Cutter Consortium was kind enough to publish an article of mine -- "Disrupting the Disruptors" -- in their IT Journal, a special issue on "Creative Destruction" in the IT industry.
Here's a link to a complimentary copy of that issue of the magazine.
Cutter is a huge panel of IT experts who will give you disinterested advice on most IT questions.
My article was on how incumbents might be able to defend themselves against disruptive technology business threats. A quick read, IMHO...
A recurrent meme at the Hadoop World conference last week was the idea that part of "Big Data" or even "the heart" of Big Data is "bringing the computation to the data."
At first I thought that the main impact of this -- beyond the very real observation that "shared-as-little-as-possible" architectures are great for scaling data processing -- was poetic: it was sort of a democratization of compute power, or liberating compute power from the dark satanic mills of Oracle or the like.
But there appear to be architectural implications as well. A stateless or practically stateless approach to data weakens any hope of transactional integrity, for example. If you coordinate enough to be certain that everything will be undo-able, you'll never get anywhere on your data. You need probabalistic assurances, not logical ones.
Also, new approaches will be needed for security and storage in an architecture where a vast universe of data/computation nodes coordinate. Maybe there are startups looking at this today, but would love to hear of anything interesting going on in these areas.
Was in a discussion today about the "consumerization of IT", by which people mean the trend to have consumer technology products and approaches become the leading edge for innovation in the enterprise.
The tenor of the conversation was that this was a historic shift, and that enterprise IT had formerly led innovation in consumer IT.
I found myself objecting. It's not that consumer IT has never led; it just hasn't led lately.
In the '80's, a new machine called the PC (and even Macs were called PCs then) invaded the enterprise. Its owners valued the pleasure of running software on a PC, the interactivity, the fun of using PC software.
Enterprise software, which was mostly time-sharing -- so-called "green screen" apps -- was ugly, cumbersome, and hard to learn how to use. There was nothing fun about it.
PC software -- and it was the "consumer" software of its day -- led enterprise IT, and enterprises were dragged kicking and screaming into supporting it.
Throughout what you might call the "LAN-based PC" era, consumer IT led. And then a different wind blew -- mainly databases and database-based applications -- and the client-server era began. What led then was the ability to run large datasets in something less than geologic time. Enterprise IT led, and led until... new clients came along that were a pleasure and fun to use, and users insisted that the enterprise support them.
Maybe it's a cycle, and not a series of epochs.
Your thoughts?
Do you need a connected tv for that? No, but it should be a nifty medium in terms of screen real estate. Unfortunately not so nifty in terms of input device(s) unless you happen to enjoy spelling things out with a remote control or cuddling a qwerty keyboard on your lap. But maybe voice input will take care of that: the gadget-oisie is gushing about Siri, forgetting that Siri is witty but not that great at voice recognition (like a URL, say). Those of us who broke our hearts trying to do natural language stuff in the '70s and '80s appreciate the difference between wittiness and understanding.
In any case, I'm excited about the coupling of Internet interactivity and social connection with tv production values. Get ready for a great ride.
OK, if we're going to have a significant increase in noSQL approaches to big data management, what will take the place of SQL?
This isn't just a Zen koan. SQL, a language I never cared for, nevertheless has two signal virtues:
What will take the place of this border in the noSQL world? Today it's anarchic: the query is a method in some languages, a specification in others, and (thanks to some bridging technologies), SQL itself.
Just as web applications took UI/UX back a decade, noSQL risks taking the data layer abstraction back a decade or two. Needs some work.
Anybody know good companies or approaches to this problem?
We're looking for investments in connected TV. Apple TV and others have thus far not ignited this market, but we believe something will.
Ideas?
We investors frequently fault entrepreneurs -- especially tech entrepreneurs -- for not understanding the difference between a great product and a great business.
A business is so much more than a product: it's a value proposition; it's communicating that value proposition to the customers; it's bringing the product to the market, and to the customers; it's establishing an advantage vis a vis competitors; it's building an organization that can reproducibly do all of the above. It's no wonder that many startup businesses don't know whether or not they have a great business, even when they might have a great product.
To be fair, however, many VCs and angels don't get the difference between a great product and a great business either. We convince ourselves that just because we understand how a product works that we understand the business that could successfully sell that product. Or we think that because we can understand a product in a marketplace that we undertand all the "gotchas" of running a business in that marketplace.
It's not just entrepreneurs who need to be honest with themselves about the distinction.
