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Most of you work in a data center. Can you do this?
This photo came from a Facebook presentation, and is of an employee who posts on her Headstands, including in a Facebook data center.
Here are three images that show range that Abby goes to show her headstands.
Gigaom’s Barb Darrow asks for a question you would ask the Titans of the Cloud - Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, Rackspace, Red Hat, VMware, and Microsoft.
Top 5 questions for the titans of cloud
by Barb DarrowSUMMARY:If you had Amazon’s Werner Vogels, Google’s Urs Hölzle, IBM/SoftLayer’s Lance Crosby, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, Rackspace’s Taylor Rhodes in one room, what would you ask?
There are 5 questions listed. Being an insider and seeing how stuff works behind the scenes I have a tougher question than the readers sent in.
Tell me how your team is better than the Competition?
Anyone who knows how things work know there are teams of people who work on the Cloud infrastructure. If you trace cause of outages the human factor is hard to miss. The Cloud automation is created by teams of people as well.
HBR has a post on The New Science of Building Great Teams.
The New Science of Building Great Teams
by Alex “Sandy” PentlandIf you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on.
Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science.
And one of the insights on team performance.
Patterns of communication, for example, explained why performance varied so widely among the seemingly identical teams in that bank’s call center. Several teams there wore our badges for six weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues at Sociometric Solutions—Taemie Kim, Daniel Olguin, and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.
Here is the HBR video on Team Performance.
Here are Barb’s 5 question from readers.
1: When will all the major clouds support the same set of APIs?
2: When will they support migration of data/workloads from one cloud to another natively?
3: What comes after the race to the bottom in cloud storage prices plays out?
4: When will we see a true cloud exchange?
5: How can we be sure our data is safe in your cloud from prying eyes?
Apple is rumored to be buying Beats. Beats has focused on its image from the beginning getting the influentials in music, sports and other areas to be seen wearing Beats.
Google Glass has hired a leading designer to lead its effort to save Glass.
Here’s the World-Class Designer Google Just Hired to Save Glass
May 16, 2014Google has been putting a lot of effort into making Google Glass seem like a fashionable device and not a vaguely creepy gadget for geeks. The wholesome Mother’s Day ad was a solid first step. Now, the company is handing the reins to a master designer and marketer who will be tasked with making Glass appealing to the masses.
But, consider that the most famous Google Glass image is this one of Robert Scoble.
When I make a new connection through LinkedIn I often go to see the shared connections which tells you a bit about the other person, and allows you to have conversation on how you both got to know a shared connection.
I decided to do the opposite and went to LinkedIn did a quick search of my well connected data center friends. I have 944 connections, and the three unnamed friends have more than than I have. Here is a surprise. For each of my three uber connected friends I have 191, 165, and 138 shared connections.
Metrics for a friendship may sound silly. You know who your good friends are.
Last night our family got together with two other families who we ski a lot with and each of us have a kid who ski together all the time, and they spend time together off the mountain as well.
It’s pretty hard to recognize people unless you are familiar with their clothes, so it is nice when you can see people’s faces.
One of the parents mentioned how so many of his LinkedIn contacts are other Microsoft employees. Turns out both of the dads are at Microsoft. I didn’t work with either of them when I was at the company, and we talk about so many other things than Microsoft. The one thing one dad said being an executive is he gets LinkedIn requests so much from Microsoft employees after a while his LinkedIn looks like a Microsoft Directory.
Out of curiosity I wondered what % of my contacts are current and ex-Microsoft employees. I worked there 14 years (1992-2006), and live in Redmond so Microsoft would be highest. Adding it up 7.7% of my 944 connections have Microsoft as the company. Next in size of contacts is Gigaom, Google, Apple, and Schneider Electric. I can understand Gigaom. What was interesting to see that I had more connections at Google (didn’t work at) than I do at Apple (worked at 1985-1992). The low Apple count could be leaving Apple to go to Microsoft is not a popular thing to do. :-)
It’s been 8 years since I left Microsoft and it was good to see that my Microsoft contacts are less than 10% of my LinkedIn profile given I spent 14 years there and live in Redmond.
What did make sense is 20.6% of my connections are in the Seattle Area which is #2. #1 for where my connections live is SF Bay Area with 20.8%. Well that is basically a tie and make sense given I spend so much time in the bay area and so much of my work is related to clients in the bay area. Some people see me so often they think I live in the bay area which I did do from 1960-1992.
