As I was reading John Hagel's post this morning on Pareto Paring (in a nutshell: applying the 80/20 rule to your business to figure out what to cut) a question occurred to me: Do any executives really only plan for sudden downturns after they happen?
Maybe I have a naive view, but I tend to assume that the executive management of any company has a model for their business that can take as inputs various economic factors and has as outputs the adjustments the company will need to make to remain at optimal production. I can assure you that ExxonMobil knows exactly how they would handle $20 oil. And $200 oil. And everything in between.
If you're running a business, do you find yourself reacting to the current economic crisis by looking around and wondering, "What do we do now?" If so, you should consider what you'll be doing when the situation changes dramatically yet again. Because if recent history is any indicator, the only constant we can count on is change. Big change.
I haven't posted anything to this blog since Obama won, but that's only because I've been busy.
I'm getting ready to start my economics degree program at UT, and blogging about it at The 40-Year-Old Freshman. I'm also working hard on some stuff I'm super excited about at Spanning Sync. And, of course, I'm getting ready for the holiday season, which includes my kids' birthdays.
I have a bunch of blog posts queued up in the back of my brain, but they seem to get crowded off the calendar by actual work. The good news there is that I'll have some pretty awesome work-related stuff to share in the not-too-distant future.
Thanks to a tip from @yojibee, I just tried and then immediately purchased AppZapper. Most excellent for uninstalling software that doesn't want to be uninstalled—like the resource-hogging Adobe Reader and Adobe Update. My MacBook Pro now starts up waaay faster.
AppZapper is for people who want to confidently try new apps while knowing they can uninstall them easily. Drag one or more unwanted apps onto AppZapper and watch as it finds all the extra files and lets you delete them with a single click.
"...the idea being that all the training in the world was of no use, maybe even worse than useless, if you did not know when to use it, and knowing when to use it was a lot harder than it sounded, because sometimes, if you waited too long to go into action, it was too late, and other times, if you did it too early, you only made matters worse."
We use Google Groups for the Spanning Sync discussion forum, and until recently spam had become a serious nuisance. To weed it out, I had enabled message moderation, but I was still spending an inordinate amount of time deleting spam messages and banning users (who were probably using one-time accounts anyway).
Then Google did something wonderful. They added a "Spam" category to the moderation panel, which lets me quickly delete the message, ban the user who posted it from the group, and allow everything else—all with just a couple of clicks. Nice!
Gizmodo brings word that you can now control your Sonos with your iPhone, so if you own one of the pricey multi-room audio systems (and an iPhone) your life just got a little more integrated.
Update: I got to check out the new Sonos iPhone app at my friend Doug Stoakley's house last night, and it is slick. As he said, it's better than the $500 Sonos hardware controller.
With images of financial crises, natural disasters, human ugliness, and existential threats being regularly pushed into our collective consciousness, it can be hard to remember that these are amazing times.
If you had told me even ten years ago that I'd be walking around with a wireless-broadband-connected, GPS-enabled, hardware-accelerated 3D unix workstation in my pocket that could render maps, traffic, and high-resolution satellite photographs in perspective along with constantly-updated points of interest—and that that was just one application among thousands—I'd have smacked you and called you Neal Stephenson.
Responding to yesterday's announcements from Rackspace that they intend to compete with Amazon's EC2, S3, and CDN businesses, today Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pre-annouced via blog post that his company will be adding monitoring, load balancing, and automatic scaling to their offerings:
To make sure our customers can also benefit from our experience in building highly efficient systems we have decided to release versions of these services on the Amazon Web Services platform. The Monitoring, Load Balancing and Auto-Scaling services will be combined with a Management Console that provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets you configure, manage and access your AWS cloud resources.
They will first be released in private beta and you can express your interest in that program on the AWS web site. More details can be found in the posting on the Amazon Web Services blog.
Also, Amazon AWS is no longer in beta and EC2 now includes a 99.95% uptime SLA. Rackspace's offerings, while still in beta (meaning that there will be maintenance windows for upgrades) sport a 99.9% SLA.
This is welcome news for those of us who have considered running commercial services on EC2 but have been discouraged by the complexity of configuring load balancing and auto-scaling. Plus, the competition between these two companies can only be good for customers.
I'm at the RackSpace "Cloud Event" where they're launching their cloud hosting business. Luckily I showed up with RedMonk analyst Michael Coté so they didn't throw me out. In fact, I got to meet Rackspace's CTO John Engates. I guess it pays to hang out with celebrities. Or at least popular analysts.
I could tell right away this was an event for a Texas company: lunch was catered by The Salt Lick. Nice. Coté and I grabbed some BBQ with Emil Sayegh, who runs Rackspace's Cloud Hosting division Mosso.
Now, on to the event proper.
Cloud Sites
They're talking about Mosso. I've never really understood what Mosso is about, but from his description it sounds compelling: standard stacks (including LAMPP), then "you code it, you load it, and watch it scale". No worrying about scaling, load balancing, etc. Hmm. Sounds extremely interesting for us.
Cloud Files
To that they're adding "cloud storage". Cloud Files on mosso.com. $0.15/GB (comparable to Amazon S3's pricing.). REST API's, Web-based GUI file manager. Beta (specifically, they'll still have maintenance windows, but they have a 99.9% SLA.) Like S3, Cloud Files includes a CDN (same price as their standard bandwidth: $0.22/GB). Powered by Limelight Networks.
Killer app for cloud storage is backup. Announcing an acquisition of JungleDisk! Congrats to those guys. JungleDisk works with Amazon S3, but was designed for multiple cloud providers, so customers will have a choice. They can still choose S3. Interesting. "Sync to the Cloud" for mobile users. Hmm.
Notably, Rackspace is moving up the stack to applications instead of just staying at the platform level like Amazon. Good news for customers, maybe not so much for application-development partners. I asked this question, and was told that they'd be focusing on "ubiquitous apps" like email, backup, etc., and would leave niche apps to partners. Which begs the question, where's the line?
Cloud Servers
"Raw compute" resources. Talking Xen, so I assume this is a raw virtual machine instead of a preconfigured instance. Announcing the acquisition of Slicehost. Uh, congrats to those guys too. :-)
When I enrolled as a freshman at The University of Texas in the fall of 1988, I did so under protest. I didn't have any friends who cared about school, I didn't care about school, and I didn't care that I didn't care about school. The University called me a Presidental Scholar and an Undergraduate Fellow, but beneath the titles and the test scores I was a disaffected, angry young man.
I thought the idea teaching a bunch of eighteen-year-olds the theoretical underpinnings of the world was ridiculous. With little to no practical experience on which to hang the theory, how could they possibly exercise any critical judgement? They would have no intuitive feel for the topics they were being taught and would have to take it all on blind faith. Universities, I said, were more appropriate for people who had lived long enough to truly develop their own worldviews than for teenagers.
Over the next four years not much changed apart from the fact that I earned—with the absolute minimum effort required—a degree in Computer Science.
Fast forward twenty years.
It's now 2008, and I'm a bit more mature than I was then. I've grown up and built a career, a couple of companies, and a family of my own. I know something about discipline, achievement, responsibility, and sacrifice. I'm proud of what I've done, and I find that I've become one of those people I imagined when I was eighteen who's experienced enough of the world to truly appreciate higher education. So I'm putting my theory to the test and going back to school.
I considered getting a master's in CS, but have decided instead to add an Economics major to my degree. I'll still be working on Spanning Sync (and other, unannounced projects) full time, so I'll only be have time for one or two classes each semester. My first day of class is Tuesday, January 20.
1 OK, I'm not yet 40 (38, actually) and I won't be a freshman (degree-holding senior, technically), but "The 38-Year-Old Degree-Holding Senior" isn't quite right.
Tonight I saw the candidates as I've hoped they would be from the outset: as respectful, deliberate rivals for the presidency. Absent were the ad hominem attacks that have characterized the last few weeks of the campaign, as was any discussion whatsoever of the vice presidential candidates.
Tonight I saw John McCain return to what I believe is his true nature. He abandoned the vicious, slanderous methods of Karl Rove and his acolytes. He said hat he meant and meant what he said. He engaged his opponent on policy instead of personal attacks. He performed admirably. But in doing so, I believe he conceded the election.
Obama won the night, not only with his ease and, to borrow a word from the New York Times' David Brooks, fluidity, but also with his command of the immediate future. While McCain dwelled on the past—his opposition to sending troops into Lebanon two decades ago, his record of bipartisanship, his military service—Obama was able to answer questions from the audience of "What happens next?" and "How will the bailout affect me?" McCain did himself a service tonight, but it was a service to his legacy, not his campaign.
Senator McCain, I wanted to vote for you in 2000, and I'm still sorry you weren't nominated. I wish that when the planes hit the towers in 2001 you and not George Bush had been our Commander in Chief. But I'm glad that you will lose this election to your opponent, who is better suited to belatedly lead the United States into the twenty-first century.
In an email exchange with a good friend of mine who is a Republican, I asked this question:
"If it were George W. Bush running against Barack Obama, would you vote to reelect Bush?"
He said:
"I hadn't considered this. After some thought, I could not force myself to cast another vote for W, given the disaster that his presidency has become. Of course, I also would not willingly cast a vote for someone with so little experience in life as Obama, so I'd probably (for the first time since being of voting age) would sit that one out."
So I asked the obvious followup question:
"OK, fair enough. So what are the differences between George Bush and John McCain that would prevent you from voting for the former but would lead you to vote for the latter?"
His response:
"I'm not sure the transitive property of equality can apply to people, can it?
"If it can, that was a trap. ;-)"
If you're planning to vote for John McCain, I ask you the same questions. I'd love to hear your answers in the comments. Thanks!
Update: We saw, and to their credit both candidates kept the discussion on a Presidential level. It was a substantive, respectful debate of philosophy. My cynicism is abated. Thanks to both Senators McCain and Obama for that.
"A survey of academic economists by The Economist finds the majority—at times by overwhelming margins—believe Mr Obama has the superior economic plan, a firmer grasp of economics and will appoint better economic advisers." —Examining the Candidates, The Economist, 10/3/08
Ifill, moderator: Terrible. Yes, she was constrained by the agreed debate rules. But she gave not the slightest sign of chafing against them or looking for ways to follow up the many unanswered questions or self-contradictory answers. This was the big news of the evening. Katie Couric, and for that matter Jim Lehrer, have never looked so good.
Palin: "Beat expectations." In every single answer, she was obviously trying to fit the talking points she had learned to the air time she had to fill, knowing she could do so with impunity from the moderator. But she did it with spunk and without any of the poleaxed moments she had displayed in previous questions. The worst holes in her answers - above all, about the Vice President's role, also either mishearing or ignoring the question about her "Achilles heel" - were concealed in ways they haven't been before.
Biden: No mistakes. This is a bigger deal than it seems, since Biden could easily have seemed bullying, condescending, chauvinistic, or whatever. He didn't. And while he was woolly-sounding in the beginning, he was commanding and authoritative - from his side's perspective - on issues of foreign policy and constitutional balance. And to all appearances sincere in his choking-up near the end when talking about having a child in peril. Overall, don't see how he could have balanced all the conflicting pressures on him much better.
The race: No fundamental change. Which is better news for Obama than McCain.
Katie Couric asks Sarah Palin what happens when terrorists like Hamas are democratically elected. Instead of answering that question, Palin seems to answer a different one: "What happens if someone who has absolutely no idea what she's talking about is democratically nominated?"
This isn't funny any more. It's pathetic and deeply disturbing.
"Appearing at a Senate Press Secretaries Association reception at the Cornerstone Government Affairs office, Will offered a harsh assessment of John McCain's running mate.
"Palin is 'obviously not qualified to be President,' he remarked, describing her interview on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric as a 'disaster.'" —George Will: Palin Is Not Qualified, Huffington Post, 10/1/08
"'I think she has pretty thoroughly—and probably irretrievably—proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States,' David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush who is now a conservative columnist, said in an interview." —Concerns About Palin’s Readiness as a Big Test Nears, The New York Times, 9/30/08
Tonight I saw the candidates as I've hoped they would be from the outset: as respectful, deliberate rivals for the presidency. Absent were the ad hominem attacks that have characterized the last few weeks of the campaign, as was any discussion whatsoever of the vice presidential candidates.
