wrong tool

You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.

Here Comes Another Bubble: More data

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When you look at the startling increase in dollars being pumped into seed start ups as compared to the rest of the bay area economy, you know we have a bubble.

And then there is this data shared by Thomasz Tunguz.

Start up office space has grown 12% CAGR and Start up salaries have increased 15% CAGR over the last five years. Just to make this real for those of us who still earn the bulk of our money from our salaries, in 2009 a start up was paying 90k a year and in 2014 a startup would be paying north of 170k.

If these increases were driven by customers buying products, this would be a good thing. Except it’s not. These increases are driven by an increase in funding levels. Essentially more VC’s are being given more money to put more money into more start ups.

Given that these price increases are sustained by increased funding levels not increased revenue levels, this will end in tears.

The funding spigot will end at some point in time. And when it does we will have three corrections

  1. A sudden and dramatic collapse in employment as start ups get vaporized.
  2. A sudden and dramatic collapse in salaries as more people chase suddenly fewer jobs. The jobs they had will disappear and the new companies that start up will hire at rates that are more like 2009
  3. A sudden and dramatic collapse in office real-estate

The only good news is that traffic will get better for folks who are able to stick around…

The end of Silicon Valley, Long Live Entrepreneur Valley

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There is this discussion going around VC circles about full stack startups. The notion that the business doesn’t just build a gadget but a complete end-to-end business. This a profoundly different kind of business investment for the valley and worth mulling over…

Over the last fourty or so years, Silicon Valley has been about making technology investments. Companies were created to build things that other businesses turned into products that real people consumed.

Put differently, technology was created to be in the service of a business like Starbucks. Silicon Valley built the technology that enabled Starbucks to sell more coffee, better treats and yet Starbucks is just another entrant in the restaurant business. Essentially companies outsourced their IT engineering budgets to high tech Silicon Valley companies.

The emergance of companies like uber and airbnb and altschool and Luxe and of course Amazon are not about technology companies but instead companies that happen to leverage technology. These companies may have a tech budget but their business, their products and the bulk of their staff are not technology. They use technology, they may invent technology but engineering exists to serve. Engineering is a service inside of the business not the business…

Sure tech is important to uber but the drivers are vastly more important…

These are just normal businesses that happen to get funded by VC’s… They are not traditional high tech companies…

As more of these companies get founded and succeed the valley becomes more about a place where entrepreneurs set up shop and less a place where technology gets built. As investors look to find the next business to fund instead of the next piece of innovative technology there is a real risk to the original valley ecosystem… No longer are technologists the winners but conventional business men…

Over time if this pattern holds these business men will succeed and become investors who will look to create more businesses that happen to use tech or… not.

After all our current business heroes are not guys who built technology but guys who understood a business need and found some tech guys to build it. Heck when Twitter paid 10 million for A VP of engineering the discussion on business insider . com was about how overpaid he was. I mean seriously no engineering leader should be that much – because they are just a service to the business after all….

The demographic and the core of what is the valley will change and the path to success will change.

We engineers that created a small corner of the world where geeky engineering could rules will find ourselves displaced by a new very different kind of world.

Engineers may become relegated once more to being shoved in the back room while the real power within companies has meetings…

Then the question remains what does this portend for future tech investments? My gut tells me that we will see a movement of investment outside of the valley over time. As this becomes home to large conventional businesses and investors pursue more of them… The guys who want to build tech will move elsewhere because their ability to find people and get investment will be better elsewhere. The valley relied on engineers investing in each other…

My wife says change is what you can rely on. And this change feels real andd it does mean that the future will look very different….

Still remaining bullish for the valley, I am just no longer certain the term Silicon will be appropriate… Maybe entrepreneur valley…

Toddler Meets Cloud, world ends

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My son and I visited my friend Jason’s house and while he was there Jason’s wife offered to let the kids watch a children’s movie. Jason, an early cord cutter, fired up Netflix and quickly had them watching a Curious George movie.

Half-way into the movie, as I had forewarned Nicholas, we headed out. Nicholas was appalled. He was convinced that he would never see how this movie ended. I had to promise him, repeatedly, that he would get to see the movie. Nicholas was dubious.

We arrived home, and mommy told Nicholas that the movie was in The Cloud and we would watch it later. Nicholas turned to mommy and asked:

Are we going to see the movie through the window or outside on the clouds?

We both started to laugh hard. And cursed the fact that we had not recorded this for posterity.

Daddy who works on cloud infrastructures, with  Mommy’s help – oh okay Mommy is much better at explaining and she did most of the explaining … , explained what cloud was.

Here’s what Nicholas understood:

Inside Onedrive

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Ever since Microsoft gave away storage for a product I would buy anyways, I have been working to move ~1TB of storage to the cloud and have encountered many of the limitations of the service and learned a little bit of the technical underpinnings.

I suspect when the folks who created OneDrive imagined the service they thought pictures. And pictures have a reasonable size (1-2MB) and a small number of them. They did not imagine using one-drive to backup entire multi-100GB file systems.

And that impedance mismatch has been tough.

OneDrive uploads a small number of files at at time (2-4). OneDrive scans the entire FileSystem to find new files.

All of this will get fixed over time, I am sure although things are now kind of rough.

One of the more interesting things is that I have gotten some insight into how OneDrive is built.

OneDrive has four core elements

  1. Skydrive.exe that is the sync engine that actually copies the data to the cloud
  2. WSearch the search engine for windows doubles as a way for onedrive to keep track of the files on the file system.
  3. The use-of-stubs to manage offline files and provide the illusion of a single file system. Possibly the only good use of hierarchical storage management in the history of the snake oil known as HSM.
  4. A pretty UI

All of these technologies have been around for many many years and OneDrive is really a repackaging of all of them.

OneDrive, as a product, has the property of something that was cobbled together over time without any of the architectural integrity of competing products like DropBox or Google drive. This probably reflects the ambivalence Microsoft had towards cloud services. I am encouraged to read for Windows 10 Microsoft is working to improve Onedrive significantly.

One of the challenges for a company like Microsoft is that building a product that has the feature set of DropBox is easy, but building a competing product is a completely different can of worms. A competing product requires a deeper level of engineering than the cobbling of re-purposed technologies that the current Onedrive product is.

Microsoft’s decision to embrace DropBox may reflect that reality.

 

 

 

 

 

The unusable Twitter client

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Been using Twitter for more than 5 years.

Have two sets of friends:
hockey and tech

Hockey folks don’t give a damn about tech
Tech folks don’t give a damn about hockey

Hockey folks don’t want to read about storage
Tech folks don’t want to read about the Habs

So I have two Twitter accounts

Really hated how there was no *easy* way to switch between them. I tweet less because of this. I read fewer tweets because of this.

Except there is … Can you tell me where?

IMG_0267-0.PNG

Not there, stop looking.

What about here:

IMG_0268.PNG

Can’t find it? Let me help:

IMG_0269.JPG

I only discovered this when my finger accidentally hit that icon. Apparently mystery meat UI is in vogue …

This time it is going to be different, NOT!

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Signs of the upcoming apocalypse are everywhere… and today my wife had the latest sign.

While getting gas, my wife happened to bump into the gasoline attendant who was looking at the market on his cell phone.

And he turns to her and says: Why is the market going down these days?

Wife: How long have you been here in the valley?

Him: 30 years

Wife: Well you remember 2000? and 2008? I mean this happens bubbles grow and then they collapse

Him: No, this time it’s going to be different because of Apple and Oil and – At this point my wife stopped listening.

 

Public service announcement, it’s not going to be different. The same thing that always happens in the bay area will happen again, we are going to see an implosion of companies and employment. Like the Parable from the Gospel says: The exact time of the arrival of the bridegroom is unknown but He is coming.

All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again

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One of my favorite shows on television was battle star galactica, and it’s theme that the past and future were tied forever in a cycle. As someone who has lived through three busts, the feeling of being a cylon trapped in a cycle of life and death is … familiar. And in each case, the bubble was caused by a drop in interest rates and in each case the end of the bubble came with an increase in interest rates.

Right now traffic is as bad as it was in 1999, in spite of the tremendous infrastructure improvements that were put into place since then. And there is this feeling that this guy wouldn’t be out of place here:

pets_com
Without any shadow of any doubt the total amount of investment in the bay area has gone crazy. The question is when will it end and was it correlated with an interest rate drop…

And then this shows up (my own annotations):

2015-01-12_1419

What the chart shows is how between the start of QE in 2008 and the end of QE the total aggregate investment in Seed rounds grew from under 50ish billion to over 500 billion.

What the chart also shows is how with the end of QE in Q3 of 2014, the total amount of money in seed rounds has collapsed from over 500 billion to less than 200 billion. Twitter commentary from the VC community suggests that there is basis in fact.

Turns out we had a bubble begin with a drop in interest rates (QE Start) and and end with an increase in interest rates (QE End).

Speaking from my own narrow field of view, in early 2014 people were running around getting funded, in late 2014 I heard a lot fewer stories and recruiting pitches to go join the new new thing…

What does this mean? Assume the trend holds…

First of all it means that there is going to be, once again, much better traffic for those who survive the wave after wave of layoff. Many companies will fail and the never ending and increasing investment dollars that allowed for endless seed rounds will disappear creating a large overhang of employees who will, unfortunately, move on to other pastures. Secondly it means if you are in one of those seed companies, you better be figuring out how to get to sustainability faster … and finally it means that the quality of investments will pick up….

Oh and housing prices will drop again…

For folks who have not been here in a similar bust the experience will be traumatic as the go-go atmosphere evaporates. For those of us with more grey hairs, we are reminded of the saying: This time it will not be different….

 

 

 

The problem with image backup services like iCloud

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At NetApp in 2008 while we were struggling to define feature set of ONTAP 8, a product manager asked me if it was okay to ship backup in 8.0 and restore in 8.1. He quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work…

Unfortunately Apple has made a similar mistake with iCloud.

The problem with iCloud is that it is an image backup service. An image backup copies every disk block and restores every disk block. An alternative to an image backup is a file backup that restores every file. An image backup has the nice property that it is faster to restore than a file backup. The problem with an image backup is that it is a an all or nothing restore. If a part of the image has a corrupt file, then the backup is useless.

For example, if you have a firmware image in the iCloud backup that’s corrupt, then restoring the backup from iCloud restores the phone into a corrupted state.

And that is a problem. Turns out if you have let’s say 5 years of photos in those backups, there is no way to restore the pictures because the image contains the corrupt firmware.

This isn’t impossible to fix. Many backup apps that do image backup are also able to do file restores. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t offer that service.

Fortunately third party restore apps do!

The real lesson is that if you are using an iPhone, please use a service like dropbox or google drive or one drive. In this manner if the backup is corrupt you don’t lose your data or spend money on someone tool.

 

Because some 1’s are 0’s and some 0’s are 1’s

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When I was an aspiring software engineer at my first job at SGI in 1996, I asked my friend and mentor why a specific kernel debugger wasn’t working.

He gave me an answer, but even then my unwillingness to be satisfied with a curt answer was – well – annoying. He looked at me as I tried to get a more interesting answer than just – well the configuration didn’t work and realized that he needed to get on with his life than answer one more annoying question from this freshly minted new grad.

His response to my: well okay but really what was going what was the fundamental issue?

His answer was legendary:

Because some of the 1’s that should have been 1’s were 0’s and some of the 0’s that should have been 0’s were 1’s

I love the answer. It was a brush off, but at the same time was deeply insightful. At the end of the day the reason software doesn’t work can be reduced to a string of 1’s and 0’s that aren’t correct.

And many years later my son repeated this to me when I asked his mom why the database wasn’t working:

Apparently some sayings endure.

Why we can’t have nice things

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KMM8q

 

This really captures how different disciplines see each other!

The way to really read this:

  1. Look across the discipline you belong to
  2. Look diagonally across to see how each discipline sees itself
  3. Look vertically down to see how we wall see sysadmins.