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The Strategist: Mitigating Cloud Computing Client Services Risk via Trusted, Blind API Brokers - Part IV

The plain truth: There will be no cloud computing industry initiative where competitors will agree to 'blind pool', and backstop each other's failures and outages.There may eventually be great open standards to move VMs and apps off of your cloud, but no set of commercial continuity services will ever hearken back to the days of centralized SNA shops with real plans, proven market capitalization, and legitimate durability. Rather, I would expect the next few years to look like this:

• When a really big utility cloud (AWS / Google) goes down - you will get an apology and a paltry credit. The only consolation will be that it won't happen often, and you will not be able to exceed their up time by running your own servers. The house usually wins.
• When a moderately well financed cloud provider starts to fumble, there will be ample warning, because folks will be watching and pinging. Have a plan, or get continuity coverage now, or when it really becomes specifically available for cloud users.  Don't say I didn't warn you.
• When a small, under-financed but buzzed up PAAS, SAAS, Cloud, whatever....fails overnight, taking your operations with it - comfort yourself by thinking how much you saved while it was working those 5 months in 2009. Really, now, Consider having at least a local or S3 proxy dup your data. Get insurance. Think before you trust business operations to a startup.
• If I was Andy Rooney from 60 Minutes: "Have you ever noticed that all of these hosting providers have a page on how great their hosting facilities are? Even the cut rate ones say, 'we are a level 1000 bunker with a year of diesel backup power and armed guards, and multiple super network links?" I mean, did they all copy the same page to make us feel safe?"

There is no perfect state of reliability, and that even in the days of highly centralized data shops, continuity was planned. We are transitioning from this mercantile, Web Hosting mentality, to one of running business essential applications remotely. These services are splitting into ownership  categories of incumbent giants, and start ups that have a semi permanent '?' on their forehead until they achieve operational liquidity. The former apologizes and credits your account, the later disappears int the night.

The vast majority of SAAS productivity app providers use existing utility compute services, in whole or in part. It's a cost thing - perfect continuity in the cloud, on a per-client-per-use basis would be infinitely costly. There will, however, be no comprehensive industry clearing house offsetting failures -  not in the sense of a services for profit model.

There are some shared risk examples where pooled trusts for infrastructure failures exist (to the best of my knowledge, these were at least proposed in underwriting requirements):

1) Telecom, National data haulers , Carriers-Carriers, and submarine cable system operators sometimes negotiate emergency settlement and peering agreements as a prerequisite to satisfying underwriting requirements. Sometimes these agreements predate the insurer's audit, and are just good business. Don't confuse these contingency plans with standard settlements - they are negotiated for extraordinary outages and lock in fees and technical requirements. Only the very large carriers can enter into these agreements with true peers.

2) Municipal and State Gov. Emergency Radio communications networks, SMR, and certain common carriers (terrestrial radio specialty comms) sometimes have emergency coverage agreements that are mandated by statute.

3 )Interstate Nat Gas and Petroleum Pipelines. Etc.

The real message here is that underneath a pool of policies is a risk pricing model that is often further underwritten by a re insurer; risk pools come together faster if there are means to offset the preponderance of risk. Flood Zones are hard to mitigate, and pools are still formed, sometimes under the stentorian bark of a state regulator. But in the case of our beloved IT clouds, we have yet to get to a place where risk to an individual business that depends on a cloud service can be priced, mitigated against, and potential technical failures limited, in their worst instances.

You may now go read up on all the happy hoooha about, "the open cloud manifesto, cloud interoperability, etc.", good luck with all that - I'm an optimist too.

We are talking here about commercially brokered services that are paid for by a pool of insurance companies, and that are funded by premiums. We don't get there until the primary service providers are certified, rated, and as operationally good as they can be. At that crucial juncture, where a critical mass of SAAS and Cloud hosts agree to these ratings and certs, we can price the baseline risk of outages via standard actuarial methods. Subsequently, risk offsets that are purely technical in nature can be tested and put into production. Finally, when technical services are proven to be feasible, then we can look to the reinsurance market, and viola, we have a business.

Question #1): How many service providers and Insurers have to get on board, at least provisionally, to make a real retail or B2B market that multi-line agents and specialty carriers can sell into?

Answer #1): My research was cut short before I got that far. I felt that my client knew the answer and was testing to see if I came up with a verifying figure. My best guess is that at least 35% of the top 1000 SAAS and Cloud vendors and at least three major underwriters would be required to make a realistic market for policies and payouts that make any sense whatsoever.

Question #2): Other than the actual insurance underwriting and policy sales, is there a real business model here in operating the technical services pool of a blind trust API broker/ Data mirroring / continuity services for the insurance industry? How big ?

Answer #2) Oh yes, oh my G-d yes. I am writing this series because I got far enough in my work for the last client, that I did see the foggy future in a way that mature analysts sometimes do.

How big? I believe that operating the Trusted Services Pool will be worth about 60 - 120 million annually when it hits it stride. There may be ancillary channels and opportunities along the way that could lift revenues to 250M. So, it's not going to be a Cisco or an HP, but a specialty business funded by the small insurance premiums paid by Small and Medium Businesses that make cloud computing or SAAS a critical part of their operations. (Much of my work product was projecting these numbers).

As a matter of fact, the industry as a whole may become hamstrung if these risk offsetting services are not brought online.

Maybe someone will read this very long and not too interesting series of articles (would you rather not  be reading some romance novel?), and put me back to work researching and creating the product road map, lassoing potential insurance industry partners, and start making this a reality (all that work!). 

The Strategist: Rating and Certifying the Cloud Hosting and Web Application Providers. Part III

I have been slowly morphing my consulting practice. I usually offer myself as a product sector strategy asset. Product Managers and VP's in the on-line applications business hire me to shoulder some of their burden when targeting specialist sectors - you know, industrial, technical, services, professional. These established clients usually have an idea of where their development efforts are heading. I came in to refine and prove the potential numbers. I developed approaches to paid subscriptions, industry specialty requirements, and I found innovative ways to exploit trade specific marketing. I was the product manager's helper, and It was a good gig until about 2007, when the economy got soft. Analysts are the first to have their contracts cut.

Now I am delivering what I learned as an analyst, and applying this to evangelizing small and medium businesses. These folks are the end users I had quantified, targeted, and interviewed in my work for web applications providers. Small and medium bizfolks perceive the benefits of hosted services and cloud computing. They clearly perceive the benefits of fault tolerance, licensing advantages, and a simplified communications topology. These smaller accounts are certainly numerous. Can they abide having recurring computing fees forever? They certainly know that their internal server and workstation / mobile infrastructure (as traditionally delivered), costs them big time when things go bad.

The SME  / SMB, in other words, gets it. They get the benefits of Web based, cloud hosted stuff. They like getting out from under the local IT support guy, or the internal IT guy that they are held hostage to. They look forward to a time where individual routers with special configurations are replaced by safe, centralized fault tolerant networks, servers, and comm infrastructure that they can provision and pay for in a rational way. They just don't know if they can trust you and if you will be around long enough to justify the cut over.

So, before I close this series, which might include one more post on the brokering of technical services between partners and competitors to backstop business continuity failures, I will talk briefly about ratings and certifications for any remote provider of compute and storage - out there in the cloud.

Established utility computing providers, like AWS, are probably uninsureable as far as client's needs are concerned; they are too big, and any coverage they do have insures only their own facilities and operations, which does accrue somewhat to the client's benefit in the very long run, but does nothing when the downtime occurs. In the case of the big dogs, your insurance is their size and need to maintain a reputation. Eventually we will get our way, and instances of client computing services will get risk based pricing, preceded by business viability ratings, and of course, certifications for good facilities, operating procedures, and back office accounting standards. I'm willing to bet the ISO is working up something in their wild and crazy working groups as we speak.

One more thing: Why is PAAS different?

Briefly: clients using unitary applications or suites have invested a certain amount of time moving from  thick client project management to a hosted solution (one example). They have probably identified ways of moving the data off the platform (I hope), and so on. They are using an application, and we have all changed applications. PAAS is like marrying your company to .Net or some other standard. There is an investment, a rather large one for the SME, actually. For the lone developer making web apps, it's ok.

The PAAS landscape is made of some very innovative and funny systems. I think you know what I mean. Some remind me of 4GL, some will let you host a language and framework, but not the integral database, some have language environments that are made from whole cloth. As a group they are fascinating and right on the cutting edge, and they are, as a group, under capitalized and illiquid. There are exceptions, but I will bet you the best dinner in Boston that one would be hard pressed to find a PAAS provider that would allow an industry ratings organization to inspect their capital and operations profile.

If a SAAS application company is illiquid in its essence, then we find another, move the data. If a PAAS company is under capitalized, we have a larger set of problems. The way migration has been handled for PAAS failures has been shameful.

Someone once asked me if the 25M round for an on-line storage provider places them in a well capitalized position; my answer was, "it depends, but generally, no, it is not considered well capitalized for the intended target and use case - 25M in a VC round ain't shit when rating a crucial service provider that has not attained sustained profitability and near perfect uptime."

Now, on to ratings and certifications for the cloud.

 

The Strategist: Underwriting Business Continuity in the Cloud. Part II.

This the second article which rounds out the issues covered in the previous post.

If you want to know why these issues of ratings and insuring continuity are important, I direct the reader to this article about on-line file hosting site Carbonite.

So, as I stated in the first post of this series, I was booked by what looked like a large, well financed client; well, as my client's went (with the exception of France Telecom) they were large-ish. These folks were a 100+ year old regional insurance company that specialized in professional lines. What's that, you ask? Professional and specialty underwriters serve, well, professions, verticals, and businesses. They usually are not auto, home, or life insurers, but they are often resold by multiline carriers. Why should you know this? Huh!

Professional lines insure business operations risks with certain carriers targeting coverage by profession; their expertise and actuarial models require specialization in order to correctly price the risk of business interruption, and to price the premiums and payouts that indemnify the customers of professional and industrial services operations. One simple example: field service coverage, in which the technical organization are covered against customer claims of damages, losses, and liabilities that occur in the course of repairing equipment. The other side is, of course, simple coverage for interruption of operations.  Some engineering disciplines (Civil, structural, design, architectural, aviation, you get the idea) can buy coverage for E&O (errors and omissions).

Ya Ya, what does this have to with hosted services and SAAS PAAS Cloud? Answer: Insuring business continuity was a game of physical premises insurance, which evolved into records and facilities, and now, today, optionally covers servers, workstations. software, and systems. It is a mishmash of offerings, and many industries have varying degrees of dependencies on internal IT infrastructure. The insurance products for Small and Medium businesses are semi-flexible, while mega enterprises have core needs that exceed what professional lines can provide, and instead rely on customized underwriting for the Fortune 1000.

Local agents that sell specialty products for professionals and vertical businesses have been focused on premises IT and servers, Client  / Server, and just lately, Intranets. After speaking to several insurance industry types that watch this space, I got the feeling that they vaguely understand that hosted services for business ops are different than the Web hosting services that their clients use, and the similarities are superficial. The move to hosted applications is creating a new dynamic in the offering of professional lines of insurance, and they ( the royal "they") saw it coming a little late.There were many meetings that insurance types kept saying to me, "underwriting the Web hosting, right?", and I said, "no, we have to sit down and you need a briefing, there is an evolution occurring in the delivery of applications that are crucial to your insured's operations, and have very little to do with a public facing internet marketing presence; you client's internal IT ops are going off site, you need to get your arms around the underwriting and reinsurance issues of services continuity, not just internal IT disruptions.".

The folks at the company who brought me in knew this already, they hired me, and now their IT and marketing people were, predictably, repeating what they had said to their lines of business product managers. However, my specialty is fostering the creation of new services within cultures that may be a bit behind the state of the art, so I was right in the zone. Also, a picture and a demonstration is worth a thousand words, and all will be well.

So now, if we have got this far, lets finally beak down the issues of certification, indemnification, and continuity services.

Let's now forget the underwriting and actuarial domain, and look at issues that are important to SAAS and Cloud hosting clients. I can speak with modest authority, because I am in the process of converting my consulting practice in product strategy management for larger IT and internet companies (with a focus on web applications for professional productivity), and transitioning my services towards SME's exploring SAAS and Capital-Line-of-Business cut over to Cloud host services. I include here the concerns of clients developing on PAAS, although these particular client issues have a special color, the reassurances sought via certification, indemnification, and continuity rating services are very similar.   

The Strategist: Certification Services for the Cloud - Reliability, Continuity, and Indemnification Against Outages

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If you want to know why these issues of ratings and insuring continuity are important, I direct the reader to this article about on-line file hosting site Carbonite.

I am going to write about a project that got stranded on my research pile when a well funded client decided that they did not wish to complete the contractual research allocation. The research directives encompassed finding a preliminary business model for underwriting business continuity risk within the rubric of cloud applications and hosting services. A concomitant directive was to research new and existing technological models that would offset the risk of such underwriting programs.

So there was an insurance underwriting and actuarial side, and a real systems side. I was to uncover the insurance industry's perspective on underwriting SAAS /PAAS / Cloud, etc. I was to bring to the partner underwriters technical proposals that would offset the risk. The project was on a roll and then still birthed. I think it still has merit. I think that the failure of several VC funded net storage start ups points to this, and that even recent hours-long outages in the 'clouds of the mighty', should indicate that this analysis was not a complete waste of time. I certainly uncovered gaping holes in the standard insurance industry lines when underwriting business interruptions and continuity for advanced hosting and SAAS.

I am under NDA as to the identity and specific plans of the client, but what I learned, and the contacts I made, cannot encumber my portfolio of analysis and career endeavors. I have that in writing, and the former client, admitting to the invocation of an early termination clause,  is cool with that - bigger crises on the home front and all.

We analysts wouldn't be worth much if we couldn't (at least sometimes) feel things coming 'round the bend. Before the words "economic crisis" became a meme for all subsequent business failures, many esteemed colleagues felt there was excess capital flowing into redundant business models (YASN and YAVSS, for the initiated). This was an evil wind with bad portents. Too much VC cake was handed over to the 'Valley Undertakers", i.e., entrepreneurs who had fostered serial failures, break-evens, and maybe one or two small M&A's, but who in the big picture had no business getting that much access to capital. So that's the tableaux we have set at around 3/07.

I was working for an R&D lab in South San Francisco when my self-billed services (product strategy under contract) started softening. I was counting on an implied renewal to extend a six month term to 18-24 months. Well, they said they loved me.I was not alone in the exodus from Gateway Blvd.

I also had several quotes out around the Valley, and performed several live pitches for real make-money product strategies based on bedrock research. But something was in the air, a whiff of fear in the faces of those I was pitching, even at the most august institutions. I've always been a realist, and this was well prior to the words 'economic meltdown' becoming CNBC's daily mantra. Many of my analyst-contractor colleagues in the Northern CA high technology sector also started to feel the chill.

So it happened to me a little before it happened to many of you. Despite accolades for the stellar work I performed, my contract was not renewed, and all my pitches and proposals in and near the city of San Francisco were not closing at the usual pace I was accustomed to. Until 2006ish,  I could close in a  month or two. Now in '07 I was being braced by the clients to be ready to sit on contracts for up to 90+ days. One of them closed and was aborted after 120 days. That project, hosted solutions business continuity underwriting and preemptive outage prevention, was a real money machine, with potential users, a realistic existing market model, and had reality baked-in. You get the idea. Sound business models are sometimes not enough when fear is in the air.

I researched market strategies for services offerings to rate, certify, and offer business continuity solution services for....."The Cloud". I want you all now to recall that in late '06 mid '07 "cloud" meant many things and had not yet gained that buzz cachet that it has now.

TARP vs. Salem, MA small business loan program

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Let us compare what the city of Salem, MA requires from a small business so that we may secure a 5-15k loan:

But First, the TARP for banks that screwed us all, the taxpayers that have no recourse and no veto over how our economy isrun and who gives our tax dollars away. We are all truly, "the forgotten man", (I love you Amity Shlaes).

Amount of TARP = 700++ bllion

References for receiving TARP funds = must have been criminally negligent in the misuse and abuse of all banking regs and SEC standards.

Application Process for TARP = None, the Fed will come and deliver the money, and you can use the money to pay the executives that were patently culpable for the troubles, violations, and evil.

click through for the actual program docs - they are quite thorough. Now, for the City of Salem, MA's small biz loan checklist:

Checklist of Required Documents

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The following circled items are necessary to process your application for assistance. Not all items apply to every application; only submit those items marked. Please make sure that all applicable documents are included with your application packet to ensure a timely decision on your funding request. ____1. Completed and signed application as the front page of the packet. ____2. Completed Business Plan. ____3. Projected Financial Statements (1 year monthly projections; 2-3 yearly projections) • Show use of loan ____4. Total project budget. If the project is for construction, you must include a contractor estimate that takes into account the payment of Davis-Bacon prevailing wages. ____5. Documentation from other funding sources (private investment; commercial lenders; Small Business Association; etc.) offering to fund your project together with the city loan. ____6. A list of the jobs you intend to create (with an emphasis on those jobs to be taken by low- to moderate-income individuals) with a brief description of the positions, projected salary, and the projected timeframe for hiring these positions. ____7. The lease agreement, if available. ____8. Copy of recent property appraisal(s), if available. ____9. Business References, at least three. ____10. Personal financial statements and/or tax returns of each owner/guarantor (last two years). ____11. If the business is existing, include copies of past financial statements and corporate tax returns (last two years).

And here is the actual application: (the whole process can take more than eight weeks, whereas TARP was rammed through in a month.

Application

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business Spreadsheets loans smallbizloan

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Get a signature, create a meaningless debt, levy the taxpayer.

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Capture a stiff's signature. The stiff can be poor or an earner, but all were unable to pay the inflated value of the loans (not all were mortgages, some were credit cards, cars, Harleys). When houses, in particular, get too pricey, and wages stagnate, even working people can't afford them, their down money, or their normal schedule of amortization.

Now sell the debt. Syndicate it. Sell it upstream. Insure it with nothing in the pool to pay out on the defaults. The bank isn't holding the paper - they don't give a crap. The investment bank sold the bond, they don't give a crap. The CDS issuer never gave a crap - for whatever reason.

Who is the only party that gives a crap and can do nothing to stop the locomotive? You, the taxpayer. Believe me people, this was robbery and blackmail of the highest order. You are threatened with financial meltdown, lockup of the credit markets. "if we don't do this....'

You can't pay your health insurance, or you have none to begin with. Tough shit. We can't afford a national plan like oh....(you think I'm going to say, Canada? Wrong) our Senators and Congressmen receive? You can't send your kid to college, a good school, because it's unaffordable and financial aid has been cut to the bone (and you ain't seen nothing yet). Tough shit, we can't afford it.

By the way: Our legislators always get the best health care and pension benefits. How's yours?

The mortgage banking system and the investment banking system are insolvent? That, that we can afford.

Suckers, suckers, ha ha, jokes on you. 15B a month in Iraq plus the aftermath of veterans care for a generation. $200B for Fredfan. $85+B for AIG, and on and on and $700B for all them and no one in particular.

We all could have had the best health care and free higher education. The free market would have been forced into CDS defualt (the best medicine for illiquid paper), house prices would have crashed and burned, and become once more affordable for the middle class working stiff.

Commercial paper, short term working debt, would have become tight for a while. We could have borne the pain. We are in for 40 years of much worse.

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Too Big to Fail, too stupid to succeed.

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I would direct America's small business owners, the bulwarks of our economy of whom most have never taken a dime of government money, to consider my hero, Tom Kloza's article. Read it, and notice the last line. He is being polite.

Now, our Federal Bank, just as the Reichsbank in 1936, is nationalizing a private insurance behemoth because, ahem, 'it is too big and important to fail'. The US Government's 79% stake in AIG signals an unprecedented nationalization of private capital - stupid capital that could not succeed on it's own merits.

You, the now teetering or already gone mid-range American manufacturer of specialized, technical durable goods, are shit out of luck. You were not helped when the government subsidized and deregulated the financial industry, overlooked dirty deeds, and directed capital towards do nothing instruments, rather than incentivizing and strengthening the industries that really create things. You dumb stiffs, you salt of the earth family business that saw the greatest expansion of post WWII wealth. Gone.

You can go out of business, and many of you are long gone and will never read this missive. America was the lender to the world, now we are the debtor. America was the world's manufacturer, now we mostly have all manufacturing outsourced. Rather than investment and R&D tax credits for streamlining manufacturing for mid-range specialized high-end goods, we pished the incentives away by deregulating and letting the financial industry take all the air out of the market.

Good night America; we have privatized gain, and socialized debt and failure while the base of American small business is burdened, while engineering universities are priced beyond all but the wealthy and the impoverished (one or the other).

Get ready for the breadlines, read, "The Grapes of Wrath", and get your mind right.

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Chrome is not an OS

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A number of dilettante tech journalists and bloggers are proclaiming Google's Chrome browser "a new OS!!!!"; by doing this they are displaying an incredible ignorance of what an OS is and does.I realize that we are increasingly a society that has no idea of how things actually work, and that SillyClone Valley is a place where even EE's can't fix their own appliances.

I'm not sure I want to spew out a tutorial here; I am semi-retired from RTOS kernel writing for data acquisition, I know what an OS is.

The Google Chrome browser needs an OS. It needs the hardware initialized and it needs native file system services to place its persistent storage, whether as files or as objects in the Gears Database.

Chrome needs a graphics system to draw, and frame buffer primitives for its rendering engine. It needs all the drivers to attach AV devices so you can VOIP. All browsers need this.

The newfangled and impressive WebTop, instant booting, ROM-based mini OS provides these minimal services, extracted from a full Linux, to allow web surfing and Skype without a boot from a full, disk-based OS. WebTop is an OS.

Now then, could a browser be an OS? Yes. As we see with the BEA Applications Server side of things, one may write a set of minimal services to take over after the BIOS, hand over to the Hypervisor, and provide a JVM with extended OS services. They are doing this now, you can buy a BEA Java Application server that does not require a server OS.

If the browser companies want to support the devices, to license drivers, or to use open source distros for the support of post BIOS housekeeping, then by all means, the browser could replace what we now know  as the Operating System.

One caveat - even the best Linux distributions, after all these years, and after great and astounding progress, still struggle with device support. Chew on that.

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Raw milk and SAAS for small business

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"Hmmmm...this tastes different, grassy, is it safe?". Hey, it was my first time sampling certified raw milk. I was a little wary.

The guy at the farmer's market reassured me, "well, it's only good for a day or two, in my opinion, if you keep it cold. Some people try to keep it too long, drink it, get a little tummy ache, and never come back".

It made me think about some of the small and mid businesses that I advise on SAAS. We are talking here about companies with 10-300 employees, 5M-50M per year in total revenues. I have been slowly building this client portfolio as more of these small operators in technical verticals are being screwed by enterprise software companies. These folks need alternatives.

Some went the SAAS route before I came around to help them. Raw milk baby - get a bad cup and you may never try again. SAAS. Shame. Some of these folks, despite being really fine IT professionals, really didn't understand the difference between a hosted solution, a managed server, a grid service, and a platform as a service.

Now, I'm no savior, no magician. I just try and use my head to carefully think through what services will work, what the trade offs are, and if these projects will align with the client's long goals.

One prospective client that had my bid in their maybe box had just gone through the very recent S3 outage. Another vendor, really just a glorified Web Developer (no flies on them), set up a proxy to S3 to back stop this very client's POS gateway storage. For archived credit receipts, it was really quite clever and economical (for the price) and it did what the jobber said it would - save them from having to maintain and continuously  update a SAN, for a while. (BTW, their old SAN never had a minute downtime but was a headache to operate).

They just didn't think it through, they pulled the plug on the aging, local storage array, tested the S3 proxy, and went live. They could easily have created another proxy or some kind of sync client for the EDI data on the old array that would have caught up the data in the slack periods, but the vendor was in a hurry and told the client that S3 was, "an invulnerable service".

Well, I don't have to tell you what the fallout was. My older quote had some SAAS services and I got a call right away from the client. They asked me if there was a strategy for using these services safely.

I referenced that section of my quote (it was always there!), and we talked about Raw Milk, how good it was (lower cost, better average reliability), how you gotta keep it cold (always have failure scenario), and how one bad dairy shouldn't color your experiences going forward.

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The Problem of Wanna

Scott Karp is a famous blogger. I am not. But, his post on the struggles of the newspaper industry, and how this relates to GM's last ditch effort to innovate with their Volt project, is very good reading.

That's a long sentence. I'm not a good general writer, I'm more of a technical marketing and research type. The article, however, grabbed me, because I once worked in the electric vehicle industry. My experiences at a small, secretive Israeli EV startup, were very similar to my misadventures in trying to raise capital in Sillyclone Valley for a faltering independent mobile dispatch venture called ThruDispatch.

Mr. Karp conjoins GM's monumental myopia (ignoring anything having to do with advanced drive trains) with the newspaper business' total lack of a new media game plan. I see the common thread - It's called, "Wanna".

Over the past 10 years, a parade of inventors and young alternative drive train companies signed NDA's with GM, hoping to get a foothold. They came from all sectors of the component, engine, and fuels industry, with patents galore, and some of them were indeed astounding; hopefully one day a book will be written. One company had a a fully tested AC drive train that could also power your house or sell back excess power to the utility grid. But we never heard about them, because GM didn't wanna.

In the midst of the Web20 semi-bubble of 2005-06, I wrapped up a six month contract at a Sillyclone Valley R&D lab, and took to the road to pitch a plan for a really innovative, user driven, mobile dispatch venture for independent automotive servicers. Thousands of potential Nextel subscribers were surveyed, all had agreed to pay a decent monthly fee, and a prototype had been in place for a while.

But, if the business plan or pitch didn't have the words "social network, video, or Facebook App", there was no getting past the gates of Sandhill road. They didn't wanna.

Now that we are on the threshold of what will surely be a blood bath of failed, ad-supported YAVSS and YASN ventures, in the midst of an IPO desert, will the equity come around to wanna?

Will they wanna invest in services that working people of the middle class will pay to use, rather than the chimera of free and ad supported services that are doomed?

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