A History lesson for Cloud Detractors
We've all seen cloud computing discussed ad nauseam on blogs, on Twitter, Quora, Stack Exchange, your mom’s Facebook page... you get the idea. The tech bloggers and performance experts often pipe in with their graphs and statistics showing clearly that dollar-for-dollar, cloud hosted virtual servers can’t compete with physical servers in performance, so why is everyone pushing them? It's just foolhardy, they say.
On the other end, management and their bean counters would simply roll their eyes saying this is why the tech guys aren't running the business.
Seriously, why the disconnect?
What Wouldn’t Google Do?
In his latest book, What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis seems to have authored a gushing tribute to the search giant that has pledged to do no evil. He paints a very optimistic picture, and shows us over and over how Google has opened up industries, and how that same openness helps consumers like you and I.
Jarvis, if you don't know him by name, has been a journalist for some time, but gained particular cred and notoriety when he blogged with the headline "Dell lies. Dell Sucks" after his horrible experiences with Dell computers and customer service.
While digging through Googly chapters, on Real Estate, Publishing, Entertainment, Shopping, Education and even Airlines, Jarvis serves up anecdotes on how a more open approach can help these industries adapt to a new business environment brought about by the Internet. He cites interesting examples like Gary Vaynerchuk, the creator of the hilarious and insanely popular winelibrary.tv show about wines, and now a public speaker on social media and brand building; and Brazilian author Paulo Coelho pirating his own works.
Taking the cue from some of these successes Jarvis goes on to propagate the idea that sharing and dishing out services for free is the way to make money. The irony that you have to buy his book for him to tell you that deserves a chuckle, and also raises the question of whether he himself buys all of that (pun inevitable). Indeed openness is great for consumers as most of us would agree. A level playing field increases competition, drives down prices for consumers. But it also drives down profits and margins.
How about an easier tip jar?
Walking around New York you find yourself stopping at plenty of different places to grab some takeout for lunch. There are Vietnamese sandwich places, pizza shops, noodle bars, taco stands, juice bars and of course your daily coffee shop. You'll find an endless variety.
As is customary in New York, even for takeout there is usually a tip jar at the checkout. Many of them have a large bowl, or glass jar in which you can throw your change as tips, or if you really love the place and service, a couple of dollars.
Of late I've noticed a few have placed those small plastic boxes with a tiny slot on the top. You try to put some change in the slot, and half of the money falls on the floor. It's as frustrating as threading a needle while suffering from astigmatic vision. Now when I come to a place that has this plastic box, I don't even bother tipping. I get a headache thinking about my change falling all over the floor. All I keep thinking is, why make it so difficult to tip?
Review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky tells a great story. Here Comes Everybody begins with a case of a lost phone in a taxi cab, and the extraordinary turn of events that led to the owner retrieving it. From photos posted online, to NYPD who were uninterested in following up, to taking it all online. Through that online publicity, the story got picked up by the NY Times and CNN, which put pressure on the police to track down the taxi. It's a great example that illustrates the nuances, both good and bad, powerful and persistent that the Internet can unleash.
Throughout the book he weaves stories about the network effect, friends and friends of friends, and how that impacts information, organization, and the spread of ideas. Citing examples such as the SCO vs Linux court case and Groklaw, flash mobs and political organization, Shirky notes how all these events were influenced and facilitated by the Internet.
How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck
Strip by Randall Munroe; xkcd.com
First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.
It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative coding while the guys in operations, those who deploy the code, constantly cross their fingers in the hope that application changes won’t tilt the machine. And when you’re woken up at 4am to deal with an outage or your sluggish site is costing millions in losses, the blame game and finger-pointing starts.
If you manage a startup you may be faced with this problem all the time. You know your business, you know what you're trying to build but how do you find people who can help you build and execute your ideas with minimal risk?
Ideally, you want people who can bridge the mentality divide between the programmers eager to see feature changes, the business units pushing for them, and the operations team resistant to changes for the sake of stability.
Book review – Trust Agents by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith
Stumbling onto 800-CEO-Read, and their top books feature, I found Brogan and Smith's work. Brogan's blog intrigued me enough so I walked down to the Strand here in NYC to pick up a copy.
What I found was an excellent introduction to the nebulous world of social media marketing, where you find all sorts of advice and suggestions on how to engage your target audience. If you're feeling like an ignoramus on matters of social media, Trust Agents is a great place to start and will give you ideas of how to 'humanize' your digital connections.
The authors illustrate the Trust Agent idea with Comcast Cares for example and how they engaged customers, and what worked so well for them. Or Gary Vaynerchuk and his game changing Wine Library TV about wine. He also emphasizes that building relationships online is a lot like building relationships in the real world a la Keith Ferrazzi of Never Eat Alone fame. Engage in meaningful ways with people, don't market to them. Share valuable tidbits, and the community will reward you tenfold.
A 'trust agent' lives by six principles:
- Make your own game - be willing to take risks and break from the crowd
- Be 'One of Us' - be part of the community by doing your bit and contributing to it
- The Archimedes Effect - leverage your own strengths wisely
- Agent Zero - position yourself at the center by connecting people and groups
- Human Artist - learn how to work with people; help others and be conscientious of etiquette
- Build an Army - you need allies to help spread your ideas
The book is excellent. Put it on your holiday list.
Book Review – The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
What do you do after founding not one, but two companies and watching them fail miserably all by the time you were barely out of college?
Move to the Valley, make shrewd investments in other startups and become insanely rich like Sean Parker? A Bit lofty perhaps. How about try, try again and succeed. Then reinvent yourself as a guru dishing out startup wisdom through your blog and publishing a book that ends up the top of the New York Times Bestseller's list. That's essentially what Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup did.
True entrepreneurs fail many times before they succeed and continuously find opportunities to reinvent themselves. Ries is one of them. He's taken all that he's learned from his failures, and later successes, from his college years in the 1990s right through the dotcom crash, and packaged them into a guide for startups to consult in their quest for world domination.
Book Review – Help! by Oliver Burkeman
Help! How To Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done
I've long overcome that sheepish feeling when browsing the Self-help section at the bookstore. Sure, How to Make Friends and Influence People or the Seven Steps to World Domination in your bookcase aren't exactly the sort of titles to suggest a deep intellect but I like to keep an open mind when checking out the latest hardcover secret to happiness and prosperity. Basically I try not to diss a book just because it's got "soup" on the cover.
I will concede that publishers have gone a bit overboard with churning out the number of self-help titles in the last 20 years or so. As with anything that proliferates you're stuck with having to wade through the swamp of well, BS. HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done by Oliver Burkeman is ideal for those curious enough about self-improvement but too cool to buy into mind-body-soul mantras.
iHeavy Newsletter 84 – Restaurant Scalability
Restaurant Scalability
Could pro-waitering serve up some lessons on web scalability? Observing peak hour dining at a New York restaurant gave us some insight.
I was dining at a restaurant the other day with friends. It was a warm and cozy place, nicely decorated with a long, narrow dining room. The food was scrumptious, yet we were getting increasingly frustrated by the service as the night went along.
With some waiting experience behind me, I could immediately see the problem. The waiters, probably through lack of experience, were making the mistake of doing one thing at a time. They would go to a table, respond to one customer's request, and go and fetch that item. Back and forth, back and forth they would dart, but always dealing with one request at a time.
Sean Hull
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- A history lesson for cloud detractors - http://t.co/rfzGONtc 4 days ago
- What Wouldn't Google Do? http://t.co/FFfWwmbM @jeffjarvis #google #disruption #innovation 1 week ago
- paul graham really knows how to make friends! http://t.co/wcmofNEU #hollywood #disruption #startups #ycombinator 1 week ago