangelizing the whole “no software” thing. And that was part of the draw too,” Leary said of his first experiences working with Salesforce.

Leary added, “My first Dreamforce was in 2004, and I remember it particularly because it was actually held on Election Day 2004 and they had a George W. Bush look-alike come and help open the conference, and some people actually thought it was him.”

Greenberg said that the “no software” campaign was brilliant because it brought this idea of delivering software online to a human level. “When Marc said, ‘no software’ he knew there was software, but the thing with him is, that he’s so good at communicating a vision to people.” Software in the 90s and early 2000s was delivered mostly in boxes on CDs (or 3.5 inch floppies), so saying no software was creating a picture that you didn’t have to touch the software. You just signed up and used it. Greenberg said that campaign helped people understand online software at a time when it wasn’t a common delivery method.

Culture club

One of the big differentiators for Salesforce as a company was the culture it built from Day One. Benioff had a vision of responsible capitalism and included their charitable 1-1-1 model in its earliest planning documents. The idea was to give one percent of Salesforce’s equity, one percent of its product and one percent of its employees’ time to the community. As Benioff once joked, they didn’t have a product and weren’t making any money when they made the pledge, but they have stuck to it and many other companies have used the model Salesforce built.

Image: Salesforce

Bruce Cleveland, a partner at Wildcat Ventures, who has written a book with Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame called Traversing the Traction Gap, says that it is essential for a startup to establish a culture early on, just as Benioff did. “A CEO has to say, these are the standards by which we’re going to run this company. These are the things that we value. This is how we’re going to operate and hold ourselves accountable to each other,” Cleveland said. Benioff did that.

Another element of this was building trust with customers, a theme that Benioff continues to harp on to this day. As Harris pointed out, people still didn’t trust the internet completely in 1999, so the company had to overcome objections to entering a credit card online. Even more than that though, they had to get companies to agree to share their precious customer data with them on the internet.

“We had to not only think about scale, we had to think about how do we get the trust of our customers, to say that we will protect your information as well or better than you can,” Harris explained.

Growing up

The company was able to overcome those objections, of course, and more. Todd McKinnon, who is currently co-founder and CEO at Okta, joined Salesforce as VP of Engineering in 2006 as the company began to ramp up becoming a $100 million company, and he says that there were some growing pains in that time period.

Salesforce revenue growth across the years from 2006-present. Chart: Macro Trends

When he arrived, they were running on three mid-tier Sun servers in a hosted co-location facility. McKinnon said that it was not high-end by today’s standards. “There was probably less RAM than what’s in your MacBook Pro today,” he joked.

When he came on board, the company still had only 13 engineers and the actual infrastructure requirements were still very low. While that would change during his six year tenure, it was working fine when he got there. Within five years, he said, that changed dramatically as they were operating their own data centers and running clusters of Dell X86 servers — but that was down the road.

Before they did that, they went back to Sun one more time and bought four of the biggest boxes they sold at the time and proceeded to transfer all of the data. The problem was that the Oracle database wasn’t working well, so as McKinnon tells it, they got on the phone with Larry Ellison from Oracle, who upon hearing about the setup, asked them straight out why they were doing that? The way they had it set up simply didn’t work.

They were able to resolve it all and move on, but it’s the kind of crisis that today’s startups probably wouldn’t have to deal with because they would be running their company on a cloud infrastructure service, not their own hardware.

Window shopping

About this same time, Salesforce began a strategy to grow through acquisitions. In 2006, it acquired the first of 55 companies when it bought a small wireless technology company called Sendia for $15 million. As early as 2006, the year before the first iPhone, the company was already thinking about mobile.

Last year it made its 52nd acquisition, and the most costly so far, when it purchased Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, giving it a piece of software that could help Salesforce customers bridge the on-prem and cloud worlds. As Greenberg pointed out, this brought a massive change in messaging for the company.

“With the Salesforce acquisition of MuleSoft, it allows them pretty much to complete the cycle between back and front office and between on-prem and the cloud. And you notice, all of a sudden, they’re not saying ‘no software.’ They’re not attacking on-premise. You know, all of this stuff has gone by the wayside,” Greenberg said.

No company is going to be completely consistent as it grows and priorities shift,  but if you are a startup looking for a blueprint on how to grow a successful company, Salesforce would be a pretty good company to model yourself after. Twenty years into this, they are still growing and still going strong and they remain a powerful voice for responsible capitalism, making lots of money, while also giving back to the communities where they operate.

One other lesson that you could learn is that you’re never done. Twenty years is a big milestone, but it’s just one more step in the long arc of a successful organization.

Salesforce wants to reach $60 billion revenue goal by 2034

Via Ron Miller https://techcrunch.com

[todaybharatnews]

via Today Bharat nbsp; In cases of sexual violence, power is a big factor at play. And unless we realise how this power plays out in everyday situations, we can keep harping ndash; ldquo;Oh but why didnrsquo;t she speak sooner.rdquo; Nandhini* was on the lookout for a job in 2009, when she made the acquaintance of a senior journalist in Hyderabad. The man was a big name in news television and told her that he would help her with leads. The news that Nandhini had outed a predator in the organisation where she was working had spread, and the then-21-year-old was desperately looking to get a new job as the environment in the newspaper she worked with was getting uncomfortable. The senior television journalist added her on Facebook, praised her courage for outing her predator, and on the pretext of setting up a meeting with his wife ndash; also a senior journalist ndash; he took her to his house and sexually assaulted her. ldquo;When we went up to his house though, I realised that the door was locked. I got uncomfortable and said I will come back later. He said his wife must have stepped out to pick up their daughter, and asked me to come in and sit down. This man then went into the kitchen to get some water. When he came out, he had unzipped himself and had his penis out. I was frozen, shocked and scared, and got up to leave. He held my hand pushed me down on the sofa and forced me to give him a blow job, even as I was crying,rdquo; Nandhini says, ldquo;He then threw a box of tissues on me, asked me to clean up and get out of the house.rdquo; ldquo;When the incident happened a decade ago, I was too shaken and shocked to process it. All I felt was shame,rdquo; Nandhini tells TNM, ldquo;Since I had just gone through the trauma of being harassed at my then workplace and being stigmatised for having raised my voice, I felt that if I spoke up about the assault I would be shamed again.rdquo; The journalist who assaulted her also made her believe that no one would trust her if she spoke up. ldquo;He told me no one would believe me because many in the media circles thought I was lsquo;offrsquo;. I guess I believed that and didn't want to put myself through another round of being stigmatised, so I did not reveal what happened to anyone,rdquo; she says. ldquo;I thought this was the best thing to do for self-preservation. Now I know it's this culture of silence that allows men to get away with impunity and predatory behaviour,rdquo; Nandhini says, days after she spoke up about the assault for the first time in a #MeToo post. In the last decade, the journalist ndash; and his wife ndash; have only grown more powerful in the industry, and while she has heard whispers of his misconduct with other women, he has not faced any repercussions for his behaviour so far, she says. Like Nandhini, many women who face sexual abuse, assault, and harassment donrsquo;t report it or speak up about it immediately after it happens for many reasons. In many cases, there is a power differential between the survivor and the perpetrator; survivors risk losing their livelihood if their perpetrator is a powerful man in the same industry, and for many women, redressal mechanisms are not immediately apparent. Reason 1: lsquo;Good girls stay quietrsquo;Singer Chinmayi, who has accused prominent Tamil lyricist Vairamuthu of misbehaving with her, says there is a conspiracy of silence that women are forced to follow. ldquo;When it first happened, I told my mother about it ndash; and in the course of several years after that, I have told some other people too about how he misbehaved with me; so in these discussions, others have told me that he has behaved inappropriately with them as well ndash; but wersquo;re in a culture where women are told to not speak out about these things,rdquo; Chinmayi tells TNM. ldquo;Maximum ndash; we share with our lsquo;girl gangsrsquo; about who is a pervert. That women must take care of themselves around certain men. Wersquo;re not in a society where we are encouraged to speak up about sexual harassment,rdquo; she adds. ldquo;We are conditioned from childhood to hush up when something bad happens,rdquo; Nandhini says, ldquo;An uncle touches you inappropriately and you tell your parents, and parents hush you up. They either don't believe you, or believe you and worry too much about you being tagged lsquo;violatedrsquo;. In schools too, there is very little conversation on consent, safe touch, unsafe touch ndash; and somehow, girls and women are brought up to carry the burden of shame that isn't theirs.rdquo; Reason 2: lsquo;No real mechanisms for redressalrsquo;Veteran Bollywood writer-producer Vinta Nanda, who recently accused actor Alok Nath of rape 19 years ago, tells TNM that when the crime happened, such behaviour was so normalised there was rarely a question of seeking redressal. ldquo;It was not considered lsquo;wrongrsquo; anyway, so what will you go and report?rdquo; she asks, ldquo;Now there is a provision for ICCs (Internal Complaints Committees for sexual harassment) ndash; back then there were no platforms for redressal. So, who would I go to?rdquo; Going to the court, Vinta says, is a process that not many women can afford ndash; both financially and in terms of time. ldquo;Itrsquo;s only in the last month that ICCs are being set up in the film industry. Before there were ICCs, where could we go? Going to court would take our life away. I did not feel empowered to speak up 20 years ago,rdquo; she says. Reason 3: lsquo;When the man is powerful, no one believes yoursquo;ldquo;More than anything else, the man who misbehaved with me was very powerful,rdquo; says Chinmayi, ldquo;so there was fear.rdquo; ldquo;In many cases, coming out means losing all the support you have, if the man yoursquo;re accusing is powerful,rdquo; Vinta explains. In Nandhinirsquo;s case, the man in question has already displayed how he will react when someone accuses him. ldquo;When another woman came out with her #MeToo story about him, his wife decided to intimidate her, and he decided to shame her in a statement,rdquo; Nandhini says, explaining why she has chosen to not reveal her identity. The day she made her #MeToo statement was the first time Nandhini spoke out about the assault to anyone ndash; the first instance she has acknowledged the assault. ldquo;Reliving my trauma is difficult enough,rdquo; she explains. Reason 4: Layers of oppressionNandhini says that among the many disgusting things the senior journalist said when he assaulted her, was, ldquo;Glad you were upper caste, no way I would let anyone else touch my penis.rdquo; The very fact that most of the voices that have been heard in this wave of the #MeToo movement in India points to how much more difficult it is for marginalised women, men, and non-binary folks to speak up. As former Miss India and actor Niharika Singh said in her #MeToo statement, shared by journalist Sandhya Menon, ldquo;Violence against women may be a common feature faced by all women in India, but there is no denying the fact that certain kinds of violence are customarily reserved solely for Dalit women. More so for those who assert themselves and reject caste and patriarchal domination. While crimes against upper caste women are taken seriously and elicit more empathy, violation of rights of Dalit women and the injustice meted out to us has an excruciating long history. Statistics show that crimes against Dalits have risen by 746% in the last one decade. A Dalit atrocity is committed every 15 minutes and six Dalit women are raped every day. Most cases are neither registered nor acted upon and the perpetrators go scot-free.rdquo; The way forwardldquo;When people ask why women donrsquo;t speak up, or why women donrsquo;t speak up sooner ndash; I think that question can only be asked after you make the society safe for women,rdquo; Vinta says, ldquo;Me Too has brought the discussion about sexual violence into the mainstream, and has brought men into the discussion as well. Therersquo;s a tectonic shift in the discourse.rdquo; ldquo;We need to create safe spaces for everyone ndash; whether they have support systems in their industry or they are outsiders. Only then can women feel empowered to speak out and seek justice,rdquo; she adds. Chinmayi says that itrsquo;s only when there is more dialogue that people will feel confident about speaking out. ldquo;We as a society are in a constant state of denial that something like this can even happen,rdquo; she says, ldquo;We need to understand that itrsquo;s possible that an extremely talented individual could also be a sexual predator. Itrsquo;s possible that someone whorsquo;s work we have really loved is a sexual predator. We, as a society, need to figure out how wersquo;re going to treat someone whose work we love, admire and respect ndash; but the man has personal failings.rdquo; ldquo;If the culture of silence needs to stop, then hear us survivors out. Without shaming us. Without judging us,rdquo; says Nandhini. Most importantly, we need to dismantle power structures that enable such sexual violence, as Niharika Singh said. ldquo;Itrsquo;s time to realize that the pompous, neoliberal, savarna feminism is not going to liberate anyone. Unless the Savarna feminists dismantle the same power structures from which they have benefitted, women in this country will continue to be gaslit, exploited and maligned; their dreams thwarted, voices silenced, bodies assaulted and histories erased. The selective outrage of the supposed lsquo;liberalsrsquo; and lsquo;Indian leftistsrsquo; benefits only their convenience, and we most note that it finally took a Dalit student, Raya Sarkar in academia and a beauty pageant winner, Tanushree Dutta, to burst the Bollywood bubble while they silently looked on for years.rdquo; nbsp;

[jesusvasser]

Track Drive: 2018 Mercedes-AMG E63 S Sedan and Wagon

BOWLING GREEN, Kentucky — I arrived at the NCM Motorsports Park (MSP) race track about an hour earlier than expected by the Mercedes ground crew. Not because I drove my allocated AMG GLC 63 S Coupe faster than anyone else, but because I took a shorter detour around some of my newly discovered favorite roads in the area. Those roads just happen to be close to the race track and Bowling Green happens to be my new home after 30 years in South Florida.

Getting there early gave me a chance to look over the 2018 Mercedes-AMG E63 S Sedan and AMG E63 S Wagon before things got started on track. These two sporty people movers were our allocated track weapons for the day.

You may ask why anyone put a luxury sedan and wagon on a race track? First, because it’s fun. Then again, I’d take a shopping trolley round a race track if someone put an engine in it, so I may not be the right person to comment. Most importantly, Mercedes must think it’s a reasonable idea or at least, the company’s marketing folks have a good sense of humor—either way, no complaints from my end.

The E63 sedan and wagon feel similar to drive on road or track, which makes sense as they are almost identical. Both stealthy PG-rated missiles pack handcrafted 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8s kicking out 603 hp and 627 lb-ft of torque. They also carry trick AMG handling technology to cope with all that power. So to feel the power and technology at its limit and save the driving licenses of people like me, to the race track it is.

Mercedes had racing legend and well-known sports commentator Tommy Kendall on hand to give the track talk and pace the lead-follow laps. (Tommy also heads up the AMG Driving Academy for Mercedes.) Each car was equipped with a track radio. Tommy gave running commentary as he drove the lead AMG GT R pace car to help the first timers learn the fast and technical MSP track. Even though I am based at MSP and know the track well, I was happy to follow Tommy and listen in. “An open mind learns something new every day,” my mum always told me.

I was in the E63 S Sedan first, but before I talk about the track handling, let me spend a minute on standing start capabilities. The Sedan weighs in at 4,515 pounds (versus 4,669 pounds for the wagon), some 900 pounds more than Tommy’s AMG GT R. And though the E63 has the benefit of 26 more horses and all-wheel drive, it’s still impressive how this heavy four-door can equal or even beat the GT R to 60 mph. According to Mercedes, the sedan needs just 3.3 second to hit 60 mph, while the wagon needs a 3.4 seconds to get there. My rear end and my chiropractor both think those figures might be conservative.

To get the best launch I used the “RACE START” launch feature. It is easy to use and brutally effective. If you’re in any drive mode other than Comfort, press the brake pedal hard, fully depress the gas pedal, and let off the brake when ready to hole shot.

Most of the technical help to effectively transfer the big power to the ground is provided by the AMG Performance 4MATIC+ system. This All-wheel drive technology has the ability to move 100 percent of power to whichever end of the vehicle can use it most effectively.

I used the Sport+ drive setting to put the E63 into the least intrusive level of nanny control. Sport+ causes the AMG Sport Suspension Air Body Control and Dynamic Engine Mounts to stiffen the car, slow down body roll, and enhance steering feel. The Electronic Limited Slip Differential also works with the 4MATIC system to quicken the allocation of drive to each wheel. In a nutshell, Sport+ changes the car from a luxury sedan to an extremely sporty sedan, allowing more vehicle yaw rotation and wheel slip before the nannies wake up.

At a brisk pace on track following Tommy, the steering gave me enough feel to easily control the rate of vehicle rotation going into any corner I chose. This would set me up nicely for smooth and fast corner exits. Chassis behavior was both impressive, predictable and a total blast to play with.

The AMG Performance Exhaust System is well worth the $1,250 buy-in. It sounds great inside the car with a little enhancement coming through the speakers, popping and growling like a serious performance car. The line of E63s going into turn one with Tommy leading in the GT R sounded great on the outside too. This car can definitely provide an early morning treat to upset that neighbor who leaves their poor dog outside barking all day.

I want to give a shout out to the E63’s Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires for good grip and consistency in the very hot conditions. The Pilot Sport 4S don’t offer Pilot Cup 2 levels of grip and are instead designed to grip and last, which they do. Considering the weight of the E63 and the sliding abuse I was giving them, the tires gave me all I asked for. Tire sizes for the sedan and wagon both are 265/35R20 up front and 295/30R20 at rear.

The driver seat is comfortable and supportive. No surprise for a vehicle at this price point. The steering wheel is a smaller racy circumference with a flattened bottom, which I like. The twin 12.3-inch wide screens are impressive—though I am not a fan of infotainment systems as I find them very distracting to try and use while driving, hands-free or otherwise, I like to try them out while parked. Once I figure out what I might use and how to access it, I’m good to go. The Mercedes system was as intuitive and easy to use as most. I particularly liked the twin gauge cluster showing on the fly horsepower and torque.

Driver aids such as Active Steering Assist, Active Lane Change Assist, and Active Lane Keeping Assist function the same way as other manufacturer’s. They are basically at level 2+ autonomy levels, meaning that the driver has to pay full attention to the road at all times while using them, which seems to miss the point a bit. The reason a driver is warned to pay full attention is in case the system goes blind (bad road markings) or another driver dangerously enters your driving space (because the technology can’t evade). I always opt to skip the driver assist systems when I drive.

I had been doing the on-track lead follow at the kind of pace you could never do on public roads without the probability of ending up in jail or being loaded onto a wrecker. I felt I had a good handle on the E63s but wondered aloud if it might be possible to do a couple of hot laps and really take one cars to the limit. Luckily for me, the Mercedes execs in attendance also have irrational tendencies and were all for it.

Of course, I chose the E63 S wagon for the hot lap. It just seemed right and pleased my cartoon sensibilities. My plan for the run would be to do a warm up lap, two flying/timed laps, and a cool-down lap. There was no time to do any practice runs at full speed, so off I went. I rocketed down the straight heading for turn one with the nine-speed AMG SPEEDSHIFT MCT (multi-clutch transmission) automatic spitting shifts like a champ. I braked as late as I dared, seeing over 135 mph before deploying the chutes and the $8,950 ceramic brakes did not disappoint, with the wagon immediately impressing me with its full-on panic stopping power. The nearly 4,700-pound wagon shredded speed as efficiently as a serious sports car. I was thinking we might be shredding the track surface also and the Michelins seemed to be trying to leave the vehicle, yelping and screeching in anguish, but everything held on and I made it through turn one. Only 22 turns left to go on this lap. Great.

The brakes and tires were holding up well as I blasted out of turn 15 at over 130 mph, on my way to the track’s infamous turn 16—the trickiest and one of the fastest corners at MSP. Getting through it clean, fast, and in one piece takes total commitment or sanity; I have commitment. Turn 16 is an up and over 100 mph turn with a blind climbing entry, changing to downhill and off camber as it sweeps away to turn 17. It is my favorite turn at MSP, mainly because I’m not well.

Entering turn 16, I had a quick word with the E63 wagon. I need you to rotate, like right now. Relying on only the front tires to make this turn at the speed I was carrying in a 4,700-pound car would have been futile. Using the cresting hill, I tried to kick out the rear end by aggressively tapping the brake pedal as I turned in. I was almost caught out as the wagon rotated really fast. Too well in fact. Even though I was in Sport+, the violence of the rotation totally woke up the 4MATIC and stability nannies, which, convinced we were all going to die, impressively and annoyingly brought the rear end back in line. Oh poo (or words to that effect) I may have said, while continuing to convince the rear to stay where I wanted it. The fight between me, the nannies, and the 4MATIC was a good one—one that was finally broken up by the approaching brake zone of turn 17.

The wagon ran like a champ for the two hot laps.The brakes took the hammering impressively well, especially considering the weight of the wagon and the ambient and track temperatures, giving me a solid pedal during the whole run. For those of you who know MSP and maybe run there, my best lap was the first one, at 2 minutes and 23.14 seconds. Tires were Michelin PS4S, ambient temperature 93 degrees, and track temp was over 125 degrees.

You have to give credit to Mercedes for continuing to bring their rocket ship wagon to the US when they know the US is a lousy market for wagons. They told us they expect to sell just 3,000 wagons a year in the States and only 10% will be E63s, which is not a lot.

I have always liked ultra-capable big sedans and am a huge fan of wagons. The 603-hp E63 S Sedan will push the new BMW M5 and Tesla Model S to their limits; the E63 S Wagon will do the same, while moving house. We live in strange but very good times for motor heads my friends.

2018 Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Sedan Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $105,395 (base) ENGINE 4.0L twin-turbo DOHC 32-valve V-8/603 hp @ 5,750-6,500 rpm, 627 lb-ft @ 2,500-4,500 rpm TRANSMISSION 9-speed multi-clutch automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE 15/22 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 196.4 x 75.1 x 56.6 in WHEELBASE 115.7 in WEIGHT 4,515 lb 0-60 MPH 3.3 sec TOP SPEED 188 mph

  2018 Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Wagon Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $107,945 (base) ENGINE 4.0L twin-turbo DOHC 32-valve V-8/603 hp @ 5,750-6,500 rpm, 627 lb-ft @ 2,500-4,500 rpm TRANSMISSION 9-speed multi-clutch automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE 16/22 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 197.1 x 75.1 x 58.0 in WHEELBASE 115.7 in WEIGHT 4,515 lb 0-60 MPH 3.4 sec TOP SPEED 180 mph

IFTTT

[jonathanbelloblog]

Track Drive: 2018 Mercedes-AMG E63 S Sedan and Wagon

BOWLING GREEN, Kentucky — I arrived at the NCM Motorsports Park (MSP) race track about an hour earlier than expected by the Mercedes ground crew. Not because I drove my allocated AMG GLC 63 S Coupe faster than anyone else, but because I took a shorter detour around some of my newly discovered favorite roads in the area. Those roads just happen to be close to the race track and Bowling Green happens to be my new home after 30 years in South Florida.

Getting there early gave me a chance to look over the 2018 Mercedes-AMG E63 S Sedan and AMG E63 S Wagon before things got started on track. These two sporty people movers were our allocated track weapons for the day.

You may ask why anyone put a luxury sedan and wagon on a race track? First, because it’s fun. Then again, I’d take a shopping trolley round a race track if someone put an engine in it, so I may not be the right person to comment. Most importantly, Mercedes must think it’s a reasonable idea or at least, the company’s marketing folks have a good sense of humor—either way, no complaints from my end.

The E63 sedan and wagon feel similar to drive on road or track, which makes sense as they are almost identical. Both stealthy PG-rated missiles pack handcrafted 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8s kicking out 603 hp and 627 lb-ft of torque. They also carry trick AMG handling technology to cope with all that power. So to feel the power and technology at its limit and save the driving licenses of people like me, to the race track it is.

Mercedes had racing legend and well-known sports commentator Tommy Kendall on hand to give the track talk and pace the lead-follow laps. (Tommy also heads up the AMG Driving Academy for Mercedes.) Each car was equipped with a track radio. Tommy gave running commentary as he drove the lead AMG GT R pace car to help the first timers learn the fast and technical MSP track. Even though I am based at MSP and know the track well, I was happy to follow Tommy and listen in. “An open mind learns something new every day,” my mum always told me.

I was in the E63 S Sedan first, but before I talk about the track handling, let me spend a minute on standing start capabilities. The Sedan weighs in at 4,515 pounds (versus 4,669 pounds for the wagon), some 900 pounds more than Tommy’s AMG GT R. And though the E63 has the benefit of 26 more horses and all-wheel drive, it’s still impressive how this heavy four-door can equal or even beat the GT R to 60 mph. According to Mercedes, the sedan needs just 3.3 second to hit 60 mph, while the wagon needs a 3.4 seconds to get there. My rear end and my chiropractor both think those figures might be conservative.

To get the best launch I used the “RACE START” launch feature. It is easy to use and brutally effective. If you’re in any drive mode other than Comfort, press the brake pedal hard, fully depress the gas pedal, and let off the brake when ready to hole shot.

Most of the technical help to effectively transfer the big power to the ground is provided by the AMG Performance 4MATIC+ system. This All-wheel drive technology has the ability to move 100 percent of power to whichever end of the vehicle can use it most effectively.

I used the Sport+ drive setting to put the E63 into the least intrusive level of nanny control. Sport+ causes the AMG Sport Suspension Air Body Control and Dynamic Engine Mounts to stiffen the car, slow down body roll, and enhance steering feel. The Electronic Limited Slip Differential also works with the 4MATIC system to quicken the allocation of drive to each wheel. In a nutshell, Sport+ changes the car from a luxury sedan to an extremely sporty sedan, allowing more vehicle yaw rotation and wheel slip before the nannies wake up.

At a brisk pace on track following Tommy, the steering gave me enough feel to easily control the rate of vehicle rotation going into any corner I chose. This would set me up nicely for smooth and fast corner exits. Chassis behavior was both impressive, predictable and a total blast to play with.

The AMG Performance Exhaust System is well worth the $1,250 buy-in. It sounds great inside the car with a little enhancement coming through the speakers, popping and growling like a serious performance car. The line of E63s going into turn one with Tommy leading in the GT R sounded great on the outside too. This car can definitely provide an early morning treat to upset that neighbor who leaves their poor dog outside barking all day.

I want to give a shout out to the E63’s Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires for good grip and consistency in the very hot conditions. The Pilot Sport 4S don’t offer Pilot Cup 2 levels of grip and are instead designed to grip and last, which they do. Considering the weight of the E63 and the sliding abuse I was giving them, the tires gave me all I asked for. Tire sizes for the sedan and wagon both are 265/35R20 up front and 295/30R20 at rear.

The driver seat is comfortable and supportive. No surprise for a vehicle at this price point. The steering wheel is a smaller racy circumference with a flattened bottom, which I like. The twin 12.3-inch wide screens are impressive—though I am not a fan of infotainment systems as I find them very distracting to try and use while driving, hands-free or otherwise, I like to try them out while parked. Once I figure out what I might use and how to access it, I’m good to go. The Mercedes system was as intuitive and easy to use as most. I particularly liked the twin gauge cluster showing on the fly horsepower and torque.

Driver aids such as Active Steering Assist, Active Lane Change Assist, and Active Lane Keeping Assist function the same way as other manufacturer’s. They are basically at level 2+ autonomy levels, meaning that the driver has to pay full attention to the road at all times while using them, which seems to miss the point a bit. The reason a driver is warned to pay full attention is in case the system goes blind (bad road markings) or another driver dangerously enters your driving space (because the technology can’t evade). I always opt to skip the driver assist systems when I drive.

I had been doing the on-track lead follow at the kind of pace you could never do on public roads without the probability of ending up in jail or being loaded onto a wrecker. I felt I had a good handle on the E63s but wondered aloud if it might be possible to do a couple of hot laps and really take one cars to the limit. Luckily for me, the Mercedes execs in attendance also have irrational tendencies and were all for it.

Of course, I chose the E63 S wagon for the hot lap. It just seemed right and pleased my cartoon sensibilities. My plan for the run would be to do a warm up lap, two flying/timed laps, and a cool-down lap. There was no time to do any practice runs at full speed, so off I went. I rocketed down the straight heading for turn one with the nine-speed AMG SPEEDSHIFT MCT (multi-clutch transmission) automatic spitting shifts like a champ. I braked as late as I dared, seeing over 135 mph before deploying the chutes and the $8,950 ceramic brakes did not disappoint, with the wagon immediately impressing me with its full-on panic stopping power. The nearly 4,700-pound wagon shredded speed as efficiently as a serious sports car. I was thinking we might be shredding the track surface also and the Michelins seemed to be trying to leave the vehicle, yelping and screeching in anguish, but everything held on and I made it through turn one. Only 22 turns left to go on this lap. Great.

The brakes and tires were holding up well as I blasted out of turn 15 at over 130 mph, on my way to the track’s infamous turn 16—the trickiest and one of the fastest corners at MSP. Getting through it clean, fast, and in one piece takes total commitment or sanity; I have commitment. Turn 16 is an up and over 100 mph turn with a blind climbing entry, changing to downhill and off camber as it sweeps away to turn 17. It is my favorite turn at MSP, mainly because I’m not well.

Entering turn 16, I had a quick word with the E63 wagon. I need you to rotate, like right now. Relying on only the front tires to make this turn at the speed I was carrying in a 4,700-pound car would have been futile. Using the cresting hill, I tried to kick out the rear end by aggressively tapping the brake pedal as I turned in. I was almost caught out as the wagon rotated really fast. Too well in fact. Even though I was in Sport+, the violence of the rotation totally woke up the 4MATIC and stability nannies, which, convinced we were all going to die, impressively and annoyingly brought the rear end back in line. Oh poo (or words to that effect) I may have said, while continuing to convince the rear to stay where I wanted it. The fight between me, the nannies, and the 4MATIC was a good one—one that was finally broken up by the approaching brake zone of turn 17.

The wagon ran like a champ for the two hot laps.The brakes took the hammering impressively well, especially considering the weight of the wagon and the ambient and track temperatures, giving me a solid pedal during the whole run. For those of you who know MSP and maybe run there, my best lap was the first one, at 2 minutes and 23.14 seconds. Tires were Michelin PS4S, ambient temperature 93 degrees, and track temp was over 125 degrees.

You have to give credit to Mercedes for continuing to bring their rocket ship wagon to the US when they know the US is a lousy market for wagons. They told us they expect to sell just 3,000 wagons a year in the States and only 10% will be E63s, which is not a lot.

I have always liked ultra-capable big sedans and am a huge fan of wagons. The 603-hp E63 S Sedan will push the new BMW M5 and Tesla Model S to their limits; the E63 S Wagon will do the same, while moving house. We live in strange but very good times for motor heads my friends.

2018 Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Sedan Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $105,395 (base) ENGINE 4.0L twin-turbo DOHC 32-valve V-8/603 hp @ 5,750-6,500 rpm, 627 lb-ft @ 2,500-4,500 rpm TRANSMISSION 9-speed multi-clutch automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE 15/22 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 196.4 x 75.1 x 56.6 in WHEELBASE 115.7 in WEIGHT 4,515 lb 0-60 MPH 3.3 sec TOP SPEED 188 mph

  2018 Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Wagon Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $107,945 (base) ENGINE 4.0L twin-turbo DOHC 32-valve V-8/603 hp @ 5,750-6,500 rpm, 627 lb-ft @ 2,500-4,500 rpm TRANSMISSION 9-speed multi-clutch automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE 16/22 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 197.1 x 75.1 x 58.0 in WHEELBASE 115.7 in WEIGHT 4,515 lb 0-60 MPH 3.4 sec TOP SPEED 180 mph

IFTTT

[eddiejpoplar]

Track Drive: 2018 Mercedes-AMG E63 S Sedan and Wagon

BOWLING GREEN, Kentucky — I arrived at the NCM Motorsports Park (MSP) race track about an hour earlier than expected by the Mercedes ground crew. Not because I drove my allocated AMG GLC 63 S Coupe faster than anyone else, but because I took a shorter detour around some of my newly discovered favorite roads in the area. Those roads just happen to be close to the race track and Bowling Green happens to be my new home after 30 years in South Florida.

Getting there early gave me a chance to look over the 2018 Mercedes-AMG E63 S Sedan and AMG E63 S Wagon before things got started on track. These two sporty people movers were our allocated track weapons for the day.

You may ask why anyone put a luxury sedan and wagon on a race track? First, because it’s fun. Then again, I’d take a shopping trolley round a race track if someone put an engine in it, so I may not be the right person to comment. Most importantly, Mercedes must think it’s a reasonable idea or at least, the company’s marketing folks have a good sense of humor—either way, no complaints from my end.

The E63 sedan and wagon feel similar to drive on road or track, which makes sense as they are almost identical. Both stealthy PG-rated missiles pack handcrafted 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8s kicking out 603 hp and 627 lb-ft of torque. They also carry trick AMG handling technology to cope with all that power. So to feel the power and technology at its limit and save the driving licenses of people like me, to the race track it is.

Mercedes had racing legend and well-known sports commentator Tommy Kendall on hand to give the track talk and pace the lead-follow laps. (Tommy also heads up the AMG Driving Academy for Mercedes.) Each car was equipped with a track radio. Tommy gave running commentary as he drove the lead AMG GT R pace car to help the first timers learn the fast and technical MSP track. Even though I am based at MSP and know the track well, I was happy to follow Tommy and listen in. “An open mind learns something new every day,” my mum always told me.

I was in the E63 S Sedan first, but before I talk about the track handling, let me spend a minute on standing start capabilities. The Sedan weighs in at 4,515 pounds (versus 4,669 pounds for the wagon), some 900 pounds more than Tommy’s AMG GT R. And though the E63 has the benefit of 26 more horses and all-wheel drive, it’s still impressive how this heavy four-door can equal or even beat the GT R to 60 mph. According to Mercedes, the sedan needs just 3.3 second to hit 60 mph, while the wagon needs a 3.4 seconds to get there. My rear end and my chiropractor both think those figures might be conservative.

To get the best launch I used the “RACE START” launch feature. It is easy to use and brutally effective. If you’re in any drive mode other than Comfort, press the brake pedal hard, fully depress the gas pedal, and let off the brake when ready to hole shot.

Most of the technical help to effectively transfer the big power to the ground is provided by the AMG Performance 4MATIC+ system. This All-wheel drive technology has the ability to move 100 percent of power to whichever end of the vehicle can use it most effectively.

I used the Sport+ drive setting to put the E63 into the least intrusive level of nanny control. Sport+ causes the AMG Sport Suspension Air Body Control and Dynamic Engine Mounts to stiffen the car, slow down body roll, and enhance steering feel. The Electronic Limited Slip Differential also works with the 4MATIC system to quicken the allocation of drive to each wheel. In a nutshell, Sport+ changes the car from a luxury sedan to an extremely sporty sedan, allowing more vehicle yaw rotation and wheel slip before the nannies wake up.

At a brisk pace on track following Tommy, the steering gave me enough feel to easily control the rate of vehicle rotation going into any corner I chose. This would set me up nicely for smooth and fast corner exits. Chassis behavior was both impressive, predictable and a total blast to play with.

The AMG Performance Exhaust System is well worth the $1,250 buy-in. It sounds great inside the car with a little enhancement coming through the speakers, popping and growling like a serious performance car. The line of E63s going into turn one with Tommy leading in the GT R sounded great on the outside too. This car can definitely provide an early morning treat to upset that neighbor who leaves their poor dog outside barking all day.

I want to give a shout out to the E63’s Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires for good grip and consistency in the very hot conditions. The Pilot Sport 4S don’t offer Pilot Cup 2 levels of grip and are instead designed to grip and last, which they do. Considering the weight of the E63 and the sliding abuse I was giving them, the tires gave me all I asked for. Tire sizes for the sedan and wagon both are 265/35R20 up front and 295/30R20 at rear.

The driver seat is comfortable and supportive. No surprise for a vehicle at this price point. The steering wheel is a smaller racy circumference with a flattened bottom, which I like. The twin 12.3-inch wide screens are impressive—though I am not a fan of infotainment systems as I find them very distracting to try and use while driving, hands-free or otherwise, I like to try them out while parked. Once I figure out what I might use and how to access it, I’m good to go. The Mercedes system was as intuitive and easy to use as most. I particularly liked the twin gauge cluster showing on the fly horsepower and torque.

Driver aids such as Active Steering Assist, Active Lane Change Assist, and Active Lane Keeping Assist function the same way as other manufacturer’s. They are basically at level 2+ autonomy levels, meaning that the driver has to pay full attention to the road at all times while using them, which seems to miss the point a bit. The reason a driver is warned to pay full attention is in case the system goes blind (bad road markings) or another driver dangerously enters your driving space (because the technology can’t evade). I always opt to skip the driver assist systems when I drive.

I had been doing the on-track lead follow at the kind of pace you could never do on public roads without the probability of ending up in jail or being loaded onto a wrecker. I felt I had a good handle on the E63s but wondered aloud if it might be possible to do a couple of hot laps and really take one cars to the limit. Luckily for me, the Mercedes execs in attendance also have irrational tendencies and were all for it.

Of course, I chose the E63 S wagon for the hot lap. It just seemed right and pleased my cartoon sensibilities. My plan for the run would be to do a warm up lap, two flying/timed laps, and a cool-down lap. There was no time to do any practice runs at full speed, so off I went. I rocketed down the straight heading for turn one with the nine-speed AMG SPEEDSHIFT MCT (multi-clutch transmission) automatic spitting shifts like a champ. I braked as late as I dared, seeing over 135 mph before deploying the chutes and the $8,950 ceramic brakes did not disappoint, with the wagon immediately impressing me with its full-on panic stopping power. The nearly 4,700-pound wagon shredded speed as efficiently as a serious sports car. I was thinking we might be shredding the track surface also and the Michelins seemed to be trying to leave the vehicle, yelping and screeching in anguish, but everything held on and I made it through turn one. Only 22 turns left to go on this lap. Great.

The brakes and tires were holding up well as I blasted out of turn 15 at over 130 mph, on my way to the track’s infamous turn 16—the trickiest and one of the fastest corners at MSP. Getting through it clean, fast, and in one piece takes total commitment or sanity; I have commitment. Turn 16 is an up and over 100 mph turn with a blind climbing entry, changing to downhill and off camber as it sweeps away to turn 17. It is my favorite turn at MSP, mainly because I’m not well.

Entering turn 16, I had a quick word with the E63 wagon. I need you to rotate, like right now. Relying on only the front tires to make this turn at the speed I was carrying in a 4,700-pound car would have been futile. Using the cresting hill, I tried to kick out the rear end by aggressively tapping the brake pedal as I turned in. I was almost caught out as the wagon rotated really fast. Too well in fact. Even though I was in Sport+, the violence of the rotation totally woke up the 4MATIC and stability nannies, which, convinced we were all going to die, impressively and annoyingly brought the rear end back in line. Oh poo (or words to that effect) I may have said, while continuing to convince the rear to stay where I wanted it. The fight between me, the nannies, and the 4MATIC was a good one—one that was finally broken up by the approaching brake zone of turn 17.

The wagon ran like a champ for the two hot laps.The brakes took the hammering impressively well, especially considering the weight of the wagon and the ambient and track temperatures, giving me a solid pedal during the whole run. For those of you who know MSP and maybe run there, my best lap was the first one, at 2 minutes and 23.14 seconds. Tires were Michelin PS4S, ambient temperature 93 degrees, and track temp was over 125 degrees.

You have to give credit to Mercedes for continuing to bring their rocket ship wagon to the US when they know the US is a lousy market for wagons. They told us they expect to sell just 3,000 wagons a year in the States and only 10% will be E63s, which is not a lot.

I have always liked ultra-capable big sedans and am a huge fan of wagons. The 603-hp E63 S Sedan will push the new BMW M5 and Tesla Model S to their limits; the E63 S Wagon will do the same, while moving house. We live in strange but very good times for motor heads my friends.

2018 Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Sedan Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $105,395 (base) ENGINE 4.0L twin-turbo DOHC 32-valve V-8/603 hp @ 5,750-6,500 rpm, 627 lb-ft @ 2,500-4,500 rpm TRANSMISSION 9-speed multi-clutch automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE 15/22 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 196.4 x 75.1 x 56.6 in WHEELBASE 115.7 in WEIGHT 4,515 lb 0-60 MPH 3.3 sec TOP SPEED 188 mph

  2018 Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Wagon Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $107,945 (base) ENGINE 4.0L twin-turbo DOHC 32-valve V-8/603 hp @ 5,750-6,500 rpm, 627 lb-ft @ 2,500-4,500 rpm TRANSMISSION 9-speed multi-clutch automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE 16/22 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 197.1 x 75.1 x 58.0 in WHEELBASE 115.7 in WEIGHT 4,515 lb 0-60 MPH 3.4 sec TOP SPEED 180 mph

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