2016 Apr 18

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.

2016 Apr 12

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.

2016 Apr 7

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.

2016 Mar 30

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.

2016 Mar 29

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 "

2016 Mar 18

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.

2016 Mar 14

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.

2016 Mar 10

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?

2016 Mar 7

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:

2016 Mar 3

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.