Now that we’ve replaced all these people with a robot, how can we climb the CAGR?

I was a guest on the Cloudcast this week. I go over how I use AI and then Brian and I discuss how companies could get more use out of AI.

Most of it, I think, rests on how management behaves and uses AI. As with all “productivity” tools, management can get some quick-wins on “productivity” by replacing people with automation - firing humans, favoring computers. But that’s empty calories. That’s a one-time bottom line numbers juice.

After AI “optimizes” your company by removing costs, how is management then going to grow revenue and company valuation? To do that, you need to take the free time people have after automating all the bullshit tasks out, and do something new with that free-time.

Is management ready to deal with the question “now that our meatware has have 10% more free time across the board, what will we do?” Executives always complain that they need more budget, that they can’t find the “talent” they need (read: we choose not to pay people what they’re worth), that they just can’t get things done because everyone is so busy (and incompetent), etc. Well, applied correctly, using AI in the enterprise addresses some of that. Now’s management’s chance!

Part of the “ethics” thing here is more of a mindset change. In the West, we have a belief that if you haven’t suffered, real work hasn’t been done. You can’t just be killed to save humanity, you have to drag your own machine of death to the hill. We value sacrifice and suffering. If something is effortless, it must be less valuable and, likely, not even real work.

So, in a corporate setting, if all the sudden you can spit out text and ideas that previously took a week…we don’t know how to deal with the ethics or that. Did I do actual work? Should I be paying this person for just asking a computer for a “FY25Q3 marketing strategy” and then getting a draft that what would have taken two weeks of meetings? Is it unethical for me to “take credit” for the work? Is it like taking credit for the work Excel does for you (“they’re a wizard at Excel!”), or taking credit for the work that one of your staff does for you (“they steal ideas from their people”)?

This goes both ways though: what’s the ethics of an executive using an AI to write routine internal emails. Internal communication in a company is very expensive, important, and risky. Creating it takes many skilled hands, many meetings, and usually leads to boring, barely functional text. And if the workers reading it misunderstand it and go off in the wrong direction, that negative effect compounds. Worse, it could demoralize them! And, if employees thought the executive uses AI to write one of these emails, some (many?) workers would think it was disingenuous and slimy.

Another thought-tool: executives hire management consultant firms to do studies and come up with strategy. How is this different than them using ChatGPT to do the same? The answer to this is helpful as well: strategy is just step one of hundreds. Once you have the strategy doc, you now have to figure out how to apply it, how to adapt to reality, and all the other stuff we call “execution.” You could ask the management consultants (or ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to help there, but then you’ll still need to actually do the work. AI doesn’t do the actual work, meatware does.

Despite all the AI glory-talk, I’d wildly estimate that less than 10% of knowledge workers are using AI seriously for their daily work. We have no idea what how enterprises will apply and benefit from generative AI usage once 30%, 50%, 80% of them use it “all day long.” I don’t think anyone is prepared for what to do after all that productivity is disgorged onto the meeting room table. In your enterprise AI strategy, is there a slide that says what you’re going to do with all that free time your meat-sacks will have?

As with instant messaging in the 2000s, there’s plenty of shadow IT going on. At the moment, those workers are getting a boost over everyone else. In a delightful twist on productivity-by-firing, AI is likely benefiting individual workers more than corporations right now.

Anyhow. Brian and I talk about all that in the discussion. More importantly, I also give a slight overview on using AI to play D&D.

Listen to it!

Relative to your interests

• The Ultimate Guide to Grappling in D&D - This is one of the more obscure combat actions in D&D, but actually seems really useful, especially. for lower level characters.

• Sonos’ interim CEO hits all the right notes in first letter to employees - This “hey, I’m the new executive” memo is some well done internal comms. He literally has a Sanos tattoo and mentions three times that he’s uses the products.

• Understanding Private Cloud, Hybrid Infrastructure, Multi-Cloud, and Distributed Cloud: A Comprehensive Framework - Classify cloud based on how much control you have and much mixing of other clouds you have. As opposed to where the cloud is. Also, a little bit about NetApp ONTP.

• Google Workspace business getting full Gemini, price increase - Instead of charging $20 to 30 extra a month of AI, give it to everyone and raise everyone’s price by $2. // Teams pricing going up similarly.

• What CIOs should know as DORA regulations kick in - All the great -ility’s. // “The business continuity standards laid out in the EU’s DORA require banks, insurers, securities exchanges, trading venues and other financial services providers to maintain backup systems for swift incident recovery. The EU expects impacted parties to be able to restore critical functions within two hours of an outage incident, per DORA.”

• Brainwash An Executive Today! - (1) What it’s like to market to technical people. (2) He doesn’t like LinkedIn. (3) he discovers enterprise event marketing.

• Trying Times for Tech - “Microsoft is trying to socialise the costs of its AI investments because people largely don’t care about AI and don’t want to pay for it. Microsoft really doesn’t want The Line to notice how little demand there is for AI and would prefer to force customers to pay back the billions it has already set on fire.”

Wastebook

• A functioning imposter.

• He’s been through hell, several times now, but he’s the one that keeps going back.

• “algorithms may have forced our perspective of the internet into the size of a pinhole, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The internet is a wild, weird, vast world and a testament to the wild, weird, vastness of humanity. Go off the rails.” Here.

• “Another time, Yeltsin reportedly called Clinton while inebriated and asked him to hold a secret meeting on a submarine.” History.

• “If possible, avoid taking on a role that involves changing a large established culture. The established culture always wins.” Corporation, heal thyself.

• “Embark on a voyage of enlightenment as we transcend the boundaries of conventional reporting.” xraised

• The Broken Deal == the free ride is over.

• “These days, in the capering adventures of my wild-and-restless 70s, I’m often hard-put to know if the world is old-and-boring or whether that’s just me personally.” bruces.

• “The Belgian government warned its citizens not to eat their discarded Christmas trees” Harper’s Weekly Review

• “wishcasting” Here.

• “‘Being like Socrates’ just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking ‘sauce’ that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense.” Open Socrates.

• “The Turbo America view of the 80s.” Here.

• Reinforced imposter syndrome.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Feb 3rd to 5th, Ghent, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LONDON10.

Logoff

We all know slides are a terrible way to do internal corporate coordination and planning. Slides are a prop for presenting, which means a person needs to be there. The next time you email around slides, send a recording of you going over them. Or, just write some prose instead.

There are slides that are actually prose. “Sorry about all the text on this slide,” someone will say. This is actually great! That’s exactly what we actually want: writing. If you’re going to email around your slides, try putting too much text in your slides.

Smuggle in what we all know is better: a document.

Just links and stuff today.

Relative to your interests

• When to Consider Building a Private Cloud: A Pragmatic Perspective - Yes, and: consider if you already have a private cloud and it’s working just fine. Don’t able flip your success to chase improvements that you’ve already achieved and rely on.

• Trust in Generative AI: A European and Dutch Perspective - ”the gap between GenAI usage for personal activities (47%) and work-related tasks (23%) remains significant.” And: “Only 35% of Dutch respondents say their company promotes generative AI use at work. It’s one thing to allow its use, but without support, employees might fail to unlock its full potential.”

• o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) - “o1 will just take lazy questions at face value and doesn’t try to pull the context from you. Instead, you need to push as much context as you can into o1.” // Instead, give it briefs, memos, reports to start with. As always: context.

• Not even OpenAI’s $200/mo ChatGPT Pro plan can turn a profit - I use the AI things a lot and I’m still baffled at how you could use her $200 of it each month. What are these people doing? Living in there? // Maybe it’s the live voice features and image generation? Maybe they load up huge docs?

• How Fidelity’s “chaos buffet” pushed AWS to new Lambda tools - “Fidelity has over 7,700 applications (75% of its estate) in the public cloud. Among these are its trade order management system, which relies heavily on Lambda’s serverless, event-driven compute service.”

• No Tech Workers or No Tech Jobs? - Trying to answer the quandary: if there are so many unemployed programmers (after layoffs), why do companies frequently say it’s hard to find programmers to hire?

• The Last Strategy Framework You’ll Ever Need - I know this is unhelpfully snarky, but my experience is that the secret of successful strategies is to have one. The framework you use is situations to what your organization likes and can understand. The next secrets are: tell people what the strategy is, and then follow it for at least a year before coming up with a new one. // Great over in this piece.

• Review: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - Good excerpts and book notes on (corporate) strategy. // “A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.” // Meanwhile, here is the problem with relying too much on war for your case studies: war focusing on killing people to achieve its “business outcomes.”

• Bitcoin Lessons - The case that crypto is bad. This is a good counter/balance to the Trump Tech Bros acting all butt-hurt about crypto regulation.

• What ‘Free Speech’ Is - “Right now, it is important for Meta to avoid getting on the incoming Trump administration’s shit list, so they, like everyone, are grovelling.” // Good over all, almost philosophic, analysis.

• Alcohol Carries New Risks in Middle Age - “Researchers are not entirely sure why middle-aged drinking is on the rise, though they noted that adults in this age range faced the pressures of caring for both children and aging parents, heightened demands at work and “historic” levels of loneliness.” // Well, obviously! And for thousands of years.

• Revealing Questions - Potential interview questions for podcasts, etc. Also small talk.

Wastebook

• “As always, economics is downstream of politics, and politics is downstream of culture.” Scott Sumner.

• It’s OK to ask why AI prototypes are not getting to production - “Is a wizard an agent?”

• “Traditional, non-intelligent applications” as a way of saying “apps without AI,” that is, all pre-AI apps.

• “our heels get higher the closer we inch to death” Sartorial mori.

• “My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I’m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there’s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there’s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations are nothing but a distraction.” ★

• “volte-faces”

• “swingeing” - 1.5°C;

• “Not long after, it was my turn to hold her for the first time. I took her to the window. From up there, we could see all the lights of the town at night. And I held her up to the light-splashed window, and introduced her to the world, and asked it to be kind to her.” light25 6.

• “Cuddly cod were garnished with fuzzy lemons and served with plushy peas.” The $12bn part of the “kidult” market.

• “wisdom art” Here.

• I used to be something of an armchair intellectual. Now I find it hard to finish the first few pages of a book. (I can still traipse through podcasts.) I’m not sure what happened, but I need to train back up and build the mind-muscle to maintain attention, thought, and synthesis across months.

• “sclerotic shiggoth” Not Boring.

• “now in her mid 70s, she creates a new image and a new career starting with, of all things, a shockingly hard-assed roast of Justin Bieber. The Bieber roast leads to a succesful colloboration with Snoop Dogg. Legendary.” Tyler.

• “I have removed my brain to the dreamy equivalent of a room next door.” Tina Brown on 2025.

• “We need to drink our own champaign, even if it tastes like dog food at first.”

• See the “shoes of history drop.”

• Hateful chaos.

Logoff

I’ll be at cfgmgmtcamp, Feb 3rd to 5th. I’m speaking. I now go to this conference every year, and it’s great. Ghent can be a little tough to get to, but it’s worth it. The conference is a unique mix of people and topics that you won’t get in any other conference. And Ghent is a fantastic, under-appricated city to be a tourist in if you’ve never been. If you’re in the (enterprise) infrastructure software world, you should go.

//

I’ve been working on a longer piece about the “Trump Tech Bro Vibe Shift.” I haven’t done the math, but there’s a minority of prominent tech people who are suddenly in favor of Trump. There are obvious stand-outs here. I don’t really understand their math in moving over. It feels like anything multiple by zero is always zero. That is, aside from just the pure mechanics and outcomes, in a quality of life and moral sense: so, you want to have a life where you sign-up for full-on Trump think? Is that who you want sitting at the Thanksgiving table every year?

I don’t know: “what am I missing?” as they say. So, I’m trying to at least characterize it. So far I’ve listened to about three hours of Marc Andreessen talk, and now there’s this! I think I have something finally, but I need to sit on it for a little beyond the off-the-cuff chunks I’ve done so far.

Field notes from my annual note taking rumspringa

I went through my annual “I should try to use Obsidian” cycle last month. As always, I went back to Apple Notes after a few weeks.

Here’s my read-out of this year’s cycle.1

Notebook philosophies

First, here’s an Apple Notes method to get an Obsidian/Notion feel, briefly mentioned this week on our podcast. The method also gives you a sense of what the hard-core Obsidian philosophy is. For me, it’s over the top and too much work - but I do admire the Shortcuts cleverness.

The two things I like about the Obsidian philosophy are

1. Store your plaintext/markdown files in directories. I found syncing Obsidian with iCloud to be not good (you very often have to wait). I could use/pay for the Obsidian Sync service, but then that defeats much of the plain text point. Drafts, in contrast, does not have plain text, but because (I think?) it uses the iCloud sync services, it works extremely well, “seamlessly.” Related: editing in markdown, markdown being “native.”

2. The Obsidian Daily Note feature. I like the idea of have a daily note that’s the “hub” of everything you do. This is easy to do manually (I do it in Apple Noes), but making it core to the notebook philosophy is really nice. You can set a template (or use the default) and it’s auto-created for you. Of course, inherent in this is Obsidians first philosophic principle: linking notes (in both directions) is what makes them valuable, e.g., hyperlinks/WWW/Hypercard.

3. The command palette. This is one of the best UI metaphors of the past ~15 years and is used in many other apps. You can add this in to all of MacOS with Paletro, but having the app’s features built to use a command palette is best.

My friction with Obsidian:

1. I sort of like the plugin community…but I found them very mixed as far as quality. And after a while, I added so many that it made things a mess. It was like having to many icons in the menu bar, or too many apps on my phone.

2. As always, I really like using the Apple Pencil: I’m Gen-X, so I grew up with hand-writing as a core writing method, on par with typing. More importantly, it’s a core thinking method, especially when combined with drawing. A a sheet of A3 paper in landscape mode with a blue-ink Pilot G2 0.5mm is still the way I get my best thinking done. Support for the Apple Pencil in Obsidian is still too weird for me. The Excildraw (or whatever) solution in Obsession just didn’t feel good to me. I still think Goodnotes is the clear best-in-class for the Apple Pencil life, but their text handling (last I checked) is not good - hence, I compromise to the “suite” of Apple Notes, giving up the best-in-class of Goodnotes. I used Goodnotes for years, but you throw out all your plain text dreams and pretty much everything else you expect form a general notebook app with them.

3. Aesthetics. I just can’t get with the text editor feel, the vibe, of Obsidian. I feel like a skinny jeans guy in a JNCO scene.

Apple Notes “secrets” and making Apple Notes beter

There are many things that would make Apple Notes better, and wrapped up in those are ways that it’s good:

1. Make it better: The option to store notes as plain text/markdown in a file system (iCloud). Technically, this is not a big deal at all as numerous notebook apps show (Obsidian, Bear,2 just using a text editor). Privacy wise, I completely trust Apple the most of any tech company so I don’t mind storing my stuff with them. (The privacy marketing works!!)

2. Related: proper exporting. Apple Notes doesn’t have have no batch exporting and you can only export to a PDF. There’s programatic ways to export, and even hacks (I believe what you do is just load up the sqlite database Apple Note use and then Bob’s your uncle). You can use the third party Exporter app instead, which I recommend, but it should be built into Apple Notes.

3. A markdown mode. It’s 2025, markdown is a native way of writing for many people. QED.

4. You should be able to mix together text and Apple Pencil drawings like you can in Goodnotes. Right now, they’re separate sections of a note. I can live with that (I do!) but it’d be cooler if the type input types could overlap.

5. I don’t really understand, rather, know all of the philosophy of Quick Notes. It’s intriguing, but feels wrong, at best, anemic-weird. After a few more years of iterating over this feature, it could really be something. If you don’t already have an ingrained bookmarking philosophy (I was born into del.icio.us and so now use pinboard.in, and I can’t fathom any other way to live),3 using Quick Notes would be perfect for stashing content/bookmarking. Also, I think there’s some method you could come up with to use Quick Notes for Daily Notes - you can set it up so that you append your Quick Notes to the same note instead of creating one each time…at least on the iPhone?4

6. ChatGPT’s desktop app works with Apple Notes. You can bind (or whatever it’s called) a ChatGPT session to the currently open Note. It’s like copying the Note into a chat. (Does it sync/update the Note text as you change it, or just take an initial copy? Can you have it change the note?) This could be interesting. If Apple Intelligence finally left toddlerhood and had a chat panel along side a note (like Gemini in Google Docs), and also let you add in the context of other Notes, shit would get real interesting. For example, I’ve exported all my journal entries (going back to 2009) with the Exporter tool to markdown, put them into big-ass files by year, and uploaded them to a project in ChatGPT so that I can use ChatGPT as a therapist and ask it “what the fuck is wrong with me?” It’s pretty good! With this kind of setup you’d also want to do local LLM’ing, and if Apple implemented MCP it’d could be amazing.5

7. PDF editing. This is so close to what you want with managing your PDF library. My “PDF library” is just a directory system of, you know, PDFs. As always, the problem is Apple Notes disgust with file systems. If Apple Notes stored the PDFs your editing/using in the file system instead of in Apple Notes, it’d be awesome.

8. The voice memo recording is a good start. It stores your original recording and a transcript. It needs to have the one button, start recording right away feature that Just Press Record, Voice Memos, and Drafts has, though. Right now it takes four to five buttons/clicks/taps to just start recording.

9. Integration to other Apple apps. There’s some integrations, but they can always be better. In particular, it’s absurd that the Journal app is an island - it should just be part of Notes, probably a button in a note to “create/build a Journal entry.” Freeform is excellent, but it’s also an island. Reminders is pretty good, and it should be integrated into Apple Notes: the check lists in Apple Note should show up/be lists in Reminders and vice-versa. All these integrations could be optional, etc. I don’t use Apple Mail, but I’m sure there is and could be stuff there.

There’s all sorts of other things in my wishlist, but they’re minor. Even the Daily Note automation is pretty far down the list.

It’s worth looking at the Apple Notes manual. Apple is total shit at devrel’ing it’s apps (detailed explanations, demos, and telling you their PoV - the “philosophy” I talk about above), so you have to really dig into their docs to understand Apple Noes and learn the intermediate and above features.

For example, did you know you can type “>>” to get a popup of other Notes to link to? Did you know you can keep typing to search over the Notes? The document scanning is good (built in the Files app too).6 Smart Folders in general and to do things like show all notes with unchecked check boxes is good. And so forth.

The Mac Stories people are pretty good at filling in the gaps, and you can pick through the usual mountain of Internet garbage to find a few gems here and there.

In conclusion: #DefaultsLifestyle Forever!

Colophon: that I wrote this all in Drafts and then copied it as rich text into Substack, where I then did further editing, is further commentary on Apple Notes that’s worth pondering when you have nothing else more exciting to do.

Logoff

That’s enough for today. I’ll try to bundle up the usual links and stuff next episode.

(That said, there’s three pieces of original content for you this week, all podcasts: Software Defined Talk #501, Whitney and I’s interview with Sasha, and my guesting on Cloud Foundry weekly.)

Monolithic Transformation revisited

Ryan re-read my 2019 book on improving your application strategy, mostly at large organizations:

The message is as relevant now as it was in 2019: success comes down to nailing the basics - ship fast, iterate faster, and keep the user front and center. Coté’s framework of small-batch thinking, cross-functional teams, and user-first design isn’t theory - it’s a map for organizations to fundamentally rethink how they deliver software.

Here’s the punchline…five years on, I’m still having the same conversations with organizations trying to figure out how to get better at software, but not willing to change their process. Yes, the tools have evolved, but the core of transformation hasn’t changed. It’s still about people, process, and focus. Not just for tech, but for any type of meaningful change.

You can get the PDF for that book completely free now, no email gating even.

Around 2019/2020, all us in the industry went way down the stack to Kubernetes and decided to build our way back up. I hope we’re finally done with that and back to focusing on apps and how they’re built and improved, not run.

Of course, all of that applies to making use of AI as well. I hope that community doesn’t get stuck at the infrastructure layer for years. Instead, it should build out that commodity layer and move on to focusing on actual applications. Writing those apps and then continuously improving them is he tough, never-ending work.

Relevant to your interests

• Integrating AI Agents into Companies - Changing how organizations work to fit what AI can do. Also, you need context about the organization: as always access to data will be a bottleneck, which is to say, governance and meetings.

• Cognitive load is what matters - Legacy software can mean: when changing the code requires too much cognitive load.

• Public Domain Day 2025 - “The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.” And: more highlights.

• Productivity “hacks” don’t work. These do. - If you don’t have a to do list and use your calendar, start with that and ignore all other productivity improvement advice.

• How Do You Create AI Advantage? - You’re going to need access to all that data you have. Historically, this is a very difficult problem in large enterprises and is rarely solved well. For example, are you satisfied with your CRM? For all your enterprise AI hopes and dreams, focus on that first. // “Develop your firm’s knowledge capacity by inventorying your knowledge assets; make sure that you have a plan to build proprietary advantage with the knowledge you’ve captured, and begin the process of capturing tacit knowledge to sustain that advantage.” // Related: data wrangling commentary.

• Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision - Dell has always been the “configure exactly what you want” PC dealer. Enterprises can then setup their own “standard configurations” to force on employees. Here, they’re trying to make opinionated laptops (like Apple).

• Our Favorite Management Tips of 2024 - “Add up your total score. If you rated any of these items a 4 or a 5, you have some workaholic tendencies. But if your total score is 15 or above, you’re displaying significant signs of workaholism.” // Plus some PowerPoint tips.

• DX Unveils New Framework for Measuring Developer Productivity.

• The Truth About January 6th - Too easily forgotten.

Wastebook

• You can always put dishes through the dishwasher twice.

• “Your business, your body, and your buttocks. It’s true. On an airplane, those are important things o take care of.” Brand from First Class, re-stated by Noah, Hotline Show #44.

• Also: “Whoa. Brought tears to my eyes. Thinking back…when I was cool.”

• “It’s Not to Hide a Magical Cooking Rat.” Here.

Conferences

cfgmgmtcamp, speaking, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th.

Logoff

Nothing to report. See you next time.

CaaS Problems

Nicky lists the advantages of a real platform over Kubernetes. The platform is Cloud Foundry, and it’s been in development and use for many years, all ready to use.

Building platforms

I think he goes a little strong on the “sometimes Kubernetes is good for…” part, but that’s mandatory seasoning for such commentary.I don’t hear a lot of people saying “we love Kubernetes!” This is especially true at “normal” organizations. Those that don’t complain (too much) have built layer upon layer of platform-code on-top of Kubernetes and tooling around it, hiding it from developers and even operators. That seems like a lot of work when you could just use an already made PaaS.

You can get a sense for what those layers are in the CNCF’s platforms white paper, and then an idea of the two the three (or more!) years of work you’ll be doing to make it all work in their platform maturity model paper. Both of these papers are excellent - I don’t think they’re read widely enough.

The wrong layer

I think what’s happened is a classic dog catching the bus situation. Originally, Kubernetes’s purpose was the commodify AWS’s hold on IaaS, giving Google and Red Hat a strategic tool. Later, everyone else jumped onto that strategy. It was meant for public cloud providers and people building platforms. In the end, AWS seems to have absorbed and adapted to the threat. That is: Kubernetes was for cloud builders, not developers.

The Kubernetes people told us his over and over. But, through the usual resume driven development and vendors happy to be janitors for the mess, Kubernetes moved up the stack to a general purpose platform layer, used directly by application developers. Clearly, that’s a mistake, and we’ve spent well over five years dealing with it.

Will someone think of the operator?

There’s another thing scurrying about in his post: developer productivity is fine, but operations productivity is better. A misinterpretation of DevOps is that developers should work more with infrastructure, networking, and whatever else is in “IaaS.” SRE and platform engineering tried to correct this, and maybe we’ll get there. But, in the meantime, using Kubernetes just means you’re making developers deal with infrastructure.

It also means you’re giving your operations staff a lot of extra work. When I talk with people in large organizations, a lot of this comes down to adding in all the standard enterprise grade features to Kubernetes: HA, storage management, availability, security, multi-region hoopla, etc. You know, all the great -illities. This is especially true when it comes to data management and databases - something that’s core to all enterprise apps. Those things have been solved for a long time by cloud providers - the public ones and in private cloud with VMware.

In all this focus on developer productivity over the years (and, worse, Kubernetes), we’ve lost sight of operator productivity. This seemed like a good gamble when everything was going to move to public cloud - public cloud gives off the vibes that you don’t need as many operations staff, which feels true. But, now the we’re in a cloud equilibrium where workloads are spread 50/50 between public and private cloud, we should focus on operations productivity more - and security, compliance, etc.

Check out Nicky’s post for several comparisons between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes for a lot more. If what you care about is developers and enterprise applications, he makes a good case that you should just use Cloud Foundry, especially if, like so many large organizations, you already do.

2025 Predictions

Our 2025 predictions episode is out, take a listen: we recap the biggest tech news and trends of 2024, grade our predictions from the year, and look ahead to 2025. Plus, we share our New Year’s resolutions.

It’s also our 500th episode!

Relative to your interests

• How I Replaced Notion with Reminders, Numbers, and Notes - Use the apps they come with MacOS.

• Exporter - Exports your Apple Notes as markdown files. Good stuff.

• HP Study: Why Work Isn’t Working - ”Workers who use AI report greater job satisfaction and work-life balance. AI tools automate tasks, streamline workflows and give employees more time and opportunities to enjoy their work—so much so that 60% of WRI respondents who use AI credit it with contributing to a better work-life balance, while 68% say AI opens up new opportunities for them to enjoy their work.”

• Harness’s CEO Jyoti Bansal on creating an all-singing platform for developers – and “startups within startups” - Pipelines.

• The End of Democratic Delusions, George Packer, The Atlantic - “Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.”

• Screwed by the cloud: Hardware vendors need DCs to refresh - ‘Almost no organization these days wants to build their own on-prem datacenter," Edwards said. "They want to have the control, the sovereignty, the security, and compliance, but they want to locate it where they don’t have to deal with an increased power requirement, increased need for liquid cooling, which you can’t just repurpose an existing datacenter for.’

• The Beautiful Failure of Being a Man - Most everyone thinks they’re less beautiful than they actually are.

• Why are corporations cutting managers? - “a large share of a company’s work force does not produce widgets. Instead, they produce organizational capital.” // Also, what if employee (individual contributor) productivity meant less managers?

• Big Tech is pushing ‘AI agents.’ They’ll need intimate access to your data. - (1) The next big bump in AI productivity and change will come when enterprises give it access to all the data, (2) historically, access to data for the people who need it is a huge bottleneck, (3) give the advertising tech companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) access to all your personal data…what could go wrong?!

• How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle - “if you’re not able to carve out even 20 minutes for yourself, then something needs to change in your life.” // Tools that find the priorities are hard: “We hear a lot about how to optimize for productivity, but what we don’t have is the emotional awareness and emotional intelligence around why we pursue the things we pursue.” // Related: make sure you have some purpose, even if you’re rich.

• Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job - “OKRs say what is different this quarter, what we’re changing, and what we’re trying to figure out.” // Also, why OKRs work better in marketing than in product.

• OKRs for Evil and Good - Use the metrics well, and know how they work.

• They squandered the holy grail - “Writing Tools is basically useless for me. It’s just a way to get a slightly worse version of what I already have the ability to make myself better.”

• What to know about Democrats losing the working class - The race + labor angle on “how did the Democrats lose the US election” quandary.

• Tips on Using LLMs (AI) Effectively for Text - “If you take away one thing from this, it’s that asking the LLM things, rather than using it to generate copy and paste text, is almost always a better use case.”

Wastebook

• “Amiable Nickel.” In for 2025.

• “Modern adhesives are central to her efforts because she’s constantly clamping together junk-scraps which have no common material properties.” bruces.

• And: “The public limits of everyday weirdness.”

• “There’s plenty of reason to despair. But, as Terence notes, there always has been.” // Wise words for any topic. Or: “if you think The Culture it’s bad now, you should have heard Socrates' take!”

• “natural Ponzi scheme.” Krugman.

• “The most important characteristic of LLMs is heir patience.” Alex.

• “Clavdia leaves Hans Castorp with a framed X-ray of her tubercular lung.” Here.

• “The western sunshine of Ronald Regan.” Political Gabfest, Jan 2nd, 2025.

• And: “the fringe has become the rug.” (Originally from Matthew Taylor.)

• “I don’t know what a wallet looks like,” my four year old.

Conferences

cfgmgmtcamp, speaking, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th.

I’m waiting to hear back from some cfps, and need to submit to a lot more.

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We’re back in Amsterdam. For three weeks, in Texas, we lived with blue skies and temperatures in the 80’s F (high 20’s in C). As if to really rub your face in this point, the ground at Schiphol was covered in snow, the roads in sludge, and the skies full of grey. // Over the break I’ve returned to a new thought over and over: I’ve stopped listening to my own feedback loops, let alone making micro- and macro-life choices based on that feedback. That is, I don’t use my own sensing and feelings to drive how I should be living. One way of looking at it this is that I ignore the stresses in my life, thinking that they’re irrational, when really they’re signals telling me what to prioritize. That comes from over-applying all the self-care stuff from DevOps and pandemic times. One can have too much self-care. It also means I too easily slide into people-pleasing, ignoring my own desires and intuition about what needs to be done, and even my state of mind. My calibration for “trusting myself” is all out of whack: I don’t know how to balance “what I want” with “what other people want of me.”

Each year we go back to Texas for the Christmas break. We’ve lived in Amsterdam for six years, so when you’re a stranger yourself at home, you notice things. Here’s a selection.

• Using the word “awesome.”

• Dip Cup.

• People starting sentences with “Honestly…”

• Adults saying the word “TikTok.”

• Ford Ranger truck.

• Hotel rooms with three flat screen TVs.

• Egg Nog, various sizes, brands, also available in soy and oat.

• Can’t buy wine before 10am on Sunday, whether to drink now or later.

• “Have a nice day!”

• Transcendental experience eating a breakfast taco in the gas station parking lot.

• Free samples.

• Colder inside than outside, in December.

• Or: the only reason you need to bring a jacket is if you’re gonna stay inside a long time.

• “Ranch Hand.”

• Baker’s dozen of glazed donuts.

• Plastic lids on all drinks, unasked for.

• Cardboard sleeves on hot drinks.

• Plastic straws.

• Cradling a giant Stanley cup, straw with end cover.

• Pack your own doggie bag.

• “The thing about no ice-maker, though, is that we always need ice.”

• Old guys talking about Vietnam.

• “Cowboys won, I don’t wanna see it. I lost twenty dollars on that game.”

• “I forgot my koozie.”

• “It’s fun with the ice in the water. A nice touch.” Expat Kim

• Bike racks on the front of the city bus.

• “Still workin’ on that?” asked to see if you’re done eating.

• Leggings.

• Toilet paper that you could use as bed sheets.

• “So that’s where we’re at…”

• Free parking.

• Public bathrooms that accommodate wheelchairs.

• “I wonder if they like HEB as much as we do.”

• Talking about HEB, at least once a day.

• Annoyingly helpful.

• “Insert shmear here.”

• The strawberries tase like strawberries, the bananas taste like bananas!

• “Everyone is so friendly, and they actually mean it.”

• Watch out for the coyote in the creek.

• Alejandra: “They have big gardens.” Me: “Oh, you mean ‘yards’?” Alejandra: “Yes.”

Previous installments from 2023: part 01, part 02, part 03. Also, here are some observations from our 2022 trip.

Wastebook

• “Everything we do is so specific and so unnecessary,” RotL #564.

• “Science as an employment program for scientists” Seems a little cynical.

• “how can you tell if something is a zero-percent-interest phenomenon vs. a real step change?” Questions for Tyler

• “Form follows failure,” Henry Petroski.

• “All parents leave some scars in their kids and that’s one I inherited from two parents who grew up very poor and reached through hard work a certain level of security (that they both never felt).” Here.

• “‘you guys’ energy, a chatty, ersatz intimacy that feels consonant with the way we exist on social media—offering a glimpse of our private lives, but in a deliberate and mediated way.” Amanda Petrusich.

• “Someday I’ll remember that Command+Option+Esc is the Mac’s Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Someday.” Here.

• “They have a specific selfish narrative they want their manager to build, so they carefully select a subset of the truth and market it as the complete picture. They believe their manager is so busy and soup tasting that their interpreted version of the story will become canonical.” Here.

• “But that’s not important,” Future Noah. // This is a common trope, here. It is a way of saying "that was good, and possibly True, but we have to wrap this up and keep moving. Maybe we’ll get back to it. Or maybe we won’t. But, right now, it’s not what we should be doing. Even worse, it’s possible that, right now if we keep going, we’ll ruin it.

• “I am so glad I put your number in speed-dial.” First time caller.

• First: “It’s possible, though, that Brombert had a secretary to type up, when necessary, his handwritten texts. I mean, the guy is wearing an ascot, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that men who wear ascots do not do their own typing.” But, more importantly: “Sergeant Brombert’s unit eventually reached the Seine, and he sneaked away to Paris in its first stirrings of liberation. He visited his old home, school and playground. In the heart of the city, he accepted wine from celebrating passers-by and, in fluent French, gave speeches whose content, he said, he was too drunk to remember. The war, he thought, was over. He dreamed of finding an apartment and a French girlfriend."

• “Prince was never big in Finland.”

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If you do anything with marketing and community management in tech, and also big events, check out our interview with Katie Greenley at the CNCF. There’s also some Tupperware theory in the back-half.

//

It’s the last day of 2024. I’m sitting in Austin, in a living room of an AirBnB. The weather has been in the 80’s (ChatGPT tells me “80°F to 89°F converts to 26.7°C to 31.7°C”), sunny, blue skies. So different than Amsterdam and Northern Europe.

It’s a cliche observation, but the most concise way to describe the difference between America and Europe is: in America everything is bigger than it needs to be, in Europe, everything is as small as it needs to be.

AI Stone Soup

One of my co-workers, AI Adib, pointed me towards the AI stone soup, uh…analogy? Parable? Anyhow, the point of it is that the models at the core of all this AI stuff are cool, but it’s the layers and layers of applications and people on-top that make the difference. The app that you put on-top of the AI is what matters.

Indeed, the whole reason we’re talking about AI now is because of the app of ChatGPT, then Gemini, Midjourney, NotebookML’s podcasts, Claude, Perplexity, etc. These apps do a lot of the heavy lifting, workflow coordination, and anyone would suspect pre- and post-processing. Even all that vector database stuff.

As ever, it’s the packaging.

All of this amounts to “AI middleware,” all those other ingredients you put into the soup with models. AI middleware isn’t it all either: you need to actual apps too. I’ve used a lot of these apps and their usability and feature set matters a lot. The most valuable is retrieving and searching the web, uploading files and connecting to Google Docs is good too.

I’m thinking that, for “enterprises” looking to do AI, this AI middleware and the app layer are what will matter the most, be the most affordable (ROI’able?) option, and likely the quickest and easiest to succeed at.

//

Speaking of AI, I switched to using Claude over the weekend. For playing D&D it is amazing, so much better than ChatGPT. Its notion of projects is like Perplexity’s Spaces. ChatGPT does this kind of thing with custom GPTs. To the stone soup point, ChatGPT’s approach feels clunky and kind of forgotten about.

Claude will also lets you change writing style/tone. It has some canned ones, but you can “train” it. So, I uploaded some long newsletter episodes into it to see what it came up with. I think it’s fine?

The Model Context Protocol thing in Claude has a lot of potential. It’s trying to be a generic API for interacting with an AI. This includes, of course, bringing text in, but also “writing” out. For my basic uses, since it works with the GUI, you could have it interact with your local desktop, say like random NPC generators and game trackers for D&D.

Claude lacks web search, which is a major problem. If it had that, I could see giving up on ChatGPT.

In all of these, you can see that what matters isn’t the stone of the lower level models, but the layers and layers of app-stuff. Stone Soup!

Relative to your interests

I asked the AIs to write up this episode’s links in a Harper’s/Matt Levine link round-up style, made some tweaks, and here it is:

Strategy has finally outgrown its Sun Tzu phase, embracing gardening metaphors just as Dell's earnings wilt while customers await the next generation of AI silicon. Speaking of outdated frameworks, it turns out employee performance isn't actually Gaussian—though someone should tell HR—and Wardley Mapping continues its to enchant. I asked various social channels about Wardley Map case studies and stories, and there were a handful enough of replies: people love the stuff.

For those exhausted still lost in strategy-land, delight in some hybrid cloud chatter. Speaking of, Tanzu Platform 10 shipped, promising to transform Kubernetes from arcane yaml-craft into something mere mortals might actually deploy—complete with Cloud Foundry characteristics for those who remember when PaaS was supposed to save us all. Oh, and also just with Cloud Foundry for the discerning.

Meanwhile, modern work drowns in SaaS sprawl—though maybe we should just embrace the #defaultslifestyle of Microsoft 365—while growing organizations rediscover why hierarchy and meetings persist, much to everyone's chagrin.

Wastebook

The AI didn’t know what to do with the wastebook section.

• “there are more idiots here.”

• “Real leopards ate my face energy here” Reid.

• “my employer has never wanted me to share an opinion publicly and i do my best every day to ensure they never will” @maya@occult.institute.

• And: “leading voice of the goblin web.”

• ”I have a scraggly patch of hair on my right calf from when I scraped off a swath of skin in an Ultimate Frisbee tournament.” Jason.

• “inclusive growth.”

• “But you wouldn’t comment on telecommunications now, it’s too normalised” Matt.

• “Because no matter how much fun we had, it wasn’t the plan.” RotL #559.

• “trusted brawlers”

• “My entire existence of life.”

• “OKR stratosphere.”

• “I’ll wait for Burger King counter attack.” On Delta’s burgers in the sky.

• “Looking forward out in the 20 mile stare.” Furrierism.

• “AI that builds pipe, not hype.”

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I feel like there was more original content I wanted to share, but I can’t find it. Did I share this interview with the aforementioned “AI Adib” yet? In the second half we talk about how executives can think through their enterprise AI strategy.

Meanwhile, why not enjoy these FY27 Q3 vibes:

I let that guy shaking hands go on a little long, but it pays off.

Where are people putting their modernized apps? Here’s a recent survey chart on that topic from 451:

Recent Content

Three things for you today:

1. The private cloud equilibrium - my most recent attempt to figure out how much private cloud is out there.

2. Platform Engineering and UK Digital People, with Abby Bangser - this week’s Software Defined Interviews: As if platform engineering and expat'ing in the UK weren't enough, Whintney and Coté discuss the forgotten technology of business cards wih Abby Bangser.

3. The most honorable of mentions - This week’s Software Defined Talk: we discuss the relationship between DevOps and Platform Engineering, Gartner’s take on Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, and Nvidia’s search for new use cases. Plus, a listener chimes in to clear up some Podman misconceptions.

Relative to your interests

• DORA Report 2024 – A Look at Throughput and Stability - Developer productivity is fine, but: “We thought the bottleneck was developers writing code, but in fact the bottleneck is putting good code into production.” // Maybe the current trend in DevOps/platform engineering/cloud native to to stop caring about developer productivity, rather, re-silo and let them care about it, and instead focus on operations productivity. Definitely that re-eval of how silo-busting has been going. https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2024/11/26/dora2024/

• The Rise of AI Agent Infrastructure - We’re all figuring out what “agent” means in AI land. It’ll probably end up meaning nothing if us marketing people do our jobs of claiming that we all do it.

• AI is reshaping call center work in the Philippines - ‘“AI is not to replace people but to help people become more productive,” she said. “If you needed 10 team members before, maybe now you only need five.”’ // Hmm, those two statements don’t seem to go together.

• China tech tariffs: Which countries will be affected - Round up of how current tariffs are going, and what they are.

• Rewiring the way McKinsey works with Lilli, our generative AI platform - “30% time savings in searching and synthesizing knowledge.” // Worth reflecting on how much of this is pulling together all the stuff for monthly status updates to management, a huge time suck for office workers. Much of it is probably bullshit work, but why not let the bullshit artist do it?

• Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure - I’d call this something more like “multi-cloud platform.” A sub-set is cloud native, Kubernetes, really. A further subset is private cloud. As always with critiquing Gartner work, unless you have full access to related PDFs and have read them, be careful with assumptions and scorn.

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Not much this episodes! I’ve recorded 6 podcasts this week, with one more coming this afternoon. I’ve also been working on that same internal video for our Sales Kick-off. You could say I’m multi-media brain-dead. Still, it’s been fun having “content” to focus on with little time to do so: it allows me to ignore all the daily bullshit work.1 Perhaps there’s something to learn there! Of course, it being Thanksgiving week in the US helps: most people are also ignoring daily bullshit work.

//

Just two more weeks left in my work-year. How did this last year go? My work made a dramatic shift in strategy, focusing just on private cloud. This is probably good.

I didn’t speak at as many conferences as I usually do. I do a little bit more internal facing work, and I’ve done a lot more “on brand” work. This is sort of weird. I’ve run out of things to say at conferences.

Since platform engineering decided to murder DevOps and just start that whole thing over from scratch, the conversations has turned into the same old shit we’ve been talking about since at least 2015. I spent a lot of 2022 and 2023 saying as much. It gets really, really boring talking about “how to do software better” over and over after 10 years, especially when the industry decided to reboot it. It’s like watching a really shitty remake of a classic movie you grew up with. This means it’s difficult for me to come up with anything interesting and entertaining to say.

Nonetheless, I had a few new talks - arguably just twists and updates on the same old shit, but fun to do nonetheless. I have one new talk that’s been accepted for new year building on my ongoing hunt for coverage of private cloud usage. And if the KubeCon London 2025 people are into it, there’ll be a new panel.

Open Source $$$ Ethics, How Analysts use AI, Advanced Chicken Nugget Diplomacy, with Rachel Stephens

In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Whitney Lee and Coté dive into the insights of Rachel Stephens from RedMonk about the world of being an industry analyst. They discuss experiences from working as an analyst, the balance between qualitative and quantitative analysis, the challenges and misconceptions surrounding open-source business models, and the impact of AI on the analyst profession and beyond. They also discuss the 2024 DORA report, and a few other topics.

If you listen to podcast, you should subscribe to this one.

Relative to your interests

• Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures - “The report found code generation is the leading use case for generative AI, with more than half of survey responses naming that as a dominant use. Support chatbots came next, at 31%, followed by enterprise search and retrieval, data extraction and transformation, and meeting summarization.” // Once enterprise people are comfortable with using public cloud AI (they are currently not, at scale) things will grow a lot. Then we’ll need a year to see if it’s actually useful (and worth, like, $20 a month per head more in the IT bill). I hope it works! I like the AI stuff.

• Platform Engineering Is The New DevOps - “Once hailed as the savior of organizational dysfunction, DevOps is causing friction in teams finding that operations is work they never really wanted to do. To get back to a happier balance, DevOps teams are finding that platform engineering helps them to split out operations from application development so that each function can return to focusing on what they do best.” // Way back when, Andrew Shafer would explain that the “you write it, you run it” thing only works if you have a highly automated platform. He still goes over that of course. His point there is one of the most often forgotten parts of all the cloud stuff over past years. Worse is when you have lots of platforms or set the layer of your platform too low, usually at the IaaS layer. You need a centralized PaaS. People are difficult in change, but technology is hard as well, especially if you have the wrong technology or haven’t changed it to match, help, and embody the new way you want to work (“culture”).

• New York Times & AWS dispel three mainframe migration myths - What’s most shocking is that the New York Times had a mainframe. But, I guess it’s old enough that of course they do.

• The Future Of B2B Buying Will Come Slowly … And Then All At Once - “Six months later, a little more than 18 months after ChatGPT launched, we polled B2B buyers for the first time about whether they are using generative AI. The genAI adoption numbers were shocking. The overwhelming majority, 89% of buyers in Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, reported that they were using genAI in at least one area of their purchasing process.”

• Best non-fiction of 2024 - List of books.

• Marketing from jdilla.xyz - “If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, they’ll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, they’ll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then they’ll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked. Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post.”

• Managing managers is its own skill - “I remember when a new executive was brought in to Freddie Mac at a high level in the IT department. My colleague Mary pointed out to me that he did not bring anyone with him from his former position. She saw that as a bad sign, suggesting that he had not earned much respect from his managers at his former employer. She was proven right, and he soon was bounced out of his position at Freddie Mac.”

• THE RIGHT PEOPLE - Driving subscribers: “Write a post that will resonate with the person you’re emailing. Yes, even if it’s just that one person. Email the person the link. Maybe they subscribe, or at least reply and you two catch up, and who knows where that leads?”

• AWS named as a leader again in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure - AWS, VMware, Azure, Oracle, and Nutanix are in the MQ leader’s quadrant for “hybrid cloud.”

Wastebook

• “Individual non-contributor.”

• I’m pretty sure that I had a dream last night that I could easily buy SPY in my US brokerage account. For some reason, living abroad, I can’t do that. Taxes? Small print for liability reasons? Who knows, who cares. The thing is, I could probably call the brokerage and find out what to do. I am somehow horrified of calling them - just the conversation, just calling someone. What an odd, paralyzing phobia. This applies to almost every other business/consumer relationship I have. How do I get over that? I see other people who are totally fine just calling whoever - sometimes they’re the person hoarding a plane and talking on their phone. What thought-technology are these people benefitting from that I’m not?

• I did the math tonight and I realized I’ve worked in computers for 29 years.

• Related: Kid, I’ve got dotfiles older than you.

• Why have the Dutch not come up with kruidennoten ice cream? It’d be like the Blue Bell buñuelos of the Netherlands.

• I bet this is a great panel from KubeCon. Packed with banks.

• Brevity is the soul of corporate comms confusion.

• “Please cease the vibing and chilling or we will swallow a battery.” ArcaneBullshit.

• “Bitter,” as in “they’re a very bitter person,” isn’t used much anymore. Now’s probably a time to put it back into the daily lexicon.

• “The industry keeps moving, even if I’m in all-day meetings.” Link-blogger powerhouse Seroter.

• “I’m sure we’d all agree that McDonald’s do not make the finest hamburgers on the planet. On the other hand, if you want a Big Mac, then a Big Mac is what you want — and no amount of boutique sliders fashioned from Kobe beef and hand-seasoned by elves is going to hit the spot.” From fellow Big Mac fan.

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The Software Defined Interviews podcast reboot is going real well, see above! Whitney is a natural at podcasting and she and I don’t overlap too much in, I don’t know, the conversations we want to have and takes. That makes for a whole new type of conversation than if it was just me or with my usual bunch. We have a lot of recordings this week which we’ll drip out every two weeks. You should subscribe to it and listen, of course. I don’t really “get” subscribing to YouTube as a podcast (I think you just subscribe to the channel?), but here’s the playlist of the video versions of our recordings.

//

As I mentioned, I’m working on an internal video. Five minutes for the annual sales kick-off going over what Tanzu is. Normally, I loath spending too much time on video content, well, any content, really. I suppose there’s hubris crossed with laziness: I think my “first takes” are good enough, and I believe in abundance over perfection.

That’s not how working on an internal video that represents your business unit works, though. I think I’m OK with the fine tuning, reworking, reshooting, and collaborative editing.

Most of it (being OK with it) I guess, is that the intention is to have it be in my gonzo style. Also, I’ve tried to think of the first few video recordings as draft to get people thinking and extract the content - what they want me to say - from the group.

Extracting that content is part of the process. It’s also, in the last few years, where I’ve found myself in marketing. I get involved in work that isn’t about translating the official marketing strategy, talking points, positioning, messaging - you know, the official point of view, “what to say” - into content. It’s about figuring all of that out, coming up with the stuff.

There’s usually so much rigor, discipline, and being on message with corporate marketing that he lack of “what to say” can seem bad, negligent even. But, I mean, that official marketing-talk has to be created somewhere.

The point being, if you work in marketing, you have to watch out for this switch. That applies to all sorts of work, actually. Sometimes you’re asked to follow he strategy, sometimes you’re asked to help come up with it.

(This is especially true when you’re working on corporate strategy. So often when I was doing that at Dell for software and cloud I waned to [and did!] ask “just tell me what you want, dear scatterbrained, changing what you ask for every meeting, executives!” but that wasn’t the job. It was to help them figure out what they wanted.)

I did a second interview with the GM of my division at work, Tanzu. The first one was about Prunima’s career in IT management and, now, cloud. This second one is all about private cloud. Here’s a video except:

Here’s a summary from our AI friend:

When it comes to cloud infrastructure, Purnima Padmanabhan, Tanzu GM, highlights that customers often require both private and public clouds, depending on their application needs. She outlines several reasons why people choose to maintain, even prefer private cloud:

1. Data Gravity - Applications running in private clouds often handle large volumes of data. Transferring this data to and fro other environments is challenging, and costly, especially when integrating advanced analytics or AI/ML capabilities. Keeping the data within the private cloud minimizes complexity and enhances performance.

2. Ecosystem Gravity - Applications frequently interact with other systems such as ERP, supply chain, ordering systems, and other applications and services. Hosting all these interconnected applications within the same private environment improves performance and reduces latency. It ensures seamless integration, as applications do not operate in isolation.

3. Control Over Governance, Privacy, and Regulation - Private cloud infrastructures offer greater control over data management, helping organizations comply with governance policies, privacy standards, and regulatory requirements. Customers feel more secure managing sensitive data within their own infrastructure, where they can enforce strict controls.

4. Effectiveness and Familiarity of Private Cloud - Many organizations find that their applications run efficiently on existing private infrastructures. Instead of migrating to public clouds, they can enhance their private environments by implementing platforms that make it easier for developers to build and update applications. This approach provides the needed flexibility without the complexities of a public cloud migration, often leading to better outcomes.

There’s more in my full interview with her in the Tanzu Talk podcast feed.

Relative to your interests

• Customer-centric applications: Heroku simplifies deployments - "Heroku’s owned by Salesforce,” she noted. “Heroku’s philosophy is like, ‘Hey, you know what? The undifferentiated heavy lifting for a lot of people is building your platform. You should spend the time building your business, building your app.’ The integrations that we provide, we unlock a ton of capabilities for all the creators bringing business analysts like sales ops, marketing ops people together with developers to build the best workflows and automations”” // Here’s to the dream of hiding Kubernetes from app developers working this time! Not only working, but having the industry actually stick to it instead of tearing it down to the IaaS studs once some cool new IaaS layer comes along in ₅ years.

• Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.’

• Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF - “Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF.”

• Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations - These look cool, but I had to spend a lot of time figuring them out. Bar charts are boring, but they’re efficient. Still, I want to try some of these.

• Elon Musk hints at plan to sink DOGE’s teeth into legacy tech - List of old IT in the US government. // Escaping the legacy trap is hard.

• Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity - “the revenue shares for our eight cloud companies in the combined IaaS/PaaS cloud market at nearly $300 billion projected for 2024. AWS has 36% of this combined market, Microsoft 23% and Google 7%. Alibaba, Oracle Tencent Huawei and IBM combine for around 14% of the market with “Other” (not shown) at 20%.”

• Google Cloud growth - “Google Cloud now accounts for 12% of Alphabet’s overall revenue. That’s nearly double the amount from 4 years ago.”

• The Influence of Bell Labs

• What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? - "Treating [AI chatbots] like a coach - tell it what you’ve done and need to get done, include any feedback you’ve had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you’re some kind of neurospicy and ‘regular human’ responses sort of escape you.”

• IMG_0001 - Take a look into random videos from people’s lives from a decade ago: ‘Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.’ // Mesmerizing!

Wastebook

• Ignorant urgency.

• Some simple premature optimization.

• “Give developers and engineers the terrifying responsibility of being in charge of their own spending. Let them enjoy both the upsides and downsides of being adults.” Justin.

• “AI as an accountability sink.” Fresh in from Iceland.

• “Calling in rich.” Brandon.

• “DevOps Activist.”

• People don’t like it when you raise prices. Often, they’ll like it less if you disappear.

Logoff

I’ve been working on a video for our annual sales kickoff (SKO). Doing SKO work is always weird. People have so many theories about how to communicate with sales people. Also, as with a lot of internal comms, you can end up with so many fingers on the film that end-up with a Homer Car.

Brandon’s number one theory is that you need to tell them how to make money. I believe this is the most important thing. You could do just the and be done.

There’s a common belief that you have to be brief and high-level, keep in mind simple.

Another one is that you need to speak to the benefit and outcomes of the product you’re highlighting - which is another way of going over he problems solved.

My theory is that you also need to tell sales people who to find in an organization, what their problems are, and how your product can solve their problem. If you do person-to-person sales (not just through the web, PLG, demand gen - whatever), you also need to give them some conversations to have.

We’ll see!

Outro: It’s Tuesday, all day today. I recommend this 39 minute 45 second track. And if you don’t have time for that, here’s what you want.