When someone asks to meet one of your friends, do you fire off an e-mail right away with both parties on it or do you contact your friend and ask for permission to introduce you to a person? It kind of depends on the circumstances. Where things get most sensitive is one party could be a buyer and the other is a seller. I would say you definitely want to get permission from both parties to connect before you make an introduction.
A Drone's view, seeing Fireworks from an immersive view
This Fireworks video has gone viral with over 7 mil views. Note this is not a 4th of July posting as it went up on May 13, 2014.
One of the cool features of the DSLRPro Drones is a FLIR option.
Cameras are typically not allowed in a data center, but with the growth in drones it seems like a good idea to try to integrate into operations.
Death of the Tradeshow, transitioning from shallow to deep relationships
One of my LinkedIn connections, Dave Mendlen has a post on why the tradeshow is dead.
David Mendlen
Senior Technology Marketing Leader/CMO, Former Microsoft Executive, Speechwriter for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer
I know David from working on speeches for Bill and Steve and when David moved to Visual Studio Marketing. David’s post on the death of the tradeshow makes excellent points that I am sure many of you will nod your head.
The next time you are at one of those trade shows, watch the engagement model. You will see that almost every customer spends less than a minute at any given booth. They pick up literature, scan their badge to enter the raffle and maybe ask a question or two. In exchange what do you get?
An unqualified lead. I'd argue that the customer likely was interested in winning a free iPad or whatever it is you were raffling off and is not a good, qualified lead. So in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing spend you now have a list of hundreds of unqualified leads - the sales team will call them garbage and they are not wrong.
We’ll see if other marketing companies try to change.
It's time to try a different approach to engage customers. This surface connection to customers is a bad use of marketing dollars and doesn't move the needle.
It's time to drive deeper conversations with customers.
There are exceptions to this, but is it worth the huge marketing spend?
There are a number of ways to get closer, deeper conversations. It's time to try something different.
Time can support credibility, Google vs. Microsoft outage reports
One of my friends has made the switch from Google to Microsoft. Well actually I have many friends who have made the switch. There are also many who have Google to go to Microsoft. One friend who made who knows how Microsoft works and Google made the point on how the outage reporting posts from the companies differ.
Microsoft had an Outlook outage with this post on the event.
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, some of our Office 365 customers hosted in our North America datacenters experienced unrelated service issues with our Lync Online and Exchange Online services. First, I want to apologize on behalf of the Office 365 team for the impact and inconvenience this has caused. Email and real-time communications are critical to your business, and my team and I fully recognize our accountability and responsibility as your partner and service provider.
Google reported on one of its outages with this.
Earlier today, most Google users who use logged-in services like Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents found they were unable to access those services for approximately 25 minutes. For about 10 percent of users, the problem persisted for as much as 30 minutes longer. Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies—we strive to make all of Google’s services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today.
One way to look at the contrast is Google is specific with the time of 25 minutes, 30 minutes longer.
Microsoft says they have full understanding of the issues, but doesn’t provide the specifics on time.
We have a full understanding of the issues, and the root causes of both the Exchange Online and Lync Online services have already been fixed.
Google had another outage where specifics are reported down to the minute.
Issue Summary
From 6:26 PM to 7:58 PM PT, requests to most Google APIs resulted in 500 error response messages. Google applications that rely on these APIs also returned errors or had reduced functionality. At its peak, the issue affected 100% of traffic to this API infrastructure. Users could continue to access certain APIs that run on separate infrastructures. The root cause of this outage was an invalid configuration change that exposed a bug in a widely used internal library.
Timeline (all times Pacific Time)
- 6:19 PM: Configuration push begins
- 6:26 PM: Outage begins
- 6:26 PM: Pagers alerted teams
- 6:54 PM: Failed configuration change rollback
- 7:15 PM: Successful configuration change rollback
- 7:19 PM: Server restarts begin
- 7:58 PM: 100% of traffic back online
Outages are painful for all companies.
Suggestion for when you report your own outage if you include the time of events, then your communication can be viewed as more credible. Using terms like “some” or “brief” doesn’t work when you are the one who is affected by the outage and brief would mean a minute of outage.
Dockers beats VMware when you have similar workloads - 20 to 80% lighter -> 25% to 500% more performance?
Gigaom’s Jonathan Vanian interviews Docker’s CEO Ben Golub and posts on June 27, 2014. I had a chance to talk to Jonathan before he interviewed Ben and I had a simple question. If you have a 100 servers running workloads that would fit in a Dockers environment how much better is Dockers vs. a typical virtualized environment? Here is what Jonathan wrote up.
If an organization has 100 applications that are only slightly different from each other, it doesn’t have to spin up 100 virtual machines to house each application, thus saving a ton of overhead that comes with spinning up so many operating systems.
Depending on the situation, using containers can result in workloads that are 20 to 80 percent lighter than an equivalent workload using only virtual machines, according to Golub.
How can Docker be smaller than a VM? Microsoft in its support for Docker writes an explanation.
By making Docker containers significantly smaller than traditional VMs, they can be booted/restarted more quickly, more of them can run on a single host and they are considerably more portable. Furthermore, when capturing a new Docker container, the tooling only needs to capture the differences between the original and the new container. This makes it possible to rationalize Docker as a kind of version control system for disk images.
One simple assumption you can make is if something is lighter with its size there is a 1-1 relationship between being lighter means you should be able to be more efficient. If you are 20% lighter, than you can do 25% more work with the same capacity. If you are at the extreme of 80% lighter, then you can do 500% more work with the same capacity of server hardware.
As time goes on we’ll hopefully see real world results of how much more efficient Docker is than a hypervisor virtualization strategy.
Disclosure: I work for Gigaom Research as a part-time freelance analyst.