My Latest Folly, and Article

Here's my latest CW article, which brilliantly illustrates my contention that most of the problems we have in IT are due to our inability to communicate with each other.

It seems James Rogers was in a session I did last week and wrote a Byte and Switch article on one of the issues I raised.  Then David DeJean wrote this article arguing with James' position.  It looks like they are disagreeing but they really aren't, they just didn't hear things the same way.  I love this example.  Interpretation and translation - that's where we all fall down.

On a much more serious note, last evening I entered the Hilton in NY as I had a keynote to deliver this morning (which was 90% the same presentation I did at SWC last week which caused the aforementioned ruckus).  I took the train down with my brother Greg, had a nice dinner, and went to the hotel around midnight.  I, as always, ran into some folks I knew who, as always, were able to convince me to have a glass of wine prior to heading to bed.  While I was kibitzing with folks, the bar lights suddenly came on, and last call was called (which I didn't think happened in NY, especially with a very crowded bar making lots of money).  I tried in vain for 10 minutes to get a bartender to acknowledge my existence when I happened to look across the bar and noticed two lovely young ladies who appeared "professional", if you get my drift.  The bartender, however, was hovering over them, so I made my way over and asked the blonde young lady if she would mind getting the bartender's attention.  She said "sure" and within 8 seconds I had a glass of bad red wine.  I thanked her and was heading back to the hundred or so IT and IT industry people (all of which were now looking at me, mind you) when "Charisma" (no lie, her real name, not even a stage name) started chatting me up.

Now, I may be a lot of things, but I like to think one of them is that I'm a realist.  I know I'm not rich or handsome, I know I'm not really interesting except in very small, very odd niches, and I know that I'm married to a six foot goddess who I adore, and who could kill me in 4 seconds if she wanted to.  Therefore, I simply assumed Charisma was beginning the sales pitch, and I'm trying to get out of Dodge.  I turn away and start chatting with someone (by now a bunch of semi or full on drunk vendor marketing guys have made it to this side of the bar under the guise of really needing to ask me something) and have every intention of working my way back to safety, when my brother yells to me, "hey, Charisma's a porn star".  Well, that is one business I know absolutely nothing about, and as you know, I love to learn.  She was very forthright and gracious in answering a slew of questions I've always wanted to ask but never had the opportunity, and she wasn't at all disappointed that I wasn't familiar with her body of work - making her a much better person than I, since I get really irritated when people don't know who I am or just how darn important I am.

It turns out she was in town for the Howard Stern show (I love Howard).  I was able to satisfy many curiosities during the 30 minute conversation, and then I ran away.  I'm not sure what happened after that, but the drunken marketing pack kept edging closer and closer.

Bizarre little things like that always seem to happen to me, and really does make life interesting. In the last week I've met a secret service agent, a district attorney, a few CEO's, and a porn star.  I almost can't wait for next week.

P.S. the showering at the Hilton was entirely uneventful.

Cheers

The Machine Has No Soul - Sha Doobie

I make a living in the computer world.  I love gizmo's, spec's, and waxing ethereal on all things IT.  I wanted to be a rock star, but this is as close as I could come.

We all face intense challenges in our IT lives because of gizmo's, spec's, and widgets.  We really do try to make our worlds better via the application of technology - and then we spend countless cycles trying to manage the new problems we just inadvertently created while solving some other problem by throwing more technology at it.  It seems we are caught in a vicious cycle.

Does it matter?  Kids are a good bell weather for such questions.  My kids are amazed I can A: make a living talking about this stuff and B: that there are other people out there that spend any time at all listening to people like me talk about stuff like this.  I try to explain to them that machines are the future - that some day computers will be so smart they will help us in unimaginable ways.  The kids say "they already do", and I say "ah, but they don't.  They stink.  They make us work much too hard on keeping them happy, so we don't really get to see them doing the good things they are capable of.  They are too complicated, too hard to manage, too hard to make them really useful."

Then my kids walk away with their eyes rolled up.  My daughter pulls out her phone, and listens to some rap music (which, by the way, is just awful.  I'm sorry, and I know I'm officially my father, but you have to be kidding me with this stuff.  The lyrics are not only stupid, but disgusting.  I grew up loving punk, to which my dad must have been equally thrilled, but at least those mohawk wearing freaks tried to say something ((albeit not well always - I love the Sex Pistols, and they aren't going to win any poetry contest)).  My son hops on IM like he's been doing it since he was born, which he pretty much was.

They don't see gizmo's as technology.  The see applications.  They don't care about pipes and cycles.  They care about how many songs fit on their phones, and how they can connect and grab other songs from friends and Internet sites.  They replicate more data in a day than most fortune 500 companies I think.

So, the interesting (to me) things learned are 1. I probably am an idiot for spending as much time as I do on how things are supposed to work and not on how they really do work, and 2. what they taught me is that technology will never have life.  It takes the soul of human to apply meaning and value to a gizmo, whether a phone or a data center.  The machine will run faster and faster, but it will never really think.

I brought my 14 year old daughter Katie to see Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) two weeks ago.  She has really eclectic musical tastes, she's also the one who enjoys listening to rappers tell tales of their sexual exploits over sampled (stolen) music and profess to how many cops they have shot, but I digress.  Anyhow, we are in the midst of 28,000 40 year olds smoking dope like it's 1970, watching what was probably the single greatest display of musicianship I've ever seen (really, and I've seen everyone - he had 3 guitarists, two keyboardists, sax, three back up singers and some guy who I couldn't figure out what he did.  They played every song note for note - no kidding, note for note.  If you happen to play an instrument of any kind, you realize that not only is that music effectively impossible to play as a soloist, but the fact that all eleven of them could be so perfect was astounding).  The only other comparative even close that I have witnessed would be Steely Dan.

Leaving, totally blown away, I said "what did you think?", and she said "That was awesome".  So I said, "yeah, I don't think I've ever seen better musicians".  She said "yeah, they were good, my guitar teacher can play a lot of that stuff, he plays along with a machine", which made me think.  They have keyboards that really are computers that can play stuff like Pink Floyd.  Roger no doubt used one or two.  They were programmed to play.  They created sounds that made the live show feel like you were listening to the album.  Now that's an application.  That's a great example of some of the good things that all this technology can do - but at the same time, it's why my kid was totally underwhelmed at witnessing what might have been one of the greatest musical performances she may ever see.  She expected it to sound like that - and why not?  Her cell phone plays Pink Floyd songs through her earphones and it sounds great, why the heck wouldn't some old guy and a bunch of young guys playing live sound the same way?

The problem isn't technology.  The problem is perception.  In IT we have become our fathers.  We still focus on the gizmo's, we haven't learned how to focus on the application.  We spend too much time figuring out how to make the cell phone work, and not enough time listening to the music.  The application is human, the gizmo's are not.

So even if Roger had a little help, the fact is that people wrote those songs - brilliantly.  The creative element and the ability to execute on it will never be done by a machine.  Sure, someone from some lab is going to tell me how I'm wrong, but I'm not.  There is no point in making the machine feel - we already do that.  The machine is how we deliver the post creative results on a consistent basis, but it doesn't come up with the plan.

Which, finally, gets me to the point.  Strategic thinkers will always have a role, whether as song writers or IT folks.  Would you rather be the guy who writes the song or the roadie who downloads it onto the machine?  If you spend all day chasing cables, you should at least spend the ride home thinking about what you would do IF everything infrastructural just worked - because someday it just might.

Of course this rant could be based on residual contact ingestion from last nights Stones concert.  This was my 6th (?) farewell "Keith can't possibly live another year" tour.  Jagger is the most strategic thinker in the history of the music business.  I'm guessing he personally pulls a million dollars a night out of the shows they do.  Keith gets a bottle of Jack and someone to tell him when to go to bed and wake up. The rest are just happy to be there.  They are the machines.

IPO Anyone?

The only Data Layer player to go public in the last decade (ish) has been Xyratex.  They got killed at the IPO, and it took a year or so to get back - and now the stock is doing well.  The IPO market for technology players has been non-existent since 2001.

Today we have Riverbed, CommVault, Isilon, and DoubleTake in registration - waiting to go public.  Yee Haw!! 

Suffice it to say these four are being very closely observed - by panting venture capitalists, salivating entrepreneurs, begging investment banks, and most of all - by the big dogs of the business.

EMC, IBM, HP, Symantec, etc. have had a field day since the markets have shut down - they have paid 10 cents on the dollar to acquire companies and technologies because there was no other way out for many of the acquired.  If the public market comes back - even marginally - for this space, the price of acquisition will go up, and it could be a lot.

The best situation for the civilized world (yes, including the Data Layer folks) is that the market allow exits, the companies who get public perform well in their businesses, and the public take a sensible view of the value of those companies - and hold them to a high standard. 

That would be great.  Unfortunately, I'm skeptical.  Even after Enron and all the garbage of the last 50 years being exposed, even after you read every day how even "good" public companies are now in trouble for the way they expense options, even after all the negative exposure - greed still rules.  Case in point - HP.  The current fiasco at the board should be sending red flags and sell orders throughout Wall St., let alone the cops.  Wall St.'s reaction?  Zip.  If the numbers are good, they don't care if your board is run by an axe murdering psycho or an incompetent fool.

I mean no disrespect to HP - current fiasco aside, they have joined the ranks of IBM, Apple, and EMC as the best turnaround stories in the history of the computer business.  Mark Hurd is my favorite CEO I've never met.  HP is back in every business, and kicking butt in most.  I do mean disrespect to Wall St.  I don't think they have learned a single thing, nor do I think they care.  Yes, I grossly generalize, but overall, Gordon Gecko lives and breathes in Manhattan.

What's the Data Layer?  Good question.  It doesn't make sense to talk about the "storage" market anymore.  What isn't storage or directly related to storage in IT infrastructure?  I'm thinking about things in 3 major contexts - 1. the User/Application presentation layer (one end of the wire), 2. The Infrastructure Layer, and 3. The Information (the other end of the wire).

Inside the Infrastructure Layer resides 3 sub-components:  A: The server/processor layer, B: the network layer (user facing and infrastructure facing) and C: the DATA layer.

The data layer includes things that prepare, manage, store, move, and protect data.  That includes databases, file systems, storage devices, data management/protection, and all the other IIM subsets.

Why no "application" layer?  Because what is an application?  Applications execute at every point of the infrastructure - there is no layer.  Applications are simply an execution engine which execute on whatever hardware they need to in order to fulfill their mission - which is to create or find the right data in the Data Layer and deliver it to the User/Application Interface - or vice versa.  The SOA world made me re-think all of this.  It was easy to put file systems and databases in the data layer, because after all, what they do is manage data so that it can be found later on.

On The Way To SNW Europe

Not that Frankfurt is not a fantastic place, but having been a few times, I decided to come early and spend the labor day weekend in Paris, where my lovely wife and I have not spent all that much time.  We are staying in Versailles at the suggestion of fellow ESG'er and world traveler, Paul Myerson.

Versailles is fab.  Perfect French suburb.  Outrageously expensive.  One cannot get a taxi to save ones life.  Tres bien.

Not to sound absurd, but the French fries are magnificent.  They come with pretty much every meal we have had (and while I did see 2 McDonald's today, no, we have only eaten in places where there have been no burgers, at least that I can tell) and they must do something to the oil, because they are really good.  I know it sounds stupid, French fries and all, but they are really something.  I can't wait to try the French dressing.

Observation - apparently the French are cold.  Everyone either is wearing a sweater or a scarf, or has one draped around their neck (males only, apparently).  It must be 75 degrees here.  Sweater and scarf stores must make a ton of money. I have yet to see a beret, except on someone who clearly was from New Jersey.  Today, Sunday, every other person we saw had a straw basket with a loaf of bread sticking out of it, and i'm fairly confident they were not doing it simply because I was in town.  You are apparently supposed to get wine with every meal, including breakfast.  Rose is preferred prior to the afternoon, and it's good.  It's not the Gallo gallon of pink sweet crud, it is really quite dry and tasty.  Provence is where they make it, which must be in this country somewhere.  The cheese has been quite good also, though I feel it could become a problem shortly. 

Service is a tad like Italy, where the only one in a rush ever seems to be me.

I have witnessed more Lamborghini's and Ferrari's as every day street cars today than in any city I have ever been in.  They must have a lot of dough in France.

The Louvre is magnificent, but way too big.  My feet are killing me.  The Eiffel tower is really, really, tall, and it's brown, which I didn't know.

My wife, who is a 6 foot blond stunning lady, has had more traffic stopping stares than when we were in the middle of China.  My international ego is now immense. 

More from Germany soon, and some might even be IT related.  Au revoir.