AWS emerged organically to be a Trillion Dollar baby, not invented by any one person

Medium has a 4 year old post from Jan 2015 interviewing Andy Jassy. The paragraph that caught my eye is Andy describing the beginning. The invention of AWS.

“Amazon Web Services wasn’t any one person’s single idea. No proverbial apple fell on some Newton’s head, no Henry Ford or Steve Jobs-like character had a brainstorm. Instead, it rather emerged. The idea grew organically out of the company’s frustration with its ability to launch new projects and support customers.”

The other part was the willingness to experiment and fail.

“Invention”, says Jassy, “requires two things: 1. The ability to try a lot of experiments, and 2. not having to live with the collateral damage of failed experiments.”

These are good lessons to think about when creating new services.

How smart should the edge be? Think of it as too many cooks in the kitchen

Quantamagazine has an article on smart things.

“Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn

As researchers delve deeper into the behavior of decentralized collective systems, they’re beginning to question some of their initial assumptions.”

— https://www.quantamagazine.org/smarter-parts-make-collective-systems-too-stubborn-20190226/?=1

The article is makes good points using a goldilocks analogy of not too hot, not too cold to get a balance. I like to think of it as too many cooks in the kitchens. If you have too many intelligent things like too many cooks in the kitchen there are mental battles over who gets to make the decisions.

If you are at at the edge and have all the data should you let the central authority over rule your decision? How do you send commands from the central authority to say the way you are making your decisions is wrong. How do you know? I am at the edge and everything is running fine. Central authority, I can see how your edge performance compares to others and it is below the average of others. Change your decisions. OK, change what? I don’t know I am not at the edge you are. Uh, I am doing the same thing all the rest of the edge nodes are doing. Maybe there is a condition at my edge environment that is causing my poorer performance. There are dozens of services running at the edge. Well hundreds, maybe thousands. What do you suggest i change?

“It’s like a second wave of this kind of research,” Kao said. “The first wave was naive enthusiasm for these collective systems. Now, it feels like … we’re questioning a lot of the assumptions we made initially and finding more complex behaviors.”

Did Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes avoid contact with Bill Gates? Her anti-BillG power was David Boies

Bill writes a review of John Carreyou’s Bad Blood book https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Bad-Blood

 “Theranos is the worst-case scenario of what happens when a CEO prioritizes personal legacy above all else—but I hope that people don’t use it as an excuse to write off the next young woman with a big idea. I also don’t want Bad Blood to scare people away from next-gen diagnostics. Theranos went to extraordinary lengths to get around quality standards. The industry is highly regulated, and new diagnostics undergo rigorous testing.”

What got me curious is thinking about what would happen if Elizabeth Holmes was in a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates review. It is hard to imagine we should survive and they both would say the idea is good, but this is the wrong person to get it done. Steve passed away in Oct 2011 so he has no overlap with Elizabeth. Bill is still going and he is passionate about human health. It is ironic that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as inventors is often referenced by 

Elizabeth had nothing to fear from running into Steve Jobs. Her biggest fear could be Bill Gates getting a peak at what Theranos was inside. I think Elizabeth was careful to stay clear of Bill Gates and his inner circle of health advisors. The vent diagram had no overlap. Well there is one overlap between Theranos and Bill Gates. That was David Boies.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies”

• At Cravath, he represented the Justice Department in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case. Boies won a "victory" at trial,[10] and the verdict was upheld on appeal. The appellate court overturned the relief ordered (breakup of the company) back to the trial court for further proceedings. Thereafter, the George W. Bush administration settled the case. Bill Gates said Boies was "out to destroy Microsoft".[11] In 2001, the Washington Monthly called Boies "a brilliant trial lawyer", "a latter-day Clarence Darrow", and "a mad genius" for his work on the Microsoft case.[10]

With David Boies on the Theranos board and representing Theranos as an attorney there is no way Bill would get close to Theranos. So did Elizabeth Holmes add David Boies to protect her from Bill Gates?She did hire David Boies to protect the company and go after the whistleblowers. That didn’t quite work as the biggest heroes from the Theranos saga are the whistleblowers - Erika Cheung and Tyler Schultz. Below are both of them speaking at a Stanford University event.

A fake inventor vs. true inventor, Theranos vs. Laser Printer

When you look at Theranos Edison machine it looks a lot like a laser printer size device.

Watching the HBO The Inventor documentary is a good lesson in not what to do. Elizabeth Holmes in one scene claimed to be an engineer. To me an engineer is a person like Gary Starkweather who is the inventor of the laser printer. Think of what Gary figured out 50 years ago. He said let’s replace the white light copier method with a laser light to rasterize the image. We can print anything a computer would image. In 1970 so many Xerox executives in the copier business argued against the project. Luckily Gary was able to escape Xerox HQ and go to PARC and continue his effort. At PARC Gary was surrounded by people who were inventing ethernet for networking, postcript for graphics and type, mice, and ultimately after the work was done people wanted to print it. With what? A dot matrix printer. ugh. The first laser printer printed 4 million pages in one year at PARC.

Unfortunately, 50 years ago Gary wasn’t considered a hero at Xerox HQ to the point where let’s reward him for his effort. He didn’t own half the company like Elizabeth Holmes. What Gary did do is he persevere in proving every denier wrong that his invention, the laser printer would work. At the same time he built an elegantly simpler way to print leveraging the power of lasers and computer circuits to rotate the mirror and aim the beam.

A few good links if you are interested in reading more are:

https://natsci.msu.edu/natsci-profiles/gary-starkweather-perseverance-laser-vision-lead-to-printer-innovation/

https://digitalprinting.blogs.xerox.com/2017/06/29/marking-40-years-of-xerox-laser-printing-with-its-inventor-gary-starkweather/

There is a whole chapter in Dealers of Lightning where Gary is the star as “The Refuge.”

If anyone symbolized the gulf separating the inventors of the future in Palo Alto from the Xerox development drones back East, that person was Gary Starkweather.

I never met Elizabeth Holmes, and I can’t think of many who would be brag of knowing her well. I do know Gary Starkweather. We worked together at Apple discussing scanning, imaging, and printing issues. When I went to Microsoft in 1992 I would keep in touch with Gary and we would chat regularly as I was still working on fonts, printing, and imaging issues at Microsoft trying to figure out what Microsoft needed to do to have a presence in the desktop publishing industry. In 1997, in one of discussions Gary expressed his frustrations and I told him why doesn’t he join Microsoft. Made introductions. Microsoft HR was all over it, claiming they bagged a huge win. Which nicely turned into a good offer for Gary to join Microsoft Research. Gary and I chatted when he joined the company and we were both in Redmond. So I know the laser printer story well and what Gary is capable of as a true inventor.

When I realized the way to solve the construction information problem, it reminded me of the challenges Gary had when people wanted to do things the same way they had done in the past. In construction most investments that are called innovative are so many times just digitizing of manual processes to mobile devices. Gary is 80 years old, and as sharp as ever. We chatted and I wanted to see what he thought of the invention that I had. He agreed it was big and good. And I asked if he would be an advisor. Gary said absolutely. Good ideas get better when you get smart people to make input and you listen.

I don’t think in the story of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos story she says she discussed her invention with another smart person and they pointed out an area that needed to be addressed.

The huge operations issue for 5G, getting Cloud Operations Staff

I have been in Seattle area for 27 years. And the area is known for being cloudy.

The top cloud companies Amazon and Microsoft are headquartered here. Google has a large presence. Faceebook too. Seattle has the highest concentration of cloud workforce in the world. T-mobile is headquartered here. AT&T has a large presence in Redmond.

5G requires a cloud-native core. You go to Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia’s 5G architecture and they all mention cloud. Here is Nokia.

Chatting with a friends and family we have made the observation that it is extremely hard to hire cloud operations staff. If you want to learn and be trained you go to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. And many go to multiple. Then you look for whether you want to go to a startup and try that path or be a free agent go where is the top money and build up your resume. In this plan do any of these people say I am going to spend 5-10 years working on my resume then I am going to work for a Telco. No. Every Telco has failed with its own cloud services. What would lead an educated cloud expert to think going to a Telco will be worth their time. Seems riskier to go to a Telco than going to a startup.

Now some of you may disagree with this view. That’s OK. The problem is there are lots of cloud people who have no plans to even look at a Telco cloud operations job. So the Telco is faced with the option to retrain its existing staff for cloud operations which is being done with SDN, NFV, and VNF. Yeah try to figure out what that stuff does and how it fits together. :-) And it requires system level skills as a service based architecture is about how all the pieces work together.

On top of that the number of 5G radios deployed will grow a magnitude or more to support the latency, throughput, and range issues of the new spectrums.

If you listen to the 5G hype you think it is right around the corner. The problem is cloud operations staff will severely limit rollouts at scale.