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.

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.

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.

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,"

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.