The Good(?) And Evil Of PRISM


The whole news about PRISM is pretty depressing – but after thinking through the weekend, I am not as depressed as I was when I first heard it. Sure it is still very evil, but has a few positives as well . The evil part is pretty obvious , so I am just calling out the not so evil things that partly balances it out . Who knows, my opinion could still change as I think more .

The most obvious positive is that there is a chance this does help government keep us safer to some degree .Bad guys are bad – but sadly they are not stupid . They already should know that law enforcement is checking emails and phones . A part of me wants to believe that PRISM is just a leak to further deter the bad guys 🙂

Irrespective of political leaning , Government will over reach . Neither Bush nor Obama has any moral superiority that their administration can claim when it comes to privacy invasion. And this is as good a reason as any to stop following either party blindly the next time people vote them to power .

We compromise privacy all the time – by disclosing personal data in social networks , by using loyalty cards , by online commerce and so on . Experts have warned us a million times to be careful – yet not much has changed . If private companies can hold our data and target us – what is the big deal if government does the same ? Or do we trust capitalist companies to do less evil than an elected government ?

If PRISM has to live up to its great expectations – government probably does not have all the tech it needs in house . This means a lot of companies – big and small will make good business creating that tech . And then those technologies will be repurposed for enterprises and consumers – in good and bad ways . Irrespective – this in general should help an advancement of technology and economy in general .

Same with hardware – a lot more disks, flash, DRAM etc need to be produced to keep up with the big data that the government needs . That is good for the semiconductor industry in general , and should further increase affordability and quality of HW for the rest of us .

Even with all of these , the evil is not nearly balanced by positives. and it could get a lot worse . Aggregation of data is generally considered a good thing in enterprise world – for things like 360 degree view of the customer , end to end supply chain visibility etc . The limiting factor in achieving that goal is that enterprises do not have much access outside their intranets . But if governments can gain access to enterprise servers and get business information – now they can indeed have nearly 360 degree information on everyone . Or god forbid – government could have an API for companies to get some parts of the data from government repositories . It can get even more real evil real soon .

Privacy matters in more ways than most people realize . I don’t know if anything much would change – but the least we can all do is raise awareness so that we keep the damages to a minimum .

Weekend rant on Innovation , Industrialization & Watching Your Back


I missed watching Seth Godin’s keynote in person couple of weeks ago in Orlando, and ended up watching the recording later. http://www.asugonline.com/asug-annual-conference/videos/keynote-persentation/?catid=asug-annual-conference-keynotes&slg=2013-asug-annual-conference-keynote

I don’t read his blog regularly, but every time someone I follow on twitter tweets out one of his posts – I tend to check it out hoping that it is something I can relate to and learn from. Unfortunately, the keynote replay did not exactly excite me – I tuned out along the way, around the time he explained what a Fermata is to his audience. I am not an expert in western music theory, but I had a very different idea of what a Fermata is compared to what Godin said..But I digress…

There is a part of the keynote that made sense to me – the need to be very good at what you do, to market effectively and so on. But the rest of it generally didn’t sound relevant to me in the context of my work in enterprise software.

I am as big a fan of innovation as the next guy – but I firmly believe that we have enough examples around us to indicate that not everyone can or should innovate. Enterprise Software business is largely made up of fast followers and a minority of innovators ( or inventors) . However, industry wide we spend a lot of time trying to democratize innovation – although with limited success. Shouldn’t we know better by now?

Innovation is a high risk and high reward game most of the time – with characteristics like failure, chaos, disruption etc to go with it. And for a company (especially a big company) to afford innovation, they need to be masters of industrialization . Although not an exact statement – a company that can afford to put 20% of time and effort on innovation, needs the other 80% to be an efficiency machine to innovate on a sustaining basis.

Startup companies are usually in an “all in” mode – since there is no cushion from a portfolio of offerings when you are in a new business. On the plus side, everyone is motivated and will do their best. On the flip side, vast majority of start ups fold without making a tangible impact. However, VCs etc who take a portfolio approach and invest in many startups (usually with opposing risk characteristics) generally have better chance of surviving and thriving.

Big companies typically follow some version of the 80-20 rule. 80 percent runs at high efficiency and pays the bills for the 20% of innovation experiments. And depending on cushion available – as soon as innovations look viable, they try to industrialize partly or fully. And if it is not panning out as planned, they can move out and focus on next big idea without going bust.

I think this model is what we will continue to see for a while – enterprise customers love innovation, but they can’t usually stand an over dose of disruption and chaos. So in my opinion , the vendor part of the ecosystem will need to constantly up their games and compete harder to remain relevant. And that won’t happen by everyone innovating – it will only happen by a minority innovating, and a majority industrializing in a fast follower model. Otherwise the amount of chaos, the cost of innovation etc will make sure the so called innovation will die without adoption.

This also means the leaders in the industry have to constantly watch their backs – when fast followers get their act right, the leader will find it harder and harder to keep their lead. Enterprise software only needs to look at consumer electronics companies to know what that means.

It is time that our industry recognized its unsung heroes who make sure that their counterparts have the cushion/opportunity to innovate. Stop looking down on them – appreciate them – A LOT.

 

 

True Innovation Needs A Viable Business Model


The news that caught my attention the most this lazy long weekend was that Better Place was liquidating . http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57586236-76/electric-car-startup-better-place-liquidating-after-$850-million-investment/ . Of course there was the SAP announcement of organizational changes – but my thoughts as an employee ( that too just 5 months as employee) might not be of much interest to anyone else.

Although alternate sources of energy is a top concern of our generation, that was not the reason I remembered this company called Better Place . I remembered it because of my sense of awe on how quickly Shai Agassi raised multiple rounds of funding – each in 100s of millions of dollars – to turbocharge the progress of his company . I have always been a fan of Shai’s ability to explain his vision in a compelling way to his audience . So it was no surprise that he could garner support like he did . This vision was further backed by investment bankers who concluded that the days of gasoline engine were numbered.

On Social media, the mood I saw was along the lines of “This was bound to happen given the idea was ahead of its time, but admirable that someone chased a dream despite many obstacles”. I beg to disagree – There is nothing admirable in reckless spending of investor money and running a company to bankruptcy in my opinion . If anything , that just is a terribly costly way to show how not to innovate . Innovation without a viable business model is just wishful thinking at best and an unmitigated disaster at worst .

I do hope that Shai dusts off quickly, and becomes successful at this venture itself or something else. And I hope and pray that alternate energy problems we face do get solved one day soon .

The other topic that I got to discuss with my friends this weekend was whether “disk is dead” – In the context of software innovations. I think the electric car company’s unfortunate demise has some lessons that IT industry should pay attention to . For most of the last decade , I have spent most of my time supporting clients in semiconductor industry. Every time I hear “disk is dead” – I am reminded of the economics of that industry that I have watched over the years. When we try to innovate without keeping the economics in mind, what suffers the most will be adoption .

I might be off in exact numbers – but roughly, I think there is 10 to 12 times the capacity to create disks today compared to flash . No doubt flash will increase market share many fold going forward, but not at a clip that disk will become extinct any time soon. Why ? Because it is not easy or cheap or fast to set up a new fab to manufacture flash . All semi companies of the world together might not have the resources (probably in hundreds of billions of dollars) to convert the world from disk to flash any time soon . And if they did so on leverage, most of us would not have the purchasing power to afford our fancy mobiles and tablets anymore 🙂 . What about DRAM then ? A similar logic exists – compared to SSD , DRAM is dearer by 3X or so.

Then there is the cost of disruption – customers have heavy investments in existing technology. For sure there are enough cases where price-performance plays in favor of the more expensive DRAM and SSD solutions . However, the “right time” for all business problems is not “real time” ( Yet ). So for innovation to be viable – at least till hardware manufacturing economics catches up – solutions working on DRAM and SSD need to be able to work closely and efficiently with those that make good use of Disk . And if you listen closely to industry observers you will already hear a lot about “RAM is slow” ! So in a few years, we will need yet another version of hybrid solutions .

Smart vendors realize this and build solutions that make good use of existing technologies, while enabling rapid and useful change with disruptive technologies . Their not-so-smart competitors stick to old or new technology exclusively and either die of obsolescence ( innovators dilemma types ) or of running short of resources and demand ( like better place example) .

Easier said than done – even a genius like Shai couldn’t get technology and business model right at the same time . But cheers to the leaders who get it right ! And I do hope Shai gets it right in his next try as well .