It's tough being a Server Vendor, who would have thought Amazon.com is your competition

WSJ has an article on companies buying from Amazon Web Services instead of from a server vendor.

The Lafayette, La., company, has been shifting a growing proportion of its computing chores to computers operated by Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.65% In the past year, Schumacher purchased just one server from Hewlett-Packard Co., HPQ -0.04%says Douglas Menefee, Schumacher's chief information officer.

Five years ago, the company may have bought 50 such servers for as much as $12,000 apiece. "We don't really buy hardware anymore," says Mr. Menefee.

End users are dumping the old way of buying IT hardware then attempting the integration in-house or with IT services.  Users in the past were so happy it worked whether it was efficient and effective was many times not an issue.  Remember when you had a performance problem and the answer was to upgrade or buy more hardware?

Now end user want IT services that have been marketed by amazon.com, google, microsoft, salesforce, and others.  Enterprises want Big Data environments and high performance compute (HPC) solutions.  Here is an example of one solution for those who want to buy IT gear, but want an integrated deployed solution.

Microsoft says Best of Times are ahead which means the past and present are the worst

Microsoft corporate PR has a response to the media coverage of Steve Ballmer's retirement.  Part of what Microsoft says is there are different ways to see the facts of the situation, referencing Tales of Two Cities and Rashomon.  The ending line is where the point is trying to be made.

So when people see the “worst of times” while we see the best still ahead of us, we know it’s simply because we’re not looking through the same frame or the same time horizon.

So, if the best of times are ahead it means that at the present and/or the past is the "worst of times."  And part of what the media has had is an uncontrolled response is pointing out the worst of times at Microsoft during Steve Ballmer's CEO time.

One of the worst times at Microsoft which was before my time at the company. When Microsoft was totally behind OS/2.  Here is the history of David Weise, the god father of Windows 3.0 and savior of Microsoft going down the path of partnering with IBM.

 You see, at this time, Microsoft's systems division was 100% focused on OS/2 1.1.  All of the efforts of the systems division were totally invested in OS/2 development.  We had invested literally tens of millions of dollars on OS/2, because we knew that it was the future for Microsoft. 

Yes Microsoft was committed with hundreds of people developing OS/2.  Windows was not a priority.  Windows was less important than the future bet on OS/2. What saved Microsoft from these dark and worst times of the company was David Weise.  It was sad to see DavidW leave in 2005, but I, DaveO left one year later in 2006.  (One of the geeky left overs from the early days of Microsoft is we called each other by our e-mail aliases.)

DavidW with a small team built Windows 3.0 and beat a team much bigger who was using IBM's software development process.

And here was this little skunkworks project in building three that was sitting on what was clearly the most explosive product Microsoft had ever produced.  It was blindingly obvious, even at that early date - Windows 3.0 ran multiple DOS applications in virtual x86 machines.  It ran Windows applications in protected mode, breaking the 640K memory barrier.  It had a device driver model that allowed for development of true 32bit device drivers.  It supported modern displays with color depths greater than had been available on PC operating systems. 

There was just no comparison between the two platforms - if they had to compete head-to-head, Windows 3.0 would win hands down.

...

The rest was history.  At its release, Windows 3.0 was the most successful software project in history, selling more than 10 million copies a month, and it's directly responsible for Microsoft being where it is today.

And, as I mentioned above, David is responsible for most of that success - if Windows 3.0 hadn't run Windows apps in protected mode, then it wouldn't have been the unmitigated success it was.

David's spent the last several years working in linguistics - speech generation, etc.  He was made a distinguished engineer back in 2002, in recognition of his contribution to the industry. The title of Distinguished Engineer is the title to which all Microsoft developers aspire, it is literally the pinnacle of a developers career at Microsoft when they're named DE - other DE's include Dave Cutler, Butler Lampson, Jim Gray, Anders Hejlsberg.  This is unbelievably rarified company - these are the people who have literally changed the world.

From the worst of Microsoft's times came a heroic brilliant effort to invest in Windows 3.0.  The story of what DavidW did is knows amongst the old time Microsoft and probably remembered as some of the darkest times when the company was young and a servant of IBM to develop a future OS.  If you tried to do what DavidW did it would get you fired at most companies.

It is interesting to see how some of the most innovative products come from those who don't follow the direction of executive leadership.  One way to view how innovative companies are is whether the smart people can survive within the official corporate heirarchy.  If you look at many of the companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon there is a separate innovative ecosystem that works across boundaries.  Most executives will squash this innovative ecosystem.  If Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates had they would have killed Windows 3.0 to support the development of OS/2.

Case study of Washington Post using AWS

Jeff Bezos bought Washington Post, and there is speculation Washington Post would use amazon.com technology.  Here is a case study that was released a while ago on the Washington Post using AWS.

AWS Case Study: Washington Post

Peter Harkins, a Senior Engineer at The Washington Post, heard the news spread through the editorial department as the National Archives announced the release of Hillary Clinton’s official White House schedule. The data was going to be released to the public on March 19th at 10am. 17,481 pages of data as a non-searchable PDF.

The documents included Hillary Clinton’s daily activities as a First Lady during President Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, from 1993-2001 that were being made public under the Freedom of Information Act after multiple requests from journalists and watchdog organizations.

Harkins knew that reporters would be very interested in this data but it would take hundreds of man hours to pore through the document’s low-quality PDF files. So, about 45 minutes after the release, Harkins started working with the data, trying to find a way to convert the images into usable, searchable text and deliver them to the newsroom within the same news cycle.

Harkins first tested various PDF and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools to convert the images into machine-readable text. With these software tools, he estimated that it would take about 30 minutes per page to process the sizable document including reformatting, resizing, and scanning each page.

Working against time, Harkins moved the project to the cloud—Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With Amazon EC2, he launched 200 server instances to process the images to his specifications. With a processing speed of approximately 60 seconds per page, the project was completed within nine hours and sent to the eager writers who began searching against the data. Then, Harkins and team created a polished web interface and made their searchable database available to the public 26 hours later.

Harkins ruminates, “EC2 made it possible for this project to happen at the speed of breaking news. I used 1,407 hours of virtual machine time for a final expense of $144.62. We consider it a successful proof of concept.”

Practice every day, make mistakes, learn, get better

I write almost every day in this blog. Some think i do this for money.  No, a year's worth of blogging revenue is less than I make in a day with a client.  So, I write for getting my name out there.  No, I don't focus on marketing myself as most people don't even know what I do.  So, why write?  Because it gets me every day spending a bit of time, sometimes more than others, sometimes less, on thinking about what is going on in the industry that is worth writing about.  This every day effort for the past 6 years has made it so it is natural for me to analyze and write what I observe.  Part of observing is understanding how things work.

Reasoning from observations has been important to scientific practice at least since the time of Aristotle who mentions a number of sources of observational evidence including animal dissection (Aristotle(a) 763a/30–b/15, Aristotle(b) 511b/20–25). But philosophers didn't talk about observation as extensively, in as much detail, or in the way we have become accustomed to, until the 20^th century when logical empiricists and logical positivists transformed philosophical thinking about it.

The first transformation was accomplished by ignoring the implications of a long standing distinction between observing and experimenting. To experiment is to isolate, prepare, and manipulate things in hopes of producing epistemically useful evidence. It had been customary to think of observing as noticing and attending to interesting details of things perceived under more or less natural conditions, or by extension, things perceived during the course of an experiment.

As a skill I have found being able to document the analysis process for my clients and myself is useful.  Parts leak into this blog when I think it is useful to my friends and there is a public disclosure.  Many times when I write I have specific people I am thinking about like the departed Olivier Sanche.

If you want to get good at something practicing every day, making mistakes, learning, and getting better is powerful.  Here is an article in Fast Company on this idea.

WANT TO CONQUER A NEW SKILL? DO IT EVERY DAY

AT THE INTERSECTION OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PRODUCTIVITY LIES A SIMPLE TRUTH: TO DO SOMETHING WELL, YOU MUST EMBRACE QUANTITY.

 ...

When you're learning a new skill--whether developing dance moves or websites--quantity is way more important than quality.

Why? Over at Medium, entrepreneur-essayist Herbert Lui expounds on expansion:

Quantity should be a higher priority than quality, because it leads to higher quality. The shorter path to maximized quality is in maximized quantity, and executing on the feedback after each finished product.

To put it into startup terms, you're making yourself maximally iterative. To put it into hardware, the idea is to get as many cycles as possible. To put it into workout terms, the idea is to get as many reps as possible. Try fast, fail fast, learn fast.

Why does the do-it-a-bunch technique work? Take it away, science:

• On average, an action becomes an "automatic" habit after 66 days of doing
• The subconscious mind rebels against big changes, but you can woo it with gradual shifts
• The more familiar a task is, the less scary it is. Cut to: public speaking for introverts,negotiating for non-negotiators

Oops, People are finding out that electric cars create a peak load when plugged in

MIT Technology Review has a post on something that is pretty obvious to a data center crowd.  Plugging in electric cars can create stress on a local circuit.  In the data center users don't think about at the local power constraints on a circuit.  Having an even distribution of power use on circuits is ideal.

The trouble arises when electric car owners install dedicated electric vehicle charging circuits. In most parts of California, charging an electric car at one of those is the equivalent of adding one house to the grid, which can be a significant additional burden, since a typical neighborhood circuit has only five to 10 houses. In San Francisco, where the weather is cool and air conditioning is rarely used, the peak demand of a house is much lower than in the hotter parts of California. As a result, the local grid is sized for a much smaller load. A house in San Francisco might only draw two kilowatts of power at times of peak demand, according to Pacific Gas & Electric. In comparison, a new electric vehicle on a dedicated circuit could draw 6.6 kilowatts—and up to 20 kilowatts in the case of an optional home fast charger for a Tesla Model S.

I found another post on the same Southern California Edison report and this one compared to the MIT Technology Review pointed to the SCE report which is here.

The most useful data I found to give you an idea of what is going on with Southern California Edison's ability to support car charging is the rate structure set up for electric vehicles.  You would expect that the use of electric vehicles pushes most people to the Tier 2 rate.  Charging off-peak vs. midnight -6a is three times more.  Charging during 10a - 6p vs. midnight  - 6a is 5 times more expensive during the summer.

I would say the Utility is driving the a more manageable electric load by creating the financial incentives.  When people see their electricity bill it will get them to adapt their behaviors.

There is also a rate plan just for electric vehicles.