Category Archives: Musing

Death of Conversation and the Nuclear Option

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If you’ve spent any time online since the founding of the Internet, you know how quickly things can escalate when it comes to arguments.

"Borrowed" from Tony Bourke (@tbourke)

“Borrowed” from Tony Bourke (@tbourke)

This is no more apparent to me than the recent discourse surrounding “Donglegate.”  The short, short version:

Male Pycon attendees make inappropriate comments.  Female attendee gets upset and publicly tweets about it.  Stuff happens.  People get fired.

I’m not going to go into anything about the situation, as that’s not my place or my area of expertise to comment.  What I did find upsetting was that after the first attendee that made the inappropriate comments was fired from his job, there was a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack launched at the employer of Adria Richards (the female attendee).  Their website was knocked offline for a couple of days.  The news that Ms. Richards had been let go from her job had to be posted on Facebook initially, as there was no other official communication method available.  It wasn’t until the news broke of her removal that the DDoS finally died down to the point where normal operations could continue.

This is a disturbing trend that I’m starting to see in many online disagreements.  As an increasingly online society, we have started to forego polite discourse and jump straight to the “nuclear strike” option of retaliation.  Don’t like a blogger’s post?  Nuke his site with a DoS tool like LOIC.  Think a vendor employee did something wrong?  Shame them in public and release their private information (also known as “doxing”).  Even noted security researcher Brian Krebs had the local SWAT team called to his house after he wrote about a service used to knock websites offline.

How did we end up at the point where we’ve skipped past “I disagree with what you say and would like to debate this topic!” all the way to “You suck and I’m going to burn down your house and the hospital you were born in!!!“?  Rather than have a meaningful and rational discussion, it appears to be in vogue to nuke anything and everything associated with the person that has made you upset.

Look at what’s happened to Spamhaus recently.  Yes, the articles posting about a massive 300Gbps “Internet breaking” DDoS were a bit overblown.  Yet someone has decided that the best way to make Spamhaus “pay” for their crimes is to launch an attack that relies on using DNS exploits to amplify the traffic to the point where even DDoS frontends like CloudFlare are having a hard time keeping up.  Spamhaus does have a reputation for taking things to the extreme as well when it comes to blacklisting IP ranges suspected of providing havens for spammers.  What you end up with is a standoff where neither side is willing to budge from their viewpoint.  Only they fight their war with packet generators and black hole ACLs that cause problems for users and make ISP technicians pull their hair out.

I’m no stranger to the “nuclear option” myself.  I’ve made some comments on my blog that are a bit…pointed, to put it mildly.  While I do get a bit of satisfaction sometimes from verbally sparring with someone that has called me names or done other such unsavory things, that’s where it ends for me.  I have no desire to do any further harm besides jousting with clever phrases.  I’ve never considered erasing their phone or clogging their Internet connection or releasing their Social Security number online.  Ruining someone for the sake of making a point is the height of pettiness.

Here’s a thought: At the height of the arguments leading up to the American Civil War, where American representatives were calling for state secession opening in Congress, decorum never faltered.  Even when referring to a senator that was despised for their politics, the opponent always called them “the distinguished gentleman from <state>.”  Hard to believe that a conflict that saw families torn apart and Americans shooting at each other by the thousands could still have some polite discussion in a government on the verge of being ripped asunder.  Those rules served to keep a bit of decorum in a place where it was required for conversation and useful argument to take place.

Maybe the problem is anonymity.  It’s far to easy to fire off anonymous comments or be a small cog in a larger DDoS and have a huge impact while staying mostly safe behind a curtain of obscurity.  People who might never utter an ill word to another human being suddenly turn into biased uncompromising trolls.  Rather than discuss rational points, they turn to the most extreme option available to either silence their critics or prove a point in a “scorched earth” victory at any costs.  Consider this XKCD comic:

I laughed when I first read this.  Slowly, I realized that the author is right.  Sometimes reading back the comment to people proves the point better than anything.  I frequently use a commenter’s words in my replies to point out what was said and how it was construed (at least by me).

Tom’s Take

In the end, to me it comes down to a matter of manners.  I’ve always made it a rule here to never say anything about a topic or person that I wouldn’t say to them in person.  I also do my best to look at both sides of an argument with a critical eye.  I don’t call people names or threaten them.  Even when people call me biased, narcissistic, or even just plain stupid I just try and debate the facts of the discussion.  Sure, I may rant and rave and shout out loud to myself sometimes.  However, name-calling never accomplishes anything.  Moving beyond that to the nuclear option is equally appalling to me as well.  I have no desire to knock out anyone’s blog or line of business for the sake of proving a point.  If my arguments don’t suffice to change someone’s mind or get a policy I care for overturned, then that’s my fault and not the fault of others.  I just agree to disagree and move on.  Maybe therein lies the spark that will reignite polite conversation and discussion instead of leaping straight to the last resort.  After all, an attentive ear can win more battles than the sharpest spear.

Gamification Gone Wild

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CloudCredBadge

VMware launched a new site recently called Cloud Credibility.  The idea is that you log in and start earning points that you can cash in on rewards for things such as pens, books, and even a chance to win a trip to VMWorld.  Some of the tasks are simple, like following VMware personalities on Twitter.  Others include leading VMUG sessions or hosting a podcast.  There’s been a lot of backlash in recent days about the verification of these tasks or how downright silly some of them are.  One post from Michael Ducy (@mfdii) went so far as to compare it to Klout.

This isn’t the first site to do something like this.  While Klout may be the most well known, you have to include sites like FourSquare as well.  Tech sites are not immune from this.  Cisco’s support forums have a point-earning component that plays into earning VIP status and they have announced social rewards as well.  Sites like Codecademy award badges for completing certain modules as you learn a programming language.  Even education is starting to get on the bandwagon, as this review from MIT discusses.

The term for this type of thing is gamification.  It specifically refers to the addition of game playing elements in a non-game setting.  Most often, this is expressed via points or achievement badges of some kind.  That’s how Cloud Cred works.  You do a task and you earn 10 points.  You do a bigger task and earn 100 points.  When you get to 500 or 1000, you can cash in those points for a meaningless prize or keep accruing them in hopes of winning something big.  While the currency is all virtual, the effect is quite real.

The only purpose that gamification serves to me is to hook people into staying on the site and pushing toward a lofty goal.  When you see whitepaper, you may not be inclined to read it unless it’s something interesting to you.  If you see the same whitepaper with a quiz at the end that earns you points toward a USB drive you might be more compelled to read it more closely, if only to learn enough to pass the quiz.  Now, if you make the USB drive cost twice the number of points that the quiz offers, you can make the reader find other things on the site to do to earn those points.  You keep them on your site digging through things if only to keep their point-earning streak going.  Then, you make the plateaus for prizes rewarding in their own right but also give the earners a look at a bigger prize.  Cash in the points you’ve earned on a notebook or a USB drive, but if you earn 10,000 more you can enter in a drawing to win a laptop!

Cloud Cred seems to serve dual purposes right now.  The first is to gain more social discussion of VMware and the technologies around their announced cloud computing initiatives.  The more people talking about what’s going on with VMware and cloud the better.  The second purpose looks to be peer review of whitepapers.  By having people reading over these and taking quizzes or pointing out errata, you raise the collective intelligence of your solutions and technical offerings.  Plus, rather than having to beat people over the head to get them to review the research, you just offer them some meaningless points that they will probably never cash in on tchotchkes that cost the marketing department about $.38 each.

Tom’s Take

I dislike the trend of gamification in technology and education.  Remember, this is coming from a gamer.  When I sit down after a day of working, I fire up my favorite game and play to gain levels and fake money and whatever else the developers have decided I should earn.  When I’m stitting at a desk from eight to five, I don’t want to be subjected to the same kind of rewards.  These things are designed to suck you in and keep you interacting long past the date you would have otherwise.  I wasted half an hour earning Cloud Cred just while writing this article.  Every time I would go back to check something, I found myself earning a few more points to try and hit the next tier.  If we’re going to reduce all of our support and technical offerings to the electronic equivalent of rats in a maze hitting the green button for another food pellet then maybe it’s time for us to rethink our strategies.  After all, the reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.  It shouldn’t be a pen and a flashy star next to your forum name.

Every Voice Adds To The Chorus

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BlankStaff

A long time ago, I was in high school.  I wasn’t a basketball player or an artist.  My school didn’t have a computer club or a chess club.  Instead, I found myself in the choir.  Despite what my futile attempts at karaoke might otherwise indicate, I had a nice bass voice at one point in my life.  However, my school was pretty small.  Our entire choir consisted of about 12 kids.  Because we didn’t have a lot of guys in the group, we didn’t have the opportunity to split the male section into tenors (higher notes) and bass singers (lower notes).  We combined the guys into baritones, which can sing in the middle of the range but don’t usually stray to either extreme.  While this allowed us to sing in competition, we couldn’t really sing complex material written for four-part harmony.  Instead, we were forced to sing three-part harmony at a less difficult level.  It wasn’t until my senior year that we got enough people in the choir to split into four-part harmony and increase both the quality and the difficulty of our songs.  Those extra voices really did make the choir better.

When I was at VMware Partner Exchange in February, I talked to a lot of people about my activity online around social media and blogging.  A lot of people expressed both interest and discouragement at the thought of blogging.  Most of it went something like this:

“I want to blog.  I’ve got some ideas.  But I don’t want to feel obligated to do it.”

If you want to blog or write or even make witty comments, the most important thing to do is to say something.  The biggest bump in the road isn’t finding content to publish.  It’s finding the nerve to publish it in the first place.

Most people want to light the world on fire with a blog.  They want to write that single post that is going to be linked on Slashdot and Reddit and make everyone impressed.  In reality, that’s likely to never happen.  When you write for yourself and not for a “name” like the professional blogging sites, the odds of your posts getting linked to major news aggregators are slim.  In two and a half years of blogging that’s only happened to me twice.  Once was my Meraki story.  The other was when Matt Simmons linked to my post about learning why things work on the sysadmin subreddit.  I’ve never written posts for the purposes of getting linked.  I just write because I have something to say and want to share it.  Other people reading it is just an added bonus.

Bob McCouch wanted to start a blog after becoming CCIE #38296.  He spent lots of time trying to come up with the perfect name.  I like Herding Packets, which is what he decided on.  At first, I think Bob may have been worried about what he was going to say on his post-CCIE blog.  Some want to use it to further their studies around a specific technology.  Others use it to plan for another big certification.  The point isn’t to write about something specific.  The real point is to get the writing juices flowing.  Here’s hoping that Bob keeps all the good stuff coming.

You don’t have to write about technical stuff all the time.  Staying that focused will eventually lead you to get burned out if you aren’t careful.  I try to keep things light with goofy posts from time to time, like my software release names post.  Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) writes about random things like hot water heaters and toilets. Jeff Fry (@fryguy_pa) is a huge Disney fan.  They find ways to work their own interests into their writing to show their many facets.  Even within their own blog ecosystems, the very diverse voices they add to their own choral composition make things unique and interesting indeed.  If you ever find yourself in need of a quick post, never overlook the mundane things you do that might be exciting to someone else.

All of the above are excellent examples of how adding new and interesting voices to the overall choir serves to make the music much more enjoyable.  When more voices join into the conversation more time can be spent on analyzing up and coming topics.  The more words dedicated to discussing things like BYOD, SDN, and a thousand other topics, the better they can be understood by everyone.  The music becomes deeper and more meaningful with more voices involved in singing.  We aren’t just limited to the same four or five arrangements (or discussions) and instead can tackle the really tough pieces because of the varied voices.

Tom’s Take

I often say that everyone has at least one good blog post in them.  Once you’ve gotten that out, one often leads to two or three.  Unlike writing book chapters, blog posts are very free form and varied.  Some are like Michael Jackson, fast and lofty.  Others are like Barry White, robust and slow.  They all make music that people enjoy in their own way, and each of their songs adds to the overall variety and beauty of music.  In much the same way, blogging can only get better when people write down their thoughts and publish them for all to see.  Maybe you only want to post once a month.  Maybe you want to try and post every day.  It doesn’t matter if you want to publish short and sweet like a commercial jingle or more long-form like a symphony.  What’s important is making your voice heard.

CAS – Catchy Acronym Syndrome

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If you work in the technology industry, you know the pain of acronyms.  It seems like every tech term sooner or later devolves into a jumble of letters.  For some of the longer tech terms, I don’t mind this.  I can even understand if the acronym forms a word naturally, like RIP or RAID.  What I do have a problem with is the growing trend to name something with a very unwieldy moniker solely for the purpose of giving it a cool acronym.  It’s so pervasive that I’ve given this trend it’s own acronym – Catchy Acronym Syndrome (CAS).

You may find yourself suffering from CAS if you go out of your way to name your product after you’ve decided on the acronym for it.  If you’ve never referred to your product or protocol by its full name you may also be guilty of CAS.  Yes, for me this means that RAdio Detection and Ranging (RADAR) and Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER) are prime examples of CAS.  Let’s look at a few of my favorite offenders:

RFCs

SIMPLE – SIP Internet Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions Why all those extra words?  SIP IM and Presence (SIMP) would have worked too.

RFC 6837 – NERD: Not-so-novel Endpoint ID (EID) to Routing Locator (RLOC) Database – Your acronym contains two other acronyms that are both almost as long as the one you created.  You’re not only guilty of CAS, you are the poster child for it.

RADIUS – Remote Access Dial-In User Server  I’m including this one because it’s obvious to me that the original intent was to create a word first.  Given the fact that the successor protocol is called Diameter, which itself isn’t an acronym for anything and is a play on words with RADIUS you can see how this made the list.

Business Units and Other Business Terms

Cisco High-End Routing and Optical – HERO I’m sure they had no ulterior motive for that one.

CARAT – Customer And Role Attribute Tracking Just keep sticking words in there until it makes a word.

PARTNER – Processing Automated Receivables Transactions and E-Routing The longest offender I could find

(more Cisco-specific offenders here)

This practice also exists today for the purposes of media exposure.  Take Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).  What does this term actually tell you?  It’s a very complicated idea, sometimes multiple attack vectors and exploits being used all at once.  Why such a simplistic acronym then?  Because the basic non-computer user reading the news can’t grasp a Persistent Attack and Theft Program, but they can get APT because it’s catchy.  Now, we’re developing acronyms like Advanced Volatile Threat (AVT) that don’t add any additional information beyond APT, but the new ones have to look similar to APT or regular people won’t understand they are security related.  When the entire purpose for making an acronym isn’t for descriptive purposes and instead serves to link your idea to another idea or ride on another acronym’s coat tails, you’ve violated CAS.

Tom’s Take

People who get started in technology hate the huge amount of acronyms that must be learned.  It doesn’t help that people today seem to be more content on creating protocols solely because they want to have a cool acronym.  I’ve made fun of acronyms for things like the Disaster Recovery Tool (DiRT) for years, but that was never an officially sanctioned acronym.  I’m sure it was more frustration from people who used it and wanted to sully the name a bit.  I get more and more irritated when the list of new RFCs comes out and some hotshot programmer named his proposal NERD or GEEK simply so he could use these common words to refer to a complex idea.  Gone are the days of descriptive names like RIP and RAID and DSLAM.  Instead, we have to deal with people trying to be catchy.  If you spend more time writing your protocol and less time trying to name it, you might not have to worry about being catchy.

Data Never Lies

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lies

If you’ve been watching the media in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen the spat that has developed between John Broder of the New York Times and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors.  Broder took a Tesla Model S sedan on a test drive from New Jersey to Connecticut to test out the theory that the new supercharger stations that have been installed along the way would help electric cars to take long road trips without fear of running out of electricity.  Along the way, he ran into some difficulty and ultimately needed to have the car towed to a charging station.  After the story came out, Elon Musk immediately defended his product with a promise of data to support that assertion.  A couple of days later, he put up a long post on the Tesla blog with lots of charts, claiming that the Model S had lots of data to support longer driving distances, failure to fully charge at supercharger stations, and even that Broder was driving in circles in a parking lot.  After this post, Broder responded with another post of his own clarifying the rebuttal made by Musk and reaffirming how the test was carried out.  It’s certainly made for some interesting press releases and blog posts.  There has also been a greater discussion about how we present facts and dat in a case to support our argument or prove the other party is wrong.

Data Doesn’t Lie

If nothing else, Elon Musk did the right thing by attaching all manner of charts and graphs to his blog post.  He provided data (albeit collated and indexed) from the vehicle that gave a more precise picture of what went on than the recollection of a reporter that admittedly didn’t remember what he did or didn’t do during portions of the test drive.  Data never lies.  It’s a collection of facts and information that tells a single story.  If x equals 7, there’s no other thing that x could be.  However, the failing in data usually doesn’t come from the data itself.  It comes from interpretation.

Data Doesn’t Lie.  People Do.

The problem with the Elon Musk post is that he used the data to support his assertion that Broder did things like taking a long detour through Manhattan and driving in circles for half a mile in a parking lot in an attempt to force the car to completely discharge its battery.  This is the part where the narrative starts to break down and where most critics are starting their analysis.  Musk was right to include the data.  However, the analysis he offers is a bit wild.  Does rapid acceleration and deceleration over a short span of distance mean Broder was driving in circles attempting to drain the car?  Or was he lost in the dark, trying to find the charging station in the middle of the night like he claims in his rebuttal?  The data can only tell us what the car did.  It can’t explain the intentions of someone that wasn’t being monitored by sensors.

Let The Data Do The Talking

How does this situation apply to us in the networking/virtualization/IT world?  We find ourselves adrift in a sea of data.  We have protocols providing us status information and feeding us statistics around the clock.  We have systems that will correlate that data and provide a big picture.  We have system to aggregate the correlated data and sort it into action items and critical alert levels.  With all this data, it’s very easy for us to make assumptions about what we see.  The human brain wants to make patterns out of what we see in front of us.  The problem comes when the conclusion we reach is incorrect.  We may have a preconceived notion of what we want the data to say.  Sometimes its confirmation bias.  Other times its reporting bias.  We come to incorrect conclusions because we keep trying to make the data tell our story instead of listening to what the data tells us.  Elon Musk wanted the data to tell him (and us) that his car worked just fine and that the driver must have had some ulterior motive.  John Broder used the same data to support that while his recollection of some finer details wasn’t accurate in the original article, he harbored no malice during his test.  The data didn’t lie in either case.  We just have to decide who’s story is more accurate.

Tom’s Take

The smartest thing that you can do when providing network data or server statistics is leave your opinion out of it.  I make it a habit to give all the data I can to the person requesting it before I ever open my mouth.  Sure, people pay me to look at all that information and make sense of it.  Yes, I’ve been biased in my conclusions before.  I realize that I’m nowhere near neutral in many of my interpretations, whether it be defending the actions of myself or my team or using the data to support the correctness of a customer’s assumptions.  The key to preventing a back-and-forth argument is to simply let the data do all the talking for you.  If the data never lies, it can’t possibly lose the argument.  Let the data help you.  Don’t make the data do your dirty work for you.

Dell and the Home Gym

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DellFlex

Unless you’ve been living under a very cozy rock for the last couple of weeks, you’ve heard that Michael Dell jumped in and bought his company back with the help of Microsoft and Silver Lake Capital.  There’s more than a fair amount of buzz surrounding this leveraged buyout.  What is Michael planning on doing with his company?  Why did he suddenly want to take it private?  What stake does Microsoft play in all of this?  I think Michael Dell felt it was time to hit the home gym, so to speak.

There’s usually a large influx of people into health clubs and gymnasiums around the first of the year.  These people made a resolution to get fit and decided to go out to do it.  They probably wanted to get out of the house after being cooped up during the holidays.  Maybe they wanted to go somewhere with a treadmill or a weight bench.  Perhaps they felt the only way that they could get fit was by being around other people that motivated them to get things done.  They all have their reasons.  There does exist a subset of the population that doesn’t go to the gym for various reasons.  In this case, I’m focusing on those that don’t like having the spotlight shined on them.  They either are afraid that they’ll look foolish in public just starting out with a workout program or they’re scared that others will judge them for their form or exercise choices.  They’d rather apply the work using a personalized workout program or spend the money to buy some of the equipment and setup their own gym in their garage.  They may work twice as hard in the comfort and protection of their own home to get fit.  These are the kinds of people that you don’t see for six or seven months only to run into them one day and say “Wow!  Look at you!”

To extend this metaphor to the market, Dell is in need of shaping up.  Whether they’ve acquired too many companies or their margins are getting slammed by the shift away from PCs, the fact is that Michael Dell has decided to make some changes.  However, he doesn’t want that to happen in the public health club, or stock market in this case.  Every action will be scrutinized.  Every decision will be debated by investors and talking heads on CNBC and CNN.  They will deride Dell for strategy mistakes and wonder why they made the decisions they did.  Doubt and uncertainty of direction will squeeze the life from Michael Dell’s baby.  If you don’t believe something like that could happen, why don’t you ask Meg Whitman what she thinks about the market right now?

Dell has decided to buy some home gym equipment and get fit in the privacy and comfort of their own home.  This isn’t a cheap solution by any stretch of the imagination.  Michael Dell put up a lot of his own money.  He’s borrowed from others and put his reputation and livelyhood on the line.  He’s done this because he feels that he knows how to get fit.  He doesn’t need the gym rats sitting around critiquing his form and telling him he needs to do more squats.  He wants to take the time to concentrate on the “exercises” he feels are most important in order to come out looking like he wants.  Maybe that involves staff reductions or spin offs.  At this point, no one really knows.  What can be certain is that no one will know until Dell wants them to know.  No investor speculation or outside interference will drive Michael Dell to do something he doesn’t want to do.  Better still, those same dynamics won’t have an opportunity to force him out like the CEO of Chesapeake Energy or the last two CEOs of HP.  He’s only going to quit this new fitness regimen when he decides he’s done.  As for the Microsoft question?  They basically provided a treadmill for Dell’s home gym with their investment.  That way, no matter what else Michael Dell decides to work out with, Microsoft is sure he’ll be running on their treadmill for his workouts.

You can’t help but applaud Michael Dell for wanting to fix things.  He’s certainly started a firestorm among his current investors, but I think he genuinely believes he can right the ship here.  Granted, he’s known as a very private person.  That means he doesn’t want to air his business in public if he can help it.  That, to me, is the driving motivation behind the buyout.  He wants to fix things privately and come back out on the other side a stronger, better company.  He wants people to say “Wow!” when he’s finished and compliment him on his new physique.  Once he’s put in all the hard work, I can assure you that you’ll see more of Dell’s new look in public.

Incremental Awesomeness – Boiling Frogs

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Frog on a Saucepan - courtesy of Wikipedia

Frog on a Saucepan – courtesy of Wikipedia

Unless you’ve been living under a big rock for the last couple of weeks, you’ve no doubt heard about the plunge that Apple stock took shortly after releasing their numbers for the previous quarter.  Apple sold $54 billion dollars worth of laptops, desktops, and mobile devices.  They made $13 billion dollars in profit.  They sold 47 million iPhones and almost 23 million iPads.  For all of these record-setting numbers, the investors rewarded Apple by driving the stock down below $500 dollars a share, shaving off a full 10% of Apple’s value in after-hours trading after the release of these numbers.  A lot of people were asking why a fickle group of investors would punish a company making as much quarterly profit as the gross domestic product of a small country.  What has it come to that a company can be successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams and still be labeled a failure?

The world has become accustomed to incremental awesomeness.

Apple is as much to blame as anyone else in this matter, but almost every company is guilty of this in some form or another.  We’ve reached the point in our lives where we are subjected to a stream of minor improvements on things rather than huge, revolutionary changes.  This steady diet of non-life changing features has soured us on the whole idea of being amazed by things.  If you had told me even 5 years ago that I would possess a device in my pocket that had a camera, GPS, always-on Internet connection, appointment book, tape recorder, and video camera, I would have either been astounded or thought you crazy.  Today, these devices are passé.  We even call phones without these features “dumb phones” as if to demonize them and those that elect to use them.  We can no longer discern between the truly amazing and the depressingly commonplace.

When I was younger, I heard someone ask about boiling a frog alive.  I was curious as to what lesson may lie in such a practice.  If you place a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will hop right back out as a form of self-preservation.  However, if you place a frog in a pot of tepid water and slowly raise the temperature a few degrees every minute, you will eventually boil the frog alive without any resistance.  Why is that?  Well, by slowly raising the temperature of the water, the frog becomes accustomed to the change.  A few degrees one way or the other doesn’t matter to the frog.  However, those few degrees eventually add up to the boiling point.

We find ourselves in the same predicament.  Look at some of the things that users are quibbling over on the latest round of phones and other devices.  The Nexus 4 phone is a failure because it doesn’t have LTE.  The iPad Mini is useless because it doesn’t have a Retina screen.  The iPhone 5 is far from perfect because it’s missing NFC or it’s not a 5-inch phone.  The Nexus 7 needs more storage and shouldn’t be Wi-Fi only.  Look at any device out there and you will find that they are missing features that would keep them from being “perfect”.  Those features might as well be things like inability to read your mind or project information directly onto the cornea.  I’ve complained before that Google is setting up Google Glass to be a mundane gadget because they aren’t thinking outside their little box.  This kind of incremental improvement is what we’ve become accustomed to.  Think about the driverless car that Google is supposedly working on.  It’s an exciting idea, right? Now, think about that invention in 5 years time when it becomes ubiquitous.  When version 6 or 7 of the driverless car is out, we’re going to be complaining about how it doesn’t anticipate traffic conditions or isn’t able to fly.  We will have become totally unimpressed with how awesome the idea of a driverless car is because we’re concentrating on the things that it doesn’t have.

We want to be impressed and surprised by things.  Even when we are confronted with groundbreaking technology, we reject it at first out of spite.  Remember how the iPad was going to be a disaster because people don’t want to use a big iPhone?  Now look at how many are being used.  People want to walk away from a product announcement with a sense of awe and wonder, not a list of features and the same case as last year.  We’ve stopped looking at each new object with a sense of wonder and amazement and instead we focus on the difference from last year’s model.  Every new software or hardware release raises the temperature a few more degrees.  Before long, we’re going to be boiling in our own contempt and discontent.  And the next generation is going to have it even worse.  Even now, I find my kids are spoiled by the ability to watch TV shows on a tablet in any room in the house on their schedule instead of waiting for an episode to air.  They no longer even need to remember to record their favorite show on the DVR.  They just launch the app on their table and watch the show whenever they want.  Something that seems amazing and life-changing to me is commonplace to them.  All of this has happened before.  All of this will happen again.

Instead of judging on incremental advancements, we should start looking at things on the grand scale.  Yes, I know that some companies are going to constant underwhelm the buying public by delivering products that are slightly more advanced than the previous iteration for an increased cost.  However, when you step back and take a look at everything on a long enough time line, you’ll find that we are truly living in an age when technology is amazing and getting better every day.  Sure, I’m waiting for user interfaces like the ones from Minority Report or the Avengers.  I want a driverless car and a thought interface for my computer/phone/widget.  But after seeing what happens to companies that are successful beyond their wildest imaginations I’ll be doing a much better job of looking at things with the proper perspective.  After all, that’s the best way to keep from getting boiled.

Independence From Oversight

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Secrets

Just when I think I’ve just about run out of things to write about when it comes to blogging and independence, the real world goes and gives me a nice topic on a silver platter.

For those that may not have heard, there was a bit of an issue at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  At most of these shows, the various media outlets that cover the event will look at the gadgets or products that the vendors are showcasing and pick a few to win “best of show awards.”  Most of the time, this involves writing a little bit about the product and giving it some press.  CNET does this for the CES every year.  This year, one of the products they were going to give an award to was the multi-channel commercial skipping DVR from Dish Networks called Hopper.  According to a few reports, this was going to be the Best in Show winner out of everything at CES.  There was just one problem.  The parent company of CNET is CBS Interactive.  CBS, along with ABC, NBC, and Fox, is suing Dish over the Hopper DVR.  When word got out that CNET was about to give a huge award to a product that CBS despises and wants to destroy, the big wigs at CBS interactive stepped in and rescinded the award for Hopper and told the CNET editors to revote.  There was a footnote in the article noting that CNET wouldn’t award to products under litigation in the future, but the genie was already out of the bottle.  There was a lot of discussion about the rights that CBS Interactive had to step in and squash the award based on something going on in a different area of CBS.  One of CNET’s writers quit over objectivity issues.  People started wondering how you could be objective if you had overlords with agendas.  I sat back and smiled to myself.

Many people take to social media to find a voice when they can’t have one.  Anonymous Twitter accounts, nameless blogs, and even venting on Facebook allow people to stay in the shadows while airing dirty laundry or putting frustrations out in public.  These people get a lot of value out of using social media to feel better without being seen.  The risk of being found out and muzzled is very real.  That is something I absolutely will not stand for.  When I started this blog, I did it to put my thoughts down on paper.  I had a lot to say and wanted to see if anyone would read it.  Now, over two years later, I’ve said a lot of things.  Some are funny.  Some are insightful.  Others still are inflammatory or even downright rude.  But each of them represent thoughts and feelings that are mine.  If someone else were to come to me and ask me to remove a post because they disagreed with the content, we’d have a nice discussion and perhaps an offer to draft a rebuttal.  However, the post would stay up.  If I had someone come to me and order me to delete something because it didn’t jive with the corporate byline or didn’t fit the image that was being project, I would come unglued.  No one tells me what to write.  By the same token, no one tells me what not to write.

I’m generally respectful of embargoes and requests for delayed posting.  I understand the reasoning behind that.  There are press kits and release dates and other things that go into product launches.  If you give me awesome info ahead of time and ask me to hold off writing about it until a certain date, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.  After all, you asked nicely.  Other times, I write about things that may not be public knowledge, like the Meraki acquisition.  I went out on a bit of a limb when I posted that.  Had someone contacted me and asked me to take it down, I would probably have smiled and asked, “So it’s true then?”  The information that I used to draft that post was one part accidental public leak, one part conjecture, and one part analysis.  There would have been no reason to remove it.  For someone to ask me to put the genie back in the bottle smacks of a kind of control that hasn’t been seen in the broader media in more than 30 years.

Asking anyone to take down a disagreeable blog post is akin to asking Woodward and Bernstein to unpublish their articles about Watergate.  It’s like asking the New York Times to rescind the Pentagon Papers.  Those of us that write have a right to make our opinions heard.  That those opinions may conflict with the opinions of others is the basis for discussion and compromise.  You don’t have to agree with anything I say.  That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to say it.  People take umbrage with what I say.  They write articles disagreeing with me, sometimes vehemently.  I don’t ask them to take down their writing.  I look at it as a challenge.  I see it as an opportunity to make my position even more clear and win some of the undecided people over to my side.  The same applies to my writing.  I will correct errors or restate points when they are unclear.  But I will not remove a post because someone is upset about it.

I answer to one person on this blog: me.  I’m the name behind everything here, and I’m the one that must answer for what’s written.  No one can force me to put something up.  No one can force me to take something down.  That comes with a lot of responsibility.  It’s storm that you have to weather some times.  In the end, it speaks volumes about integrity and fairness and all sorts of other things we sometimes take for granted in both the old and new media.  I also have to be cognizant of this going forward.  I’ve already found myself in situations where my blog has had an impact on future employment, both good and bad.  I feel that this is important enough to me to bring up quickly in the negotiation process.  My blog is a part of me.  An extension of my will and thoughts.  If you aren’t willing or able to deal with the things that I say here and feel that you have some right to dictate terms to me,  then I think the conversation is over.  And as my mother will be the first to tell you, I can be very stubborn when the time comes.

I think what’s most important in this whole story is that you must find a voice that allows you to say what you feel needs to be said.  You should never put yourself into a position for anyone to tell you what you should and shouldn’t write or say.  The only way the someone can be truly objective and open is to create from a position free from constraint.  It’s only after we’re free to say what we want when one’s real voice can be heard.

Frame of Reference

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Got a second?  Awesome.  Go grab a watch.  I promise this won’t take long.

Back already?  Even better.  That probably took a few seconds to find, right?  Now, look at the watch and count off thirty seconds.  Just wait and watch.  I’ll be here when you’re done.

Thirty seconds doesn’t seem like a lot of time.  It feels longer when you’re watching each second pass looking at a watch or a clock.  For some things though, thirty seconds is an eternity.  In the IT world, thirty seconds might as well be a year to some protocols and processes.  Think about some things that can happen in thirty seconds:

6 EIGRP hello packets (by default)

300 OSPF hellos when configured for sub-second failover (ip ospf dead-interval minimal hello-multiplier 5)

VMware notices a host has failed and HA starts moving it to a different hypervisor (12 seconds from last hello to start isolation, 15 seconds from start of isolation to begin moving hosts)

3.75 gigbytes of data transferred over a 1 Gbps link

All that in such a short amount of time.  Yet, for most of us thirty seconds isn’t worth bothering to notice.  We think on time scales of a minute or an hour or even a day.  I recently had to quote the amount of time that it would take for me to install a new system.  When I told them it would take me 40 hours, the response was incredulous.  How on earth could it take that many hours to install this widget?!?  When I told them I thought a week was plenty of time to take care of this thing, the person responded with “Oh.  Why didn’t you say that it would only take you a week the first time?”  I shook my head in disbelief.

When we start talking about a project, we all need to make sure our frame of reference matches.  I deal with lots of projects as an education VAR that need to be done in a specific time frame.  I have a lot more flexibility than others in my maintenance windows.  Spring breaks and summer vacations are prime times to rip out pieces of the network and replace all manner of things.  However, despite my best efforts to wrap everything up by the end of my window, I’m always warned that extra projects need to be completed “before school starts.”  My frame of reference for my extended maintenance window was several weeks.  Now, my project is being extended and compressed into the span of a few days, since this extra work always seems to come around the first of August.  If this had been discovered and planned for ahead of time, it could have been completed with a minimum of fuss.  My frame of reference of a few weeks was totally different that the customer’s frame of reference of a few days before school starts.

It’s a fact of life that people run on totally different frames of reference.  Some think about the day in minute-long increments.  They always seem busy and sometimes on edge.  Every part of the day is filled with something.  Others have a longer-term approach.  Their schedule is measured in days or even weeks.  They can seem lackadaisical or even relaxed.  Their outlook is that things will be done in due time.  When these two types of people meet on a project, the results can be disastrous.  The hares will spend a lot of time spinning their wheels, waiting for the rest to finish and gradually become bored and antsy. The tortoises will become overwhelmed shortly, feeling rushed without taking the time to digest what’s going on.  The key to getting buy in from everyone is to make sure that the frames of reference and time schedules are agreed upon before commencement of the project.  Making sure everyone is on the same page helps alleviate issues after everything gets started.

Tom’s Take

I know that syncing a frame of reference can be hard.  I’m one of the “hares” above.  I’m a hard charger and a quick mover.  When I work with others that don’t share the same attitude, I tend to find myself growing disillusioned.  I’ve found over the years that the key to preventing this is to make sure that I lay everything out ahead of time with the people that I’ll be working with.  I want to make sure we’re all synced up before we get started.  By getting on the same page before opening the book, there’s no need to worry about confused expectations.  Besides, all it takes is thirty seconds of explanation to save hours of pain down the road.

Marketing By Subtraction

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After my posts on presentation tips, I had a couple of people ask me what I would like to see in a presentation.  While I’m kind of difficult to nail down when it comes to the things I’d like to see companies showing me when they get up to pitch something, there is one thing I absolutely would love to see go away in 2013.  I’m getting very tired of seeing marketing based solely on differential marketing.  In other words, your entire marketing message is “We’re Not Those Guys.”

I’ve seen a lot of material recently that follows this methodology.  There might be a cursory mention of features or discussion of capabilities, but even that usually gets framed as in the manner of pointing out what the other products don’t do.  Presentations, marketing guides, and even commercials do this quite a bit.  The biggest example that I’ve seen recently is this commercial by Samsung:

Note that while I use an iPhone, I really don’t take sides in the smartphone marketing battle.  People use what works for them.  However, Samsung has decided to make a marketing campaign that is short on features and long on “gotchas.”  This whole ad is focused on pointing out the difference in features between the two devices.  However, it does by way of concentrating on how the iPhone is bad or lacking rather than spending time talking about what their device has instead.  When the ad is over, I wonder if people are ready to buy Samsung’s product because it has awesome features or because it’s not an iPhone (or in this case, not something used by “those people”).

Could you imagine how this would play out if other mundane items were marketed in a similar manner?  Think about going into a grocery store and seeing ads for apples that say things like “Better taste than oranges!” or “No need to peel like other fruits!”  How about a pet store using marketing such as, “Buy a cat! Less mess than dogs!” or “Take home the superior four legged friend!  Dogs are 10 times friendlier than cats!”

We don’t market other items quite the same way we do in tech.  Even car manufacturers have finally moved away from solely marketing based of differentiation with competitors.  You don’t see as many commercials focused on brand-vs-brand arguments.  Instead, you see a list of features presented in tabular format or something similar.  Even though the feature sets are usually cherry-picked to support the producer of the marketing, there is at least the illusion of balance.

I think it’s time that companies start spending their budgets on telling us what their product does and spend much less time on telling me how they are different than their competitors.  Yes, I know that we will never really be able to eliminate competitive marketing.  There are just some things you can’t get away from.  However, buyers are much more interested in the features of what you’re selling.  If you spend your entire presentation telling me how your widget is better or faster or cheaper than the other company, the potential customer will walk away and be thinking about the other product.  Some might even be tempted to go try out the other product to see if your assertions are true.  In either case, you’ve shifted the discussion from something you control to something you can’t.  If your customers are spending the majority of their time talking about something that isn’t your product, you aren’t doing it right.  It takes a tremendous amount of faith to put your product’s capabilities out there and let the stand on their own.  If you’ve built it right or designed it as well as possible you shouldn’t be worried.  Instead, take that leap of faith and let me decide what works best for me.  After all, you don’t want me to be left with the impression that the only thing unique about your product is that your aren’t your competitors.