A perspective from Tim Bray on Google Android, and tips for the blogger

Tim Bray made the switch to the Google Android team a year ago and writes two interesting posts.

One is his one year on the Google Android Team and share what is good and a problem.

What’s Good · Android, more than anything. A year spent in intimate contact with its coalface hasn’t shaken my feeling that most things about the system are mostly right. As I’ve already said in this space, I’ve never met a more accomplished engineering group; it’s a privilege to be associated with them.

…

What’s a Problem · Being a remote worker, mostly. It’s just not a part of Google culture, and the Android project is particularly centralized. If you’re not spending a lot of time in that building with the dessert sculptures in front, it’s extra-difficult to be in the loops that matter; they’re not unwelcoming, they’re just super-busy.

What was even more interesting was Tim’s “things about blogging.”  Here are three tips.  Visit his post to see the complete list.  Good stuff to think about.

In preparation for the event, I thought I’d jot down some helpful tips and tricks, and in no time at all I had more than twenty. I ran through them real fast in the hope of provoking some conversation — it worked — and got a laugh by saying “I guess I should write these up in a blog post”. Well, then.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been blogging since February 2003 and have written over a million words in this space, it’s been a boost for my career and my life, and I flatter myself that I’ve been involved in some conversations that mattered.

  1. Blogging is Healthy · It’s no longer the white-hot center of controversy it was in 2005; now it’s part of the establishment, and if you look at the numbers from the popular platform providers like WordPress and Blogger, still growing quite nicely thank you.
  2. Freshness Matters · When you don’t update a blog, it gets stale fast. The natural tendency of the human mind to favor what’s fresh is reinforced by search engines leaning the same way.
  3. Write For Yourself · Don’t try to guess what people want to read; you’re the only person whose interests you really understand. In particular, don’t thrash around trying to appeal to a larger audience; the only surefire way is pictures of celebrity breasts, and the world already has enough.

4 letters for Cloud Computing - OSSM On-demand, Self-serving, Scalable, Measurable

What is the cloud computing?  How about 4 letters?  OSSM.

On-Demand

Self-Serving

Scalable

Measurable

I’ve been getting the scoop on cool stuff at SXSW from Silent Partner’s Kevin Francis and one of his conversations is with CloudCamp’s Dave Nielsen who has been explaining the cloud as OSSM (“awesome”)

Cloud Computing is OSSM ("Awesome")

Dave Nielsen of CloudCamp says the 4 essential characteristics of Cloud Computing are: On-demand (service is setup before customer asks for it), Self-service (customer decides when to turn on & off, Scalable (can handle increase and decreased usage) & Measurable (so you know how much you are using).

What is the opposite?

Get in line

Wait for service

Over provision to scale

Trust someone else to measure when convenient for them.

The opposite sounds like legacy IT.

OSSM works for me.  How about you?

Happy St Patrick’s Day a good day to wear Green, and another day when an apostrophe will be put in Ohara

Today is a day when many try to wear green.   My kids all looked for green to wear as they were told if you don’t wear green you can get pinched on St. Patrick’s Day.

Many people, regardless of ethnic background, wear green clothing and items. Traditionally, those who are caught not wearing green are pinched affectionately.

Today is also a day that reminds me of funny stories when people think Dave Ohara is Dave O’Hara.  Ohara is a Japanese name.   O’Hara is Irish.

I have had so many people think I am Irish when seeing my name.  I was hired at HP for my first job over the phone for a summer job and my hiring manager thought I was Irish.  I changed groups at Apple, and a person in the new group was in Japan and tried to convince the people at Mitsubishi and Hitachi that I was Irish and O’Hara is a common name in the US. 

If you look in Google Person Finder for the Japan, there are multiple Oharas listed.


My grandparents all left Japan in 1930s so I have no close relatives in Japan now.  And Luckily, my grandparents left Hiroshima which had its own nuclear disaster.

Are Tablets a longer term threat to Smart Phones than Laptops?

My AT&T bill just finished a billing cycle, I used 650 minutes total on my cell phone plan and 500 MB of data.  Most of my data access is on wifi.  Do I really need a smartphone?  Or will my future Motorola Xoom make the smartphone obsolete?  Some people are addicted to be connected all the time, but is it better to have a dumb cell phone and be connected with a Tablet when you want to?

Businessweek has an article exactly on this idea.

Size Matters: Tablets vs. Smartphones

When consumers weigh buying a tablet, a smartphone, and a basic, no-frills phone for calling, the smartphone looks expendable, contends analyst Eric Chan

By Eric Chan

STORY TOOLS

Smartphones are the products most at risk of cannibalization in the rising tide of tablet sales—not laptops, as some industry analysts are predicting.

Current forecasts for the 'tablet effect' are shortsighted and fail to consider the long-term implications that this phenomenon will have on the mobile electronics industry. While tablets are likely to crimp laptop and netbook sales for the first year or so—until consumers fully understand what a tablet is—the long-term trend is different. Laptop sales will bounce back. Smartphone sales will drop. This long-term trend should be clear just by looking at user surveys, product evolution, the redundancy factor, and basic economics.

Eric Chan sees the change in the younger audience.

I specifically see smartphone sales falling among consumers in the 13-17 and 18-24 year old markets. Young consumers will start buying down on their phones, opting to buy a tablet plus a feature phone, rather than the expensive redundancy of a smartphone and a tablet, or the limited features of just a smartphone. These age groups are particularly vulnerable because they are already adopting tablets and e-readers as book replacements. Changing readership habits provides a strong incentive for moving to a tablet device; these demographics' smaller budgets will necessitate a buy-down on the phone. In the 25-34 market, consumers will still use smartphones when employers provide them. Left to their own devices, a significant proportion will opt instead for a tablet, plus a basic phone.

Businessweek says Cloud Tech Titans are Amazon, Google, & Microsoft

Businessweek has a cover story on the cloud titans.

The Cloud: Battle of the Tech Titans

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are going up against traditional infrastructure makers like IBM and HP as businesses move their most important work to cloud computing, profoundly changing how companies buy computer technologyhttp://images.businessweek.com/mz/11/11/600/1111_mz_cloud.jpg

 

Fredrik Broden

By Ashlee Vance

THIS ISSUE

magazine cover

March 7, 2011

The Power of the Cloud

Amazon.com's (AMZN) squat Seattle headquarters looks nothing like the country club affairs found in Silicon Valley. There are no free soft drinks or volleyball courts. The light fixtures hanging from the ceiling in the reception area aren't fixtures at all but rather collections of extension cords fitted with bulbs. The receptionists lack computerized systems for registering guests. They simply write down visitors' names on a piece of paper. Such is low-margin life in online retail, where Wal-Mart (WMT) stands at the ready, waiting to take away your extension cords.

But is this really a cloud fight or the new battle in Information Technology?

"Things are downright Darwinian right now," says Mike Olson, the chief executive officer of Cloudera, a startup that specializes in data analytics software. "There hasn't been this type of Cambrian explosion in corporate technology in 20 years."

Is this the future?

Scott Raney, a partner at venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures, which has invested in numerous cloud-powered startups, views the recent acquisitions and outpouring of rhetoric as a signal that the big boys fully appreciate what's at stake. Still, he can foresee their numbers dwindling as great volumes of data are sucked up into the cloud. The disaster scenario for the traditional heavyweights is that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft end up as the corporate information kingpins.

"There is one school of thought that the world is heading toward three really big data centers owned by those three companies," says Raney. "They will be the world's computers, more or less, and all the software will be running there. It's a pretty extreme view, but that's spooking the hell out of all the other companies."