Making Money with Open Source - Software Defined Interviews

We talked about a lot more than making money with open source in this interview with RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens, but the part was pretty good:

In this episode, 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.

You can listen on the episode show notes page, watch the original video (above), or, best, subscribe to the podcast to check it out. Doing these podcasts with Whitney has been great, we’ve go four of five more lined up, so there’s plenty more coming.

Wastebook

• Wilford Brimley oatmeal marketing: whatever happened to just buying computers?

• The problem is often lack of focus. What the executive has to do is give permission to cut all the other stuff out, and do the structural work for that: shutting down projects, closing divisions, even getting rid of people. In tech, this often means limiting chasing shinny objects, shutting down “moonshots.” Anti-innovation as it may be, these executives only focus on things that make money and immediately, intuitively benefit the customer. You have a strategy to run the business better, maybe even make more money. You don’t have a strategy to come up with a new product, create a new market. Which is fine: you’ll probably fail at that, like most everyone else. Your goal is to survive and thrive, not risk it all for glory and selling your shares at the IPO.

• “The Drooling Diplomat,” Dungeon Magazine, #63.

• “Reading is a form of necromancy.” Here.

• Even “Bitcoin Jesus” can’t escape the IRS.

• “I really don’t want cynicism to become my compass.” Noah.

• “Bull power for money stream.” Both at GoTech World.

• “We are all smart with browsers made by others.” Talk title at GoTech World.

• If you give people the chance to edit, they often will. If you just publish it, they will often say it’s good. -“Musk-a-Lago.” Recent reports.

Relative to your interests

• Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book - “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.” // The irony, in a good way, of Godin’s work is that it’s mostly aphoristic: short, punchy, and memorable. Less of a book, and more of a chapbook or blog posts, Tweets, etc. The perfect length, tone, and cleverness that an executive likes and can use in bureaucratic knife-fighting.

• Red Hat acquires tech to lower the cost of machine learning | Computer Weekly - The race to build the private AI stack for enterprises: “All of this translates to lower costs, faster inference and the ability to run AI workloads on a wider range of hardware.”

• Why Developers Are Unresponsive to Traditional Marketing - They just want to try the actual tool without a lot of bullshit. At the very least, they want to see a realistic use of it: actually typing, no business outcomes babbling.

• Da Art of (Business) Storytellin’ - “Storytelling is not only important for advertising but for internal team alignment. We hear stories about Airbnb’s movie-quality storyboards around its office or Amazon’s Press Release Method. The key takeaway is that the company must align marketing and product. Slogans and one-liners must be brainstormed at the same time patents are being drawn. If the product team builds first, then asks marketing to find the story, it’s a recipe for disaster. It will lead to the customer expecting X but actually receiving Y.”

• “Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study - ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.” And: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity.” // And: “The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized [because he carved maxims a proverbs into the wooden rafters], and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life.”

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent. SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

Logoff

The T key on my laptop is sticking. How does one fix that kind of thing? (Notice how many T’s were in the sentence? I sure did!)

Not much to say, really. Weird afternoon. On such occasions, this is one of the many comfort clips that makes me smile.

Private PaaS

Along with our summary of Explore EU last week, around the start of this I go over my thinking about private PaaS, VMware, and Tanzu. At least that’s what I remember doing.

Wastebook

• “THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER—BUT THEY’RE IMPROVING” Systemantics. The Systems Bible, John Gall.

• And: “we are interested, not in the process of forgetting to mail a letter, but in the Post Office Box that is too full to accept that letter.”

• “I kept the option for tiling when holding down the Option (⌥) key because I’m a tolerant person at heart.” Good settings.

• “[H]e’s ageing and displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decay, so we should be paying more attention to J.D. Vance, who is hale and hearty and may be president sooner than we think.” John Naughton.

• One dev’s “abstract away” is always one ops person’s problem.

Relative to your interests

• Broadcom’s VMware strategy is winning despite market friction - The case for the Broadcom acquisition being good, especially for all-in, large companies that want a private cloud stack. Plenty of financial and survey data to move it beyond anecdata.

• Who owns Kubernetes in VMware now? Or, Reflections from Explore Barcelona and the Challenges of Modern App Delivery - “What happened to TKG? One of the lessons I took from the week was that there is still confusion over the Kubernetes runtime we sell and where it sits in the VMware by Broadcom portfolio. Earlier this year, we moved what was known as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service from Tanzu and included it as part of VCF where it is renamed to VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service. This move was very intentional as the Kubernetes runtime itself is just part of any modern cloud IaaS, and this being deeply embedded into the VCF stack means that more VCF customers will be ready to adopt advanced services offered by Tanzu sooner, without struggling with integration. Many existing Tanzu customers use other versions of the Kubernetes runtime (namely, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Multicloud) to meet specific requirements. Tanzu will continue to support these versions, but in the end, Tanzu Platform is designed to run on any CNCF conformant Kubernetes runtime.”

• Alaskan telecoms company GCI uses VMware private cloud to boost business value

• “‘This means a shift away from just standard checking and savings accounts to more personalized self-service banking experiences and support,’ he said. ‘The bank felt tied down by the complexity of its legacy technology environment.’ Following extensive analysis, ABN AMRO decided to build a private cloud platform based on VCF and move away from their previous managed service.'” VCF at a Netherlands bank.

• IDC: VMware Explore 2024: A Shift to Private Cloud, AI, and AppDev Simplification - The VMware Private AI Foundation “platform appeals to Broadcom customers because of its ability to deliver advanced security and privacy, granular policy and control capabilities, resource sharing functionality, and centralized operations capabilities that deliver a lower TCO.” // Also, a good write-up of the overall VMware and Tanzu shift to private cloud stack. Lots of Tanzu and Spring coverage as well.

• On-premises private cloud usage grew fastest in 2022 - January, 2023: “⁠⁠last year’s six-percentage-point uptick in on-premises private cloud usage outpaced growth in SaaS (up three points) and public cloud (up four points); hosted private cloud adoption was flat⁠⁠.”

• Taco Bell puts AI front-and-center in drive-thru strategy - “Taco Bell’s drive-thru voice AI was designed for internal and external applications. An AI assistant takes orders and relays the information to the staff. The system is designed to help restaurant employees manage orders, reducing their workload, while enabling more accurate order fulfillment for customers.” // Makes sense. I bet this works pretty good. I could even see that the misunderstanding/error rate would be better with AI taking the orders. It could switch languages too. Also, maybe an edge computing/private AI use case - or you just switch over the humans when the Internet connection goes down.

• Ai, Big Tech, & Markets - “AI is the newest king of the economy and will end up making the rules.” // Plus, huge rise in tech company valuations since the US election.

• Modernizing the Mainframe in Place: Transforming Core Technologies - Improve the mainframe app. // Likely some good patterns for talking/thinking about modernizing any type existing apps “in place.”

• From Agile to Radical: conflict - How management can deal with “at least three consequences of unresolved conflict that I’ve experienced in practice: unaddressed business areas, repeated patterns of unproductive behavior and undoing each other’s progress.” // A little bit on European work-culture too.

• The Counterculture Switch: creating in a hostile environment - Return of the leftwing counterculture, and what it could mean for software.

• Navigating Private Equity ownership. - A memo template for R&D’s plans after private equity. Basically: here’s how we’ll spend less money and use attrition to lower staff costs (hire more junior people as senior people leave).

• SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12) - “There’s just one solitary naked boob on the screen — and metaphorically speaking, all life has been sucked out of it. This is Dawn of the Dead, the classic 1978 horror movie that we’re talking about.”

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

I don’t have any conferences schedule for the test of the year. Early next year, I’m hoping to go to CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent, which I always enjoy despite the cafeteria lunch (it’s become almost charming at this point. There’s also SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

Logoff

I’m in Bucharest for a day to give a talk at the GoTech World conference. They selected my legacy trap talk as the first talk in the DevOps track. The legacy trap talk doesn’t really fit there, but I've added some commentary on “ops legacy”: the old thinking and mindset of operations people. It’s, you know, my usual stuff on CI/CD, putting platform as a product in place, etc. I have a rehearsal recording that’s pretty good.

When you present this stuff, it feels like cheating because you’re repeating yourself. When I speak, I feel like each time I should be doing new material. But, most people watching it, especially in the room, likely won’t have seen the talk, so it will be new to them. Besides, all the “how to optimize apps and ops” stuff needs to be repeated over and over - per the above: THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER—BUT THEY’RE IMPROVING.

(Sidenote: you know, I often bemoan here that I don’t produce enough content. At the moment, I have a stack of about three, maybe even four, drafts of things that either just need a final edit pass [like the rehearsal video] or for someone to finally click the publish button. Doing alright there, I guess.)

Finally, I offer you the chance to contemplate contemporary men’s waistlines by looking at past waistlines:

Wastebook

• “I’m still in my pajamas — haven’t changed since Tuesday night. I’m also drinking a fair amount…” ProfG.

• “My conspiracy theory has a much higher budget.” Lordess.

• “To create this post, I used a cascade of AIs.” Tomasz Tunguz.

• “improvident” is an adjective meaning lacking foresight or failing to plan ahead, often resulting in wasteful or reckless behavior without considering future consequences. Culturally, the term is often used to critique individuals or societies that prioritize immediate gratification over long-term well-being. In literature and folklore, improvident characters frequently serve as cautionary examples, highlighting the importance of prudence and planning in various cultural contexts. From the 🤖.

• “He’s a serial boat-burner.” On Elon Mush, Sharp Tech, Nov 7th, 2024.

Relative to your interests

• Gartner Raises IT Spending Forecast For 2024 Again - “Gartner thinks that spending on servers, storage, and networking for the datacenters of the world will rise by 34.7 percent in 2024 to just a hair over $318 billion. We have not seen this kind of growth since the recovery after the crash in IT spending during the Great Recession, and this time around it is different because there is no crash ahead of such growth. Rather, this is a transformation in IT systems that is probably more impactful than the Dot Com boom.” // This is almost unbelievable. Where do you suddenly find ₃₅% more money? // Well, it’s probably just the public cloud companies: “The typical enterprise is definitely not spending anywhere near as much as the hyperscalers and cloud builders do on IT hardware and software. Enterprises spend more on services, relatively speaking compared to revenue size, because they do not have vast pools of IT talent like the hyperscalers and cloud builders do.” // Also, see the Gartner press release.

• Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities - Some useful MacOS command line utils - not the usual Linux ones.

• “Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture” - “There’s always a current thing.”

• It’s the parasocials, stupid - On the podcast election theory, that bring: (1) podcasts and videos are a big channel now, (2) the format is to hangout and “be genuine,” (3) for many voters, being a jackass is OK, even preferred, (4) if can be a jackass for three hours, you can go for the jackass vote. // Need to contemplate the difference and overlap between “being genuine” and “being a jackass.”

Conferences

GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20.

Logoff

I’ve been thinking a lot about “focus” recently. I don’t focus on things. In work life, this means I say yes to everything and end up doing…a lot? Doing a lot of things can leave you feeling like you’ve done little of import. Being busy, but not consequential.

For example, I know that enterprise AI is the most important thing I could be working on, probably 80%, even 90% of my time. But, there are so many other things that come and go. I know that I should focus most of my “free time” attention on learning Dutch. The pay off for both would be huge.

But my mind doesn't think in long-term payoffs, and I definitely don’t go to the extreme of the irrational rationalist: if you have a chance of a 5x payoff, you should do it. Like most of humanity, I find it almost impossible to sacrifice the present (often, just being bored) for future gains.

Related, when your job makes focusing a bad strategic move:

“I feel like we’re just reactive,” marketing people have said to me over the years. This means they just do marketing (planning, managing, strategy, content) based on the most urgent need at the moment. There is little long-term thinking.

If you live in a reactive state, it means your long-term thinking is also dangerous: what you planned to do two months ago in your campaign strategy may not longer be relative. You were planning on having thought-leader content about the intellectual metrics of fidget spinners, but now your company sells toy-slime. This is a bad cycle, and marketing gets blamed for the misalignment.

This spiral is usually driven by a corporate agenda that is also near-term focused, ever shifting to meet the needs of the last meeting. A lack of focus cascades from the top, but as with most problems in a corporate system, we all share in the responsibility, just some more than others.

//

Ironically, this morning I thought: what if I just publish what I have every morning before 7:30am? That’s the time when we start getting the kids ready for and off to school. And: here we are!

Improvised Corporate Asshole

I've been listening to the book Impro by Keith Johnstone. Somewhere I read that it's on Palantir's new employee reading list, which made me interested. The section on status is both weird and intriguing. It's very prescriptive - there's no "it depends." People love this book: it has 4.3 stars on Goodreads. That enthusiasm and its place on at least one corporate reading list makes the book's chapter on "status" weird and troubling.

I haven't delved into the other chapters yet—I skipped the biographical first chapter. Perhaps things go different in those sections. I haven't gotten to it yet, but it sounds like the whole "yes, and..." concept is covered extensibly, maybe even comes from this book.

Mastering People

In the status chapter, the basic idea is that any two humans are constantly establishing their relative status and then either battling over that status, or acting according to the pecking order: who's the master, who's the servant?

"Status" in this context is about who gets to command whom and who fears whom.

The high-status person commands others and is feared by low-status people. One acting exercise involves high-status characters eliminating an endless stream of subordinates for minor, even unknown offenses. The high-status person is essentially a bully.

The low-status person does whatever the higher-status individual wants and often fears them. This dynamic results in all sorts of comedy based on absurd situations. A low-status person attempts a robbery at a store but, after interacting with a high-status clerk, ends up taking only a few cents from the till. A low-status person is used as a chair, treated as furniture—an object.

That's the lesson of the status chapter: always know who has the power and who has to obey.  Are you resting on a chair, or are you the chair?

Once you establish those dynamics, you can create comedy by introducing unexpected twists and turns into that mechanic.

Also, the act of people battling for status can be entertaining once you remove the cushion of civility. There are many sections in the book where people throw crude insults back and forth at each other. Since the book is from the 1970s, these insults are more amusing for their quaintness than their shock value.

So, sure: comedy is often about uncomfortable or messed-up things. If it weren't, it'd all just be dad jokes, puns, and complaints about airplane food.

Off Stage

When reading this book, I suspect tech people are less interested in actually doing theater—let alone improv—and are more interested in understanding and engineering social situations. You can read this book not as a manual for the stage, but for how to act off-stage, in real life.

This is especially true if you're a technical person who's not familiar with the nuances of human interactions, and part of your job involves interacting with people all week. That is, on-site consultants working on difficult tech projects. What makes these projects difficult is that the people in the organization can't do them, often because of political battles and turf wars, because of status.

Here's a former Palentir person writing up why Impro is useful in this situation:

Being a successful FDE [on-site consultant] required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games. Impro is popular with nerds partly because it breaks down social behavior mechanistically. The vocabulary of the company was saturated with Impro-isms – ‘casting’ is an example. Johnstone discusses how the same actor can play ‘high status’ or ‘low status’ just by changing parts of their physical behavior – for example, keeping your head still while talking is high status, whereas moving your head side to side a lot is low status. Standing tall with your hands showing is high status, slouching with your hands in your pocket is low status. And so on. If you didn’t know all this, you were unlikely to succeed in a customer environment. Which meant you were unlikely to integrate customer data or get people to use your software. Which meant failure. A project to unify data silos to finally break down barriers is often seen as a project to take status away from each of those silos. The DBAs don't want to give you free, unrestricted access to the regional supply chain data because then, why are they getting paid so much? What status do they have if you never have to ask them for anything?

Management consulting is, potentially, an even darker version. Management consultants are brought in to fix an organization. The expectation is that they'll tell management exactly what to do to increase their share price—or whatever metric matters. Two common recommendations are to reorganize and/or to fire people. In most cases, then, management consultants are a threat to employees.

In both the on-site tech consultant and management consultant cases, they rely on the existing employees to do their job. The tech consultant needs access to the databases. The management consultant needs to know "how things are actually done around here" and what's not working well.

Both of these consultants have power in their relationship with the employees. They were sent by the bosses to fix things. After the consultant leave, they will still have a job, and likely a high-paying one. But if the consultants act like they have the power, most employees will not be helpful.

In those situations, you need to know how to work with people—not only in a genuine, truth-seeking way but sometimes by navigating complex social dynamics. You need to some social engineering.

If you didn't know how to talk with and work with people, you'd find an interesting framework in the status section of Impro. It'd be based on manipulation and undermining. You'd learn a framework for manipulating human interactions. You might play the subservient person to get the client overconfident and cooperative. Or, when you know you have power in a situation—you would have tools to assert it.

Just knowing that there is a social game you can play is a tremendous tool to discover, especially when you're a young, inexperienced tech person.

This is where the troubling part of the book comes in. It has no moral judgments about this constant power-playing. In fact, it seems to celebrate the "I'm sorry you can't take a joke" worldview. "Oh, I wasn't actually saying you were a boot-licking subordinate who should be disregarded—it's just improv! Hahaha!"

"I'm sorry you can't take a joke." Indeed. If you want to play the status game, the only response to that is always, "I can, but that wasn't one." 

Have you ever worked for this boss?

Off stage, the behavior and world-view in the book is definitely not a joke. If you read it and think "ah, this is something I can apply in real life!" you're going down a shitty path. For example, here's a list of rules of status quoted in a review:

'Ten golden rules' for people who are Number Ones. He says, 'They apply to all leaders, from baboons to modern presidents and prime ministers.' They are:

1. You must clearly display the trappings, postures and gestures of dominance.

2. In moments of active rivalry you must threaten your subordinates aggressively.

3. In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must be able forcibly to overpower your subordinates.

4. If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates.

5. You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates.

6. You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of high ranks.

7. You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.1

8. You must make decisions concerning the social activities of your group.

9. You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.

10. You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks arising from outside your group.

This is a manual for caustic corporate life and the types of terrible management structures we've been trying to fix for the past few decades. Just imagine how someone who was reading this to use in real life would be as a co-worker, a boss, or worse a "rival" in another group.

If you see someone reading this book, ask them, "Are you an actor?" And if they say no, be cautious. You'll next need to ask them, "Are you reading this book so that you know how people work and to work with people, or so that you know how to avoid being an asshole?"

The theater part of the book is telling you how use status games to construct interesting and fun theatrical systems. Art and simple and just stupid-as-good entertainment would be terrible tension, misery, bullies, evil, and ass-hattery. It'd be like reading greeting cards as your only source of entertainment.

Corporate life is not art, or even popcorn-entertainment. If you read this chapter on status as how to use status games at work to get things done, you're contributing to a shitty corporate culture. Things like those ten golden rules should be read as the complete opposite: if you're running your organization like this, you're an asshole that's making life worse for all of us. Would anyone want to work with a person like that, or for them?

In other words, the status section is a great manual for understanding and navigating the next four years where I'm sure a lot of people will be saying "oh, I'm sorry you can't take a joke."

Relative to your interests

• Top 5 Intelligent App Delivery Challenges and How Executives Can Solve Them - AI middleware.

• Gartner Says CIOs Need to Overcome Four Emerging Challenges to Deliver Value With AI - Make sure you cap AI spend in the next few years of messing around with enterprise AI. // Also, new tech burger-stack: “As CIO, your job is to design a tech sandwich that can handle the messiness of AI”

• Gartner Survey Reveals Only 48% of Digital Initiatives Are Successful - “On average, only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed business outcome targets, according to Gartner, Inc.’s annual global survey of more than 3,100 CIOs and technology executives, and more than 1,100 executive leaders outside of IT (CxOs).”

• Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in Europe to Grow 8.7% in 2025 - “Europe has seen a remarkable 46% increase in server spending by technology providers in 2024. In 2025, technology companies will continue building out the infrastructure needed for training GenAI models today and inferencing them in the future.”

• VMware Explore - private cloud is the best way to manage AI and security concerns - “We are serious people. We’re here to help you run your business better. We’re not here to show and sell you bright, shiny objects.”

• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 Barcelona: Day 2 Highlights - "53% of banking CIOs and technology leaders reported their firm was meeting expectations on GenAI initiatives. Only 6% exceeded expectations.

• The Birth and Continuing Evolution of Platform Engineering - The Humanitec really have it out for DevOps: “But a drawback of DevOps is that it cannot be scaled beyond about 50 developers before it begins tripping over itself and becomes difficult to manage. With that serious shortcoming, platform engineering and its strengths and flexibility was gaining more attention in the marketplace.”

Wastebook

• ”It is officially synergy-o-clock.” Here.

• “Everyone Everywhere Out To Lunch.” Taylor.

• “disappointed optimist.” Just in from Iceland.

• “Where to find a.m. drinking spots in the city.” Right on time.

• “Hand painted artsy font.” A font.

• “Changing lightbulbs in the rain.” Rodrick

• “Native in the platform.”

• Is it a real thing that it’s better to use short videos for internal training over text? You know, like in that Mr Beast memo?

Conferences

GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20.

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I’m back from Explore in Barcelona. I can especially tell, now, that it’s getting colder in Amsterdam.

//

Here is some advice about reading Americans that I gave a European friend this week. This friend was talking with an American about how their company should improve.

I met up with my European friend afterwards, and they said, “I couldn’t tell if they were taking me seriously.”

“Ah,” I said, “they were probably smiling and nodding their head as you talked, huh?”

“Exactly,” my friend said, “they seemed to be agreeing, but I couldn’t tell if they were listening to me and understanding.”

“Yes, well: they were American,” I said, “Worse: California tech American.”

“Yes!”

“Well,” I began, “here is the three step filter for seeing if an American is actually listening and maybe even agreeing with you:”

1. If they are smiling and nodding, this means absolutely nothing. And, in fact, it might mean they are totally not listening to you.

2. If they start asking you questions in return, this is encouraging, but still does not mean they are understanding or taking you seriously. “Oh, really? Why do you think Widget XYZ needs more tongs?” or “Ah, and what do you think we should do?” That last question is an especially bad indication: they’re probably just asking that to get you to talk more with the hopes that you’ll just get it out of your system with and walk away.

3. If the American start making statements, then they’re listening and may even be taking you seriously. The best is to have them repeat what you said back to you:“so what you’re saying is…” or “I hadn’t considered that, here’s what I think we should do…” or even “I don’t agree, and let me tell you why…”2

“Hmmm,” my friend said. (Which is almost the European version of an American smiling and nodding, but I know them well enough…)

“Oh, also,” I said, “have you ever heard of the American-corporate phrase ‘smile fucking’?”

“No, never” my friend said, “but, now, I know exactly what it means.”

Relative to your interests

• Priorities CIOs Must Address in 2025, Insights from the 2025 Gartner CIO Survey - “only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. This statistic highlights a significant challenge for organizations aiming to achieve their digital transformation goals.” // It could also highlight that the expectations were very unrealistic. I’d bet on that more than anything else. // Also, here’s some Gartner charts on the topic.

• Storm Clouds Ahead: Missed Expectations in Cloud Computing - “According to IDC’s Cloud Pulse 4Q 2023 survey, close to half of cloud buyers spent more on cloud than they expected in 2023, with 59% anticipating similar overruns in 2024. The complexities of cloud environments, coupled with unforeseen external influences, make it challenging to forecast costs accurately. Factors such as the increasing cost of third-party services, energy costs, and the financial implications of new technologies like GenAI are contributing to these budget blowouts.” And: “According to IDC’s Server and Storage Workloads Survey, only 8–9% of companies plan full workload repatriation.”

• Embracing Antifragility: Building Resilient Products in an Uncertain World - You can read this as a take on what it means to be a “learning organization.” As ever, the hardest, most mysterious, least airport business book-ized topic is “how do we change from ‘traditional’ to this whiz-bang method?”

• Unleashing Transformation - Yup, this all of the stuff. Arguably, it’s missing #8: actually do it and stop blaming “culture.”

• What Seth Godin Really Thinks About Social Media - ”I do think that social media is largely a trap… for users and for brands. It’s purposely built to create insecurity and false proxies, metrics that get people to work for free to support the business model of the social media companies, as opposed to their own goals. When Wendy’s or Oreo cookies pulls some sort of stunt on a social media platform, it’s not clear to me that they’ve done anything of value. They haven’t sold french fries or cookies, or earned trust. They simply amused a few people. How do we earn permission, trust, the benefit of the doubt or status? If your social media isn’t doing that, what’s it for?”

• If Trump wins, get your tech shopping done fast - “The CTA predicts [PDF] that the increased cost of importation, and retaliatory tariffs from other countries, would raise the cost of a laptop by 46 percent, a gaming console by 40 percent, and smartphone prices would be 26 percent more expensive. As a result, the association expects demand to fall 54, 57, and 44 percent, respectively.”

• Stop Team Topologies - Don’t use an understandable system to avoid asking why you’re doing anything in the first place. // Or: all the value is in the “it depends.”

• Building A Generative AI Platform, Chip Huyen - This is a fantastic overview of what an enterprise AI architecture probably looks like, taking into account not only technical stuff, but also business concerns like cost and risk/accuracy.

• The stoicism secret: how Ryan Holiday became a Silicon Valley guru - “My initial attraction to stoicism is what it can do for you: how it can make you more resilient, more productive, think clearer, be a master of yourself,” he says. “This is a perfectly fine entry point into the philosophy. But if you miss what the philosophy is also asking of you, in terms of ethics and morals and its emphasis on the virtue of justice, how we’re interconnected and interrelated, then really, what you’ve just discovered is a recipe for being a better sociopath. Which is not what stoicism is.”

• Why Jamie Dimon is Sam Altman’s biggest competitor - 🤖 says: JPMorgan Chase, led by Jamie Dimon, is presented as a major competitor to OpenAI due to its vast proprietary data (150 petabytes vs. GPT-4’s 0.5 petabytes).

Wastebook

• “You can think of prompt injection as social engineering done on AI instead of humans.” Chip.

• “got scolded for drinking coffee in front of god.” Deb JJ Lee.

• “But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.” Here.

• The used to have blue hair, then a blue streak, and now they have a grey streak.

• “Spruiks.” Originally here.

• “LLMM: Large Language Mobile Marketing!” Tim.

• “And I thought, ‘well, that’s how it goes.’”

• ‘Now that The Ellen Show is off the air, he’s basically the last TV host of the “Gangnam Style era” that’s still on TV.’ Garbage.

• “Bruno Munari disco machine.” Here.

• Conway’s Law applied to M&A.

Conferences

Danielle has a new pitch for why you should join us at Explore. If you’re going to Explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20. Also, it’s “invite only,” but why not try to get an invite to our fancy dinner there?

Logoff

I’m in Barcelona at VMware Explore 2024. I did my two main talks today and they were fun to do, especially moderating the panel about enterprise AI. Hopefully the recordings will be up and easy to find soon.

The Cloud Equilibrium

As you know, I enjoy the impossible chase to track down the elusive chart that shows how many workloads are running on private cloud1 versus public cloud. I last rounded up my findings in July, 2024. Of particular interest is the IDC CloudPulse report. I don’t have access to the most recent one, but you can see one of the older charts in an older blog post of mine. When looking at this industry charts, surveys, and other goop, I still think the split is something between 40% to 60% - so, you know, “50/50.” I think of this as the cloud equilibrium. After 18 years of public cloud, we’ve had a long time to sort out which apps go where. Is the equilibrium stable? Using the rule that the future looks pretty much like the recent past, that equilibrium will probably be stable at least three years, maybe five. But who knows what will happen in five years, even four? Who would have predicted all this AI stuff would be such a big deal two years ago? Anyhow.

“Cloud repatriation” has come up here and there recently. It means moving workloads back from public cloud to on-premises. In that way, it’s the wiggle that happens on the edges of the equilibrium.

The stated reasons for cloud repatriation are usually for lowering cost, but I also suspect control (security, compliance, sovereignty, etc.), and functionality fit. Judging the amount of repatriation is difficult, if impossible, based on current industry goop. But, you can tell that it’s a common topic.

At my work’s conference, Explore, a Barclays CIO survey was referenced and it’s been used a few more times in that discussion.

I finally tracked down the original PDF recently, and here’s the chart the Explore chart is from, also shared by Michael Dell awhile back:

As with the private/public cloud charts I like to use, as worded, the repatriation question above is just about intentions and plans, not what actually happened. That nuance aside, when I combine these plans with the estimates of how many apps are “still” on-premises, there’s another interesting idea: you can't repatriate what never left in the first place. In the cloud equilibrium, there are a lot of apps already on-premises.

Also, in the Barclays PDF, you can see what types of workloads CIOs are planning on moving back:

It’s a bummer that the apps I care about - custom written applications - aren’t called out there. I don’t know if they’re part of “compute,” but they’d definitely touch “databases.” Maybe custom apps were part of the top seven.

To add more goop to my cloud equilibrium chart pile, in the PDF, you can also see the private/public cloud spread:

Here, you see that CIOs have been moving a lot of workloads to public cloud in recent years, and it’s nearing 50%. That’s a high rate of change year over year, but it’s wild to think that as of 2022, only 30% of workloads were in public cloud.

Also, this new chart for my pile makes the point about how difficult it is to find workload placement estimates. They’re all over the place, mostly different. Compare that Barclays’ chart to the IDC one I linked to above. IDC already had it around 50/50 in 2022 when the Barclays survey has it at 72/28, public/private. Hopefully I can find the 2025 Barclays survey to see what happens next!

What kind of goop do you have on file?

Wastebook

• “trad tech companies.” Gregely.

• Data is not oil, it’s milk: it goes bad if not used. Here.

• Data is power.

• A lot of my procrastination is just putting off making a decision that I already know I’ll make. Rather: taking on the debt, actions, and responsibilities of that decision. It can be as simple as having to call customer service, trivial as me wanting to avoid boredom and tedium, and as big as telling someone “no.”

• “API surface.”

• “EXTRA-ARGS” sounds like the noise you’d make when you need to use EXTRA-ARGS.

Relative to your interests

• Docs are the new something - The Google Docs web.

• Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry’s Hidden Superpowers, Save Money with Java Native - “you can reduce your Java app’s memory usage by 90%. This allows your applications to use fewer resources, which directly contributes to cost savings and more compute capacity”

• Google NotebookLM: AI-Powered Document Analysis Tool - Ideas for using NotebookML.

• Citi taps Google Cloud for app migration, AI adoption - “As evidence of progress, CFO Mark Mason pointed to 450 apps retired by the bank since the start of the year. Citi has reduced tech sprawl by eliminating 1,250 apps in the last two years, Mason said.” // Thinks of all the zombie apps like that across every organization in the world.

• Gartner sounds alarm on AI cost, data challenges - Enterprise AI is like any other enterprise IT project: “CIOs have found generative AI goals harder to attain than first anticipated. Technology leaders are blaming data challenges, technical debt and poor strategy or execution for slowing down progress. Nearly half of CIOs say AI has not yet met ROI expectations, according to Gartner research.” // Data access is the first problem, then your existing systems, then people and process that don’t change how they work to take advantage of the new tech. "AI Transformation?

• Enterprise AI moves from ‘experiment’ to ‘essential,’ spending jumps 130% - “Organizations reported a 130% increase in AI spending since 2023.” And: “The research shows a dramatic increase in organizational spending on generative AI, with over 40% of companies now investing more than $10 million in the technology. This represents a significant shift from the previous year when the typical investment range was between $1–5 million.”

• How PostgreSQL is Dominating AI and Multicloud - Postgres never goes away.

• Platform Engineering: Why You’re Doing It Wrong - Hopefully also how to do to real right.

• DORA 2024: AI and Platform Engineering Fall Short - The New Stack - Good summary.

Apple Intelligence

I’ve got the new iOS and Mac updates, so I have Apple Intelligence. So far, it’s alright for simple summaries and rewritings. I’ve used it a few times! However, like Gemini, they’ve fallen prey to AI Cowardice:

I mean, sure, I agree 100% that it’s the right business move. And, it’s probably also the right “how do we sustain this long term enough to achieve escape velocity without The Culture dragging us to the guillotine?” move. But…still: what a disappointment!

I think it’ll be good though, especially when you can actually prompt-coach it more. From what I can tell, with Apple Intelligence features, you can’t put in your own prompt. Boo!

The image editing (removing people) is what you’d expect: not great, a dancing bear. I dub this “weird, but OK.”

Conferences

Danielle has a new pitch for why you should join us at Explore. If you’re going to Explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20. Also, it’s “invite only,” but why not try to get an invite to our fancy dinner there?

Logoff

Our big conference, Explore, is next week in Barcelona. It’ll be fun! Here’s details of what I’m doing if you’ve forgotten from the past 52 times I’ve mentioned it here. Rita has a write-up of what feels like everything for you to checkout too.

Tell me if you’ll be there, maybe we can solve the mystery of tapas enjoyment.

Start with good content, get better content

I've seen enough generative AI used to help marketing now that my theory is: you should only use it if you're already good at making whatever "the content" or strategy is. The AI will help you make it better, or more broadly consumable. It will do a terrible job starting from a blank slate.

You can coax it, try to get it to know your style, feed/RAG more context in, workshop and refine it…but at that point you’ve spent just as much time as it would taken to just type an email, call someone to plan/brainstorm, blog post, or hit record.

The bigger marketing productivity gains are people-based (just like dev and ops): they need skills/mentoring/pairing/training; more frequent, but quicker/shorter collaboration; a stripped down pipeline that remove/automates governance; and cleaner tops-down direction to be principle self-directed.

And the bigger, obvious AI anti-pattern is simply garbage in, garbage out. The AI is just going to predict the next words (or pixels/sound-waves) to output. If you feed it garbage, it's going to know that what usually follows is more garbage.

If you start with good stuff, the AI will help you get to even good-er stuff for sure. AI is terrible at shift left.

DORA 2024

The 2024 DORA report is out. I haven’t really digested it yet, but the findings on platform engineering are weird/troubling:

Internal developer platform the key findings can help your platform users had 8% higher levels of individual productivity and 10% higher levels of team performance. Additionally, an organizations' software deliver and operations performance increases 6% when using a platform. However, these gains do not come without some drawbacks. Throughput and change stability saw decreases of 8% and 14%, respectively, which was a surpassing results.

Still:

Overall, the impact of a platform is positive, individuals were 8% more productive and teams performed 10% better when using and internal developer platform… [W]hen a platform is used in an organization’s overall performance [see definition of that], with an increase of 6%.

I’ll have to go check the numbers to be sure, but I feel like I’ve seen much better productivity results over the years in the Cloud Foundry community: going from months and months to deploy to weeks and days. One of our Software Defined Talk listeners, Chris, did a “live reading” with plenty of commentary which you can see in our Slack. I recommend it if you’re interested in the DevOps reports.

The last time I commented on DORA, Nathen Harvey pointed me to this, which I think is what most people want to see. That is, “what organizations behaviors and process do I change to get them awesome results?”:

If you’re doing the DevOps and it doesn’t seem to be working, then look at this chart and ask “are we doing these things” and if not, that’s why doing the DevOps is not doing it for you. Top digital transformation tip: if you don’t change, you won’t change.

Here’s a blog post of highlights and a pretty good infographic of “executive level” take-aways.

Software Defined Talk Podcast #490: AI's use UI's

This week’s episode:

This week, we talk about Anthropic's new AI agent, cloud exits, and why BMC is splitting up. Plus, a quick update on the WordPress drama and some thoughts on Amsterdam’s autumn weather.

Listen to it, or watch the unedited video if you prefer that kind of thing.

Relative to your interests

It’s analyst predictions season. Is it me, or does it get earlier every year, har, har. So, lots of enterprise IT stuff this episode, starting with enterprise AI.

• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 9.3% in 2025 - Setting expectations: “CIOs will begin to spend on GenAI, beyond proof-of-concept work, starting in 2025. More money will be spent, but the expectations that CIOs have for the capabilities of GenAI will drop. The reality of what can be accomplished with current GenAI models, and the state of CIO’s data will not meet today’s lofty expectations.”

• Gartner sounds alarm on AI cost, data challenges - ‘“Nearly half of CIOs say AI has not yet met ROI expectations, according to Gartner research. “The truth is that you’ve been in the mud for the last year, working hard to find all those benefits that were promised by AI,” said Hung LeHong, distinguished VP analyst and Gartner Fellow, during the keynote session. “It hasn’t been easy.”’

• But where will all that money go? OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning Through Piles of Money - "OpenAI’s monthly revenue hit $300 million in August, up 1,700 percent since the beginning of 2023, and the company expects about $3.7 billion in annual sales this year, according to financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. OpenAI estimates that its revenue will balloon to $11.6 billion next year.” // Also, big firm consultants.

• Related: How CIOs gain employee buy-in on generative AI.

• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 9.3% in 2025 - Setting expectations: “CIOs will begin to spend on GenAI, beyond proof-of-concept work, starting in 2025. More money will be spent, but the expectations that CIOs have for the capabilities of GenAI will drop. The reality of what can be accomplished with current GenAI models, and the state of CIO’s data will not meet today’s lofty expectations.”

• Gartner Unveils Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2025 and Beyond - “By 2029, 10% of global boards will use AI guidance to challenge executive decisions that are material to their business.” // Weird prediction.

• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 9.3% in 2025 - Setting expectations: “CIOs will begin to spend on GenAI, beyond proof-of-concept work, starting in 2025. More money will be spent, but the expectations that CIOs have for the capabilities of GenAI will drop. The reality of what can be accomplished with current GenAI models, and the state of CIO’s data will not meet today’s lofty expectations.”

• The Modern CIO: Moving from Technology Steward to Transformation Agent - AI is cool, but there’s still that 95% of other day-to-day shit to deal with in the enterprise.

• IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2024 Predictions - “Application modernization has been a nagging problem for decades but has recently emerged as a critical concern for enterprises, with around 62% of organizations worldwide considering it a high or top priority today, and over 70% expecting it to be a high or top priority in the next 24–36 months.” // “With 50% of CEOs concerned about their company’s cloud spending and 64% of CIOs say they are spending more on cloud than budgeted” (IDC, 2023)

• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 Orlando: Day 3 Highlights - “By 2028, more than 50% of enterprises will not get value from their multicloud implementations.” And: “By 2028, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives — up from less than 50% in 2023.”

• The Future of Smart Rings - “In the last full year of data, 2023, IDC recorded Global Ring sales of 880,000 units, with Oura representing 80% and Ultrahuman in second with 12%. We are forecasting this to rise to 1.7 million in 2024 and 3.2 million in 2028, equating to a year-over-year growth rate of 29.5%. For comparison, the total global Smartwatch sales in 2023 were roughly 161 million devices, forecasted to rise to 175 million by 2028, an average year-over-year growth rate of 1.7%.”

• IBM revenue misses, but execs say AI will drive future growth - “The company’s Red Hat subsidiary, which anchors its hybrid cloud strategy, grew revenue 14%. Krishna noted that the Red Hat business has doubled in size since the acquisition five years ago.”

• MQTT turns 25 – here’s how it has endured - “Today, 25 years on, it is in many things and places you may not realize – hobbyists and makers use it, it’s used (for example) in Dyson air conditioners and their associated apps, in 3D printing, in home alerting, in industry and manufacturing – it’s almost certain that more than one of the apps on your phone is using MQTT somewhere in the stack.” // MQTT is “used (for example) in Dyson air conditioners and their associated apps, in 3D printing, in home alerting, in industry and manufacturing – it’s almost certain that more than one of the apps on your phone is using MQTT somewhere in the stack.” Andy Piper on 25 years of MQTT

• Users remain on PostgreSQL 12 as end of life looms - “Users of PostgreSQL 12 have less than a month to prepare for the database to enter end of life and become unsupported.”

• Unpopular opinion about “Moving back to on-prem” - The case against private cloud. // Also this on Kubernetes: “Although you could develop new applications based on Kubernetes on-prem, the cost and complexity of managing the control plane, and the limited scale capabilities, will make your solution a wannabe cloud. A small and pale version of the public cloud.” What if all the consternation around Kubernetes was because people keep trying to run it themselves? “Kubernetes is only for public cloud providers,” or something like that.

• Basecamp-maker 37Signals says its “cloud exit” will save it $10M over 5 years - “Late last week, Hansson had an update: it’s more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into existing racks and power allowances, estimating seven years' life for that hardware, and eventually transferring its 10 petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and have more storage available.”

• The Other Bubble - What the enterprise software market looks like from the outside. Also with a side of AI-washing.

• Don’t Click Here - I’ve gone go back and forth on this over the decades. Like every other good little HTML’er in the 90s, I would link the words in a sentence that indicated what the link went to. I kept doing this in the 2000s. But then in the 2010’s when we started treating the web less like documents and more like, I don’t know, like web of apps, the idea of telling people to “click here” seemed more obvious. And in the 2020’s, I don’t use it at much, but a click here is sometimes more natural especially when you’re doing a CTA. That is: I accept that sometimes “click here” style linking is OK and maybe even the best choice. Still, if you were to pick one, I’d go with avoiding “click here” linking.

• This is an under appreciated part of most Dutch systems: they do the minimum needed, cutting out all the irrelevant stuff. There are still forms, waiting, etc., but the paper work tends to be efficient. In healthcare this can seem insane compared to American standards. In the Netherlands, they don’t do annual checkups and paramedical is prescribed all the time as a cure all. It’s like for each step in creating a system they think “is this needed? If not, cut it.” I think the American test is “is it possible this might be needed?” and if so, you include it.

Wastebook

Ale: “it’s misty outside.”

Me: “like my head.”

Ale: “that’s all that it’s in there? Just mist and gas.”

Me: “That’s right.”

Ale: “And fart jokes.”

Meanwhile:

• “snackers of all ages” Here.

• “I am a cat in a hobo hat trying to steal a pie off a window sill.” RotL #556. And: the t-shirt that became a book is now a t-shirt based on the book.

• “They put coffee in the coffee in Brazil.” I don’t know if you need one hour of this, but here it is.

• “multicloud by accident,” Tracy Woo.

• “Hot Lunch.”

• “an excess of perseverance.” Here.

• “It was a Honda Accord, and the lyric is ‘Midnight black on the outside,’ but the car was actually green—midnight black just sounded cool.” “Midnight.”

• And: “I never got caught. But I think she’s going to find out now.” Ibid.

• Related: “This song really captures the mood of cruising Texas highways and taking it all in while the sun sets.”

• And: “No matter where you are in Texas, it’s big sky, big sun - that unifies the state. Khruangbin and Leon are both on tour all the time, so I think there was a relatable thing of just missing the feeling of home.”

Conferences

Danielle has a new pitch for why you should join us at Explore. If you’re going to Explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

Logoff

What my talks sound like to my family:

Whitney has a LinkedIn problem

Our second episode of the Software Defined Interviews reboot is up:

Whitney and Coté talk with Sidney Miller about tech recruitment. They talk a lot about the process from both sides: people hiring and people looking for jobs. Plus, some thoughts on working at Neiman Marcus. Find Sidney in LinkedIn.

More details:

They explore effective strategies for both the hirer and the job seeker. Key topics include the comprehensive role of tech recruiters, tactics for handling diverse skill sets, inclusion efforts, unbiased interview practices, and the significance of empathy and transparency. They also cover personal strategies for successful job applications, the emotional aspects of career transitions, and networking tips for long-term career growth. Additional insights highlight challenges faced by artists and musicians transitioning into tech roles and the importance of leadership in fostering a positive workplace culture.

You can listen to the interview on the World Wide Web, and/or watch the video version in YouTube. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast too so you just get it every two weeks.

Have any internships?

Speaking of, my nephew is looking for an internship to wrap-up his college studies. His name is Caleb Marques, and would love to join a great team. He's studied all the thrilling IT stuff at Texas A&M: Unix sysadmin'ing, cybersecurity, networking, python, Business, and all that kind of stuff. He graduates in August 2025 and needs an internship to finish up his business and cybersecurity degrees. He'll move where ever, so location is not a problem. Tell me if you're interested, or know someone who's got an IT, especially security internship. He's fun too! :)

Check him out in LinkedIn, and contact him or me if you’re interested in seeing his resume, talking with him, etc.

Relative to your interests

• Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents - February, 2024: “By 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents, according to Gartner, Inc.” // A 25% drop would be catastrophic for how businesses use the internet. A real “changes everything” event if that actually happened.

• LinkedIn is the new social media channel baseline - “You can see how much Twitter has fallen by how well LinkedIn performs in comparison.” // Another round of nerds trying to escape Twitter. This is about the third, I think.

• How you use customer GPTs - Great looking uses for custom GPTs, and thus AI in general.

• United credits tech and staff investments for rising NPS scores - A rare example of an enterprise praising better user experience for helping the business. // “to create an airline that customers choose to fly, we need to deliver a great customer experience.”

• What Is the Point of Austin’s Fake AI Restaurant? - You usually do this to build up follows for an account to sell to someone, then they delete all the content and start new with all those followers. But wouldn’t it be it cool if it was some kind of new, surreal performance art?

• Medieval Fantasy City Generator 0.11.4: forests - This looks great: I like this map generator but always want more trees.

• Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases - Aileen Oeberst, Roland Imhoff, 2023 - Summarizing all those cognitive biases.

• PlatformCon 2025: June 23rd to 27th - CFP closes February 23rd, 2025.

• JPMorgan Chase leads banking sector in AI adoption: report - "JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon prioritized data and infrastructure modernization to drive AI adoption in an April letter to shareholders, stating the bank planned to have 75% of data and 70% of applications migrated to the cloud by the end of the year. // “The characteristic of the top banks is that they started preparing five or six years ago with restructuring, hiring and putting in a research lab,” Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and co-CEO of Evident, told CIO Dive. “That’s what Jamie Dimon did.””

Conferences

If you’re going to explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

Logoff

Here’s another overview of how I play D&D with ChatGPT (and the other AIs): use a PC journal that’s mixed in with other PoVs, meta-notes, etc. The audio in the video is sad, but the content is great!

Let’s start with some YAGV (yet another goofy video):

Relative to your interests

• Spring AI: An AI framework for Java developers - No python? No problem.

• The Great Data Integration Schlep - ‘Every company has something fucked-up and dumb going on somewhere, no matter how admirable they are in other respects, and if they’re facing an existential crisis there’s definitely something going badly wrong that somebody doesn’t want to face. If you ever want to get all your data in one place, you need to figure out some of the shape of the Badness, in an environment where most of the people you meet are presenting as “reasonable and highly competent professionals” and everybody’s got a different story about the Badness and why it’s unavoidable or someone else’s fault.’

• Via: Reflections on Palantir - There’s a lot going on here, from small tactical points (much of the work in enterprise software is just meetings and “politics” to get access to enterprise data and systems) to complete world views (always questing for the most optimized, quickest, and profitable solution that actually works, no matter the cost). Counter arguments: how would one live like this with three kids, even one kid? // There’s also the mystery of why the thought leaders and executives of this world are so weird.

• Warren Buffett’s GEICO repatriates work from the cloud - “Ten years into that [cloud] journey GEICO still hadn’t migrated everything to the cloud, their bills went up 2.5X and their reliability challenges went up quite a lot too – because if you spread your data and your methodology across so many different vendors you are going to spend a lot of time recollecting that data to actually serve customers.” And: “Most engineers I talk to are [also] excited…when ‘Big Tech’ is enforcing less flexible working conditions, coming to a place where we want to build together [without those conditions – she is hiring for jobs that include the option to be fully remote] then that’s very attractive…”

• The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett review – James I’s beloved bedfellow - ‘Buckingham initially consulted Lambe, whom he called “my devil”, about his “mad” – probably bipolar – brother, but retained him as an adviser, perhaps to use his love potion-making skills or his curses, practices for which Lambe had spent time in prison.’

• What Message Queue-Based Architectures Reveal About the Evolution of Distributed Systems - There’s not a lot of buzz and chatter about message-oriented middleware (MOM) anymore (remember the Kafka craze?), but is one of the most common workloads running in containers. One of those “boring” states: when a technology is ubiquitous enough, just works, and therefore is a well oiled wheel that gets no thought.

• Related: Tanzu Postgres for Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry adds new features - Faster, incremental backups using pgBackRest, AI/ML support with Pgvector, and streamlined restore options with adbr

• Relatable, not louder - “More generally, what persuades people is new information – ideally information that is relevant to their lives and that comes with someone who they have something in common with.” // How devrel works. More broadly, of course: marketing.

• A History of Microwave Ovens - As it says.

• I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is - “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

• The XOXO 2024 Talks - People keep raving about these talks.

• Internal Developer Platform: Insights from Conversations with Over 100 Experts - Looks comprehensive!

• The Evolution and Expansion of IT FinOps - Overview of current needs and possibilities in enterprise-y FinOps, I assume.

• Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media - “Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. As every school principal knows, you can’t solve bullying through the design of the physical building.”

• Are Kids Screenable? - New screen time app. It sounds like it actually integrates with iOS stuff, which I didn’t even know was possible.

• Why Retail Health Clinics Failed - I wonder if failure is rated by profitability or by the improvement in the amount and quality of care given to people. In medicine, those are probably two different things that don’t often work together.

• The Real Impact Of Return-To-Office Mandates On Productivity At Work - “Not surprisingly, research by Upwork showed that 63% of C-suite leaders whose companies implemented return-to-office mandates say the policy has led a disproportionate number of women to quit. In addition, more than half agree that the loss of female talent resulted in a serious decline in productivity. In addition to women, a Gartner survey revealed that millennials and high performers are the most likely to quit when companies enforce return-to-office mandates. Among high-performing employees, their desire to stay dropped by 16%. And among millennials, the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, the intent to stay declined by 10%.” // RTO is dress-code.

• The Cloud Foundry Renaissance, Julian Fischer, CF Day EU 2024 - This is a good talk, content wise and also structure wise. It has a point of view, a vision, finds a problem, and then launches a product.

Lots of fonts this round-up, so I’ll cluster them:

• Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine - “This kind of Art Nouveau styling doesn’t really suit Lovecraft either, the design being more a result of Ballantine following prevailing trends than anything else. You could make something like this work for Lovecraft if you were determined, with a border design and font choice more suited to the subject.”

• Typefaces of the occult revival - Back in the 80s, I went to the occult shelves first thing when I’d goto in Half Priced Books. I found a copy of the Necronomicon once! Also, clearly one of the horn-doggest sections of the used bookstore.

• Nick Cooke’s Exentrica - “it seemed as though it were a bridge between Jugendstil and Art Deco — the missing link, so to speak.”

Wastebook

• “Broken steering is a metaphor for that feeling at work where your actions seem to have no impact. Turn the wheel, car still goes straight. This is rare in blue collar work: the car got assembled, now you have car. It is common in knowledge work: you sent some email, so what?” Here.

• “I’ve been married to you long enough. I know you like warm biscuits.”

Conferences

If you’re going to explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

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I need a haircut and will be getting one soon.

Most of the generative AI applications we'll see in the coming years will be just new features added to existing applications. Even more pragmatically, simply improving how existing applications work will drive a lot of the AI benefits. When it comes to applications, this means we should manage AI like we would any other service, both in process and how we run it. That's my prediction at least. I'm as enamored with AI as anyone else, trying out plenty of experiments and ravenously hungry for any real world case studies that are more complex that chatbots, sophisticated search, and (re)writing.

The reality of AI roll-out in the enterprise is creeping in. That reality is: it’ll be slower than we were promised. For example, Battery Venture's recent enterprise tech spending survey says: 

The AI wave is still building, but the future has been slower than anticipated. Today only 5.5% of identified AI use cases are in production, a sobering reality check on respondents’ Q1’24 projection that 52% of identified use cases would be in production over the next 24 months. 

As Benedict Evans put it "the future can take a long time."

My point is not to dampen the enthusiasm, but to make the timeline more realistic and, thus, the chances of success much higher.

In enterprise software, sanity is valuable because it introduces stability and reliablity. I'm not sure I want my bank working at break-neck speed, applying new ideas this way and that before figuring out what works and, even, what's valuable for me. As with any highly regulated business, I want to trust my bank, and that trust comes from knowing they're operating in a consistent, proven way. I want my bank to be a lot more sane than whatever services I use to share pictures of my sandwiches or listen to Yacht Rock.

There's years of AI-driven benefits in our future, especially in large organizations and businesses. AI stuff could, indeed, be a silver bullet: something that didn't previously exist that lets us solve problems faster and cheaper, and even better than what we previously had.

But, how you achieve those goals is likely immune to silver bullet dreams. This is especially true when it comes to applications. The practice of creating, evolving, and maintaining good applications will remain the same as they were in the pre-AI era. If we mess around with and ignore those practices, just as we found out when Kubernetes up-ended all the progress we made with PaaS, we'll have to start all over again, losing time, progress, expertise, and trust.

In the enterprise, just like the rest of the world, great ideas are a dime a dozen, in a good way: there's lots of options for improvement. In a large organization, three hurdles stand in the way of transforming good ideas into code and ultimately into production: (1) neglecting product/problem fix, (2) "politics" due to silo-defending cultures, and, (3) fear of releasing due to lack of trust in resilience, reliability, and sometimes cost.

When enterprises try to spin up AI projects, these three barriers will come into effect just like they would any new IT services. Let's look at each.

Most IT projects fail because of neglected product/problem fit 

I'm sure you've used many applications and thought "do the people who build this software actually use it?" That's the first layer of the problem: the app is poorly designed and doesn't actually help the people using it do their job better. The second is that the application is just solving the wrong problem. "Wrong sounds" judge-y. What I mean there is that there were better problems to solve first. Of more vexingly, better ways to solve the problem. 

AI projects will have to solve this product/problem fit. Worse, that product management labyrinth is even more dangerous when it comes to hot new technologies because we get so torqued up that we lose sight of basics. We assume that these new silver bullets will remove the need for all that tedious process stuff we’re currently putting up with. 

I like how Jürgen Geuter put it recently: 

[W]ith every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us - that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No, we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it. Because actually solving a problem includes first fully understanding the reasons for the existence of the problem, reasons that often come back to an organizations’ structure, their – sometimes inconsistent – goals and their social structure in addition to actual technical issues.

The antidote for this is consistently applying product management. Well, applying it at all for most enterprises.

Product management brings a cool-headed approach to all that "magic." The good news is that product management is one of the more understood, more developed and real-world tested software practices out there. And, if you follow the frequent weekly or fortnightly release cycles that people who follow the Tanzu Labs model do, you introduce a data-driven method of planning and improving your apps. I've seen this done at numerous large enterprises. You can read more about it in my book Monolithic Transformation and the Tanzu Labs Product Manager Playbook.

Culture

To me, "politics" is whatever noise, sandbagging, and (selfish) behavior people in an organization do that prevents you from doing "the right thing." No one likes "politics": it's always bad. Otherwise we'd just call it "work." It's grit in the system, often put there by other people in your organization who want to protect what they have, hoard budget and the rewards that come with success.

For the most part, it's not so much the grit-throwers fault, but management's fault for setting up and sustaining the system to work that way. People are rational, they figure out "the game" and play it.

When it comes to initiatives like the magic of AI, politics shows up in maximum force. People either want to hoard the benefits and attention, or they want to defend themselves. Is it taking a long time to get access to the infrastructure you need to run AI models? That's probably politics. Are you trying to find time for yet another meeting to get access to the manufacturing quality data you need? I bet it's "politics."

The fear that AI will eliminate jobs will compound this problem even more: people will be reluctant to give you access to their data to automate analysis because "then, what will I do?" After all, employees rarely get the benefits of “productivity,” speeding up work by 20% doesn’t mean workers now get Fridays off.

There's absolutely nothing about the magic of AI that will solve these culture problems. To adapt what one of my team-mates once said: "AI will not fix your broken culture."

Solving culture problems is difficult, but, again, we have decades of experience learning what works and doesn't work. There's a lot of "it depends'ing" to it, yes. But, as with product management, that's why you start with a system and rigorously apply it.

Lack of trust in process and platforms

I mentioned that I want my bank to be sane. This is because, you know, they have all my money. If that money just disappeared overnight, my life would get very difficult. It'd be a major bummer!

The financial sector hasn't exactly behaved rationally during my years as an adult, and there's a whole generation of people who were born into bad financial times. That is, banks have earned that need for trust. 

Similarly, IT has earned a need for trust. Just as with banking, in aggregate, things are fine. I still have all my money after all these years! And, IT keeps running businesses. But, when big problems happen - delays, growing budgets, ineffective apps, and security breaches - all of IT gets blamed. People forget how valuable most all IT is. In short, IT needs to constantly win and maintain the business’ trust.

When it comes to software, this lack of trust feeds delays by adding in endless governance and process. But it also injects fear into the people doing the work. If things go poorly, if we're not 100% correct and successful, we will be punished. For applications, this means you have a bias towards taking fewer risks. For organization, this means you're afraid of releasing your apps. 

It all comes together in a cultural malaise - a fog of timidity and lethargy that stifles innovation, slows down decision-making, and encourages risk-averse behavior. Here again, the people are acting rationally within the system that management has built and continues to maintain, if only through neglect.

In applications, the first step to solving this malaise is to get a reliable, proven platform in place, changing how operations works to be the product managers of that platform. The second step is to change how developers write applications to take advantage of that platform.

This is where platforms and platform engineering come in. I'm, you know, reticent to hand over the torch from DevOps to platform engineering - the PE crew has done a good enough job just swiping it - but platform engineering has a lot going for it when it comes to building trust. Of course, you need a platform too - culture without technology is just delightful conversations.

What I'm talking about here is a baseline of trust in application development and platforms, nothing to do with AI. But, AI will need that same amount of trust. And that trust will come from being "just another service" in a reliable platform. You're not going to want AI to exist on its own as a weird service held together by newly typed up python, you'll want it supported by platforms relying on the same old, boring but “enterprise grade” components that run the world day in and day out.

This means putting in place the SRE-smells in platform engineering, the product management in platform engineering to make sure the AI services are useful and used by developers, and then the actual platform stack itself, hopefully one that you didn't just paste-pot together out of parts.

People probably trust AI now because it seems like magic, because they haven't used it day-to-day to know how finicky it is, and because not many AI apps have been put into production yet. But, as with any new software, the more it’s used, the more you'll notice the failures and start to build up mis-trust.

We know how to run, program with, govern, and secure any old type of "service," and I don't think there'll be much different with AI services if we treat them as such. You need an AI platform strategy.

How to eat silver bullets

Does this seem to slow? Unrealistic in the face of boards and CEOs hungry for those AI silver bullets? It can, and we see this over and over. You can achieve those stupendous results, but your biggest problem is going to be figuring out what exactly to do and how to organize your teams to do it.

If you have those parts right, you've got a good chance of getting that AI magic. You'll certainly have a better chance than people who follow the fire-aim-ready approach to strategy. Seemingly contradictory, the most important thing is to start right now: assess your software capabilities. Do you have product managers? Are you able to release software every week or two to actual users? Can you gather feedback about what works and doesn't work so you can refine your app? Maybe you can, but most organizations don't have the basics of that loop in place.

Adding product-thinking and frequent releases to your organization and culture takes a long time, but it will take even longer if you don't start. Put that in place, and then you'll be on your way. Set realistic expectations and then you'll benefit from another theory of applying IT magic to your business: "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years."

I’ll be in two talks on these topics next month at Explore in Barcelona, November 4th to 7th.

I’m really interested in a panel I’m moderating with a platform engineer from Mercedes-Benz, Benni Miano, and what I’m going to call our chief AI architect (in Tanzu-land), Adib Saikali. I’ve been really bored with enterprise AI for awhile, and talking to those two has gotten me interested in again. Adib had some interesting thoughts on roles and responsibilities in the enterprise AI stack.

There’s another one on platform contracts that I’m helping out with. It’s based on some work that we’ve done with NatWest to get developers to shift to cloud native applications - that whole point above of changing how your developers work to take advantage of your platforms.

And, of course, there’ll be all sorts of talk about how we think about adding AI to your platforms. Plus, Barcelona in November - what’s not to like! Check out the two talks, and tell me if you’re coming.

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I’ll save up the links and weird finds for next time. If you’re into my experiments using generative AI to play solo Dungeons & Dragons, here’s a new technique I’m working on and recommend.