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My Interview with Taiwan Cloud Leader George Wang

2010-06-15T02:22:00.001-07:00

Who isn't impressed by Taiwan? Isolated diplomatically, its 20 million+ people crammed onto a relatively small island, the country has achieved world leadership in much of the computing hardware industry over the past 20 years.

Now, it's focusing attention on Cloud Computing in a big way. It wants to build more than just traditional computing hardware, but also build new Cloud devices, and deliver services. It sees China as one of its big markets--business has flourished on the continent despite the political delicacy.

I was able to catch George Wang, EVP of Taiwan's Institute for Information Industry (III), one of the prime movers behind Cloud in Taiwan.

He sees Cloud as a "golden opportunity" for Taiwan, and he has a time of between 500 and 600 R&D researchers to aid the cause. The government has allocated 24 billion Taiwan dollars toward Cloud Computing (about $730 million), and sees a "trillion-dollar opportunity" in local dollars.

So, check out my interview with George!

My Interview with Software Park Thailand's Director

2010-05-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

Say "hello" to Suwipa Wanasathop, Director of Software Park Thailand. I just interviewed her about the Park's history and mission, its prospects, investment in the Thai software industry, a little bit about Cloud Computing, what motivates her, and why investors should be motivated to place a bet on Thailand. The interview ran long, so I broke it up into two parts, which can be found at these two URLS:

http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com/node/1391290

http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com/node/1393452

She was a liberal arts major in her home country, then won a Fulbright Scholarship and earned an MA and an MBA in the US. She's also spent many years in Europe, and led a trade mission to China, before assuming the top spot at the government-funded Software Park a few years ago.

During the interview, she emphasized collaboration--among developers and investors in Thailand, and among nations--and threw in a pitch about Thailand's status as an ASEAN nation.

I'm a big ASEAN fan, as it acts as a regional governmental cooperative that represents almost 600 million people. With the twin elephants China and India in this neighborhood, that fact sometimes gets lost in the discussion.

But Indonesia now has one of the world's top 20 economies, and Thailand has a higher per-capita income than its archipelagoan neighbor. ASEAN is often criticized as a mere "talk shop," and is under fire these days for being soft with the dictators in Burma. To me, talk is not cheap in the world of diplomacy, it is the coin of the realm. Better to be talking than to be shooting.

Whew! The Philippines Elects a President

2010-05-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

The tension was ratcheted up about as high as one would ever want by media reports of potential trouble with the May 10 Philippine Presidential election. The new, automated machines might not work, the military might intervene, the current president might declare a "failure of elections" and try to hang onto power, with daily revelations and accusations among the leading candidates.

Then, as with the feared Y2K bug, nothing happened.

Or, more accurately, a lot happened: 45 million or so people showed up at crowded polls, stood in the blazing sun for as long as four or five hours, and voted. Then the election commission announced 38% of the vote only two hours after the polls closed. It was clear by then that Benigno "Noynoy" Acquino III had won.

By the next morning, the man who was thought to be his primary competition, Manny Villar, conceded. This was a supreme act of statesmanship, in that it closed off the possibility of a serious challenge to the results. The Philippine Senate actually has the right to announce the official results in a few weeks, but Villar's announcement etched those results in stone.

Villar actually finished third, and only had about a third of the votes of Aquino. Former movie star and Philippine President Joseph "Erap" Estrada finished second, earning his redemption in his eyes. He refused to concede, but he also said he wouldn't mount a challenge to Noynoy's presumed victory. He also "forgot" to vote for his running mate (President and VP are chosen separately here), because of a recent feud. It was just Erap being Erap.

Villar's very disappointing finish was a major shock for a candidate was thought to be neck and neck in polls taken a few months ago. But allegations of corruption--that Philippine evergreen--dogged him. Villar will return to the Senate; maybe his statesmanship had an element of "pagasa" (hope) that Aquino won't press any investigatory efforts against him.

Aquino has said his administration will prosecute members of the current administration who he thinks are dirty. The strong implication is that he means the current President, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and especially, her husband. But GMA, as she's called, was herself a winner in this election, having easily gained a seat in the House of Representatives from her home province of Pampanga (just north of Manila).

GMA may also have the votes to become the Speaker of the House, and rumors have had it for months that she will lobby for a constitutional change that would establish said speaker as Prime Minister at the government's head. Oy. Welcome to the bigs, Noynoy. How'dja like that first fastball behind your ear?

Certain of us remember Peter Boyle and Robert Redford exchanging panicked looks at the conclusion of the great movie, "The Candidate," when newly minted President of the United States Redford asked his top adviser "now what?"

One can only hope the placid, seemingly unflappable Noynoy is more aware of the tremendous challenges he now faces to break this beautiful country's feudal mentality and unleash its tremendous potential upon the world.

Black Propaganda and the Philippine Election

2010-05-05T20:52:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to write this story for a couple of weeks. But real work intervened, a series of blackouts (electrical, not alcoholic) limited any extra time I might have had, and I'm half-serious when I say I worry about some guy driving buy on a motorcycle and shooting me.

I decided that the motorcycle thingie wasn't going to happen. I'm far from well-known enough here to be considered a threat to anyone. But there have been a few reports of this form of political thuggery in the run-up to the current election, which is also the first Presidential election in six years.

Hard to Figure Talaga
One of the pleasures of international travel is the opportunity to try to grasp what seem to be confounding contradictions. The English rudely slamming you in the back to get past you while very politely saying "sorry." The Turkish penchant for precise detail in a country that often defines the word "chaos." The ultra-liberal French banning everything in sight.

And the specter of extreme Philippine violence in a country populated by soft-spoken, non-confrontational people.

The Maguindanao Massacre made world headlines, and was repugnant viscerally, morally, and politically. A total of 57 people, mostly journalists and female relatives of the second most powerful political family in the region, shot and butchered, allegedly by members of the most powerful political family in the region.

Maguindanao lies beyond the normal reach of government here. It is part of the Muslim Autonomous Region, and according to local press reports, functions as a sultanate for members of one extended family.

The family reportedly delivered an enormous windfall of votes to the current president, Gloria Magapacal-Arroyo during the last Presidential election in 2004; an infamous, recorded phone call has long been held up as indisputable evidence of chicanery in this affair. The region receives ample government financial support, yet remains the poorest in the Philippines.

Most recently, a federal attorney let two members of the family off the hook for any and all charges regarding the massacre. Following a couple of weeks of outrage, he found "new evidence" to re-instate the charges.

Now, the Main Event
All this is just a sideshow to the main event, which pits Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III, the scion of two icons, against a rich guy (Manny Villar) and a bunch of guys who won't win.

In the Orange Corner, Erap!
One of the guys who won't win is former President Joseph "Erap" Estrada, who was hustled out of office on corruption charges in 2001, and who has been working tirelessly to restore his reputation ever since. Erap, as many outside the Philippines know, is also a movie and TV star.

The candidates are all color-coded here, for instant recognition. Erap was the original "orange" candidate, and has complained that Villar, a nemesis, has taken this color as well.

To my eye, Erap seemingly styles himself after Ronald Reagan, with unlikely jet-black hair at the age of 73, a twinkle in his eye and gait, and a penchant for the quick quip. Unlike Reagan, Erap has always positioned himself as a tireless worker for the poor, and his guttural voice and accent make him sound more like Charles Bronson than The Great Communicator.

In the Other Orange Corner, Manny!
Villar also positions himself as a friend of the poor. One of the Philippines' richest businessmen today, he claims poverty-stricken roots from Manila's sprawling Tondo ghetto. Those roots have been questioned by is political opponents, allegations that he says are part of "black propaganda" campaign against him.

"Black propaganda" rates with "trapos" (traditional politicians) as two of the favorite slurs slung around the political horn in the Philippines. No one is a trapo except for one's competition, and black propaganda is also the province of one's competitors, never one's self.

Villar has been darkly referring to all the blackness hurled against him in recent weeks--about his roots, whether he conspired to rig the national stock exchange in his favor, and whether he was the source of black propaganda against Aquino.

In the Yellow Corner, Noynoy!
Noynoy Aquino is the son of the Marcos-era political martyr Benigno "Nino" Aquino, Jr. (whose face is now on the 500-peso note) and Corazon Aquino, who was thrust into the international spotlight after her husband's murder, and who was ultimately swept into office during the People Power's revolution in 1986, replacing Marcos.

Noynoy has served in the Senate for several years, with little apparent distinguishment. He has taken the color yellow, appropriating the color made famous during his mother's People Power campaign.

Noynoy seems preternaturally calm and unflappable--in stark contrast to his over-animated sister Kris, a TV and movie star--or is he merely reticent? Or is he psychologically depressed, even stupid, as numerous sources have claimed?

Twice now, reputed psychological reports attesting to his depression have surfaced, only to be quickly refuted by their alleged authors. Villar has maintained that his campaign is not the source of the leaks, while calling on all candidates to take psychological evaluations now.

Meanwhile, Villar's mother was so upset by all the black propaganda against her son, that she made a long and lachrymose appearance on television the other evening attesting to her hard life of poverty while raising her son, and her hurt that he is being attacked so mercilessly.

When questioned about his mother's interview, Villar (rather disingenuously, to my eye) expressed surprise that she had been on TV at all.

Erap quickly said that he would never, and had never, used his mother as a political tool in this deeply conservative culture in which mothers and especially grandmothers are revered, even as he was being thrown out of office, arrested, convicted, and put into house detention in 2001. (Manny Villar led the impeachment effort. Yes, everything in Philippine politics is intertwined.)

In the Green Corner, Gibo!
The official candidate of the current ruling party, Gilbert "Gibo" Teodoro (a second cousin to Noynoy) languishes in fourth place in the polls. Another calming, placid personality, Gibo served as Defense Minister under GMA, and my guess is he will end up somewhere in the new administration, no mater who wins.

Gibo has been saddled with his association with the current, deeply unpopular administration. Yet ironically, the major newspapers have reported all along that Villar is the candidate that current president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (and her powerful husband, Mike) really prefer. Macapagal-Arroyo (known as GMA) was vice-president in the Estrada administration, and assumed power when the Villar-led revolt gave Erap the boot.

She then won election to a full, six-year term in 2004, in an election that has remained controversial since that time, with allegations of massive voter fraud.

A Scion from God?
A year ago, Noynoy was not in the race. His current running mate, Mar Roxas II, grandson of the first president of the independent Philippines, whose surname is found on the main thoroughfare of Manila and seemingly everywhere else one looks around, was one of the favorites.

But when Corazon Aquino died of cancer at age 76 earlier this year, the Philippines witnessed a renewal of the passion that accompanied her accession to office. Cries of People Power re-emerged, and its L-shaped handsign (the L stands for "laban" or "fight") re-appeared.

Noynoy secreted himself in a religious retreat for several days, saying that God would help him decide what to do. His sentiment seemed heartfelt, and still resonates in a country that takes its religion seriously and at face value, even if most people wear it lightly.

Roxas, educated at Harvard (as was Gibo), was smart enough to see things for what they were. Once Noynoy and God decided he would run, Roxas put aside his own aspirations to join up with the man he saw as the clear favorite.

Villar and Noynoy were running neck-and-neck in the polls a few months ago. But the constant talk that Villar is GMA's true candidate and the appearance of his mother on TV have driven down his numbers. He is now tied with Erap in the polls, well behind Noynoy. (GMA, by the way, is herself the daughter of former Philippine president Diosdadao Macapagal, who was defeated by Marcos in 1965.)

It's an Onion. No, It's a Quilt

I was going to make this blog entry short and concise, but Philippine politics has defeated my effort to do so. There are layers upon layers to be peeled away if one tries to understand politics in the Philippines.

I have covered maybe 0.2% of what could be discussed. My version here is the Reader's Digest version of the Reader's Digest version.

I haven't covered, for example, the ongoing disturbances by Muslim breakaway groups Abu Sayef and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (or MILF, yes MILF, the abbreviation that is outstanding in its hilarity to US eyes), the continuing war against the Communist National People's Army, and how the rebel groups are sublimely intertwined into the warp and woof of the Philippine political quilt.

I haven't mentioned that Bongbong Marcos, son of Ferdinand and Imelda, is a senator and running again on Villar's ticket. This is no more scandalous here than seeing another Kennedy or Bush on a senatorial ticket would be in the US.

Instead, I offer up one overarching theory and one basic fact, though, that seem to be the sources from which everything else flows.

The theory is that GMA simply does not want to give up power. She's running for Congress from her home district, and there's talk she will then work to get herself elected house leader, then force a change in the constitution that would re-install her at the head of the government as Prime Minister.

There is a whole side story about the voting machines that fits into this theory. This will be the first time that automated voting machines have been used. Past elections used paper ballots that were hand counted, a process that has been ripe for fraud since paper was invented, whether in the Philippines, the United States, or anywhere else.

Yet the reported problems with the machines have been banal in their predictability and operatic in their appearance. To wit:

* the ultraviolet security stamps on the ballots had the wrong kind of ink.

* he contract for folders to hold ballots was cancelled when it was revealed they were to cost $8 apiece, an outrage in a country where half the people make less than $100 a month.

* and now, the flash memory chips have been programmed in a way that they're unable to read the ballots.

Meanwhile, in a culture that is nonconfrontational and polite (until stupendous violence suddenly breaks out), the passive-aggressive political pronouncement has evolved into a minor art form.

There's been almost-daily talk over the past few months about a "failed election," how the military will have to step in if their is one, how such talk is dangerous, how such talk about such talk is dangerous, how the national police force will be loyal to its leaders and not politicians, how a plot has been uncovered to grind the election to a halt, how a side-by-side manual count is a necessary complement to the automated count, how a proposal for a manual count is in itself a tactic to create a failed election, how such talk is dangerous, how talk about such talk is dangerous, ad infinitum.

Dark secrets, black propaganda, whispers of military takeover all fit into the theory of GMA simply not wanting to let go. She has to be out of office by June 30, according to the constitution. But the constitution was written only in 1986, and is an easy target for severe testing.

The fact to which I allude above is, Philippine politics is still dominated by the small number of families who were original large landowners before independence, and who just don't want to let go.

They are able to maintain their power through a highly centralized government, with all power flowing from the capital city of Manila, in a country that is unified only by cultural tendencies toward politeness, conformance, respect for authority, and saying "yes" with one's eyebrows.

Language Lesson
This country is a densely packed string of islands. Each of the big islands has at least one of its own languages; call them dialects if you will, but they are, for the most part, mutually unintelligble.

Even the main island of Luzon, which contains Manila and the Tagalog-speaking people whose language is, in essence, the National Language known as Filipino, has other language groups. In fact, where I live, just 40 miles north of Manila, in GMA's home territory, the local language differs dramatically from Tagalog or Filipino.

Every student learns the national language in school, and it's spoken on all the TV shows and newscasts. It's an effective enough lingua franca. But at night, in the mostly tiny homes of the "ordinary Filipino" it may be remarked that this day was particularly "mapaso" and not "mainit," let alone "hot." That barking may be coming from an "iro," not an "aso," and not a "dog." Life may be "malisud" or "makuri," not "mahirap" and not "difficult" or "hard."

English is an official language here, government transactions are in English. I don't dare venture into the ambivalence toward English in Phlippine intellectual society at this point. But I will say that English is not well-understood by 50% or more the population, particularly as one gets further away from Manila, down into the provinces. These people have no shot at better lives unless one of them makes it overseas via marriage or a work visa.

Filipinos at all levels of society use the term "bahala na" as a way of saying, in essence, God's will, and moving on. It's not passivity, it's a way of looking at things very clearly and accepting what is possible and what is not. It's tough to think of this as the Land of Opportunity, unless one is born into one of the still-ruling families.

So What Will Happen?
Noynoy comes from some of those families. His mother, good-hearted as she was, was stymied, oftentimes by her own relatives, in trying to bring about the sort of reform that commentators have been crying out for through the decades. He has shown no fire in the belly to do so during his time in the Senate.

But as the election date nears, it appears that he is the people's choice. In a free and fair election, he would win. He has already all but promised civil disturbance if he loses unfairly.

It's going to be a mess Monday and for many days beyond. This is a tropical country, and the humidity level has just kicked up a few notches in recent days as the winds start to shift in the weeks before the onset of typhoon season.

The weather is always hot here, as are the politics. This is the first presidential election in six years, so there is serious money and power to be grabbed. This country has a GDP in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and enough money for good roads, major hydroelectric power, and a skyline in its main business district of Makati City that rivals that of Singapore.

So, what will happen? Will the favored candidate get elected peacefully? Or will the current administration somehow spring an "upset"? Will the election be postponed? Will it be considered legitimate or "failed"? Will there be a military takeover? Will certain elements of the military rebel against other elements of the military? Will it take another revolution to put the candidate that people really want into office?

All of these things have happened here in the last 25 years.

As an American who watched a national crisis unfold in the US in 2000 and early 2001, when a stalemate in the presidential election kept the world in suspense for several months, when only the most self-serving "solutions" were offered by both political camps, and when the election was finally resolved through a series of court decisions that struck most people as abjectly political, I have little room to wag my finger at political scoundrels in the Philippines.

My only hope is that, shaky as the system may be and heated as the rhetoric may become, that the fundamentally fair-minded and cooperative nature of the "ordinary Filipino" will win out, that this election will be determined peacefully, if chaotically. Bahala na.

I Just Made a John Veenstra Sighting

2010-04-30T04:45:00.000-07:00

There may be a group of people out there who know the name John Veenstra. If you know his name, then you know what I'm talking about.

Remember ZLand?

He has a new website at www.johnveenstra.com

He registered the name in 2007, so I'm behind the times here. But I've been trying to locate John for many years, and this is the first I've heard of him for a long time.

If you know John as I do and would like to discuss, go ahead and email me at strukhoff@yahoo.com

Philippines Update: The Weather Outside is Frightful

2010-04-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

It rained last night in Metro Manila. Hard.

This was the first time in two months we've had rain. Does it signal a shift from the dry season to the rainy season?

When I look at an interactive map at weather.com, it appears so. There are prevailing westerlies to the south of the Phlippines, curling around and pulling humidity north and to the east--and bringing us rain.

But if it is, I certainly won't find out from the official weather service here. (More on that topic later.)

The Amihan and the Habagat
The March-to-May period is summertime in the Philippines. It's the hottest time of the year. Schools are out; they will resume in June.

The dry season runs from around November to May or June, when the prevailing wind is from the northeast, and the wet season from May or June to around November, when the prevailing wind is from the southwest.

The northeast seasonal wind is known as the Amihan, and the southwest seasonal wind is known as the Habagat.

The Amihan allegedly blows in cool air from as far north as Siberia, and I've seen the term "cold front" in describing a little pick-up in the breeze on certain days. It's a relative term. A cold front here is analogous to a fast snail or a quiet seventh-grader. Not very fast, not very quiet, not very cold.

This is not the Midwest, where the cold fronts form giant V-shaped wedges across hundreds of miles in the skies and come booming in with thunderheads, tornadoes, and 30-degree temperature drops. The cold fronts here might raise the prevailing breeze from 7 to 9mph and drop the temperature a degree, maybe two.

The irony of the Amihan season is that the end of it is the hottest time of the year, ie, now. Even in a hot place such as this, the summertime heat is remarkable.

So the heat has been building steadily for six weeks now. Each day seems incrementally warmer than the last. Typical high-low readings are 95/75, 97/73, 95/73, 99/77, etc.

Everybody in the US knows about humidity and its effect on hot weather. They're a little less sure about where it's humid, but they know high humidity makes things miserable. When I lived in the East for awhile, people asked me if it was humid back in my native Midwest. People in the Midwest wonder the same thing about the East.

Affirmative for both regions.

Now that I'm spending a lot of time in Southeast Asia, trying to get a grip on business outsourcing on the one hand and cloud computing on the other, people from the US have asked me if it's humid here.

Yes, it is. I live at approximately 14.5 degrees north latitude. The tropics kick in somewhere around 22 or 23. We're hundreds of miles below the tropical line. So it's humid.

This is an El Ninyo year, which in this part of the world means drought. Hydroelectric power has been crippled, leading to numerous blackouts, some of them lasting throughout the daylight hours.

With the drought comes an unrelenting sun, the kind you can imagine in an old Clint Eastwood western, or more appropriately, in any movie about India. Heat and Dust meets the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Very few people venture out between 9am and sunset at 5pm. The few that do are usually women after a kilo or two of rice, or perhaps some gossip; they carry lovely, delicate parasols. The guys who have to work in the sun (and it's mostly men), whether in construction, installation, or driving a tricycle, wear towels and other garmets to protect their heads from boiling over.

Then, last night, it rained. Clouds had been building a bit over the past couple of days, in our area centered around the volcanic Mt. Arayat, which rises out of the Pampangan plains. Yesterday, they seemed to be reaching a critical mass, and by nightfall, all hell finally broke loose. Thunder, lightning, moderately high winds, and precipitation by the bucketful.

The temperature dropped noticeably; for the first time anyone could remember, it felt cool.

Weather Nuttery: It's Important
I'm a weather nut, clearly. Most Midwesterners are, because there's a real good chance that the weather will kill you there over the course of any given year. So you better learn about it, know the forecast, and use your own sense and experience to make your own real-time forecast.

I grew up listening to 10-minute weather discussions on TV, full of isobars, dewpoints, wind chills, occluded fronts, precipitation probabilities, and all the rest. I know the difference between a thunderstorm (or tornado) watch and a warning.

There's a government agency, Pagasa (Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration) that forecasts the weather.

But Pagasa (the word coincidentally means "hope" in tagalog) is just a damned bureaucracy. The Philippines is highly centralized, bureaucratic country (thank-you, Spain), and Pagasa fits right in.

Even though the agency has very high expertise in observing and describing atmospheric conditions, ie, the weather, it is focused only on its "area of responsibility" and very, very laconic in making predictions.

Pagasa was chastised last year when what appeared to be just another typhoon suddenly ballooned into Ondoy, flooded large parts of Manila, killed several hundred people, and made tens of thousands of others homeless.

I remember on another occasion when a tropical disturbance turned into a moderate-sized typhoon shortly after Pagasa warned only of an "increased southwest flow."

But Pagasa is typical of the way things are done in this country. People are given rules to follow, they follow them, and there is no advantage--no upside, as we say in Silicon Valley--in sticking your neck out and offering an opinion. This is a serious weakness of this country, that hampers its efforts to compete globally with its more aggressive neighbors, but that's a different story.

Returning to the topic of typhoons, they come from the east, striking the relatively unpopulated areas of the Philippines first. Manila is on the western edge of Central Luzon island, so is usually spared the worst of the storms.

The seeming discrepancy between the prevailing southwest winds in typhoon season and the typhoons' actual approach from the east lies in simple geography. During typhoon season, the prevailing winds in Southeast Asia are from the east, but travel under the southern Philippines, then curl up and to the right to manifest themselves as southwesterlies.

Pagasa knows all this, and more. Check out the wind-analysis graphic I picked up from its website. Looks like it was created by smart people to me:

So why in hell isn't anyone from there telling me about all this rain? It's raining again today, this time in mid-afternoon. But my visit to the Pagasa website states the following:

"Low Pressure Advisory: The Low Pressure Area was estimated at 350 kms Northwest of Puerto Princesa City (12.5°N 116.5°E)."

To be fair, elsewhere on the site it tells me that conditions in the metro area "will be partly cloudy to cloudy with isolated rainshowers or thunderstorms mostly in the afternoon or evening."

But where's the rest of the story? I see precipitation all over the little Bing weather map at weather.com, something that I haven't seen for two months? Where did this come from?

The dewpoint jumped up about 7 degrees today, compared to the last several weeks. Where is Pagasa's commentary on that? Where's the passion, dude?

More important, does this storm signify the shift from Amihan to Habagat? This often happens in a single day? Has it this time? Has the monsoon occurred? Is typhoon season upon us?

April Fools' Day Is Over, Back to Work

2010-04-02T04:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who read my little jest. Back to serious stuff here real soon now...

Oh, Those French! New Law Bans Use of 2.0

2010-04-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

President Nicholas Sarkozy of France has signed into law new legislation that outlaws use of the term “2.0” in France and all of its holdings around the world.

“This imbecilic term led so many people, in the business and consumer sectors, to hold a false impression of the truth of the world,” Sarkozy said in an official statement.

“It was proven without doubt in 2001 that there is no such thing as a new economy; today we can say without contradiction there exists no possibility of applying the term ‘2.0’ to anything that is viable or comprehensible.”

Sarkozy added, “This vacuous term led to the global economic meltdown in 2008-09.” The legislation itself notes that “the idea of ‘2.0 thinking’ led to overconfidence among entrepreneurs building a so-called New Economy 10 years ago.

“Then, after the dot-com bubbleburst (éclat de soufflé in French) the term returned immediately, being used ubiquitously to justify risk in financial instruments and machinations that proved to be untenable and catastrophic.”

France has a long tradition of resisting US influence, whether in movies, television, food, or fashion. Only blue jeans, Jerry Lewis, Mickey Rourke, and Le BigMac have penetrated this cultural Maginot Line.

“Resistance to the term ‘2.0’ should thus be viewed through this prism of French opposition to bad ideas,” explained Avrile LaPlaisantre , an analyst with the Paris-based trendspotting firm, Obtenuvous. “We French truly believe that most ideas emanating from the US are, how does one say, merde.”

A redesign of the Élyséé Palace website (referred to as “la version 2.0” in the leading French newspaper LeMonde at http://bit.ly/dqjf5q) was said to have been the “pièce de resistance” that led to the new law.

The redesign was announced only three days ago, but contained numerous gaffes and faux pas. Officially, “la version 2.0” was reportedly considered by Sarkozy to have “un certain je ne sais quoi” that he disliked. (The Palace is the official residence of the President of France.)

Grand Implications
The law may have far-reaching implications for media companies and retailers who brand new products and ideas with the 2.0 label.

Under terms of this legislation, products with the term “2.0” on their packaging will be confiscated. Offending retailers and wholesalers are subject to fines of 100 euro per item. Newspapers, magazines, television shows, and radio broadcasts who use this term are subject to closure and minimum fines of 10,000 euro.

The French government has requested a “expedited local normalization” from the European Union that would allow this legislation to remain in force within overall EU trade and commerce guidelines. “I think also that the Sarkozy administration will push to normalize this legislation throughout the entire EU,” LaPlaisantrie said. “I believe there is a universal loathing of this term in Europe, and that France’s courageous stand will be widely supported.”

The Obama administration had no immediate comment on the legislation itself, but a senior aide noted, “Mr. Sarkozy is a good friend to America, and we’ve valued the good will of the French people since the time we worked together so closely in the 1940s. We will address any concerns we have at the next G8 summit in 2011 (which coincidentally, will be held in France).”

Holy Week in Pampanga, Philippines 2010

2010-03-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

Holy Week dawned with the usual summertime heat here in Pampanga, Philippines. Roosters crowed, dogs barked, and the sun came up as usual in the general direction of the volcanic Mt. Arayat to our east.

We set off at 7am for the Immaculate Conception Parish Church in Balibago, Angeles City. One trike ride and three jeeps later, we arrived shortly after eight. As with most mid-size Catholic churches here, it's a white, Spanish-style building. It holds a couple thousand worshipers.

The first mass of the day was already in progress, and we joined the few hundred people milling about in the sun. Dozens of small vendors were offering the same palm fronds; we bought three for a little more than a dollar.

Soon enough, we joined the crush of people waiting to get inside. It was a civilized crush, this being the affable Philippines. Most were clearly distressed by the heat, a ceaseless aspect of life here, but there were no elbows thrown or sharp words exchanged (even uttered) as people pressed toward the side entrance we had chosen.

Upon hearing the measured applause that accompanies the end of Mass here, the crowd surged a bit. The doors opened, a mass of people started to leave, as a second mass entered simultaneously.

We suddenly felt a blast of cool air. The long-advertised "aircon program" had been put in place, and the church sanctum now offered a welcome respite from the diabolic sun one grows to hate here at 14 degrees latitude.

Once inside, I counted 24 new LG aircon units, each about eight feet in height. My rough guess says several million pesos went into this project. They were set between 79 and 82 degrees fahrenheit, an improvement of at least 20 degrees from the normal climate inside this church. It felt wonderful.

As the mass began, people quickly surged forward, waving their fronds, approaching the clergy to get a splash of holy water onto their palms and on themselves.

A Philippine mass is a modestly cheerful affair. Bible passages are read quickly but enthusiastically, and the short sermon in tagalog and English unfailingly makes a simple point with a touch or two of humor. Respectful applause follows it as well.

After the mass, we surged back outside, as the next group surged in. Masses would continue throughout the day. We headed back south to our barangay in San Fernando.

The City of San Fernando, Pampanga is well-known for its extreme observance of Good Friday. Known as "Maleldo" here--a contraction of the local-language words for "bad" and "day," but more properly translated as Holy Day--the Friday before Easter features processions, flagellants, and crucifixions that are reported worldwide.

Church leaders have urged people to refrain from the scourgings and crucifixions, noting that they seem to be staged to hustle tourist dollars as much as they represent devotion. The city's website promotes them, and the federal government's Department of Transportation ran a press release in local newspapers celebrating them.

As a bishop in Metro Manila said,"It is enough to remember the life and death of Jesus Christ during Holy Week through fasting, abstinence, prayer, reflection, and almsgiving," according to an article in the The Manila Bulletin.

Even in fasting, the church urges moderation, defining a fast as one normal meal and two small ones. Ironically, this is more than millions of Filipinos can afford on the best of days.

I decided to skip the gory spectacles. This is not Spain, I am not Hemingway, and it's not the 1920s; anyone who wishes to witness this stuff can find it easily enough on YouTube.

The Week Progresses
As Holy Week begins, schools have been let out for the summer, which runs here from March through June, when the monsoonal rains are due. Thursday and Friday were national holidays. The malls were closed, as were most small stores and government offices.

The thousands of ferries and hundreds of thousands of buses were full of people fleeing Metro Manila to return to their home provinces.

The churches, Catholic and others, held their Maundy Thursday services in the evening and their Good Friday services in the morning. Many people flocked to grotto services at dawn on Friday.

Saturday was also a slow day, albeit one in which you could again buy manok (chicken) for dinner or some Red Horse for a family get-together.

No newspapers, though, because even ink-stained wretches got the day off on Friday.

Many people in the Philippines will awake Sunday morning to "salubong," an hours-long ritual and procession in which the risen Jesus greets his mother Mary. It is a uniquely Filipino ritual; this one is favored by the Church, as it reflects maternal fidelity and celebrates the joy of Easter.

As with most gatherings here, it will be simultaneously respectful and cheerful. The Pampangan Maleldo's theatrics are an unfortunate aberration that do not reflect the character of "ordinary Filipinos," as people refer to themselves here.

Heavy Faith, Worn Lightly
It is my impression that although the Philippines is a heavily Catholic country, it is one in which most people wear their faith lightly.

This country now numbers 92 million souls; maybe 85% of them profess to be Roman Catholic. To be sure, the presence of a sizable Muslim community, a few million Protestants, the homegrown Iglesia ni Cristo, a tiny Jewish community, and other faiths here makes little impact on The Church's influence.

Divorce is not allowed, birth control uncommon, and legalized abortion unthinkable. The Church recently got into a terrific row with a government leader who favored the use of condoms.

Yet family trumps even religion in this conservative place, and the daily struggles of life tend to center people around what is concrete rather than what is spiritual. So this week has been one of family members getting together--whether traveling hundreds of miles to a home province or a few kilometers to a neighboring town or barangay.

Music is played, food is prepared, and copious amounts of "tsismis" (gossip) exchanged.

Laughter is found in abundance anytime two or more Filipinos gather. Since being alone is the worst thing imaginable to people here, laughter is always found in abundance; during Holy Week, even more so.

I Won't Vote for Richard Gordon

2010-03-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

I was riding around greater Manila today setting up a couple of interviews and dealing with a visa issue. It's approaching mid-summer here, and is just insufferably hot most of the day.

As I was riding in a very crowded jeepney (just called a "jeep" by locals), we suddenly came to a stop. Not unusual, the traffic can be horrendous, and this was late Friday afternoon, just as schools and many offices were letting everyone out.

But we sat. And sat. and sat. The people here are extraordinarily patient by Western standards. Life is hard and people typically just accept things for how they are. "Bahala na" goes the saying (something between "whatever" and "god (little g) willing."

But this was silly. After a while horns started honking, and looks of genuine anger started to appear. If you've traveled anywhere in Asia, you know that the typical protocol goes from placid to homicidal in a flash. There is no steadily escalating anger and threats as in the US and other Western countries. Here, people stay calm...until they aren't.

It turned out that the root of the problem was a political parade. A big one. Supporters of presidential candidate Richard Gordon, in concert with the local police, had blocked the main highway in my area, so that hundreds upon hundreds of cars, SUVs, jeeps, and trikes could proudly parade through a very modest neighborhood in search of votes.

The election is May 10. It's starting to be crazy time here. Daily talk of new conspiracies involving the current president, of a possible military takeover, of why talk of a takeover is so responsible as to cause one, and on and on. Most of the major candidates are color-coded: leading candidate Noynoy Aquino uses yellow (the color of his mother's People Power campaign in 1986); second-place candidate (according to the polls) has countered with orange; Gibo Teodoro, running under the flag of the current ruling party, is in green; and Richard Gordon is red.

(Another candidate, former President and movie star Erap Estrada, also uses orange, but he gets along fine just being Erap.)

Richard Gordon is supported primarily by wealthier voters, according to polls, so I doubt he won any today. He certainly didn't win mine! (That is, he didn't win mine if I were able to vote here.)

Willie Nelson, God, and Cloud Computing

2010-03-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

Hard to restrain one's self 24/7/365, know what I mean?

http://bit.ly/c90Y2T

I was actually a bigger fan of Waylon, who sung with Willie on the song I reference in the above link. But Willie sang the specific lyric that I mention, so I had to go with him.
Putting him in front of God in the headline is not meant to make offense; it's just that the storyline followed the three subjects in the head in that particular order.

I've been reading about and writing about Cloud Computing non-stop for awhile, and am gearing up for the Cloud Expo in New York, at the Javits Center April 19-21.

www.cloudcomputingexpo.com

There could be 5,000 people there, which would make it by far the largest cloud event produced to date. There is a surge behind cloud, precisely because it's not "the latest, greatest thing." Nothing new to see here, gang.

But it's the fruition of so many trends of the past decade or so. The genius with Cloud--at least with Enterprise Cloud--is how it takes many recent and great technological developments and combines them into truly a new and revolutionary way to run your IT department, and your business.

The idea of the Consumer Cloud, ie, "all your software are belong to us," is much more controversial and untested. But the Enterprise Cloud--in which resources are turned over to third parties, but still owned and strategically managed by the original owner--is a Big Freaking Deal, as Joe Biden might say.

Laos On the Economic Radar Screen

2010-03-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

Laos looks to be the next Southeast Asian to start experiencing rapid economic growth. Its 2009 GDP growth rate was tops in the region, at 6.4 percent according to the World Bank (or 7.6 percent according to the government.)

Laos (which is actually pronounced "Lao"--it's a semi-long story) has been experiencing an average of 7-percent growth for the past five years, and is expected to continue on this pace in 2010. The country mines copper and gold (the two minerals are often found in the same places), and sells a lot of it to China. Its tourism sector is also strong.

What intrigues me is its growth as a producer of hydroelectric power. Investors from adjoining Thailand have in mind to create 8,000 megawatts of power. Agreements have already been signed to export this juice to Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

About 1,000 megawatts of that just went online today, as generators at the Nam Theun 2 dam began cranking. Laos has designs on becoming the so-called "Battery of Asia" with its hydroelectric potential.

Could there be server farms in the future of Laos?

The Nam Theun 2 dam was built at a cost of almost $1.5 billion US. Meanwhile, the Russians are coming, too, investing in a series of four dams that will generate 1,200 megawatts by 2013 at a planned construction cost of $1.7 billion.

Compare these numbers to the GDP of the entire country of about $5.4 billion and you get an idea of the ambitions of the investors, not only from Thailand but also Vietnam and China.

Despite the economic progress of the last five years, Laos remains in the bottom third of GDP per capita, at a little more than $2,000 per year in local buying power. This is only 60% of the Philippines, for example, which is hardly a wealthy country.

But with a population of less than 7 million, Laos does not face the crushing pressures that face many Southeast Asian countries. Perhaps it can become a sort-of Canada of Southeast Asia--a low population sustained by abundant natural resources and beauty--without those pesky nine months of winter.

Cloud Computing By Any Other Name

2010-03-17T05:36:00.001-07:00

I posted a long article about the key difference between the Enterprise Cloud and the Consumer Cloud on my website.

My main idea is that while both are inevitable, today's discussions about Enterprise Cloud are technical and tactical, while The Big Debate over Consumer Cloud has only just begun.

With Enterprise Cloud, table-thumping discussions will ensue about security and may ensue about public v private v hybrid, whether a private virtualization really cloud, etc.

With the Consumer Cloud, there is a major issue of handing over all of our information to a big company, which more than likely will hand it over to an evermore intrusive government if "requested."

The full story is here.

AP: You Are Guilty Until Proven Innocent

2010-03-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

I was working on an article about making the distinction between Enterprise and Consumer Cloud Computing, in which I offered the viewpoint that the current issues involving the Enterprise Cloud are matters of implementation, while the main issue with Consumer Cloud is one of ideology.

Enterprise Cloud discussions are about public v private v hyrid, virtualization v real cloud, and what metrics are used to justify or reject a Cloud Computing initiative or strategy.

But the main Consumer Cloud discussion is whether we should do it all. Shall we turn over all of our personal information to a big corporation, which is very likely to cave into governmental "requests" to see that information?

Just after I finished the piece, I saw the breaking news about how a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed the latest snooping by the FBI, sometimes in concert with local law enforcement, to detect and prosecute criminal behavior. Facebook was prominently mentioned.

The Orwellian idea of Feds camped out on popular websites, trolling for double-plus ungood thoughts and actions, is chilling enough. But I think most of have grown to expect fascistic behavior on behalf of men and women with badges. Certainly, an intrusive, paranoid federal government didn't start or end with the George W. Bush administration. (After all, the FBI works out of the trans-cendant J. Edgar Hoover building.)

What really set me off was the headline for the Associated Press report on this story: "Break the law and your new 'friend' may be the FBI."

While this headline is factually correct, it obliterates the notion, which should be implicit in this story, that an FBI that trolls Facebook and other social networking sites will not necessarily be going after convicted criminals.

This genie, once out of its bottle, will consider anyone a suspect; or in the words of Ronald Reagans' Attorney General Ed Meese, "if you're not guilty, then you wouldn't be a suspect."

Nice to see the AP being so compliant with Newspeak 2.0. I look forward to its future reports on how war is peace and how we've always been at war with Eastasia.

GMA Coverage of Pacquiao-Clottey Fight a Disgrace

2010-03-14T00:28:00.000-08:00

The good news is that people are able to watch Manny Pacquiao's fights here in the Philippines free of charge, on the leading broadcast television network, GMA. The bad news is that GMA shamelessly fills its coverage with enough commercials to choke an elephant.

Estimates of poverty in the Philippines vary, but it's realistic to say that 40% of the country's 92 million people fall below a poverty line no matter where it's drawn. Another 20% or so struggle to have more than one meal a day. About 25 million fall into an emerging "middle class," but this is a middle class along the lines of the US in 1963.

So even though the pay-per-view theaters and coliseums were full today with fans of Pambansang Kamao (the National Fist), generally paying between $5 and $20 apiece, the reality is that the vast majority of people here watched the fight on GMA.

And GMA was utterly disgraceful, in my opinion, in loading its coverage with commercials. The pre-fight and undercard stuff started at 10am, with four hours devoted to covering about 75 minutes of fighting.

The main event then started at 2pm, more than half an hour after the result had been announced on a rival network. GMA then layered in more than 100 minutes of commercials against the 47-minute duration of the actual fight, and a continuous stream of banner ads at the bottom of the screen during the actual fighting.

To me, this is exploitation. I would remind GMA that the federal government in the US had to step in against the avaricious networks in the 70s to put limits on the number of commercials they were allowed to run.

At the time, the networks had no clue that one day they would be abandoned as cable channels brought them real competition and as rising affluence allowed viewers to tune them out.

Living in the Philippines is often like living in the US in 1963, good and bad.

The good is that this is still a polite society, conservative of dress, absent of the crass sluttishness that has come to characterize the US. Newspapers (and to be fair, GMA and its rival ABS/CBN) take political coverage seriously, as do the candidates. Traffic, while chaotic, is mostly absent of the self-centered aggression found in the US. Popular singers have real talent.

But, on the other side of the coin...only now are people cracking down on smoking, birth control remains highly controversial, employers are allowed to mention specific age groups and a desire for employees to be "good looking," and the food companies push a non-stop cornucopia of sugar-laden cereal and "smart food" for anxious parents trying to do the best for their children.

And the leading broadcast network thinks it can run about three times a decent number of commericals during an event that defines "must see" for a nation with precious few international heroes.

In other words, the people here are great; some of the companies that serve them, less so.

Rain, Blessed Rain, Comes to Luzon, Philippines

2010-03-12T06:50:00.000-08:00

What passes for a cold front in this part of the world came through this afternoon, bringing with it the first rains of the year.

A blackout quickly ensued, but we didn't care. Rain, glorious rain, probably less than an inch, but still something to give people here some hope that the El Nino drought won't last forever.

The Philippines has been damaged badly, truly, by the lack of rainfall these past three months. It's normally dry-ish in the eastern provinces during this part of the year, but not rainless. And the western provinces typically experience year-round rainfall coming off the South Pacific.

In addition to crop damage, the lack of rain has caused reservoirs to dry up and put severe crimps into the country's ability to produce hydroelectric power. One can easily argue that there should have been more reservoirs and dams built in the first place. But this country isn't exactly in the world's rich-man's club. And the same argument is made in California, a state with plenty of resources.

The Philippines has no oil, the good news being that the country's government cannot skate by with the phony wealth that oil generates, as in Nigeria, Mexico, and Venezuela. But when you're stuck on one of these islands, you realize there is very little likelihood of the cavalry coming to rescue you when you run out of oil, water, or rice.

Summertime in the Philippines and the Livin' Ain't Easy

2010-03-06T18:57:00.000-08:00

El Nino in the Philippines means no rain and hot weather. Hotter weather, I should say.

We're now into March, the first month of the Philippine summer. Schools will be letting out soon, and it's the height of the dry season in the western, monsoonal parts of the country.

Each day feels a little warmer, a little more humid. The trend will continue until mid-April, when most days will be truly intolerable without air-conditioning, something that most people do without, intolerable or not.

Yet even so, the Philippines needs about 6,700 megawatts of power, equal to that of, say, the State of Wisconsin and on a par with Chile and Portugal.

Fish Are Dying, Not Jumping
It is missing much of this power now, due to a fairly serious El Nino drought that has dried up the reservoirs that feed hydroelectric plants; reports of 80- to 90-percent cuts in power generation have circulated. There have been brownouts in the southern provinces of Mindanao and throughout Metro Manila as well.

The dietary staple tilapia is dying by the millions in dry reservoir beds. Farmers throughout the country are losing their crops. The government has ominously spoken of the "special powers" it may need to address the situation. Many provinces have been formally designated as being in "a state of calamity," the phrase used here that's roughly equivalent to the "disaster area" designation in the US.

There's never much rain during the traditional dry season in the monsoonal western provinces. But on the eastern side of the country, which directly faces the Southern Pacific Ocean and its year-round humidity, rain is normally uniform throughout the year.

Not this year. The dry areas are drier then ever, and the wet areas have seen very little rain. All we can do is wait until May and hope the monsoonal shift brings in blessed precipitation.

This picture of the Philippines may seem ironic, given the inundation and tragedy brought upon Manila and surrounding areas during last year's twin typhoons, Ondoy and Pepeng.

But I've found nothing ironic in the Philippine character; resignation and resilience, yes. Irony no. Life is simply too hard to spark the optimism that is needed as ironic commentary's fall guy.

The Election Approaches
The drought and government rumblings are occurring in the context of the upcoming presidential election, to be held in May.

The two leading candidates, Noynoy Aquino (son of icons Nino and Cory) and Manny Villar (a self-made millionaire who was born in a shantytown), seem to have a commanding lead. Two other candidates, ex-defense minister Gibo Teodoro (running on the incumbent party ticket), and Erap Estrada (an actor and former overthrown president) maintain their presence on the radar screen.

Politics is a game of fluid movements in the Philippines. Recent innuendo has cast Villar as the "secret" candidate of current president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (known as "GMA"), who remains unpopular with media pundits and in political polls. An association with her is widely believed to be toxic.

Yet Noynoy does not seem unassailable. He is frequently derided as having "famous parents" as his primary positive quality. He presents a difficult personality, seemingly very shy but also a bit rigid and stubbornly proud about engaging in the messy business of reaching out directly to voters.

Villar, on the other hand, portrays himself as a man of the people, so much so that he was seen giving out 20-peso bills to children the other day, a move that was not popular with commentators. (The bills are worth about 50 cents US). Vote buying was alleged, something Villar quickly rebutted by saying that children don't vote and he was just trying to help them buy a local treat that he used to enjoy when he was a poor kid.

Erap, the TV and movie star, has always been a people's candidate as well; his recent gaffe was to give a 200-peso note to a woman pleading with him a few days ago to help her disfigured son. (He apparently didn't realize the gravity of the woman's plea, and his handlers later brought her son to a hospital for diagnosis and possible treatment.)

But hey, Erap has already been overthrown once, in what is known as the EDSA 2 revolution. It seems unlikely that he will be given the keys to the presidential home, Malacanang Palace, again.

People Power, EDSA, and More
Noynoy Aquino was an undistinguished senator until the recent death of his widely beloved mother, who was elected after the original EDSA revolution and the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos. Her funeral, attended by hundreds of thousands and watched by tens of millions here, put EDSA, People Power, and Noynoy into a very bright spotlight.

Noynoy has said that he doesn't even want to live in the Palace if elected, as it gives its inhabitants delusions of power. He'd rather retire at the end of his day to his home. His security detail may overrule him on this should he win.

A notoriously frumpy dresser, Noynoy is at least savvy enough to be seen often enough clad in the yellow associated with his mother's revolution. To me, there is nothing phony about this; he and his sisters (one of whom is a very popular TV star) are justifiably proud of their parents' legacy.

EDSA, for those of you keeping score, is a major thoroughfare in Manila; its unabbreviated name is Epifanio de los Santos Avenue. I've had an epiphany or two on EDSA, sitting on "ordinary" (un-air-conditioned) buses for hours in the implacable traffic jams that plague it.

But in 1986, EDSA was jammed with millions of Filipinos, fed up by Marcos, his seemingly tacit approval of Ninoy Aquino's assassination on the international airport's tarmac upon his return from exile, and the dictator's "win" in a consequent, snap election. (The airport was later named after Ninoy, and his face appears on the 1,000-peso note, the largest note in circulation).

The EDSA revolution swept Ronald Reagan's good friend out of office, its climax occurring the moment that top military leaders, including future president Fidel Ramos, abandoned the dictator and threw their support to the unassuming housewife Cory Aquino.

Cory's administration was rocked by conspiracies, coup attempts, and her failure to enact the sort of meaningful reform widely seen as needed here to reduce the political and financial stranglehold that a small number of families continue to hold.

To push and enact such reform, however, she would have been opposed to her own class, provided by her birthright as a member of the powerful Cojuangco and Sumulong families.

Cory was followed at Malacanang by Fidel Ramos, and then Erap Estrada. Imagine electing a movie star into a powerful political office! Erap's EDSA 2 deposal in 2001 was bloodless and much less dramatic than the original revolution. It had nothing to do with People Power and everything to do with alleged corruption.

GMA, who was serving as Erap's vice-president, was installed in the palace. She then won a six-year term in 2004, as a compromise candidate from an unwieldy new political party cobbled from disparate elements. That election has remained controversial, although really, no more controversial than George Bush's election to the White House in 2000.

WWGMAD?
Now, as we wait the remaining two months until election time, we sweat. This will be the first election to use automated voting machines, and the potential for benign malfunction and malignant vote-stealing is a daily topic in Manila's lively English-language press.

Questions about the loyalty of the 80 provincial governors are raised; who will support what GMA wants? And who does she really want? And does this matter?

The answer to the last question is probably "yes." as GMA is running as a candidate for the legislature from her native province of Pampanga, located an hour's drive from the outskirts of the capital city. Wikipedia describes the party loyalties of most Philippine federal legislators as "weak."

This is because the parties themselves are weak, having been effectively born only 24 years ago with the overthrow of Marcos. I don't see the day-to-day machinations and bloviations of legislators here as any worse than that encountered in Washington, DC.

Then again, I don't see them as any better, and maybe that's the problem. My hope is that the Philippines can have as clean an election as possible in a messy democracy, and move upward in its efforts to be taken seriously. To do this does not require emulating the politics of the United States, but if I can be idealistic, to create something better.

Aspirations, To Be Sure
The Philippines aspires to be an influential nation economically, politically, and morally. If there is no American-style optimism among the masses of people on a daily basis, there is certainly no shortage of idealism and the thundering speeches and editorials that accompany it.

This country's 12 million or so overseas workers, and millions more hyphenated Filipinos throughout the world--"ordinary Filipinos" as they call themselves--have earned a global reputation for hard work, honesty, and affability.

Meanwhile, a domestic business process outsourcing industry is generating $7 billion annually, revenue that stays here because it's being generated by local services. GMA's administration has been a transformational backer of this industry, and one would expect government support to continue, regardless of who wins in May.

But the day-to-day reality is simply impossible here for many, and quite difficult for most. Official unemployment figures hardly reflect the reality of "walang trabaho" (no work) for millions. So many places out in the provinces still lack electricity and running water.

Factory workers here in Pampanga make about 70 cents an hour. If you have the 50 cents or so to take a noisy "trike" or sweltering Jeep to work, great. If not, you simply walk, however long it takes. Ice cream is a very rare treat. Cable television is a luxury, and owning a small motorcycle is a big dream. Car ownership is out of the question unless someone in your family works in the US or some other rich country.

To be sure, conditions for a middle class of about 25 million people (almost 30 percent of the population) are not dire. To me, they are comparable to how most middle-class people lived in the US as the Great Depression was ending.

The lives of another 30 or 40 million people out in the provinces and in the urban shantytowns of greater Manila are not so good, though. There was a recent story about a six-year-old girl from the Visayan region who rescued her baby brother from a fire that destroyed their tiny shanty, incurring serious burns in the process.

She and her two siblings were living there with their mother, a laundrywoman whose husband had left her. A carelessly tossed cigarette from a passerby apparently started the conflagration.

A picture of the girl, hands bandaged, IV in her arm, and an absolutely stoic impression on her badly burned face, brought tears to my eyes. Sure, I'm soft, but this girl's unflinching heroism and humble, impassive reaction to it typifies the character of the "ordinary Filipino" to me.

We Need Real Power
I attempted to finish this piece on a Sunday afternoon, a brownout came rolling through my apartment here in Pampanga--this was not predicted, but could have been expected. Most days, I sit on my little porch and write in the cool hours of the early morning.

Those hours end promptly at 9am, at which time I'm driven inside to the small, air-conditioned room I use as my refuge from the heat. On this day, the brownout drove me back outside, to join the small kids playing in the street and the roosters watching us.

Which brings me back to my current obsession with the power supply here. Gibo recently said the country needs to revive its long-dormant nuclear power program if it has a chance of meeting current needs, let alone advancing economically.

He did not, however, endorse the revival of a never-completed plant north of Manila that Marcos tried to have built in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973. The country blew $2.2 billion on it, was paying contractors for years after it was clear that its location was too shaky, so to speak, to be practical.

The Philippines sits in the Ring of Fire, and Marcos decided to place the plant on an earthquake fault that was also near Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano that famously erupted in the 90s and forced the United States Air Force out of a sprawling base in the area.

Gibo points out that two other nations on the Ring of Fire, Japan and South Korea, have been able to install significant nuclear power capacity, so why not the Philippines?

Everyone here knows why not.

But the spirit of EDSA has been revived here, when Cory Aquino's death from cancer late last year reminded the country that its People Power revolution in 1986 was credited, in part, as a model for similar, mostly peaceful revolutions that tore down Europe's Iron Curtain in 1991.

Whomever wins in May, may he tap into the fierce energy of the masses here to create a so-called EDSA 3, and help give this country a push forward.

It will always be hot here. Most years will bring too much rain sometimes, too little other times. But it's high time to make the living a little less difficult.

Cloud Computing and Global Power Requirements

2010-03-04T04:46:00.000-08:00

About three years ago, I wrote an April Fool's story about a very large server farm that was to be built in India, to be powered by three nuclear power plants.

I, of course, thought my story was one of the funniest things ever, even if my opinion wasn't shared by all.

Then today I had a conversation with a friend of mine, originally from India and now working in Singapore, who said that India is working to build 20 very large nuclear power plants by the year 2016.

The plants would average 3,000MW apiece, an enormous amount that is about triple the capacity of the typical facility installed in the 60s and 70s during the first great nuclear power plant building boom.

So my ridiculous story wasn't that far from reality, I guess. This installed power would be twice the power consumed by the country of India just a few years ago.

I'm consumed by this idea of power generation right now, as I think about Cloud Computing and its need for server farms. My Indian friend told me that the sub-continent is being very aggressive in building these farms, despite a serious need for the power to cool them in this very hot country.

I had been musing that perhaps very hot climates, such as found in the Philippines where I'm currently located, would be a serious impediment to the growth of server farms in those regions. "No, just buy more air-conditioning!" my friend admonished.

This is easier said than done. Air-conditioning, notoriously, had the double-edged effect of making Washington, DC habitable in the summer and thereby creating the all-powerful, sprawling, year-round mess known as the federal government.

Now the wondrous invention has spread worldwide, turning Singapore into a global financial power (if not a beacon of democracy), and driving marvelous new world-class business districts in places such as Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila, and Sao Paulo, Dubai, and Mumbai.

This leads to the question of how much power are we using today and how much will we need tomorrow? I'm relying on Wikipedia for now to learn about global power requirements, so can't be 100% sure of what I am reading. But the numbers are believable enough to me to see a few things:

1. The US is not the global per-capita leader in power consumption, as many would instinctively believe. Our friends to the north in do-gooder Canada, for example, use more.

2. Cold weather seems to drive power consumption up more than hot weather, so don't get too upset, Canada, by my first point.

3. If my second point is not true, then the world is in for a major battle to bring all the hot countries (in which a majority of the world's population lives) up to speed

4. The world average would place the earth as a whole in the category of a developing country. There's a long way to go. A simple arithmetic exercise shows that bringing the entire earth up to middling European levels in a world that is growing at 1 percent a year will require four times the amount of installed power 20 years from now than we have today. This simply is not going to happen.

In any case, I'm looking for good research on data farms, where they are now, where they will be, what percentage of total power consumption they'll use, etc. In my mind there's no such thing as "Green IT," just lesser shades of brown and grey.

I also see nuclear power as the way to go, that is, if the world is to lift itself out of its widespread, endemic poverty over the next 20 to 30 years.

Is this really a Mephistophelian bargain, though? Is there such a thing as a solution that's not some sort of deal with the devil? Does everyone know that wind turbines are major mass murderers of raptors?

What if global warming is not as serious as many portray it, if whatever effect humans have on the climate get seriously trumped by sunspots or volcanic activity or forces and cycles we're either ignoring or of which we're unaware? That still doesn't mean we can burn coal and forever, right? Or, are Saudi oil and Canadian tar sands good to go for another 1,000 years?

I see Cloud Computing as the first step in the final leg of the IT journey, the step in which computing power becomes cheap, ubiquitous, and utterly able to make utopian dreams come true for the entire world.

But we'll need power, not only for the server farms but for all the air-conditioning and accoutrements that will come for newly comfortable masses of people. How will we produce this power? And how many wars will we start in the name of it?

Cloud Computing and The Philippines

2010-02-28T01:19:00.000-08:00

An economist in Manila thinks it possible to double the middle class in the Philippines to 45 million people within a decade or so. This number can be added to the tens of millions of others throughout Southeast Asia, and the hundreds of millions in China and India.

The idea of IT as a service, provided as if it were electricity or water (with data integrity) seems to me to be very appealing to a part of the world that cannot and will not have the capex capacity required to leapfrog itself into the top ranks of the global economy.

But with cloud, maybe so. Just as asking, "what can electricity do?" sounds like a silly question from the Ben Franklin area, asking "what can cloud computing do?" is not the real question. The real question is, "how fast can cloud services be delivered to every corner of the world, and how?"

The electricity grids that span North America can, in theory, deliver juice from anywhere to anywhere, but given the pesky laws of electromagnetism and physics, it's best to keep the supply relatively close to the demand.

What about IT resources? Other than for real-time financial services markets, which fuss over latency issues in the microsecond range, how critical is location for the server farms that will power and empower Cloud Computing?

Meet Pradeep Gupta of CyberMedia

2010-02-27T00:23:00.001-08:00

I worked for many years at IDG, the world's largest tech publisher, and a company that's planted in a flag in more than 150 countries and every continent, including Antarctica. The key to IDG's approach to global dominance is entrepreneurialism and compartmentalization, ie, each US publication is run as its own separate business unit, as is each IDG company located out of the US.

That experience has given me an eye for similar entrepreneurs. CyberMedia CEO Pradeep Gupta is one of them. I had a great conversation with him a couple of weeks ago. It was mid-morning in Silicon Valley for me, evening for him somewhere north of New Delhi.

I was in my office, he was in his car, and I could hear the ceaseless clamor of "third brakes" (aka car horns) as he worked his way through what sounded to be typically apocalyptic Indian traffic.

We talked about magazines, the old days, whiskey, back-of-envelope calculations, and the present moment as well.

Here is the interview.

Real Weather Strikes Silicon Valley and the Bay Area

2010-01-20T10:00:00.001-08:00

One thing I've always liked about the Bay Area during my quarter-century here is that we occasionally have real weather.

Not to diminish the tragedy that often comes with it, it's exciting to see Mother Nature's occasional wrath. It fills up our reservoirs and has a net positive effect on keeping the dreaded fires away, adding moisture to the grassy carpets that surround us even while nurturing the growth (and therefore fire potential) of them.

I took these shots along Highway 101 during my mercifully short 3-mile commute this morning. (Yes, I was snapping while driving, but not texting, talking, smoking, drinking, fornicating, or even listening to the radio.)

The good news is that the people of Northern California know how to drive in this weather, unlike say, in socal where the first drop of rain on the first windshield induces panic and 30-mile backups that can only properly be explained by wave theory.

Today's storm is the fourth of five that have been forecasted, and let's hope everyone stays safe, the hillsides don't collapse, and the sun returns by Friday!

Global Sourcing in the Philippines: Makati and Beyond

2010-01-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

I posted my interview with Oscar Sanez (pictured), President and CEO of BPAP, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (www.bpap.org). Oscar runs marathons, and have I ever mentioned I think it's hot over there? I hope they start these races at around 3am.

He's taking the long-term view of business as well. A P&G exec for almost 30 years, located in all corners of the world, Oscar returned to the Philippines a few years back to apply the full force of his experience and personality to address the challenge of developing business in his native country.

The Metro Manila municipality of Makati City (left), where BPAP is located and where I met Oscar for our interview, is one of the showcase areas of the Philippines and of the global outsourcing industry. Its skyline, greenbelt area, hotels, restaurants, shopping, etc. put it on a par with great urban areas throughout the world, at prices that remain a tremendous bargain even to Americans arriving with their puny, infirm dollars.

Makati is routinely listed as one of the very top outsourcing (or global sourcing) locations in the world, alongside Indian giants such as Bangalore, Mumbai/Pune, and Hyderabad. I've been to all these places, and I can vouch that Makati's infrastructure is vastly superior to that of any Indian city. In fact, even standard-issue Manila infrastructure (a pic I took of jeeps in the Cubao area is below) is superior to anything I've seen in India.

The vibrant success of Makati over the past two decades or so has created a number of improvements in education and social services for its half a million residents--many of whom live the very difficult life common to so many millions in the Philippines and other countries throughout Southeast Asia.

These days, Oscar and many others in the Philippines are working to continue to attract new business to Makati, while also promoting numerous other locations, within and surrounding Manila, and out in the provinces as well.

Cebu City, the commercial hub of the country's central Visayan region, has already made the list of top sourcing destinations in the world--a number of people I've spoke to report a 30-percent discount across the board from prices in Manila.

Names such as Mandaluyong, Pasig City, and Quezon City (all in Metro Manila) will be heard more and more, as well regional names such as Bulacan, Pampanga, and Cavite, and provincial names such as Iloilo, Bocolod, and Davao.

Manila, Metro Manila, Mega Manila

2010-01-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

For those of you not in the know, there are three stars on the flag of the Philippines: one for Luzon (dominated by the island of the same name and by Manila), one for the Visayas (which contains several major islands), and one for the southern Mindanao region.

This makes the regions equal in theory, but not in practice. By now, the island of Luzon contains almost 50 million of the nation's estimated population of 92 million. In contrast, there are 20 million-something in Mindandao and close to 20 million scattered throughout the Visayas.

Manila is the big megillah in this picture. Defining precisely what constitutes Manila can be a tiresome exercise, given that you have the City of Manila, the National Capital Region (less formally known as the Manila Metrpolitan Area or Metro Manila), Greater Manila, and the more-recent mega-definition, Mega Manila.

The City of Manila is like the City of London (a smallish place within a very large area that carries its name) and not like New York City, which is a collection of smaller boroughs.

Oh, wait. The City of Manila is not nearly as strange as the City of London, which has a resident population of 8,000 people and has existed since the time of the Romans--and what did the Romans ever do for England anyway?

The City of Manila contains the original city, almost 2 million people, and most of the cool old Spanish stuff, the big cathedral, and the country's presidential palace. It was named after a variety of mangrove tree. There are plenty of mangroves in the Philippines; it's hot there, you know.

Metro Manila is also quite precisely defined, and has an estimated population of about 11.5 million. So-called "Mega Manila" extends up, down, and out from the main metro area as much as 40 to 50 miles.

You can drive north, for example, through a corner of Bulacan province and into Pampanga province, through miles of flat rice fields, only to re-submerge into plenty of traffic and people once you reach the City of San Fernando and Angeles City. Another million or so people are found here, most of them doing hard, physical labor for a few dollars a day and/or waiting for remittances from relatives and friends.

Mega Manila might have 35 million people, in other words, roughly comparable to California in about one-eighth the space. Even so, having some fun with numbers, that equates to only 700 people per square kilometer. Compare this to almost 7,000 per square kilometer in San Francisco and other highly urbanized cities across the globe.

Even so, paraphrasing Wavy Gravy (and no, I wasn't at Woodstock and am not stuck in the 60s), "what Manila has in mind every morning is breakfast in bed for 35 million."

The Philippines and numerous other Asian countries have developed cultures that put much less of an emphasis on personal space than we twitchy Westerners. There is a concomitant much higher emphasis on group dynamics, eg, learning to blend into enormous clots of people and traffic, and not throwing a punch if someone sits on top of you in a jeepney.

Even so, there are severe logistical problems involved in housing, feeding, transporting--and finding work--for this many people in such a relatively small place.

Catching the Next Wave

2010-01-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

The 10 Next Wave Cities identified last year by the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (www.bpap.org) include six areas in the "Mega Manila" area, two in the Visayas, and two on the island of Mindanao.

My personal interest is in the two Visayan locations, as the Visayas is my favorite part of this country. But my plan is to visit all 10 in coming months, to give a fair-minded report on them, personal bias aside. For now, I've posted a picture of Bacolod City, one of the two Visayan locations identified by BPAP. It's actually only a 45-minute ferry ride from Iloilo City, the other Visayan Next-Wave City.

Bacolod is considered in some quarters as the greatest place to live in the Philippines, with a combination of low cost, decent infrastructure, and warm, Visayan culture. It has an energetic advocate and aspiring politician named Jocelle Bataga-Sigue, who's doing a lot of good work in trying to attract business to her city.

I've met her, spoken with her, and may get to interview her formally some day if she ever slows down a bit and lets me catch her!

It's NOW or Never

2010-01-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

The word "now" defines something that both exists perpetually and doesn't exist at all. We live in the eternal present, with "now" as the cleaving point between past and present.

So if someone tells you to do something "now," well, you won't be able to get it done until a bit later (at the earliest), although when you are done you will be able to say it is finished "now."

Mathematicians invented the concept of a limit to get around a paradox: you can measure our approach to something in terms of a percentage (I'm halfway there), but in doing so you will never reach the goal (you can always measure halfway there, down to infinitesimal numbers). Thus, the limit was create (Eureka, I am there now!), so that Newton and Leibniz could get on with the business of creating the calculus.

A similar paradox exists with the concept of "now." You can always measure where you are at, or were at a few seconds, nanoseconds, or years ago, but you can't observe it anymore, because it's no longer now. This is more in line with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which observes that can measure or observe a particle if you want, but you can't do both accurately.

Most people, of course, don't waste their time thinking about "the paradox of now," but instead employ what I like to call "the power of now" to describe what's going on, whether in entertainment, business, sports, etc. ad infinitum.

So it's amusing to see, for example, that Fox News has been using NOW as part of its ongoing news coverage, and now (so to speak) as a blog:
http://www.foxnews.com/happeningnow/

Fox's Salt Lake City station has incorporated it into its URL:
http://www.fox13now.com/

As has Fox's station in Cape Coral, Florida
http://www.fox4now.com/

And ABC has been smitten by the power of NOW:
http://abcnews.go.com/abcnewsnow/

I'm sure there are, by now, many others.

If you want to be more salacious, visit some of the versions of NOW Magazine scattered throughout the world:
http://www.nowtoronto.com/ (NSFW!)

http://www.nowmagazine.co.uk/ (marginally SFW!)

Or how about this one? (I'm sure the Chinese government is thrilled with all the coverage of the Dalai Lama!)
http://www.chinanowmag.com/chinanow.htm

Here's a NOW Magazine with a healthy-size URL from an oddly-named school in Texas.

Then there's the NOW Magazine I helped create when I worked for TIBCO. But it seems to have stopped printing this magazine, and its website hasn't been updated in two years hehe.

And wow, I notice I'm still listed there with that two-year-old copy, even though I haven't worked for TIBCO in months.

I'd fire off a cease-and-desist letter if I thought it hurt my image or was somehow competing with what I'm doing now :-)

But what I'm doing now is something far different. I'm not with TIBCO and generally don't write about the company. I do like to write about people throughout the world who are trying to create a better standard of living through job development and creation of a global services chain. You can scroll through my blog to find some of my more recent, interesting interviews.

Enjoy! That's all for NOW!

Green, Disgusting, or Just Confused?

2010-01-11T10:11:00.001-08:00

Within seconds of my previous post I was lambasted by a loyal reader who says he's seen this sort of "cleaning optional" sign for years.

"It started with towels," he said (which I actually have seen many times), "the moved to bedsheets maybe 10 years ago."

Well, OK, but how about a place that doesn't clean your room...period...every day? No vacuum, not even a cursory look at the bathroom, nothing nada.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of I May Be a Doofus, let me give you a Top 10 List of Other New Stuff I've Seen Lately...

1. How about these so-called "smart phones"? Did you know you can get your email on them?

2. Wow, who knew you could find music and even movies online and download them?

3. Has anyone else noticed that big-city newspapers are getting smaller?

4. Does there seem to be too much useless entertainment gossip in our media, or is it just me?

5. Dylan went electric?

6. Reality TV doesn't seem so real to me, know what I mean?

7. I don't get why all these bloggers are so popular. Can't we trust our mainstream media to get things right anymore?

8. When did one of George Carlin's "seven words" become more common on radio and TV than the synonyms "mad" and "angry"?

9. I wish someone had told me sooner that I don't need to go to the box office to get tickets for the game. Would have saved me TONS of time.

10. Those grocery scanners at modern supermarkets, whew, are they cool or what?

New Hotel Policy: Green, or Disgusting?

2010-01-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

Here's the little sign I found on my unchanged bed in my hotel room yesterday afternoon.

The pic is a little blurry. Here's what the sign says:

"Bedsheets that are washed daily in thousands of hotels around the world use millions of gallons of water and a lot of detergent.

"Please leave this card on the bed if you do not want your sheets changed.

"Thank-you for helping us conserve the Earth's vital resources."

The rhetoric here is certainly self-righteous and high-flown enough to qualify as a legitimate political point of view.

But isn't this just a dodge? Isn't this just a way to rationalize why the hotel doesn't want to pay to have its rooms cleaned every day?

Even worse, this hotel has a policy of sending its maids around every other day, so even if you want those sheets changed on, say, Sunday, there's a good chance they won't be changed until Monday.

The place does have a very low rate, so I'm sticking with it, as I'm on a tight budget while researching some stories. So I won't name names, because other than the gross-out factor associated with this sign and policy, I kinda like the place. I realize that not everyone will agree with me here.

Has anyone else encountered this policy?

Update on Datuk Ghazali at Malaysia's MSC

2010-01-07T12:05:00.000-08:00

The second part of my interview with Datuk Ghazali, CEO of MdEC, which runs Malaysia's multimedia super corridor, is now posted!

Badlisham Ghazali, CEO of Malaysia's MSC

2009-12-18T15:01:00.000-08:00

I've posted the first of a two-part interview I did with Datuk Badlisham Ghazali, CEO of MdEC, the Malaysian government-driven entity that runs the MSC, which was originally called the Multimedia Super Corridor.

The MSC is not a thing, but a place, one of those earnest attempts to recreate Silicon Valley. It is quite extensive, running in a corridor about 15 miles east-west and 30 miles north-south, from the signature Petronas Towers in downtown KL through the planned cities of Cyberjaya and Putrajaya, and on out to the international airport.

There are 90,000+ people employed there now, 2,000 companies represented, and general revenue approaching $7 billion per year.

Malaysia is a formal place, reflecting the fact that the British were there for more than 250 years. Its multi-ethnic, multi-religious nature gives it a unique feeling, although I'll withhold further comment on that topic unless and until I live there for awhile and feel more knowledgeable on the topic!

The country has a smallish population by Southeast Asian standards, the usual heat and humidity of the region, and a drive to continue to improve the wealth of its people in the coming years and decades.

I hope to be able to learn more about the MSC and Malaysia in the future and to examine its role on the world technology stage in depth.

For now, thanks to Mr. Ghazali and his associates, here's Part One of the interview!

Gitmo Comes to Mom's Neighborhood

2009-12-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

The proposed transfer by the federal government of some prisoners from Guantanomo Bay to a underused state prison facility in Thomson, Illinois hits home for me, literally.

My father was from Thomson, and my mom lives there now. She could walk from her house to the prison in about 15 minutes if she wanted to.

Thomson is a Mississippi River town, but unlike most, safe from the river. A state campground borders the river, with the town itself lying a few hundred feet above the river. The Army Corps of Engineers has had a long presence here, digging a channel to widen the river decades ago, and still maintaining a small office on Main St.

Thomson is located in Carroll County, the county seat of which is my hometown, Mount Carroll. The county defines the term "rural," with around 17,000 inhabitants, and a single stoplight that was put in a few years ago in the county's largest town, Savanna (pop. around 4,000), to acquiesce to tourist-related traffic.

Carroll County went through a spasm of self-reflection during the US bicentennial year in 1976, as did most places in the US.

Fire hydrants were painted to look like Founding Fathers--something that quickly ended in 1977 after complaints by firemen that they could no longer tell the capacity of individual hydrants, which had previously been color-coded.

And the county produced an historical book about itself, "A Goodly Heritage," and even came up with a county flag (which I've included here) and a slogan, "Beautiful, Bountiful, Beckoning."

I won't ridicule all this, even though it was a little grandiose for a place that is generally populated by people who are modest and humble, hard-working (when they can find a job), and live lives oriented around multi-generational families.

As with most of the heartland, the weather is about as pleasant as Bangkok in the summertime and the South Pole in the winter. But a solid two weeks in May and the entire month of September are usually very nice, and tornadoes haven't killed anyone in years around there.

Now Carroll County in general, and Thomson in particular, are in the news. I wrote my opinion piece about this a couple of days ago. Read and enjoy if you want.

This story actually begins with the building of this prison a few years ago by the State of Illinois. Huge news at the time, the assorted thugs and thieves in the state capital of Springfield promised vast new prosperity for the town. Didn't happen. The state forgot to fund the actual opening of the prison, and it has sat mostly empty, sucking up dollars rather than contributing them.

Now, the federal government has said it will acquire the prison and make use of it. My mom thinks this is a good idea. She's not afraid of the potential new residents. So, for once, I'll listen to her opinion and go along with it!

Has Global Sourcing Returned to the Heartland?

2009-12-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

Before call centers started to sprout in India and the Philippines, many companies set up moderately massive centers in the US, usually in lightly populated places such as South Dakota and Maine.

This trend actually followed a long-term charactertistic of the publishing and direct-marketing industries, which often set up in The Heartland, due to moderate wage levels and zoned postage rates that encouraged a location from the middle of the country.

Remember all those magazine subscription cards in the old days that went to Mt. Morris, Illinois and Clinton, Iowa?

The American Heartland has been under duress for three decades now. The cold weather and a certain lack of flexibility in business thinking catalyzed a brain drain to the warmer climes of the South and the innovation of Silicon Valley and other places "Out West."

But now, with near-ubiquitous broadband Web access and mass proliferation of cellphones and other wireless devices, prosperity seems to be returning to some regions.

I don't believe for a moment that President Obama can do a thing to bring all those great industrial jobs back to Ohio and Michigan, as he alleged during his campaign. Hey, maybe he's just a politician trying to win votes, I don't know.

But something more special than that seems to be going on. A recent study about emerging rural prosperity, being touted by the rurally-located University of Illinois.

I'm looking into seeing how much of that is attributable to the global sourcing phenomenon. The news I read about this report emphasizes civic awareness, the role of small colleges, and something that had a disturbing whiff to me of race-based politics.

But I'll wait until I read the entire report, and the reports behind that report.

I do think global sourcing is about to make an impact in The Heartland. To me, the key sentence I took from an overview of the report is, "geographical factors like climate, topography, distances to cities and airports, and interstate highways are unimportant in distinguishing prosperous counties from others."

There was a time when it didn't matter that it's cold in the Midwest six months of the year. Then there was a time when it did matter. Now, it appears that it doesn't matter again.

In my opinion, global sourcing is not just about India and China anymore. It's about Southeast Asia, too...and it may be about the USA as well!

Jonathan Rosenberg, Global Sourcing Pioneer

2009-12-11T11:22:00.000-08:00

During my recent stay in the Philippines, I had the opportunity to meet many fascinating people at a government-sponsored event known as Convergence 2009.

One of these was Jonathan Rosenberg, who co-founded the first Philippine call-center in 1999. Now, 10 years after, he's one of the venerable players in an industry that is delivering more than $2 billion in annual revenue and provides 160,000 jobs in a country that really...needs...jobs.

You can find the interview at the NOW Magazine syndication site.

I'm staying away from the dread term "outsourcing," because I don't believe it accurately defines what is going on in the global economy today. To me, the idea of "global sourcing" is much more accurate.

Most products today are sourced from dozens, if not hundreds, of vendors from all corners of the world. Services are also provided from innumerable pinpoints on the globe.

This Economics is Tricky Stuff

2009-11-15T19:19:00.000-08:00

The Obama Administration has decided that Asia matters. Driven primarily by the specter of emerging Chinese economic might, the President is nonetheless embracing the region as a whole.

Set aside his glib use of his childhood years in Indonesia as making him the "first pacific President." Obama appears to be sincere in paying as much attention to Asia as to Europe.

His "differences" with several Asian nations over human rights--ranging from mild rebukes to China, strong advice to Myanmar, and crisis management with North Korea--tend to obscure the reality that the real debate is about economics.

And it is with economics that former law professor Obama may receive a schooling. Unlike political diplomacy, which is often a zero-sum game, economic diplomacy is far more nuanced and unpredictable. Push a button here, pull a lever there, and a whole new unforseen picture may be created.

The top item on this agenda is the continued undervaluing of China's currency, which has allowed the country to generate enormous sales of everyting from party favors to laptop computers at great prices to consumers in the US and throughout the world.

Stop pegging the currency to the dollar, let it float, the argument goes, then US producers will have a more level playing field, and all those great jobs will return to Ohio and Michigan, as Obama promised they would during his campaign.

One of the big problems is that a stronger Chinese currency will reduce the value of the hundreds of billions of dollars of US debt that China has steadily acquired in recent years.

A strong Chinese currency won't necessarily cause a proportionate fall in the dollar, but it should weaken it. This would be a disaster from where I often sit in the Philippines, a country that generates about 13% of its economy from millions of overseas workers, about half of them in the US.

A recent dollar drop-off dropped the exchange rate here from around 48 to around 46 to the dollar, something that immediately cut the inflow of remittances from the US by about $1 million per day.

It's generally agreed that in the long term the country needs to develop more of its own good jobs and get off of the addiction to foreign remittances. Of course, it's also often argued that the US should get off its addiction to foreign oil. Which will happen first?

Who cares about the Philippines, anyway? The Obama administration says it does, and a recent friendly visit by Hillary Clinton underscored that point.

There has been enough economic success in recent years to take Thailand and Malaysia to classify them as newly-industrialized rather than developing; to launch Indonesia into the G20 and give it a major regional spokesperson role; to pronounce Vietnam as the new It Girl; and to bring ubiquitous megamalls and world-beating communications to the Philippines.

But when elephants battle, the grass suffers. And there are 600 million people in the grass in Southeast Asia. All of the progress cited above could be crushed quickly.

Obama demagogued the globalization issue during his campaign, using Bill Clinton's NAFTA legacy as a weapon against Hillary during the primaries, and excoriating those American businesses who dared to outsource. He seems to believe in tactical trade barriers, reminiscent of 70s-era anti-dumping allegations against Japan.

And now he his saying that Americans need to "save more and spend less" so that the economy doesn't go into freefall again as it did in September 2008 (ensuring his election in the process).

He will find that what gets people to cheer on the stump in Youngstown won't pass muster in Singapore this week, as he engages 54% of the world economy at a US President's first visit to an APEC meeting.

More important, he will find that the unthinking, blind cruelty of the world economy will make a mockery of his best-played talking points.

If Americans truly started to spend less just because they think they should, why yes, that would reduce the trade deficit with China. It would also be the absolute best way to plung the world back into deep recession.

If China sudddenly lets its currency float, watch what will happen to the value of its US investments. This move may actually crush the dollar.

If the dollar gets crushed, no one in the Philippines will be happy. What the country always seeks is a stable dollar, not a particularly weak or strong one.

If all of those outsourced jobs were suddenly transported to the US, and employers forced to retain them, then either the cost of innumerable products would go through the roof, or corporate profits would drop through the floor. Not going to happen, the notion is ridiculous even as a thought exercise.

President Obama has not yet called me to ask my opinion, but when he does, I would tell him to listen more and talk less while in Asia. Not only will the locals appreciate this, he will learn about how the world really works today.

The President seems to be a highly intelligent, thoughtful person. Should he learn from Asia, rather than try to dictate to it, he'll figure out how to make America stronger. Hint: encourage education and entrepreneurship...and no more memories of lost times.

Cloud Computing Expo Billows in Santa Clara

2009-10-31T03:45:00.000-07:00

I'll be reporting on www.cloudcomputingexpo.com next week, even though I'm 7,500 miles away from its Santa Clara location. It starts Monday morning, and features keynotes from Yahoo, Oracle, and Unisys.

I'll be watching it live on www.sys-con.tv, between the hours of 1am and 9am local time here in Asia. No problem, I got up in the middle of the night to watch the US get beat in World Cup soccer back in 2002, I can certainly be up for this.

A recent Cloud Computing conference run by the same folks featured a discussion of the Cloud Computing Manifesto and the defense of it by IBM's Kristof Kloeckner. We'll see what sort of sparks will fly this time.

Uncle Sam Still Matters

2009-10-25T19:05:00.000-07:00

I've been promising myself to write about the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, for which I had a press credential, but which has now been in the rear-view mirror for a month. My idea had been to talk about Indonesia and its plans to press the case for Southeast Asia, now that this country of more than 200 million people had a seat at the adult's table.

But then the real adults took over, as the US and China became the centerpiece of the event. President Obama attended, and met with Hu Jintao. Mega-concerns over North Korea, the strength of the dollar, and the overall relationship between the two countries.

But, in the end, the G20 emerged as a replacement for the G8 as the primary forum for economic talks among nations. So the Indonesians were able to get what they wanted.

Now, as we near the end of October, Southeast Asia is again pushing its agenda, at an ASEAN meeting in Thailand. This meeting had been postponed a couple of times because of political unrest there--in essence, there are two points of view among the populace that appear irreconcilable at the moment--but is now going on at a beach resort.

ASEAN is a venerable institution, but one that does not have the truly big players as members. So, these players were invited--China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

Clearly, the leaders of the 600 million people of Southeast Asia are anxious to flex their economic muscles on the world stage. There is talk of an "EU-like" partnership here. To that end, Japan and Australia made competing presentations about how to accomplish this.

To me, the fascinating aspect is that both of these plans include the US as either a "key" or a "cornerstone." On a sidenote, ASEAN is working to create a workable human rights commission, but its members are being criticized for its weak stand against fellow member Myanmar (Burma). The excuse being thrown about is that because the US has recently re-engaged the Burmese government, after many years of hostility, "the pressure is off" of ASEAN to take a strong stand.

So, let's review:
* the most important member of an expanded global economic initiative remains the United States. No real surprise there, given that the US still has, by far, the world's largest national economy.

* Southeast Asia, with input from the major Asian powers, sees a key role for the US in any future plans.

* Southeast Asia is taken a hands-off approach to a sticky human-rights issue, leaving the real work to the US.

So, after decades of economic decline, withering criticism from all corners of the world, initial weakness in assuming the role of "the world's only superpower," and a recently completed eight years of unilateral policy that alienated much of the world, the United States remains the country in which much of the world continues to place its hope. Not the UK, not France, not Japan, not China, and certainly not Russia.

Also, recent weakness in the dollar is causing enormous problems in many Asian countries, because the influx of those dollars into so many economies here is what keeps them alive and well.

Isn't it nice to feel wanted?

Philippine Coast Guard Auxiliary Aids Typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana) Victims

2009-09-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

There's been an outpouring of concern and aid from many people in the US and elsewhere to help victims of the flooding caused by Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines.

One place to send aid--an organization that's not as well-known as it should be--is the Philippine Coast Guard Auxiliary.

http://www.pcgaux.org/

The Auxiliary is not part of the Philippine government. Rather, it is a group of seaworthy, dedicated volunteers who assist the Philippine Coast Guard in many areas: search and rescue, public education, environmental protection, and several other civic-minded functions.

I spent several years with the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary and got to know many people around the world who volunteer for similar organizations in their countries.

One of the great people I met along the way is Commodore Harold Wolf of the Philippine auxiliary. I've just been in touch with him, and he said that the group is accepting donations, which are being used solely for food, blankets, and fuel for rescue missions.

Donations can be sent to:

Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. Mandaluyong Branch, Greenfield Bldg. 750 Shaw Blvd. Nandaluyong City

RCBC Acct. #0-275-80165-8

Name of account: PCGA National- International Affairs.

Julius Akinyemi: MIT Resident Entrepreneur

2009-09-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

If you've been reading my blog, you can see I have trouble coming up with good headlines.

I don't like the aspect of the Google Age that has eliminated creative headline writing by demanding a focus on keywords. So my cutesy skills have atrophied, and I usually just try to pinpoint people with something straightforward.

But I had real trouble with writing the headline for Julius Akinyemi. He has such a breadth of experience that I couldn't decide how to pinpoint him. He's been an exec at PepsiCo and Wells Fargo. He's done work with the UN. He's done work throughout the world. Then I realized that you can't pinpoint him. So I went with his current position at MIT and left it at that.

The real story is what Julius is doing right now at the MIT Media Lab. He aims to bring true empowerment--not the feel-good kind we have in the US, but the real kind that lifts people out of poverty--to millions of people throughout the world, particularly in Africa.

His idea is to create an eRegistry of everything from names of people to lists of the land and the cows they own, and create markets for them that are easily accessible, fair, and efficient. It's hard to explain in 100 words or fewer, so here's the full article/interview, just posted on the NOW Mag syndication site:

http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com/node/1125661

Here's Ross Turk, Director of Community, SourceForge

2009-09-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

I managed to meet up with SourceForge's Ross Turk at OSCON in San Jose several weeks ago. I finally managed to transcribe and edit our discussion, and just posted it at the NOW Magazine syndication site:

http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com/node/1125646

As I wrote in the article, "Ross could have certainly talked to me about a million different things, but I tried to focus on a small amount of the big stuff that drives him. I started with a really dull question, then tried to improve as things went on...

NOW Magazine: As Director of Community, what are your main responsibilities?

Ross Turk: In a sentence: my job is to understand how people use our services, represent SourceForge, and keep my company from doing dumb things."

You can find the rest of the interview at the NOW Magazine URL that I listed above.

Thanks, Ross!

Lars Kurth, Community Manager at Symbian

2009-09-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

I've now posted my interview with Symbian Contributing Community Manager Lars Kurth. I met him at OSCON, and then followed up with some specific questions for him.

One nice quote: "Becoming a 'rock star' in our community is about what individuals do for the community and whether they build their own communities around them."

Here's the full interview:

http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com/node/1118895

Lars is yet another smart, interesting character in this industry. Whenever I get depressed about the state of the world (which is often), I remember all the great and dedicated people in the IT industry worldwide, and I cheer up a bit.

Hope this interview provides a little cheer for you!

My Interview with Bluenog's Sastry Taruvai

2009-09-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

Even though I had mean things to say about OSCON's location in San Jose this year (see earlier post), it was convenient enough for me to head over to the convention center and interview some key people in the industry.

One of those people was Bluenog co-founder and CIO Sastry Taruvai. He's an engaging guy who worked for BEA for awhile, then recently plunged into the open-source enterprise software waters with two other like-minded execs.

"Enterprise software cannot be built in a vacuum," he told me in our interview. In short, he gets it. You can find the interview at NOW Magazine online:

http://nowmagazine.ulitzer.com/node/1107964

My interview with Sastry is just the first of several from OSCON that I'll be posting over the next week or so. Happy reading!

Asian G20 Countries Want More Say

2009-09-19T09:38:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press ran a story this morning, picked up and run prominently in Manila and elsewhere, about how the big Asian countries who belong to the G20 want "more input" into how the world is run.

http://tinyurl.com/nrjbeh

Based on GDP, China is at the forefront of this group, with Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, and Indonesia also in the group. Everyone will have a chance to make their voices heard in the upcoming G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Australia is a Western country located near Asia, and twins with Canada a low-population, resource-rich member of the British Commonwealth. As the world once again re-focuses on scarce resources and the impact of their use, Australia does have the opportunity to be influential despite having an economy that can seem anachronistic in the hip, 21st century Internet Age.

And not for nothing, Australia and Canada are two nations that don't generally mind welcoming immigrants and integrating them into their societies.

I throw this out there because Japan is among the more exclusive societies in the world, traditionally even loathing as gaijin the nisei/sansei/yonsei (children of Japanese parents and grandparents) who visit Japan.

Anyone who's visited Japan knows that the word "gaijin" is often pronounced in a guttural way that makes it sound like an English equivalent of "turdface" or something of that nature.

A recent seismic shift in Japanese politics is the first serious threat in years to end the two-decade economic stagnation here, caused by the rigid, iron-gripped stranglehold of government bureaucrats and big business on society.

But the political shift was accomplished by an appeal to the day in/day out cares of ordinary Japanese, rather than some vision of global integration.

South Korea, still getting a grip on its recent economic success and how to use it most effectively on the world stage, has fought hard over many centuries to prevent being dominated by its neighbors. Koreans are justifiably proud of their "scientific" writing system, which has brought an ease of literacy in a difficult language.

Pronunciation remains a problem. Koreans are on a par with the French in their trouble in making themselves understood in English. On the flipside, even a simple word such as "Seoul" is confounding to non-Koreans; it sounds more like "czar" when pronounced properly than the "soul" of its English transliteration.

Koreans work tremendously hard to overcome the language barrier. The people are bracingly direct, more like Westerners than most in Asia. The country has a stable democracy, and has shown much patience with the continuing misery of being a divided nation and insanity of the North Korean government.

It encourages foreign invesment, and works hard to be a reliable trading partner, whether selling integrated circuits, cars, or animation. It vies with the U.S. to have the world's greatest computer-game players. It's hard to imagine South Korea some day being a pluralistic society, but you never know. The country wants to host a G20 summit. It wants to do something about the gap between rich and poor nations. It does seem ready to assume a louder voice in global affairs.

The desires of China and India to have a larger role are driven primarily by population, of course.

China already exerts a large geopolitical role; its efforts in the next several years will likely be related to trade and preserving the wealth it has earned through exports and floating the never-ending debt of the U.S. The elephant in the room remains the country's terrifically undervalued currency, and the economic disruption that might ensue should anyone get serious about addressing the issue.

India remains frustrated in not being taken seriously enough. But the country is best-known in recent years as a place where outsourcing has not been successful. The financial crash in the U.S. hurt Indian outsourcing tremendously. The disappointments routinely experienced by Silicon Valley companies in locating offices throughout India have created a climate of mutual distrust, whether high-level executives acknowledge this or not.

India did have its own U.S.-style thievery scandal when the CEO of upcoming outsourcer Satyam allegedly ran off with a billion or so dollars. Should the Indian outsourcing industry hold steady through the economic crisis and this particular scandal, the country may be ready to move upstream and become a leader in future years.

That leaves Indonesia, the largest country in my favorite region of Southeast Asia. A recent terrorist attack on a hotel there was a terrible thing, but is unlikely to scare off big investors.

The country remains a laggard in its use and development of IT, but has created a stable democracy for 240 million people out of the ashes of decades of totalitarian rule. As the world's largest Muslim country, it is sensitive about portraying itself as a reliable, conservative place rather than a hateful, radical one.

As always, political and religious leaders foment dissent and violence among people who really just want to build decent lives for themselves and their children, as is the case throughout the world, including in the "secular" U.S.

The globalization cat is out of the bag. The cat will remain free, despite a rash of recent protectionist barriers quickly slapped together in the recent recession, as pointed out by Global Trade Alert. The cat may have lost a life or two in the decade since the first big anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999.

But it has many lives left, and is being fed by the newly-wealthy countries in the G20 and a second group of about 30 countries that aspire for more wealth and influence.

Government leaders in these places have seen that their governments become stronger as their people become less miserable. The old tirades of how colonialization by the West ruined everything are being replaced by efforts to sell things to the West, and increasingly, to one another.

It seems to be generally agreed that the days of the post-WWII old-boys' club running the world are over. Even most of the old boys agree with this. But there's more to leadership than making money. The upcoming G20 meeting will show how well the aspiring leaders understand this, and to what degree the old guard believes them.

Asian Innovation -- Economic Echelons

2009-09-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

As we all know, there are five countries that stand above the rest in Asia: China, India, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

China and India are the twin colossi of growth right now.

Japan and Korea are the finished products, having produced their own economic miracles (Japan after WWII until the 70s and Korea from the 70s until today. Korea's Incheon Bridge, pictured left, is but one little example).

Taiwan has quietly produced its own miracle in the past 30 years, accomplishing a look-and-feel that is starting to approach that of Japan and Korea. Its amazing subway system, pictured left, is but one little example.

Each of these five countries deserves to have many more books written about them. Each has a complex of issues and more than enough angst to go around. More later.

But I want to focus on Southeast Asia, which forms the second Asian economic echelon and is an incredibly vibrant region of the globe.

If you're selling IT, you probably want to be there. The governments there all make noise about improving the lot of their people through IT innovation. Open-source is a hot topic, of course. But so are netbooks, and the increasing array of handheld devices.

And if you're looking for innovation, you might want to do some pioneer work there, particularly in social networking and social media, as this is a very community-based part of the world. The cultures there are born to do social networking!

Five Southeast Asian countries--Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia--have a combined population of about 560 million and a combined GDP in PPP terms of around $2.5 billion.

The region's population will soon exceed 600 million and be more than twice that of the US by 2013. Its GDP is greater than that of France or the UK now. Unless you're selling snow shovels or 3XL t-shirts, this region is somewhere your business probably wants to be.

One report I read ranked IT use and innovation in SE Asia in the order I mentioned above: Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia.

(I'm leaving the city-state of Singapore out of the discussion. And Cambodia, Laos, and the former Burma remain mired to a large degree; the first two never having recovered from celebrity-seeking war criminal Henry Kissinger's ideas about war, and the latter in the grip of an infamous totalitarian regime.)

Indonesia (its capital Jakarta, is pictured left) has the largest GDP in the region--a function of its immense population of 240 million people--and has now achieved G20 status.

Many westerners are unaware of how stable it has become since the bad old days of Sukarno and Suharto--The Year of Living Dangerously remains a great movie, but it does not describe the country today.

Yet the other four countries seem more heavily bent on improving their use of IT (or ICT as it's called in some places) and developing reputations for innovation.

Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is a prime example. I've been chasing someone from there for a long time now, and will nail them down for an interview some day, I'm sure.

The Philippines is building a very-high-speed IT corridor of its own, running down the spine of this complex archipelago. I interviewed government ICT head Ray Roxas-Chua a year ago about some of the government's activity.

http://tinyurl.com/bjnfmz

Thailand has seen a couple of solid decades of growth. The kingdom sees itself as better in some respects to all of its neighbors, as it's never been conquered by a foreign power. It has been successful in promoting its second city, Chiang Mai, located in its slightly more pleasant northern climes.

Vietnam, while still run by a Communist government, is following a version of China's economic liberalization policies to great effect. Its entrepreneurial hordes (pictured left) have upgraded their bikes and slow down for no one.

Ironically, bloggers there have been arrested recently for criticizing China, a country that has often tried to dominate the Viets over the millenia and which started a nasty little border war in 1979.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, to be sure. Business makes one indifferent as to who or what's in the bed.

I don't want to be in total cheerleader mode about this region. It's hot and steamy, and there are a wide variety of governments and religious beliefs.

Vietnam has Buddhists and Catholics, as well as a syncretic local faith so precisely described by Graham Greene in his 1950s novel, The Quiet American.

Indonesians and Malaysians are primarily Sunni muslims, except for the Christians in the former breakaway province of East Timor that is now the country of Timor-Leste.

Thais are mostly Theravada Buddhists (with Muslims in the south). I am sure there is more complexity here than I currently know.

Meanwhile, above you can see pix I took of the Quiapo Catholic church in Manila, and of a mosque that is just a 10-minute walk from the church.

The Philippines also has its own homegrown, tagalog-speaking "Church of Christ," founded by a nationalist leader almost a century ago. The recent death of his son, who assumed leadership 50 years ago, was a traumatic event, not least of all to the politicians who curry favor with an 8-million-strong membership that is very strongly encouraged to vote as a single bloc.

And on it goes.

Charges of corruption also resound throughout the region. In this area, I don't want to sound cavalier...but hey, I grew up in Illinois, one of the most corrupt places on earth, and the lifestyle there has always been at least the equal of the supposedly cleaner states that surround it! (I provide a picture, left, of Richard J. and Richard M. Daley circa 1968 for your amusement.)

What strikes one in visiting Southeast Asia is how all politics is local all over the world. In the Philippines, for example, when local presidential candidates are not accusing each other of murder, they're obsessing about the economic challenge that Vietnam presents.

Vietnam, for its part, keeps thrumming along blithely, hoping to sell more and more to China as Western markets remain weak.

Indonesia distrusts Malaysia, its closest neighbor, and Manila wonders if Malaysia can be neutral in talks with Muslim groups in the southern reaches of the Philippines.

Thailand sometimes seems at the brink of civil war, and wearing the wrong color on the streets of Bangkok might be as dangerous as doing so in south LA.

You probably can ignore Southeast Asia without peril. But I choose not to. The future of our world lies here, I believe, and someday I'll get around to that book that explains why.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to report on the region, with looks at some of the companies, initiatitves, and people who are making things happen.

Asian Innovation -- China and India

2009-09-16T15:41:00.001-07:00

During a recent trip to Asia I read many reports about relative competitiveness. Even though I want to focus most of my efforts on Southeast Asia, I'm compelled to rant a bit about China and India as well.

I have no answers here, just some initial impressions based on recent travel and having working relationships and friends in both countries.

China and India stand as the twin colossi of innovation-fueled growth, of course. Both have made astonishing progress in the past 30 years, to be sure.

But both are beset by internal challenges that would make American policymakers tremble, cry, and start shouting at everybody they see, not just their head-of-state.

China can fool the first-time visitor with its fantastic new airports, nice roads, and mile after mile of modern office complexes and high-rises.

Shanghai feels to me like the new New York, with the added advantage of my being able to stare directly into the mid-day sun without fear of damaging my eyes.

Beijing feels like a cross between Washington DC and Dallas. Clearly a government capital, and on a scale that might humble JR Ewing.

India is capable of no such sleight of hand. It's a miserable slog from the time you land until the time you depart. The heat in most places is pernicious and merciless. As a splendidly raucous, messy democracy, the country is unable to sweep its problems under the rug (or out into the nether provinces) as the totalitarians in China can.

Yet both countries still have hundreds of millions of poor people, are gobbling increasingly large shares of oil and other natural resources, and if anyone is really sincere about making the connection between carbon-based emissions and global warming they would start to address the situation in these two countries before going after the US or Western Europe.

The population bulk is so obvious as to be unremarkable, but I'll remark anyway: the two countries hold more than a third of the world's people. (Add another 600 million or so in Southeast Asia, 130 million from Japan, and 50 million from South Korea, and you are nearing half of the world's population.)

Many of us remember the Malthusian-based "population bomb" thinking from the 70s. The premise was that hundreds of millions would starve soon because the planet could not provide enough food for them. This was when the globe's population stood at around 4 billion, compared to today's 6.7 billion.

A revolution in crop hybrids, which dramatically increased yields, arrived just in time. (The best-known leader of that movement, Dr. Norman Borlaug, died just recently.) Starvation became more a function of war than food shortages, and the population continued to grow.

Yet the pressures of population are way apparent to me when I visit either of these two countries. I always have to check my American mindset at the exit gate, and try to see what I'm seeing with unbiased eyes (if that is possible).

Just as many visitors to the US, conditioned by American TV shows and movies, think we have numerous gunfights in all of our streets every day--oh wait, sometimes we do--we Americans almost uniformly become uncomfortable when confronted by the masses, say, outside of Mumbai International Airport or rush-hour in Shanghai.

So I try to be the earnest guy. Hey, I'm a regular Rick Steves when I'm in foreign lands.

That said, I can't get away from the numbers in China and India.

Let's shift gears for a second, and look at the counter-example of Ireland.

Visitors to the Emerald Isle in the 70s found a beautiful place that was noticeably poor. Ireland's per-capita income in 1975 was sandwiched among Spain, Greece, and Puerto Rico, and was less than 40% of that of the US.

Today, Ireland's per-capita GDP ranks as high as fifth in the world (according to the World Bank), just behind the US and just ahead of Switzerland.

Why? A series of smart (in retrospect) government initiatives, including a friendly tax policy for investors, kicked off a "Celtic Tiger" renaissance in the 90s that brought Ireland into the world's elite economies. Adopting the Euro as its currency (a move most likely made more to spite hated England than anything) confirmed to the outside world that Ireland was a serious regional and global player.

But it had to help that there are only 3 million people in the republic. Add a couple hundred thousand good jobs in Ireland, and you've transformed a country's economy. But add a couple hundred thousand good jobs in India, and you haven't made much progress in improving any city, let alone the entire country. Boiling the ocean.

This is relevant because we live in an era of nations. The empires of old have (almost) vanished and the kingdoms of today are either democratic or tiny. This would seem like progress and a devolution of power among the peoples of the earth.

But thanks to our terrible weapons of war and a centralization of capital, a few nations today have a global presence that would be the envy of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.

The United States, of course, leads this pack, and Americans are taught (or were taught until recently) that this is the way things should be. Yet the nations of China and India are two places that challenge this assertion today.

When India was a collection of hundreds of states under the British Raj, it had no real power. As an enormous, independent country--even shed of modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh--and the world's largest democracy, it does.

India, to me, is a place of insatiable demand and really crappy roads. This sounds harsh and will no doubt anger my Indian friends. I am trying to ameliorate this opinion by working with a friend of mine there on a book about the complexity of India and its still-new relationship with the US.

China, to me, has a yin and yang aspect to it: terrifying from a distance, but resolutely benign when you're there. The striving folks I know there have no grandiose illusions about leading the world, but just want stable, comfortable lives.

One friend of mine in China is utterly perplexed at US criticism of Chinese imports. "We do all this work for you, we make all of your products at a really cheap price, and then you complain. We do not want to own your country, we want to own ours."

Asian Innovation -- First, the Cultural Barriers

2009-09-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

I had trouble with my phone on a recent trip to Asia. Made the rookie's mistake of not knowing my bb was CDMA only, when you have to have GPS in that part of the world.

I was able to squeeze off a few emails, texts, and tweets in Korea. This was ironic in that many US/Canada/Australia travelers have trouble there, but there must have been an old CDMA tower somewhere in the neighborhood.

One of my tweets referred to the '"second echelon" of innovation among Southeast Asian countries.

Using a pompous, manly word like "echelon" implies one has something important to say. The military loves the word. I like it because it helps me get a grip on the frenzied acitivity in Asia right now.

Beehives are calmer places than many Asian countries today. And once I'm able to wrap my dim, linear Western mind around Asian culture, the hyper-organization found in beehives makes itself apparent in Asia as well. (More on that in a later post.)

Asian culture, as in singular culture, do you say? Yes, to invoke Danny Quayle, I do realize that it's like there are really a bunch of different countries in Asia. Yet there is a certain indirectness, or obliqueness, that one encounters everywhere. In more racist times, what Westerners referred to as "inscrutability."

Put Korea at the top of the list in directness and either India or the Philippines at the bottom, and you've made a start. Raising one's voice, making intractable demands, and generally huffing and puffing will get you nowhere. As so many have noted, "yes" doesn't necessarily mean "yes."

But I can tell you that "no" means "no," so you can get that Asian businesspeople are as flummoxed by the Westerner's sales-y "selling starts at no" mentality as Westerners are confounded by constantly hearing "it's up to you" or hearing nothing when seeking affirmation.

The trick is not getting to "no." If I do business in Asia for another 300 years I won't understand all the aspects of "face," having it, saving it, losing it, etc. So many times the notion of "saving face" seems no different than the Western idea of achieving "win-win."

But maybe it's the word "achieve" that causes the trouble. When you've been taught your entire life to strive, to be outstanding (ie, to stand out), to speak up, to say what you mean and mean what you say, and to rack up as many achievements as you can, then plunging yourself into ancient, community-centric mileau is the most confusing situation imaginable.

The language barrier can be overcome to some degree; the cultural barriers not so much.

Goto http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com

2009-09-16T13:55:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to get a grip on organizing things. No, not personal things; my place will remain a catastrophic mess until I'm no longer around to ignore it.

But I'm getting all the NOW Magazine stuff better-organized. The plan is to treat this blog as, well, a blog. You know none of us can really define a "true blog," but we know one when we see it. My hope is that you'll see this one frequently.

I have several very nice interviews backed into my editing queue. I am working on getting them published real soon now. They will be published at the NOW Magazine site:

http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com

The domain at this site is a CMS environment that lets me post my stories easily and which gets fairly good google-search traction. Ads will show up there per the CMS owners' sales efforts. I have nothing to do with it.

I'll publish future NOW Magazine Thought Leadership features there as well. Plans now call for a new print edition of NOW to come out in Q2 2010.

So here's the hierarchy:

Unfocused, short, asinine thoughts: www.twitter.com/strukhoff

Slightly focused, middle-length, self-important rants: www.readnowmag.blogspot.com

Focused, sharp, tremendous interviews/features: http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com

Happy reading!

Real Conferences Are Much Better Than Virtual

2009-09-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

Saw the latest puffpiece on why virtual conferences are so cool in today's SF Chronicle. The story had a cute lead and everything.

http://bit.ly/4wzxLv

The topic doesn't merit a true rant, but I'll only say that whenever things hit the fan, you'll read numerous articles about telecommuting, teleconferences, and virtual conferences.

We're social animals. Yet we like to get away from the office now and then.

Telecommuting coops people up in their homes. They forget to dress nice, they get lazy, and they soon despair of missing all the gossip, nice printers, and fast networks they get in their offices.

Teleconferencing is slow torture. Sure, it beats the dreaded conference call if the signal is good, but most teleconferences are either log-rolling exercises or a way around a company being too cheap to either hire US employees or put them on a plane so they can meet their colleagues face to face.

Virtual conferences, as the Chronicle article mentioned, can be great add-ons to real conferences. They do provide value for those years that a company doesn't want to fork out millions for a real conference. But they have always been, and will always be, a stopgap measure. When the good economic times return, the good times return as well. Viva Las Vegas!

Flying Asiana to Asia

2009-09-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

Long-time travelers to Asia learn to master the travel options to that region, because it's a long haul, it can be an expensive one, and Asian travel oftens means landing in a crowded steambath. The energy levels in Asian cities can be enervating as well, so you need to have your A-game with you when you land.

I've had a good experience with Asiana Airlines on a few recent trips. This is South Korea's other major airline, and it's rated as one of the very few "five-star airlines" in the world (see www.airlinequality.com).

I'll give it 4.5 stars, I guess. I don't get to travel Singapore Airlines business class like the Thom Friedmans of the world, so I can't compare my experience with those who've raved about Singapore for years. I have traveled on Cathay Pacific (in economy), and found it to be the most pleasant experience one can have for 12+ hours in a metal tube.

Back to Asiana. Nice legroom, personal entertainment systems (although the "city info" is laughable), a neutral-colored color scheme that (no kidding) helps me sleep, and efficient service make it a nice experience.

Nice, but not overwhelmingly so. Remember, Koreans are hardly the shrinking violets of the Asian world, so don't expect anyone to grovel for you in the way flight attendants are depicted in ads for many Asian airlines.

Korean culture is very direct, like that of the US. So, think United Airlines, but without the overt, deliberate nastiness that's invariably found in the happy employees of the Friendly Skies.

If you're connecting to Southeast Asia, it may seem you've wasted time flying past Tokyo for an hour to reach Seoul, only to track back on your connecting flight. But the schedules out of Narita can have longer connecting times, and this airport can have delays that one rarely sees at the spacious new Incheon airport in Korea.

You get hearty Korean food on these flights as well--much less strange to the US palate than anything you might encounter from a Japanese airline, and much less bad than the crap United et al still like to serve to the unfortunates trapped on their planes.

And here's the fun thing. One of the routes I take has a 12-hour layover on the return to the US. I do this because Asiana's fares are often several hundred dollars less than that of its competitors. But if you call the airline beforehand, you'll get a very nice hotel room for the day, free of charge, so you can sleep and not be a total waste upon arrival back home. Alternatively, you can take a city tour, which I've been told is a lot of fun. For me, I take the room and the sleep every time! Be sure to call ahead, because you won't get this without a reservation.

Asiana is part of the Star Alliance. Most flights receive 70% mileage credit on United, but if you just go ahead and join Asiana, you'll get upgraded into the frequent-flyer hierarchy much more quickly.

In the Philippines, the Heat is Always On

2009-09-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

(This is the first of a series of articles about the Philippines, what it's like to be there, its political scene, and its potential as a global outsourcing destination and technology innovator. I start with the most obvious thing a Westerner notices upon arrival there: the heat.)

Arrival at Benigno Aquino International Airport in Manila has always gone smoothly for me. Despite Westerners’ fears of the Asian masses—and there will be 100 million people residing within the Philippines’ 100,000 or so square miles by the end of 2013—the reality is that international travel is a true luxury here. Not many locals can afford it.

The zoos one finds at SFO and most airports in North America and Western Europe are not in evidence in Asia. In the past year, I’ve been struck by the sheer emptiness of the ultra-modern, massive glass edifices in Beijing, Shanghai, even Seoul, as well as at the slightly less grand International Terminal here in Manila.

Immigration and customs moves quickly. The Philippines is inclined to let us rich Americans into their country; the main concern seems to be that I’m aware that I’ll need to come up with a few hundred pesos should I wish to overstay my initial 21-day visa.

Absent here in Manila are the insulting slow pace, the skeptical, even paranoid eyes, and the hectoring tone one finds when returning through US immigration. This country has a real, ongoing terror problem in many of its provinces, a problem that is taken seriously and often addressed severely. But there is no spillover paranoia toward me, the aging white guy from the US, there to visit friends and further destroy his health with spaghetti for breakfast, fried foods for lunch and dinner, and halo halo for dessert.

The heat is apparent the instant I step off the plane and into the jetway. It returns, full-force, as I stroll through the exit doors and into the night air. The heat is such an apparent, omnipresent feature of the Philippines that to complain about it is to belabor it. I’ll throw out some statistics about it, make a few observations about it, then try to move on before I put you to sleep.

Manila’s climate can be compared to Miami’s. Same rough statistical range—highs in the 80s, lows in the 70s most of the year. It rises into the 90s frequently. The temperatures would be higher were it not for the humidity, and It is oppressively humid here almost every day—dewpoints in the 73-77 range for those of you who enjoy knowing this stuff. Frequent rains during a defined wet season with numerous typhoons, then a very slight cooling around Christmas.

They name their typhoons there, just as tropical storms are named in the Americas. The distinction made in the Americas between the terms “tropical storm” and “hurricane”—the latter being used when sustained winds exceed 75 miles per hour—is not made here. Justly so, because any typhoon is capable of wreaking enormous damage on the fragile infrastructure found anywhere outside of Manila and the other cities, flooding can be catastrophic anywhere, and landslides are a feared threat during any storm.

Very few people have air-conditioning (or “aircon” as they call it here) outside of the central city. Very few people want it. It is amusing to watch people who are among the toughest on the planet go into convulsions if the aircon at the local Jollibee or internet café is cranked too high. (It’s much less amsuing to see the medieval housing in which so many of these same people live, a topic I’ll cover in more detail later. )

The lack of aircon presents a major problem for me, as it does for most “Kano” (the shortened form of Americano that is applied to all white folks. Kano British, Kano Australian, Kano German, and Kano Dutch are among the specific indicators you’ll hear.)

Very few Kano are silly enough to try to live without aircon, because the heat is not only remorseless, but exacerbated by pollution from squadrons of the famous Jeepneys, fleets of two-stroke “trikes” (dirt bikes hooked up to tinny, covered sidecars designed perfectly for those in the 4-10 to 5-4 height range), innumerable trash fires, and pervasive slash-and-burn agriculture.

I am reasonably sure that DDT or reasonable facsimiles are also in widespread use. The eco-commitment in the Philippines reminds me of my late 50s-early 60s childhood in rural, Midwestern America. Even the young people here in the Philippines are plagued with a frequent hacking cough that comes from way down deep.

The locals walk around in this heat all day without apparent effect. There’s a certain unhurried, loose amble that I’ve learned to copy, which allows you to move efficiently through the angry sun and soupy air at a reasonable speed. Try to propel yourself with the hurried, aggressive, no-nonsense gait of the typical American city, and you’ll find yourself completely gassed and very unhappy within three minutes.

They crowd onto the Jeepneys (actually called “Jeeps” and pronounced “Jips”) with less than no room to spare. A low-ceilinged vehicle with facing bench seats that would hold about 10 people in the US, the Jeep in the Philippines provides transportation for at least 18, and if there is luggage worked into any remaining space in the aisle, so be it. The trike is ideal for one passenger, and three people (with one riding sidesaddle behind the homicidal driver) typically ride it.

Books have been written and academic careers made on the topic of the Western concept of personal space vs. the Asian concept of communitarian space. I have nothing new to add here. My unschooled, non-academic observation is to say only that if you don’t like to be crowded continuously, if you quickly grow weary of “nonconsenual rubbing” (in Paul Theroux’s phrase), then you don’t want to live as most people do in the Philippines. Additionally, if you suffer in the summertime heat of, say, Washington, DC or Orlando, then you will suffer here.

My biggest problem with the heat occurs at night. No break. No breeze. Humidity simply increases as the ambient temperature drops to the swelteringly high dewpoint. Then, at about 4am, a little relief. I am often awake at that hour, and when in the Philippines I feel a slight cooling around that time. I feel as if I’m breathing more air than water for the first time in a day.

An hour later, the comically numerous and obstreperous roosters announce the sun, the dogs start in, and the hot, damp cloth of Philippine humidity is once again wrapped around my forehead, neck, and body.

OSCON: Dead Venue, Good Conversations

2009-07-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

"I liked it better in Portland," said one OSCON attendee to another during Thursday's lunch. This comment summed up the feeling of OSCON 2009 at the San Jose Convention Center. Nice people, wrong venue.

Portland's progressive reputation and its status as the North American home of open-source deity Linus Torvalds made it the perfect place for this modest event. The cavernous, sterile confines of the largest convention center in sterile Silicon Valley brought the excitement surrounding OSCON down several notches.

But in the spirit of hating the sin and not the sinner, it can be reported that there is still a lot of personality and dynamism in the world of open-source software. Open Source is experiencing stimulating times during this global recession, the most exciting period since the great tech meltdown of 2000-2004.

As IT budgets once again go under siege, the concept of "free" software--or at least much cheaper software without vendor lock-in--becomes very appealing to organizations of all sizes throughout the world.

This time, Open Source doesn't have to go through that pesky validation process it faced years ago. Linux is well-established, even conquering many segments of enterprise IT. The Firefox browser is the most popular--if not yet the most used--in the world. The great proprietary behemoths Microsoft, Sun, and Intel were all out inf force at OSCON screaming as to how open they really are if you just give them a chance to prove it.

And conversations I had with folks from companies such as Bluenog, WSO2, SourceForge, and Revolution Computing demonstrated that there are many serious businesspeople out there who are using this moment to "innovate and invest" in the words of one of them to secure a solidly defensible position when the economy recovers. WSO2 also presented on the mission-criticality of security and governance, and why it's time companies imbue it at design-time.

The New Symbian has a new story--trying to expand paltry market share in the US while maintaining hegemony in the rest of the world--and had the best booth, with glorious yellow beanbags providing a comfortable respite from walking the floor and enduring hard chairs during long sessions.

The political dimension of Open Source Software will never abate entirely. Certainly about half of the booth space here was occupied by the good folks who truly believe in your freedom, in the greater good of the Open-Source movement, and in not trying to make too much money. But the practical dimension seems to co-exist peacefully these days.

The compelling ideas of flexibility and ownership through forking, of community-driven standards, of staying out of the clutches of the monopolists in the crowd, and of using software that works and doesn't bleed you to death have penetrated into corporate consciousness to the degree that it must have seemed like a good idea to hold this event in the Heart of Silicon Valley. Too bad the Heart of Open Source in North America is still in Portland, Oregon.

Google Takes on Microsoft Windows

2009-07-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

http://bit.ly/VTbJ0

Who knows if Google can transform its strengths in handling megatraffic into the ability to develop a mega-OS?

Google today is primarily an IT company. Yes, it is quite annoying that this public company won't publicly discuss where it keeps its servers, let alone give a hint to the secret sauce that powers them.

The fact remains that the company has achieved astonishing technical competence in developing and managing a hive intelligence that will be the subject of historical analysis centuries from now.

The question is whether it can turn its expertise outward and deliver an application (eg, OS) strong enough to knock Redmond off of its perch.

Few tears will be shed (outside of Microsoft, that is) should this occur. Older-generation folks such as myself have simply spent too many years putting up with buggy versions of DOS, then Windows, then being subjected to the innumerable and large problems that the virus-magnet Internet Explorer has caused.

Microsoft has been almost willfully careless over the decades with its arrogantly casual treatment of the problems its OS and browser have caused, in my opinion.

Its strikingly hubristic, monopolistic practices were oh-so-close to being consigned to the dustbin of history, before judge Thomas Penfield Jackson indiscretely bragged about what a badass he was in adjudicating Microsoft, thereby calling into question his judgement and neutering his verdict.

Comparing Microsoft execs to "stubborn mules," Jackson demonstrated that even a very smart person can be a real dumbass.

A younger generation doesn't seem to have this emnity toward Redmond. With their first experience being a well-oiled Windows XP, and with many of them enamored by the XBox, the Vista fiasco seems to be the aberration rather than the norm to them.

Yes, they've encountered the XBox's red ring of death (the child of the blue screen of death), but simply trade their units in when this happens. Microsoft, to them, is a good consumer electronics company, and Bill Gates is just another old rich guy.

So, maybe any rant I have against Microsoft reveals a mentality that's been passed by, sort of like those old guys of my youth who used to piss and moan about FDR.

The historical record does reveal Roosevelt's arrogance--trying to pack the Supreme Court, running for endless terms as President, initiating an age of massive government intervention while overstating its results and taking too much credit himself, serving until he was so enfeebled that he did the world untold damage by his weak Yalta performance.

His still-new memorial in Washington DC betrays the grandiosity of the man, in stark contrast to the classic, powerful elegance of the other presidential memorials. Yet Roosevelt continues to be considered one of the country's great presidents, the guy on whose watch the government established a safety net for its citizens, The Great Depression ended, and World War II turned decisively into what would be total victory for the good guys.

The historical record is already treating Bill Gates et al in similar fashion. Bill is seen today as a great technological visionary, his company as the single most important in the history of computing, and his philanthropy as the modern-day equivalent to Andrew Carnegie.

Yet the company made its wealth in a fashion I consider to be nefarious. It had no concept of homegrown innovation or of treating its customers (whether vendors like Compaq and Dell or users like you and me) with any sort of consideration or respect.

So if a day of reckoning does come for Redmond, I would expect to see very little sentimentality over its fate. Reminds me of when airlines started to fail. After decades of providing uniformly hidebound, crappy service, no one cried when we lost such previous American icons as Eastern Airlines, PanAm, and TWA. No one would have cried if the same had happened to United.

General Motors is experiencing the same situation today. Had the company decided, let's say in the 1970s, to manufacture well-built cars and tried to address what has proven to be a chronic cycle of oil shocks, then maybe there would've been some customer loyalty that would've kept the company from its recent embarrassments and failure.

On a smaller scale, the Comdex trade show perished a few years ago, after many years of abusing its exhibitors and attendees. Many people mourned the passing of their annual November bacchanal in Las Vegas; no one mourned the passing of the Comdex brand itself.

As I said, there is an entire generation of people who do not share my views and history will continue to be kind to Microsoft, I think.

So I should rant no more. But deep down inside, I think it would be cool to see Google just kick Microsoft's butt right out to the curb.

NOW Magazine Wins Award

2009-06-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/nz7uy7

Nice to see this recognition for a great collaborative effort among many of us at TIBCO.

As Editor-in-Chief of the magazine, I have appreciated the support and guidance of Ram Menon over the past few years, though, as we've produced the mag in several languages with several breakthrough articles and interviews.

And a quick tip of the hat to Scott Fingerhut, who adamantly resisted my efforts to name the magazine "Predictive Business," insisting on the much simpler, yet far more powerful, NOW.

Music and SOA: Theory and Practice

2009-06-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

A good writer can make any subject tolerable, even interesting. I hope to write well enough here to make the subject of this post as interesting as possible.

It's often remarked that music and mathematics seem to fit well in certain people's brains. The great Doug Hofstatdler's Goedel, Escher, and Bach took this and related insights to a sublime height.

As a music and math person, I've never seen or felt the connection. Yes, both use abstract, universal symbols. Both require superific concentration. Both are easy to appreciate and impossible to master.

Yet I think the music-math brain is a statistical coincidence. I've known a lot of great pianists who can barely add and a few mathletes who couldn't carry a tune with a forklift.

I do, however, see an important intellectual connection between a certain type of music and a certain type of enterprise IT. The music is that of Anton Webern, an early 20th century composer. The enterprise IT construct is today's SOA.

My friends and I were invariably able to clear the dorm room in college when we put on the Mahler around midnight. Most people just couldn't hang, had no willingness to watch us music geeks revel in the subtleties and bombast of the magnificent Gustav. So I know I better keep things moving here as I approach the even more difficult Anton Webern.

So let's leap forward first to the SOA part of the discussion. The keys to building a SOA, as we know, are identifying and liberating/decoupling services from within applications, loosely coupling (and later, perhaps composing) them into desired functionality, orchestrating them, then governing them so they do what you want them to do.

This approach is remarkably similar to the one Webern took with his compositions around 100 years ago.

The early 20th century was a revolutionary time in the worlds of art, music, and literature. The 19th century's beautiful scenes of people and places became abstract representations of inner psyche. The weighty lyricism of Yeats turned into the despairing way the world will end with TS Eliot.

And in music, a centuries-long melodic tradition turned into the deconstructed, compressed forms of what were known as the Second Viennese School composers.

If you don't know Webern, just go to wikipedia, you'll find a few seconds of sound there. If you want more, fear not, his typical pieces run six to nine minutes, a fraction of Mahler's 90-minute Mahler symphonies or Wagner's hours-long operas.

Yet Webern compressed a world--and worldview--of music into those precious few minutes. The music has its own spare beauty, to be sure, but is not something that anyone could bear on a large scale. It is, to think in modern business terms, efficient.

The theory behind Webern's music is fascinating to those who like this sort of thing, but the theory is useless if the guy couldn't write good music. Webern could.

The key thing to remember is that Webern took traditional elements--melody, harmony, meter, and texture--tore them apart (liberated/decoupled them), then put them back together in a spare format that appears almost random (or maybe loosely coupled) on paper but is actually composed with great structural unity and flow.

The governance in this case, is of course, the conductor, without whom the piece would quickly dissolve into a fibrillating heap when performed.

The end result is music that still sounds "weird" to most ears even today, yet grows on one more and more. Yet I annoint Anton Webern the intellectual Father of SOA. His principles are being practiced, knowingly or not, by SOA practitioners worldwide today.

As with Webern, the SOA gang's work can be difficult to explain in theory and effectiveness, difficult to master, and represents an enormous threat to the old ways of seeing and doing things.

I'll stop the analysis right there. The slippery slope of comparing Webern with music created 50 years on either side of him looms before me, as does the chasm of convincing anyone but the earliest adapters that I'm making sense here.

The analogy cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon my blogpost.

My Heart's Not Into SOA Marketing

2009-06-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

I've been debating this post with myself for a long time. All the voices in my head have contributed to the dialog. It has to do with my health, with my future, and with my relevance.

I'm not famous enough, even to my friends, to think I'm making a public statement here. But I plow on with it.

I wrote the headline for this post with google in mind. Gotta get "SOA" in there for it to be picked up. The head is also a pun, as it relates to my health, which is the real topic of this post.

I've been fighting with this asinine coronary artery disease, or CAD, for about 15 years now. The semi-crippling chest pains first hit when I was mowing the lawn during the years we spent in Wisconsin, when I 38 years old.

For some reason, the disease was never diagnosed there, in the buckle of the Heart Bypass Belt of this country. But upon my return to Silicon Valley in the late 90s, the pains grew increasingly worse and frequent, and in 2000 I had a complex triple bypass that revealed what was termed "severe" and "extensive" disease.

Two more relatively minor angioplasty procedures and several scares later, I have a 1-in-3 chance of making it another nine years; after that, the prognosis gets grim.

This is not exactly the sort of bad news about, say, newly diagnosed cancer that a few thousand people in the US get every day, let alone the tragic news that comes to too many about dread disease or accidents taking another life before its time.

But it has focused my mind wonderfully, in the words of the good Dr. Johnson.

As we say, we can get hit by a bus at any time, an expression that resonates profoundly if you spend any time in San Francisco and its infamous Muni buses.

So living life to its fullest, seizing the day, addressing challenges head-on every day, and all that should already be part of living one's life the right way. Doesn't always happen.

I've spent so many years covering the wondrous machines (and software) that are almost routinely cranked out of Silicon Valley and from like-minded people throughout the world.

We in Northern California like to think we live in the world's most splendiforous region with the most innovative technological culture by far.

This may be true, because all great technology companies did and do come from here--with the minor exceptions of IBM, Microsoft, Novell, DEC, Compaq, Dell, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, and Nintendo. Oh, and the creators of most programming and scripting languages, Linux, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the browser, and the Blackberry.

The weather is great here, though. There have been a few breakthroughs and insanely great companies here as well. So I've enjoyed my time, writing, editing, launching magazines and events, meeting many great and eccentric people, and feeling lucky on a daily basis that a failed piano player and erstwhile sportswriter could hack out a living in this hypercompetitive industry.

But now it is time to get serious.

So many of the 10 million or so words I've written over the decades have been workmanlike, as just another writer/editor guy bangs out another feature on local-area networking or asynchronous data flows, or touches up a press release about the next great thing, or asks another executive not to bullshit too much when he or she is telling me how excited he or she is about his or her job and his or her company's new strategy.

I was amused from the time of my first writing job out of college how so many writers wanted to be the next Hemingway and just hated the idea of "selling out" by making money for craftwork, whether journalistic, propagandistic, or somewhere in between. Maybe because my limitations were so apparent to me, I never felt this urge to write The Great American Novel or any anger because I couldn't.

Besides, the short forms served me better. Less work, you know. The onset of Twitter is a godsend to me.

Back to the thought of getting serious, maybe there is some sort of great writing inside of me, waiting patiently all these years to get out, corrupt people's minds, and bring down society in general and Western Civilization in particular as we know it.

So that's what I'll pursue. Oh, but first, I have unfinished business with SOA marketing. What first lured me to this industry and has kept me here unapologetically all these years is the notion that information technology is the most important business in the world, that it will continue to bring enormous change to the world, lift people out of starvation, remove the scales from their eyes, and lead to a better world. I really believe this.

So before I finish that novel, I'm going to refocus on SOA, which I believe to be the profound computing breakthrough of my lifetime. I love this business. I love almost all of the people I've met in it. And I love the precious time I have left to write about it, live in it, and enjoy it.

Thanks for reading.

--roger

Job Losses in India "Trickle Down" from US

2009-05-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

I've been in touch recently with Sharon Colaco, a well-known IT business writer from Pune, India.

Working with Sharon over the years, I've found that she takes a detached view of the IT business in India, ie, she's neither a cheerleader nor someone who is overly critical, in a country where emotions can run very hot whether one is defending the country's reputation or picking it apart.

I asked her about how much job loss has there been in India in the wake of the global financial crisis, and how much of it has been directly related to the US and Europe. Now seemed like a good time to elicit this opinion, as we're several months out from the initial economic shock and have had enough time to see how all this is playing out.

This was her response in a recent email to me:

This is a worldwide downturn, and Indian firms realize that the first three quarters of 2009 need to be tided over before things will even start to look up.

The industries that faced the highest job cuts were Textiles, BPO, Automotive, Steel Production, (local) IT, Jewellery, Construction, and Mining.

Most of the the BPO and IT losses are directly related to the loss of business from US or European clients, but there is also a homegrown recession within India. Even though housing loans are cheaper, and homes have become cheaper, the construction industry is going through a very tough phase in India currently. Not enough people are buying homes, fearing layoffs and salary cuts.

Yet companies are resorting to job cuts as only the last measure. Most companies are tightening their purse strings – recruiting few or no new employees, cutting salaries, perks and incentives, telling employees pitch in by putting in longer hours – the emphasis is to carry on with the same team sizes, but cut costs on the teams drastically.

Employees too prefer these measures to actual job cuts. This is the “salary correction” that you and I discussed last year, Roger.

With no or very few new recruitments, the country’s fresh graduates are facing a very tough time. B-schools have seen a decrease in their campus placements this year. Companies who do come to hire, offer much lower pay packages than the previous year.

Despite all this, India is not facing a “full-blown” recession. Spends on infrastructure have not reduced. Indian manufacturing, banking and government sectors are doing quite well. This is a key indicator that the country is doing well, but is spending cautiously.

To conclude, the impact from the US is only a trickle down effect, and most of India thinks that things will look up after the next quarter.

In the meantime there is a lot of internal retrospection, improving of services, tightening of spends. When I look at this situation objectively, I would say this is a very important phase for India. I am glad its happening because companies are looking at themselves objectively, making themselves lean and mean, and when the recession is over, you are sure to see a new India emerge – stronger and all set to take on the world’s business once again!

Gladwell, Basketball, and Music

2009-05-16T14:11:00.001-07:00

I was discussing the recent Malcom Gladwell basketball piece with a friend of mine. In this recent piece, published in the New Yorker, the writer and a guy he interviewed draw a parallel between basketball strategy and the biblical tale of David and Goliath.

My friend told me that he's developed a similar insight, one with a parallel between music and the biblical story of Moses receiving The Ten Commandments.

My friend grew up in a place not familiar with Western musical tradition or with the Bible, so naturally views his complete lack of knowledge as an opportunity to bring fresh insight to these topics.

His insight came to him while he was watching me play a moderately difficult piano composition, the Chopin Ballade #3 in A-flat major. He had several thought-provoking questions.

Why are you using the black keys disproportionately here?, he asked. There are about 20% more white keys, yet you seem to be favoring the black keys, particularly on the left side of the piano. It seems the piece would be more effective if it had a better balance.

Well, I told him that not all pieces did this. This particular piece did probably favor the black keys a bit, since it was written in a key (A-flat major) that uses black keys as its "tonic," "dominant," and "sub-dominant" harmonic foundation.

Hmm, he said, so there are other pieces that favor the white keys?

Well sure, I said. If I played Chopin's A-major polonaise for you, you might notice a slight favoring toward the white keys. Certainly if I played his Etude in C major, I told him, you would see me hitting white keys almost exclusively.

Well, let's revisit that later, he said. I'm also troubled by the way you said the second most important notes are the "dominant" ones. Why aren't they the most important? After all, you said they're dominant. And what is "sub-dominant" supposed to mean? Less optimally dominant? I mean, your whole idea of music theory is screwed up here, he said.

Also, he told me it seems "mindless" to him how the left hand just sits there sometimes while the right hand is doing all this work. To quote: "Why don't composers put all the fingers to work more consistently? You could fit a lot more music into the same space this way. I mean, people love to listen to music, why not give them more of it in the same amount of time?"

Well, I said, it's really a little more complex than that. It's not as well-known keyboard composers--you know, guys like Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann--and Chopin--hadn't thought very, very seriously about music and how to combine theoretical knowledge with creative inspiration.

Centuries of musical theory, evolving from single-line monody through elaborate Medieval constructs, a few hundred years of Baroque contrapuntal innovation, through the dawn of Classical forms and their extensions in the Romantic Period, are reflected in the work of the supreme artist Chopin, I told him. There's also another 150 years of keyboard innovation after him, too, I noted.

Of course, I added, there are many passages in music--in fact, many entire pieces--that are just crammed full of as many notes as humanly possible to play. But to take this approach all the time in every piece of music is not an idea that any serious music person would take seriously. It would decrease one's enjoyment of music, not increase it, I said.

I hated to tell my friend this, but I think that Chopin would be badly offended by his uninformed, obtuse analysis. Certainly I was.

Well, my friend said, realizing I was getting agitated, it's too late for me to learn how to play the piano well.

Yet he remains inquisitive, and he says there is no reason why a Ten Commandments cannot be established for music in general.

He'd like to conduct an orchestra. He notes that all you have to do is wave a stick around, without having to spend years and years learning how to play an instrument. He also wonders why so many of the players--the trumpets and trombones, for example--just sit there for long periods of time.

Wouldn't it be more effective if you just had everybody play at once? That should be the First Commandment, in his view. Again, more music in less time.

My friend also doesn't understand why music people always talk about natural harmonies as "just" intonation--why do they take it for granted, he wonders? Wouldn't it be better if everyone took staying in tune seriously? He said if he was conducting the orchestra, he would insist that the players play in tune. That would be the Second Commandment.

He also noted that The Ten Commandments was originally part of Jewish history, which explains why so many Jewish people are good at music. But he thinks he could build a successful orchestra that is equal to all those groups with "born-with-a-violin" musicians.

He also told me of a writer friend of his who claims that similar lessons can be learned from comparisons that to the untrained eye appear ludicrous. I couldn't really follow the parallels he made with warfare, simulated gaming, and the history of hot dogs.

But I trusted him because his writer friend is said to be a genius by many. My friend has been able to construct the other eight commandments just from talking to him, he says.

I don't know. I really like my friend, and he's financially successful, but I don't agree with him. I think he needs to study music and learn a lot more about it before offering his silly opinions about it.

But I kind of like it when he gets biblical. I wonder if he's familiar with the stories of Jesus humbling himself?

Heading Back to Cloud Computing

2009-04-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

Sorry, got a little distracted by the megadeal last week. I see I wrote four entries about the deal, which was probably at least one too many.

Yet I spent too many years writing, publishing, and producing for Sun to let this deal go uncommented upon. The relationship started when we shook hands and signed a deal with Ed Zander to acquire an in-house magazine on the day the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area (I was with IDG at the time).

Zander was rude, scathing, really funny, and quite straightforward and honest in what was a negotiation lasting several months. Ed signed at about 1pm, and four hours later, we just about got rocked right out of our sales office in Palo Alto.

A lot of exciting things happened in the ensuing decade or so, including the broadcast of a satellite TV event from Brazil featuring John Gage and a squadron of carpenters pounding away, building booths at a major trade show that was to start the next day.

Gage was in Japan at an event we produced a few years later, along with McNealy, waiting patiently to deliver a keynote in a big hall with many TV cameras and no people. About 15 minutes before their speech was to start, my colleague Jim Povec went running down to registration, screaming (in English) "McNealy-san and Gage-san in room upstairs! 10 minutes!"

There were thousands of people milling around, each waiting for another to be the first to move toward a hall. They responded to this crazy American's pop-eyed performance, and "Jim's Stampede" succeeded in filling the place faster than you can say "Ohayo-gazaimas."

Getting involved at the beginning of JavaOne was another great time. Told by Sun mid-level management that the company wanted something "way outside the box," I suggested a JavaRave to reflect Java's essential coolness, or Java-Ichi (One) to reflect its truly international nature, and to hold the thing in one of those then-emerging hip warehouses South of Market in San Francisco.

In the end, JavaOne was launched at the most traditional of venues, the Moscone Center in San Francisco (mostly because it had superior electrical outlets). But it was a smash hit, drawing 20,000 the first year and scaling up to twice that before the meltdown.

Oh wait, was this post supposed to be about something other than Sun? Sorry again.

The merger does make Sun very relevant again, as its hardware will no doubt play a major role in the coming Cloud Computing deployment battle.

The future of Java is tied to cloud as well, as that of Solaris and its uneasy relationship with Linux. In fact, the entire enterprise software space is newly up for grabs. Companies must now ponder how much they will trust with SaaS and IaaS, how much glue they need, and really, how much is social networking going to play in their customer-facing futures. This pondering will take at least five years to give us a true read on Cloud and what it all means.

And then there's storage. This may be the most important area of all. Storage may be the least efficiently-used resource in enterprise IT today, its price per X-byte keeps falling, by nature it's a conservatively managed resource, yet the demands for scalability and performance will be unyielding.

Storage is the Golden Fleece for doers of misdeeds, too. To paraphrase that weathered old quote from Willie Sutton, vandals and criminals attack storage because that's where the data is. Whether you have a good grip on storage or not, here's a tip: There's a clan of storage experts who share their opinions across Twitter (start with www.twitter.com/3parfarley and go from there).

Now that I think I have Sun-Oracle out of my system completely, I'll start to break down these areas vis-a-vis Cloud, interview people who know far more about each aspect than I do, and report to you what I find.

Sun Builds Computers - Duh

2009-04-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

I had a rather terse exchange with Scott McNealy in the mid-90s, just trying to make conversation while we waited for the CEO of my employer to show up to a meeting.

The appointment's time, location, and topic matter had been painstakingly scheduled over a period of months, and my CEO's lateness that day induced some sweaty palms on my behalf and some scowls on behalf of Scott and his handlers.

The meeting (which ended up being severely truncated) was located behind the scenes at a tradeshow called SunWorld that we had developed to complement a magazine by the same name that we published.

I decided not to try to talk golf or hockey with him, as he didn't seem in the mood. Instead, given we were at a trade show dedicated to Sun's business, I mentioned the business that Sun was in, namely, computers.

The gist of my rather simple point-of-view was that "Sun builds computers."

At that point in time, Sun was the clear market leader in its space and was threatening to drive major players such as HP and IBM right out of the arenas in which they mutually competed.

So why, I wondered, fuss with all this chip-building, software-producing, network-inducing, and other paraphernalia, which was obscuring the message?

My unsolicited opinion did nothing to lighten Scott's mood. But yet, here in 2009, it seems these three words remain the gist of the company and the gist of the Oracle-Sun deal.

Has Anything Really Changed?

How Did Ellison-McNealy Affect Oracle-Sun?

2009-04-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

One question about the Oracle-Sun deal, not scandalous except perhaps in the eyes of IBM executives, concerns the personal relationship between Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy.

The deal, to me, shows how little power shareholders (ie, owners) of public companies really have in the face of personal relationships. I believe IBM was ready to pay a max of 9.40 per share for Sun, an offer that was vehemently castigated by Sun Chairman Scott McNealy, according to many reports.

Yet Oracle came swooping in to pay $9.50, after only four days of discussion. Of course, Sun shareholders are no doubt ecstatic about the deal, seeing their holdings quadruple from recent lows. Yet Sun's stock was hovering at about $10 before last fall's marketwide meltdown (after a 4-1 reverse split in late 2007).

What if IBM had run amok and offered an insane price like $12-13 a share for Sun? Would the market have killed IBM for this? Would Sun have been forced to accept it?

Assume that IBM had done this, with no ensuing bidding war. How does the few billion dollars premium compare to the revenue (and valuation) that IBM now risks losing against a fortified, fire-breathing Oracle? What if Oracle and HP now partner more closely? How much additional damage does this mean for IBM?

Back to my lead, back to the personal angle. McNealy and Ellison forged their apparent friendship from years of battling Microsoft. I remember self-described Libertarian McNealy testifying in front of Congress when Microsoft was in the cross-hairs of the US Justice Department, all but begging the Feds to dismantle The Borg.

The obvious business reason for the two companies to cooperate--most of Sun's server hardware is running Oracle and a large percentage of Oracle customers are on Sun--no doubt forms the basis of the relationship.

Yet, the personal angle still nags. As I noted in my previous post, John Dvorak was all over this story more than a year ago, with a column that at the time sounded paranoid but now looks to be spot-on:

http://bit.ly/15lYnG

McNealy was famous for his funny (if immature) jibes at Microsoft and IBM; I heard him once say that not only was Sun's approach superior to Redmond's but that "my kid is better-looking than his, too." Ouch.

Additionally, we're all aware of the seeming personal animus that drives Ellison in some of his deals, whether against competitor SAP or former competitor/subsumed Peoplesoft.

On a lighter note, one blogger, Marc Farley from 3Par, offered this hilarious custom-crafted video take on the process:

http://bit.ly/EkwHY

You know, satire is funny because it hits so close to the mark. Maybe Marc's video is all we need to know about this deal.

The Oracle-Sun Repercussion Discussion Begins

2009-04-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

I just started following sfearthquakes on twitter, a useful service that provides the scoop whenever we get a temblor in norcal.

If it followed biz earthquakes in Silicon Valley, it'd be reporting on a magnitude 7.0 event, maybe higher, today. For the repercussions from the Oracle Sun deal have just begun, and there are several fault lines along which major aftershocks could no doubt occur.

The major threads in the repercussion discussion are:

* What is the future of MySql? John Dvorak was all over this angle more than a year ago, with a column that at the time sounded, frankly, paranoid, but which now looks incredibly brilliant and prescient:

http://bit.ly/15lYnG.

(As he said in a twitter post today, "not to brag, but I nailed something here.")

* Will Oracle now get real close to HP, and provide a blockbuster competitor to IBM? ZDNet's Dana Gardner has thought this and other aspects through in is recent blogpost:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2903

* How will the deal affect Java and all of the community-centric initiatives it's spawned over the years? (Related to this topic, JavaOne in June should be a must-see event.)

* Will this deal help consign Microsoft to irrelevancy? Or does it strengthen Microsoft's hand (through Java FUD)? TIBCO CEO had some thoughts on Java and Microsoft in this interview, conducted by John Seely for Dana Gardner's column:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2907

* How does the deal affect Cisco's nascent, unformed efforts to be a big Cloud player?

* Is the deal a good thing for Cloud (by offering a new great alternative) or a bad thing for Cloud (by squeezing Google et al through both potential vendor lock-in and as a competitor)?

Of less concern to most is the fate of thousands of Sun employees--early reports indicate as many as 10,000 will be gone--and the demolition of Sun's unique, feisty, personality-driven by sometimes dysfunctional culture.

In my opinion, the glory days of Sun's culture are far in the rear-view mirror anyway. The dot-com boom was probably the worst thing that ever happened to Sun, because it ballooned the company up to an unwieldy size, and it made everyone there think they were as smart as the few truly smart people who actually built the company.

Oracle-Sun is Great for Cloud Computing...or Not

2009-04-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

It's an obvious point, already commented upon elsewhere, that the respective cultures of Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corp. couldn't be more different.

Sun, although brash and aggressive in the mode of its co-founder and chairman Scott McNealy, has produced numerous "characters of the game" other than McNealy over the years.

Folks such as co-founders Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim, Ed Zander, James Gosling, John Gage, Radia Perlman, Whitfield Diffie, Bill Raduchal, Greg Papadopoulos, and Bernie Lacroute to name just a precious few.

The company was also a famous breeding ground for CEOs, including Zander, Eric Schmidt, Bill Larson, Carol Bartz, current Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and in the glory of the dot-com days, Kim Polese.

McNealy was always clearly the boss, but having grown up around powerful people, always seemed utterly at ease in working with high-wattage personalities and letting them shine on their own.

Not so at Oracle. Larry Ellison's company has also produced CEOs such as Marc Benioff, Craig Conway, and Tom Siebel, but there has never been an indication that Ellison is comfortable sharing either power or the limelight. This history is well-documented and needs no further comment here.

Ellison has also seemed to get personal in some of his acquisitions, notably the extended, nasty PeopleSoft takeover.

So the grand meeting of idealistic Sun and hard-boiled Oracle will no doubt be difficult, with an expectation that much of Sun's idealism will ultimately be squeezed out of the combined organization.

If you go to the very southern tip of Ellison's and Siebel's home state of Illinois, you will see the pretty blue Ohio River merge with the dirty brown Mississippi. This is one of the greater river confluences in the world.

The two colors run along side by side for awhile, but all is brown soon enough. After the rivers merge, the river is known simply as the Mississippi. The bright blue Ohio simply disappears.

The technology merger aspect of this deal--presumably why Oracle is paying $7.4 billion--seems more harmonious. Many of Oracle's database customers run on Sun, and most of any hardware company's vendors run on Oracle.

The two companies have been long-time marketing partners, there are oodles of ways the two companies are touting their Java synergy, and this merger seems to create a nice overall platform that should not raise anti-trust hackles in the way an IBM/Sun might have.

Oracle will presumably not croak open-source competitor MySql (now owned by Sun), but use it to hook and reel in new generations of smaller businesses. Sun also is a significant player in the storage arena through its StorageTek acquisition of a few years back.

But, getting to the point the headline of this article makes, is this merger too harmonious? Will it simply represent more vendor lock-in?

Sun has been aggressive in promoting its Cloud Computing strategy, yes...but is vendor lock-in to a major Cloud provider fundamentally different from vendor lock-in to today's IT customers?

Capitalism does not reward that nice spirit of sharing that we all teach our kids when they're fighting for toys in the sandbox. And Ellison seems hell-bent on turning his observation--that Silicon Valley would start to look like Detroit in a few years by dint of massive consolidation--into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Cloud Computing promises new waves of innovation by IT visionaries who will be less encumbered by the same old same old, having delivered enormous cost savings by outsourcing the drudgery to Google or Yahoo or whomever.

Will this promise be broken when, encumbered by precious little vendor choice, cloud provisioners establish pricepoints that simply return IT departments back to the budget jams of old?

Cloud Is Bigger Than the Internet

2009-04-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

There, I said it. I wasn't the first--a couple of guys funded by Google speculated in March 2009 that cloud computing "could be" bigger than the Intertubes.

And I'm sure there are hundreds of you out there, if not more, who have voiced this opinion to colleagues, in a blog, or maybe in a corporate memo that's been ignored completely.

Someone else said that cloud will be bigger than we can imagine. This is not true and not possible. Nothing created by humans is bigger than we can imagine, because we imagined it.

The universe is bigger than we can imagine, to be sure. I'm not even sure if the universe is finite, infinite, or one of those mathematical infinities in which some infinities are much larger than others (think irrational numbers vs. rational numbers).

Even the manner in which we humans misuse new technology shouldn't be bigger than we imagine anymore, given what we've learned from The Manhattan Project.

I certainly don't want to sound glib along the lines of "The Internet changes everything." I was never sure what that was supposed to mean. The Internet didn't change the laws of physics, didn't change past historical facts, and certainly hasn't changed fundamental human nature just yet.

Plus, sounding glib in a blog would make a travesty of all the deep, considered thinking that goes on in the blogosphere.

So, back to the statement: Cloud is Bigger Than the Internet and Web.

Why?

Because as the much-smarter-than-me Nicholas Carr (among others) have pointed out, Cloud will turn IT power into a measured, utilitarian commodity. "Yes, IT does matter" was, of course, the rhetorical answer to Carr's provocative article "Does IT Matter?" a few years back. It matters in the way electricity matters.

IT does not matter in the water matters, because we can live without electricity but we can't live without water. So we'll limit the utility analogy to electricity.

Electricity, once it was standardized on a national basis, captured, and distributed more-or-less safely, has indeed transformed society for the better.

Electricity spawned innovation. For the good--safe and reliable lighting, furnaces, numerous labor-saving devices, and radio. For the bad, television. For the in-between, air-conditioning and cellphone/blackberry/iPod chargers.

Cloud will spawn similar innovation. Companies will no longer have to devote such a large percentage of their effort to keeping HAL in line.

Hand those hassles over to someone who can make money providing reliable computing power, and now you're freer, ie you have more resources, to think of all the good things you should think about.

Penicillin, Post-It Notes, and Viagra were all semi-accidental discoveriers. The researchers weren't necessarily looking for these market-busting products when they were monkeying around in their labs.

The Web was introduced in similar fashion. But additionally, legions of very smart people had been discussing hypertext and hyperlinks for years before the Web came into being. Its realization certainly kicked off a new era of dot-com innovation. But the dot-com crash illustrated that the Web itself didn't really give us a new paradigm--it just made communications a lot more convenient, while also spawning endless amounts of trivial chattering.

And its inventor will be the first to admit he stands on the shoulders of many, and he didn't expect his clever invention to crystallize with the Internet and provide the greatest IT story of the past two decades.

The Internet itself was a government operation. No more need to be said about whether it was one of history's great inventions.

Ironically, it was designed in a hugely decentralized fashion to protect against something that never happened (a large-scale nuclear attack), yet which has proven limited in its ability to handle what has happened (magnitudes upon magnitudes of increased network traffic).

Do we have a "father" (or mother) of Cloud Computing? Probably not. The topic has been discussed for awhile, and seems to represent a convergence of recent thought about software provisioning, server consolidation, frustration over long deployment times, and the usual drone of budgetary concerns.

But as Cloud is adopted, it will be historically clear that we have finally caught up to where electricity was in the late 19th century. To be sure, there will be standardization issues and disputes, failures, mass confusion (never underestimate the power of FUD), and buyer's remorse along the way.

But just as "the current wars" in Edison's time over whether to adopt AC or DC seem quaint and amusing to us today, the initial cloud-v-cloud skirmishes over the next several years will seem quaint a century from now.

It's a done deal. Cloud is the way of the future. For the first time since computing resources started to be managed by customers in the 1950s, Cloud places this responsibility back on the shoulders of utility providers.

Sure, pesky things such as application development, deployment strategy, capacity planning (which will become much more sophisticated once people realize they can micromanage this), and knowing exactly what you are trying to do with your IT will remain in the hands of the business.

And it is here where Cloud becomes most profound. Electricity doesn't enable a company to do anything. Computing resources do.

Farming out your IT functionality means you can now focus on making all the great brains in your company--and brains are not computers, never have been, never will be--spend their time inventing the future, rather than hassling with problems of the present.

Will Cloud Providers Become Too Big to Fail?

2009-04-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the SF Bay Area, and I can think of nothing better to do than sit on my tail and write up some recent thoughts.

Let others hit the beaches, walk in the redwoods, cruise one of the three wine countries he have here, enjoy The City, or maybe sneak up to Tahoe for the last of this year's skiing. Today, I'm all about Cloud Computing and its place in history.

I'm not a technical person, as anyone who has ever read my stuff can attest. So I won't tell you how cloud will affect EJB or you PHP/Perl/Python folks, or whether open-source will boon in a cloud-obsessed world.

Truth is, this last sentence was a straw man, as we all know that technical discussions about cloud--at least as they relate to application development--miss the point. Cloud Computing requires a very high-level, organizational dialog.

Therein lies Cloud's vast potential. Because it is through this dialog that decades of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between IT and the business side may finally come to an end.

One does not have to know a whit about IT to know that letting another company deliver computing power as if it's electric power is a world-shaking idea that on the surface seems to exude risk.

One does not need to be sympatico to business a whit to know that this idea, with enforceable SLAs, is no more risky than the current situation of in-house IT fraught with a nightmarish complexity among servers that leads to innumerable 3am phone calls.

It occurs to me that if Cloud Computing takes hold in a big way and Amazon, Google, and Yahoo become successful in gaining high-majority market share, we may face the dreaded "too big to fail" argument should something go wrong.

Will it be a smart move to move a significant percentage of the world's IT resources to just three companies? Since the companies don't tell us much about their operations, where they are, and how they work, can we be sure that they are failsafe enough to withstand HAL episodes, the ironic electricity blackout, or dare I sound rabid, terrorist attack?

Business leaders live in an amoral world, one in which stonewalling and obfuscating is perfectly acceptable behavior. Google has already been accused of being "moral pygmies" by one influentail politician, a man (the late Tom Lantos) who was prone to bluster as much as anyone but who had a moral compass inside of him that knew where true north was.

But don't think for a minute that there is any other company on the planet that wouldn't sell its users down the river. Google's biggest crime was being clueless about what they were doing and in getting caught.

My point here is, can we trust any mega-provider to provide us the truth about the reliability of their service and how the risk their other business activities incur may affect the service they are providing to us?

If the stock market goes south on them, if they run into a cash crunch, or should they "be struck by a bolt of lightning" (apologies to Francis Ford Coppola) , will they make the argument that they are too big to fail and hold the IT operations of untold numbers of companies hostage?

"Too big to fail" is the most weasely argument I've ever heard. Guys, the Roman Empire was not too big to fail. Nor were countless other empires over the past several thousand years. The Soviet Union was not too big to fail.

And this just in, the United States is not too big to fail. There is no such thing as "American exceptionalism" unless its people and its leaders continue to be exceptional in meeting exceptional challenges. Look around today, what are the odds?

So, it seems as if one of the following scenarios will unfold in the next five to 10 years (from least likely to most likely, imo):

* Cloud proves technically infeasible on a grand scale, fizzles, joins Teletex, ISDN, and "chiclets"

* Conservative IT grudgingly deploys resources to cloud providers, but stealthily builds in 100% local redundancy, thereby negating savings and increasing overall IT costs

* Cloud wins a few high-profile accounts, more than 50% of IT runs on cloud provided by The Big Three providers, things look great all the way to the horizon

* A welter of new providers jumps into the competition, driving utility costs down, increasing the deployment of cloud dramatically, lessening the big vendor's market share to about 30%. The truth no one tells is that companies use multiple vendors for their cloud deployments, just to be safe.

* The above scenario, followed by a big consolidation among a few vendors, led by either a late-to-the-party Borg or by a twin-axis enterprise run by Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch. IT rebels and starts moving resources back in-house, the industry is in a huge muddle. An isolated guerilla attack in Moldova or Indonesia precipitates a massive house-of-cards destruction in global IT provisioning, once again it looks like the world is going to end, bailouts ensue, we are told to stop being reliant on oil and change our consuming ways, and a couple of young hackers go to jail for a few months. In other words, the same old same old.

So yes, Cloud Computing will take hold. It holds the promise of reducing costs, increasing corporate agility, and freeing up vast new resources for innovation (more on that in a later post).

But back to the beginning of this column, the most important thing about it is that it will force IT and business to talk--clearly, unambiguously, and maybe some day, honestly.

Cloud's day-to-day benefits will accrue slowly and incrementally, but not fundamentally change the fact that we humans are still in charge. And when humans are in charge, things never turn out as planned.

Cloud Computing Will Drive Innovation

2009-04-15T13:41:00.001-07:00

Flip 80/20 and Go.

What does that mean?

Flip 80/20 means to stand the conventional wisdom that IT spends 80 percent of its resources on management and 20 percent on innovation. Actually, while researching an article last year on this topic, I located some academic work done in Europe that operations and maintenance taking up 90 percent of budget. A Gartner report on the topic put the ratio at 91/9.

Industry CEOs such as Mark Hurd and Michael Dell have put the maintenance percentage at 70.

So we all know the ratio tilts very unfavorably toward pesky operations and maintenance.

By sending all this stuff to the cloud--ie, a service provider's cloud--and saving money in the process, the modern-day hepcat CIO should now, in theory, be able to focus the IT department's energies on innovation.

If there is even a 10-percent savings, for example, one would think enlightened companies would plow all or most of that back into innovation. (The company has also removed a lot of capital expenditures over to operational expenditures, but I won't write much about that until I've talked to a few expert beancounters.)

Innovation is not a precise word. Rather than debate incremental vs. quantum, updates vs. breakthroughs, etc., let's look at innovation the way Bobby Kennedy looked at the world, ie "...I dream things that never were, and say 'Why not?'"

Think of what you would like your organization to be able to deliver. Break through The Innovator's Dillemma by dreaming of things your customers aren't (yet) demanding. Understand that once you have outlined your dream, you can order up the IT power you need to fulfill it. Similar to adding a new building, then ordering up the water and electricity. Yes?

This could lead to a modern-day CEO with a background in philosophy, history, literature. Yes, I know many high-level execs (including CIOs) are already broadly educated and do need to see the forest for the trees.

But, once you have outsourced the task of providing the gas to power the car, you can just step on the accelerator and go. No year-long, 18-month, or longer lag between conception and deployment.

Of course, it's not that simple. But we can always dream, can't we?

Cloud Computing - Flip 80/20 and Go

2009-04-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

I am not an early adopter. As a semi-slow native Midwesterner, I need to think new things over, often for a long time, before deciding they're OK.

Thus I am starting my Cloud Computing conversation now, rather than a year or more ago.

In my job as Editor-in-Chief of NOW Magazine, I've been covering SOA, BPM, Ajax, BI, and Virtualization for awhile. I remember when Web Services turned into SOA. (Heck, I remember when 45s turned into LPs.)

Now all this and more is being hoisted into the sky and into the cloud. Blue Sky has become a legitimate way of thinking about IT. Wow. The physical reality of the original bug (a moth that Grace Hopper found) has now metamorphosized into the complete abstraction of all IT resources (to the user).

So what does this mean? Is this the latest paradigm shift, the latest techno-marketing babble, a revolution, a revolutionary evolution, what?

I'm up to speed on my SaaS/IaaS/PaaS trilogy, and happy to see that PaaS (Platform as a Service) has only been listed in wikipedia since January of this year. So I'm not wholly late to the cloud conversation.

I (and you) know all about new RAS concerns within the cloud, the stringency and effectiveness of what will be a new generation of SLAs, and how much interaction the local IT team really will spend hassling with server issues, now that these problem have, in theory, been delegated to the cloud provider (Amazon, Google, whomever).

But I think the key insight here involves what the Cloud-empowered CIO will do, and what type of people will be hired in the Cloud-empowered organization? I can summarize the conversation into two short sentences:

Flip 80/20 on its head. Hit the gas and go.

In other words, you will stop devoting 80 percent of your resources to maintenance and only 20 percent to innovation. And when you want to achieve something, you don't have to wait for your new architecture to take shape in your data center.

Cloud is a utility. You just put in the wires and pipes, turn on the faucets and flip the switches, and you've got water and electricity.

This is the thought that I'll develop in a new, extended article I'm writing at the moment. I can't wait to see the final draft!

Greg the Architect: SOA What?

2009-03-14T16:10:00.001-07:00

Did dinosaurs really become extinct or did they just evolve into birds? Did all the Neanderthals really die or did they devolve into us? (Remember, evolution doesn't necessarily mean better, it just means more apt to survive current conditions.)

Thus I view with enormous skepticism the various Death of SOA commentary found here and there. Jeez, it's as if some people write teasing headlines, thoughtless questions, and vapid observations just to grab web traffic. I'm shocked, shocked. After all, isn't SOA just evolving into The Cloud? I mean, after all these decades the mainframe and COBOL are not dead yet. Why would SOA be?

Speaking of vapid, I've posted an interview I did with Greg the Architect about a year ago. It ran in a print issue of NOW Magazine in 2008.

But now, as with, you know, The Basement Tapes (ID check in force to see if you truly remember what I'm talking about), this interview has been rediscovered and posted at my author's site.

It wasn't easy interviewing a small, plastic figurine, as these outtake from the interview attests:

Me: How would you rate the difficulty in implementing SOA?

Greg: Difficult

Me: How difficult?

Greg: Very difficult

Hey, bring on Joaquin!

Greg was in the throes of a SOA implementation at the time we interviewed him. I've been trying to reach him over the past few days to see if he's thinking about The Cloud yet. I'm sure his thinking has evolved over the past year.

China Wants Us to be Credible

2009-03-13T10:40:00.001-07:00

It was with amazement that I read of China premier Wen Jiabao's wish for the US to remain "a credible country."

Wen was expressing his fears of a weaker dollar, which would diminish the value of China's trillion-dollar-plus holding in US treasury bonds, and multi-trillion-dollar overall investment in Uncle Sam.

The translator's use of the word "credible" no doubt carries the very specific meaning of the US regaining and remaining credit-worthy, to keep the dollar attractive and strong. But I have to say the use of this word must surely sting most of us here in the US.

For any serious country in the world to doubt that the US can remain "credible" is something shocks anyone who remembers an era when the US was considered to be "the good guys." Now we are not only not the guys in the white hats, but we have an enormous nation with whom we are co-dependent worrying about whether we are "credible" ? Indeed.

The country famously lost credibility during the Vietnam War era, a time when innumerable other foreign policy abuses came to light and three consecutive presidents were wrenched from office--by assassination, a catastrophic popularity drop, and threat of impeachment, respectively.

The US slowly regained credibility in the intervening decades, a high point being the fall of the Berlin wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union, but has now become a risible facsimile of the "world's only superpower." The reasons for this are complex, in my view, and I will not take any political stance here.

But I do note the irony in having China--a country that is well-known for a sophisticated strategy that weakens its currency--fret about the US weakening the dollar.

Wait, maybe it's not ironic. China needs to keep its currency weak so that it can continue to stoke the flames of its house-on-fire manufacturing base growth rate. Should the greenback start to weaken again, China's leaders can envision a spiral in which their investments go poof along with their manufacturing base.

So premier Wen's concerns are real, concrete, and credible. But currency markets are notorious for their unpredictibility. After all, the dollar's new-found strength of last summer played a role in bursting the oil-price bubble, and it was the oil-price bubble that played a huge role in bursting the US housing bubble, which in turn killed the stock market, which in turn drove the price of oil down further.

Meanwhile, the dollar stayed strong. Now that we may be glimpsing the early spring days of a recovery, will the dollar ironically start to weaken, and thereby cause China to lose faith in US investments? If so, the recent/current recession will just be the overture to the Wagnerian opera.

Eoww, too much thinking, I need to lie down for awhile...

Google Promises Evil-Free Outage Policy

2009-03-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Slow news day, so a 30-minute outage by Google--shutting "millions" out of their email accounts, gasp--merits some seriously extensive coverage.

Google responds by promising to be more open and transparent about acknowledging and addressing such outages.

Great, OK, fine. But how about applying a don't-do-evil policy to something much more important? To wit, I wonder when Google (and other monster datafarm owners) will tell everyone where they keep all their servers?

The games they play, ostensibly from corporate security concerns but truly from the potential embarrassment in letting the world know how un-green they are, seem ludicrous.

You've never seen Dow Chemical or any nuked-up utility try to hide their locations, have you?

As the importance of these server farms is only going to increase, probably exponentially in the coming decades, why not just let everyone know what's going on?

California Governor Tom Campbell?

2009-03-08T18:43:00.000-07:00

eBay ex-CEO Meg Whitman has been getting the recent Silicon Valley pub for her gubernatorial run in California, but we shouldn't forget about her fellow Republican and Silicon Valley notable Tom Campbell, who has served as a U.S. congressman, UC-Berkeley Haas School dean, and top staffer for Gov. Schwarzenegger.

I won't say whether I support any of the Republicans running for the office, any of the Democrats, anyone else, or even whether I truly believe in the democratic process. I will say that I interviewed Tom about a year ago, and had the interview published in an early issue of NOW Mag.

We posted it in .pdf form on our mag site awhile back, but now it's available in html form on my author site. He doesn't talk about politics in this interview, but about big issues.

I have no idea if he would be a good governor, but he's an entertaining and highly intelligent guy to interview!

Innovate with SOA

2009-03-08T16:42:00.001-07:00

We just posted an article from Issue 4 of NOW Mag, published last April. It's about innovating with SOA, and it's still very relevant, we think.

Economic crisis or no, it's still muy importante that companies are looking at all of the services within their enterprise IT fiefdoms and busting them out into some SOA-centric, virtualized thinking.

You optimize operations, provide a better user interface (leading to fewer user-related problem calls), and you can create new worlds out of your existing Lego blocks.

We broke the article into two pieces for easier consumption (and yes I'll be honest, more page views.) You can find it at my author site or you can just google "Innovate with SOA."

Happy reading!

Ha-Joon Chang Loathes Globalization

2009-03-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

Well, not really, but he does loathe the way a lot of countries view globalization.

We just published an interview I did with the economist Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, whose recent books include Bad Samaritans and Kicking Away the Ladder. He spoke at Stanford last year and I was lucky enough to catch up with him, as he's based at Cambridge University in the UK.

I got the interview posted at a new authors' website. Contact me for a print issue of NOW, and you read it in there as well.

Dr. Chang believes that rich nations such as the US are inherently hypocritical when they argue for free trade and a level playing field. He contends that they built their wealth under no such principles. His books and my interview are very high-level and non-technical, but for those who wish to dive deeply into his dismal science work, it's easy enough to find.

The relevance of Dr. Chang to me is that globalization is here to stay, and is really not an intellectual principle so much as a practical reality that reflects our highly connected, round world of fluid capital flows--and more important--communications of a sophistication that was unimaginable as recently as 15 years ago.

Plus, he told a really funny joke during his presentation at Stanford, in an accent that he knows remains thick and which just added to the merriment!

Why Web 2.0 Should be Web 2.x

2009-02-22T16:21:00.000-08:00

The global economic crisis focuses IT buyers' minds on efficiency and immediate financial benefits. Real software in areas such as business intelligence (BI) and complex-event processing (CEP) is in vogue. Abstract thinking is not.

Thus comes what might be the final nail in Web 2.0's coffin. When's the last time you heard someone use the term non-ironically, with a straight face? How often is it said now without being archly surrounded by "air quotes" ?

I've always thought that the main problem with the term was its glibness. Well, duh. But listen for a sec...

There are many important concepts within Web 2.0 thinking. The problem is that the real term should have been Web 2.x, to describe steady, ongoing improvements to the Web.

Instead, the Web 2.0 name just served as the latest, ugh, revolution from Silicon Valley that you either "get" or don't, featuring fatuous "entrepreneurs" who want that quick jakcpot, reported on breathlessly by fatuous "journalists" who want that same jackpot.

But there was tremendous value in the original Web 2.0 conception. Go back to Tim O'Reilly's original Web 2.0 article in 2005: http://tinyurl.com/743r5

Sure, it has a "meme map," ascribes importance to nonsensical notions such as The Long Tail--and may in retrospect have been written solely to serve as the launching pad for a pretentious conference and a new generation of social networking consultants.

But it is a very long, serious article written in an earnest and sweeping way that, if nothing else, provides a nice tutorial of the software industry up to that point in time.

And it outlined principles of real importance, as you can see when they are presented unadorned:

1. The Web is a Platform

2. Harness Collective Intelligence

3. Data is the Next Intel Inside (ok, this one is confusing, but it hits on the importance of who owns the data, something that puts companies such as Google and Facebook in the news almost daily)

4. It's the End of the Software Release Cycle (thereby leading to why it should be called Web 2.x, btw!)

5. Lightweight Programming is in Ascendance

6. Software Should be Written for Many Devices

7. Focus on Rich User Experiences

As Tim O'Reilly himself said in the original outline:

"The next time a company claims that it's 'Web 2.0,' test their features against the list above. The more points they score, the more they are worthy of the name. Remember, though, that excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven."

Well, I have to disagree with his final point. It is the collection of small steps that leads to profound, long-lasting change. But yes, Yet check features against the list by all means! This is how you will achieve your ongoing, Web 2.x breakthroughs!

Today there are legions of young people throughout the world (and some older ones of the "right age") happily texting, tweeting, gathering, posting, slinging pix and video all over the place, joyfully oblivious as to whether that are part of Web 2.0, smart crowds, social networking, or any other such ephemera that passes for Silicon Valley wisdom and philosophy.

They "get it" in a way that has no pretension. They don't talk about this stuff, they just do it. Would that everyone would do the same. Treat Web 2.0 as an ongoing series of ever less-buggy releases--a Web 2.x approach--and we will no longer endure stories about the "death of Web 2.0" or "waiting for Web 3.0."

Viva Web 2.x !!

Add Three Little Letters--CEP--to Your SOA

2009-02-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

I've developed a minor obsession with complex-event management. CEP software is getting to where it can recognize patterns on the fly that allow enterprise IT to become much more efficient.

It's not just there to keep small problems from becoming big problems--although I don't wish to understate that aspect--and it's not just there to upsell and cross-sell, but to drive real-time IT resource adjustment, something that is enhanced by all the virtualization going on. Real-time flex as it were.

The new issue of NOW has a little sidebar about CEP for people who may not be familiar with it. You can see this article online.

If you're further down this road and have already grokked CEP, look to the right of this page and start reading the CEP blogs I've cited!

I Can See SOA Clearly Now

2009-02-18T12:39:00.001-08:00

I had a nice, clear morning commute today. Cleared my mind a bit. I've been thinking a lot about Twitter and some of the other social networking phenomena. My problem with the term "social networking" is that it's a redundancy. As such, it doesn't say anything.

We had social networking back in the day of party lines anyway. Everyone knew everyone's business within nanoseconds, and semi-smart crowds would form at the first hint of something going on.

Hey, if I reference party lines--particularly the one I had for my phone service when I lived out in the country shortly after graduating college--do I sound old? Do I sound a little Hee Haw-ish?

And no, a party line is not something like "Never raise taxes" or "For the children."

All that aside, I want to start discussions with people about how and whether all this interloping social-networking-as-a-service (SNaaS) stuff is something that enterprise IT will have to grapple with. Are we talking about social-networking-oriented architecture (SNOA)?

Am I seeing this clearly? Or should I put these thoughts where the sun don't shine?

It Was a Dark and Stormy Morning...

2009-02-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

...as I set off on my commute to begin the short week following Presidents' Day. Ack, although I enjoy the three-day week-end, I'll never get used to the euphemstic re-naming of this holiday.

It's a difficult semantic problem. With Lincon born on Jan. 12 and Washington on Jan. 22, it was too awkward to have two holidays so close together. So the intention was to honor them both. But the combined holiday also implies we should honor Franklin Pierce or Warren Harding, maybe Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.

Oh well, the foreboding cloud I saw on my way over the Dumbarton Bridge may be an omen for the first day of the rest of our economy's life...or not, I hope. Or maybe it's a sign that I should be writing more about Cloud Computing.

New NOW Magazine is Here

2009-02-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

We've produced a new print issue of NOW Magazine.

It won't be online right away, as we prefer to distribute to our readers in about 60 countries, let them get a long look at it, and give us feedback before we start putting it online.

We cleverly print extra copies for anyone who would like one. Shoot me an email to get the current issue, then subscribe so you get a free copy each time it comes out.

The new issue was many months in the making. We were set to go with a visionary cover piece last fall, but the severity of the economic troubles that began then made us re-consider.

So we developed a lot of new material, and published it with a cover story telling you how to continue to get IT budget in tough economic times.

I hope everyone enjoys it, and I certainly hope not everyone agrees with everything in it!

Our next NOW issue will be in Chinese, and should blossom with the cherry trees in the spring.

Twiitecdotes

2009-02-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

Birdbrain that I am, I've been thinking a lot about Twitter over the long week-end. Wrote a few short pieces that made it to a new writer's site called "Ulitzer" (as in Pulitzer, pronunciation be damned, get it?)

You can google "soa twitter" or "twitter story 140" to find my pieces.

Or you can visit my author site.

I've played around with Twitter as a new writing form. The geeks who invented Twitter could think of nothing less banal to ask than, "what are you doing?" Ignore that sad question and free your mind to fill 140 characters in any way you know how. The 1.2 million twitterers, about one quarter of them serious, are clearly enjoying the freedom of this new form.

Twitter is one of those disruptive things that will eventually grab the attention of corporate IT departments, once C-level management figures out how much time people are spending with it.

Along with Facebook, Friendster, YouTube, IM'ing, Twitter looks to me less like so-called social networking and more like something truly revolutionary, reminding me of the days when the personal computer snuck its way into offices, much to the dismay of MIS (as it was called then), before conquering the world.

And Twitter seems to have re-invented the notion of The New Economy. Only this time around, the company needs no revenue at all, yet keeps getting fed by evil VC types who must think that some day, somehow, they can steal it and "monetize" it for their partners in slime. We'll see.

Is Twitter Really the Dumbest Thing Ever?

2009-02-14T13:50:00.000-08:00

There's a funny article in Web 2.0 Journal by an SEO consultant from Italy named Salvatore Genovese, who thinks that Twitter is the dumbest thing he's ever seen. The column appears next to a short piece I wrote about my twittecdotes.

Salvatore thinks that Twitter is full of "spammers and crazy people." Yeah, and your point is?....

The world is full of spammers and crazy people, and Twitter is nothing more than a million-plus-strong flock of humanity.

Personally, I've found Twitter to be a handy way to blast out quick messages to friends. It's led me to some new acquaintences who I think are less crazy than me.

Most important, it keeps me off the streets and busy thinking about the 140-character writing metier.

I don't know Salvatore, but I'll extend him the courtesy of assuming he is a decent guy who knows a lot about SEO and other stuff. But surely he's led a sheltered life.

If Twitter is the dumbest thing Salvatore Genovese has ever seen, that means he has never seen:

* Microsoft Bob

* The Astronaut Farmer

* Digger Phelps talking about basketball

* Lee Corso talking about college football

* Hulk Hogan's daughter talking about anything

* The Apple Newton

* Microsoft Bookshelf (Redmond's original CD-ROM product)

* Me, with my high-school friends from Illinois

* Any GMC commercial

* The Army Show

Dumb And Dumber

This list could go on past the horizon. Salvatore probably hasn't seen many of the things this short compilation...but really, he should at least rent The Astronaut Farmer, so he can move Twitter to second place on his list.

For me, I kinda like Twitter. It doesn't seem dumb at all to me. But then, I don't seem dumb to me either.

About All the Damage I Can Do For Now

2009-02-13T18:51:00.000-08:00

I've been working on the elements in this blog, and also on becoming a moderately proficient twitterer, while simultaneously playing around with a new author site at http://rogerstrukhoff.ulitzer.com

Trying to get all the wood flying in the same direction, if not behind one arrow. There are dozens and dozens of good articles from the print version of NOW Magazine that I need to convert over to the blog.

We built a nice, pretty, custom site for all the NOW stuff, but now the ulitzer thingie (run by a former business partner of mine) provides the heavy lifting for content management and story googling. So I'll move a bunch of stuff there and into this blog as well so all y'all can enjoy it.

First, it being a very rainy start to a three-day week-end, I'll fight traffic home, turn on the TV, and see if the world still has an economy.

I can't text while driving, but I can still take a picture

Then will watch the Cal-Stanford men's basketball game tomorrow (look at my bio to see which team I care about), this being a rivalry which no one outside of the Bay Area cares about, and in which punches are seldom thrown among fans, as we all work together at the same companies.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

The Year of the Ox is icumen in, in China and in the Bay Area. Our colleagues in China had the week off, although they couldn't resist the occasional peek at the blackberry.

San Francisco's Chinese New Year's parade is coming up next week-end. This one of those must-see events that never gets old (even when it's raining).

The parade has gone big-time in recent years with major sponsorship by Southwest Airlines. But it remains fundamentally a local event, with huge local participation and more cute kids than imaginable.

Its excitement factor is on a par with the Demolition Derby at the Carroll County Fair in my native rural county in Illinois.

Meanwhile, we're gearing up in Palo Alto for the Chinese-language version of NOW Magazine, in which we'll have some great interviews and some groundbreaking analysis provided jointly with one of the leading research firms in China.

Here are some great pics of the SF parade.

You can learn all about it at: http://www.chineseparade.com/

Merry Christmas!

2009-01-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

It's the Orthodox Christmas, so I can therefore wish everyone belated good wishes. Returned to the US on Dec. 23, completely fried, then took advantage of my company's holiday holiday.

Back in the office Monday, Jan. 5 and now trying to get caught up. I placed a nice gift I received from my colleagues in Beijing on the Table of Honor in my office, put it right between an award-winning magazine I created years ago and a great picture of Babe Ruth that I treasure. :-)

Back to Hong Kong and Home

2008-12-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

Sitting at Hong Kong airport, waiting for the long flight home. It was only 11-some hours in the air because we had a very large tailwind (and turbulence) that propelled us back to San Francisco as quickly as one could hope for.

Will be reporting in more detail after Christmas. Thanks for accompanying me on my trip, and Merry Christmas.

Shenzhen's Silicon Valley

2008-12-24T10:52:00.001-08:00

The border area of Shenzhen was nasty, just like nasty border towns anywhere in the world. Reminded me of Juarez. But once we got about an hour away, we found this salubrious Silicon Valley-type area, with hundreds of thousands of workers, and even warm, sunny Bay Area weather on this particular December day.

The park looked to be modeled after Taipei's Hsin-Chu, although the local Chinese may never admit that. Hsin-Chu in turn was modeled after Santa Clara County. Wide boulevards, modern low-slung buildings, nice green areas and ponds, and not a place to eat (or buy something to eat) in sight.

These guys compete with Cisco, and have 40,000 people in the tech park here. They also have a nice green area, replete with pond.

Entering Shenzhen at LuWo Station

2008-12-24T10:46:00.001-08:00

I flew into Hong Kong the night before meetings in Shenzhen. Mistake, because I had to use up my second (and final) entry from my limited-entry visa into China.

"One country, two systems" was the philosophy behind China's re-acquisition of Hong Kong in 1997. Duh, I should have realized the implications of this on entering into China.

Anyway, I took a fast train/subway system from Kowloon to the border. Walked across, and I was warned my many people to be careful in Shenzhen's LuWo station. "They cut some woman's hand off last week for her cellphone," "there are pickpockets everywhere", "you are are a foreigner so they will steal your laptop," and on and on.

I used to walk through New York's Time Square without fear in the bad old days, and the only real fear I've felt in recent years was when I foolishly attended an Oakland Raiders game. But everyone had me spooked about LuWo, so I stuck my wallet in my suit jacket, took the strap off my laptop case, tried to look big, and practically ran all the way from the station to a hotel where I met my colleague.

Really, there was no problem. The only trouble we had was with the world's nastiest cab driver (see below).

World's Nastiest Cab Driver

2008-12-24T10:39:00.001-08:00

Well, I always thought that San Francisco had the surliest, least helpful cab drivers in the world. I am always embarrassed by how badly my city treats its guests, and the cab drivers are at the forefront of this abuse.

But the guy in this picture, who took us from LuWo train station on the Hong Kong/Shenzhen border out to a meeting in a Silicon Valley-style technology park was the meanest dude ever. He didn't want to run the meter, but wanted twice the normal fare. After my colleague politely but steadfastly refused for 15 minutes, he tried to stop the cab and dump us out on the highway.

Then he got "lost" trying to find the place and then suddenly couldn't understand my colleague's Mandarin (since he spoke a different dialect as his first language). All this over about a difference in $4 in cab fare. I realize 30 yuan is not a trifle in Shenzhen, but I didn't think it was worth this sort of confrontation. Oh well, it was a nice day that day anyway. Felt like Bay Area weather there.

Everything's Up to Date in Shanghai City

2008-12-24T10:33:00.000-08:00

An obligatory night shot here. I lost my cool little FlipCam along the way, but was still able to shot a few things with my blackberry. The really cool thing about Shanghai is that it sort of feels like Europe, but it's not Europe, it sort of feels like New York but it's not New York.

One of my colleagues (a Shanghai native) lectured me on this apparently condescending attitude. "You think China is still like the 19th century in movies. You think you will see men wearing pigtails. Well, this is wrong. China is very modern and we are very proud of this." Yes.

Big City Business

2008-12-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

Standing here in front of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Got some information on background, and drew the interest of a security guard when I snapped a pic of the ticker sign inside. :-)

This Just In from the Capital of Asia

2008-12-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

This is my first trip to Shanghai and I was left speechless by mid-afternoon yesterday. Those who know me would say this was some sort of great miracle.

I won't try to summarize it here, and will refrain from the cliches you've all heard a hundred times. The city is overwhelming in a good way. Yet it's interesting to hear local businesspeople talk about how much more progress needs to be made in China, even with Shanghai.

From one American's business perspective, this city is now the equal of New York or London, and in some ways far superior. I had a notion before this trip that China wasn't quite ready to discuss the most forward-leaning IT ideas, but that is simply not true.

Everyone knows that this city has long had a cosmopolitan reputation, but there's more to it than that. Somehow this is a very Chinese city while being absolutely at the forefront of what's going on in the world, in serious business and popular culture. (Oh yes, they have Christmas trees and Santa as well, although with slightly less ubiquity than Beijing.)

My only problem has been with younger businesspeople asking me to teach them how to swear creatively in English, because they want to be the best in the world at this, too. I politely refrain, telling them I have no idea what they're asking me. They settle for my approval of their usage of "mindshare," "paradigm shift," "abstracting" and "virtualizing," "crossing the chasm," and one phrase that seems to amuse everyone, "figure it out!"

"Show us that you have fresh ideas and that you are serious about them, and we will listen to you eagerly. We must keep moving as fast as we can and we need the most fresh and best technology to do this," is a refrain I have heard over and over.

Visiting the Shanghai Stock Exchange today, and hope to have pictures of it up soon.

Random Shanghai Scenes

2008-12-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

Morning Rush

High Rises

Customer Visit - Happy Faces!

Street Scene

On to Shanghai

2008-12-16T14:57:00.000-08:00

People have been trying to draw facile comparisons of Beijing to Shanghai and of the two cities to US cities, eg is the "Washington" and Shanghai the "New York" of China. As the kids say, whatever. The two cities, as with all great cities, are unique.

I do know that at least one Shanghai Airlines pilot brings the plane up and down at a much steeper angle than anyone in the US. The good news is that they still feed you on shortish domestic flights in China; the bad news is it's hard to keep it down when you're climbing and descending at a 45-degree angle. Herewith, a quick shot of the ground scene upon arrival at the local Hongquiao Shanghai airport (not Pudong, the one that most travelers know).

Ping-Pong Diplomacy

2008-12-16T14:19:00.001-08:00

If you're going to record your trip, you might as well humiliate yourself early and often. This moment taken just before we hit the road from the VanceInfo CDC to another meeting...

We Visit the VanceInfo TIBCO CDC

2008-12-16T14:03:00.000-08:00

Had a nice, long discussion with Michael Zhang, head of the VanceInfo TIBCO China Development Center (CDC). Located in the "ZPark" software park in suburban Beijing in a Chinese version of a Silicon Valley setting, the CDC's 200 engineers are a unique resource, Zhang says. And once again, SOA and BPM and how to develop and serve sophisticated customer initiatives at breakneck speed were the main topic of conversation.

Michael is also an avid basketball player, who lead the company team to a ZPark league championship this year, whipping Microsoft, IBM, and everyone else. He was a little camera shy at first (see below) but was a marvelous host and once we turned the damn camera off, he led a very nuanced discussion of enterprise IT software challenges and opportunities in China and the world.

VolgelBurda Editor Outlines Manufacturing IT

2008-12-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

We met with one of the most respected IT editors in China, Li WeiZhong, whose eManufacturing reaches more than 300,000 people. He noted that the manufacturing sector in China trails only financial services and telco in the private sector, and has very strong growth forecast for the coming year.

He was recently at a major even in the US as well, and said that in the world he covers that Chinese enterprise IT is as current as the US in terms of SOA and BPM. Detailed thoughts from WeiZhong to appear in the Chinese-language issue of NOW. Here's a quick shot of him as we were ending our meeting.

Beijing at Night

2008-12-16T11:36:00.001-08:00

Another one of those ubiquitous Christmas trees, as we prepare to meet some local IT execs in the early evening.

"Thought Leadership" in China

2008-12-15T15:36:00.001-08:00

So I was involved in some discussions about high-level enterprise IT with half a dozen people in Beijing. I had the help of an interpreter, although everyone involved had a good grasp of English and had been to North America at least once.

I noted how NOW Magazine has a mission to focus on "Thought Leadership" within enterprise IT architecture, and I wanted to see how that phrase sounded to Chinese ears. During our discussion, held in Beijing, no one would translate the phrase into Mandarin. They just kept repeating "Thought Leadership."

So I said "you know, this phrase sounds just great to my ears. It demonstrates individual initiative and the willingness to seize opportunity, eg 'I am a Thought Leader.' But I think we need something else for China."

Why yes, everyone agreed. The original phrase just doesn't scan well in Mandarin. After further discussion, my new friends revealed that the ideal companies in China were said to be "forward looking" (Qian Zhan Xing) and that companies with this ability could "be influential" (Ying Xiang Li). Less ehmpasis on the individual, and the leadership is implied rather than stated directly.

So a new tagline was born for NOW China -- Qian Zhan Xing/Ying Xiang Li. (Sorry but I don't have the fonts to put the Chinese characters here!)

Now that's Thought Leadership!

The Obligatory Tiananmen Mao Shot

2008-12-15T11:56:00.001-08:00

Have to prove I'm in Beijing, right? This should do it. We're in early morning traffic on the way to our first meeting of the day.

More Christmas

2008-12-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

The ubiquity of Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and reindeer continues to crack me up. Everyone tells me they don't really celebrate Christmas in China, but they think the trees are beautiful and the Santas are cute. People here don't even do extra shopping--meaning they don't embrace the "true meaning" of Christmas--but they do love to decorate for it!

The end of this short vid has a shot of my colleague Liny Yang (she's based in Shanghai) and an interpreter we used for interviews today.

The Need for Speed

2008-12-15T11:43:00.000-08:00

"So what do you do if a vendor comes in tells you it will take 18 to 24 months for your new deployemtn," I asked a group of industry people today. The question was followed by the expected gales of laughter. "I think most people would tell this vendor 'bye bye'" was the most printable response I recieved amidst all the mirth.

Enterprise IT managers--whether in government, private business, or somewhere in that grey area one finds here--cannot wait. Period. Even in an economic slowdown, growth in China is breakneck. Branding is important, but branding is something that can be created quickly here as well. A Chinese corollary of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" existed during the early stages of the current boom, but no more.

"We need flexibility, so that we know that what we build today will still work six months from now, a year from now, two years from now," was what I heard more than once. The market faces critical needs to integrate application silos and islands of information, just as in what Westerners think of as "traditional" markets.

SOA, BPM, and Hardware vs. Software

2008-12-15T11:37:00.000-08:00

The first meetings in Beijing have been quite informative. SOA, BPM, even BI and CEP are on the minds of IT executives, integrators, and analysts here. Even had a spirited discussion of virtualization and cloud computing at the analyst firm CCID Monday afternoon.

Yet existing side to this leading-edge mentality is the fact that much of China's IT industry was still thinking of "hardware vs. software" until very recently. Brand-name hardware was the highest priority, and "only recently have executives thought that software is the important thing that will make a difference," according to several people with whom I spoke.

The reason for this seeming incongruity is speed. The China market is simply growing too fast for people to sit back and analyze change. I actually heard the term "paradigm shift" today. Not surprising for an IT market that is expected to "slow" to 14% growth this year, with enterprise IT software pegged at 30% growth. I heard these numbers several times.

It's Christmas Time in Beijing

2008-12-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

Along with the who's who of retail names featured along the main thoroughfares of Beijing are many very large, bright Christmas trees. You'll find big, beautiful trees in all the new malls and hotels as well.

I asked a colleague of mine if this meant that Christmas is celebrated in China these days, but no, the trees are just there because they look nice in the cold climate of Beijing this time of year and their presence encourages Westerners to buy stuff.

See Anyone You Know?

2008-12-14T04:18:00.000-08:00

Sure sure, seeing lots of people trudging through an airport is not real compelling. Hang with this one until around the 35-second mark and you'll see a familiar face on an ad. This is no surprise, either, but merely shows that arriving in Beijing these days is not any different than arriving in any other big city.