Charter Street

Bedouins Are Everywhere

By Greg Olsen

Little did I know how truly pervasive Bedouinism was when I wrote Going Bedouin. The number of emails, comments, and related posts I've since come across on the subject has been astounding (at least to a blogging newbie like me).   I feel like I unknowingly stepped into some sort of quasi-religious mass movement.  There is clearly passion around the central ideology of infrastructure minimalism.  What's also interesting are the different facets of this movement that draw peoples attention and the different perspectives that are being voiced.

Three key areas of discussion focus seem to have arisen:

• Technology: Saddlebag contents?  What specific tools are available to Bedouins?
• Location: Tent or no tent?  Physical vs. virtual office?
• Social needs: Are Bedouins lonely?  Can alternative workplace concepts meet the social needs of workers?

Getting the Word Out

By Paul McNamara

As a start-up, one of the things we need to do to be successful is to get the word out -- create "awareness" for our company.  Start-ups begin with no awareness at all – zippo, nada (identically zero as an old math professor used to say).  The goal is to go from our present state, where no one knows about us, to a state where lots of people know about us.  We're just now about to start that process, so we're thinking a lot about how to do it. 

When AT&T changed their name to at&t (?) all they needed to do was spend a bazillion dollars on an ad campaign explaining how they were now to be known as at&t and not AT&T.   OK, I got it.  You don’t have to tell me anymore.  Please stop already.

But start-ups have very limited resources.  What start-ups need to do is tell their story to other people and hope those other people repeat it.  We tell journalists our story and hope they write an article; we tell bloggers our story and hope they write a post; and sometimes we just tell random people our story and hope they repeat it to other random people. 

Software’s Glorious Revolution

by Greg Olsen

After many months of reading, I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s System of the World  (the last volume in the Baroque Cycle trilogy), and I discovered an unexpected reward - the realization that we are in the midst of a profound revolution in the software industry and that we are witnessing the establishment of a New System of the Software World.

The Baroque Cycle explores the economic, political, & religious structures of Europe around the end of the 17^th century and the profound changes that led to a transition from a land-based economy ruled by monarchs and anointed nobles and steeped in superstition, to a system governed (to a much greater degree) by capitalism, democracy, and rationalism.  The “Old System of the Software World” that I grew to be familiar with was ruled by its own monarchs and nobles, and had its own superstitions. The Powers carried names like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, and OMG and the nobles carried the title “architect” (see Joel’s discussion). We possessed hope and faith that the directives of the architect nobles would protect us from the plagues of instability, unscalability, and inextensibility.

The Software Complexity Racket

By Paul McNamara

As a young boy of nine or ten, I can remember sitting on our driveway in Pennsylvania waiting for my father to get home from work.  As soon as he got out of the car, I told him that the chain on my bike had fallen off and asked him if he could help me fix it. 

Not too long ago, I arrived home from work to find my 10 year-old sitting on the driveway.  When I got out of the car, he said, “Dad, Windows can’t find ole32.dll, can you help me fix it”?

Now, I’ve worked in the computer industry for more than 20 years; I’m supposed to know this stuff.  The fact that it sometimes takes me hours to get my home computer back running after my kids engage in some reckless and dangerous behavior -- like installing a new computer game -- is a testament to the sorry state of software today. 

If it's this tough for me, what must life be like for the insurance salesman or tax accountant or gas station owner when his or her son says that Windows can’t find ole32.dll?  At least I know what the hell ole32.dll is!  I’ve got a shot; I know where to start.  Most people don’t have a clue.  How can we, as an industry, be treating our customers this way? 

Going Bedouin

By Greg Olsen

Anyone who works in the Silicon Valley knows the fable of the company that achieves spectacular success, then moves into new luxurious headquarters, and then immediately starts its decline.  In this fable, the "new headquarters" event equates to "jumping the shark ".  Certainly, there is no scientific basis for "demise by new headquarters," but every time I drive by the still empty excite@home monument or the former SGI headquarters (the new Google headquarters, btw) with its contemplation fountain set amid lush manicured gardens, I wonder. 

For many rapidly growing technology companies, "new opulent headquarters" seem to mark the point where a once innovative and agile company has become big, slow, and distracted.  The relevant question for me is whether or not a company's attitude toward operational infrastructure such as facilities, HR, and internal information systems is an indicator of its ability to resist decay into a bloated, slothful, has been. 

Hello again, world.

By Paul McNamara

As Mark Twain once said, rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.  As some of you know, I left Red Hat in 2001 to join Hal Covert (another Red Hat alum) at SGI.  2001 was a year that saw lots of the early guys at Red Hat leave. 

I have to say that most people think that moving from Red Hat to SGI was a dubious career move.  But in truth I found it to be a really rich experience -- there's no better experience than a turn around.  There are two really big lessons that I learned from the SGI experience.  First, I grew to understand how and why SGI, once an extremely hot company, lost its way in the market.  And second, I learned just how hard it is to remake a public company.