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I love the new gig and am settling in to the new cadence.  The biggest change, by far, is in the amount of context switching.  I’m doing a lot less.  I don’t know if that’s because I’m new and there are just fewer contexts to switch between so far, or if it’s a fundamental difference between the jobs.  The second biggest change is the result of working from home rather than in an office.  My basement, at 63 degrees, is a little cooler than I like, but it also contains a wall of books that I puruse more often that I had been.  I didn’t really expect either of these, but I enjoy both.

I have only one foot in the present as I write this. The other is in the not too distant future–the end of month or so, just a week away–and my mind is wandering to about three weeks ahead. Why am I having this much trouble focusing? Simple: there’s lots of change afoot.

My last day with Model Metrics, where I’ve worked since 2007, is Friday and my first day with my new employer, salesforce.com, is February 15. I’m in career transition mode. This is an exciting and turbulent time for me, so my mind is doing what it does: wander.

Model has been a great place for me the last few years and it has been a pleasure to be a part of such a great team. Over the last few weeks, since I announced this change, everyone has been very supportive. This week, with the transition nearly complete, I’m (mostly) extra. Code is getting written, sales are being closed, and we’re continuing to recruit new people. All of the things I have been deeply involved with for years are now handled without me.

Which means I’m mentally free to wander a few weeks into the future, to my first week at salesforce.com. There’s a part of that work which will be very similar to my current job, and there’s a fair amount that will be new. One significant change will be that for the first time in about 15 years, I won’t be billing my time to a customer as part of a services business. There are several other changes — all of which I’m looking for and sought out — I’ll share more about my new role once it kicks off. These new items render the future fairly opaque from where I sit today, and so my mind wanders forward in time, this way and that, to try to suss it out.

This career border area is a time of great curiosity for me — I haven’t had that many of them. My challenge for this week is to see how I can provide value to a team now well suited to operating without me. Starting Friday and for the two weeks after that, I will attempt to truly disconnect. Once over the border, my challenge when starting the new job will be to be completely present and open to my new environment and responsibilities.

This is so exciting! No wonder my mind is wandering.

Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Sure Thing” (The New Yorker, 1/18/10) suggests that many business icons are substantially more risk averse than popular myth recalls. Gladwell gives several examples of what he means and then talks about business opportunities as a problem to be solved. Although I don’t think this was the point of his article, he’s got me thinking about business not as a collection of risks and probabilities but as a sudoku puzzle.

Sudoku is a great game. I don’t play it every day but each time I pick it up I remember why I like it. It has clear rules which — when combined with logic — make each move something I’m 100% confident in. I don’t guess in sudoku. I don’t have to. Each move builds on the last until your board is complete.

What Gladwell suggests — he adapts from another work, From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero, which I haven’t read yet — is that the most successful entrepreneurs treat their businesses more like sudoku. They understand their playing field, they understand their position on it, and then they look for the next move that has the highest payoff and the least risk.

There’s more to the article than that, and I suspect there’s more to the original work than that, but this is what it’s got me thinking about. If you own a business, and you’re taking big risks that keep you up at night, maybe you’re doing it wrong. Perhaps you’re missing something in the market or possibly something in your assumptions is too far away from reality (either too rosy or too gloomy). Or perhaps you’ve missed some way of analyzing the situation.

I’m glad to have run across the article, both for the sudoku related thinking it spurred and for the profile of John Paulson. Paulson, a hedge fund manager, looked at the mortgage market and saw both the bubble and a way to capitalize on it’s burst: credit default swaps. In 2007, if the article is right, he personally pocketed $5 billion based on these. Wow. Gladwell includes a quote attributed to one of Paulson’s mentors, Marty Gruss: “Watch the downside; the upside will take care of itself.”

Interesting stuff and good advice.

When Google told us they had been hacked, I asked the question, if Google can get hacked, what chance do the rest of us have?  Now the revelation comes that one vector of the attack was a zero day exploit in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (a fascinating not too technical read BTW).  Which begs the question:

If Google can’t get rid of Internet Explorer, what chance do the rest of us have?

Let me explain: Internet Explorer is used over 60% of the time.  Google produces their own alternative, Chrome, and has been not so quietly advertising the heck out of it (which even MS has noticed).  Its market share has now surpassed that of the much more mature Safari.  And to top things off people have been generally certain that IE is unsafe for quite a while.

So why is anyone, let alone anyone in a technology leadership position at Google, still using Internet Explorer?

I’m  guessing it boils down to one main thing.  Internet Explorer is so embedded in the dominant operating system (that’s Windows of course — and incidentally, in case you didn’t read the zero day link above — this bug exists in the brand new Windows 7 as well) that it’s ridiculously difficult to get people, even really smart people who get it, to switch.

Let’s leave aside for a second the idea that an Internet company should be using the same mix of browsers as their customers — that could be handled in a lab.

Then let’s all take a moment to re-read the history of The First Browser War (a name which I love, BTW).  Be sure to read the consequences section.  And if you’re interested (I was), you might also enjoy popping over to the article about the anti-trust case.

What now?  That’s a hard question.  And as security threats become more complex, so will the answer.

But maybe the best way to start is to use a different browser.  Will that instantly solve all the problems?  No, of course not.  But it will increase the complexity for someone wanting to exploit a vulnerability.  Heterogeneous environments make for more complex targets than homogeneous. And if you can use a browser that makes its source code available for inspection, even better.  Firefox, Chrome and Safari all do this.  Opera — I haven’t put my hands on it immediately.  Internet Explorer — nope.

And now, for your listening and viewing enjoyment (and with a nod to L.) here’s Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”. (Infer from it whatever you wish in re: this post.  Or, infer nothing and just enjoy it — it’s pretty entertaining.)

The news is out:  Google was hacked from China and lost intellectual property.  That’s right: Google, arguably the smartest company in the world with arguably the best security on the internet was hacked.  And this begs the question: what chance do the rest of us have?

I work with companies all the time as they are considering the move from local to cloud applications and security always comes up.  Although salesforce.com, my cloud platform of choice, has gone to ridiculous lengths to secure their systems and talks a great deal about it, someone always pipes up and says, “Well I can trust my systems area secure because I’ve secured them.”  As of today, all of those objections officially bunk and belong on the garbage heap.

Why?  Well let’s say you run a small data center and that you’ve spent a few thousand dollars trying to lock it down.  Have you tested it?  When did you test it last?  Are you testing it again tomorrow?  Do you honestly think you’ve secured your data center better than Google?  I doubt it.  Sooner or later, you’ll doubt it too — hopefully you’ll doubt it before you’re proven [catastrophically] wrong.  And if you’re in that 50% of data centers which are understaffed, you’re at even greater risk. It will never be easier for you to make the switch than it is today. What are you waiting for?

No, I don’t think you need to completely disconnect from the internet and I also don’t think you need to move absolutely everything to the cloud.  But if you haven’t started to take advantage of the work done others, building on the shoulders of Internet giants instead of from the ground up, you’re behind.  Your competitors are out innovating you, you’re spending too much money and sooner or later you’ll face a material loss.

What are you waiting for? It will never be easier or less expensive than it is today.

And now, for your enjoyment and to lighten the mood, here is a video of a little girl talking about kittens.



I woke up this morning thinking about the various technical trends of 2009 that have affected me in a significant way.  Here they are:

1) Force.com. 2009 was the year where I really started digging the Force.com platform.  For those of you who don’t know, Force.com / Salesforce.com is the key technology I work with every day.  Don’t get me wrong — I’ve enjoyed it since I started working with it in 2007.  But in 2009 I was deep in several very cool — and very different — projects.  Each of them relied on brand new functionality and creative uses of existing features, and each one of them had a material impact on the customer.  Very cool.  Cooler: it’s on everyone’s top 10 trends to watch for 2010.

2) Kindle.  I use it every day.  I buy all my “books” on it and have switched many of my magazine subscriptions.  I love the Kindle and would be very sad if I had to live without it.  There was a piece the other day that bookstores are now going to die because of devices like the Kindle.  Although that would make me sad — I have spent a great deal of time and money in my local Border’s — it would make me much sadder to give up having the biggest Border’s I have ever been to in the palm of my hand.  If I had to pick one to keep, it would be the Kindle.

3) GoGo Inflight.  I love using the internet while I fly.  Hopefully this doesn’t get killed by the events of 12/25.  A flight with GoGo feels faster.  A flight with GoGo feels less pointless.  A flight with GoGo feels like I haven’t put my life on hold for a 4 hour ride in a big silver tube. It’s just excellent.

4) Wii Fit.  The Wii Fit didn’t help me one bit.  Nada.  Zippo.  Zilch.  This surprised me a bit.  I was completely optimistic that a more interactive experience would motivate me to work out a bit on it.  And it did not.  The Wii Fit is  now sitting in my basement, unused for months.  Oh well.

5) Facebook, Twitter and The Blog.  At the end of 2008, I killed my Twitter account and put my blog on hold.  This was a good thing.  I was a little too engaged.  But I brought them both back in February or so and they have both been quite a bit more manageable since taking that much needed time off.  I like social media again.  I like it when I don’t get completely sucked in all day every day.  And having Facebook — a fairly private Facebook — let’s me post to separate audiences when I feel the need.  Not to mention a reconnect with a bunch of people I haven’t spoken with in a long, long time.  Even if it was just one connection — that was very much fun.

6) iPhone Apps.  I was not an early adopter for the iPhone (and even when I tried to get one I suffered through iDenial) and I pretty much hate AT&T.  But the Apps (especially those produced by these guys) have sucked me in.  I’m stuck and I know it.  Drat.

7) Amazon Web Services.  Where does EC2 fit in to all this?  Well, that’s a tough one.  I have an application running on EC2 and I dig it but it’s not substantially different for this app from any server I might get anywhere.  EC2 definitely has a cool place and it’s definitely useful — but I haven’t had that super ah ha moment with it yet.  It’s hardware.  It’s hosting.  And hardware and hosting, even really cool hardware and hosting and even back in the bad old days when I sold monthly hosting aren’t that interesting to me personally.

So that’s it.  I’m sure there are more I should include.  I’ll update the post when I think of them.

IT Conversations over at Conversations Network.  This morning, specifically, Will the promise of location based ad models ever get off the ground? I could put almost everyone one of their pod casts on the list — I’ve found them to be very enjoyable.

Another is the book Adventures of an IT Leader.  The flow of the book, a fiction account of a new CIO’s first year on the job, is a bit strained, but the message is pretty good and it’s given me some good things to think about.

Finally, caught up on the latest “You Look Nice Today” which never fails to crack me up, even when I’m listening while shopping a major home supply stores.  That guy laughing out loud to something on his headphones while buying some boxes, yeah that’s me.

And Modern Family is ridiculously good.

Several weeks behind on The New Yorker and have at least two MIT Technology Reviews to at least skim.  Oh and well over 1000 articles in Google Reader.  C’est la vie.

I’ve been more focused than usual on the question of sustainability lately. Why?

A more interesting question might be why I lost focus on it. Any of my college crew who reads this from time to time will probably remember me trying to sell them recycled paper and printing a couple of books on 100% post consumer.

Why did I lose it? Probably a whole bevy of reasons. Living in Chicago with it’s general lack of recycling programs, etc., played a role for sure.*

Anyway, so my three things:

Science Commons, from the Creative Commons crew, is working on something called GreenXchange with Nike. It’s super cool.  And, I think, more than just a feel good publicity stunt.  Time will tell.

TechNation had a really interesting podcast on with Ray Anderson the other day.  Never heard of him?  I hadn’t either.  Excellent speaker on the subject how commercial enterprises need to change in order to not kill the planet.  39 minutes that are worth a listen.  Interesting note: his company reduced their use of water by 70%.  Listen to find out how!

TechNation also had Greg Papadopoulos on the other day to talk about sustainability at Sun and with computers in general.  One interesting concept is a periodic table of the elements with a number of them crossed out as unusable.  Cadmium for example.  Cool.

Which brings me to my question for Trader Joe’s.  From a sustainability standpoint, is it better for me to buy their frozen prepared brown rice or to buy unprepared brown rice that I cook at home?  My first reaction was that I should be making it, and then I started to wonder about how the efficiencies of making it in bulk would be offset by the inefficiencies of freezing and transporting it to my local store.  I’d love to have a definitive answer on this, something that featured carbon load (or some other useful measure) for product alternatives (like their food guides).

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* Yes we have Blue Bag. No, I have no faith that it works. Yes, I haul my stuff to the big blue dumpster anyway.

First Snow, Idaho, September 30, 2009, originally uploaded by ReidCarlberg.

Ran into this on my way out of Swan Valley.