Can A True Analysis be Written of Amazon.com? Everything Store book makes the point

I am reading the Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon for the 2nd time.  The first read I found interesting to see what the author had collected as the facts to write his book.  The nice thing is I know some folks who have been at Amazon and talked with them first hand on what the company is like.  One friend I found was in the book.  Were they quoted in an interview?  no they just appear in this picture included in the book.

A point made in the book is the challenge of telling story in words.

The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species’ tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives. These stories, Taleb wrote, shield humanity from the true randomness of the world, the chaos of human experience, and, to some extent, the unnerving element of luck that plays into all successes and failures.

Bezos was suggesting that Amazon’s rise might be that sort of impossibly complex story. There was no easy explanation for how certain products were invented, such as Amazon Web Services, its pioneering cloud business that so many other Internet companies now use to run their operations. “When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process. There’s no aha moment,” Bezos said. Reducing Amazon’s history to a simple narrative, he worried, could give the impression of clarity rather than the real thing.

Stone, Brad (2013-10-15). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (pp. 12-13). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

If you agree with the point made by Bezos and Taleb which the author Brad Stone would appear given he puts it in the book, then how should you interpret what Brad Stone has written?  The image above tells a story that is not manipulated in photoshop to align with the goals of a sales team.  The words written by Brad Stone are written in a way that fulfill his objectives and his publisher.

This idea is going through my head as I read the book for the 2nd time.

Here are some words from my friend who is in the above picture.

in my time he was just a very enthusiastic, very smart startup CEO with a mission beyond what any of us ever imagined. I'm still crazy proud of the place and my time there

This point is going through my head though more as I study Amazon.

Back to Blogging

I had an unintended break from Blogging.  I got a chance to attend an analyst briefing by RMS and got to meet in person Hemant Shah the CEO.  Why is RMS interesting to me?  Because here is a company that has spent 25 years working on catastrophe risk modeling and they are about to launch on Apr 15 their Cloud HPC Risk Modeling environment, RMS One.

I had just listened to Hemant’s talk at Stanford.

Description 

Hemant Shah, co-founder and CEO of RMS, takes students on a ride through the highs and lows of growing and changing a company. From early days in an apartment with co-founders, to making the tough calls as a market leader in risk and catastrophe modeling, Shah discusses lessons around culture, business models, and pivoting a value proposition.

Spending the day with RMS got me thinking of how to view operations from a Risk perspective.  This perspective was not what they told us, but I saw how risk is different way to view the waste that can exist.

I had so many ideas spinning in my head I was having a hard time writing down the ideas, but that is not a good excuse.

Anyway back to writing.  This is a busy week.  OSIsoft has their user conference that I haven’t attended for over 5 years.  Google has their cloud event in SF.  and AWS has their one day summit SF as well.  Going to a data center in Santa Clara.  And, going to try some ideas on how risk modeling is a perspective to see the issues that exist in operations.

Images to Provide Feedback on Performance

Video is assumed to be the way to provide feedback on the performance of athletes.  I find that many times though a good photo can work to freeze a point of time.

Here are a bunch of pictures from this year’s Buddy Werner 2014 U14 Girl’s championship GS race at Crystal Mountain.  https://www.facebook.com/BWC2014

There are a bunch of little details the coaches and parents can point out to how their kids race tuck looks.

FYI - the fastest girl out of the group was the 1st picture.

Happy St Patrick's Day

St Patrick’s Day is a day to celebrate for the Irish, and Google even changes for today.

So many people have thought I am Irish, and my name is spelled like in this family crest.

I always spell my name - Dave Ohara, but people will sneak an apostrophe in.  Recently I was visiting AT&T and an admin escorted me to a meeting.  I told her, I bet you thought I was an Irishman.  (embarrassingly) Yes.  How’d you know?  Because when you came down you talked to the security guard and she pointed at me.  You were looking for a red haired Irishman and couldn’t find me in the lobby..  I then told her various stories of how others thought I was Irish.  The best is when I worked at Apple and a tooling engineer was in Japan visiting Mitsubishi, and he was telling them a new person joined the team, Dave O’Hara.  The Japanese were telling him that Dave Ohara is a Japanese person.  No, O’Hara is a popular Irish name and I was Irish.

Maybe if people could read this  小原 which is Ohara in Kanji (Japanese Writing) they would think I was Japanese.

Doesn’t really bother me that people think I am Irish.  I had some Irish Stew for lunch and a Guinness is in fridge.  

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Are More Companies coming in the Data Center Operations Outsourced space?

The Economist has a post on how Facility Operations companies are attempting to expand beyond their current markets.  This market is huge.

Facilities management

Service elevators

Big outsourcing firms find that escaping the crowd is not so easy

Mar 15th 2014 | PARIS | From the print edition

IT IS a sprawling, unseen, unglamorous industry that is hard to define and harder still to measure. Outsourced facilities-management firms clean offices, guard premises, feed students, manage heating and lighting, move prisoners from cell to workshop, and so on, for customers who prefer to focus on their core activities.

Employing millions, outsourcing firms have combined revenues that some put as high as $1 trillion a year. The market is most established in Europe and North America, though it is on the rise in Asia too (see chart). Now the structure of the business is changing, as firms that used to specialise in one sort of outsourced service increasingly aim to be all things to all men, and trip over each other in the process.

One company that caught my eye is Sodexo because a friend works in the food service business andI was curious if their company does any work in data centers.

ISS’s larger main rival, Sodexo, sees the market in much the same light. The family-controlled French firm was originally known for running canteens in offices, hospitals and schools, diversifying into lucrative luncheon vouchers and employee benefits. It grew big in the 1980s as more businesses joined the outsourcing trend and bigger still when governments, beginning with Britain’s, started setting up public-private partnerships to build and run facilities. When “soft” services like catering and cleaning showed signs of becoming commodities, Sodexo expanded into “hard” services such as building maintenance and energy management. Acquisitions came thick and fast, helping Sodexo increase its foreign operations too.

Digging a bit I found there are 24 data centers the company lists, but I don’t know of any of data center friends who use Sodexo.

Many more friends have been switching to Norland Managed Services.