2015 Feb 24

Do VCs Abandon Startups?

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.

2015 Feb 23

Velocity: Metrics that Encourage Safe Deployment

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:

2015 Feb 20

Superfish or Stupidfish?

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, "

2015 Feb 19

Lost in Twitteration

What does a great daily paper by a smart thinker have to teach about good product management? About a week ago, I came across Adrian Colyer's great "Morning Paper". I have no idea how I missed this before. The "Morning Paper" takes a look at some trend, research or paper in technology and investigates its impact on technology development and, of course, by extension, business. The Paper is not for the faint of heart or those without pretty deep technical background, at least from the editions that I have seen.

2015 Feb 18

Websites and the Cost of Change

You are reading this blog on WordPress. It is not a secret; any technologist with experience managing WordPress can look at the page and see that it is run by WordPress. How does WordPress show you this page? Here is what WordPress does, simplified: Look at the requested address, showing right now in your browser's address bar. Translate that address into a specific article. Retrieve the text for that article from the database.

2015 Feb 17

Change Control in the Cloud

"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.

2015 Feb 16

Samsung's "Too Smart for Their Own Good" TVs

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.

2015 Feb 12

Trust Your Employees

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.

2015 Feb 11

Why Deployment Matters to Your Bottom Line

How you do deployment is very important, and the technologies you use can have a direct and immediate impact on your bottom line. It also can make your employees happier, which leads to better productivity and lower turnover. But how does deployment technology directly affect your bottom line? Let's look at one. Docker is a "hot new" technology for software deployment. If you are running a cloud or IT business, you might be wondering, "

2015 Feb 10

Operational Red Flags in the Cloud

Early in my career, when I did technology for a very large financial firm, we started with dedicated servers for each business process. It was an easy way to track costs, manage risks and allow each business unit to maintain control. Unfortunately, it was also an exorbitant way to maintain control. As servers became more powerful and disk cheaper, processes utilized less and less of their capacity. Even more than the costs of the infrastructure itself, the costs of the staff to deploy, maintain and support each piece of infrastructure could kill profitability.