I have a new podcast up that’s on the ongoing topic of software development, big and small, tools and practices, news and theory, old and new. I’m co-hosting it with Bill Higgins. I’ve talked with Bill Higgins for many years, and occasionally we’ve done a podcast episode together. He was in town a few weeks back, and I thought we should start recording our conversations rather than have them disappear into the ether.
Posts in "tech"
The research reported in this book … shows that in the cases of well-managed firms… . good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.
What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets. This book derives a set of rules, from carefully designed research and analysis of innovative successes and failures in the disk drive and other industries, that managers can use to judge when the widely accepted principles of good management should be followed and when alternative principles are appropriate.
From the intro to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, which remains an incredibly provocative read after all these years. (via chaddickerson)
Indeed! If you’re like me you were reading that thinking, “what new book is this?”
Nice overview of SolidFire
A good overview of what the software-heavy enterprise storage company does, including this assessment on market segment targeting:
SolidFire is very honest about not being built for the mid-market, as it feels that most of the middle of the market is headed toward cloud providers anyhow. Some may consider this a weakness, but I consider it a great strength. It has allowed SolidFire to focus on the pain points of organizations with large storage and storage performance needs, to do so with great scale, and to do so in a way that greatly reduces operational complexity and all the mental friction that usually accompanies that scale.
In the M&A world, you kiss a lot of frogs
I like this post on what filling up the deal-flow pipeline for VCs looks like. For example, a good bozo bit heuristic:
One of the reasons that a meeting doesn’t go well is that the founding team will say they expect $50 million in revenue in 5 years, but they have difficulty articulating how they’ll get to their first $1million.
Having worked on the buy side of the table (when I was in corporate strategy, working on M&A for software and cloud at Dell), there’s a similar story for what the exit looks like.
Red Hat jumps on all the right cloud bandwagons, focusing on new application trends (451 Report)
My overview of the Red Hat Summit is up now, for clients only of course. Here’s the 451 Take:
Like many infrastructure companies, Red Hat used its recent annual summit to point out the importance of developers as the driver for the next wave of IT spending: namely, developers writing new software on top of cloud platforms, often using devops-like practices. We, of course, think paying attention to this space is wise as companies seek to become digital enterprises, using custom applications and cloud-based IT to instrument and boost their business processes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Yeah, this should definitely be in 3D.”
No, what he said was, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That’s what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential, and aware of your inexperience. And that’s really tough. There are moments when you’ll have a different point of view because you’re a fresh set of eyes; because you don’t care how it’s been done before; because you’re sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way. But there will also be moments when you have a different point of view because you’re wrong, because you’re 23 and you should shut up and listen to somebody who’s been around the block.
Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit, Jon Lovett
It’s a good speech, no matter how old you are, for how to cope with working with other people which, we know, is hell.
BMC BladeLogic integrating with Chef
So we’ve built some first-generation integration between Chef and BladeLogic 8.5, which we’re demoing in our booth for the first time here at ChefConf. You can use BladeLogic to call Chef cookbooks and recipes on a push/scheduled basis, and you can reference BladeLogic compliance policies from inside your Chef cookbooks. It’s all very early and not production-ready, but we want to put this integration front and center with the people here at ChefConf and start a conversation about how they want to blend these two approaches to a stable, managed IT infrastructure.
Red Hat revenues, old vs. new and early cloud momemtum
Brandon Butler sums up the “old” (Linux) vs “new” (middleware and cloud) revenue stream for Red Hat
The company gets about 80% of its $1.3 billion in revenues from a category that’s headlined by RHEL, and those subscriptions aren’t likely going away any time soon, says Joel Fishbein, who tracks Red Hat’s stock closely as an analyst at BMO Capital Markets.
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The enterprise transition from Unix to Linux is fairly mature, with revenue from the RHEL-focused main part of the business growing 13% last year, Fishbein says.
Infor ERP moving products to AWS - Press Pass
A few weeks ago, I talked with Chris Kanaracus for his story on Infor moving parts of their application portfolio to Amazon Web Services. Chris said this looked like a pretty strong endorsement for using AWS, and asked for my thoughts, which were:
Yes, this a nice vote a confidence for AWS. However, I think most SaaS companies would look at AWS as capable of being used like this. There might be questions about pricing long-term, but technologically it’s just a stack of middleware running on a bunch of servers.
VMware and Citrix team-up with Google Chromebooks to run Windows apps - Press Pass
I spoke with a couple of reporters earlier this week on the partnerships between Google and VMware and Google and Citrix around supporting Windows XP on Chromebooks. VMware has $200 off Chromebook discount for business buyers, and Citrix has a discount as well. Both are deep into vying with each other around the Desktop-as-a-Service market and interested in dominating that market which is looking to be driven by a pretty simple need: providing a way to use Windows applications on non-Windows devices.