First published on Linkedin, the day before the NFC Championship When the current NFL season started, one of the expected dramas was whether the talented Green Bay Packers quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, would give himself freely to a new era of coaching, where all the calls would be made from the sideline. Highly analyzed, scripted and…
Category: Business
Disaggregated Internet Exposes Strategic Straddles
All markets force companies to make choices: value proposition, how will it be differentiated, does anyone care, how does each investment support the intended value chain/value proposition. A disaggregated Internet forces existing companies to make new choices and creates the opportunity for new ones to disrupt. The emergence of Broadcom, and companies like Arista that…
Transformation: From Spreadsheets to Services
No other application embodies the then newfound business power of the personal computer, than the spreadsheet. Spreadsheets empowered number crunchers like never before. Over the decades that followed, formulas, pivots, macros, linking, and add-ons amplified that power creating mini IT fiefdoms disconnected from a company’s central business systems. Today, in the age of digital transformation,…
Pattern Matching a River of Data
Every new technology inevitably faces a taxonomy problem — WTF are we talking about. Today, the most misunderstood and controversial term in technology is “Artificial Intelligence”. The full scope of human capabilities includes touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Importantly, it also includes reason, personality, spirit, values-based actions, instinct-based reactions, memory-based consideration, and intuition. That…
How Safe is Your Embedded Software Environment?
The disclosure of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities in 2018 brought a new level of focus to embedded environments. The exclamation mark was the assertion that a major U.S. CPU manufacturer advised Chinese tech companies of the vulnerability before they notified the U.S. government, thus mixing geopolitics with tech. One of the vulnerabilities dealt…
AI is Under-Hyped
As the noise level around AI ramps up, as sure as the famous Gartner hype cycle predicts, the AI critics are also ramping up their messaging. Some of it is around the negative impacts AI could have on society, and some of it is good-natured attempts to debunk the reality of what AI can actually…
5G and Machine-Scale Networking
For many consumers, the promised increased throughput of 5G is the headline feature. For others, it might be latency or private networks. However, the ability to support a trillion or more devices may end up defining this generation of networking. A shift from people-scale networks to machine-scale networks. At ARM TechCon today, October 8th, 2019,…
Heard Never: Amazon Complaining About Integration and Testing
When was the last time you heard Amazon, Facebook, Google, of Netflix observe that integration and testing were going to be a major impediment to a mission-critical activity? How much off-the-shelf software do they use? Yet telecom operators routinely struggle with the fundamental reality of the cloud era: operational excellence — efficiency, productivity, agility, continuous…
Google’s Quantum Achievement / Experiment
Experimentation is essential to innovation. In celebrating Google’s quantum achievement, we are at least celebrating the spirit of experimentation. We may also be celebrating the demonstration of something that cannot be done in any practical sense by a classic computer architecture. Finally, we may be celebrating everything that was learned in the journey to that…
The Importance of Experimentation
Whether in the topic area of business model change, business model transformation, artificial intelligence, product development, user interface design, or any other area of significant change, it is common to hear experienced practitioners assert the importance of experimentation. If you marshal the forces of the entire company for something that has not been well thought…