Tag: .net
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Decoupling Microsoft, or Free Your App
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!
Tag: ach
Post
Whence Bitcoin
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 "
Tag: acquisition
Post
Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Tag: ad-blockers
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Ad Blockers Are Good Signals
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.
Tag: ads
Post
Ad Blockers Are Good Signals
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.
Tag: advertising
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Big Bang Theory of Advertising, or How Broadcasters Are Like Supermarkets
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.
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Agile Advertising
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."
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For the Love of Brilliant Advertising
Great technology companies have been built on advertising: Google, Facebook, Yahoo (in the old days), not to mention many a magazine, newspaper and television network.
I have always loved the operational side of ad networks. They require building and managing a systems whose data throughput and reliability requirements rival a financial pricing and trading system. I have managed several of those, and the parallels are quite strong.
What truly interests me in advertising, though, is the brilliance of great creativity.
Tag: advisors
Post
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, "
Tag: agile
Post
On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
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Agile Advertising
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."
Post
The Best Laid Schemes Of Mice And Men
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 "
Tag: airline
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Internet in the Air
I used to hate taking long day flights. If I had to spend 12 hours in the air from New York to Tokyo, or Zurich to Bangkok, or Tel Aviv to Newark, I preferred overnight flights. Even since the advent of on-demand entertainment, personal video screens and portable devices like the iPad, those flights just seemed to last forever.
So most of the time I would fly overnight. However, the timing didn't always work out, and overnight flights tend to be significantly more expensive than all-day flights, often much greater than 50% more.
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It's Always About the People (Even in Tech)
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.
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How Incredibly Good Airline Choice Has Gotten
I expect this topic to get me a lot of flak. After all, everyone likes dumping on the airlines, including me. But hear me out.
I fly a lot of miles every year, mostly in coach, sometimes in business. Most of the time, the journey is tiring and uneventful, sometimes it is annoying, and sometimes downright offensive.
I regularly hear and read stories about the decline of comfort, service and value in air travel over the last 30 years.
Tag: airlines
Post
The Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
"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 "
Tag: airplane
Post
Why the Internet of Things Is So Vulnerable
It seems every day there is another article about how "vulnerable" the Internet of Things (IoT) is. Here are two choice excerpts from the last year:
"Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway," Wired, 21st July 2015 "Security Researcher Claims to have Hacked into Flight via Entertainment System," CNN, 19th May 2015 While these are major life-threatening issues - one cannot compare a malicious actor disabling your iPhone while you are on it with someone talking control of your car going 110 kmh down the highway, let alone a plane flying at 35,000 feet and 600 mph!
Tag: amazon
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Amazon Pricing Should Be Customer-Centric
Today, I had a very interesting discussion with Rich Miller, a consulting colleague who has been around the block more than a few times.
One of the interesting points he raised is that Amazon's AWS pricing doesn't quite work for enterprises.
Let's explore how it is a problem and why it is so.
At first blush, Amazon's pricing is intuitive: use an hour of an m4.xlarge, pay $0.239; use 2 hours, pay $0.
Post
The Problem with Serverless Is Packaging
Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions.
Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management.
In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.
Post
Whence Serverless Cloud? It's About the Market.
I love tech. Despite an MBA and a decade of consulting and running a start-up or two, deep down, I always will be an engineer.
One of the most important lessons I learned as a young engineer 20 years ago at Morgan Stanley - courtesy of Guy Chiarello - is that the technology is only the means, not the end. Understand the finances, the market, even the politics if you want to do something with technology, even just inside a company, let alone outside.
Post
Bare Metal Cloud
Infrastructure-as-a-Service, cloud servers, whatever you call them, have been around for years. Amazon is the clear leader in the pack (and, according to Simon Wardley, is likely to remain so for a long time), with others like Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, and Azure picking up much of the rest (fortunately for them, the market is plenty big enough).
Digital Ocean, a company I mostly ignored for a while, takes kudos for speed and simplicity, and rapidly have become my go-to option for quick servers.
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Pricing Inversions, or Smart vs. Lucky
Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently.
One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product.
What your costs do is have two effects:
Post
For the Love of Brilliant Advertising
Great technology companies have been built on advertising: Google, Facebook, Yahoo (in the old days), not to mention many a magazine, newspaper and television network.
I have always loved the operational side of ad networks. They require building and managing a systems whose data throughput and reliability requirements rival a financial pricing and trading system. I have managed several of those, and the parallels are quite strong.
What truly interests me in advertising, though, is the brilliance of great creativity.
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Nimbleness of Scale
In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies:
Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources:
Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.
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Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
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Does Amazon Web Services Pricing Follow Moore's Law?
Yesterday's article on the short life span of premium (and especially ultra-premium) pricing led to a robust discussion on Hacker News. In the article, I used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example of a company that actively tries to cannibalize itself.
A smart commenter pointed out that AWS pricing, while falling continually, has nonetheless fallen more slowly than Moore's Law, according to which equivalently-priced capability should double roughly every 18 (or 24) months.
Post
Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last
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 "
Tag: analysis
Post
The Hidden Dangers of Interim Solutions
One of the hardest challenges in business is knowing when to use an interim solution and when to start over from scratch.
From a pure financial perspective, interim solutions almost always win out. I see this regularly in the software industry. The progress looks something like this:
You (i.e. your company) write a piece of software. It is successful and useful and sells and grows. Over time, you add more and more features and capabilities, leading to a more useful but more complex product.
Tag: android
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Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
Tag: antivirus
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Security Spending: Part I, the Bottomless Pit
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.
Tag: apple
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Growing Independent: Laptop to Smartphone to Wearable
When does a personal technology - a computer, a smartphone, a watch - "grow up"? There is a slow but continuous process I have observed with every new personal computing technology.
Stage 1 - Child: The new technology provides unprecedented flexibility. It allows you to do just a few new things, but its real appeal is allowing you to do old things on the go. It does so by being a mobile accessory to, or child of, existing "
Post
Pricing Inversions, or Smart vs. Lucky
Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently.
One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product.
What your costs do is have two effects:
Post
Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Post
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.
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The Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
"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 "
Post
Just Making Technology Work Is Hard Work
Apple's philosophy for technology is, "just make it work." I had one of the early pre-iPod mp3 players. It was a great piece, lots of battery life, played every format out there at the time... and within a year I had replaced it with an iPod. Transferring music to this player and managing it was just an enormous headache. With iTunes and iPod, it "just worked".
Fast forward to the year 2014.
Tag: apps
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Pilots In Habitats: Basic Unit of Application Deployment
What is the basic unit of application deployment?
Two related trends have changed the answer to this question:
DevOps Containers For many years, the tasks between engineer and operator were cleanly, if painfully, split:
Engineer builds and delivers a package of files to deploy and run Operator deploys and runs those files in a production operating environment In the early years, the package of files consisted of a directory with a ream of paper and instructions.
Tag: architecture
Post
On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
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Architect Your Product Before It Holds You Back
Architecture determines capabilities.
This is not new. Anyone who has planned and architected a new product, or has tried to retrofit capabilities for which a platform has not been architected, knows it first-hand.
Yet, time and again, I come across products that have not been planned, and therefore architected, around reasonably expected capabilities.
Sometimes I see these as a user.
Last week, a client wanted to give me access to their Dropox Team account, so we could share information.
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The Pain Caused By Poor Software Design
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.
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Smart Design in Containers
In a previous article, we invented "Conway's Corollary" - how design determines scale.
Today, we will look at another case from the hottest technology of the last year: containers.
When designing software - any piece of software - the most important criterion is not, "what features does it have," or "how well is it documented," although those are very important. It is not even, "how sexy is the user interface,"
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Conway's Corollary - Design Determines Scale
When I went to business school, I worked closely with an incredibly smart woman with whom I shared a very similar method of thinking and mindset. When we would find the same responses to the same questions in the same manner, inevitably I would quote, "great minds think alike."
She taught me that there is a corollary: "...but fools rarely differ."
The great challenge in life often isn't to agree with someone, no matter how smart; it is to determine if you are both great minds thinking alike, or both fools who are not differing.
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Go Conway
There is a famous saying, known as Conway's Law, which states that:
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
It means that when your organization builds a system, its structure will reflect the organization that created it. If you have 3 teams - database administrators, system administrators and Web developers - then your system architecture will have 3 distinct components: databases, servers and Web UI.
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Why Does My Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one).
One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "
Post
Design for Failure in the Cloud. Actually, Everywhere.
In one of our earlier discussions about cloud, an astute reader pointed out that one "downside" of public cloud, especially one like AWS, is that they make very few guarantees about your instances. While the system as a whole has service level agreements (SLAs), your particular instance does not. To quote:
"If your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it"
The underlying assumption, of course, is that you have better control over the level of availability of your particular instances and their underlying hardware, especially scheduled maintenance, when you control the entire environment rather than leaving it to a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace.
Tag: assistant
Post
Reports of the Death of the Keyboard Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
For almost all of computing history, we have interacted with computing devices via keyboard for input and printer, then screen, for output. Computers are logical devices, and require clean, defined logical statements to interact. Thus, we use precise text.
Human interactions, on the other hand, are less precise but much richer. We interact via touch, sound and sight - both the precise written word and visual pictures. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of people, upwards of 99%, were illiterate.
Tag: authentication
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Yahoo's On-Demand (In)Security
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 "
Tag: aws
Post
Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
Post
Amazon Pricing Should Be Customer-Centric
Today, I had a very interesting discussion with Rich Miller, a consulting colleague who has been around the block more than a few times.
One of the interesting points he raised is that Amazon's AWS pricing doesn't quite work for enterprises.
Let's explore how it is a problem and why it is so.
At first blush, Amazon's pricing is intuitive: use an hour of an m4.xlarge, pay $0.239; use 2 hours, pay $0.
Post
The Problem with Serverless Is Packaging
Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions.
Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management.
In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.
Post
Whence Serverless Cloud? It's About the Market.
I love tech. Despite an MBA and a decade of consulting and running a start-up or two, deep down, I always will be an engineer.
One of the most important lessons I learned as a young engineer 20 years ago at Morgan Stanley - courtesy of Guy Chiarello - is that the technology is only the means, not the end. Understand the finances, the market, even the politics if you want to do something with technology, even just inside a company, let alone outside.
Post
Lift and Shift
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Container Summit NYC, arranged by the great folks at Joyent.
The first speaker, Dave Bartoletti of Forrester, gave a broad overview of cloud computing - private and public - and container adoption. One of his themes was the methods by which companies adopt new technologies, particularly cloud and containers, and the benefits they gain.
New technologies enable new ways of operating. While some technologies simply make it easier or cheaper to operate in the same way as before, most enable new methods, new processes, new ideas that previously were difficult or impossible.
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You Are What You Sell
At the risk of kicking someone when they are down, let's look at... GoPro.
GoPro recently reported slower than anticipated sales, laid off 7% of their staff, and had their stock hammered (down 14.5% in a day). BusinessInsider did a straightforward if nice job showing their absolute revenue and relative year-over-year growth for the last 5 years. While total sales numbers are nice, the growth numbers aren't pretty.
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Cloud to Culture
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.
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Managing Your Users... Right and Wrong
Is your user management an afterthought?
For most companies building technology systems, how to manage users - the process of creating, managing, grouping and linking accounts - is bolted on later. After all, you fully expect your users to spend the bulk of their time using your service, not logging in to or managing your service! So you use some reasonably standard user management library, and when you have to worry about groups and organizations, you sort of bolt it on.
Post
Bare Metal Cloud
Infrastructure-as-a-Service, cloud servers, whatever you call them, have been around for years. Amazon is the clear leader in the pack (and, according to Simon Wardley, is likely to remain so for a long time), with others like Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, and Azure picking up much of the rest (fortunately for them, the market is plenty big enough).
Digital Ocean, a company I mostly ignored for a while, takes kudos for speed and simplicity, and rapidly have become my go-to option for quick servers.
Post
Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
Post
Design for Failure in the Cloud. Actually, Everywhere.
In one of our earlier discussions about cloud, an astute reader pointed out that one "downside" of public cloud, especially one like AWS, is that they make very few guarantees about your instances. While the system as a whole has service level agreements (SLAs), your particular instance does not. To quote:
"If your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it"
The underlying assumption, of course, is that you have better control over the level of availability of your particular instances and their underlying hardware, especially scheduled maintenance, when you control the entire environment rather than leaving it to a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace.
Post
Does Amazon Web Services Pricing Follow Moore's Law?
Yesterday's article on the short life span of premium (and especially ultra-premium) pricing led to a robust discussion on Hacker News. In the article, I used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example of a company that actively tries to cannibalize itself.
A smart commenter pointed out that AWS pricing, while falling continually, has nonetheless fallen more slowly than Moore's Law, according to which equivalently-priced capability should double roughly every 18 (or 24) months.
Post
Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last
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 "
Tag: backup
Post
Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Tag: balance
Post
Deodorant for Software
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.
Tag: bank
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Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
Post
Whence Bitcoin
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 "
Tag: banking
Post
Whence Bitcoin
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 "
Tag: beer
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When Your Workers Love Their Job
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.
Tag: behaviour
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Who Are You Going to Tell?
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.
Tag: bethune
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It's About The People, Stupid
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.
Tag: big-data
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Experience Matters... Especially In a Startup
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, "
Tag: bimodal
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Dangers of Bimodal Budgeting
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.
Tag: bitcoing
Post
Whence Bitcoin
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 "
Tag: blades
Post
Nothing is New Under the Sun Server
As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses.
It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended).
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.
Tag: books
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Pricing Inversions, or Smart vs. Lucky
Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently.
One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product.
What your costs do is have two effects:
Tag: bot
Post
ReCAPTCHA 2.0
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 "
Tag: brand
Post
Old URLs Don't Die... They Come Back to Haunt You
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:
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Kodak's Hail Mary
I always get a kick when a long-storied company which is in decline tries to hook onto the latest, hottest market, thinking, "we will get into this market, and with our amazing brand, we will knock it out of the park!" This is the business equivalent of a Hail Mary pass... while throwing it off to the sides and into the stands, rather than down the field towards the goal line.
Tag: browser
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Docker and Browser - It's All About Packaging
What do Docker containers have to do with Web browsers?
Everything.
Web browsers provide easy access to the digitized collective knowledge of the human race, political rants, serious applications and even silly kittens.
However, it is important to understand why browsers became so popular, and such a success.
Prior to browsers, networked applications existed. Mostly, they were client-server two-tier applications, but they were quite popular in business, and many home personal computer users had such applications.
Tag: budget
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Surprising Efforts: Debug vs Test vs Fix
In the last article on serverless, I referenced the old ad in the New York City subways for a trade school. Their tagline was similar to, "technicians will always be needed, because things always will break."
We technologists are familiar - intimately - with fixing broken things. Sometimes, it is our own software, devices or infrastructure; other times, it is someone else's. Either we have become responsible for it, or we need it to work under certain circumstances where it simply fails.
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It's Always Been a Matter of Trust
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:
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Security Spending: Part I, the Bottomless Pit
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.
Tag: budgeting
Post
Dangers of Bimodal Budgeting
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.
Tag: buffett
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Youth Makes You Young, Not Coca-Cola
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?
Tag: bugs
Post
Surprising Efforts: Debug vs Test vs Fix
In the last article on serverless, I referenced the old ad in the New York City subways for a trade school. Their tagline was similar to, "technicians will always be needed, because things always will break."
We technologists are familiar - intimately - with fixing broken things. Sometimes, it is our own software, devices or infrastructure; other times, it is someone else's. Either we have become responsible for it, or we need it to work under certain circumstances where it simply fails.
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Engineer Your Core, But Only Your Core
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 "
Tag: build
Post
Engineer Your Core, But Only Your Core
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 "
Tag: burgers
Post
When Robots Replace Burger-Flippers and Lawyers
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.
Tag: business
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Why Is Yahoo Valued Less than Zero?
According to several articles I have seen today, notably this Wall Street Journal report, Yahoo's Board of Directors are considering a sale of Yahoo's core Internet business.
For quite some time, Yahoo has been a troubled company. To many people, it doesn't matter. But to those of us who enjoyed it as one of the first major Internet search sites, it is very sad to see.
Marissa Mayer was brought on board to fix the company.
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More Fun To Higher Sales
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.
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Welcome to Atomic Energy!
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
Tag: business-model
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An Electric Engine Doesn't Make it Cloud
I loved the Tesla shareholders meeting, for the same reason I love it when VCs write posts about "all the investments we passed on and regretted later." Bessemer Venture Partners even has a page dedicated to its "Anti-Portfolio."
Fortune magazine called the Tesla meeting, "Elon Musk Confessions: All the Stupid Things Tesla Has Done." In the meeting, Musk catalogued many "stupid" mistakes (his words), although at the time they probably appeared smart, if slightly crazy (a characteristic required by every entrepreneur).
Tag: businesses
Post
What About Yahoo's Original Business?
Yesterday, we looked at how the market values Yahoo, and tried to understand why a company with $6.3BN in net assets, and another $31BN in a fairly liquid equity investment is valued only at... $31BN!
Interestingly, Daniel Morris pointed out an article in CNBC from September which argued that the issue is taxes. Essentially, Yahoo's investment is encumbered by a potential tax bill. If an when they liquidate it, the tax bill will be enough to wipe out the rest of Yahoo's assets.
Tag: buy
Post
Engineer Your Core, But Only Your Core
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 "
Tag: ca
Post
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, "
Tag: cabling
Post
Your Car Interior Should Be Like A Network
A lot of ink has been spilled (if that term still can be used in the digital age), on the coming driverless "revolution."
Yet a much simpler "evolution" is long overdue for automative technology: the inside.
Anyone who has replaced any component on a car - dashboard, door panel, side-view mirror, radio, engine part, or any component at all - is familiar with the swamp of wiring that snakes its way behind every panel on the car.
Tag: cac
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HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company
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 "
Tag: cannibalize
Post
You Are What You Sell
At the risk of kicking someone when they are down, let's look at... GoPro.
GoPro recently reported slower than anticipated sales, laid off 7% of their staff, and had their stock hammered (down 14.5% in a day). BusinessInsider did a straightforward if nice job showing their absolute revenue and relative year-over-year growth for the last 5 years. While total sales numbers are nice, the growth numbers aren't pretty.
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Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last
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 "
Tag: capacity
Post
Why Does My Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one).
One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "
Tag: capex
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Types of Cloud Services
In the previous article, we discussed what the (terribly overhyped) word "cloud" means. Before we start to delve into the difference between "true cloud" and "we just call it cloud", let's look at the different major categories of "cloud" services available.
As we discussed previously, cloud services replace:
Expertise with consumption Capex with opex Fixed costs with metered prices Unsurprisingly, you can use that model with any technology you consume.
Tag: capita
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Internet Trends and Internet Values
This week, Mary Meeker of KPCB has released her "Internet Trends" report. I look forward to the release of this report. While I rarely can sit through a nearly-200-slide presentation, the insights in here always are thought-provoking and make it worth my while. I remember Meeker back in my Morgan Stanley days - unfortunately, I never had the privilege of working directly with her.
If you have anything to do with the technology business, read it.
Tag: captcha
Post
ReCAPTCHA 2.0
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 "
Tag: car
Post
Why the Internet of Things Is So Vulnerable
It seems every day there is another article about how "vulnerable" the Internet of Things (IoT) is. Here are two choice excerpts from the last year:
"Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway," Wired, 21st July 2015 "Security Researcher Claims to have Hacked into Flight via Entertainment System," CNN, 19th May 2015 While these are major life-threatening issues - one cannot compare a malicious actor disabling your iPhone while you are on it with someone talking control of your car going 110 kmh down the highway, let alone a plane flying at 35,000 feet and 600 mph!
Tag: car-rental
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Is the Real Uber Threat to Hertz?
It has become commonplace to forecast that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing services are a strategic threat to car manufacturers. After all, if "everyone" uses Uber, why would they bother owning cars?
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that "everyone" lives where Uber and Lyft are headquartered: in a dense urban area with very little parking, going to other places nearby where there is lots of traffic and very little parking.
Tag: carbonite
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Tag: carrier
Post
Kill the SIM Card
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.
Tag: cars
Post
Your Car Interior Should Be Like A Network
A lot of ink has been spilled (if that term still can be used in the digital age), on the coming driverless "revolution."
Yet a much simpler "evolution" is long overdue for automative technology: the inside.
Anyone who has replaced any component on a car - dashboard, door panel, side-view mirror, radio, engine part, or any component at all - is familiar with the swamp of wiring that snakes its way behind every panel on the car.
Tag: cash
Post
It's Always Been a Matter of Trust
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:
Tag: catalyst
Post
Cloud to Culture
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.
Tag: causation
Post
Youth Makes You Young, Not Coca-Cola
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?
Tag: certificates
Post
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, "
Tag: certification
Post
Ask Why You Care About Security
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.
Tag: change
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The Real ROI of Cloud
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.
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Ask Not What Technology Can Do For You...
At the Container Summit, I was speaking with a colleague at a booth, when a potential customer of his walked up and engaged in conversation. He asked an interesting question:
How do I know if my software is ready for the cloud or for containerization?
While an interesting discussion ensued about the company's technology, the most important points of the conversation were three key lessons:
Just about any software or application can be containerized.
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Lift and Shift
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Container Summit NYC, arranged by the great folks at Joyent.
The first speaker, Dave Bartoletti of Forrester, gave a broad overview of cloud computing - private and public - and container adoption. One of his themes was the methods by which companies adopt new technologies, particularly cloud and containers, and the benefits they gain.
New technologies enable new ways of operating. While some technologies simply make it easier or cheaper to operate in the same way as before, most enable new methods, new processes, new ideas that previously were difficult or impossible.
Post
Cloud to Culture
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.
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Software Engineering and Human Nature
This morning, Adrian Colyer posted his morning paper on a "functional programming."
Most readers of this blog are not deep into different programming paradigms, so I will give a very short layman's overview here. For those who are comfortable, jump ahead a few paragraphs. (For the real experts, please do not nitpick on the details; the point is only to give an overview, not to debate the fine points.)
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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:
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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.
Tag: change-control
Post
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:
Post
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.
Tag: changemanagement
Post
Lift and Shift
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Container Summit NYC, arranged by the great folks at Joyent.
The first speaker, Dave Bartoletti of Forrester, gave a broad overview of cloud computing - private and public - and container adoption. One of his themes was the methods by which companies adopt new technologies, particularly cloud and containers, and the benefits they gain.
New technologies enable new ways of operating. While some technologies simply make it easier or cheaper to operate in the same way as before, most enable new methods, new processes, new ideas that previously were difficult or impossible.
Tag: chaos
Post
Put a Stake In Your Steering Wheel
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.
Tag: china
Post
Planning People and Laughing Markets
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.
Tag: christensen
Post
Blinded By The Textbook
With due respect to Manfred Mann's Earth Band, I just came across a great example of a business so blinded by their stale model that they cannot respond rationally to competitive threats: textbooks.
Anyone involved in education, from students to professors to parents, knows that textbooks are exorbitant. There are several reasons for these prices:
Market size: It is easier to sell 100MM Harry Potter hardcovers for $20 than a chemistry book that sells 20,000 copies.
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Can Early Markets Survive Without Product Management?
In earlier articles, especially here, we have discussed why great product management is crucial to a company's success. It is the role that is responsible for a product as a whole, the only one that aligns what the product should do, what features it has, where to offer it, at what price points for which packages.
Yet many companies seem to do just fine for an extended period of time without product management, especially in the technology sector.
Tag: clarity
Post
Good Writing Still Counts
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.
Tag: cloud
Post
Amazon Pricing Should Be Customer-Centric
Today, I had a very interesting discussion with Rich Miller, a consulting colleague who has been around the block more than a few times.
One of the interesting points he raised is that Amazon's AWS pricing doesn't quite work for enterprises.
Let's explore how it is a problem and why it is so.
At first blush, Amazon's pricing is intuitive: use an hour of an m4.xlarge, pay $0.239; use 2 hours, pay $0.
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SSL Is Broken, Time to Fix It
For a long time, I have felt that SSL/TLS - the protocol that secures your communications with Web sites, mail servers and most everything across the Internet - is broken. It is broken to the point that it is fundamentally insecure, except for the most technically-aware and security-alert individuals, who also have the time to check the certificate for each and every Web site.
SSL is supposed to provide three guarantees:
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Does Open-Source Increase the Value of Talent?
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.
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Open Source Business Models
Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it.
The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.
Post
An Electric Engine Doesn't Make it Cloud
I loved the Tesla shareholders meeting, for the same reason I love it when VCs write posts about "all the investments we passed on and regretted later." Bessemer Venture Partners even has a page dedicated to its "Anti-Portfolio."
Fortune magazine called the Tesla meeting, "Elon Musk Confessions: All the Stupid Things Tesla Has Done." In the meeting, Musk catalogued many "stupid" mistakes (his words), although at the time they probably appeared smart, if slightly crazy (a characteristic required by every entrepreneur).
Post
The Real ROI of Cloud
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.
Post
Innovation in... Operating Systems?
For most of us - pretty much all of us - the way we use our operating system (OS) on our laptop is not that different from how we use it on our mobile or a system administrator uses it on a server:
The operating system is installed to the local disk. Changes / upgrades are performed by installing files to the same disk and then rebooting. Software is installed and/or upgraded by installing files to the same disk.
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Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
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When Your Customers No Longer Adore You
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.
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Whence Serverless Cloud? It's About the Market.
I love tech. Despite an MBA and a decade of consulting and running a start-up or two, deep down, I always will be an engineer.
One of the most important lessons I learned as a young engineer 20 years ago at Morgan Stanley - courtesy of Guy Chiarello - is that the technology is only the means, not the end. Understand the finances, the market, even the politics if you want to do something with technology, even just inside a company, let alone outside.
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Ask Not What Technology Can Do For You...
At the Container Summit, I was speaking with a colleague at a booth, when a potential customer of his walked up and engaged in conversation. He asked an interesting question:
How do I know if my software is ready for the cloud or for containerization?
While an interesting discussion ensued about the company's technology, the most important points of the conversation were three key lessons:
Just about any software or application can be containerized.
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Decoupling Microsoft, or Free Your App
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!
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You Are What You Sell
At the risk of kicking someone when they are down, let's look at... GoPro.
GoPro recently reported slower than anticipated sales, laid off 7% of their staff, and had their stock hammered (down 14.5% in a day). BusinessInsider did a straightforward if nice job showing their absolute revenue and relative year-over-year growth for the last 5 years. While total sales numbers are nice, the growth numbers aren't pretty.
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Why Is Yahoo Valued Less than Zero?
According to several articles I have seen today, notably this Wall Street Journal report, Yahoo's Board of Directors are considering a sale of Yahoo's core Internet business.
For quite some time, Yahoo has been a troubled company. To many people, it doesn't matter. But to those of us who enjoyed it as one of the first major Internet search sites, it is very sad to see.
Marissa Mayer was brought on board to fix the company.
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Selling Clothes, Selling Software, Selling Cloud
What does selling clothes to Macy's have to do with selling software, and cloud services, to enterprises?
Everything.
Earlier today, I was speaking with my brother-in-law, entrepreneur and consultant Kevin Pearl. Before starting a firm to improve capture of billing time for attorneys, accountants and consultants; before serving as a turnaround consultant; before building a firm that sold software to manage venture capital portfolios; Kevin ran a firm that sold clothing to large well-known clothing retailers.
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Mind Your Margins... Again!
I have no idea why it surprises everyone. Every time some technology goes through the "hype cycle", or the sector as a whole goes through a "we're not in a bubble" bubble, inevitably, when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, people suddenly "discover" business fundamentals.
Often, it is not the people discussing it who discover it. Rather, they are the ones reminding everyone that the fundamentals count.
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Performance Tests Redux
A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes.
Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly.
Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox.
On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.
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Cloud to Culture
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.
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Smart Design in Containers
In a previous article, we invented "Conway's Corollary" - how design determines scale.
Today, we will look at another case from the hottest technology of the last year: containers.
When designing software - any piece of software - the most important criterion is not, "what features does it have," or "how well is it documented," although those are very important. It is not even, "how sexy is the user interface,"
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Conway's Corollary - Design Determines Scale
When I went to business school, I worked closely with an incredibly smart woman with whom I shared a very similar method of thinking and mindset. When we would find the same responses to the same questions in the same manner, inevitably I would quote, "great minds think alike."
She taught me that there is a corollary: "...but fools rarely differ."
The great challenge in life often isn't to agree with someone, no matter how smart; it is to determine if you are both great minds thinking alike, or both fools who are not differing.
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Managing Your Users... Right and Wrong
Is your user management an afterthought?
For most companies building technology systems, how to manage users - the process of creating, managing, grouping and linking accounts - is bolted on later. After all, you fully expect your users to spend the bulk of their time using your service, not logging in to or managing your service! So you use some reasonably standard user management library, and when you have to worry about groups and organizations, you sort of bolt it on.
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Bare Metal Cloud
Infrastructure-as-a-Service, cloud servers, whatever you call them, have been around for years. Amazon is the clear leader in the pack (and, according to Simon Wardley, is likely to remain so for a long time), with others like Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, and Azure picking up much of the rest (fortunately for them, the market is plenty big enough).
Digital Ocean, a company I mostly ignored for a while, takes kudos for speed and simplicity, and rapidly have become my go-to option for quick servers.
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Why Does My Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one).
One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "
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The Best Laid Schemes Of Mice And Men
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 "
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Keep Corporate Away From Production
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.
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When to Outsource
Knowing how to outsource a process is challenging enough, and requires serious operational management and help, but does not involve making strategic decisions.
Conversely, knowing when to outsource is far more challenging, as it involves making decisions with imperfect information about the future.
Caveat: Use this as a starting point, a framework, but do not use it as your sole decision-making process. Get serious help; we are here.
The Why There are only two reasons why you should outsource something.
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How to Outsource
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.
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Nimbleness of Scale
In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies:
Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources:
Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.
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TrueCrypt: True Security, True Licensing
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.
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Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
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It's Always About the People (Even in Tech)
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.
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Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
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Design for Failure in the Cloud. Actually, Everywhere.
In one of our earlier discussions about cloud, an astute reader pointed out that one "downside" of public cloud, especially one like AWS, is that they make very few guarantees about your instances. While the system as a whole has service level agreements (SLAs), your particular instance does not. To quote:
"If your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it"
The underlying assumption, of course, is that you have better control over the level of availability of your particular instances and their underlying hardware, especially scheduled maintenance, when you control the entire environment rather than leaving it to a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace.
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Kill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter.
All that matters is customer expectation in real time.
You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform.
Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.
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Does Amazon Web Services Pricing Follow Moore's Law?
Yesterday's article on the short life span of premium (and especially ultra-premium) pricing led to a robust discussion on Hacker News. In the article, I used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example of a company that actively tries to cannibalize itself.
A smart commenter pointed out that AWS pricing, while falling continually, has nonetheless fallen more slowly than Moore's Law, according to which equivalently-priced capability should double roughly every 18 (or 24) months.
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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:
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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.
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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, "
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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.
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The Technology of True Cloud
Continuing our series on cloud services, especially our most recent one, "How to Do True Cloud", we now turn to the technology that enables true cloud services.
This article will go more in depth than the previous ones; after all, we are discussing technology services. However, it will not go so deep as to lose the business-side executives. Indeed, any great executive in technology needs to hold to two principles simultaneously:
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How to do True Cloud
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?
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The Cloud and Being Nimble
In our most recent article, we explored why "true cloud" really matters: it has a significant impact on:
Your gross margins Your speed As a company providing technology services, as opposed to products like software, you cannot get cloud-scale gross margins and speed - and therefore valuations - unless you are operating as a true cloud.
Today, we will look at a different set of advantages to running your service as a true cloud: how nimble you can be.
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Why True Cloud Matters
In our previous articles, we discussed what cloud is, the types of cloud services, and the difference between true cloud and "market cloud", or hosting.
The big question is, so what?
You are a software provider offering a cloud solution. Does it really matter if it is "true cloud", or just hosted? Isn't it just a difference in architectural design, a matter for your engineers but not your customers or your bottom line?
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True Cloud vs Hosting
Having looked at the definition (and misapplication) of cloud, its key characteristics, and the various categories of cloud services, or fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service (*aaS), we now turn our attention to the important difference between true cloud services and hosting services that are marketed as cloud.
This is crucially important to vendors and customers!
While it may seem, at first glance, as nitpicking, these are very important differences. They will impact a vendor's short-term and long-term profitability, viability and responsiveness, and a customer's ability to rely on a vendor.
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Types of Cloud Services
In the previous article, we discussed what the (terribly overhyped) word "cloud" means. Before we start to delve into the difference between "true cloud" and "we just call it cloud", let's look at the different major categories of "cloud" services available.
As we discussed previously, cloud services replace:
Expertise with consumption Capex with opex Fixed costs with metered prices Unsurprisingly, you can use that model with any technology you consume.
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What is the Cloud?
Cloud seems to be the biggest buzzword in the last few years. Every technology provider, every services provider, if they aren't natively "in the cloud", they are providing a version of their offering "in the cloud."
Although the term "cloud" seems pretty clear to marketers - personally, I am convinced many believe it means, "we can charge more for this if we slap the word 'Cloud' on it" - the majority of people with whom I speak, from engineers and support staff through executives, CEOs and especially customers, do not have a real understanding of what the cloud is, and why it matters.
Tag: cms
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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.
Tag: coca-cola
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Youth Makes You Young, Not Coca-Cola
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?
Tag: code
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Deodorant for Software
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.
Tag: coffee
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HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company
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 "
Tag: colocation
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Why Does My Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one).
One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "
Tag: combine-harvester
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Rise of the Luddites
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.
Tag: commoditize
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Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last
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 "
Tag: communications
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How to Outsource
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.
Tag: company
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Mission Soundbite
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"
Tag: competition
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Can rkt+kubernetes provide a real alternative to Docker?
Last week in LinuxCon/ContainerCon Berlin, I attended a presentation by Luca Bruno of CoreOS, where he described how kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration and scheduling service, and rkt integrate. As part of the presentation, Luca delved into the rkt architecture.
For those unaware - there are many, which is a major part of the problem - rkt (pronounced "rocket", as in this) is CoreOS's container management implementation. Nowadays, almost everyone who thinks containers, thinks "
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Can Early Markets Survive Without Product Management?
In earlier articles, especially here, we have discussed why great product management is crucial to a company's success. It is the role that is responsible for a product as a whole, the only one that aligns what the product should do, what features it has, where to offer it, at what price points for which packages.
Yet many companies seem to do just fine for an extended period of time without product management, especially in the technology sector.
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The Hidden Dangers of Interim Solutions
One of the hardest challenges in business is knowing when to use an interim solution and when to start over from scratch.
From a pure financial perspective, interim solutions almost always win out. I see this regularly in the software industry. The progress looks something like this:
You (i.e. your company) write a piece of software. It is successful and useful and sells and grows. Over time, you add more and more features and capabilities, leading to a more useful but more complex product.
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Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last
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 "
Tag: complexity
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Engineer Your Core, But Only Your Core
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 "
Tag: confidence
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Open Source Business Models
Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it.
The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.
Tag: consolidation
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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, "
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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.
Tag: consulting
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Planning People and Laughing Markets
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.
Tag: container
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Lift and Shift
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Container Summit NYC, arranged by the great folks at Joyent.
The first speaker, Dave Bartoletti of Forrester, gave a broad overview of cloud computing - private and public - and container adoption. One of his themes was the methods by which companies adopt new technologies, particularly cloud and containers, and the benefits they gain.
New technologies enable new ways of operating. While some technologies simply make it easier or cheaper to operate in the same way as before, most enable new methods, new processes, new ideas that previously were difficult or impossible.
Tag: containers
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On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
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The Problem with Serverless Is Packaging
Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions.
Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management.
In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.
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Pilots In Habitats: Basic Unit of Application Deployment
What is the basic unit of application deployment?
Two related trends have changed the answer to this question:
DevOps Containers For many years, the tasks between engineer and operator were cleanly, if painfully, split:
Engineer builds and delivers a package of files to deploy and run Operator deploys and runs those files in a production operating environment In the early years, the package of files consisted of a directory with a ream of paper and instructions.
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Why Customers Agree to Open-Source
Why do customers agree to open-source work I do?
In the past, we have discussed the benefits of open-sourcing your own software:
Reputation Recruiting Contributions Recently, I had the pleasure of walking half an hour from a Tokyo train station with Matthew Garrett, who does some impressive work on core operating systems (pun intended; Mathew works at CoreOS). One of the thing I asked him is why a company open-sources its entire stack?
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An Electric Engine Doesn't Make it Cloud
I loved the Tesla shareholders meeting, for the same reason I love it when VCs write posts about "all the investments we passed on and regretted later." Bessemer Venture Partners even has a page dedicated to its "Anti-Portfolio."
Fortune magazine called the Tesla meeting, "Elon Musk Confessions: All the Stupid Things Tesla Has Done." In the meeting, Musk catalogued many "stupid" mistakes (his words), although at the time they probably appeared smart, if slightly crazy (a characteristic required by every entrepreneur).
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Internet of Iotas
From the Cambridge Dictionary of English:
iota (n.) - an extremely small amount
From the Wikipedia:
Internet of Things (IoT) - the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.
As electronics get smaller and smaller, not just wearables like an Apple Watch, but even tiny full computers like the Raspberry Pi, the "
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Docker and Browser - It's All About Packaging
What do Docker containers have to do with Web browsers?
Everything.
Web browsers provide easy access to the digitized collective knowledge of the human race, political rants, serious applications and even silly kittens.
However, it is important to understand why browsers became so popular, and such a success.
Prior to browsers, networked applications existed. Mostly, they were client-server two-tier applications, but they were quite popular in business, and many home personal computer users had such applications.
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Innovation in... Operating Systems?
For most of us - pretty much all of us - the way we use our operating system (OS) on our laptop is not that different from how we use it on our mobile or a system administrator uses it on a server:
The operating system is installed to the local disk. Changes / upgrades are performed by installing files to the same disk and then rebooting. Software is installed and/or upgraded by installing files to the same disk.
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Changing Tech, Changing Jobs: What Serverless Means for SysAdmins
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.
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Ask Not What Technology Can Do For You...
At the Container Summit, I was speaking with a colleague at a booth, when a potential customer of his walked up and engaged in conversation. He asked an interesting question:
How do I know if my software is ready for the cloud or for containerization?
While an interesting discussion ensued about the company's technology, the most important points of the conversation were three key lessons:
Just about any software or application can be containerized.
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Do You Need Microservices to Make Containers Worthwhile?
Earlier this week, I had breakfast with a colleague of mine from Rancher. Rancher is a great "orchestrator" for Docker containers. I have recommended and used them in production environments.
Containers - one of the hottest technologies in the last year - is a much more efficient form of virtualization than traditional "hardware" virtualization (think VMWare or Xen), while providing a superior application distribution model.
The challenge is that while the native Docker tools are pretty good for managing individual servers with containers, managing more than a few containers, let alone across more than a few servers, becomes impossibly complex.
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Performance Tests Redux
A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes.
Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly.
Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox.
On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.
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Cloud to Culture
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.
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Nothing is New Under the Sun Server
As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses.
It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended).
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.
Tag: continental
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It's Always About the People (Even in Tech)
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.
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It's About The People, Stupid
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.
Tag: continuous-development
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Continuous Everything
Earlier this week, a really smart architect and I were evaluating various methods for managing software code changes, bug fixes, releases and major features. We both were in agreement with the primary direction, a popular one in nimble companies.
Have a primary "trunk" or "master" branch; Any commits to "master" automatically get built and tested and ready for production (and possibly deployed); Any changes occur on "feature branches", temporary parallels streams of development that eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - merge into "
Tag: continuous-integration
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Continuous Everything
Earlier this week, a really smart architect and I were evaluating various methods for managing software code changes, bug fixes, releases and major features. We both were in agreement with the primary direction, a popular one in nimble companies.
Have a primary "trunk" or "master" branch; Any commits to "master" automatically get built and tested and ready for production (and possibly deployed); Any changes occur on "feature branches", temporary parallels streams of development that eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - merge into "
Tag: convenience
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Keep Corporate Away From Production
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.
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Yahoo's On-Demand (In)Security
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 "
Tag: conversion
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True Cloud vs Hosting
Having looked at the definition (and misapplication) of cloud, its key characteristics, and the various categories of cloud services, or fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service (*aaS), we now turn our attention to the important difference between true cloud services and hosting services that are marketed as cloud.
This is crucially important to vendors and customers!
While it may seem, at first glance, as nitpicking, these are very important differences. They will impact a vendor's short-term and long-term profitability, viability and responsiveness, and a customer's ability to rely on a vendor.
Tag: conway
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Go Conway
There is a famous saying, known as Conway's Law, which states that:
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
It means that when your organization builds a system, its structure will reflect the organization that created it. If you have 3 teams - database administrators, system administrators and Web developers - then your system architecture will have 3 distinct components: databases, servers and Web UI.
Tag: core
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What About Yahoo's Original Business?
Yesterday, we looked at how the market values Yahoo, and tried to understand why a company with $6.3BN in net assets, and another $31BN in a fairly liquid equity investment is valued only at... $31BN!
Interestingly, Daniel Morris pointed out an article in CNBC from September which argued that the issue is taxes. Essentially, Yahoo's investment is encumbered by a potential tax bill. If an when they liquidate it, the tax bill will be enough to wipe out the rest of Yahoo's assets.
Tag: coreos
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Can rkt+kubernetes provide a real alternative to Docker?
Last week in LinuxCon/ContainerCon Berlin, I attended a presentation by Luca Bruno of CoreOS, where he described how kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration and scheduling service, and rkt integrate. As part of the presentation, Luca delved into the rkt architecture.
For those unaware - there are many, which is a major part of the problem - rkt (pronounced "rocket", as in this) is CoreOS's container management implementation. Nowadays, almost everyone who thinks containers, thinks "
Tag: correlation
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Youth Makes You Young, Not Coca-Cola
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?
Tag: cost
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Conway's Corollary - Design Determines Scale
When I went to business school, I worked closely with an incredibly smart woman with whom I shared a very similar method of thinking and mindset. When we would find the same responses to the same questions in the same manner, inevitably I would quote, "great minds think alike."
She taught me that there is a corollary: "...but fools rarely differ."
The great challenge in life often isn't to agree with someone, no matter how smart; it is to determine if you are both great minds thinking alike, or both fools who are not differing.
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Why Does My Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one).
One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "
Tag: cotton-gin
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Rise of the Luddites
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.
Tag: crashplan
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Tag: creativity
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For the Love of Brilliant Advertising
Great technology companies have been built on advertising: Google, Facebook, Yahoo (in the old days), not to mention many a magazine, newspaper and television network.
I have always loved the operational side of ad networks. They require building and managing a systems whose data throughput and reliability requirements rival a financial pricing and trading system. I have managed several of those, and the parallels are quite strong.
What truly interests me in advertising, though, is the brilliance of great creativity.
Tag: cryptography
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TrueCrypt: True Security, True Licensing
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.
Tag: culture
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The Real ROI of Cloud
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.
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Dangers of Bimodal Budgeting
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.
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Ask Not What Technology Can Do For You...
At the Container Summit, I was speaking with a colleague at a booth, when a potential customer of his walked up and engaged in conversation. He asked an interesting question:
How do I know if my software is ready for the cloud or for containerization?
While an interesting discussion ensued about the company's technology, the most important points of the conversation were three key lessons:
Just about any software or application can be containerized.
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Do You Need Microservices to Make Containers Worthwhile?
Earlier this week, I had breakfast with a colleague of mine from Rancher. Rancher is a great "orchestrator" for Docker containers. I have recommended and used them in production environments.
Containers - one of the hottest technologies in the last year - is a much more efficient form of virtualization than traditional "hardware" virtualization (think VMWare or Xen), while providing a superior application distribution model.
The challenge is that while the native Docker tools are pretty good for managing individual servers with containers, managing more than a few containers, let alone across more than a few servers, becomes impossibly complex.
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Sales-Product Tension: Small Companies Scale and Big Companies Fail
Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading - actually, the entire Isaacson biography of Jobs is a great read - but here is the money quote:
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.
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Independence Drives Speed
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.
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Cloud to Culture
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.
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Deodorant for Software
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.
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How to Outsource
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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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The Technology of True Cloud
Continuing our series on cloud services, especially our most recent one, "How to Do True Cloud", we now turn to the technology that enables true cloud services.
This article will go more in depth than the previous ones; after all, we are discussing technology services. However, it will not go so deep as to lose the business-side executives. Indeed, any great executive in technology needs to hold to two principles simultaneously:
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The Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
"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 "
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Just Making Technology Work Is Hard Work
Apple's philosophy for technology is, "just make it work." I had one of the early pre-iPod mp3 players. It was a great piece, lots of battery life, played every format out there at the time... and within a year I had replaced it with an iPod. Transferring music to this player and managing it was just an enormous headache. With iTunes and iPod, it "just worked".
Fast forward to the year 2014.
Tag: customer
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Penny-Wise and Pound Foolish, Eh?
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.
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True Cloud vs Hosting
Having looked at the definition (and misapplication) of cloud, its key characteristics, and the various categories of cloud services, or fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service (*aaS), we now turn our attention to the important difference between true cloud services and hosting services that are marketed as cloud.
This is crucially important to vendors and customers!
While it may seem, at first glance, as nitpicking, these are very important differences. They will impact a vendor's short-term and long-term profitability, viability and responsiveness, and a customer's ability to rely on a vendor.
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What is the Cloud?
Cloud seems to be the biggest buzzword in the last few years. Every technology provider, every services provider, if they aren't natively "in the cloud", they are providing a version of their offering "in the cloud."
Although the term "cloud" seems pretty clear to marketers - personally, I am convinced many believe it means, "we can charge more for this if we slap the word 'Cloud' on it" - the majority of people with whom I speak, from engineers and support staff through executives, CEOs and especially customers, do not have a real understanding of what the cloud is, and why it matters.
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Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
Tag: customer-service
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Small Efforts for Big Wins
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.
Tag: customers
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Amazon Pricing Should Be Customer-Centric
Today, I had a very interesting discussion with Rich Miller, a consulting colleague who has been around the block more than a few times.
One of the interesting points he raised is that Amazon's AWS pricing doesn't quite work for enterprises.
Let's explore how it is a problem and why it is so.
At first blush, Amazon's pricing is intuitive: use an hour of an m4.xlarge, pay $0.239; use 2 hours, pay $0.
Tag: datasift
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Experience Matters... Especially In a Startup
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, "
Tag: debug
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Don't Defer the Problem, Resolve It!
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, "
Tag: decline
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Sales-Product Tension: Small Companies Scale and Big Companies Fail
Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading - actually, the entire Isaacson biography of Jobs is a great read - but here is the money quote:
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.
Tag: delivery
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Docker and Browser - It's All About Packaging
What do Docker containers have to do with Web browsers?
Everything.
Web browsers provide easy access to the digitized collective knowledge of the human race, political rants, serious applications and even silly kittens.
However, it is important to understand why browsers became so popular, and such a success.
Prior to browsers, networked applications existed. Mostly, they were client-server two-tier applications, but they were quite popular in business, and many home personal computer users had such applications.
Tag: deployment
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Pilots In Habitats: Basic Unit of Application Deployment
What is the basic unit of application deployment?
Two related trends have changed the answer to this question:
DevOps Containers For many years, the tasks between engineer and operator were cleanly, if painfully, split:
Engineer builds and delivers a package of files to deploy and run Operator deploys and runs those files in a production operating environment In the early years, the package of files consisted of a directory with a ream of paper and instructions.
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The Best Laid Schemes Of Mice And Men
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 "
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Design for Failure in the Cloud. Actually, Everywhere.
In one of our earlier discussions about cloud, an astute reader pointed out that one "downside" of public cloud, especially one like AWS, is that they make very few guarantees about your instances. While the system as a whole has service level agreements (SLAs), your particular instance does not. To quote:
"If your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it"
The underlying assumption, of course, is that you have better control over the level of availability of your particular instances and their underlying hardware, especially scheduled maintenance, when you control the entire environment rather than leaving it to a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace.
Tag: design
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The Pain Caused By Poor Software Design
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.
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Smart Design in Containers
In a previous article, we invented "Conway's Corollary" - how design determines scale.
Today, we will look at another case from the hottest technology of the last year: containers.
When designing software - any piece of software - the most important criterion is not, "what features does it have," or "how well is it documented," although those are very important. It is not even, "how sexy is the user interface,"
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Conway's Corollary - Design Determines Scale
When I went to business school, I worked closely with an incredibly smart woman with whom I shared a very similar method of thinking and mindset. When we would find the same responses to the same questions in the same manner, inevitably I would quote, "great minds think alike."
She taught me that there is a corollary: "...but fools rarely differ."
The great challenge in life often isn't to agree with someone, no matter how smart; it is to determine if you are both great minds thinking alike, or both fools who are not differing.
Tag: desktop
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Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
Tag: developers
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Developers or Engineers?
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.
Tag: devops
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Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
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DevOps in the 1990s
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending LinuxCon/ContainerCon Europe 2016 in Berlin. Besides visiting a fascinating historical capital - there is great irony, and victory, in seeing "Ben-Gurion-Strasse" - or "Ben Gurion Street" - named after the founding Prime Minister of Israel in the erstwhile capital of the Third Reich. And while I had many a hesitation about visiting, the amount of awareness, monuments and memorials to the activities of the regime in the 1930s and 1940s was impressive.
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Pilots In Habitats: Basic Unit of Application Deployment
What is the basic unit of application deployment?
Two related trends have changed the answer to this question:
DevOps Containers For many years, the tasks between engineer and operator were cleanly, if painfully, split:
Engineer builds and delivers a package of files to deploy and run Operator deploys and runs those files in a production operating environment In the early years, the package of files consisted of a directory with a ream of paper and instructions.
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Whence QA?
Since the dawn of software, more or less, companies wrote their software in a process that went something like this:
Product defines the specifications. Architecture designs it. Engineering/R&D builds it. Quality Assurance (QA) tests it. If it passes, it is scheduled for release; if not, goto #3. The jobs of QA teams historically have been procedure-oriented. Whereas engineers tend to be more creative and inventive, QA teams provide the process and constraints (remember the term "
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Chessmaster Employees
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.
Tag: digital-ocean
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Managing Your Users... Right and Wrong
Is your user management an afterthought?
For most companies building technology systems, how to manage users - the process of creating, managing, grouping and linking accounts - is bolted on later. After all, you fully expect your users to spend the bulk of their time using your service, not logging in to or managing your service! So you use some reasonably standard user management library, and when you have to worry about groups and organizations, you sort of bolt it on.
Tag: digitalocean
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The Problem with Serverless Is Packaging
Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions.
Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management.
In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.
Tag: disruption
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Blinded By The Textbook
With due respect to Manfred Mann's Earth Band, I just came across a great example of a business so blinded by their stale model that they cannot respond rationally to competitive threats: textbooks.
Anyone involved in education, from students to professors to parents, knows that textbooks are exorbitant. There are several reasons for these prices:
Market size: It is easier to sell 100MM Harry Potter hardcovers for $20 than a chemistry book that sells 20,000 copies.
Tag: docker
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Can rkt+kubernetes provide a real alternative to Docker?
Last week in LinuxCon/ContainerCon Berlin, I attended a presentation by Luca Bruno of CoreOS, where he described how kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration and scheduling service, and rkt integrate. As part of the presentation, Luca delved into the rkt architecture.
For those unaware - there are many, which is a major part of the problem - rkt (pronounced "rocket", as in this) is CoreOS's container management implementation. Nowadays, almost everyone who thinks containers, thinks "
Post
Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
Post
Docker and Browser - It's All About Packaging
What do Docker containers have to do with Web browsers?
Everything.
Web browsers provide easy access to the digitized collective knowledge of the human race, political rants, serious applications and even silly kittens.
However, it is important to understand why browsers became so popular, and such a success.
Prior to browsers, networked applications existed. Mostly, they were client-server two-tier applications, but they were quite popular in business, and many home personal computer users had such applications.
Post
Innovation in... Operating Systems?
For most of us - pretty much all of us - the way we use our operating system (OS) on our laptop is not that different from how we use it on our mobile or a system administrator uses it on a server:
The operating system is installed to the local disk. Changes / upgrades are performed by installing files to the same disk and then rebooting. Software is installed and/or upgraded by installing files to the same disk.
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Decoupling Microsoft, or Free Your App
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!
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Performance Tests Redux
A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes.
Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly.
Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox.
On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.
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Don't Break Your Customers
Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage and use.
Personally, I think Docker containers are great. They provide a far more efficient level of isolation than VM virtualization, without sacrificing manageability.
Docker itself, however, is a young company, and every now and then young companies, whose products are moving very quickly, make silly mistakes.
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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, "
Tag: downtime
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Continuous Everything
Earlier this week, a really smart architect and I were evaluating various methods for managing software code changes, bug fixes, releases and major features. We both were in agreement with the primary direction, a popular one in nimble companies.
Have a primary "trunk" or "master" branch; Any commits to "master" automatically get built and tested and ready for production (and possibly deployed); Any changes occur on "feature branches", temporary parallels streams of development that eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - merge into "
Tag: dropbox
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Architect Your Product Before It Holds You Back
Architecture determines capabilities.
This is not new. Anyone who has planned and architected a new product, or has tried to retrofit capabilities for which a platform has not been architected, knows it first-hand.
Yet, time and again, I come across products that have not been planned, and therefore architected, around reasonably expected capabilities.
Sometimes I see these as a user.
Last week, a client wanted to give me access to their Dropox Team account, so we could share information.
Tag: economics
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Changing Tech, Changing Jobs: What Serverless Means for SysAdmins
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.
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Ad Blockers Are Good Signals
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.
Tag: economy
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Welcome to Atomic Energy!
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
Tag: ecosystem
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When Your Customers No Longer Adore You
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.
Tag: education
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Blinded By The Textbook
With due respect to Manfred Mann's Earth Band, I just came across a great example of a business so blinded by their stale model that they cannot respond rationally to competitive threats: textbooks.
Anyone involved in education, from students to professors to parents, knows that textbooks are exorbitant. There are several reasons for these prices:
Market size: It is easier to sell 100MM Harry Potter hardcovers for $20 than a chemistry book that sells 20,000 copies.
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The Power of Visualization
Once in a while, we come across a perfect example of how everyday technology can improve our understanding. It is not radical new technology, like nanoparticles fighting cancer, but great usage of tools that are widely available.
Understanding Math I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering many years ago. While I did well at my alma mater, like most people, I struggled with visualizing complex mathematical principles. Sine waves are easy to draw and see, but start doing more complex forms, then head into Fourier Transforms, and even the smartest get lost.
Tag: efficiency
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What Emergency Rooms Could Learn from IT Help Desks
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.
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Rise of the Luddites
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.
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Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
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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.
Tag: email
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Deleting Email Is a Chimera
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.
Tag: employees
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When Your Workers Love Their Job
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.
Tag: encryption
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The Safe as a Web Server
Safes. They are big, heavy, and make us feel, well, "safe" about our valuables stored inside.
Historically, safes were controlled by a series of complex gears that only the correct series, or "combination", of dials would open. I loved the illustrations for gears and other mechanical devices in David Macaulay's "New Way Things Work".
Digital safes, whether the professional variety of the home variety, were created largely for convenience. They are faster to open, easier to share (and change) codes, and required less physical space for all of the gears.
Tag: engineering
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It's All About the White Rats
No, this is not about "White Hats" - security hackers who try to break into systems in order to strengthen them, as opposed to "Black Hats" - but really about what we can learn from white rats.
In the last few weeks, I have helped solve a number of vexing problems on behalf of customers, both in technology and process. Each time I am asked how I do it, and each time the answer is the same.
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Engineer Your Core, But Only Your Core
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 "
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Software Engineering and Human Nature
This morning, Adrian Colyer posted his morning paper on a "functional programming."
Most readers of this blog are not deep into different programming paradigms, so I will give a very short layman's overview here. For those who are comfortable, jump ahead a few paragraphs. (For the real experts, please do not nitpick on the details; the point is only to give an overview, not to debate the fine points.)
Tag: engineers
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Developers or Engineers?
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.
Tag: environment
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The Hidden Dangers of Interim Solutions
One of the hardest challenges in business is knowing when to use an interim solution and when to start over from scratch.
From a pure financial perspective, interim solutions almost always win out. I see this regularly in the software industry. The progress looks something like this:
You (i.e. your company) write a piece of software. It is successful and useful and sells and grows. Over time, you add more and more features and capabilities, leading to a more useful but more complex product.
Tag: epic
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It's About The People, Stupid
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.
Tag: equity
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Brave New Equity World
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.
Tag: espo
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Brave New Equity World
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.
Tag: ethernet
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Your Car Interior Should Be Like A Network
A lot of ink has been spilled (if that term still can be used in the digital age), on the coming driverless "revolution."
Yet a much simpler "evolution" is long overdue for automative technology: the inside.
Anyone who has replaced any component on a car - dashboard, door panel, side-view mirror, radio, engine part, or any component at all - is familiar with the swamp of wiring that snakes its way behind every panel on the car.
Tag: experience
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Experience Matters... Especially In a Startup
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, "
Tag: faas
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Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
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The Problem with Serverless Is Packaging
Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions.
Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management.
In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.
Tag: fail
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It's About The People, Stupid
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.
Tag: failure
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Put a Stake In Your Steering Wheel
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.
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Design for Failure in the Cloud. Actually, Everywhere.
In one of our earlier discussions about cloud, an astute reader pointed out that one "downside" of public cloud, especially one like AWS, is that they make very few guarantees about your instances. While the system as a whole has service level agreements (SLAs), your particular instance does not. To quote:
"If your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it"
The underlying assumption, of course, is that you have better control over the level of availability of your particular instances and their underlying hardware, especially scheduled maintenance, when you control the entire environment rather than leaving it to a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace.
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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.
Tag: finance
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Kill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter.
All that matters is customer expectation in real time.
You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform.
Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.
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How to do True Cloud
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?
Tag: financial
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The Hidden Dangers of Interim Solutions
One of the hardest challenges in business is knowing when to use an interim solution and when to start over from scratch.
From a pure financial perspective, interim solutions almost always win out. I see this regularly in the software industry. The progress looks something like this:
You (i.e. your company) write a piece of software. It is successful and useful and sells and grows. Over time, you add more and more features and capabilities, leading to a more useful but more complex product.
Tag: financing
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Pay Yourself First
One of the most important rules of successful longtime business owners, right after "Cash is King", is "Pay Yourself First." After all, you do not know what the business will be like in a year or two or ten, so don't shortchange yourself. Of course, you need to invest in your business's growth as well, but don't live in poverty because every penny of profit is plowed back into the business.
Tag: fingerprints
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Hiding Fingerprints in Your Browser for Privacy
The browser is the single most ubiquitous piece of software on the planet. Nearly every computing device has at least one one. Because of its ubiquity, and its use across multiple applications from open (Google "how much does a banana weigh") to private (browser-based email) to secure (office applications or banking), it is also a source of many risks.
This article will dig a little deeper into issues of browser security and privacy.
Tag: first
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It's About The People, Stupid
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.
Tag: fix
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Surprising Efforts: Debug vs Test vs Fix
In the last article on serverless, I referenced the old ad in the New York City subways for a trade school. Their tagline was similar to, "technicians will always be needed, because things always will break."
We technologists are familiar - intimately - with fixing broken things. Sometimes, it is our own software, devices or infrastructure; other times, it is someone else's. Either we have become responsible for it, or we need it to work under certain circumstances where it simply fails.
Tag: flexibility
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Architect Your Product Before It Holds You Back
Architecture determines capabilities.
This is not new. Anyone who has planned and architected a new product, or has tried to retrofit capabilities for which a platform has not been architected, knows it first-hand.
Yet, time and again, I come across products that have not been planned, and therefore architected, around reasonably expected capabilities.
Sometimes I see these as a user.
Last week, a client wanted to give me access to their Dropox Team account, so we could share information.
Tag: flipkart
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Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
Tag: forrester
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Lift and Shift
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Container Summit NYC, arranged by the great folks at Joyent.
The first speaker, Dave Bartoletti of Forrester, gave a broad overview of cloud computing - private and public - and container adoption. One of his themes was the methods by which companies adopt new technologies, particularly cloud and containers, and the benefits they gain.
New technologies enable new ways of operating. While some technologies simply make it easier or cheaper to operate in the same way as before, most enable new methods, new processes, new ideas that previously were difficult or impossible.
Tag: fun
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More Fun To Higher Sales
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.
Tag: functional
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Software Engineering and Human Nature
This morning, Adrian Colyer posted his morning paper on a "functional programming."
Most readers of this blog are not deep into different programming paradigms, so I will give a very short layman's overview here. For those who are comfortable, jump ahead a few paragraphs. (For the real experts, please do not nitpick on the details; the point is only to give an overview, not to debate the fine points.)
Tag: funnel
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Selling Clothes, Selling Software, Selling Cloud
What does selling clothes to Macy's have to do with selling software, and cloud services, to enterprises?
Everything.
Earlier today, I was speaking with my brother-in-law, entrepreneur and consultant Kevin Pearl. Before starting a firm to improve capture of billing time for attorneys, accountants and consultants; before serving as a turnaround consultant; before building a firm that sold software to manage venture capital portfolios; Kevin ran a firm that sold clothing to large well-known clothing retailers.
Tag: gap
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Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
Tag: gdp
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Internet Trends and Internet Values
This week, Mary Meeker of KPCB has released her "Internet Trends" report. I look forward to the release of this report. While I rarely can sit through a nearly-200-slide presentation, the insights in here always are thought-provoking and make it worth my while. I remember Meeker back in my Morgan Stanley days - unfortunately, I never had the privilege of working directly with her.
If you have anything to do with the technology business, read it.
Tag: general
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Welcome to Atomic Energy!
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
Tag: github
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Managing Your Users... Right and Wrong
Is your user management an afterthought?
For most companies building technology systems, how to manage users - the process of creating, managing, grouping and linking accounts - is bolted on later. After all, you fully expect your users to spend the bulk of their time using your service, not logging in to or managing your service! So you use some reasonably standard user management library, and when you have to worry about groups and organizations, you sort of bolt it on.
Tag: glitch
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The Prisoner's Software Dilemma
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.
Tag: go
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Go Conway
There is a famous saying, known as Conway's Law, which states that:
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
It means that when your organization builds a system, its structure will reflect the organization that created it. If you have 3 teams - database administrators, system administrators and Web developers - then your system architecture will have 3 distinct components: databases, servers and Web UI.
Tag: google
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Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
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Keep Corporate Away From Production
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.
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Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
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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.
Tag: gopro
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You Are What You Sell
At the risk of kicking someone when they are down, let's look at... GoPro.
GoPro recently reported slower than anticipated sales, laid off 7% of their staff, and had their stock hammered (down 14.5% in a day). BusinessInsider did a straightforward if nice job showing their absolute revenue and relative year-over-year growth for the last 5 years. While total sales numbers are nice, the growth numbers aren't pretty.
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Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last
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 "
Tag: gpl
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Licenses as Premium Pricing
Two weeks ago, we argued that, in the face of competition (and there is always competition), "Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last."
At the same time, there always will be premium priced products - Tesla and BMW, Apple Watch Edition, Oracle - but the question is how long these can maintain significant market share?
A smart commenter, amelius, raised a fascinating point.
Amelius compares premium pricing for substitutable products to restrictive licensing for software.
Tag: gross-margin
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Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
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Mind Your Margins... Again!
I have no idea why it surprises everyone. Every time some technology goes through the "hype cycle", or the sector as a whole goes through a "we're not in a bubble" bubble, inevitably, when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, people suddenly "discover" business fundamentals.
Often, it is not the people discussing it who discover it. Rather, they are the ones reminding everyone that the fundamentals count.
Tag: growth
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Mind Your Margins... Again!
I have no idea why it surprises everyone. Every time some technology goes through the "hype cycle", or the sector as a whole goes through a "we're not in a bubble" bubble, inevitably, when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, people suddenly "discover" business fundamentals.
Often, it is not the people discussing it who discover it. Rather, they are the ones reminding everyone that the fundamentals count.
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Can Early Markets Survive Without Product Management?
In earlier articles, especially here, we have discussed why great product management is crucial to a company's success. It is the role that is responsible for a product as a whole, the only one that aligns what the product should do, what features it has, where to offer it, at what price points for which packages.
Yet many companies seem to do just fine for an extended period of time without product management, especially in the technology sector.
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Once Again, Great Product Management Wins
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.
Tag: happiness
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When Your Workers Love Their Job
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.
Tag: hardware
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You Are What You Sell
At the risk of kicking someone when they are down, let's look at... GoPro.
GoPro recently reported slower than anticipated sales, laid off 7% of their staff, and had their stock hammered (down 14.5% in a day). BusinessInsider did a straightforward if nice job showing their absolute revenue and relative year-over-year growth for the last 5 years. While total sales numbers are nice, the growth numbers aren't pretty.
Tag: hebrew
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Planning People and Laughing Markets
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.
Tag: help-desk
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What Emergency Rooms Could Learn from IT Help Desks
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.
Tag: heroku
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Heroku and Product Management
I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and then easily scale them up to production scale.
As an aside, the very design encourages them to develop their software in a well-architected fashion; see "The 12-Factor App."
Just as Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) EC2 abstracts away hardware, so a PaaS abstracts away the operating system, allowing software managers to focus on software.
Tag: hertz
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Is the Real Uber Threat to Hertz?
It has become commonplace to forecast that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing services are a strategic threat to car manufacturers. After all, if "everyone" uses Uber, why would they bother owning cars?
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that "everyone" lives where Uber and Lyft are headquartered: in a dense urban area with very little parking, going to other places nearby where there is lots of traffic and very little parking.
Tag: hospital
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What Emergency Rooms Could Learn from IT Help Desks
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.
Tag: hosted
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The Cloud and Being Nimble
In our most recent article, we explored why "true cloud" really matters: it has a significant impact on:
Your gross margins Your speed As a company providing technology services, as opposed to products like software, you cannot get cloud-scale gross margins and speed - and therefore valuations - unless you are operating as a true cloud.
Today, we will look at a different set of advantages to running your service as a true cloud: how nimble you can be.
Tag: hotels
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Free Wi-Fi Is Coming!
Free Wi-Fi is coming!
Well, perhaps not everywhere, but at every Hyatt hotel. I just received an email from Hyatt that they will offer free Wi-Fi for all guests in all rooms and lobbies worldwide, beginning 14 February 2015, just a month away.
How did Hyatt come to that decision? Why wasn't it free before? What does it mean for their profits? Most important of all, what lessons can be learned for our businesses?
Tag: hp
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HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company
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 "
Tag: hr
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How to do True Cloud
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?
Tag: human-nature
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Software Engineering and Human Nature
This morning, Adrian Colyer posted his morning paper on a "functional programming."
Most readers of this blog are not deep into different programming paradigms, so I will give a very short layman's overview here. For those who are comfortable, jump ahead a few paragraphs. (For the real experts, please do not nitpick on the details; the point is only to give an overview, not to debate the fine points.)
Tag: iaas
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Types of Cloud Services
In the previous article, we discussed what the (terribly overhyped) word "cloud" means. Before we start to delve into the difference between "true cloud" and "we just call it cloud", let's look at the different major categories of "cloud" services available.
As we discussed previously, cloud services replace:
Expertise with consumption Capex with opex Fixed costs with metered prices Unsurprisingly, you can use that model with any technology you consume.
Tag: ibm
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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.
Tag: impact
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The Pain Caused By Poor Software Design
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.
Tag: imperative
Post
Software Engineering and Human Nature
This morning, Adrian Colyer posted his morning paper on a "functional programming."
Most readers of this blog are not deep into different programming paradigms, so I will give a very short layman's overview here. For those who are comfortable, jump ahead a few paragraphs. (For the real experts, please do not nitpick on the details; the point is only to give an overview, not to debate the fine points.)
Tag: incentive
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Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
Tag: incentives
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Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
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When to Outsource
Knowing how to outsource a process is challenging enough, and requires serious operational management and help, but does not involve making strategic decisions.
Conversely, knowing when to outsource is far more challenging, as it involves making decisions with imperfect information about the future.
Caveat: Use this as a starting point, a framework, but do not use it as your sole decision-making process. Get serious help; we are here.
The Why There are only two reasons why you should outsource something.
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It's Always About the People (Even in Tech)
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.
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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:
Post
The Cloud and Being Nimble
In our most recent article, we explored why "true cloud" really matters: it has a significant impact on:
Your gross margins Your speed As a company providing technology services, as opposed to products like software, you cannot get cloud-scale gross margins and speed - and therefore valuations - unless you are operating as a true cloud.
Today, we will look at a different set of advantages to running your service as a true cloud: how nimble you can be.
Tag: incident
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Don't Defer the Problem, Resolve It!
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, "
Tag: independence
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Hands Off! How to Release Product Faster
What are the three biggest impediments, or roadblocks, to fast product cycles, especially in the cloud?
Incomplete Testing. If you are not 100% confident that your testing covers every known use case, you will be fearful of releasing. Actually, fear of the risk of deployment often is the "canary in the coal mine" sign that your testing is incomplete. The other sign is infrequent releases, defined in the Internet era as less frequently than every few days.
Tag: independent
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Independence Drives Speed
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.
Tag: information
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Ask Why You Care About Security
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.
Tag: infosec
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Security Spending: Part II, the Good Tower
Today, we present the second guest post in the series by Ted Lloyd, editor of OnlineCISO.
Yesterday, we explored why security spending need not be a bottomless pit, and how yesterday's tools, such as antivirus, can be evaluated using familiar risk management methodologies.
Where then, should a business reinvest the funds previously allocated to antivirus solutions? Another analogy to the physical world can help to answer this question.
Malware and variants are similar to microbiology in our physical world.
Post
Security Spending: Part I, the Bottomless Pit
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.
Tag: infrastructure
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On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
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SSL Is Broken, Time to Fix It
For a long time, I have felt that SSL/TLS - the protocol that secures your communications with Web sites, mail servers and most everything across the Internet - is broken. It is broken to the point that it is fundamentally insecure, except for the most technically-aware and security-alert individuals, who also have the time to check the certificate for each and every Web site.
SSL is supposed to provide three guarantees:
Post
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.
Tag: innovation
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There Is Nothing New Under the Sun
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.
Tag: internet
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Internet in the Air
I used to hate taking long day flights. If I had to spend 12 hours in the air from New York to Tokyo, or Zurich to Bangkok, or Tel Aviv to Newark, I preferred overnight flights. Even since the advent of on-demand entertainment, personal video screens and portable devices like the iPad, those flights just seemed to last forever.
So most of the time I would fly overnight. However, the timing didn't always work out, and overnight flights tend to be significantly more expensive than all-day flights, often much greater than 50% more.
Post
There Is Nothing New Under the Sun
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.
Post
Internet Trends and Internet Values
This week, Mary Meeker of KPCB has released her "Internet Trends" report. I look forward to the release of this report. While I rarely can sit through a nearly-200-slide presentation, the insights in here always are thought-provoking and make it worth my while. I remember Meeker back in my Morgan Stanley days - unfortunately, I never had the privilege of working directly with her.
If you have anything to do with the technology business, read it.
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What is the Cloud?
Cloud seems to be the biggest buzzword in the last few years. Every technology provider, every services provider, if they aren't natively "in the cloud", they are providing a version of their offering "in the cloud."
Although the term "cloud" seems pretty clear to marketers - personally, I am convinced many believe it means, "we can charge more for this if we slap the word 'Cloud' on it" - the majority of people with whom I speak, from engineers and support staff through executives, CEOs and especially customers, do not have a real understanding of what the cloud is, and why it matters.
Tag: internet-of-things
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Why the Internet of Things Is So Vulnerable
It seems every day there is another article about how "vulnerable" the Internet of Things (IoT) is. Here are two choice excerpts from the last year:
"Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway," Wired, 21st July 2015 "Security Researcher Claims to have Hacked into Flight via Entertainment System," CNN, 19th May 2015 While these are major life-threatening issues - one cannot compare a malicious actor disabling your iPhone while you are on it with someone talking control of your car going 110 kmh down the highway, let alone a plane flying at 35,000 feet and 600 mph!
Tag: investment
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Penny-Wise and Pound Foolish, Eh?
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.
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When Not to Outsource
In earlier articles, we discussed How to Outsource and When to Outsource. Today, we turn to when not to Outsource.
At first blush, we expect not to outsource when our candidate does not meet at least one of the criteria for outsourcing listed in When to Outsource.
Better Results: Your outsourcers can get you better results, improving any one or more of quality + time-to-deliver + cost without negatively impacting the others.
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Deodorant for Software
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.
Post
Pay Yourself First
One of the most important rules of successful longtime business owners, right after "Cash is King", is "Pay Yourself First." After all, you do not know what the business will be like in a year or two or ten, so don't shortchange yourself. Of course, you need to invest in your business's growth as well, but don't live in poverty because every penny of profit is plowed back into the business.
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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.
Tag: investors
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Brave New Equity World
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.
Tag: ios
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Growing Independent: Laptop to Smartphone to Wearable
When does a personal technology - a computer, a smartphone, a watch - "grow up"? There is a slow but continuous process I have observed with every new personal computing technology.
Stage 1 - Child: The new technology provides unprecedented flexibility. It allows you to do just a few new things, but its real appeal is allowing you to do old things on the go. It does so by being a mobile accessory to, or child of, existing "
Post
Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
Tag: iot
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Why the Internet of Things Is So Vulnerable
It seems every day there is another article about how "vulnerable" the Internet of Things (IoT) is. Here are two choice excerpts from the last year:
"Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway," Wired, 21st July 2015 "Security Researcher Claims to have Hacked into Flight via Entertainment System," CNN, 19th May 2015 While these are major life-threatening issues - one cannot compare a malicious actor disabling your iPhone while you are on it with someone talking control of your car going 110 kmh down the highway, let alone a plane flying at 35,000 feet and 600 mph!
Post
Internet of Iotas
From the Cambridge Dictionary of English:
iota (n.) - an extremely small amount
From the Wikipedia:
Internet of Things (IoT) - the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.
As electronics get smaller and smaller, not just wearables like an Apple Watch, but even tiny full computers like the Raspberry Pi, the "
Tag: ipo
Post
Brave New Equity World
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.
Tag: isolation
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Docker and Browser - It's All About Packaging
What do Docker containers have to do with Web browsers?
Everything.
Web browsers provide easy access to the digitized collective knowledge of the human race, political rants, serious applications and even silly kittens.
However, it is important to understand why browsers became so popular, and such a success.
Prior to browsers, networked applications existed. Mostly, they were client-server two-tier applications, but they were quite popular in business, and many home personal computer users had such applications.
Tag: israel
Post
Planning People and Laughing Markets
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.
Tag: it
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DevOps in the 1990s
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending LinuxCon/ContainerCon Europe 2016 in Berlin. Besides visiting a fascinating historical capital - there is great irony, and victory, in seeing "Ben-Gurion-Strasse" - or "Ben Gurion Street" - named after the founding Prime Minister of Israel in the erstwhile capital of the Third Reich. And while I had many a hesitation about visiting, the amount of awareness, monuments and memorials to the activities of the regime in the 1930s and 1940s was impressive.
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What Emergency Rooms Could Learn from IT Help Desks
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.
Post
Smart Design in Containers
In a previous article, we invented "Conway's Corollary" - how design determines scale.
Today, we will look at another case from the hottest technology of the last year: containers.
When designing software - any piece of software - the most important criterion is not, "what features does it have," or "how well is it documented," although those are very important. It is not even, "how sexy is the user interface,"
Tag: iteration
Post
Hands Off! How to Release Product Faster
What are the three biggest impediments, or roadblocks, to fast product cycles, especially in the cloud?
Incomplete Testing. If you are not 100% confident that your testing covers every known use case, you will be fearful of releasing. Actually, fear of the risk of deployment often is the "canary in the coal mine" sign that your testing is incomplete. The other sign is infrequent releases, defined in the Internet era as less frequently than every few days.
Tag: itunes
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Just Making Technology Work Is Hard Work
Apple's philosophy for technology is, "just make it work." I had one of the early pre-iPod mp3 players. It was a great piece, lots of battery life, played every format out there at the time... and within a year I had replaced it with an iPod. Transferring music to this player and managing it was just an enormous headache. With iTunes and iPod, it "just worked".
Fast forward to the year 2014.
Tag: javascript
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Developers or Engineers?
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.
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Hiding Fingerprints in Your Browser for Privacy
The browser is the single most ubiquitous piece of software on the planet. Nearly every computing device has at least one one. Because of its ubiquity, and its use across multiple applications from open (Google "how much does a banana weigh") to private (browser-based email) to secure (office applications or banking), it is also a source of many risks.
This article will dig a little deeper into issues of browser security and privacy.
Tag: jobs
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When Your Workers Love Their Job
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.
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Rise of the Luddites
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.
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Changing Tech, Changing Jobs: What Serverless Means for SysAdmins
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.
Tag: joyent
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Whence Serverless Cloud? It's About the Market.
I love tech. Despite an MBA and a decade of consulting and running a start-up or two, deep down, I always will be an engineer.
One of the most important lessons I learned as a young engineer 20 years ago at Morgan Stanley - courtesy of Guy Chiarello - is that the technology is only the means, not the end. Understand the finances, the market, even the politics if you want to do something with technology, even just inside a company, let alone outside.
Tag: jpmc-breach-informationsecurity
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The JPMC Breach Wasn't About Systems; It Was About People
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.
Tag: keurig
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HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company
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 "
Tag: kindle
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Pricing Inversions, or Smart vs. Lucky
Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently.
One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product.
What your costs do is have two effects:
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For the Love of Brilliant Advertising
Great technology companies have been built on advertising: Google, Facebook, Yahoo (in the old days), not to mention many a magazine, newspaper and television network.
I have always loved the operational side of ad networks. They require building and managing a systems whose data throughput and reliability requirements rival a financial pricing and trading system. I have managed several of those, and the parallels are quite strong.
What truly interests me in advertising, though, is the brilliance of great creativity.
Tag: kodak
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Kodak's Hail Mary
I always get a kick when a long-storied company which is in decline tries to hook onto the latest, hottest market, thinking, "we will get into this market, and with our amazing brand, we will knock it out of the park!" This is the business equivalent of a Hail Mary pass... while throwing it off to the sides and into the stands, rather than down the field towards the goal line.
Tag: kpcb
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Internet Trends and Internet Values
This week, Mary Meeker of KPCB has released her "Internet Trends" report. I look forward to the release of this report. While I rarely can sit through a nearly-200-slide presentation, the insights in here always are thought-provoking and make it worth my while. I remember Meeker back in my Morgan Stanley days - unfortunately, I never had the privilege of working directly with her.
If you have anything to do with the technology business, read it.
Tag: kubernetes
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Can rkt+kubernetes provide a real alternative to Docker?
Last week in LinuxCon/ContainerCon Berlin, I attended a presentation by Luca Bruno of CoreOS, where he described how kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration and scheduling service, and rkt integrate. As part of the presentation, Luca delved into the rkt architecture.
For those unaware - there are many, which is a major part of the problem - rkt (pronounced "rocket", as in this) is CoreOS's container management implementation. Nowadays, almost everyone who thinks containers, thinks "
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Nothing is New Under the Sun Server
As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses.
It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended).
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.
Tag: laptop
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Growing Independent: Laptop to Smartphone to Wearable
When does a personal technology - a computer, a smartphone, a watch - "grow up"? There is a slow but continuous process I have observed with every new personal computing technology.
Stage 1 - Child: The new technology provides unprecedented flexibility. It allows you to do just a few new things, but its real appeal is allowing you to do old things on the go. It does so by being a mobile accessory to, or child of, existing "
Tag: latency
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Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
Tag: lawyers
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When Robots Replace Burger-Flippers and Lawyers
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.
Tag: lead-generation
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Big Bang Theory of Advertising, or How Broadcasters Are Like Supermarkets
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.
Tag: leak
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Who Are You Going to Tell?
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.
Tag: lenovo
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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, "
Tag: licensing
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TrueCrypt: True Security, True Licensing
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.
Tag: lies
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Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests
Mark Twain attributed the phrase "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which suits the Prime Minister's known wit, although its provenance has been questioned. If Twain or Disraeli had lived in the days of computers and software, he probably would have coined the phrase as "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests." Perhaps Twain's great novel of Americans touring the desolate Holy Land of the late 19th century might have been called, "
Tag: lightbulb
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Why the Internet of Things Is So Vulnerable
It seems every day there is another article about how "vulnerable" the Internet of Things (IoT) is. Here are two choice excerpts from the last year:
"Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway," Wired, 21st July 2015 "Security Researcher Claims to have Hacked into Flight via Entertainment System," CNN, 19th May 2015 While these are major life-threatening issues - one cannot compare a malicious actor disabling your iPhone while you are on it with someone talking control of your car going 110 kmh down the highway, let alone a plane flying at 35,000 feet and 600 mph!
Tag: linux
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Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
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Would Open-Source Windows Have Stopped Linux?
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?
Tag: lock-in
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You Are What You Sell
At the risk of kicking someone when they are down, let's look at... GoPro.
GoPro recently reported slower than anticipated sales, laid off 7% of their staff, and had their stock hammered (down 14.5% in a day). BusinessInsider did a straightforward if nice job showing their absolute revenue and relative year-over-year growth for the last 5 years. While total sales numbers are nice, the growth numbers aren't pretty.
Tag: login
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Managing Your Users... Right and Wrong
Is your user management an afterthought?
For most companies building technology systems, how to manage users - the process of creating, managing, grouping and linking accounts - is bolted on later. After all, you fully expect your users to spend the bulk of their time using your service, not logging in to or managing your service! So you use some reasonably standard user management library, and when you have to worry about groups and organizations, you sort of bolt it on.
Tag: london
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Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
Tag: loss-leaders
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Big Bang Theory of Advertising, or How Broadcasters Are Like Supermarkets
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.
Tag: ltv
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HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company
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 "
Tag: mac
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Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
Tag: maintenance
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Kill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter.
All that matters is customer expectation in real time.
You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform.
Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.
Tag: mampa
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Does Open-Source Increase the Value of Talent?
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.
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Tag: management
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Pilots In Habitats: Basic Unit of Application Deployment
What is the basic unit of application deployment?
Two related trends have changed the answer to this question:
DevOps Containers For many years, the tasks between engineer and operator were cleanly, if painfully, split:
Engineer builds and delivers a package of files to deploy and run Operator deploys and runs those files in a production operating environment In the early years, the package of files consisted of a directory with a ream of paper and instructions.
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Hands Off! How to Release Product Faster
What are the three biggest impediments, or roadblocks, to fast product cycles, especially in the cloud?
Incomplete Testing. If you are not 100% confident that your testing covers every known use case, you will be fearful of releasing. Actually, fear of the risk of deployment often is the "canary in the coal mine" sign that your testing is incomplete. The other sign is infrequent releases, defined in the Internet era as less frequently than every few days.
Tag: margin
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Mind Your Margins... Again!
I have no idea why it surprises everyone. Every time some technology goes through the "hype cycle", or the sector as a whole goes through a "we're not in a bubble" bubble, inevitably, when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, people suddenly "discover" business fundamentals.
Often, it is not the people discussing it who discover it. Rather, they are the ones reminding everyone that the fundamentals count.
Tag: margins
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The Cloud and Being Nimble
In our most recent article, we explored why "true cloud" really matters: it has a significant impact on:
Your gross margins Your speed As a company providing technology services, as opposed to products like software, you cannot get cloud-scale gross margins and speed - and therefore valuations - unless you are operating as a true cloud.
Today, we will look at a different set of advantages to running your service as a true cloud: how nimble you can be.
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Why True Cloud Matters
In our previous articles, we discussed what cloud is, the types of cloud services, and the difference between true cloud and "market cloud", or hosting.
The big question is, so what?
You are a software provider offering a cloud solution. Does it really matter if it is "true cloud", or just hosted? Isn't it just a difference in architectural design, a matter for your engineers but not your customers or your bottom line?
Tag: market
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Is the Real Uber Threat to Hertz?
It has become commonplace to forecast that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing services are a strategic threat to car manufacturers. After all, if "everyone" uses Uber, why would they bother owning cars?
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that "everyone" lives where Uber and Lyft are headquartered: in a dense urban area with very little parking, going to other places nearby where there is lots of traffic and very little parking.
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Why Is Yahoo Valued Less than Zero?
According to several articles I have seen today, notably this Wall Street Journal report, Yahoo's Board of Directors are considering a sale of Yahoo's core Internet business.
For quite some time, Yahoo has been a troubled company. To many people, it doesn't matter. But to those of us who enjoyed it as one of the first major Internet search sites, it is very sad to see.
Marissa Mayer was brought on board to fix the company.
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Who Are You Going to Tell?
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.
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The Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
"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 "
Tag: marketing
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Planning People and Laughing Markets
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.
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Kill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter.
All that matters is customer expectation in real time.
You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform.
Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.
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How to do True Cloud
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?
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Ask Why You Care About Security
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.
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Kodak's Hail Mary
I always get a kick when a long-storied company which is in decline tries to hook onto the latest, hottest market, thinking, "we will get into this market, and with our amazing brand, we will knock it out of the park!" This is the business equivalent of a Hail Mary pass... while throwing it off to the sides and into the stands, rather than down the field towards the goal line.
Tag: math
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The Safe as a Web Server
Safes. They are big, heavy, and make us feel, well, "safe" about our valuables stored inside.
Historically, safes were controlled by a series of complex gears that only the correct series, or "combination", of dials would open. I loved the illustrations for gears and other mechanical devices in David Macaulay's "New Way Things Work".
Digital safes, whether the professional variety of the home variety, were created largely for convenience. They are faster to open, easier to share (and change) codes, and required less physical space for all of the gears.
Tag: measure
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When to Outsource
Knowing how to outsource a process is challenging enough, and requires serious operational management and help, but does not involve making strategic decisions.
Conversely, knowing when to outsource is far more challenging, as it involves making decisions with imperfect information about the future.
Caveat: Use this as a starting point, a framework, but do not use it as your sole decision-making process. Get serious help; we are here.
The Why There are only two reasons why you should outsource something.
Tag: meeker
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There Is Nothing New Under the Sun
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.
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Internet Trends and Internet Values
This week, Mary Meeker of KPCB has released her "Internet Trends" report. I look forward to the release of this report. While I rarely can sit through a nearly-200-slide presentation, the insights in here always are thought-provoking and make it worth my while. I remember Meeker back in my Morgan Stanley days - unfortunately, I never had the privilege of working directly with her.
If you have anything to do with the technology business, read it.
Tag: meltdown
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The Prisoner's Software Dilemma
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.
Tag: mesos
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Nothing is New Under the Sun Server
As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses.
It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended).
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.
Tag: metrics
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When to Outsource
Knowing how to outsource a process is challenging enough, and requires serious operational management and help, but does not involve making strategic decisions.
Conversely, knowing when to outsource is far more challenging, as it involves making decisions with imperfect information about the future.
Caveat: Use this as a starting point, a framework, but do not use it as your sole decision-making process. Get serious help; we are here.
The Why There are only two reasons why you should outsource something.
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How Incredibly Good Airline Choice Has Gotten
I expect this topic to get me a lot of flak. After all, everyone likes dumping on the airlines, including me. But hear me out.
I fly a lot of miles every year, mostly in coach, sometimes in business. Most of the time, the journey is tiring and uneventful, sometimes it is annoying, and sometimes downright offensive.
I regularly hear and read stories about the decline of comfort, service and value in air travel over the last 30 years.
Tag: microservices
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On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
Tag: microsoft
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Would Open-Source Windows Have Stopped Linux?
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?
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Decoupling Microsoft, or Free Your App
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!
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
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Why True Cloud Matters
In our previous articles, we discussed what cloud is, the types of cloud services, and the difference between true cloud and "market cloud", or hosting.
The big question is, so what?
You are a software provider offering a cloud solution. Does it really matter if it is "true cloud", or just hosted? Isn't it just a difference in architectural design, a matter for your engineers but not your customers or your bottom line?
Tag: minimum-viable-product
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Architect Your Product Before It Holds You Back
Architecture determines capabilities.
This is not new. Anyone who has planned and architected a new product, or has tried to retrofit capabilities for which a platform has not been architected, knows it first-hand.
Yet, time and again, I come across products that have not been planned, and therefore architected, around reasonably expected capabilities.
Sometimes I see these as a user.
Last week, a client wanted to give me access to their Dropox Team account, so we could share information.
Tag: mission
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Mission Soundbite
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"
Tag: mistake
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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.
Tag: mit
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Licenses as Premium Pricing
Two weeks ago, we argued that, in the face of competition (and there is always competition), "Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last."
At the same time, there always will be premium priced products - Tesla and BMW, Apple Watch Edition, Oracle - but the question is how long these can maintain significant market share?
A smart commenter, amelius, raised a fascinating point.
Amelius compares premium pricing for substitutable products to restrictive licensing for software.
Tag: mobile
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Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
Tag: mozy
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Tag: mvp
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Architect Your Product Before It Holds You Back
Architecture determines capabilities.
This is not new. Anyone who has planned and architected a new product, or has tried to retrofit capabilities for which a platform has not been architected, knows it first-hand.
Yet, time and again, I come across products that have not been planned, and therefore architected, around reasonably expected capabilities.
Sometimes I see these as a user.
Last week, a client wanted to give me access to their Dropox Team account, so we could share information.
Tag: nanoservices
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On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
Tag: networking
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Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
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Performance Tests Redux
A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes.
Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly.
Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox.
On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.
Tag: nimble
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DevOps in the 1990s
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending LinuxCon/ContainerCon Europe 2016 in Berlin. Besides visiting a fascinating historical capital - there is great irony, and victory, in seeing "Ben-Gurion-Strasse" - or "Ben Gurion Street" - named after the founding Prime Minister of Israel in the erstwhile capital of the Third Reich. And while I had many a hesitation about visiting, the amount of awareness, monuments and memorials to the activities of the regime in the 1930s and 1940s was impressive.
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The Best Laid Schemes Of Mice And Men
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 "
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Nimbleness of Scale
In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies:
Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources:
Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.
Tag: noc
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What Emergency Rooms Could Learn from IT Help Desks
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.
Tag: nuance
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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.
Tag: numbers
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Youth Makes You Young, Not Coca-Cola
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?
Tag: nyse
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The Prisoner's Software Dilemma
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.
Tag: on-demand
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Whence Serverless Cloud? It's About the Market.
I love tech. Despite an MBA and a decade of consulting and running a start-up or two, deep down, I always will be an engineer.
One of the most important lessons I learned as a young engineer 20 years ago at Morgan Stanley - courtesy of Guy Chiarello - is that the technology is only the means, not the end. Understand the finances, the market, even the politics if you want to do something with technology, even just inside a company, let alone outside.
Tag: open-source
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Why Customers Agree to Open-Source
Why do customers agree to open-source work I do?
In the past, we have discussed the benefits of open-sourcing your own software:
Reputation Recruiting Contributions Recently, I had the pleasure of walking half an hour from a Tokyo train station with Matthew Garrett, who does some impressive work on core operating systems (pun intended; Mathew works at CoreOS). One of the thing I asked him is why a company open-sources its entire stack?
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Open Source Business Models
Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it.
The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.
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When Your Customers No Longer Adore You
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.
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Would Open-Source Windows Have Stopped Linux?
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?
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Licenses as Premium Pricing
Two weeks ago, we argued that, in the face of competition (and there is always competition), "Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last."
At the same time, there always will be premium priced products - Tesla and BMW, Apple Watch Edition, Oracle - but the question is how long these can maintain significant market share?
A smart commenter, amelius, raised a fascinating point.
Amelius compares premium pricing for substitutable products to restrictive licensing for software.
Tag: operating-system
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Innovation in... Operating Systems?
For most of us - pretty much all of us - the way we use our operating system (OS) on our laptop is not that different from how we use it on our mobile or a system administrator uses it on a server:
The operating system is installed to the local disk. Changes / upgrades are performed by installing files to the same disk and then rebooting. Software is installed and/or upgraded by installing files to the same disk.
Tag: operating-systems
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The Pain Caused By Poor Software Design
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.
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Should Apple and Microsoft Buy an Online Backup Company?
Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups.
In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.
Tag: operations
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Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
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Pilots In Habitats: Basic Unit of Application Deployment
What is the basic unit of application deployment?
Two related trends have changed the answer to this question:
DevOps Containers For many years, the tasks between engineer and operator were cleanly, if painfully, split:
Engineer builds and delivers a package of files to deploy and run Operator deploys and runs those files in a production operating environment In the early years, the package of files consisted of a directory with a ream of paper and instructions.
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Continuous Everything
Earlier this week, a really smart architect and I were evaluating various methods for managing software code changes, bug fixes, releases and major features. We both were in agreement with the primary direction, a popular one in nimble companies.
Have a primary "trunk" or "master" branch; Any commits to "master" automatically get built and tested and ready for production (and possibly deployed); Any changes occur on "feature branches", temporary parallels streams of development that eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - merge into "
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An Electric Engine Doesn't Make it Cloud
I loved the Tesla shareholders meeting, for the same reason I love it when VCs write posts about "all the investments we passed on and regretted later." Bessemer Venture Partners even has a page dedicated to its "Anti-Portfolio."
Fortune magazine called the Tesla meeting, "Elon Musk Confessions: All the Stupid Things Tesla Has Done." In the meeting, Musk catalogued many "stupid" mistakes (his words), although at the time they probably appeared smart, if slightly crazy (a characteristic required by every entrepreneur).
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Old URLs Don't Die... They Come Back to Haunt You
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:
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Nothing is New Under the Sun Server
As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses.
It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended).
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.
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The Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
"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 "
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Scenes from a BBQ Restaurant
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.
Tag: opex
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Types of Cloud Services
In the previous article, we discussed what the (terribly overhyped) word "cloud" means. Before we start to delve into the difference between "true cloud" and "we just call it cloud", let's look at the different major categories of "cloud" services available.
As we discussed previously, cloud services replace:
Expertise with consumption Capex with opex Fixed costs with metered prices Unsurprisingly, you can use that model with any technology you consume.
Tag: optimization
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Usability Drives Adoption, Not Technology
The great strength of technologists is that we innovate constantly, always looking for a better world. The great weakness is that we sometimes fall in love with the solution, the technology itself, without regards to its applicable value in the real world.
How do we determine if a given solution really has a chance of being adopted? The two biggest determinants of a solution are usefulness and usability.
Usefulness "
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How to Outsource
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.
Tag: orchestration
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Do You Need Microservices to Make Containers Worthwhile?
Earlier this week, I had breakfast with a colleague of mine from Rancher. Rancher is a great "orchestrator" for Docker containers. I have recommended and used them in production environments.
Containers - one of the hottest technologies in the last year - is a much more efficient form of virtualization than traditional "hardware" virtualization (think VMWare or Xen), while providing a superior application distribution model.
The challenge is that while the native Docker tools are pretty good for managing individual servers with containers, managing more than a few containers, let alone across more than a few servers, becomes impossibly complex.
Tag: organization
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Dangers of Bimodal Budgeting
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.
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Go Conway
There is a famous saying, known as Conway's Law, which states that:
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
It means that when your organization builds a system, its structure will reflect the organization that created it. If you have 3 teams - database administrators, system administrators and Web developers - then your system architecture will have 3 distinct components: databases, servers and Web UI.
Tag: outsource
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When Robots Replace Burger-Flippers and Lawyers
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.
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When Not to Outsource
In earlier articles, we discussed How to Outsource and When to Outsource. Today, we turn to when not to Outsource.
At first blush, we expect not to outsource when our candidate does not meet at least one of the criteria for outsourcing listed in When to Outsource.
Better Results: Your outsourcers can get you better results, improving any one or more of quality + time-to-deliver + cost without negatively impacting the others.
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When to Outsource
Knowing how to outsource a process is challenging enough, and requires serious operational management and help, but does not involve making strategic decisions.
Conversely, knowing when to outsource is far more challenging, as it involves making decisions with imperfect information about the future.
Caveat: Use this as a starting point, a framework, but do not use it as your sole decision-making process. Get serious help; we are here.
The Why There are only two reasons why you should outsource something.
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How to Outsource
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.
Tag: paas
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The Problem with Serverless Is Packaging
Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions.
Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management.
In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.
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Internet of Iotas
From the Cambridge Dictionary of English:
iota (n.) - an extremely small amount
From the Wikipedia:
Internet of Things (IoT) - the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.
As electronics get smaller and smaller, not just wearables like an Apple Watch, but even tiny full computers like the Raspberry Pi, the "
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Types of Cloud Services
In the previous article, we discussed what the (terribly overhyped) word "cloud" means. Before we start to delve into the difference between "true cloud" and "we just call it cloud", let's look at the different major categories of "cloud" services available.
As we discussed previously, cloud services replace:
Expertise with consumption Capex with opex Fixed costs with metered prices Unsurprisingly, you can use that model with any technology you consume.
Tag: packaging
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Docker and Browser - It's All About Packaging
What do Docker containers have to do with Web browsers?
Everything.
Web browsers provide easy access to the digitized collective knowledge of the human race, political rants, serious applications and even silly kittens.
However, it is important to understand why browsers became so popular, and such a success.
Prior to browsers, networked applications existed. Mostly, they were client-server two-tier applications, but they were quite popular in business, and many home personal computer users had such applications.
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Free Wi-Fi Is Coming!
Free Wi-Fi is coming!
Well, perhaps not everywhere, but at every Hyatt hotel. I just received an email from Hyatt that they will offer free Wi-Fi for all guests in all rooms and lobbies worldwide, beginning 14 February 2015, just a month away.
How did Hyatt come to that decision? Why wasn't it free before? What does it mean for their profits? Most important of all, what lessons can be learned for our businesses?
Tag: packet
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Bare Metal Cloud
Infrastructure-as-a-Service, cloud servers, whatever you call them, have been around for years. Amazon is the clear leader in the pack (and, according to Simon Wardley, is likely to remain so for a long time), with others like Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, and Azure picking up much of the rest (fortunately for them, the market is plenty big enough).
Digital Ocean, a company I mostly ignored for a while, takes kudos for speed and simplicity, and rapidly have become my go-to option for quick servers.
Tag: packing
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Heroku and Product Management
I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and then easily scale them up to production scale.
As an aside, the very design encourages them to develop their software in a well-architected fashion; see "The 12-Factor App."
Just as Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) EC2 abstracts away hardware, so a PaaS abstracts away the operating system, allowing software managers to focus on software.
Tag: parking-tickets
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When Robots Replace Burger-Flippers and Lawyers
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.
Tag: partners
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Don't Break Your Customers
Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage and use.
Personally, I think Docker containers are great. They provide a far more efficient level of isolation than VM virtualization, without sacrificing manageability.
Docker itself, however, is a young company, and every now and then young companies, whose products are moving very quickly, make silly mistakes.
Tag: password
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Yahoo's On-Demand (In)Security
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 "
Tag: payments
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Whence Bitcoin
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 "
Tag: people
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Chessmaster Employees
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.
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Developers or Engineers?
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.
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It's Always About the People (Even in Tech)
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.
Tag: perceptions
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Pricing Inversions, or Smart vs. Lucky
Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently.
One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product.
What your costs do is have two effects:
Tag: performance
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Chessmaster Employees
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.
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Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests
Mark Twain attributed the phrase "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which suits the Prime Minister's known wit, although its provenance has been questioned. If Twain or Disraeli had lived in the days of computers and software, he probably would have coined the phrase as "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests." Perhaps Twain's great novel of Americans touring the desolate Holy Land of the late 19th century might have been called, "
Tag: performance-tests
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Performance Tests Redux
A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes.
Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly.
Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox.
On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.
Tag: pilot
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Selling Clothes, Selling Software, Selling Cloud
What does selling clothes to Macy's have to do with selling software, and cloud services, to enterprises?
Everything.
Earlier today, I was speaking with my brother-in-law, entrepreneur and consultant Kevin Pearl. Before starting a firm to improve capture of billing time for attorneys, accountants and consultants; before serving as a turnaround consultant; before building a firm that sold software to manage venture capital portfolios; Kevin ran a firm that sold clothing to large well-known clothing retailers.
Tag: pma
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Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
Tag: policy
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More Fun To Higher Sales
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.
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Mission Soundbite
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"
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Ask Why You Care About Security
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.
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Welcome to Atomic Energy!
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
Tag: power
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Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
Tag: premises
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The Cloud and Being Nimble
In our most recent article, we explored why "true cloud" really matters: it has a significant impact on:
Your gross margins Your speed As a company providing technology services, as opposed to products like software, you cannot get cloud-scale gross margins and speed - and therefore valuations - unless you are operating as a true cloud.
Today, we will look at a different set of advantages to running your service as a true cloud: how nimble you can be.
Tag: premium
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Licenses as Premium Pricing
Two weeks ago, we argued that, in the face of competition (and there is always competition), "Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last."
At the same time, there always will be premium priced products - Tesla and BMW, Apple Watch Edition, Oracle - but the question is how long these can maintain significant market share?
A smart commenter, amelius, raised a fascinating point.
Amelius compares premium pricing for substitutable products to restrictive licensing for software.
Tag: prevention
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Security Spending: Part II, the Good Tower
Today, we present the second guest post in the series by Ted Lloyd, editor of OnlineCISO.
Yesterday, we explored why security spending need not be a bottomless pit, and how yesterday's tools, such as antivirus, can be evaluated using familiar risk management methodologies.
Where then, should a business reinvest the funds previously allocated to antivirus solutions? Another analogy to the physical world can help to answer this question.
Malware and variants are similar to microbiology in our physical world.
Tag: pricing
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Amazon Pricing Should Be Customer-Centric
Today, I had a very interesting discussion with Rich Miller, a consulting colleague who has been around the block more than a few times.
One of the interesting points he raised is that Amazon's AWS pricing doesn't quite work for enterprises.
Let's explore how it is a problem and why it is so.
At first blush, Amazon's pricing is intuitive: use an hour of an m4.xlarge, pay $0.239; use 2 hours, pay $0.
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Pricing Inversions, or Smart vs. Lucky
Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently.
One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product.
What your costs do is have two effects:
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Heroku and Product Management
I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and then easily scale them up to production scale.
As an aside, the very design encourages them to develop their software in a well-architected fashion; see "The 12-Factor App."
Just as Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) EC2 abstracts away hardware, so a PaaS abstracts away the operating system, allowing software managers to focus on software.
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Nimbleness of Scale
In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies:
Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources:
Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.
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Once Again, Great Product Management Wins
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.
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Licenses as Premium Pricing
Two weeks ago, we argued that, in the face of competition (and there is always competition), "Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last."
At the same time, there always will be premium priced products - Tesla and BMW, Apple Watch Edition, Oracle - but the question is how long these can maintain significant market share?
A smart commenter, amelius, raised a fascinating point.
Amelius compares premium pricing for substitutable products to restrictive licensing for software.
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Does Amazon Web Services Pricing Follow Moore's Law?
Yesterday's article on the short life span of premium (and especially ultra-premium) pricing led to a robust discussion on Hacker News. In the article, I used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example of a company that actively tries to cannibalize itself.
A smart commenter pointed out that AWS pricing, while falling continually, has nonetheless fallen more slowly than Moore's Law, according to which equivalently-priced capability should double roughly every 18 (or 24) months.
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Free Wi-Fi Is Coming!
Free Wi-Fi is coming!
Well, perhaps not everywhere, but at every Hyatt hotel. I just received an email from Hyatt that they will offer free Wi-Fi for all guests in all rooms and lobbies worldwide, beginning 14 February 2015, just a month away.
How did Hyatt come to that decision? Why wasn't it free before? What does it mean for their profits? Most important of all, what lessons can be learned for our businesses?
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How Incredibly Good Airline Choice Has Gotten
I expect this topic to get me a lot of flak. After all, everyone likes dumping on the airlines, including me. But hear me out.
I fly a lot of miles every year, mostly in coach, sometimes in business. Most of the time, the journey is tiring and uneventful, sometimes it is annoying, and sometimes downright offensive.
I regularly hear and read stories about the decline of comfort, service and value in air travel over the last 30 years.
Tag: privacy
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Experience Matters... Especially In a Startup
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, "
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Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
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Hiding Fingerprints in Your Browser for Privacy
The browser is the single most ubiquitous piece of software on the planet. Nearly every computing device has at least one one. Because of its ubiquity, and its use across multiple applications from open (Google "how much does a banana weigh") to private (browser-based email) to secure (office applications or banking), it is also a source of many risks.
This article will dig a little deeper into issues of browser security and privacy.
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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.
Tag: problem
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Don't Defer the Problem, Resolve It!
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, "
Tag: process
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What Emergency Rooms Could Learn from IT Help Desks
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.
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Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
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Small Efforts for Big Wins
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.
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Smart Design in Containers
In a previous article, we invented "Conway's Corollary" - how design determines scale.
Today, we will look at another case from the hottest technology of the last year: containers.
When designing software - any piece of software - the most important criterion is not, "what features does it have," or "how well is it documented," although those are very important. It is not even, "how sexy is the user interface,"
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Don't Break Your Customers
Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage and use.
Personally, I think Docker containers are great. They provide a far more efficient level of isolation than VM virtualization, without sacrificing manageability.
Docker itself, however, is a young company, and every now and then young companies, whose products are moving very quickly, make silly mistakes.
Tag: processes
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There Is Nothing New Under the Sun
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.
Tag: product
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Why Customers Agree to Open-Source
Why do customers agree to open-source work I do?
In the past, we have discussed the benefits of open-sourcing your own software:
Reputation Recruiting Contributions Recently, I had the pleasure of walking half an hour from a Tokyo train station with Matthew Garrett, who does some impressive work on core operating systems (pun intended; Mathew works at CoreOS). One of the thing I asked him is why a company open-sources its entire stack?
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The Pain Caused By Poor Software Design
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.
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What About Yahoo's Original Business?
Yesterday, we looked at how the market values Yahoo, and tried to understand why a company with $6.3BN in net assets, and another $31BN in a fairly liquid equity investment is valued only at... $31BN!
Interestingly, Daniel Morris pointed out an article in CNBC from September which argued that the issue is taxes. Essentially, Yahoo's investment is encumbered by a potential tax bill. If an when they liquidate it, the tax bill will be enough to wipe out the rest of Yahoo's assets.
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Sales-Product Tension: Small Companies Scale and Big Companies Fail
Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading - actually, the entire Isaacson biography of Jobs is a great read - but here is the money quote:
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.
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Don't Break Your Customers
Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage and use.
Personally, I think Docker containers are great. They provide a far more efficient level of isolation than VM virtualization, without sacrificing manageability.
Docker itself, however, is a young company, and every now and then young companies, whose products are moving very quickly, make silly mistakes.
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When Not to Outsource
In earlier articles, we discussed How to Outsource and When to Outsource. Today, we turn to when not to Outsource.
At first blush, we expect not to outsource when our candidate does not meet at least one of the criteria for outsourcing listed in When to Outsource.
Better Results: Your outsourcers can get you better results, improving any one or more of quality + time-to-deliver + cost without negatively impacting the others.
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More Fun To Higher Sales
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.
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Heroku and Product Management
I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and then easily scale them up to production scale.
As an aside, the very design encourages them to develop their software in a well-architected fashion; see "The 12-Factor App."
Just as Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) EC2 abstracts away hardware, so a PaaS abstracts away the operating system, allowing software managers to focus on software.
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Mission Soundbite
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"
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Kill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter.
All that matters is customer expectation in real time.
You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform.
Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.
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How to do True Cloud
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?
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Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
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The Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
"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 "
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Scenes from a BBQ Restaurant
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.
Tag: product-management
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Architect Your Product Before It Holds You Back
Architecture determines capabilities.
This is not new. Anyone who has planned and architected a new product, or has tried to retrofit capabilities for which a platform has not been architected, knows it first-hand.
Yet, time and again, I come across products that have not been planned, and therefore architected, around reasonably expected capabilities.
Sometimes I see these as a user.
Last week, a client wanted to give me access to their Dropox Team account, so we could share information.
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Good Writing Still Counts
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.
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Deodorant for Software
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.
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Can Early Markets Survive Without Product Management?
In earlier articles, especially here, we have discussed why great product management is crucial to a company's success. It is the role that is responsible for a product as a whole, the only one that aligns what the product should do, what features it has, where to offer it, at what price points for which packages.
Yet many companies seem to do just fine for an extended period of time without product management, especially in the technology sector.
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Heroku and Product Management
I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and then easily scale them up to production scale.
As an aside, the very design encourages them to develop their software in a well-architected fashion; see "The 12-Factor App."
Just as Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) EC2 abstracts away hardware, so a PaaS abstracts away the operating system, allowing software managers to focus on software.
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Once Again, Great Product Management Wins
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.
Tag: production
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Selling Clothes, Selling Software, Selling Cloud
What does selling clothes to Macy's have to do with selling software, and cloud services, to enterprises?
Everything.
Earlier today, I was speaking with my brother-in-law, entrepreneur and consultant Kevin Pearl. Before starting a firm to improve capture of billing time for attorneys, accountants and consultants; before serving as a turnaround consultant; before building a firm that sold software to manage venture capital portfolios; Kevin ran a firm that sold clothing to large well-known clothing retailers.
Tag: profit
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Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
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Mind Your Margins... Again!
I have no idea why it surprises everyone. Every time some technology goes through the "hype cycle", or the sector as a whole goes through a "we're not in a bubble" bubble, inevitably, when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, people suddenly "discover" business fundamentals.
Often, it is not the people discussing it who discover it. Rather, they are the ones reminding everyone that the fundamentals count.
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Scenes from a BBQ Restaurant
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.
Tag: profits
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Why True Cloud Matters
In our previous articles, we discussed what cloud is, the types of cloud services, and the difference between true cloud and "market cloud", or hosting.
The big question is, so what?
You are a software provider offering a cloud solution. Does it really matter if it is "true cloud", or just hosted? Isn't it just a difference in architectural design, a matter for your engineers but not your customers or your bottom line?
Tag: project-manager
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Hands Off! How to Release Product Faster
What are the three biggest impediments, or roadblocks, to fast product cycles, especially in the cloud?
Incomplete Testing. If you are not 100% confident that your testing covers every known use case, you will be fearful of releasing. Actually, fear of the risk of deployment often is the "canary in the coal mine" sign that your testing is incomplete. The other sign is infrequent releases, defined in the Internet era as less frequently than every few days.
Tag: qa
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Whence QA?
Since the dawn of software, more or less, companies wrote their software in a process that went something like this:
Product defines the specifications. Architecture designs it. Engineering/R&D builds it. Quality Assurance (QA) tests it. If it passes, it is scheduled for release; if not, goto #3. The jobs of QA teams historically have been procedure-oriented. Whereas engineers tend to be more creative and inventive, QA teams provide the process and constraints (remember the term "
Tag: qr
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Old URLs Don't Die... They Come Back to Haunt You
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:
Tag: quality
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Open Source Business Models
Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it.
The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.
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Whence QA?
Since the dawn of software, more or less, companies wrote their software in a process that went something like this:
Product defines the specifications. Architecture designs it. Engineering/R&D builds it. Quality Assurance (QA) tests it. If it passes, it is scheduled for release; if not, goto #3. The jobs of QA teams historically have been procedure-oriented. Whereas engineers tend to be more creative and inventive, QA teams provide the process and constraints (remember the term "
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Deodorant for Software
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.
Tag: rackspace
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Nimbleness of Scale
In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies:
Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources:
Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.
Tag: rampd
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An Electric Engine Doesn't Make it Cloud
I loved the Tesla shareholders meeting, for the same reason I love it when VCs write posts about "all the investments we passed on and regretted later." Bessemer Venture Partners even has a page dedicated to its "Anti-Portfolio."
Fortune magazine called the Tesla meeting, "Elon Musk Confessions: All the Stupid Things Tesla Has Done." In the meeting, Musk catalogued many "stupid" mistakes (his words), although at the time they probably appeared smart, if slightly crazy (a characteristic required by every entrepreneur).
Tag: rancher
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Do You Need Microservices to Make Containers Worthwhile?
Earlier this week, I had breakfast with a colleague of mine from Rancher. Rancher is a great "orchestrator" for Docker containers. I have recommended and used them in production environments.
Containers - one of the hottest technologies in the last year - is a much more efficient form of virtualization than traditional "hardware" virtualization (think VMWare or Xen), while providing a superior application distribution model.
The challenge is that while the native Docker tools are pretty good for managing individual servers with containers, managing more than a few containers, let alone across more than a few servers, becomes impossibly complex.
Tag: reboot
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Don't Defer the Problem, Resolve It!
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, "
Tag: rebuild
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The Hidden Dangers of Interim Solutions
One of the hardest challenges in business is knowing when to use an interim solution and when to start over from scratch.
From a pure financial perspective, interim solutions almost always win out. I see this regularly in the software industry. The progress looks something like this:
You (i.e. your company) write a piece of software. It is successful and useful and sells and grows. Over time, you add more and more features and capabilities, leading to a more useful but more complex product.
Tag: recaptcha
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ReCAPTCHA 2.0
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 "
Tag: recovery
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Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
Tag: retention
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Deleting Email Is a Chimera
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.
Tag: review
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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.
Tag: ridesharing
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Is the Real Uber Threat to Hertz?
It has become commonplace to forecast that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing services are a strategic threat to car manufacturers. After all, if "everyone" uses Uber, why would they bother owning cars?
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that "everyone" lives where Uber and Lyft are headquartered: in a dense urban area with very little parking, going to other places nearby where there is lots of traffic and very little parking.
Tag: risk
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Continuous Everything
Earlier this week, a really smart architect and I were evaluating various methods for managing software code changes, bug fixes, releases and major features. We both were in agreement with the primary direction, a popular one in nimble companies.
Have a primary "trunk" or "master" branch; Any commits to "master" automatically get built and tested and ready for production (and possibly deployed); Any changes occur on "feature branches", temporary parallels streams of development that eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - merge into "
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Don't Defer the Problem, Resolve It!
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, "
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Agile Advertising
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."
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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.
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Security Spending: Part II, the Good Tower
Today, we present the second guest post in the series by Ted Lloyd, editor of OnlineCISO.
Yesterday, we explored why security spending need not be a bottomless pit, and how yesterday's tools, such as antivirus, can be evaluated using familiar risk management methodologies.
Where then, should a business reinvest the funds previously allocated to antivirus solutions? Another analogy to the physical world can help to answer this question.
Malware and variants are similar to microbiology in our physical world.
Tag: risks
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Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
Tag: rkt
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Can rkt+kubernetes provide a real alternative to Docker?
Last week in LinuxCon/ContainerCon Berlin, I attended a presentation by Luca Bruno of CoreOS, where he described how kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration and scheduling service, and rkt integrate. As part of the presentation, Luca delved into the rkt architecture.
For those unaware - there are many, which is a major part of the problem - rkt (pronounced "rocket", as in this) is CoreOS's container management implementation. Nowadays, almost everyone who thinks containers, thinks "
Tag: robots
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When Robots Replace Burger-Flippers and Lawyers
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.
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Rise of the Luddites
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.
Tag: roi
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The Real ROI of Cloud
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.
Tag: rsu
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Brave New Equity World
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.
Tag: saas
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Mind Your Margins... Again!
I have no idea why it surprises everyone. Every time some technology goes through the "hype cycle", or the sector as a whole goes through a "we're not in a bubble" bubble, inevitably, when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, people suddenly "discover" business fundamentals.
Often, it is not the people discussing it who discover it. Rather, they are the ones reminding everyone that the fundamentals count.
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HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company
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 "
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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, "
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True Cloud vs Hosting
Having looked at the definition (and misapplication) of cloud, its key characteristics, and the various categories of cloud services, or fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service (*aaS), we now turn our attention to the important difference between true cloud services and hosting services that are marketed as cloud.
This is crucially important to vendors and customers!
While it may seem, at first glance, as nitpicking, these are very important differences. They will impact a vendor's short-term and long-term profitability, viability and responsiveness, and a customer's ability to rely on a vendor.
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Types of Cloud Services
In the previous article, we discussed what the (terribly overhyped) word "cloud" means. Before we start to delve into the difference between "true cloud" and "we just call it cloud", let's look at the different major categories of "cloud" services available.
As we discussed previously, cloud services replace:
Expertise with consumption Capex with opex Fixed costs with metered prices Unsurprisingly, you can use that model with any technology you consume.
Tag: safes
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The Safe as a Web Server
Safes. They are big, heavy, and make us feel, well, "safe" about our valuables stored inside.
Historically, safes were controlled by a series of complex gears that only the correct series, or "combination", of dials would open. I loved the illustrations for gears and other mechanical devices in David Macaulay's "New Way Things Work".
Digital safes, whether the professional variety of the home variety, were created largely for convenience. They are faster to open, easier to share (and change) codes, and required less physical space for all of the gears.
Tag: safety
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Put a Stake In Your Steering Wheel
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.
Tag: sales
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Selling Clothes, Selling Software, Selling Cloud
What does selling clothes to Macy's have to do with selling software, and cloud services, to enterprises?
Everything.
Earlier today, I was speaking with my brother-in-law, entrepreneur and consultant Kevin Pearl. Before starting a firm to improve capture of billing time for attorneys, accountants and consultants; before serving as a turnaround consultant; before building a firm that sold software to manage venture capital portfolios; Kevin ran a firm that sold clothing to large well-known clothing retailers.
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Sales-Product Tension: Small Companies Scale and Big Companies Fail
Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading - actually, the entire Isaacson biography of Jobs is a great read - but here is the money quote:
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.
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Good Writing Still Counts
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.
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Kill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter.
All that matters is customer expectation in real time.
You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform.
Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.
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The Technology of True Cloud
Continuing our series on cloud services, especially our most recent one, "How to Do True Cloud", we now turn to the technology that enables true cloud services.
This article will go more in depth than the previous ones; after all, we are discussing technology services. However, it will not go so deep as to lose the business-side executives. Indeed, any great executive in technology needs to hold to two principles simultaneously:
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How to do True Cloud
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?
Tag: sales-vs-product
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Sales-Product Tension: Small Companies Scale and Big Companies Fail
Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading - actually, the entire Isaacson biography of Jobs is a great read - but here is the money quote:
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.
Tag: salesforce
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Why True Cloud Matters
In our previous articles, we discussed what cloud is, the types of cloud services, and the difference between true cloud and "market cloud", or hosting.
The big question is, so what?
You are a software provider offering a cloud solution. Does it really matter if it is "true cloud", or just hosted? Isn't it just a difference in architectural design, a matter for your engineers but not your customers or your bottom line?
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Types of Cloud Services
In the previous article, we discussed what the (terribly overhyped) word "cloud" means. Before we start to delve into the difference between "true cloud" and "we just call it cloud", let's look at the different major categories of "cloud" services available.
As we discussed previously, cloud services replace:
Expertise with consumption Capex with opex Fixed costs with metered prices Unsurprisingly, you can use that model with any technology you consume.
Tag: samsung
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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.
Tag: savings
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Rise of the Luddites
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.
Tag: scale
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Sales-Product Tension: Small Companies Scale and Big Companies Fail
Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading - actually, the entire Isaacson biography of Jobs is a great read - but here is the money quote:
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.
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Conway's Corollary - Design Determines Scale
When I went to business school, I worked closely with an incredibly smart woman with whom I shared a very similar method of thinking and mindset. When we would find the same responses to the same questions in the same manner, inevitably I would quote, "great minds think alike."
She taught me that there is a corollary: "...but fools rarely differ."
The great challenge in life often isn't to agree with someone, no matter how smart; it is to determine if you are both great minds thinking alike, or both fools who are not differing.
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It's All About the White Rats
No, this is not about "White Hats" - security hackers who try to break into systems in order to strengthen them, as opposed to "Black Hats" - but really about what we can learn from white rats.
In the last few weeks, I have helped solve a number of vexing problems on behalf of customers, both in technology and process. Each time I am asked how I do it, and each time the answer is the same.
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Nimbleness of Scale
In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies:
Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources:
Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.
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Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
Tag: science
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The Power of Visualization
Once in a while, we come across a perfect example of how everyday technology can improve our understanding. It is not radical new technology, like nanoparticles fighting cancer, but great usage of tools that are widely available.
Understanding Math I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering many years ago. While I did well at my alma mater, like most people, I struggled with visualizing complex mathematical principles. Sine waves are easy to draw and see, but start doing more complex forms, then head into Fourier Transforms, and even the smartest get lost.
Tag: scientific-method
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It's All About the White Rats
No, this is not about "White Hats" - security hackers who try to break into systems in order to strengthen them, as opposed to "Black Hats" - but really about what we can learn from white rats.
In the last few weeks, I have helped solve a number of vexing problems on behalf of customers, both in technology and process. Each time I am asked how I do it, and each time the answer is the same.
Tag: scope
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Nimbleness of Scale
In business, there are two benefits that accumulate to large or diversified companies:
Economies of Scale Economies of Scope Economies of Scale are the benefits of from doing more of the same. If you make 10MM laptops a year, your cost per computer will be cheaper than if you make 100,000 laptops per year. These benefits come from a number of sources:
Purchasing Power: Since you are buying components for 100x as many LCD screens, you can negotiate better prices.
Tag: security
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SSL Is Broken, Time to Fix It
For a long time, I have felt that SSL/TLS - the protocol that secures your communications with Web sites, mail servers and most everything across the Internet - is broken. It is broken to the point that it is fundamentally insecure, except for the most technically-aware and security-alert individuals, who also have the time to check the certificate for each and every Web site.
SSL is supposed to provide three guarantees:
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Why the Internet of Things Is So Vulnerable
It seems every day there is another article about how "vulnerable" the Internet of Things (IoT) is. Here are two choice excerpts from the last year:
"Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway," Wired, 21st July 2015 "Security Researcher Claims to have Hacked into Flight via Entertainment System," CNN, 19th May 2015 While these are major life-threatening issues - one cannot compare a malicious actor disabling your iPhone while you are on it with someone talking control of your car going 110 kmh down the highway, let alone a plane flying at 35,000 feet and 600 mph!
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Keep Corporate Away From Production
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.
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TrueCrypt: True Security, True Licensing
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.
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Experience Matters... Especially In a Startup
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, "
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Hiding Fingerprints in Your Browser for Privacy
The browser is the single most ubiquitous piece of software on the planet. Nearly every computing device has at least one one. Because of its ubiquity, and its use across multiple applications from open (Google "how much does a banana weigh") to private (browser-based email) to secure (office applications or banking), it is also a source of many risks.
This article will dig a little deeper into issues of browser security and privacy.
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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.
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Deleting Email Is a Chimera
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.
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Ask Why You Care About Security
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.
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Security Spending: Part II, the Good Tower
Today, we present the second guest post in the series by Ted Lloyd, editor of OnlineCISO.
Yesterday, we explored why security spending need not be a bottomless pit, and how yesterday's tools, such as antivirus, can be evaluated using familiar risk management methodologies.
Where then, should a business reinvest the funds previously allocated to antivirus solutions? Another analogy to the physical world can help to answer this question.
Malware and variants are similar to microbiology in our physical world.
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Security Spending: Part I, the Bottomless Pit
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.
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ReCAPTCHA 2.0
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 "
Tag: self-service
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Penny-Wise and Pound Foolish, Eh?
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.
Tag: server
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Bare Metal Cloud
Infrastructure-as-a-Service, cloud servers, whatever you call them, have been around for years. Amazon is the clear leader in the pack (and, according to Simon Wardley, is likely to remain so for a long time), with others like Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, and Azure picking up much of the rest (fortunately for them, the market is plenty big enough).
Digital Ocean, a company I mostly ignored for a while, takes kudos for speed and simplicity, and rapidly have become my go-to option for quick servers.
Tag: serverless
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On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
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Why Networking is Critical to Serverless
As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally).
Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency.
Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here.
I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.
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The Problem with Serverless Is Packaging
Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions.
Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management.
In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.
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Open Source Business Models
Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it.
The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.
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Changing Tech, Changing Jobs: What Serverless Means for SysAdmins
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.
Tag: servers
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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, "
Tag: services
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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.
Tag: sierra
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Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
Tag: sim
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Kill the SIM Card
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.
Tag: siri
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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.
Tag: sla
Post
Kill Your SLA
Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter.
All that matters is customer expectation in real time.
You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform.
Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.
Tag: smartphone
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Growing Independent: Laptop to Smartphone to Wearable
When does a personal technology - a computer, a smartphone, a watch - "grow up"? There is a slow but continuous process I have observed with every new personal computing technology.
Stage 1 - Child: The new technology provides unprecedented flexibility. It allows you to do just a few new things, but its real appeal is allowing you to do old things on the go. It does so by being a mobile accessory to, or child of, existing "
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Kill the SIM Card
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.
Tag: smell
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Deodorant for Software
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.
Tag: software
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Open Source Business Models
Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it.
The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.
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Surprising Efforts: Debug vs Test vs Fix
In the last article on serverless, I referenced the old ad in the New York City subways for a trade school. Their tagline was similar to, "technicians will always be needed, because things always will break."
We technologists are familiar - intimately - with fixing broken things. Sometimes, it is our own software, devices or infrastructure; other times, it is someone else's. Either we have become responsible for it, or we need it to work under certain circumstances where it simply fails.
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Deodorant for Software
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.
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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.
Tag: solutions
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The Power of Visualization
Once in a while, we come across a perfect example of how everyday technology can improve our understanding. It is not radical new technology, like nanoparticles fighting cancer, but great usage of tools that are widely available.
Understanding Math I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering many years ago. While I did well at my alma mater, like most people, I struggled with visualizing complex mathematical principles. Sine waves are easy to draw and see, but start doing more complex forms, then head into Fourier Transforms, and even the smartest get lost.
Tag: solve
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Don't Defer the Problem, Resolve It!
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, "
Tag: sony
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Deleting Email Is a Chimera
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.
Tag: speech
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Reports of the Death of the Keyboard Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
For almost all of computing history, we have interacted with computing devices via keyboard for input and printer, then screen, for output. Computers are logical devices, and require clean, defined logical statements to interact. Thus, we use precise text.
Human interactions, on the other hand, are less precise but much richer. We interact via touch, sound and sight - both the precise written word and visual pictures. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of people, upwards of 99%, were illiterate.
Tag: speed
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Continuous Everything
Earlier this week, a really smart architect and I were evaluating various methods for managing software code changes, bug fixes, releases and major features. We both were in agreement with the primary direction, a popular one in nimble companies.
Have a primary "trunk" or "master" branch; Any commits to "master" automatically get built and tested and ready for production (and possibly deployed); Any changes occur on "feature branches", temporary parallels streams of development that eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - merge into "
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The Real ROI of Cloud
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.
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Internet in the Air
I used to hate taking long day flights. If I had to spend 12 hours in the air from New York to Tokyo, or Zurich to Bangkok, or Tel Aviv to Newark, I preferred overnight flights. Even since the advent of on-demand entertainment, personal video screens and portable devices like the iPad, those flights just seemed to last forever.
So most of the time I would fly overnight. However, the timing didn't always work out, and overnight flights tend to be significantly more expensive than all-day flights, often much greater than 50% more.
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Put a Stake In Your Steering Wheel
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.
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Whence QA?
Since the dawn of software, more or less, companies wrote their software in a process that went something like this:
Product defines the specifications. Architecture designs it. Engineering/R&D builds it. Quality Assurance (QA) tests it. If it passes, it is scheduled for release; if not, goto #3. The jobs of QA teams historically have been procedure-oriented. Whereas engineers tend to be more creative and inventive, QA teams provide the process and constraints (remember the term "
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Hands Off! How to Release Product Faster
What are the three biggest impediments, or roadblocks, to fast product cycles, especially in the cloud?
Incomplete Testing. If you are not 100% confident that your testing covers every known use case, you will be fearful of releasing. Actually, fear of the risk of deployment often is the "canary in the coal mine" sign that your testing is incomplete. The other sign is infrequent releases, defined in the Internet era as less frequently than every few days.
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Conway's Corollary - Design Determines Scale
When I went to business school, I worked closely with an incredibly smart woman with whom I shared a very similar method of thinking and mindset. When we would find the same responses to the same questions in the same manner, inevitably I would quote, "great minds think alike."
She taught me that there is a corollary: "...but fools rarely differ."
The great challenge in life often isn't to agree with someone, no matter how smart; it is to determine if you are both great minds thinking alike, or both fools who are not differing.
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The Cloud and Being Nimble
In our most recent article, we explored why "true cloud" really matters: it has a significant impact on:
Your gross margins Your speed As a company providing technology services, as opposed to products like software, you cannot get cloud-scale gross margins and speed - and therefore valuations - unless you are operating as a true cloud.
Today, we will look at a different set of advantages to running your service as a true cloud: how nimble you can be.
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Why True Cloud Matters
In our previous articles, we discussed what cloud is, the types of cloud services, and the difference between true cloud and "market cloud", or hosting.
The big question is, so what?
You are a software provider offering a cloud solution. Does it really matter if it is "true cloud", or just hosted? Isn't it just a difference in architectural design, a matter for your engineers but not your customers or your bottom line?
Tag: spinoff
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Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
Tag: ssg
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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.
Tag: ssl
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SSL Is Broken, Time to Fix It
For a long time, I have felt that SSL/TLS - the protocol that secures your communications with Web sites, mail servers and most everything across the Internet - is broken. It is broken to the point that it is fundamentally insecure, except for the most technically-aware and security-alert individuals, who also have the time to check the certificate for each and every Web site.
SSL is supposed to provide three guarantees:
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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, "
Tag: stack
Post
Internet of Iotas
From the Cambridge Dictionary of English:
iota (n.) - an extremely small amount
From the Wikipedia:
Internet of Things (IoT) - the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.
As electronics get smaller and smaller, not just wearables like an Apple Watch, but even tiny full computers like the Raspberry Pi, the "
Tag: stackoverflow
Post
Ad Blockers Are Good Signals
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.
Tag: standards
Post
Your Car Interior Should Be Like A Network
A lot of ink has been spilled (if that term still can be used in the digital age), on the coming driverless "revolution."
Yet a much simpler "evolution" is long overdue for automative technology: the inside.
Anyone who has replaced any component on a car - dashboard, door panel, side-view mirror, radio, engine part, or any component at all - is familiar with the swamp of wiring that snakes its way behind every panel on the car.
Tag: starbucks
Post
Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
Tag: statistics
Post
Performance Tests Redux
A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes.
Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly.
Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox.
On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.
Post
Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests
Mark Twain attributed the phrase "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which suits the Prime Minister's known wit, although its provenance has been questioned. If Twain or Disraeli had lived in the days of computers and software, he probably would have coined the phrase as "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests." Perhaps Twain's great novel of Americans touring the desolate Holy Land of the late 19th century might have been called, "
Tag: strategy
Post
Do You Need Microservices to Make Containers Worthwhile?
Earlier this week, I had breakfast with a colleague of mine from Rancher. Rancher is a great "orchestrator" for Docker containers. I have recommended and used them in production environments.
Containers - one of the hottest technologies in the last year - is a much more efficient form of virtualization than traditional "hardware" virtualization (think VMWare or Xen), while providing a superior application distribution model.
The challenge is that while the native Docker tools are pretty good for managing individual servers with containers, managing more than a few containers, let alone across more than a few servers, becomes impossibly complex.
Tag: subscription
Post
HP Printing Is An Ink Company, Not a Printer Company
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 "
Tag: sun
Post
Nothing is New Under the Sun Server
As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses.
It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended).
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.
Tag: superfish
Post
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, "
Tag: support
Post
Negative Cloud Margins?
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me something shocking: a particular cloud company's gross margins on cloud products are below -40%. That is not a typo, it is minus 40% or worse.
Essentially, the company is doing one of: burning investor money; running down their own cash reserves; borrowing from banks or the market; or subsidizing from other business lines. Whatever the method they are using to stay afloat, they are burning quite a hole.
Tag: switch
Post
Kill the SIM Card
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.
Tag: sync
Post
Just Making Technology Work Is Hard Work
Apple's philosophy for technology is, "just make it work." I had one of the early pre-iPod mp3 players. It was a great piece, lots of battery life, played every format out there at the time... and within a year I had replaced it with an iPod. Transferring music to this player and managing it was just an enormous headache. With iTunes and iPod, it "just worked".
Fast forward to the year 2014.
Tag: talent
Post
Does Open-Source Increase the Value of Talent?
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.
Post
Chessmaster Employees
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.
Tag: technical-debt
Post
The Prisoner's Software Dilemma
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.
Tag: technology
Post
Internet of Iotas
From the Cambridge Dictionary of English:
iota (n.) - an extremely small amount
From the Wikipedia:
Internet of Things (IoT) - the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.
As electronics get smaller and smaller, not just wearables like an Apple Watch, but even tiny full computers like the Raspberry Pi, the "
Post
Penny-Wise and Pound Foolish, Eh?
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.
Post
What About Yahoo's Original Business?
Yesterday, we looked at how the market values Yahoo, and tried to understand why a company with $6.3BN in net assets, and another $31BN in a fairly liquid equity investment is valued only at... $31BN!
Interestingly, Daniel Morris pointed out an article in CNBC from September which argued that the issue is taxes. Essentially, Yahoo's investment is encumbered by a potential tax bill. If an when they liquidate it, the tax bill will be enough to wipe out the rest of Yahoo's assets.
Post
Why Is Yahoo Valued Less than Zero?
According to several articles I have seen today, notably this Wall Street Journal report, Yahoo's Board of Directors are considering a sale of Yahoo's core Internet business.
For quite some time, Yahoo has been a troubled company. To many people, it doesn't matter. But to those of us who enjoyed it as one of the first major Internet search sites, it is very sad to see.
Marissa Mayer was brought on board to fix the company.
Post
Good Writing Still Counts
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.
Post
Don't Break Your Customers
Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage and use.
Personally, I think Docker containers are great. They provide a far more efficient level of isolation than VM virtualization, without sacrificing manageability.
Docker itself, however, is a young company, and every now and then young companies, whose products are moving very quickly, make silly mistakes.
Post
Go Conway
There is a famous saying, known as Conway's Law, which states that:
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
It means that when your organization builds a system, its structure will reflect the organization that created it. If you have 3 teams - database administrators, system administrators and Web developers - then your system architecture will have 3 distinct components: databases, servers and Web UI.
Post
Nothing is New Under the Sun Server
As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses.
It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended).
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.
Post
The Purpose of a Business is to Create and Keep a Customer
"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 "
Post
ReCAPTCHA 2.0
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 "
Post
The Safe as a Web Server
Safes. They are big, heavy, and make us feel, well, "safe" about our valuables stored inside.
Historically, safes were controlled by a series of complex gears that only the correct series, or "combination", of dials would open. I loved the illustrations for gears and other mechanical devices in David Macaulay's "New Way Things Work".
Digital safes, whether the professional variety of the home variety, were created largely for convenience. They are faster to open, easier to share (and change) codes, and required less physical space for all of the gears.
Post
Welcome to Atomic Energy!
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
Tag: television
Post
Big Bang Theory of Advertising, or How Broadcasters Are Like Supermarkets
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.
Tag: testing
Post
Whence QA?
Since the dawn of software, more or less, companies wrote their software in a process that went something like this:
Product defines the specifications. Architecture designs it. Engineering/R&D builds it. Quality Assurance (QA) tests it. If it passes, it is scheduled for release; if not, goto #3. The jobs of QA teams historically have been procedure-oriented. Whereas engineers tend to be more creative and inventive, QA teams provide the process and constraints (remember the term "
Post
Independence Drives Speed
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.
Post
Performance Tests Redux
A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes.
Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly.
Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox.
On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.
Post
Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests
Mark Twain attributed the phrase "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which suits the Prime Minister's known wit, although its provenance has been questioned. If Twain or Disraeli had lived in the days of computers and software, he probably would have coined the phrase as "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests." Perhaps Twain's great novel of Americans touring the desolate Holy Land of the late 19th century might have been called, "
Post
Engineer Your Core, But Only Your Core
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 "
Tag: textbooks
Post
Blinded By The Textbook
With due respect to Manfred Mann's Earth Band, I just came across a great example of a business so blinded by their stale model that they cannot respond rationally to competitive threats: textbooks.
Anyone involved in education, from students to professors to parents, knows that textbooks are exorbitant. There are several reasons for these prices:
Market size: It is easier to sell 100MM Harry Potter hardcovers for $20 than a chemistry book that sells 20,000 copies.
Tag: time
Post
It's Always Been a Matter of Trust
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:
Tag: tls
Post
SSL Is Broken, Time to Fix It
For a long time, I have felt that SSL/TLS - the protocol that secures your communications with Web sites, mail servers and most everything across the Internet - is broken. It is broken to the point that it is fundamentally insecure, except for the most technically-aware and security-alert individuals, who also have the time to check the certificate for each and every Web site.
SSL is supposed to provide three guarantees:
Tag: tools
Post
Independence Drives Speed
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.
Post
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:
Tag: travel
Post
Penny-Wise and Pound Foolish, Eh?
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.
Tag: truecrypt
Post
TrueCrypt: True Security, True Licensing
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.
Tag: trust
Post
It's Always Been a Matter of Trust
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:
Post
Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
Post
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, "
Post
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.
Post
The Technology of True Cloud
Continuing our series on cloud services, especially our most recent one, "How to Do True Cloud", we now turn to the technology that enables true cloud services.
This article will go more in depth than the previous ones; after all, we are discussing technology services. However, it will not go so deep as to lose the business-side executives. Indeed, any great executive in technology needs to hold to two principles simultaneously:
Tag: tsa
Post
ReCAPTCHA 2.0
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 "
Tag: tv
Post
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.
Tag: two-factor
Post
Yahoo's On-Demand (In)Security
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 "
Tag: uber
Post
Is the Real Uber Threat to Hertz?
It has become commonplace to forecast that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing services are a strategic threat to car manufacturers. After all, if "everyone" uses Uber, why would they bother owning cars?
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that "everyone" lives where Uber and Lyft are headquartered: in a dense urban area with very little parking, going to other places nearby where there is lots of traffic and very little parking.
Tag: undercut
Post
Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last
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 "
Tag: unikernels
Post
On to Nano-Services
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.
Tag: united
Post
The Prisoner's Software Dilemma
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.
Post
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.
Post
It's About The People, Stupid
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.
Post
How Incredibly Good Airline Choice Has Gotten
I expect this topic to get me a lot of flak. After all, everyone likes dumping on the airlines, including me. But hear me out.
I fly a lot of miles every year, mostly in coach, sometimes in business. Most of the time, the journey is tiring and uneventful, sometimes it is annoying, and sometimes downright offensive.
I regularly hear and read stories about the decline of comfort, service and value in air travel over the last 30 years.
Tag: upgrade
Post
Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
Tag: url
Post
Old URLs Don't Die... They Come Back to Haunt You
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:
Tag: usability
Post
Usability Drives Adoption, Not Technology
The great strength of technologists is that we innovate constantly, always looking for a better world. The great weakness is that we sometimes fall in love with the solution, the technology itself, without regards to its applicable value in the real world.
How do we determine if a given solution really has a chance of being adopted? The two biggest determinants of a solution are usefulness and usability.
Usefulness "
Tag: usb
Post
Your Car Interior Should Be Like A Network
A lot of ink has been spilled (if that term still can be used in the digital age), on the coming driverless "revolution."
Yet a much simpler "evolution" is long overdue for automative technology: the inside.
Anyone who has replaced any component on a car - dashboard, door panel, side-view mirror, radio, engine part, or any component at all - is familiar with the swamp of wiring that snakes its way behind every panel on the car.
Tag: users
Post
Managing Your Users... Right and Wrong
Is your user management an afterthought?
For most companies building technology systems, how to manage users - the process of creating, managing, grouping and linking accounts - is bolted on later. After all, you fully expect your users to spend the bulk of their time using your service, not logging in to or managing your service! So you use some reasonably standard user management library, and when you have to worry about groups and organizations, you sort of bolt it on.
Tag: valuation
Post
Does Open-Source Increase the Value of Talent?
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.
Post
Why Is Yahoo Valued Less than Zero?
According to several articles I have seen today, notably this Wall Street Journal report, Yahoo's Board of Directors are considering a sale of Yahoo's core Internet business.
For quite some time, Yahoo has been a troubled company. To many people, it doesn't matter. But to those of us who enjoyed it as one of the first major Internet search sites, it is very sad to see.
Marissa Mayer was brought on board to fix the company.
Post
Internet Trends and Internet Values
This week, Mary Meeker of KPCB has released her "Internet Trends" report. I look forward to the release of this report. While I rarely can sit through a nearly-200-slide presentation, the insights in here always are thought-provoking and make it worth my while. I remember Meeker back in my Morgan Stanley days - unfortunately, I never had the privilege of working directly with her.
If you have anything to do with the technology business, read it.
Tag: value
Post
Why Is Yahoo Valued Less than Zero?
According to several articles I have seen today, notably this Wall Street Journal report, Yahoo's Board of Directors are considering a sale of Yahoo's core Internet business.
For quite some time, Yahoo has been a troubled company. To many people, it doesn't matter. But to those of us who enjoyed it as one of the first major Internet search sites, it is very sad to see.
Marissa Mayer was brought on board to fix the company.
Post
Once Again, Great Product Management Wins
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.
Post
How Incredibly Good Airline Choice Has Gotten
I expect this topic to get me a lot of flak. After all, everyone likes dumping on the airlines, including me. But hear me out.
I fly a lot of miles every year, mostly in coach, sometimes in business. Most of the time, the journey is tiring and uneventful, sometimes it is annoying, and sometimes downright offensive.
I regularly hear and read stories about the decline of comfort, service and value in air travel over the last 30 years.
Tag: vc
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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.
Tag: velocity
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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:
Tag: vendor
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Open Source Business Models
Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it.
The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions.
Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.
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Why Does My Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one).
One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "
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True Cloud vs Hosting
Having looked at the definition (and misapplication) of cloud, its key characteristics, and the various categories of cloud services, or fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service (*aaS), we now turn our attention to the important difference between true cloud services and hosting services that are marketed as cloud.
This is crucially important to vendors and customers!
While it may seem, at first glance, as nitpicking, these are very important differences. They will impact a vendor's short-term and long-term profitability, viability and responsiveness, and a customer's ability to rely on a vendor.
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What is the Cloud?
Cloud seems to be the biggest buzzword in the last few years. Every technology provider, every services provider, if they aren't natively "in the cloud", they are providing a version of their offering "in the cloud."
Although the term "cloud" seems pretty clear to marketers - personally, I am convinced many believe it means, "we can charge more for this if we slap the word 'Cloud' on it" - the majority of people with whom I speak, from engineers and support staff through executives, CEOs and especially customers, do not have a real understanding of what the cloud is, and why it matters.
Tag: venture-capital
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Pay Yourself First
One of the most important rules of successful longtime business owners, right after "Cash is King", is "Pay Yourself First." After all, you do not know what the business will be like in a year or two or ten, so don't shortchange yourself. Of course, you need to invest in your business's growth as well, but don't live in poverty because every penny of profit is plowed back into the business.
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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.
Tag: visualization
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The Power of Visualization
Once in a while, we come across a perfect example of how everyday technology can improve our understanding. It is not radical new technology, like nanoparticles fighting cancer, but great usage of tools that are widely available.
Understanding Math I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering many years ago. While I did well at my alma mater, like most people, I struggled with visualizing complex mathematical principles. Sine waves are easy to draw and see, but start doing more complex forms, then head into Fourier Transforms, and even the smartest get lost.
Tag: vlc
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Just Making Technology Work Is Hard Work
Apple's philosophy for technology is, "just make it work." I had one of the early pre-iPod mp3 players. It was a great piece, lots of battery life, played every format out there at the time... and within a year I had replaced it with an iPod. Transferring music to this player and managing it was just an enormous headache. With iTunes and iPod, it "just worked".
Fast forward to the year 2014.
Tag: vmware
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When Your Customers No Longer Adore You
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.
Tag: walmart
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Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud
After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input.
In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:
Tag: watch
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Growing Independent: Laptop to Smartphone to Wearable
When does a personal technology - a computer, a smartphone, a watch - "grow up"? There is a slow but continuous process I have observed with every new personal computing technology.
Stage 1 - Child: The new technology provides unprecedented flexibility. It allows you to do just a few new things, but its real appeal is allowing you to do old things on the go. It does so by being a mobile accessory to, or child of, existing "
Tag: waterfall
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The Best Laid Schemes Of Mice And Men
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 "
Tag: web
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Usability Drives Adoption, Not Technology
The great strength of technologists is that we innovate constantly, always looking for a better world. The great weakness is that we sometimes fall in love with the solution, the technology itself, without regards to its applicable value in the real world.
How do we determine if a given solution really has a chance of being adopted? The two biggest determinants of a solution are usefulness and usability.
Usefulness "
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Planning People and Laughing Markets
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.
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Should Your Mobile App Shutter Your Web Site?
Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well.
Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.
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The Safe as a Web Server
Safes. They are big, heavy, and make us feel, well, "safe" about our valuables stored inside.
Historically, safes were controlled by a series of complex gears that only the correct series, or "combination", of dials would open. I loved the illustrations for gears and other mechanical devices in David Macaulay's "New Way Things Work".
Digital safes, whether the professional variety of the home variety, were created largely for convenience. They are faster to open, easier to share (and change) codes, and required less physical space for all of the gears.
Tag: webserver
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The Safe as a Web Server
Safes. They are big, heavy, and make us feel, well, "safe" about our valuables stored inside.
Historically, safes were controlled by a series of complex gears that only the correct series, or "combination", of dials would open. I loved the illustrations for gears and other mechanical devices in David Macaulay's "New Way Things Work".
Digital safes, whether the professional variety of the home variety, were created largely for convenience. They are faster to open, easier to share (and change) codes, and required less physical space for all of the gears.
Tag: welcome
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Welcome to Atomic Energy!
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
Tag: wifi
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Kill the SIM Card
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.
Post
Just Making Technology Work Is Hard Work
Apple's philosophy for technology is, "just make it work." I had one of the early pre-iPod mp3 players. It was a great piece, lots of battery life, played every format out there at the time... and within a year I had replaced it with an iPod. Transferring music to this player and managing it was just an enormous headache. With iTunes and iPod, it "just worked".
Fast forward to the year 2014.
Tag: windows
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Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?
Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons:
Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.
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Would Open-Source Windows Have Stopped Linux?
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?
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Decoupling Microsoft, or Free Your App
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!
Tag: wins
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Small Efforts for Big Wins
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.
Tag: wireless-charging
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Mind the Gap
What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit.
Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed.
On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:
Tag: word-of-mouth
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Who Are You Going to Tell?
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.
Tag: wordpress
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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.
Tag: work
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Internet in the Air
I used to hate taking long day flights. If I had to spend 12 hours in the air from New York to Tokyo, or Zurich to Bangkok, or Tel Aviv to Newark, I preferred overnight flights. Even since the advent of on-demand entertainment, personal video screens and portable devices like the iPad, those flights just seemed to last forever.
So most of the time I would fly overnight. However, the timing didn't always work out, and overnight flights tend to be significantly more expensive than all-day flights, often much greater than 50% more.
Tag: workers
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When Your Workers Love Their Job
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.
Tag: worst
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It's About The People, Stupid
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.
Tag: writing
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Good Writing Still Counts
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.
Tag: wsj
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The Prisoner's Software Dilemma
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.
Tag: xss
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Hiding Fingerprints in Your Browser for Privacy
The browser is the single most ubiquitous piece of software on the planet. Nearly every computing device has at least one one. Because of its ubiquity, and its use across multiple applications from open (Google "how much does a banana weigh") to private (browser-based email) to secure (office applications or banking), it is also a source of many risks.
This article will dig a little deeper into issues of browser security and privacy.
Tag: yahoo
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What About Yahoo's Original Business?
Yesterday, we looked at how the market values Yahoo, and tried to understand why a company with $6.3BN in net assets, and another $31BN in a fairly liquid equity investment is valued only at... $31BN!
Interestingly, Daniel Morris pointed out an article in CNBC from September which argued that the issue is taxes. Essentially, Yahoo's investment is encumbered by a potential tax bill. If an when they liquidate it, the tax bill will be enough to wipe out the rest of Yahoo's assets.
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Why Is Yahoo Valued Less than Zero?
According to several articles I have seen today, notably this Wall Street Journal report, Yahoo's Board of Directors are considering a sale of Yahoo's core Internet business.
For quite some time, Yahoo has been a troubled company. To many people, it doesn't matter. But to those of us who enjoyed it as one of the first major Internet search sites, it is very sad to see.
Marissa Mayer was brought on board to fix the company.
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Yahoo's On-Demand (In)Security
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 "
Tag: ycombinator
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It's Always Been a Matter of Trust
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: