tech

The myopic focus on IT and engineering has to stop.

The myopic focus on IT and engineering has to stop.

The truth is that there is absolutely critical telemetry coming from every facet of your organization. All of this telemetry is either directly related to providing better service to customers or directly related to providing better service to your organization itself which, in turn, stabilizes the platform on which you deliver products and services. Of this, I shouldn’t have to convince you and I find that no convincing of the general population is required. Yet, here we are with almost every organization I see standing blind to this vital information.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think technology isn’t a first-class component of today’s (and tomorrow’s) organizations. In fact, I think the technology group has been applying radically advanced techniques to telemetry data for years. It’s high time that these techniques and tools were applied to the organization unabridged.

There is a profound shift in data transparency and accountability coming to the organization to tomorrow. If you don’t buy in, you’ll simply fail to achieve the agility and efficiencies of your competition. I’m here, with Circonus, to make that happen.

[Nice rant Theo, no arg from me. But how about some examples about how you measure things at OmniTI? And how can I apply that to my company without jumping through ten hoops to do so? (I’m not being cynical here. I’ve got a busy group that would happily measure more things if it were easy to implement. Tell me how to do so.)]

Source: The Scriptures of Jesus

Open infrastructure and the common good

Open infrastructure and the common good:

At this very moment you’re using a magnificent outcome of this kind of “common good” approach that I’m talking about—the Internet. Yes, yes, I’ll pause for you to crack an Al Gore joke here, but let’s not miss the point. The Internet exists the way it does because no private or state actor owns it, right? The reason no private or state actor owns it is because of explicit decisions made by both its creators and funders to treat it as a common good. From TCP/IP up to higher-level protocols like HTTP and electronic mail, no company or government agency has the power to declare “from this point in time forward, things using this protocol will be different.”

Those protocols are open infrastructure. Sometimes they have nominal owners but control has been relinquished to a standards body; sometimes they’re true public domain. Businesses can build on them, governments can try to spy on them, and of course vice-versa—but they’re public roads, not private ones. Everybody can use whatever web browser they want or email client they want or MP3 player they want. People can (and do) build businesses on top of those protocols, just like businesses in the physical world are built on top of physical infrastructure that those businesses only pay for indirectly.

[Interesting thinking. But spot on in the above.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Physical location in connection with data

Bruce Willis in “DRM Hard”:

But at second glance, this really does bring up some interesting questions, doesn’t it? Digital copies of all our media is already becoming the norm rather than the exception, and it’s my suspicion that in the future—probably sooner than we think—the notion of physical location in connection with data will all but vanish. And, as in so many other areas, our social mores and the legal system that nominally reflects them will lag a considerable distance behind.

Source: Coyote Tracks

On the Planting of a Ridiculous Apple Rumor That Many Fell For

On the Planting of a Ridiculous Apple Rumor That Many Fell For:

First hit, John Brownlee at Cult of Mac, with the delightful headline “Apple May Be Working on a Top Secret Asymmetric Screw to Lock You Out of Your Devices Forever”.

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

[So what amazes me about this is the lack of humility by the people and organizations that reported this… they all give themselves a pat on the back for having a “healthy dose of skepticism” but I see very little. A little hedging is all… whatever.]

Source: Daring Fireball

A Killer, Sustainable, Industry Saving Music Service Is Possible – hypebot

A Killer, Sustainable, Industry Saving Music Service Is Possible – hypebot:

You would be amazed what you can build with $10 million dollars in funding when you don’t have to give $8 million of it to the major labels in advances. Spotify, Pandora and countless other services could have, long ago, built tons of these features and value-driving tools if their money wasn’t first poured into the labels, and then their focus placed on scraping by a meager living creating minimal value for car manufacturers and fast food joints.

[It’s all messed up. Kinda like the social networks. The model is simply wrong.]

Dear Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg:

Mark, I know for a fact that my experience was not an isolated incident. Several other startup founders & Facebook employees have told me that what I experienced was part of a systematic M&A “formula”. Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing. I know all about intimidation-based negotiation tactics: I experienced them for years while dealing with the music industry. Bad-faith negotiations are inexcusable, and I didn’t want to believe your company would stoop this low. My mistake.

In a lot of ways, I got what I deserved. I have come to the conclusion that I took this foolhardy risk because the Twitter “platform” was even more of a joke than the Facebook “platform”. As someone that wants to build quality social software, software that doesn’t force users to re-create their friends list, or not use oAuth, etc., I have to endure huge platform risk. Personally speaking, I am resolved to never write another line of code for rotten-to-the-core “platforms” like Facebook or Twitter. Lesson learned.

Mark, I don’t believe that the humans working at Facebook or Twitter want to do the wrong thing. The problem is, employees at Facebook and Twitter are watching your stock price fall, and that is causing them to freak out. Your company, and Twitter, have demonstrably proven that they are willing to screw with users and 3rd-party developer ecosystems, all in the name of ad-revenue. Once you start down the slippery-slope of messing with developers and users, I don’t have any confidence you will stop.

I believe that future social platforms will behave more like infrastructure, and less like media companies. I believe that a number of smaller, interoperable social platforms with a clear, sustainable business models will usurp you. These future companies will be valued at a small fraction of what Facebook and Twitter currently are. I think that is OK. Platforms are judged by the value generated by their ecosystem, not by the value the platforms directly capture.

[Amazing how rotten, how fast.]

Source: Dalton Caldwell