“did some thinking, and suddenly it was gone 5”

• Spent most of the day on the newsletter episode, using two analyst reports as an excuse to putter around platform engineering again. I didn’t do my work to lookup platform engineering definitions; a delightful effect is that I was sent two: from Donnie (such nice writing style!) and a definition from Gartner.
• When I refer to analysts reports (Forrester, Gartner, IDC, 451 Reseach, etc., etc.) I reference the analyst shop as the author, e.g., “Gartner seems to be saying…” I feel bad each time I write this: there are actual people writing these reports. Sometimes I reference the people, especially in presentation footnotes. But, it’s a universal, industry style to just list the analyst shop name. In fact, when you get official permission from those shops to use their content (something you need to do when you’re a vendor, even if you’re quoting public material - I don’t know: it’s just the norms), they strip out the authors and just put the shop name. That tells you a lot about their business mode, style, and overall vibe.
• As I mentioned in the newsletter, I like industry analyst work a lot. Having been one at two very different places (RedMonk and 451 Research), and consumed a lot of analyst material, briefed them, worked with them, and become friends with several analysts, I have a much more detailed view and experience with analyst shops than most people. Most of the negative impressions about industry analysts are just utter, uninformed bullshit. Like most things that get the drive-by, pearl-clutching treatment in our little tech world. (Wow! What a weird thing for me to feel the need to write!)
• Booked my VMware Explore travel, to Las Vegas. So many happy RedMonk memories from there. One of the best: that time James Governor lost his shit about the PDF standard at dinner with Mark Cathcart as a rando hanger-on.
• On-deck: I still need to finish my CF Day talk for next week. I’ve written and re-written the 20 minute presentation in my had many times over the past two weeks, and now I need to actually finalize it. I was thinking I could finally try a slideless format. That might be fun: would they think I hadn’t done the work? It’s only 20 minutes.
• On-deck: I have a three part webinar series on “FSIs” - financial services institutions. Two things: here, you can see enterprise marketing in action. It’s on the topic of FSIs (banks, insurance companies, and associated companies), it will be emailed to people at FSIs, and we use the “FSI” insider term. Thankfully, I’ve teamed up with one of my co-workers who actually worked at several FSIs: he knows what he’s talking about, first hand! I’m looking forward to these…but I need to do the work. I figure I’ll sort of interview him for the first time about the topic at hand, then give a lightly tailored overview of what we provide there. I don’t usually “sell” out services, but I’m beginning to think that my way of presenting it (which largely ignores whatever the official story is and instead just goes over, well, what I think about them) is helpful.
• On-deck, the foggy future: after these two things, I have ongoing conversations about new material, topics, “conversations” to start up, help people with, and architect/write.
• I’ve lost much my ability to read books. They have to be super-high interesting/quality for me to read more than a few pages a day. Also, you know, I work all day, then family all day, and by the time I have time alone, mostly fall asleep.