Earlier today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Stuart Hasking, a colleague from my financial services IT days, and currently a strategic consultant at TESM. We were discussing the challenges in making changes in a technology environment, when he shared a great line that summarizes the issue perfectly: "It's about the carbon, not the silicon." Most people view technology - deploying servers, designing networks, writing software - and especially complex large-scale distributed technology, as hard.

I find it interesting when the same conversation happens with two different people in the span of just a few days. In the past week, I had almost the exact same conversation twice, with two different people at two different companies, about culture and acquisitions. In both cases, they had initiated the topic of conversation. The following is a common pattern: Company Small is founded to bring a product to the market.

A few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services held its annual AWS re:Invent conference. Unsurprisingly, they announced, yet again, a slew of new services, all meant to ease adoption and management of technology services. Yet, something felt a little amiss: https://twitter.com/avideitcher/status/804418718994407424 Not only are SaaS firms getting nervous, but plenty of large firms, as well. As Benoit Hudzia pointed out, many on-premise software giants, including Oracle/PeopleSoft and SAP, should be getting nervous (but perhaps are not):

How do you know when your workers really love their jobs? Of course, not all will, and plenty will leave over time no matter how great a working environment, but how do you know when workers really enjoy working for you? A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the Hallertau Brewery, just north of Auckland, New Zealand, on a Saturday night. It is in New Zealand wine country, a rural area, so they close at 10:00pm on a Saturday night.

For the last few weeks, I have been trying to unravel the connection between the value of talent and open-source. Inevitably, some products have a high level of importance but few people who truly understand it. This creates high demand with low supply, increasing the value of those people. But that isn't special to open-source; it is true for any product with high demand + low supply. These just happen to be open-source.

Can robots replace burger-flippers? How about lawyers? Tools have been around for thousands of years, making a human job faster and easier; try banging a nail in without a hammer. Machines, complex combinations of parts that are either human-operated or human-started, have existed for far less than that. With a Gutenberg press, you can print hundreds of copies of printing with just 1-2 people operating the machine. A washing machine will wash your clothes after you just press the right buttons.

After more than twenty years working in many companies, many of them as a consultant often dramatically improving operations, I have received a blessing and a curse: Blessing: I see improvements and benefits potential almost everywhere. Curse: I see improvements and benefits missed almost everywhere. The other day, I spent six and half hours in a hospital emergency room (ER) with a family member. Fortunately, everything is fine, and they are healthy.

Over the last few month, I was reminded - twice, painfully each time - about the impacts of good vs. bad software design choices, especially the impact those choices can have downstream. Ironically, it is not only - or even mainly - the creators and primary users of the software who are impacted, but others unforeseen at design time. Installing an Operating System Anyone who has installed an operating system on their laptop or server - or even smartphone - is familiar with a series of questions, choices and answers, as they configure the operating system.

One of the most popular recent television shows is CBS's "The Big Bang Theory," broadcast on Thursday evenings. In addition, the most recent 5 shows are available online on cbs.com. As with the live CBS broadcast, commercials are interspersed in the show - based on what I can tell at the same places as when broadcast in its normal slot. For decades, the entire broadcast television (and radio) business was based on advertising.

Is hard return on investment all there is? In exploring business (and tech) projects, we have a tendency to think about the immediate, quantifiable ROI. Yet, there are times when the soft costs or other benefits outweigh any measurable ROI, and sometimes are even worth a negative ROI... in the short term. This was highlighted to me again yesterday. A colleague of mine is heading up a project to move tens of thousands of VMs from on-premise to the public cloud.

For the last year or so, my various news feeds have been filled with dire warnings about the "Rise of the Robots." Apparently, the advances in robotics - hardware and software - are now beyond relatively simple home vacuums, and are poised to become the new drivers and waiters, gardeners and barbers. Simon Wardley has argued that they even could replace higher-intellect roles, such as CEOs. Many are worried that this is an economic disaster in the making, as millions of blue-collar and possibly white-collar jobs could be at risk.

The New York City Subway used to have ads above the seats for some trade school. The general thrust was, technicians always will be in need, because things always will break. What happens when employers no longer need to manage things that break? Ever since we have had IT, we have had servers. Ever since we have had servers, we have had systems administrators, or SysAdmins. I actually started my career as a sysadmin, recruited out of engineering school to run systems for CS First Boston.

One of the hot words over the last few years has been "Bimodal IT". I won't go into a complete definition - let's leave the people who make much money off of the idea to explain it. The short form is that some technology activities are more traditional, sequential and driven by a focus on safety, while others are more innovative, agile and driven by a focus on new risks.

Where will VMWare be in 5 years? For many years, VMWare was practically synonymous with virtualization. It provided multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, with a great feature set, good (for its time) management interface, and enterprise customer support. Lately, VMWare has been under threat, primarily due to 2 factors: Public Cloud: When deploying to the public cloud, customers don't just wash their hands of managing compute hardware, storage and network.

In the cellar of Westminster Abbey in London, lies a lovely little café called the Cellarium, with all of the architectural design and feel of the Abbey. Of course, as it is in the heart of London, it has good tea as well. Earlier this week I was privileged to have a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion with Adrian Colyer, which led to 2 provocative questions: Will Microsoft open-source Windows?

Yesterday, Vala Afshar tweeted out the following https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/706678404884652032 ... to which Paul Graham of YCombinator fame responded: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/706710881652965376 I beg to disagree with Paul, but not how you would expect. One of the valuable intellectual behaviours one learns from studying Talmud is to analyze a situation from all directions, teasing out all potential logical explanations, no matter how strange or absurd they appear at first. If all of the following is true:

This morning, I paid a visit to the American Citizen Services department of a US Embassy, for passport-related services. Anyone who has been there knows that this is not exactly an efficient experience. You need to make a reservation online in advance The security makes TSA look like a luxury hotel: no bags, no backpacks, no phones, no earphones, no Kindles, no food, no drink. You only are allowed your documents, wallet, keys and printed material.

There is an old (obviously) English saying, warning people not to be "penny-wise and pound foolish." As the main British currency is the pound, 1/100 of which is a penny, someone who is penny-wise and pound-foolish is someone who refuses to invest a small amount now, leading to a much greater cost later. No matter how often I come across companies being penny-wise and pound-foolish, I never cease to be surprised by it.

When at the Container Summit, I heard a great (if somewhat perverse) line from Jacob Groundwater of New Relic. I liked it so much, I tweeted it out immediately: If you want people to drive slower, don't give them an airbag; put a spike in their steering wheel! While a rather morbid image, Jacob hit on a core truth: if you make dangerous activities safer, people will do more dangerous things.

Are ad blockers good or bad? Does it depend for whom? Advertisers and content Web site owners are up in arms over ad-blockers. A report from August 2015 suggested that the industry lost $22 BN in revenue in 2015 due to ad-blockers. Yesterday I visited a news site on my phone - I believe it was Forbes - and it refused to show me the page until I turned off the ad-blocker.

A few weeks ago, a colleague showed me a technology that was fascinating in and of itself, but the strategic ramifications are even greater. For those of you who are technically inclined, look at these links: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/dotnet/ https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/aspnet/ https://github.com/aspnet/home These are, respectively, the Linux docker images for running Microsoft .Net and ASP.Net apps, and the open-source repository. This is quite cool technically. After all, apps compiled for platform A, especially tightly closed platforms like Microsoft, usually aren't meant to run on platform B!

I have been pondering this article for quite some time, then came across a great similar quote from Bryan Cantrill: "Don't just reboot it, goddamn it! Debug it!" Since Bryan always is a great speaker, watch it here. Time and time and time again, I come across companies and people with systems that are misbehaving. Time and time and time again, people suggest "why don't we just restart/reboot it?" What these people really are suggesting is, "

Poor founders and CEOs; we really should have some sympathy for them. The sheer amount of information they need to know is mind-boggling. Everyone starts out with one area of expertise. For most startup founders, it is technology; for some, it is product or marketing. You quickly need to learn sales, and technology, and marketing. Then comes HR - since you need people to grow - and finance becomes important very quickly.

In the last week, I have had several discussions with some really smart technologists, partially focused on what makes technology companies nimble and fast and, therefore, great. In the last article, we discussed hiring 10x people, and especially the way many great employees compound together to create up to 2 orders of magnitude faster companies. However, hiring really smart employees is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What these employees need is independence.

It has long been known, at least among experienced technologists, that the best people are worth ten times the "just" really good ones. I rarely see numbers to support this contention - which is somewhat surprising for someone as data-hungry and -driven as I - but I have known it since my earliest days in the technology business. The best people are the best because they absorb more, see more, are more creative, and can put these together to grasp the future and deliver results in a way that most others simply cannot.

In a world full of email, then SMS, then Twitter-based abbreviations for everything - ttyl, afaik, iirc, rtfm - do good, clean, clear writing skills still matter? Yes. Unquestionably, and without a second's hesitation, writing certainly matters, not solely for the pedantic nitpickers. Good writing skills greatly affect your business success. Secret of Success I once asked a very successful executive what he thought was the single most important factor in his success.

If you want to change technology that requires a change in process or, more seriously, culture, then you need to change the culture first. Get your people on board and then make the changes. Right? Perhaps not. Or at least not always. If your culture is flexible and open, people collaborate across groups and you are staying competitive, then, yes, change some of the culture to new ways of working, then adopt new technology that requires the different mindset.

There is an old joke about a rabbi who goes golfing on Yom Kippur, although I am sure there are variants about an imam in ramadan or priest during Lent. It is such a beautiful day, and the rabbi never gets a chance on the links, so he skips synagogue and heads out. On the first hole, he swings... hole in one! He cannot believe it! He moves on to the second.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a famous model in game theory. I am far from an expert in game theory - although I did have the pleasure of meeting Prof. Israel Aumann, nobel laureate in economics and world game theory expert - but I can grasp, and sometimes explain, some of the basics. The Prisoner's Dilemma describes a situation wherein if everyone cooperated, they would have the best outcome. However, because they are prisoners and cannot coordinate with others, they make independently rational decisions.

Although the title for this article might imply suggestions for Proctor & Gamble's IT department, instead we will address how badly code can "smell" and how and when to prevent it. In business as in software, the concept of a "smell test" is a base instinct for if something is a bad idea or implementation: if something smells bad, it probably is. One of my favourite technology bloggers, Adrian Colyer, wrote a recent article about a fascinating analysis of open-source projects, primarily Apache, Eclipse and Android.

What do Heinz Ketchup, QR codes and adult Web sites have in common? Apparently, everything. QR codes are those two-dimensional barcodes you often see on ads or consumer products. Just like regular barcodes encode numeric information, QR codes encode full text. They often are used to reference Web addresses, or URLs. For example, the following QR code, when scanned with a mobile phone app, will link to this site:

Friday I had lunch with a friend who does marketing for a pharmaceutical company. He described to me the process by which he manages major ads. "Ads are very expensive," says he. "First you have to develop the concept, which can be $10,000 or more. Then the production costs for the real ad are $100,000 or more. Finally, the actual costs to air the commercials easily can run $500,000."

For many years, business was assumed to be "staid" or "proper". Certain dress and behaviour was appropriate for outside the office, and never to be seen inside. While the distinction between professional and unprofessional behaviour (thankfully) still exists, businesses have begun to open up to the distinction between "inappropriate" and "just plain fun." Those businesses that do embrace their humourous and playful sides have begun to realize significant customer loyalty and even pricing benefits.

I have always loved the contrast between companies that are quick and light, focused on doing the right thing, and are nimble in execution and change on the one hand, and those that must plan everything down to the minutest detail before beginning, execute on their plans precisely... and are thrown off balance by change. In my Wall Street days, I worked for two such companies. Both could be defined by "

Following on our review of Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report, today we will look at the "Re-Imagining" section. On slides 28-44, the report looks at business processes and how they have changed over the last several decades. Here are some salient examples: Document signing - ink-and-paper to DocuSign Physical payments - cash registers to Square Benefits - paper files and brokers to Zenefits As exciting as the enterprise space is, not one process is new.

For a very long time, corporations treated their corporate networks as safe protected environments. The data and applications inside that network are: confidential and must be kept safe from unauthorized access (protect from loss), and crucial to business processes and must be kept accessible to employees (protect from denial of service). Over time, however, two trends have challenged these assumptions. First, more and more business-critical data has migrated to the Internet.

Over the last week, I have had several discussions about the challenges to successful outsourcing. One person was dealing with manufacturing products in China; another was managing outsourced server maintenance and operations; yet a third had a financial technology management service provider. In all the cases, the question was the same: how do you know when it is good to outsource, and how do you make it succeed? Successfully outsourcing anything is far beyond the scope of a single article.

Normally, I dislike the phrase "soundbite". It implies a shallow, bite-sized saying that misses all of the depth, nuance and complexity that exists in the real world. Nonetheless, soundbites are successful precisely because they can convey - for better or for worse - a key idea in a short, memorable and often inspiring phrase. Earlier this week, Josh Bernoff, in his bluntly named blog, gave the "Parable of Ray's Helicopter Company"

TrueCrypt was a great open-source encryption program. It created files that, when opened by the program, looked to your computer like an additional drive. Any files placed in that drive would be encrypted and protected from prying eyes. Why would you do it? To keep files protected on your computer. To send files securely from one person to another. To protect files that you might store in the cloud, for example, on Dropbox.

Which do you hire, developers or engineers? Nowadays, the most popular programming language is JavaScript, or, by its correct name, ECMAScript. Since "Eck-Ma-Script" is not a great marketing name except, perhaps, for a language for Ghostbusters EctoPlasm, it is not surprising that everyone still calls it JavaScript or just "JS". Whether this is a good thing or not, and whether JavaScript is the worst or best language invented, is not a topic I am too interested in.

I often notice the incredible value of great product management. Unfortunately, it is something many experienced people do not get, simply because it is the one area of a business, and especially a startup, that cuts across the company. Every other group has a clear line of responsibility: Engineering builds the product. Marketing defines who will buy it and drives awareness. Sales sells it. Customer support supports it. Finance manages the cash, P&L and balance sheet.

Sometimes, you build marketing collateral for a market that is completely unexpected. And while on the way, it teaches you, once again, why Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Co. are right: everything you rationalize and think about is only an opinion about the way the market will react to it; facts exist only in the real world. I have a friend who is a very experienced technology consultant, Reuven Lerner.

When do you buy? When do you build? This question of "buy vs. build" is at the heart of many a debate in companies, not only inside engineering teams, but between engineering, product management and executives. Fact #1: Engineering is Hard Engineering is very hard. Despite the enormous advances over the years, and the number of system tools and development frameworks and languages, every one of which is touted as a "

There is a belief in startup-land that you have to be younger than ___ to successfully innovate. To some extent, that is driven by the youth of the founders of a few highly successful companies like Facebook and Twitter, magnified by the adoring media coverage they get. And yet, even when I was back in my 20s and 30s, there was a nagging presence in my head that said, "

Passwords are insecure and annoying. I get that, I have written about it, and I experience it. So lots of companies and organizations are working on replacing passwords with something that is both more secure and more convenient. For example, Twitter's Digits service. Other approaches, like 1Password's password manager, make passwords easier to manage and auto-generate, so they simultaneously can be more secure and more convenient. Then there are "

Late last night, Hunter Walk, of HomeBrew Seed Stage VC, tweeted out the following: This shouldn't be too surprising; people and businesses buy the machine once, but the K-Cup refills are bought over and over again. This is why Keurig has been so intent on keeping machine users buying their coffee, by any means necessary. A year ago, I wrote how I found a mention in their annual report about digital rights management (DRM) to force Keurig machines to accept only "

Two months ago, I posted an article about a United Airlines series of failures that, if not so painful for their paying customers - and their employees too - would be laughable. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading an interview with the legendary Gordon Bethune, who turned around Continental Airlines in a single year, from a loss of $600MM in FY1994 to a profit of $225MM in FY1995.

About five months ago, I looked into the "Not-So-Simple SIM Card." In short, I called for the abolition of the SIM-to-carrier-to-number tie. For those who never change carriers or travel, this doesn't matter much. You get your phone, you go to your carrier store - or a local retailer like RadioShack (RIP) or BestBuy - sign some paperwork, get a card, insert it into your phone... and never worry about it again.

If there is one truism in the technology market, it is that premium pricing just doesn't last. If you are first to succeed in a new market - which is distinct from first to a market - then you often have a premium price product because you are the "first" and often the "best". The problem is that it just doesn't last. No matter how good your IP (Intellectual Property, like patents, not Internet Protocol), eventually competitors catch up with "

It is oft-stated that most people really do not get statistics. Just say that word, "statistics," and most people's eyes glaze over. Confession from this engineer and MBA: I did horrifically in my undergrad stats course. (Fortunately, I did better in my MBA course, thanks to a big dose of good teaching from Bob Winkler, and a small dose of being a decade more mature). What does all of this have to do with Coca-Cola?

For years, people I have known in the VC business, as well as entrepreneurs who have been funded by VCs, have discussed the 7-2-1 rule. For every 10 investments a VC fund makes: 7 will fail - "dogs" 2 will hang around, perhaps returning the initial investment - "zombies" 1 will be a great success - "superstar" This formula is why VCs are willing to take such risks; they expect many companies in their portfolio to fail.

What do you do when you want to move towards more rapid deployment, perhaps as close as possible to continuous delivery, but the culture and incentives push against it? This is the exact issue I have had at several clients over the years. When brought in to improve their operational performance, I found that, with all of them, a major issue was instability due to deployments. The flow looked something like this:

How did Lenovo do something so inane as fundamentally breaking their customers' laptop security by installing Superfish? What is Superfish, and what is wrong with it? I have often asked clients to consider, "what business are you in?" The right answer is not, "to make profits", or "shareholder return", because those are bland, meaningless statements. Every business wants to make profits and return value to their shareholders. Peter Drucker said, "

"We made a small change and it brought down our customers for 4 hours." - colleague "Network issues caused outage" - GoDaddy "A configuration error... caused days of downtime." - Amazon "Facebook was down... for 2.5 hours." - Facebook Every one of us has seen human errors cause significant, revenue-affecting, downtime. Our stability instinct always is to tighten up change control to try and prevent a recurrence. In a cloud environment, though, our agility instinct is to be as nimble and loose as possible.

The Internet has been abuzz for the last week about a hitherto little-known clause in Samsung's "Smart TV" privacy policy. The news was most prominently covered in the Daily Beast, here. The Daily Beast includes a link to the entire privacy policy, but the important element is: Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.

What would you call a global, enormous, Fortune 500 company that 95 out of 100 of its employees strongly recommend it as a place to work? Sure, an exciting new startup, but an old-school 70-year old company? What if that company was IBM? In a great article by a former IBM manager, he explains how they used to have: Merciless manager reviews Managers much younger than their employees who took severe criticism from those employees.

Now that we understand what the cloud is, the types of cloud services, the difference between true cloud and hosting, why true cloud matters greatly, and how it makes you nimble, the inevitable question is, how do we get there? Or, to use our question from our last article, how do we get to say, "YES", to the customer who offers us $500,000 - or $5MM - if we are ready to run tomorrow?

In response to the Sony hack, in which not only valuable intellectual property, such as movies, was stolen, but also (previously) confidential emails, a number of experts have recommended increasing the usage of email retention policies. They go something like this: Email is confidential People put things in corporate email that they do not want seen outside the company Companies get hacked Therefore, we should limit the damage by forcibly deleting all emails older than some time period, say, 30 days The Wall Street Journal also had an article discussing the debate about email retention policies.

"The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer." - Peter Drucker No matter how many times we say it, we forget it. We get caught up in operations, or competition, or marketshare, or share price. Yet a business, like a life, has a purpose: to create and keep a customer. I might add, "to keep that customer profitably satisfied." Earlier this month, a very well known Apple developer, one of the "

Years ago, a young man, let's call him D, with whom I had once gone to summer camp followed his dream and opened a meat restaurant. They had great big burgers, flaming wings, fresh onion rings and fries, a meat-lovers dream. Not only did I enjoy going there, but when a group of friends helped me move apartments before I got married, I took them there for a "thank-you" dinner.

Recently, I had a conversation with a senior executive at a company about the firm's information security. The conversation, like others I have had, revolved around a sudden increase in interest in that security. To be clear, we are not talking privacy settings on Facebook (use them) or whether or not Snapchat pictures and messages really disappear (they don't). These people are seriously concerned about loss of data due either to security breach by bad actors targeting the company, or simple loss of data due to employee errors.

It has happened again. Another horror story of an airline leaving customers in miserable conditions for hours on the tarmac. This time, however, it happened multiple times over a 28 (!!) hour period. According to the Jerusalem Post article, United Airlines Flight 84 from Newark to Tel Aviv in June: was delayed without explanation multiple times when explanations were given, they were patently false required the police to come on board to remove the pilot from the cockpit gave minimal food vouchers ($21 per person) for a day+ delay gave passengers vouchers for a hotel that was half an hour away from the terminal didn't bother to arrange rooms at the hotel for the passengers The list goes on.

Today, we are honoured with the first of two guest posts in a series by Ted Lloyd, editor of OnlineCISO. Cybercrime has emerged as a multi-billion dollar business and spawned another mufti-billion dollar business to combat it. As 2014 closed, Gartner estimates that global spending on information security will top $71 billion representing a nearly 8% increase in spending over 2013. The trend and trajectory are expected to remain steady for 2015 as well.

In the first half of this year, I noted that ReCAPTCHA was a lot like the "TSA of the Web" - an annoyance that is sometimes necessary to keep bad actors out and good (or, in the case of ReCAPTCHA, "real") actors in. I also noted that Google, itself, had publicized that it had broken ReCAPTCHA, rather than wait for someone else to do so. In that respect, ReCAPTCHA was lot more like the TSA - weak, broken, but good "

Bitcoin - and its focused leveragors and imitators like Ripple - have gained a lot of press and traction. The question that I keep coming back to is, what are they good for? I do not mean this in a cynical sense, but in a literal, "what is the best use case" sense? The answers I keep coming back to are two, and only two: Person to person payments International transfers I am, for now, ignoring the "

Probably the biggest story of the last few weeks has been the hack of Sony Pictures by North Korea (or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea / DPRK, naming convention courtesy of George Orwell). While hacks happen all of the time, this one is particularly notable for several reasons: It was directed by a state actor. The US Government officially responded and "named and shamed" the state actor, thus forcing itself to respond.

According to a New York Times article, the major JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) breach was due to a single entry point: a single server in its vast array of servers, one that either has access to confidential data or acts as a gateway to the internal systems, was not fully patched. Does one patch really matter? It depends on what that patch is. A "patch" probably is not the right word for this.

The Internet has been abuzz with the discovery by Dani Grant, a writer at BuzzFeed, that she had found an easy way to explore - and print, and use - lots of boarding passes from Delta, even those for other people and other airlines. When you ask for your mobile boarding pass, Delta sends you a URL to click and view your boarding pass QR code as well as all of the "

Message to Keurig: never fight your customers. Where did this come from? You, Mr. or Ms. Entrepreneur, have worked hard, built up a successful business, maybe even sold it out to a larger firm because they saw how much it could be worth with their capital and market strength. Whatever stage of your business, there are 2 prime rules for continued success and growth. Cash is King - but we all knew that.

The other day, my wife forwarded me an article arguing that toy companies need more women at the top. Simply, toy companies have stagnated and reflect the mindsets of those who run them. It is hard to argue this isn't true... about any company. Companies always reflect some combination of the personalities of those who founded them and those who run them. When a founder runs a company for a long time, the cultural assumptions tend to be dominant.

When companies bring new products and services to market, they are addressing some unmet need. It might be an unserved or underserved market; it might be significantly lower costs - and therefore price to customer at the same margins - for a similar product; it might be a lighter and simpler product for a lower price; it might be one of myriad different ways that your company wants to differentiate itself.

I love some of the old technology deployment phrases. According to legend, most of these - eat your own lunch, boil the ocean, etc. - came out of the heyday of IBM. As an example, I know of one company that moved from customer support software to customer support software as a service (SaaS)... and their first customer was their own customer support department. While I like some things about how this company and runs its SaaS business and disagree with others, their willingness to take the plunge themselves has two benefits:

This article has been in formulation for a long time, and is the result of my own experiences in many places: corporate IT, software startups, services (cloud) startups, consulting, and many other places. It includes the input of many people whom I respect - although many disagree with some of my conclusions - including consultants, executives, founders and venture capitalists. How should you organize your technology team? This is a difficult question to answer, yet critical to your ability to succeed.

Traditional software development looks something like this: Product management defines the product specifications, gives it to technical leadership Technical leadership / architecture defines the technical specifications, gives it to the engineers Software engineering builds the product, gives it to quality assurance (QA) QA tests the product, sends it back to engineering to fix any failures, when passed gives it to operations Operations deploys the product, and maintains it in production While this process varies somewhat in steps 1-2-3 for agile development, creating more of a feedback loop, the essentials of steps 3-4-5 remain the same.

I am a big advocate of open-source software. I believe that, along with Amazon Web Services, open-source has been the single greatest enabler of startups in the last decade or more. Amazon made it possible to launch an online startup for pennies on the dollar of what it cost in the 90s; I still remember startups that raised millions just to buy and run their Web servers. Nowadays, you do it for a few hundred dollars per month.

It always amazes me when a company tries to cheat, somehow expecting not to get caught. Yesterday, Ars Technica published a detailed takedown as to how Samsung tried to deceive the performance benchmark tests in its latest Samsung Galaxy Note 3. For the non-technical among the readers, benchmarks in the technical world are exactly what they are in the business world: standards-based tests that allow purchasers to compare multiple items.

Open-source, as discussed in the previous posting on network equipment, is a fascinating world. Perhaps the best intellectual and business promotion ever written is Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." There is no question that open-source has led to an upheaval in the world of business technology, enabled entirely new industries, and benefitted the overwhelming majority of individuals and companies out there, with few tears shed for those commercial vendors that have lost business due to open-source competitors.

In Part I of this series, we explored why the music industry is suffering, and what the market, technology and legal forces are that brought it to this point. In Part II, we discussed what the barriers to change are within the music industry, and what might be done to plan for the future. In this final Part III, we will look at some possible models. We begin with a caveat.

Welcome to Atomic Energy! This is the CEO's blog, with thoughts and insights about everything that affects business, economy, society, policy and, of course, technology. Comments on any blog postings are always appreciated, and Trackbacks and Pingbacks are certainly welcome. I look forward to interacting with many of you. Avi