As I work here on my laptop I have a bunch of apps open but they are idle, not opened since yesterday:  a word processors, spreadsheets, two email clients, two web browsers with 34+ tabs full of html, java, and flash.  Today all I’m using today TextEdit (writing this blog post) and iTunes (currently playing some Rodrigo Y Gabriela), and I’m reminded of something Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, said – “Most modern user-applications are over-served by Moore’s Law.”  What he means is that getting yourself more memory and a faster processor isn’t going to make iTunes play your songs any differently or your email tool do something interesting while waiting for your slow fingers to type the next character in your sentence.

Frankly, the work I do most of the time (reading email, reading web pages, creating word documents and spreadsheets, listening to iTunes) would be perfectly well served by my 7 year-old PowerBook G4 (and it was way back then).  What annoys me is that I’m running on a modern 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, by all rights a screaming machine, and my computer is doing NOTHING right now, yet the system is running at 64% of max!

Faster processors and larger memory have made software developers LAZY BASTARDS!  They write big fat bloated apps that have memory leaks galore.  My modern machine easily has 8x the processing power and 4x the memory of my old laptop, and that lets me run more apps at once, but not too many more because while “idle” they continue to suck up more and more resources.

The only truly “active” app on the list is iTunes, in 5th place and using only 3.2% of 1 CPU.  Safari, which I haven’t touched in 2 hours is choking up 97% of 1 CPU.  WTF?!

Dear programmers of the world… Being “green” shouldn’t just be about recycling your soda bottles and writing software to run the smart grid, it should be about not wasting ANY resources, including the “free” ones like the unused memory and CPU cycles on my laptop.  I could argue that efficient, clean code would consume less CPU, meaning less power consumption, saving battery life, which in turn means less electricity is used charging the laptop, but it shouldn’t just be about that.   You should be embarrassed that your app runs amuck and requires your customers to restart it (or worse, reboot the whole machine) periodically to clean up after you.

Imagine if other objects in your life worked like that.  Suppose that if you left appliances on for more than a week they began to consume more and more resources (electricity), after two weeks your refrigerator might be sucking up 80% of the entire capacity of the wires coming to your home, the toaster would be getting hot even though you haven’t used it since last Tuesday’s breakfast, pretty soon you’d have to go unplug your devices, or even trip the main breaker to reset everything and get your electricity usage back down to the tiny percentage of resource utilization that is warranted by idle devices.  You wouldn’t tolerate that!  Nor should you of your software!

Moore’s law doesn’t give you carte blanche to write sloppy code.

My dream is of a day when I can get away with a cheaper, lower-power laptop because there just isn’t anything I need it to do that warrants a more powerful device.  As my freshmen comp-sci professor used to say “All computers wait at the same speed.”   Frankly my typing just isn’t fast enough to wear out a dual core 2 GHz box, even with a little flamenco music on the side.

And the 8th deadly sin is… PIZZA!

How The Fat Kid Became Cool

No, I’m not talking about Jared I’m talking about the iPhone.

Nearly 2 years ago now I met @thinguy on Twitter.  He was a fellow Sun employee and I soon learned of the double-entendre of his handle – he his a health conscious man working to keep himself fit (and keep those moobs off!), but he’s also an engineer on Sun’s awesome thin-client desktop – SunRay.

Years ago Sun’s then CEO, Scott McNealy proclaimed that Thin was In.  He foresaw a day when the PC would fade away and we’d return to the way computing started – big servers accessed by “dumb” terminals.   Sun built a modern thin-client that could handle today’s video and audio demands but all the heavy-lifting is done on big backend servers over a high speed network.  Login credentials are carried on a smart card (something you have) and paired with your password (something you know) – giving strong two factor authentication.  Your state is saved on the servers and you can unplug your SunRay card from one machine, walk across the campus or fly across the country (or world for that matter), plug into any other SunRay and poof, there’s your session just as you left it.  FANTASTIC.

Now it’s not perfect mind you, but it’s a great vision and a product line that gets stronger by the year.  It’s a great solution for governments, schools, libraries, and the like, but it was darn slick at a Fortune 500 company too.

Honestly I think computing is swinging towards Scott’s vision.  Cloud computing is gaining ground.  Some of the best (or at least most popular) apps out there aren’t installed on your desktop, rather they run on the web (Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Mint, Hulu ) and in many cases even your data doesn’t reside on your machine (Flickr, YouTube, GoogleDocs, blip.tv).   These compute engines, apps, and data stores mean that your machine can be simpler and simpler – the popularity of teeny-tiny “Netbooks” is proof of that…

But at the same time that computers are getting thinner and thinner something odd is happening in the cell phone space.  Sun’s current CEO is fond of saying (and he’s right) that more people will experience the Internet via their phone than via a computer.  With each passing day that becomes a stronger reality.  Cell phones are cheap, small, portable, don’t require tethered electricity nor a complex wi-fi infrastructure.  They too can do chat, email, photos, music, and video, and with web access they make a suitable substitute for the computer.  Up to now most phones were built with a simple OS and lightweight apps, often written in Java.  Content providers often made stripped down light-weight versions of their sites for mobile devices, the so called m-dot sites (m.cnn.com) Then came the iPhone.

Apple changed everything with the iPhone.  They produced a beautiful, cool, and feature filled device.  It provides a great user experience and it’s sex appeal made it THE device to have.  Then Apple released their developer kit and introduced the iTunes App Store – they used the success of the iTunes model to monetize applications and people are writing and buying them by the thousands!  Now the phone has a big fat complex OS and people are filling their phones with stand-alone apps, installed locally on the device.  People aren’t using m.websites, instead they are using Twitter apps, Ebay apps, Amazon apps, there’s an iPhone app for everything, EVERYTHING.

Apple’s iPhone is a fat little bastard (I mean that in the most endearing sense of the word!) and he’s the darling of the world.  Fat is cool baby, Fat is where it’s at!  And as more and more people rush to join the iPhone app gold-rush he will just keep getting fatter.  (And watch for his little fat buddy: Palm Pre)

But what of my skinny little phone?  My thin OS and m.twitter.com experience?  My “you can’t view nhl.com cuz you haz no flash”?  My “I can’t buy you a mother’s day gift cuz my phone don’t go there”?  I’m sooooo not cool and I’ll never get another date with this thin phone weighing me down.  If thin is in for the desktop, why not take the Web2.0 meme to the mobile space?  m.websites don’t need to suck, make ‘em cool, make ‘em slick, make ‘em work with my lean OS.  Trouble is, the cheese has moved for the phone space and Thin is NOT where it’s at.  As SIR-MIX-A-LOT knows, even white boys got to shout iPhone got back!

]]> http://brianherman.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/how-the-fat-kid-became-cool/feed/ 2 Brian http://brianherman.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/my-sun-set/ http://brianherman.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/my-sun-set/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 04:21:16 +0000 brianherman http://brianherman.wordpress.com/?p=174 ]]>

A few people (well more than a few) have been asking me what prompted me to leave Sun and Colorado for a new job in a new city.

I’ve always been a Sun guy, in fact I took a pay cut to join the company 8 years ago.  I love their products, I love their innovation, I love their culture, and I especially love their commitment to doing the right thing.  I had a great career at Sun and it was hard to leave that all behind but there’s something special in this job at Amazon that I couldn’t resist.

At a high level, I’m a program manager (which is an uppity way of saying I’m a project manager with a big scope).  And while I have great passion for Project Management that alone wasn’t enough to lure me, after-all I was one of the leaders of project management in Sun IT.  It’s what I get to program manage that’s so awesome.

About 2 years ago I began hearing a buzz about “Web 2.0″ and “social media” – this was new to me and I began poking around the space to see what it was about.  What I learned was that the social/community aspects of these so called “social media” tools were really about taking the static “go-read-a-web-page” experience into an interactive place where you gain value not just from the content the provider puts out but from what the community builds around it. 

I’ve played with blogging and micro-blogging, wikis and twikis, document repositories and collaboration tools of all kinds all with an eye toward helping PMs manage their projects and teams.   As I shared my thoughts with the PMs in Sun IT I found the usual bell curve of reactions from the team:  from enthusiastic to interested to skeptical to “why the heck would anyone do that?!!” 

Interestingly those reactions were more varied tool to tool than they were person to person.  It wasn’t that Bobby loved the tools and Sally hated them, it was that some of the folks who couldn’t see the point of micro-blogging got totally into wikis and some of the people who loved micro-blogging didn’t see the value in a more traditional blog.  The lesson to me is that social-media isn’t a single tool, single type of communication, or even a single idea.  The whole point, like the content itself, is that social-media is whatever you WANT it to be.

So… what’s the job then?   I’m responsible for knowledge management and social media programs for Amazon’s technology workers!  What was a hobby area for me at Sun, a place where I played with new ideas and how they fit in with project management, is now my day job!  I will be running projects to deliver those tools, and more importantly, the communities around them for Amazon’s employees.

I’ll explain more about what “knowledge management and social media” mean in the coming weeks but for now I need to get back into the routine of blogging.  I wouldn’t be much of a leader if I said “hey Amazon, you should be blogging” if I wasn’t doing it myself! My posts might be spotty for a while as I get established in a new job and a new city, and I’ll be busy getting my family ready to move here too, but I’ll be writing more as time goes on, thanks for sticking with me!

In the last several weeks we’ve heard plenty about the Big-3 US automakers, how they are failing, and why they think they need government bailout monies.  There have been some well thought out articles detailing why we should let them fail, arguing that only through the protections of bankruptcy law can they truly get out from under the burdens that have made them fail.  

Jack and Suzy Welch’s thoughts are good, but I think former POTUS candidate Mitt Romney really nails it in his assessment for the New York Times

I love this section from Mitt, and the last sentence in particular.  That’s everything that’s RIGHT about Sun over the last 5 years:

Investments must be made for the future. No more focus on quarterly earnings or the kind of short-term stock appreciation that means quick riches for executives with options. Manage with an eye on cash flow, balance sheets and long-term appreciation. Invest in truly competitive products and innovative technologies — especially fuel-saving designs — that may not arrive for years. Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.

Sun has done the right thing here and just need it to start paying off!  We have such great products now, way ahead of our competitors who didn’t invest in R&D after the dot-com bubble burst.  This is our time.  I just hope our Volume Drives Value, community based strategy catches on before it’s too late!

Go Sun Go!

Yesterday I attended the CSIA DEMOgala in Denver and I had the opportunity to see our strategy around open-source and building community in action.   I was talking with the development team at BrightKite – they have a pretty interesting take on social networking – a Twitter-like service that is focused on your physical location, helping you meet new people “in the real world”.

At one point one of the developers looked at my name tag and said “Hey, you’re with Sun?!  We’re using your Startup Essentials and Try and Buy programs!”   We had a great conversation about how Sun is helping them get up and going and how we can continue to help them grow in the future.  Being a group of young entrepreneurs, they are long on talent and ideas but short on cash, so Sun’s programs make it possible for them to do things they couldn’t otherwise do without VC cash.  It was really fun and rewarding to see our strategy in action.  The developers were really excited about it and about Sun – so cool to see it working!  

I also had the chance to talk to Hal Stern, one of the keynote presenters – Hal told me about a $2M per quarter (read recurring revenue) deal that we just closed – he said it took us 2 years to bring the deal to fruition and that it all started with a try and buy.  Awesome!  At the end of the conversation he told me “get out there and SELL!”    He’s right, we all have a part to play in helping Sun grow.

Downloads lead to registrations.  Registrations lead to sales calls.  Calls lead to sales.  Sales lead to long term customers.  The funnel narrows from millions to thousands to hundreds but at each point we have an opportunity to make a lasting impression, to build a relationship, and to help someone realize their own dreams using Sun’s technology.  Maybe 1 in 1,000,000 becomes a huge account – that’s not a bad thing, that’s a GOOD thing!  Without capturing that customer way back when they were starting out, we’d have missed out on the next Google, Facebook, or SalesForce.com.

I, like many at Sun, understand that strategy and believe it can work, but seeing it in action – seeing the eyes of a developer light up when talks about Sun – makes it real.  There’s nothing like a personal connection to turn theory into reality.  

Volume Drives Value!

In the mean time, I’m gonna go play with BriteKite and see if I can become an early drop in the rainstorm they hope will come!   Good luck you guys!

Is Google your next data center? (link)

An interesting read talking about what Google, Amazon, and others are doing in a move beyond SaaS (from the likes of Salseforce.com).  Sun’s own John Dutra is quoted many times talking about how Sun IT sees the role of the CIO and IT changing, but sadly mentions very little about Sun’s own $1/cpu/hr and $1/10GB/month programs that were available 2-3 years ago already.  Network.com is our wave of the future in this space but the article scarcely gives it a nod.  I’m wishing John had talked more about (or at least been quoted more about) those offerings than how Sun IT sees the future for everyone else.

But I think the question isn’t “is Google your next data center?” but rather “is your cellphone your next computer?”  Scott McNealy has been talking about grid-computing, cloud-computing, whatever you want to call it, for years and years… he called it “net-tone”, which was the worst name ever (no wonder it didn’t catch on).  His point was that computing should be a utility, like your phone.  You never think about it, you just pick it up and expect dial-tone every single time.  Why should we own our own and operate compute infrastructure?  In the old days companies had their own electric power plans, then that became a utility.  Companies too had their own phone infrastructure, then that became a utility.  We don’t build and operate our own, we just use the utility.  Computing is going that way, but it’s not IT and big-business that’s driving it – it is you and your parents and your kids, using cell phones.  

More and more people experience the Internet every day via their phone.  They text, they email, they send pictures, they listen to music, they read news, they check scores, they watch videos.  The cell phone is just a tiny mobile monitor and keyboard, but the majority of the computing goes on somewhere else – it’s a utility.    Thin (client) is in!

Today I shared half a dozen photos of the tree-removal process going on at my house.

Ailing trees

Tree removal underway

I took the photos on my phone, uploaded them over the cell network onto Twitter’s twitpic service.  Friends and followers all over the world got to see what was going on at my house.  Not because “my back office is someone else’s front office” but rather, because my phone *is* my computer – it’s my gateway to the world.

Over the past few weeks I’ve chronicled our move to a new home, subsequent redecorating, and even Freddy’s wedding this way.  My home computer is still in a box, along with the cables and bits that I need to get photos off my camera.  But I didn’t need all that stuff to be able to share what’s going on. All I needed was my phone (and someone else’s compute services).

Too bad it’s just a lowly RAZR2 and not a sexy iPhone!

Excellent news:  Gartner grades Sun as Overall Positive in a recent report – http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/sunmicrosystems/article3/article3.html

Highlights from the Vendor Rating:

What You Need to Know - Sun Microsystems customers should feel more comfortable with their infrastructures than they have since 2001, because of the company’s improved market and financial position. The past year represents an important turning point in Sun’s ambition to be known as an open-source company.

On Sun’s overall strategy: “Sun is betting on delivering volume-based solutions that will increase its market presence and developer “mind share,” and set the stage for next-generation deployments for which it and its partners will be the primary contributors. Sun’s business model is more forward-thinking than many of its competitors, but not without risk. Converting free-of-charge software downloads, especially Solaris, into an ongoing revenue stream has proved challenging. Gartner believes that Sun’s forward-looking strategy is appropriate and can be a major competitive differentiator.”

On executive leadership: “Sun continues to strengthen its organization. Its executive management team is stable, strong and comfortable working together. With the acquisition of MySQL, it added to its strategic executive team strengths and has filled key executive positions in global sales and services, and green IT responsibility to complement a strong technical competency in hardware and software.”

On CMT (Strong Positive): “Sun has pioneered the market for dense, multicore processor designs, which it refers to as “chip multithreading” (CMT). Its T1000 and T2000 servers, utilizing the Niagara 1 processor, have significantly increased Sun’s penetration of the 1- to 2-socket server market (approximately a $1 billion business). Niagara 2 has been introduced, and a continuation of the road map through 2009 is assured with its next-generation family, called Victoria Falls, which was introduced earlier this year… Sun receives a strong positive rating in this category due to the product’s forward-looking design and philosophy, strong throughput, and reduced space and power consumption.”

On Solaris (Strong Positive): “Solaris remains at the center of Sun’s hardware strategy. With all of Sun’s server and client platforms running Solaris, the operating system continues to hold its market share lead in the Unix market. Sun is conscious of the threat that Linux poses to Unix, and the Sun approach is to enable ever-better Linux coexistence, so that Solaris effectively will become a better Linux than Linux is itself.”

on Identity and Access Management (Strong Positive): Through the integration of several acquisitions from 2003 through 2007, Sun has created an identity and access management (IAM) portfolio that provides enterprises with a relatively effective answer to their IAM requirements. Sun Java System Identity Manager and Access Manager products are considered leaders in the IAM market.

I’m very proud to see Sun Microsystems Inc. ranked #14 in Computer World’s survey of the 100 BEST PLACES TO WORK IN IT 2008.   Though I’m disappointed in the brief write-up, which is focused on how “green” we are due to our “open work” program.   Open work (aka “work from home” or “remote work”) is a fantastic benefit at Sun, there is no doubt of that.  For years we at Sun have been able to work from anywhere, anytime with full access to the exact same tools we would have in the office.  All we need is a telephone and Internet access, and if you’re clever you can do without the telephone.  The whole process is so seamless and the technology so solid that my employees, bosses, and customers can’t tell (and don’t need to know) where I’m located on any given day.  I could be 50 meters down the hall, at my house, or in the waiting area of my Mini dealer (I’ve done it before) and no one knows or cares.  My relatives marvel at this, but when your employees are scattered around the globe and the computers are in datacenters in Singapore and England and around the US, what does it matter where you sit to type at a keyboard?  (Hint: It doesn’t!)

So yeah, it saves me drive time (meaning Sun just gets more work out of me in a given day) and it’s good for the environment, and it saves the company money not having real-estate costs for all of us.  And yeah, I’m a HUGE fan.  In fact it would be hard for another company to lure me away unless they could match that benefit.  BUT… is that really why Sun is among the greatest places to work in IT?!!!?   Really?!!!  (Hint: NO WAY!)

There are dozens of things that make Sun IT fantastic.  I could talk about our technology, the type of work we do, the culture, the ethics and values, and the way we’re empowered as employees, but what is truly great about Sun IT is the people!  

Our CIO has real vision, he understands how IT is fundamentally changing and he’s making sure we’re ready to respond.  And he gets that IT is all about people and that leadership is what unites them.  (Shameless sucking-up by me at review time… Bob, how am doing so far?)

Our IT leadership from the VPs down to the line managers want to grow our employees and their capabilities.  They strive to lead by example and to live our core values.

The employees I work with on a day to day basis are simply amazing.  Sure there are the few odd under-achievers and political creatures, but you’ll find them everywhere.  An overwhelming majority of the employees are in it for the right reasons, helping Sun succeed and doing so ethically and courageously.  

There are those employees who leave Sun for what appear to be better opportunities or healthier (richer) companies but after a while they start looking to come back.  We have an affectionate term for them:  Boomerangs.  They don’t come back for the money or the health care plan or even the open-work program.  They come back for the people.

(The opinions expressed here are my own and my not necessarily represent those of my employer).