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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.

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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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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High Hopes Part-One. IT Salad and the Fiascoes that Follow

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This is part one of a two part series by Alan Wilensky.

"I had high hopes for that Tuna Salad", said the IT director, "It didn't really deliver".

I was thinking about his IT problems, but in the middle of lunch with him, I thought I would respond by conjoining the two issues:

I said, "It's full of heavy metals, they have signs at Whole Foods that you shouldn't eat too much, and certainly not if pregnant".

He was not thinking about his IT problems at that precise moment, and why should he? Lunchtime was his one daytime hour away from the nightmare that had been plaguing him for months; unless I could convince him to take drastic action, the issue would continue to fester until the budget was spent, he was fired, or a decision to undertake a complete roll-back to the formerly reliable processes was made. They had certainly left  the realm of the familiar and functional for a stinking pile of ERP.

He continued: "Well, everyone here gets the Tuna Salad, and I'm not pregnant!"

I answered with a piquant anecdote that would steer the question back to where we could discuss his real problem: Big, heavy enterprise software, ill matched to the strategic mission, integrated, installed, and manhandled by a VAR's enterprise sales team of butchers. These stooges didn't know him or his industry from Adam.

This was indeed a phantasmagoria of errors with the proportions of a tragicomedy - nay, a comedia of epic dimensions that would be humorous if not for the high stakes.

Surely, like the Tuna Salad at this overpriced Luncheonette,  it was a recipe for disaster.

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Dying 20 seconds at a time; the story of increasing page load times

My teeth are getting chipped from a semipermanent habit of grimacing while I wait for web pages to load. I have broadband, several fast computers, and I've been around since before the web (had email since 1991), and so I know when to grimace.  It's getting worse.

While many web sites have a snappy load-time (Ars Technica, fer instance), some blogs, like Techcrunch and  Mashable are so loaded with widgets that they take at least 30 seconds to fully render. It's getting to be a frustrating exercise to click through from a feed to the site on these otherwise decent services.

Am I alone in noticing this?

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Yahoo Culture - What was, is, and Could Be

I am not a professional journalist. There are no ads on this blog, and I have a tiny readership. I use this blog to drive my consulting work in alternative channel marketing and product strategy. Therefore, I don't have the kind of attributable and authoritative sources that other bloggers have on the inside of Yahoo.

What I do have is a small group of friends and professional acquaintances that are subject to all of the fear and loathing that career uncertainty brings.   These folks are not VP's or Directors, they are editors and community managers, product managers, and software engineers. I met most of them through my work at France Telecom (where I was a contract analyst for product strategy). FT opened doors for an 'under the radar guy', like myself. Lots of small Bay Area companies wanted to work with this EU telecom giant, but the only survivor of the internet's halcyon days to visit the lab (while I was there) was Yahoo.

Anyhoo, when news of a round of anticipated layoffs started to surface, I wanted to collect some opinion from my small cadre of Yahoo contacts - not necessarily for a feature article on Yahoo buzz, but more for a perspective piece on the Valley's work culture. I'm fairly certain that most folks in the techbiz are aware that prior to the Microsoft take over news, and long before the layoff news, there was a fairly rigorous re-organization taking place at Yahoo that coincided roughly with the departure of Terry Semel. 

You may also recall the famous Peanut Butter letter by Brad Garlinghouse (a TechCrunch link here).  The Garlinghouse manifesto was an early warning of an impending internal shakeup. Within my network of Yahoos, folks who perform the daily work at ye olde Purple Giant, all were moved to new departments, placed under new managers, or bumped up or down a notch in perceived responsibilities. All of these salt-of-the-earth folk got a small (though by no means symbolic) pay raise.

Following here is a smattering of paraphrased narratives that I have collected with permission. As far as attribution, I was not able to secure the release of their identities, which is understandable in this climate of uncertainty. Perhaps, when the dust settles, said one, we can go on the record.

So, take these observations for what they are: thoughts and anxieties from the collective consciousness of Big Purple's mid-level ranks, as paraphrased by an amateur blogger.

It's a take on the culture of the valley we love and loathe so much:

Sacramento - the sacred place where no tech gets done.

Sacramento, the sacred, San Francisco, the profane. Or substitute Santa Clara, Mountain View, whatever.

Sacramento has few tech companies that you have heard of, anyway. That's because what goes in the valley, behind the funding, the side deals, the dirty deeds, is profane. Just like a David Lynch film title, town monikers such as Sunnyvale, conjure a veil of hidden evil. Sand Hill Road, envisions a den of vipers hiding in the obviously gritty substance.

The Bay Area will garner fame yet again for the redundant capital placed in YAVSS and YASN. Yet Another Video Sharing Site and Yet Another Social Network will be our legacy for this upcoming foul year of our lord 2008.

The vortex of financial woes in the larger economy, which thankfully shall not be repeated here, will extend inexorably toward the cherished technology forges of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area tech shops, crammed full of 'Silicon Valley Undertakers'; men and, increasingly women who have developed a serial reputation of raising, burning, and selling off half started technology properties, many of the last round, clones of YAVSS, and YASN.

So Sacramento may have an exalted name and no tech credentials, but the Silicon Valley is unholy altogether in it's capitalization practices of late.

It sometimes happens that vertical markets with proven business models in the old economy, primed to take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies that have languished in consumer ventures, are slapped down but good by those who should know better. These smaller, saner markets deserve a hearing, but are often shut out by the noise of the YAVSS and YASN. The unholy gatekeepers: the VC partners. The blood of the valley will ultimately be on their hands by way of closing every avenue to some of the sanest blue-collar mobile ventures.

And, no, I'm not just speaking of ThruDispatch, my errant venture. I'm speaking of tales of woe gleaned from entrepreneurs with much better credentials and curriculum vitae than myself.

This article shall be extended when I cool down.

White papers Posted on Automotive Industry Supply Chain

A White paper that generated some critical acclaim has been posted to the portfolio samples page of this blog. The paper is meant to be a layman's introduction to the EDI vs. XML issues of the 69 page Automotive Supply Chain monograph I completed for France Telecom. Although few folks would read this for pleasure, potential clients and /or future partners may like to review it as just another piece of my collateral.

This particular paper was singled out for recognition by several in-the-know types in the supply chain infrastructure enabling industry, especially the EDI over internet folks.

See it the small one here:

See the big report on EDI vs. XMl networks for the Automotive Industry Supply Chain here

Social Networks Await a Renaissance in Real Applications

Facebook is a good example of a technology seeking its mission critical use case; true, such systems extend the interaction model between people in the online world, but would we all be that much worse off without a Facebook profile? Thousands of almost useless or inconsequential Facebook apps and  extensions only serve to underline this revelation.

But, there is an entirely untapped, mission critical application space that could showcase social media engines: technical service  applications that foster interactions and mutual support among users of complex products ranging from consumer electronics to industrial and professional equipments.

Currently, high-end durable goods  enthusiasts  (take motor sports for example) use  typical text-based user forums to communicate with one another; this has been a great boon for folks like me, (a scooter enthusiast), who can post technical issues and observations among my forum members. The kind of forums that I frequent allows for a (fairly inelegant) posting of images, links, etc. There is also the typical conversation threading, some have tags, etc. This is where the depth of information and interactivity stop.

So much more could be done through a Facebook paradigm. Users of technical equipment, whether HD video technicians or motorcyclists, could potentially avail themselves of a much deeper, richer, and interactive collaborative experience.

What would such an add-on Facebook app look like for a motor sports enthusiast interaction model? Well, I'll throw some things off the cuff without even thinking it through, and  towards the end of this article, I will try and  extrapolate the  lesson for more mission critical technical product support services that might make use of these social media engines.

The Johnny Appleseed of Angel Investors

Regarding the recent Techcrunch interview with Paul Graham, Partner at Ycombinator, an early seed angel investor and incubator that is covered in the kiko.com video segment previously: I do plan on extending this article in somewhat more depth, but the following is just my answer to the vitriol poured on Paul Graham by folks in the Techcrunch article comments.

Picking apart the overarching selection model and track record of a seed funder as innovative as ycombinator is just......eechhh....I don't have a word for it.

You can state your opinion, I would never stop someone from stating their opinion, but I have one, too. We  need more Paul Grahams and Ycombinators.

Some of the longer and more pessimistic  comments regarding Mr. Graham exhibit a quality of transparent jealousy that I haven't seen in a while.

Providing mentorship and seed funding to small teams working directly on their own code and prototypes is a laudatory, Johnny Appleseed model for the community of angels placing direct equity into very early stage teams. Getting there teams to a fully realized product,  and driving on to further rounds of financing, however, will be celebrated by a subset of these fortunate seedlings.

A small direct investment in teams that do the work themselves, in an environment of innovation, is just like a greenhouse for great things of the next web.

I really get a kick out of the folks  who pooh pooh Paul Graham and Ycombinator - picking out each venture and flippantly disparaging each startup like a Monday morning quarterback. feh on you.

This is what we need - the freedom for small teams to get the rent paid, buy food and office supplies, hire that one other team member - and this is what Ycombinator does.

To make a short-term assessment of the track record of Mr. Graham and Ycombinator is to narrow the scope of the issue of technology incubation, and completely ignore the viability and wider dispersion of great ideas that are fostered in environments like Ycombinator.

It’s not the top 40, it’s not all about IPO’s. It IS however about successful products, services, teams, and companies; the longer view should take into account the legacy and genealogy of the entire startup portfolio of a given angel investor, and the intellectual capital that is spun off - no matter where it originated.

In the final analysis, whether Mr. Graham is an investor or philanthropist can only be revealed at the bottom line of his personal and corporate financial statements. Traditional Institutional Investors have a distinct calculus for their placements of equity - these funds in various instances might be called failed philanthropists.

My central point regarding the enumeration of the ycombinator portfolio’s win/loss ratio is that such a model, fostered by a visionary, wealthy, and thoughtful angel investor, lends a quality of ‘breathing space’, for the flourishing of ideas that might not have a chance if left to the wiles of the typical VC.

I don’t think there is one here that would disagree that acquisition is the penultimate goal of any technology based venture - that or sustainable growth over the long haul. However, I stand by my core premise that there are far too few like Paul Graham and Ycombinator.

 

One only has to walk down that tree-lined neighborhood in Cambridge MA,  walk through the doors of Paul's incredible incubator of ideas, and breath in, deeply, that aroma of new and potentially great things.

Here's to you, Paul Graham, here's to you.