It's difficult to describe the bewildering amount of change in the technology space over the last decade in a single diagram ... however, undeterred I've tried to catch the fundamentals ...
Same patterns are occurring. In 2008, the future giants of media were Netflix (focused on the user, cloud and reducing assets) not the Blockbusters (focused on cashflow, building stores and data centres). Ditto today. The future giants of robotics are companies like iRobot.
It's always a hoot to go through those past Blockbuster presentations from 2007 to 2008 ... the self belief, the investment in assets, the hubris, the mindless strategy that was bereft of any understanding of basic economic patterns.
I see the same occurring today with serverless ... oh well. Some will spend huge fortunes on assets that don't meet any specific user need and they will fail to deliver on whatever paltry benefits they claim it will create.
Well, my advice to CEOs in 2008 was to ask your CIO about Cloud. If they dismiss it then fire them.
M advice to CEOs in 2018 is to ask your CIO about Serverless. If they dismiss it then fire them.
If you must, as a rule of thumb, for an estate providing functions to others then ... one ops person + $300k p.a. for every 10M active users. This is for everything, electricity, buildings insurance, software, tin, monitoring etc.
"But, we spend more than that on consultants to design it!"
Then don't. Have a policy of public serverless first, then public cloud (containers etc) if you absolutely can't in a specific case. After five years, you'll have enough experience to laugh at your home grown plans.
But gain that experience. Take any home grown serverless efforts and shelve them until you have a high % of your engineers with five or more years experience of public serverless. Only then will you be in a position to properly judge a home grown effort.
This is why I'm not going to serverless events focused on building your own ... it's a waste of my time and everyone else's money. I find the very idea to be utterly foolish.
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X : Can you make a map of my industry?
Me : Let me guess, mapping is hard and you need to apply strategy to it?
X : Yes.
Me : I can make the map.
X : Excellent.
Me : Alas, you can't apply strategy to it.
X : Why not?
Me : You can't map. You don't know what strategy is.
... to explain, it's a bit like someone who has been playing Snap for a decade wakes up to discover the world is playing Chess. It doesn't matter how much "Snap" strategy you've developed over the years - it's meaningless. Most corporate strategy is Snap i.e meme copying.
I count every year of "strategy" experience that I had prior to learning how to map as a negative i.e. a source of inertia, bad habits and old models to overcome.
Me : All maps are imperfect. This is a necessary requirement in order to be useful. A perfect map of France would be the size of France i.e. it would be France.
It would be useless ... as a map and a mechanism of communication.
... it is not perfection that makes maps useful. It is the ability for people to communicate, learn, navigate, challenge and explore that makes them useful.
Hidden in that is a concept that space has meaning. You start with a blank map, you fill it out as you explore and communicate with others. We can navigate with it through anchor, position and movement. Even a blank map has this and the first thing we do is draw the anchor ...
X : Why are you going on about sustainability in tech - change.org/p/sustainable-…
Me : Do you have $1bn in the bank?
X : No, and what has that got to do with anything?
Me: You're a muppet. Look, VC's might be dreaming of escaping on spaceships but you're not on those ships.
... less than a $1bn then you're an outsider, a nobody. You're not in the rich set. You might think you and your family are escaping the future damage we're causing to the planet but you're not. No escape for you. No Star Trek Federation. We either fix it or we wallow in it.
At least 500 signed up, it's a start. They'd probably have got more if they said they were going to shave a cat rather than try and save the planet. But we're the generation of apathy. Why fix things when we can just ignore it and let it become someone else's problem.
I'm still processing what I heard and saw at #mapcamp#map18 ... everything was on a scale I hadn't expected. I mean when you're listening to people talk about mapping saving lives and the UN talk mapping, it's ... #mindblown -
Listening to #bbcqt and how "big government is bad for the economy" ... hmmm, someone better explain that to China who is currently going around the globe knocking the stuffing out of these neoliberal fantasies.
I must admit, I'm looking forward to the future neoliberal narrative that tries to explain how China is a neoliberal fantasy of small government ... I'm not sure how they're going to try and hoodwink that one, should be funny to listen to though.
It'll have to be something truly twisted, an epic reality distortion of doublespeak proportions e.g. "it's not so much big Government, it's lots of small Government" or something like that.
Going for an early morning walk in London, passing an Estate agent. Oh lordy. £1.25m for a tiny one bed flat in Bloomsbury and it's not even freehold. That's 3x the price of my entire 4 bed detached freehold house. The rents in London are also eye watering.
It must make living in London very hard and stressful. Having a smoke and chat with a lovely chap Jim. Poor fellow, living on the streets. Really? We're supposed to be a wealthy country but then GDP is distorted with rents, debt revenue etc rather than productive work.
If this is the best our society can do, then it's clearly not working. Capitalism has some merits but it's a pointless system if it leaves people behind. The focus must always be the many not the few.