Coté's Weekly Wunderkammer
Hello again. As always, my notebook is emptied at the top, there’s a bunch of links at the bottom, and miscellaneous other things slice in here and there.
Software Defined Talk #173: Tacos tomorrow, voice & AI are garbage
This week it’s just Matt and I, with a short cameo from Brandon at the end:
IBM Watson didn’t work so well in health care, maybe it was too early. Also, Chef goes full open source, with Apache 2. Meanwhile, Coté has to pay taxes in two countries.
Plus:
- My dog’s in a cone right now.
- I gotta go play some video games.
- This is not premium content.
- There’s a Ted talk in here.
- I like my science fiction truck-stoppy.
- You can go nuts with the code, where ever you like.
- You are taco-eating hologram.
- Molemite is the worst.
Also, this week Mat and Brandon interview Adam on open source, himself, and all that.
Pivotal Conversations: Beyond the Sea of No’s, with Jon Osborn
Demonstrating the value of software, how it contributes to revenue, is no easy feat. Staffing can be difficult, especially with an eye to sustaining teams over the years. Jon Osborn returns as a guest to discuss these and other transformation hurdles, plus successes they’ve had at the Great American Insurance Group.
Come speak at SpringOne Platform 2019
Want to come to Austin & talk about DevOps, Java, THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS & cloud hoopla? Apply to speak at SpringOne Platform this year, Oct 7th to 10th. I help pick talks for 3 tracks, so you can torment me! This is the last week to CFP!
The stupid network
Long ago, David Isenberg described “the stupid network.” It was all about telcos being disintermediated by Internet stuff - having the relationship with their customers stolen by those whacky, 90s Internet people.
There’s all sorts of new “multi-sided platform” and aggregator theories now-a-days - and gig economy shit. The stupid network is still an excellent framing for strategy defense - worth keeping in mind at all times.
For example:
If you don’t control the end user - i.e., they think of your brand as the product, not a component of the product they’re buying - you’re in a weak position. Money is made by apps on the Internet, in addition to your monthly service charges. And, in fact, you probably don’t care who your Internet service provider (ISP) is: you treat it like a commodity, looking for best price and performance, or just lazily ignoring optimizing month-to-month.
You want your ISP to be a stupid network, just a pipe to get the “smart” things shot through that piple.
Something like Apple Pay, then, “steals the customer.” This isn’t only from an ISP perspecrtive, but from a banking and credit card company perspective.
Even though the backend is all the incumbents (the bank part is done by Goldman and MasterCard providers the credit card part, the end users will only think of it as “Apple.” Over time Apple can swap out that “legacy” system to their own, or other partners.
There’s nothing making the old system sticky, required, except that it works and matches Apple’s needs. This is a bad strategic position.
Stupid network strategies work if you have a large scale and subscription model that people ignore: how often do you switch your ISP (on your phone and your house)? How often do you switch your bank, life insurance, and so forth? Not much now because switching is onerous (have you ever tried to cancel any of those - to even get ahold of someone at a life insurance company?). But, with the right kind of “smart” overlay - like Apple Pay - switching can be easy, even hidden from the customers.
Of course, Apple has proven that it can goof up product management: they often launch a product and then never really develop it. Sometimes they nail it, however. And, with revenue directly tied and trackable to something like Apple Pay, it might be easier for Apple’s managers to prioritize it more than, say, Apple Music or iCloud email and calendaring.
Always think about how stupid your strategy is getting and plan accordingly.
Avoiding people by speaking in public
For all my personally, insufferable, introvert shit, once I’m on the stage, I’m in my element, and things are fine, mystic, and joyful even. This seems strange given that I don’t really like, you know, dealing with people outside of my tiny inner circle. But, there’s an isolation on the stage, and a definitive end. Few people talk with you, and you can just monolog.
You could take that to be some bullshit - speaking at people, not with them. Whatever though. I’ll take what I can get.
The Art of Business Value
I re-read Schwartz’s first book. Usually business books aren’t worth a re-read, but this one is.
For example, here’s his start of arguing that “red tape” is often actually a feature, part of the “business value” delivered by IT:
But what if those requirements actually are adding business value—just an indirect and well-disguised type of value? If the public requires transparency into a government IT project, then activities to provide that transparency are not necessarily waste. If the government values fair competition between vendors and supporting veterans through preferential hiring practices, the additional process steps those concerns add to our IT delivery value chain are not necessarily waste, though they do not add user value. If the public demands independent validation of the results of a government IT project, and as a result there is independent duplication of testing that has already been performed, then that is not necessarily waste. It is simply a type of shareholder value, a demand that the “owners”—or at least key stakeholders of the government—demand as one of the returns on their investment of tax money.
Also, he discusses what “leadership” actually does several times. One of the key ones is defining “business value” and how it’s tracked. It’s the job of corporate managers to say what’s valuable, not really individual product managers and teams.
And, of course, defining business value is an ongoing, theory/experiment/refine small batch loop:
Business value is a hypothesis held by the organization’s leadership as to what will best accomplish the organization’s ultimate goals or desired outcomes.
The organization’s goal might be to maximize shareholder value: if so, then leadership’s business value hypothesis is about what combination of indicators will lead to long-run increases in shareholder value; it might attach particular value to investments that contribute to its generic competitive strategy. The goal might be to eradicate malaria in Africa, in which case leadership will have a hypothesis about what will best achieve that goal. The goal might be to raise the value of the startup in the next round of financing so that the Series A venture capital investor will have less dilution of its equity. In any of these cases, leadership’s hypothesis is not a single plan of activities, but rather a set of business value indicators that will add up to the desired goal. It will include, perhaps, some revenue generation, perhaps some customer satisfaction, perhaps some risk management, perhaps some brand-building. Each of these is a source of business value that the Agile team will seek to deliver and maximize. The nonprofit that wants to eradicate malaria does not just prioritize activities that eliminate malaria: leadership’s current hypothesis may be that a combination of disease-fighting, cost reduction, and marketing to raise awareness about the cause are the sources of business value that will lead to the strongest outcomes. Raising awareness, in that case, is far from being “waste,” even though it is not a cure for the disease.
Leadership has to come with with the measurements and the processes that seem to have business value. He uses an example of Netflix. They wanted to grow subscribers, of course. How do they show value delivered, business value? For them, it’s the number of videos each person watches a month. It indicates the value people are getting and what they will likely drive. It serves as a proxy metric for Netflix.
More specifically: they evaluate each new feature by how many more videos subscribers watch. You can do this on a weekly, maybe even daily basis and it can serve as an indicator of the value customers get. You’ll know how customers value Netflix and new features month to month - when customers decide to cancel or not. But this shorter-cycle proxy gives you quicker indications.
So, “engagement” and watching videos becomes a way of measuring business value, the goals and metrics to drive product management decisions.
An unused executive dinner speech
I hosted an executive dinner a few weeks ago. I’d put together this opening talk, introducing the customer who was kind enough to come go through their story. I didn’t really get a chance to give it, which was probably for the best. Maybe next time.
Thanks for coming – we’re glad y’all took the time. I know it’s hard.
My favorite thing about Pivotal is that I get to meet new people, computer people. My wife is always befuddled that I’m a wallflower in most company, but then, turn into an extrovert around computer people. So, it’s nice to meet more people like myself.
I’ve been at Pivotal almost five years and I’ve seen people like yourselves go through all sorts of transformations. They’re getting better at doing software. That’s setting them up to change how they run their business, to change what their business is, even. You can call it innovation, or whatever. Anyhow, I collect these stories – especially the parts where things go wrong – and in the Pivotal spirit of being kind and doing the right thing, try to help people who’re getting started by telling them the lessons learned.
Tonight, I’m hoping we can just get to know each other, especially amongst yourselves – us Pivotal people know each other well already!.
Most organizations feel like they’re the only ones suffering. They think their problems are unique. I get to talk with a lot of organizations, so I see the opposite. In general, everyone has the same problems and usually the same solutions.
Given that, I’d encourage you to talk with each other about what you’re planning, or going through. Chances are someone right next to you is in the same spot, or, if you’re lucky, has gotten past it.
As an example of that, we’re lucky that [customer who’s here] wanted share what’s been going on at [enterprise]. There’s lots of great stories in there…
So, let’s hear them…then let’s eat!
Originally posted on my blog.
This week’s links
Why Uber’s Business Model May Not Be Viable
The sharing economy, fueled by the internet’s capacity to match small buyers and sellers, looks like a revolutionary business model. But for this model to be sustained, there must be a reliable source of long-term profits. Ride-hailing is perhaps the application of the sharing economy that is currently most developed, so its success or failure will teach us a great deal about the model’s viability in the global business landscape.
Why Urban Millennials Love Uniqlo
The question Uniqlo faces now is whether it can inherit the Gap’s empire without repeating its mistakes. To do so, it will have to convince shoppers across the country of a proposition that’s radical for the industry: Fashion can be affordable without being disposable.
Certain American States: Stories
Reasons were in short supply.
And:
March 30, 2019 a dream I could only watch instead of do She never brought up Daniel again, but it didn’t really matter. I’d already made it a habit to consider the way my life could have been if I’d said yes when Daniel had asked the question I knew he didn’t even think was a question, just a rite of passage we had to go through. (You could see a marriage approach some couples in Texas the same way you could watch a summer storm churning on the plains, miles before it hit.) It was possible my life wouldn’t have been any more or less enjoyable had I turned from person to wife, wife to parent, had I stayed in White Deer and parceled my hours out to a family, turned my mother grand. (A life might comfortably disappear into a well-worn groove between house, school, and grocery store. (All lives disappear one way or another. (All hours get spent.))) But as pleasant as it might have been, that kind of life also seemed—somehow—elsewhere, like a dream I could only watch instead of do.
A difficult collection to get into, but then it works out. The last story is great and spooky in a Gaiman kind of way.
SUSE on Cloud 9 for love-in with OpenStack and Kubernetes
With the Cloud Application Platform 1.4, SUSE has set its sights on a multi-cloud world laying claim to being the first software distribution to go 100 per cent Kubernetes for Cloud Foundry.
…
The juice comes from Cloud Foundry’s Project Eirini, which allows devs to seamlessly switch between Kubernetes or Cloud Foundry Diego as their container scheduler. An organisation already invested in the Kubernetes world therefore does not have to faff around with the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime orchestration. A single scheduler should do the trick.
Whole lotta features:
- Weighted routing uses Istio and Envoy to simplify blue-green deployments (beta)
- Platform Automation for PCF, the engine of your perpetual upgrade machine (beta)
- Windows Server 2019, Microsoft’s most container-friendly OS yet, now powers PAS for Windows (coming soon)
- Consume upstream Kubernetes your way with the new PKS family
- Got apps that need multiple custom ports? Run ‘em on PAS.
- Use metadata on API resources throughout PAS to share context
- Keep tabs on all your apps, wherever they run with multi-foundation Apps Manager (coming soon)
- Steeltoe 2.2 improves the stability of your microservices, simplifies connections to MongoDB
- Spring Cloud Data Flow for PCF 1.4: Wire up data pipelines across Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry (coming soon)
- Single Sign-On for PCF 1.9 will help you get more done faster with a new, streamlined dashboard (coming soon)
- Detecting manifest changes with Ops Manager is much easier
- Other Enhancements
- Public Service Announcements
- Try Pivotal Cloud Foundry for Free
How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care
MD Anderson Cancer Center partnered with IBM Watson to create an advisory tool for oncologists. The tool used natural-language processing (NLP) to summarize patients’ electronic health records, then searched databases to provide treatment recommendations. Physicians tried out a prototype in the leukemia department, but MD Anderson canceled the project in 2016—after spending US $62 million on it.
Outside of corporate headquarters, however, IBM has discovered that its powerful technology is no match for the messy reality of today’s health care system. And in trying to apply Watson to cancer treatment, one of medicine’s biggest challenges, IBM encountered a fundamental mismatch between the way machines learn and the way doctors work
Not so fast AI Doctor, the FDA would like to check how good you really are at healthcare
Obtaining FDA approval can be a difficult and long process. “The traditional paradigm of medical device regulation was not designed for adaptive AI or ML technologies, which have the potential to adapt and optimize device performance in real – time to continuously improve healthcare for patients,” the report said.
“The highly iterative, autonomous, and adaptive nature of these tools requires a new, total product lifecycle (TPLC) regulatory approach that facilitates a rapid cycle of product improvement and allows these devices to continually improve while providing effective safeguards.”
For example:
If a manufacturer decides that its device that studies retinal scans for diabetic retinopathy can also measure if a patient has high blood pressure or not, it’ll have to contact FDA officials to check if the device can be used for that purpose.
Meanwhile, we can’t even figure out how to figure out the ethics of AI.
This is probably a good space for that Talebian thinking that goes “start with what’s worked for thousands of years, and probably don’t stop.”
Cloud Foundry Project Eirini Inches the Group Closer to Kubernetes
“A lot of work needs to be done for that but it’s evolving quickly,” Childers said of interoperability tests using Eirini as a bridge between Diego and Kubernetes. He did add that the evolution from Diego to Eirini, if it does occur, will be similar to how Cloud Foundry moved from its DEA architecture system to its Diego architecture system. That involved Diego having to show functional parity to DEA and the necessary production readiness for vendors and organizations to feel comfortable using Diego in place of DEA.
Assessing IBM i’s Role In Digital Transformation
This is going to sound silly,” he says. “The hardest part isn’t necessarily the refactoring. The hardest part is convincing people to do this. Because, let’s be honest the upfront cost can be very scary, man. It can be frightening. The business is going to say, ‘We just put in X amount of dollars last year to support these kinds of environments.’ You kind of have to ask the question, what’s going to happen five years from now?”
While the legacy application may not be “broken,” forward-looking companies will consider the lost opportunity costs that are inherent when an existing system is not agile enough to support new opportunities and initiatives.
“You’re going to have to have the conversation where you can’t integrate with cloud at all, or you can’t integrate with data analytics, or you’ve failed to do cognitive system and your competitors are because RPG can’t support this stuff?” Kleyman says. “But just because it’s working doesn’t mean necessarily it’s bringing value back to the business.”
It’s easy for an executive to identify problems when servers are down, the application is throwing errors, and the day-to-day business is being impacted. It’s much harder for the executive to be able to identify the ways in which a legacy system could put hamper growth in the future.
“Honestly that’s one of the best approaches, when things aren’t on fire, to start asking some of these difficult questions,” Kleyman says. “It’s kind of like in a relationships. When everything’s going great, you don’t want to bring up any sore points. But realistically speaking, you don’t want to start arguing when everything’s wrong and you start bring up the pain points.”
Unlike America, where banks have a return on equity of 12%, Europe does not have strongly positive government-bond yields, or a pool of investment-banking profits like that on Wall Street, or a vast, integrated home market. All this is true, but European banks have been lamentably slow at cutting their costs, something which is well within their control. As a rough rule of thumb, efficient banks report cost-to-income ratios below 50%. Yet almost three-quarters of European lenders have ratios above 60%. Redundant property, inefficient technology and bloated executive perks are the order of the day.
“Most people in contemporary society don’t believe in Athena”
Religious belief effects rhetoric and how you read something. If you think it’s just fairy tales, you want it to be entertainment. If it’s a guide for life and existence itself, perhaps not.
COWEN: When you translated the Odyssey — as a reader, I think of your approach as pretty clean and direct and very easy to read, but also with a lot of psychological depth, and I prefer that in the Odyssey. But when I read, say, the Hebrew Bible, I want something a little more, maybe stentorian in tone, or a little more baroque, actually. I think a lot of people feel the same way. Why that difference? Why do we want something different from a Bible translation often? … WILSON: ..I think it’s partly just about the source text, and it’s also about the cultural perception of the sourced text. Most people in contemporary society don’t believe in Athena, so we have a different idea about how should divinity be represented in this text versus in a text where there are people who still worship the God of the Hebrew Bible, right?