Technology Futures

Sadly Greg Papadopolus, SUN CTO was not available, but a video of his pitch was presented. (His slides are here… ). He starts by exploring the change in software economics from shrink wrap to service and from their shows how organisations can leverage network organisations and immersive supply chain management to great new applications fabrics by assembling service. Unfortunately, he uses the word “Outsource”, which in some places remains sensible, but is often a dirty word for dumping cost (& inefficiency) somewhere else. The search for excellent business performance is required, so crude outsourcing is never a good thing; businesses can always save their outsourcers margin, and if they’re lazy the customer pays for that as well. …

Confidence & Strength

Marissa Petersen : “Your confidence is our strength!”

She also stated that in measuring the causes of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, they’ve discovered the top two causes of both are the same (and obvious), “Effective Support” and “Competitive Product”. This is good, because it proves we can do both well, so we only have to get it right more often. …

Solutions or Service

One of Sun’s internal debates is what “Solutions” are. Currently in my mind there seems to be ambiguity between a Solutions or Utility proposition, and what Sun seeks to organise around. Bob Macritchie (EVP Global Sales) opened the conference with a presentation on Sun’s sales model. He spoke in balanced terms between solutions (consultancy/project) and programme (commodity/utility) . He was clear that he wanted GEM (geographic organisations) autonomy, presumably using both loose and tight controls, but he did describe them as billing engines. This does not imply a lot of faith in their intellectual property generation but it may have been a throw-away remark.  …

Technology as a service tomorrow

And on to CEC, opened by Hal & Jim. In Hal’s speech, he referred to some research undertaken by Brenda Laurel about how teenagers consume technology, my take away point is that they love their phones, my personal experience is that they don’t use e-mail. He illustrates how kids are consuming technology as a service (albeit transactional service) and that they perceive companies and offering differently. Apple is a design company, not an engineering one. This service orientated computing needs to occur, but the consumers thinks technology is cool, and they’ll be the only buyers years in 20 years time. Again my experience is that having held out for many years, I’ve just bought Sky, internet broad band and a web site (including disk rental). …

Predicting Outage

Mike Harding (Sun Preventive (sic) Services) presented on his groups new offerings. The highlight for me was his very dramatic illustration that standard availability metrics i.e. Four or Five Nines are historic and cannot be changed, in order to manage, leading indicators are needed which is why Sun has developed the Operational Risk Index (ORI). This may not be new to some of you, but it is to me despite Richard Morgan’s attempts to keep me up to date.  Mike also had a very dramatic illustration of risk dimensions, differentiating between probability and severity (or cost). Interestingly the bulk of the audience chose to minimise probability not cost. …

Some musings on programming languages

Over the last few days, I bumped into Tim Bray, (well, more accurately arranged to meet him). Somehow or other we got onto scripting, had a chat about languages and purpose. I’ve been mucking around with TCL/TK over the last few years and struggling to make it look right under my Linux builds. (The Laptop Diaries series may get there when I return to it). I reflected Tim’s view that TCL had probably missed its adoption window to Mike Ramchand, and he showed me ‘zenity’, which he uses to build the GUI for his dynamic system configurator. (‘zentity’ is part of Sun’s S10 Gnome distribution, although not its not on my Red Hat build.). Its obvious that I’m going to have to move on. Frankly, I should find perl or python easier than tcl; I started with COBOL and now use SQL or shell. …

Stern, Management and taking Solaris as a feed

The meeting today was opened by Hal Stern (Sun Services CTO). He repeated & re-inforced several themes about utility and annuity or subscription services but interesting highlighted several things. Firstly he argued for an enlightened, liberating management style to harness talent, “Think XP, not waterfall” because waterfall involves management saying no or re-work it a lot and “does not scale”.

He also in a discussion about mapping AIM onto “Customise, Standardise, Utilise” raised the goal of offering Solaris as a service based subscription. The language I’ve been using is to make Solaris a real-time feed, enabling Sun’s customers to take advantage of the newest, most reliable and best as it becomes available.  …

Applications’ Citizenship

I’m still at Sun Engineering and I ran a BoF on my Applications’ Citizenship theory. For those (all?) of you who’ve not heard them, I attempt to classify an applications sociability by observing its behaviour. Applications can thus, be good citizens and co-exist with all apps that do not themselves exhibit some form of non-social behaviour. The three classes of non-social behaviours are bad citizens, which jeopardise the operating system, anti-social citizens which cause a limited, known and bound list of applications to fail and a special class of the anti-social where an application cannot exist with additional instances of itself …

Everything, Now and Free!

Ron Jefferies (XProgramming.com) presented a keynote speech about Agile software development. I enjoyed his pitch, although I’m no longer a developer. He delivered some great slogans. Despite describing them as slogans, these are based on important insights. I like “Ship early, ship often”. I was also interested in his view (reinforced by John Nolan) that team co-location is very important. I also enjoyed his definition of the customer requirement as “Free, Now & Perfect”.  …