Dave Jenkins

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the iPhone, and how I was not so impressed by all the functionality there, because I have seen what the keitai (mobile phones) in Japan can do. Well, I missed a big fat chunk of it– the keitai are capable of a lot more than what I had considered at the time, and things are about to get very interesting over in Tokyo.

Son Masayoshi, the maverick entreprenuer behind Yahoo BB (Japan Yahoo as an ASDL provider) and some other wacky schemes, recently flooded the market with cheap cell phones with a prepaid-package of minutes every month. When I say cheap– I mean $10/month– that’s it (the phone is free). My 68-year-old father-in-law recently got one, as did his wife (these two have resisted cell phones for 15 years, if that gives you any idea of their technological inklings). The deal from Son Masayoshi was finally too good to resist, and they’ve joined the masses.

So what? Well, The Economist just came out with a rather good piece about the death of cash society, and how everyone is going to be moving toward Near Field Communication (NFD). Japan has been pioneering this with the Suica cards in the trains, and then the shops around the train station– wave your metal card (or now your keitai) near the register and tada! everything is paid for. Here’s the trick: people will have their salaries deposited to their bank accounts as normal, but now they wil lgo one step further and transfer all their “walking around money” from the bank account to their keitai, maybe 20% of their salary. Son must have understood that by putting phones in everyone’s hands, he doesn’t need to make a damn dime on the airtime, he has a chance to capture 20% of the cash holdings of the entire country.

Not bad– he hands out cell phones and creates maybe the 5th or 6th largest “bank” in Japan. But it gets even better: cash is untraceable (that’s why they call it “cash”); but all these keitai transactions are traceable at the atomic level. The data around buying trends alone is worth millions (for both internal investment data as well as for sale back to merchants).

Let’s see if Son Masayoshi can pull off what may be the biggest game changer since Visa created the debit card.  I would welcome any comments from those who have used smart cards– are they easier than cash?  Do you worry about the (lack of) privacy)?

Someone called my office this morning. he was offering “training” for my crew. i asked what kind of training, and he started to rattle off the usual suspects: MSCE, Novell++, whatever. I told him we are an open source shop, and I could hear him turn the page and say “you mean, like Linux?” Yes, like Linux. He then told me that he has Red Hat training courses for both 7.0 and 7.2

Heh. 1998 called, they want their distro back.

I then told him “well, we have some pretty smart cookies here. Not to sound arrogant, but I bet my engineers are smarter than your trainers.” He responded that yes, I was arrogant. A salesman told me, his potential customer, that I was arrogant.

I went ahead and confirmed his suspicions by hanging up.

Open Source training, unfortunately, is still an afterthought for many of the large training companies out there. The only people I would really trust to teach the RHEL certification is Red Hat. This kinda puts them in the catbird’s seat, and keeps prices high– too bad. The best thing I think Red Hat and Novell could do would be to (forgive me MLK) ‘flood the classrooms’ with RHEL and/or Linux sysadmins. Any sysadmin worth his salt now can administer Linux boxes. But I am talking about all those secondary people: desktop supports, junior sysadmins, floor managers, mail admins, and all their pointy-haired bosses. Never ignore the power of a technically-exposed PHB. Yes, they get in the mix sometimes when you’re trying to make a decision, but generally they are a Force For Good when it comes to budget time, and explaining your hardware/software stack to the rest of the executives.

Red Hat: make training (almost) free, and watch your martketshare skyrocket.

We are the priests of the Temple of Syrinx
Our great computers filled these Hallowed Halls

How much data does a business need to store? How much does a dot-com need to store? What about SOX? The storage vendors must be pouring money into congressmen’s pockets to make requirements all the more heinous– every email, every photo, every random document and the full diff history of everything so far. EMC must be salivating at where the requirements are headed.

I’ve been trying to work it out on the thumbnail math level. The metric here should be 1) product, and 2) customer. Every product has a text description, photo(s), price history, qty, and a half-dozen other table entries. The photos are the biggest wildcard here– the other stuff is really just some text. The product metric is trackable. I (as CTO) can set it to what I want. I can tell Marketing that they get xx kilobytes per product, or rather they tell me what the want to do, and I can do the math pretty quickly, and tell them that storage will cost X.

Customers are another story. There is seemingly no end to the amount of data to track there. We’re way past phone number and shoe size. Every click, every photo uploaded, downloaded, product added to the cart, not added to the cart, and the timestamps on every freaking event since Goldstein set up the first cameras all over Airstrip One. Beyond that, there’s all the derivative data: take any two or three data points that I have mentioned so far, mash them together, and voila! A whole new data set that needs to be put somewhere, with it’s own little dashboard.

There is an economy of data– and it’s not the cost of physical storage. It’s the cost of eyeballs on all these little numbers running around. It’s the Kuhn-like convincing of truth (not Truth) to your peers that your statistics are the right ones to measure. Who wins in middle management? The person who can convince as many other employees that _their_ view of the numbers is correct.

Punch cards begat tapes; tapes begat disks; disks begat databases; databases begat data warehouses; data warehouses begat “business intelligence”. BI begat dashboards. Everything up until that last step was sheer fecundity. The BI–>dashboard stage is the first step toward a “meta” level synthesis from all that data. We now have too much data to comprehend. But will the trend continue toward less presentation? Will it swing back toward the swamping? Who can trust the synthesised conclusions? Where is the rigour around the methodologies that produce these dashboards? What next? “data consolidation”? “derivative decisionment”? It doesn’t really matter to the storage people: every derivative, every summary, every consolidated report still requires that much more storage. Every time we breed one set of numbers with another, we need to store all the children.

HA, HA HA HA HA HAAAA, HA.

Microsoft needs to lay off the meth. They’ve seriously lost their minds in how much they think they need to think for us.