Green Data Center Blog

Post #800, How are things going?

I needed to let someone know how many posts I had written, and realized this post is #800.  Which has created a small writing block as i think what it means to reach post #800.  Thinking on what to write about, I was recently asked the opening question “how are things going?” Quite well, having fun and learning a lot.

Next good question.  Given you worked for HP, Apple, and Microsoft which company did you learn the most from?

I worked at Microsoft for 14 years vs. 7 years at Apple, and 5 years at HP, so it is easy to say Microsoft given the length of time. But, that isn’t really the right answer. The most important thing I learned is an accumulation of the three companies, learning to think different ways.

HP, Apple, and Microsoft each have a different way it views its customers, develops its products, and measures success. You can argue which is right and wrong, but out of context almost every method can be proven wrong.

Apple was the brilliant one in marketing “think different” in 1997. But, i am taking a different take on this video than the marketing message of changing things.  The text used in the ad :

Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world,
Are the ones who do.

The one-minute commercial featured black and white video footage of significant historical people of the past, including (in order) Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon, R. Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog), Frank Lloyd Wright, and Picasso. The commercial ends with a young girl opening her closed eyes, as if to see the possibilities before her.

What all these people had was a view to integrated their actions.  It may have seem random and hard to understand, but over time their methods worked for their purpose.

Think From Different Views

The Green Martial Art - Aikido

I was just in the bay area for the week. One of the places and friends I always thing about when I am down there is my Aikido dojo (Aikido of San Jose), my training friends, and teachers. After coming back I decided to try and look up a bunch of Aikido friends online.

I like Aikido because it taught me a lot of things that have made a lasting impression and made great friends who think the same way.

A surprise discovery is my sensei, Jack Wada has this post 3 days ago while I was in SJ on the green martial art.

The Green Martial Art

We are trying a new marketing approach, that of aikido as the Green Martial Art. You may have seen it on some of our new literature and our new posters. For me green means environmentally safe, connected to the earth, preserving our planet in going ahead with advances in technology. It has become quite a catch word recently.

In the above picture taking the fall for Jack is a good friend Harry Concepcion.  Harry was my partner for my black belt test, and one of the best training partners.  Here is a picture of Harry demonstrating his throwing technique in his 4th degree (yon-dan) black belt test.

Another great teacher with a practical and spiritual approach is Peter Ralls.

Peter Ralls Sensei
Rokudan (6th degree black belt)

---

Born in 1959, Ralls Sensei began Aikido in 1975 at the age of 15, with Frank Doran Sensei at Stanford Aikido club, in Palo Alto, California. After receiving his Shodan (first-degree black belt) just before his nineteenth birthday, he moved to Tokyo, Japan to study Aikido at the world headquarters in Shinjuku ward. Peter remained in Tokyo for a year, practicing Aikido daily.

An interesting story Peter tells that opens your eye to how things can work is from the day Peter went to Tokyo to the day he left he was in pain every day.  Why was he in pain? Because, he was the cocky tall white boy gaijin who thought he knew Aikido with his black belt, and every day there was at least one person who would teach Peter there were new levels of pain as he was slammed, thrown, twisted and blocked. The good thing is Peter was 19, and could recover physically, but when he came back to SJ, he quit Aikido because he was mad and frustrated with one year of being beat up by little Japanese men and women.  After a year, Peter started to train again, and he discovered that his Aikido skills were now much better than most people.  All those painful hours of ukemi taught him how to work with energy.  There are multiple lessons in this story.

Peter has a good perspective on Aikido he shares in this discussion forum where Peter responds to the question here.

I started aikido when I was a teenager also, but it was along time ago, when doing both traditional martials arts, and spiritual practises were "cool".

Unfortunately it seems like that is not the case now. These days when I talk to people who think poorly of aikido, which tends to be people doing certain more competitive martial arts, I don't try to convince them of aikido's effectiveness. One, because I have used aikido in self defense situations, and I know it can work. Two, because I really don't care what they think about aikido. And three, because I'm not going to change their minds anyway.

So when they diss aikido to me, I simply tell them that I enjoy doing it and I get a lot out of it, and don't get in any debate about it's effectiveness as a martial art. I think that the thing to remember is that you are doing it because YOU like it.

The other thing you can do if you feel like it is cross train in some other martial arts that would allow you to be more effective in a sparring type situation. Aikido isn't really very good for sparring, it isn't designed for it.

Peter’s comments fit well with Sensei Wada’s blog entry.

Way before it became important and even trendy, we were helping people to recycle their own energy. When we are in our shoulders, head spinning, caught in a fight/flight/freeze response we are taught to settle, ground, and allow the energy that is there to flow through us. Its major reason for being is to help us deal with whatever is in front of us. This can be an attack or a technique in class, or a situation outside. When caught in something like gridlock, you get the energy to deal with that. Relax and settle with it. It can then have a meditative quality.

I use my Aikido mentally every day, and it works well to have green data center discussions. Understanding the energy from people and where there are attacks and defensive moves in concepts and conversations.

Now, as much as I like Aikido don’t think all dojos have teachers like Jack, Peter, and Harry, but if you are in the Bay Area try to check out these to judge how other dojos compare.

http://www.aikidosj.com/

http://www.suginamisf.com/index.html

If you think you know someone who has an interest in Aikido or a green martial art in the San Jose area, please forward on this post, as my old dojo is attempting to reach new members.

And you can help us by getting behind the concept. In the dojo we have new flyers and new schedules with the green concept. Feel free to take a poster to put up at a workplace, laundromat, bookstore, or coffee shop. There are posters on our display table as you enter the dojo.

For a video that gives you a movie version of Jack’s ideas see this one, his favorite comic book hero.

Insight to Blogging Brands, Exciting and Boring

Thanks to Deborah Grove, there was panel discussion at Uptime Institute with Rich Miller (datacenterknowledge), Kevin Heslin (Mission Critical), Matt Stansberry (Searchdatacenter) and me to discuss blogs and the environment.

We each have different approaches.  One thing I research is how blogs work to discuss ideas. I spent a long time being a technical evangelist which required lots of travelling and presentations.

Here is a blog post I found that has some interesting data.

Social Strategy for Exciting (and Boring) Brands

By Josh Bernoff

(From my Marketing News column.)

There are two kinds of brands in the world. If you are a marketer, you know what I mean. There are brands people like to talk about, and brands they don’t.

Brands of the first kind – the brands that marketing thinker Rohit Bhargava calls “talkable” – are uncommon. Apple’s iPhone is a talkable brand. So is Harley-Davidson. If you market a talkable brand, you have the luxury of tapping into customers who love you, but you’ll have to be careful – those customers have already decided what the brand stands for, and woe unto you if you go against their wishes.

Brands that people don’t like to talk about – I’ll call them “boring” brands – are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you’re really earning your living as a marketer. That’s because you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about.

I’ve been analyzing social strategies for both kinds of brands, and they form an interesting contrast.

Most of the data center vendors are boring brands. I was lucky to work at Apple and Microsoft two exciting brands.  I can’t think of a brand that people are excited the way they are about their ipod, iphone, and macs.

The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. [Forrester Report: "Social Technology Strategies for 'Boring' Consumer Brands".] The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won’t talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.

So, what do you do?

Applications that talk about customers problems create “borrowed relevance,” since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. American Express (credit cards are boring, face it) created the Members’ Project, a contest to choose deserving charities, since it realized that charity would generate more passion than credit cards. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn’t talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.

Borrowed relevance is a versatile strategy. Liberty Mutual (in another boring category, insurance) wrapped itself in relevance by creating The Responsibility Project, a community about moral decisions. Johnson & Johnson built a Facebook page for mothers of ADHD kids – because, as with all medications, its ADHD drug is boring but its sufferers generate interesting problems. Doritos invited its customers to make ads in the 2007 Superbowl, since an ad contest is more exciting – and more social – than a corn chip.

and  why?

If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it’s boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they’re about to become some of your most important corporate assets.

Two Great People Who Saw the Vision for Green IT Publishing

I’ve had the pleasure of leveraging two great people at TechNet Magazine, Joshua Hoffman, ex-editor in chief and Matthew Graven, ex -senior editor to publish on green IT and data centers.  I use the term “ex-“ because both of these people were hit in latest rounds of cuts at Microsoft as Microsoft shut down the TechNet staff in the NY office.

Joshua and Matthew were both helpful in crafting content that would work for the IT pro audience and providing valuable input as I tried to write content that would make sense and resonate with their audience of IT pros. It was a huge difference to have people who cared about the Green IT topic and think about what to publish vs. most of the vendor sponsored content published in other areas.

I’ll miss the brainstorming of new content as i would throw out many ideas, and Joshua and Matthew would help prioritize.

If you aren’t familiar with TechNet Magazine here is the site with 480,000 unique visitors per month.

Why would Microsoft shut down the NY TechNet Staff?  Probably because they want to outsource the work and reduce costs.

But, I think Microsoft just gave up being the leader of the Windows IT pro tribe.  For an explanation of the tribe, see this blog post by Seth Godin.

Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn't an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

And of course, since this is so important, product development and manufacturing and the CFO work for the tribal manager. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe.

Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe. Jerry Garcia understood this. Do you?

If you look at TechNet mag as a traditional publication it is expensive.  If you look at as leader of a tribe of 480,000 IT pros, how much is that worth?

If anyone is looking for people who know how to publish to the technical audience, send me e-mail and I can connect you with Joshua and Matthew.

Left Microsoft 3 years ago, and not looking back

Today is May 1, 2009, and 3 years ago after 14 years at Microsoft I decided it was time to leave.  Having spent my whole working career at big companies (HP 5 yrs and Apple 7yrs), it was a big leap to be on my own.

But after 3 years I don’t regret the move at all.  I still keep in touch with many Microsoft people who are working on Green IT/Data Centers, and have met many more people who want to solve sustainability IT problems.  In 15 min, I have a series of conference calls with a construction company and then intel to discuss its Data Center Efficiency Challenge.

The weather is nice today in Seattle, and I am going to work my dock for as long as the laptop battery will last. Wifi to my house gives me high speed internet, so I can even write this blog entry.  The only problem I have is if a sea plane takes off, and I won’t be able to talk on my cel phone.

I am lucky to talk and work with some of the brightest people in the industry who want to build and operate green data centers.

And, my blog are my notes for what I discover and part of my research on topics.

Thanks for reading my blog.

-Dave Ohara

Story behind a Viral Font, Comic Sans

WSJ has a front page article about the typeface Comic Sans.  I can give you an interesting insider story on this as I worked in this group at Microsoft and can provide some history.

Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will

By EMILY STEEL

Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.

Vincent Connare

Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer.

The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: "Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, 'We don't serve your type.'" On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.

There is a Ban Comic Sans movement, but from the moment Vinnie produced Comic Sans it surprised us how viral the typeface was.

The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: "to eradicate this font" and the "evil of typographical ignorance."

"If you love it, you don't know much about typography," Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, "if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."

To start let me give you some background that few know and I haven’t written about. From my first days at Apple in 1985 I was picky about using the right typefaces and eliminating font substitution when printing.  Few knew that Helvetica was the sans serif font and Times Roman was the serif font. Through my years at Apple, I worked with people on the LaserWriter team, Adobe, and the pain of Adobe Type Manager with Type 1 typefaces.  TrueType was created by Apple, and I had the pleasure of working with some passionate type technology developers like Mike Reed, Sampo Kaasila, Richard Becker, and Bryan Ressler. Eventually I got a job where my specialty was the Asian TrueType fonts.  In 1992, I made the switch to Microsoft to be the program manager for Win3.1 Asian TrueType fonts, working on all the Asian fonts.

When I was group program manager for TrueType fonts, I drove the Verdana project, and I’ll tell the insider story to that one in another post (it is much more complicated to tell).  But, bottom line after Verdana it was no longer a business model of take traditional lead typefaces like Times New Roman, Palatino, and Arial digitize them into TrueType fonts.  Microsoft could start from scratch and build fonts that Microsoft owned all copyright and trademarks.

The proliferation of Comic Sans is something of a fluke. In 1994, Mr. Connare was working on a team at Microsoft creating software that consumers eventually would use on home PCs. His designer's sensibilities were shocked, he says, when, one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.

But, then it truly became viral when it was included with Windows.

A product manager recognized the font's appeal and included it as a standard typeface in the operating system for Microsoft Windows. As home computers became widespread, Comic Sans took on a goofy life of its own.

Now this doesn’t have anything to do with green data centers, but it does help tell the story of what I enjoy doing.  I like figuring out problems and coming up with new ways to approach solutions.  In typefaces, breaking the barriers of traditional font development allowed creative new typefaces to be developed like Comic Sans. I paid the price as I pissed off the people who owned the historical method of typeface development whose plan was to digitize 1,000s of historical typefaces.  What could piss them off more than the popularity of Comic Sans vs. Palatino? And as a result, I  was asked to leave the Truetype group, and in hindsight it was one of the best moves I made to leave type behind.

Which reminds me of a good lesson I learned from the Executive in charge of the Macintosh II development. To ship difficult projects you have to be willing to piss people off.

The good thing is Vinnie didn’t mind upsetting a few people creating Comic Sans.

Are you ready to upset a few people as you green your data center?

7 year old vs. Thomas Friedman, Inspiring a Green Revolution

At the Uptime Institute, Thomas L. Friedman presented his ideas from his latest book “Hot, Flat, and Crowded – why we need a green revolution – and how it can renew America .”  it was impressive to have Friedman speak. Curious I decided to look up what Friedman’s speaking fees are.

Friedman has built a comfortable life, even leaving aside his wife’s family fortune. His speaking fee recently passed $50,000; with his Times salary, syndication rights, and royalties from his bestselling books, his annual income easily reaches seven figures.

Listening to Friedman’s talk was in some ways depressing, trying to inspire people to take action to do the right thing for the environment.

Here is a video you can view to give you an idea on what Friedman presented.

Leaving the conference, I ran into Olivier Sanche who I had blogged about at the Google data center event. We were chatting and he was short on time as he needed to meet his family.  Olivier asked if I wanted to meet his daughter, Emilie Sanche.  Why would Olivier want me to meet his daughter? Because I was the one who helped tell the story of how Olivier’s daughter was worried about global warming and the polar bears were going to drown.

One of the questions for the panel members was on subject of green and sustainability.

Ken Brill gave a practical view of show me the money. Green is overhyped and a clear ROI needs to be established for projects.

Olivier Sanche starts by telling the story of his child telling him how the polar bears are drowning, then he thinks he is potentially building a data center that will have a bigger impact to global warming than any other action he has as an individual.  Olivier tells his team we need to do the right thing, and how we impact the environment is part of the equation.

I have 7 year old daughter as well, and quite frankly thinking about my children’s future is a big inspiration to do the right thing.

I had great conversations with Google and Microsoft engineers who get the whole idea of taking risks to be environmentally sensitive in data center design and operation.  Financially all the ideas may not pay out, but taking risks to be innovative in sustainability is worth it in the long run.

So at the end of the day was I more inspired by a Pulitzer winning author or a 7 year old who is proud of her dad’s efforts?

Emilie it was a pleasure to meet you, and keep on prodding your dad to do the right thing.  

Visiting Apple Computer, What is Their Secret to Developing Great Products?

Last week I was able to catch up with three great friends who I worked with at Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL).  It has been 17 years since I left, and it felt like a surrealistic dream sitting in the cafeteria watching thousands of people going through, recognizing a few here and there, but after 17 years there were few familiar faces.

At one point in our conversation, one friend said Apple needs a person like Steve Jobs, because it needs a Dictator. I agreed, but offered a better description.  What Apple needs is a Chief Showman, and Jobs fills that role well. We continued the conversation that almost all product development is done in Cupertino as people need to be close to Jobs to show their progress. The only product development outside the area is international localization. While almost all high tech companies have shifted development outside the US, Apple is alone focusing development in the US surrounding its corporate campus. Working in small development teams to drive innovation.

But, that is not the secret.

When Steve Jobs was pushed out in 1985, John Sculley had his phase. Then Sculley was pushed out and Michael Spindler had his stint, and was pushed out. Then Ellen Hancock and Gil Amelio. This last phase was some of the darkest days of Apple with losses and low stock price.  Ellen Hancock brought in the IBM mindset. In 1997, Apple purchased NeXT, and Steve Jobs was able orchestrate the removal of Gil and Ellen.

Recognize a pattern? Apple went through a series of managers that was focused on a Top Down Management approach as sited in one of the wikipedia posts above.

In 2007, Jobs summed up his predecessor's tenure with a quote that he attributed to Amelio:

"Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, and my job is to point the ship in the right direction"

Apple was able to reject the cancerous growth of clueless management who knew little about developing great product products like the Apple II and Mac.  It started with John Sculley, then the cancer grew with Michael Spindler, and became life threatening with Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock. Upper and Middle management was in a “careerism” mode.

Careerism is the overwhelming desire or urge to advance one's own career or social status, usually at the expense of other personal interests or social growth.^{[citation needed]}

Careerism is not simply the desire to succeed.^{[citation needed]} In the work place, careerist individuals are often seen as conniving workers who will stop at nothing to succeed.^{[citation needed]}

Apple was in danger of going out of business, and Microsoft was hovering with the success of Windows 95 to squash the Mac. Steve Jobs was able to cut the cancer off and remove it from Apple’s culture.  It took a while to recover, but Apple has had steady growth since 1997.

For the good of industry we can hope Steve Jobs recovers from his latest illness.  He has shown a different way of developing products that beats all the rest of the industry.  Apple has beat back Microsoft and the PC industry, the audio/video players, and gone from nowhere to be “the phone”.  Apple is competing against the broadest range of technology companies and winning consistently.

I’ve had the pleasure of being at Apple for 7 years and working at Microsoft for 14 years watched it as an outsider, yet having insights to how Microsoft has tried to compete against Apple.

Apple’s secret is it is a cancer survivor, rejecting a way that doomed its existence.

Over 600 RSS Subscribers for GreenM3

Yippee, I just hit 605 RSS subscribers.

I’ve been a little slow with my writing, over the last few months, but I have a bunch more coming as I am now researching many more topics in the New Year.

I don’t have the exponential growth of some sites, but I like the slow and steady, sustainable method anyway.

Nice Holiday Greeting Card

Just received a nice Green Holiday card from my friends at Jack Morton.