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andrewdburton · 4 years

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How to prepare for a natural disaster

My world is on fire.

As you may have heard, much of Oregon is burning right now. Thanks to a “once in a lifetime” combination of weather and climate variables — a long, dry summer leading to high temps and low humidity, then a freak windstorm from the east — much of the state turned to tinder earlier this week. And then the tinder ignited.

At this very moment, our neighborhood is cloaked in smoke.

I am sitting in my writing shed looking out at a beige veil clinging to the trees and nearby homes. The scent of the smoke is intense. My eyes are burning. After everything else that's happened this year, this feels like yet one more step toward apocalypse. So crazy!

Fortunately, Kim and I (and the pets) are relatively safe. We're worried, sure, but not too worried. Our lizard brains make us want to flee. (“Fight or flight” and all that.) But our rational brains know that unless a new fire starts somewhere nearby, we should be safe.

Here's a current map of the fire situation in our county. (Click the image to open a larger version in a new window.)

The areas in red are under mandatory evacuation orders. (And the red dots are areas that have burned, I think. They added the dots to the map this morning.) Residents of areas shaded in yellow need to be prepped to leave at a moment's notice. And the areas in green are simply on alert.

See that town called Molalla? That's where my mother and one of my brothers live. My mother's assisted-living facility was evacuated to a city twenty miles away. My brother and his family voluntarily moved from their home to our family's box factory. But even that doesn't feel 100% safe. (The box factory is located just to the left of that cluster of red dots at the top tip of the yellow area around Molalla.)

Kim and I live near the “e” in Wilsonville. We're more than twenty miles from the nearest active fire. We should be safe. But, as a I say, we're worried. So, I spent much of yesterday prepping for possible evacuation.

Update! Barely three hours later, things have changed. Now Molalla is under a mandatory evacuation order. My brother can't go back to get anything. He didn't film his house and belongings, so he simply has to hope for the best. Meanwhile, the level two alert has been shifted to cover more of the county, including the town where I grew up (Canby) and the surrounding areas. The caution zone ends at the Willamette River, which is maybe four miles from us. Kim and I are on edge. Here's the latest update to the evacuation map…

The scariest part of all this? The main fire that's threatening these communities is zero percent contained. Zero

Natural Disasters

We Oregonians don't have a protocol for emergency evacuations. It's not something that really crosses our minds.

While the Pacific Northwest does have volcanoes, eruptions are rare enough that we never think about them. And yes, earthquakes happen. Eventually we'll have “the Big One” that devastates the region, but again there's no way to predict that and it's not something we build our lives around. (Well, many people have been adding earthquake reinforcement to their homes, but that's about it.)

In the past fifty or sixty years, the Portland area has experienced four other natural disasters.

My father used to talk about the Columbus Day Storm of 1962, a cyclone that blew through area when he was in high school.

On 18 May 1980, Mount St. Helens blew its top. There was plenty of warning before the eruption, though, so most everyone had cleared away from the peak.

On the morning of 25 March 1993, we had the “Spring Break quake”, an earthquake of magnitude 5.6. (This was also my 24th birthday, so I personally call it my “birthquake”.)

The Willamette Valley flood of 1996 was pretty spectacular.

Now, in 2020, we're experiencing the worst wildfires the state has ever seen. That's roughly one disaster every ten or fifteen years, and it's the first one during my 51 years on Earth that's made me think about the need for evacuation preparedness.

Kim and I have been asking ourselves lots of questions.

If we were to evacuate, where would we go? What route would we take? What would we carry with us? How would we prep our home to increase the odds that it would survive potential fire?

Let me share what we've decided and what we've learned. (And please, share what you know about emergency preparedness, won't you?)

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Evacuation Preparedness

The first thing we did was brainstorm a list of things that were important to us. Without reference to experts, what is it that we would want to do and/or take with us, if we were to evacuate.

Our animals (and animal supplies).

Phones, computers, and charging cords.

Important documents from our fire safe.

A bag for each of us containing clothes and toiletries.

Sleeping bags and pillows.

Sentimental items. (We have no “valuable”.)

Create a video tour of the house for insurance purposes (be sure to highlight valuable items).

Move combustible items away from the house.

After creating our own list, we consulted the experts.

In this case, we looked at websites for communities in California. California copes with wildfires constantly. (And, in fact, Kim's brother and his family recently had to help evacuate their town due to wildfires!) For no particular reason, I chose to follow the guidelines put out by Marin County, California. I figured they know what they're talking about!

The FIRESafe MARIN website has a bunch of great resources dedicated to wildfire planning and preparedness. I particularly like their evacuation checklist. While this form is wildfire specific, it could be easily adapted for other uses, such as hurricane preparedness or earthquake preparedness.

The ready.gov website is an excellent resource for disaster preparedness. It contains lots of info about prepping for problems of all sorts. You should check it out.

Creating a Go Kit

FIRESafe MARIN and other groups recommend putting together an emergency supply kit well in advance of possible problems. Each person should have her own Go Kit, and each should be stored in a backpack. (In our case, I have several cheap backpacks that I've purchased while traveling abroad. These are perfect for Go Kits.)

What should you keep in a Go Kit? It depends where you live, of course, and what sorts of disasters your area is susceptible to. But generally speaking, you might want your kits to contain:

A bandana and/or an N95 mask or respirator.

A change of clothing.

A flashlight or headlamp with spare batteries.

Extra car keys and some cash.

A map marked with evacuation routes and a designated meeting point.

Prescription medications.

A basic first aid kit.

Photocopies of important documents.

Digital backup of important files.

Pet supplies.

Water bottle and snacks.

Spare chargers for your electronic equipment.

That seems like a lot of stuff, but it's not. These things should fit easily into a small pack. Each Go Kit should be stores somewhere easy to access. Kim and I don't have Go Kits yet, but we'll create them soon. We intend to store them in the front coat closet.

Writing this article reminds me of one of the first posts I shared after re-purchasing Get Rich Slowly. Almost three years ago, I wrote about how to get what you deserve when filing an insurance claim. This info from a former insurance employee is very helpful (and interesting).

Final Thoughts

I spent much of yesterday prepping for possible evacuation. This isn't so much out of panic as it is out of trying to take sensible precautions. I gathered things and put them in the living room so that we can be ready to leave, if needed. If authorities were to upgrade us from level one to level two status, I'd move this stuff to my car.

Also as a precaution, I moved stuff away from the house and thoroughly watered the entire yard. (Not sure that'd make much difference, but hey, it can't hurt.) I created a video tour of the house that highlights anything we have of value. And so on. This took most of the afternoon.

This morning, I can see that the neighbors are doing something similar. We're all trying to exercise caution, I think.

Kim and I will almost surely be fine. Although the smoke is thick here at the moment — it's like a brownish fog, and it's even clouding my view of the neighbor's house! — there aren't any fires super close to us. And barring mistakes or stupidity, there won't be any threat to our home.

Still, it's good for us to take precautionary measures, both now and for the future. And it's probably smart for you to take some small steps today in case disaster strikes tomorrow.

Updates!

The situation here in Oregon is evolving rapidly. I'm going to use the space at the end of this post to post updates. These will be fragmentary thoughts, for the most part — not coherent paragraphs.

Here is a terrific Reddit post about what one person wishes they'd known when evacuating for wildfire.

Last night, it became clear that the family box factory really could be in harm's way. We're worried. We're not freaking out yet — it's a good distance from the fires and it's located in a “prairie” — but the workers there are trying to formulate some sort of plan for if things do go bad.

There are crazy rumors floating around that the fires were started by far-left political operatives. This is blatant bullshit and it pisses me off that (a) anyone would believe this idiocy and (b) spread the (unsubstantiated) rumors. It's causing actual issues as armed vigilantes are threatening people now because they're worried they're liberal firestarters. Simply insane.

Kim and I intend to spend most of today (Friday, September 11th) prepping the house as if it were indeed going to get hit. We realize that it probably won't, but better safe than sorry.

That's it for now. More later.

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/emergency-preparedness/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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pelikinesis · 4 years

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They taught me how to write. BIG mistake (verily and forsooth, I am high).

Maybe because there are people out there who want to believe, that beings who appear to be monstrous, beings for whom all observable characteristics of their physical forms activate responses of disgust and fear, individuals who can be kinder and more knowable than the majority of their kind, people who can be a source of safety rather than danger, of joy rather than suffering. Maybe that’s the closest that their sense of self-preservation will allow their hearts to get to that amplitude?

Or maybe because monsters and aliens and demons, etc. are hot? Did you ever think about that?

Okokoakokyokokokayokokyaokokokyaokokyaokyaok but. But. BUT. BUT.

Wait no I’m forgetting it no I remember yes okso can you remember like the dumbest thought you’ve ever had? The most mundane surprise or sensible chuckle or blandest slice of cheesecake you’ve ever had, you know some real good shit that falls into the continuum between first world problems and a damned good day. Or just like, the worst pun you’ve come up with. That one time you actually stopped and smelled the roses instead of continuing with your policy of ignoring all cliché advice or just assuming said cliche advice is not worth doing at least as far as you’re concerned.

That mundane thing, that experience of remembering the reference to the movie Shrek that happened within the movie I Am Legend, for no reason, while stepping into the elevator for the parking lot of the shopping plaza off Main Street you used to go to in high school, that memory, that moment of experience which cooled down and air dried to become that memory, and also this whole fucking ping pong match of rocket-boosted travesties against the noble effort of articulating coherent thoughts as sapient beings in order to externalize the internal phenomena into a shared reality woven by our interactions with others of our species.

All that stuff happened, and could potentially happen again and again every freaking time someone reads this, or arrives here anyways through completely different means unassociated with this piece of writing and this act of writing and your experience of reading (except you aren’t but others are unless none of them did), as a result of the process that formed the known freaking Universe with stars and comets and Mars and Venus and Pluto and black holes and supernovae and the skeletons of all those dogs and chimpanzees some of the first unmanned but not un-animal’d space probes contained, and that one birthday balloon that the laws of probability dictate must either have existed, must inevitably exist, or currently exists right now, which floated away from the hand of its birthday girl and up into the sky and got blown even upperwards (which is a perfectly cromulent word) by a freak gust of wind into space, that ballo either is or will be up in space as well, and all that 99% of existence which is extraterrestrial in nature and astronomical in scope. Alllllllll that.

And all that was created in the same event and continues as the same process which were necessary for this piece of writing to exist, and for you to be born and educated in order for any of that to matter (as far as you’re concerned, also, hi. How ya doin’? I hope you’re living and loving [originally I misspelled ‘living’ and decided to keep the typo in] in a world that’s gained more than it has lost than the one I’m writing this from. I’m afraid it won’t be. Remember to stay hydrated, and time out of your day to do a little something for yourself, if you can afford to. Everything stops sounding cheesy once you remember how ephemeral our existences are. Don’t be afraid to like and be moved by things. Unless the thing is bigotry or fascism or whatever sociopolitical poison is fuelling and amplifying the ills of your time. Something like Trumpanomics, or neoneoneoliberalism, or Let’s Continue Never Progressing Past Societies With Egregious Wealth Disparities, Political Corruption, Concentration Camps, and Genocide Denial, Because That Sounds Hard And Like We’d Have to Work On Our Enormous Collective Flaws In Part By Shining A Spotlight On Those Responsible As Well As The Systems That Perpetuate and Incentivize Them. Be moved in the opposite direction of those, because they suck. I really hope you don’t have to deal with any of that over when you’re from. Anyways, I hope you feel a little braver after reading this. I have no idea why you would, it’s not like I began writing this thinking “I feel like trying to inspire the HELL out of some kid taking a Early 21st Century Literature Class right now” because I am reasonably confident, at the time of this writing, that no one else EVER has had that thought, and if I’m wrong, then clearly I’m too committed to my own particular latitude of willful ignorance and desperate sense of self-importance to entertain that alternative possibility, but I have to say, this feels pretty good. Maybe because being high feels good. But not too high. But WHY does being high feel so good? Well, it does to me. I have a lot of friends who do not share that opinion. I guess it’s like asking why some people think celery tastes good, when they’re wrong.) And if nothing else, this is still easier to read and understand than 99% of books and articles written by philosophical scholars, even if it’s not as profound. But if this isn’t profound but what they say is profound then what is profundity and why do I need to pretend to like it?

As for why I just took a teensy hit from my vape pen (HAHAHHAA yeah, suck it, nerds and students of the future! I, Marc Cid, who is clearly a revered and iconic author of the new millennium [unless the millennium beginning in the year 2000 AD is no longer considered the new millennium in which case wow holy shit, what year is it over there? I’m impressed that you’ve managed to translate what to you is our equivalent of Ye Olde Englishe, unless you didn’t, in which case this looks like a bunch of gibberish and your finest paleolinguistic scholars have all been staring at this fossil of a text file all like “Ah yes, the fabled shibboleth of The Mad Poet, Marc--I mean, of the Incredibly Mildly Pleasant, Profound, and Manbun-sporting Poet, Marc Cid. For centuries, scholars of yore thought it lost to the sands of time, in the wake of the great InternetQuake of the year 2030, predicted by him in the very fabled shibboleth of which I am currently gawking at in a museum in the future but I can’t read that this is totally going to happen at a period in time far beyond its writing.

...Okay, that one got away from me and it would take soooooooo much effort to try to wrestle it back. If it really bothers you, then YOU can finish it, I don’t even care. Hey, English professors in the future! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Make this an assignment for your students, that they have to finish that last paragraph. In the English of my time!!! Or whatever other contemporary languages, that wouldn’t be fair to people from other places that don’t speak what I supposed I’d have to describe as “Future English” because even though I’m predicting all of this with absolute confidence it will happen, I can’t predict the exact name of “Future English.” Well, I don’t mind taking a guess, or three. Okay here goes, 1-2-3: I think Future English will be called Quenya, Sindarin, or It’s Not Delivery, It’s DiGiorno.

#highblogging #nobody should read this ever #anime was a mistake #Cukoloris #gibbous #Dr. Robert Liston

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brucebai · 7 years

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Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover

Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover http://ift.tt/2uxW6Vt

Microsoft announced something very impressive last week: revenue for the company’s 2017 fiscal year (which ended June 30) increased 5% year-over-year. That may not seem particularly meaningful until you realize 2016 was only the second year in the company’s history that revenue declined; the first included the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression:

Moreover, all indications are that growth will continue, defeating the presumption that tech companies that start to decline do so inexorably. The most famous example that said inexorable decline need not be inevitable is IBM, which, in the early 90s, found itself in far more dire straits than Microsoft, only to recover under the leadership of Lou Gerstner:

Microsoft’s earnings report isn’t the only thing that has made me think of IBM lately; Two weeks ago, at Mirosoft’s annual partner conference, CEO Satya Nadella introduced a new offering called Microsoft 365. Nadella said:

Microsoft 365 is a fundamental departure in how we think about product creation. This is the coming together of the best of Office 365, Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility and Security…

We have decided that the time has come for us as a company and us as an ecosystem to talk about this in the terms that customers can get the most value. We want to bring these products together as an integrated solution. A complete solution that has got AI infused in it with intelligence, whether it is intelligence that is helping end users be more productive and creative and teamwork, or intelligence in security. It’s that complete solution for intelligent teamwork and security that we want to bring about with Microsoft 365.

A cynical take is that this is typical Microsoft, cribbing a successful naming scheme (‘365’) to rebrand a SKU that Microsoft actually announced a year ago. That’s true! A slightly more generous take is that Microsoft 365 is the latest implementation of the company’s decades-old bundling strategy, and, well, that’s true too!

The way Nadella framed the announcement though — associating customer value with integration — that is straight from Gerstner’s IBM playbook.

The IBM and Microsoft Monopolies

When Gerstner signed on as IBM CEO in the spring of 1993, the company had just recorded the biggest annual loss in American corporate history: -$4.97 billion. In his memoir about the turnaround he led at IBM, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, Gerstner noted that 1993 was going just as badly:

At the end of May I saw April’s [numbers] and they were sobering. Profit had declined another $400 million, for a total decline of $800 million for the first four months. Mainframe sales had dropped 43 percent during the same four months. Other large IBM businesses—software, maintenance, and financing—were all dependent, for the most part, on mainframe sales and, thus, were declining as well.

Gerstner expanded on this point in various sections of his book:

Despite the fact that IBM, then and now, was regarded as a complex company with thousands of products…IBM was a one-product company—a mainframe company—with an array of multibillion-dollar businesses attached to that single franchise…It didn’t take a Harvard MBA or a McKinsey consultant to understand that the fate of the mainframe was the fate of IBM, and, at the time, both were sinking like stones.

IBM’s mainframe business was being hammered on two fronts: Unix-based alternatives offered modular lower-cost alternatives for back-end operations, while PCs were taking over many of the jobs mainframes used to do — and, in the long run, threatening to take over the data center itself. IBM was not only stuck with a product that was too expensive for a market that was simultaneously shrinking in size, but also an entire organization predicated on that product’s dominance.

This was Microsoft a few decades later: the company loved to brag about its stable of billion dollar businesses, but in truth they were all components of one business — Windows. Everything Microsoft built from servers to productivity applications was premised on the assumption that the vast majority of computing devices were running Windows, leaving the company completely out of sorts when the iPhone and Android created and captured the smartphone market.

The truth is that both companies were victims of their own monopolistic success: Windows, like the System/360 before it, was a platform that enabled Microsoft to make money in all directions. Both companies made money on the device itself and by selling many of the most important apps (and in the case of Microsoft, back-room services) that ran on it. There was no need to distinguish between a vertical strategy, in which apps and services served to differentiate the device, or a horizontal one, in which the device served to provide access to apps and services. When you are a monopoly, the answer to strategic choices can always be “Yes.”

That, though, is why it is so interesting to think about what happens — and the problems that arise — when the monopoly ends.

Post-Monopoly Problem One: Nature

The great thing about a monopoly is that a company can do anything, because there is no competition; the bad thing is that when the monopoly is finished the company is still capable of doing anything at a mediocre level, but nothing at a high one because it has become fat and lazy. To put it another way, for a former monopoly “big” is the only truly differentiated asset.

This was Gerstner’s key insight when it came to mapping out IBM’s future:

I am not sure that in 1993 I or anyone else would have started out to create an IBM. But, given IBM’s scale and broad-based capabilities, and the trajectories of the information technology industry, it would have been insane to destroy its unique competitive advantage and turn IBM into a group of individual component suppliers more minnows in an ocean.

In the big April customer meeting at Chantilly and in my other customer meetings, CIOs made it very clear that the last thing in the world they needed was one more disk drive company, one more operating system company, one more PC company. They also made it clear that our ability to execute against an integrator strategy was nearly bankrupt and that much had to be done before IBM could provide a kind of value that we were not providing at the time—but which they believed only IBM had a shot at delivering: genuine problem solving, the ability to apply complex technologies to solve business challenges, and integration.

So keeping IBM together was the first strategic decision, and, I believe, the most important decision I ever made—not just at IBM, but in my entire business career. I didn’t know then exactly how we were going to deliver on the potential of that unified enterprise, but I knew that if IBM could serve as the foremost integrator of technologies, we’d be delivering extraordinary value.

In Gerstner’s vision, only IBM had the breadth to deliver solutions instead of products; the next challenge would be changing the business model.

Post-Monopoly Problem Two: Business Model

The natural inclination for former monopolies, at least if Microsoft and IBM are any indication, is to stick with the monopoly-era business model. That meant doubling down on the device (or OS, as it were).

The problem with this approach is twofold:

First, as I just noted, the nature of the company is set: being big — which in this case means offering services to everyone — is much easier to accomplish than being better, a critical factor in selling a differentiated device in a competitive market.

Second, as long as the business-model is device-centric, there is a risk in destroying the services component of the business. In Microsoft’s case, that meant holding Office for iPad back to prop up Windows, for example, or building Azure (née Windows Azure) around Windows Server. IBM, in far more dire straights, was, as Gerstner noted, close to splitting up the company so that individual divisions could sell their respective devices on their own without corporate overhead.

The reality is that while changing business models is hard, for both Microsoft and IBM it was necessary to preserve what strengths they still had. This is why defenders of former-CEO Steve Ballmer miss the point when pointing out that Microsoft Azure and Office 365, the keys to Microsoft’s renewed growth, both got started under his watch. Look again at Gerstner’s account of IBM:

If you were to take a snapshot of IBM’s array of businesses in 1993 and another in 2002, you would at first see very few changes. Ten years ago we were in servers, software, services, PCs, storage, semiconductors, printers, and financing. We are still in those businesses today…

My point is that all of the assets that the company needed to succeed were in place. But in every case—hardware, technology, software, even services—all of these capabilities were part of a business model that had fallen wildly out of step with marketplace realities.

This is why I don’t give Ballmer too much credit for Office 365 and Azure: the products of Microsoft’s future were there, but the Windows-centric business model was constricting every part of the company to an ever-shrinking share of the overall market; Nadella’s greatest success has been taking off that straitjacket.

Post-Monopoly Problem Three: Culture

Four years ago, while announcing a company-wide reorganization (that I thought was a bad idea), Ballmer wrote a memo called One Microsoft. This was the key paragraph:

We will reshape how we interact with our customers, developers and key innovation partners, delivering a more coherent message and family of product offerings. The evangelism and business development team will drive partners across our integrated strategy and its execution. Our marketing, advertising and all our customer interaction will be designed to reflect one company with integrated approaches to our consumer and business marketplaces.

I wrote in Services, Not Devices:

The crux of the problem is in that paragraph: no one is asking Microsoft to design its “customer interaction” to “reflect one company.” Customers are asking Microsoft to help them solve their problems and get their jobs done, not to make them Microsoft-only customers. The solipsism is remarkable.

The solipsism, at least if IBM was any indication, was also inevitable. Gerstner writes:

When there’s little competitive threat, when high profit margins and a commanding market position are assumed, then the economic and market forces that other companies have to live or die by simply don’t apply. In that environment, what would you expect to happen? The company and its people lose touch with external realities, because what’s happening in the marketplace is essentially irrelevant to the success of the company…

This hermetically sealed quality—an institutional viewpoint that anything important started inside the company—was, I believe, the root cause of many of our problems. To appreciate how widespread the dysfunction was, I need to describe briefly some of its manifestations. They included a general disinterest in customer needs, accompanied by a preoccupation with internal politics. There was general permission to stop projects dead in their tracks, a bureaucratic infrastructure that defended turf instead of promoting collaboration, and a management class that presided rather than acted. IBM even had a language all its own.

Sounds familiar!

Comic from Bonkers World

Gerstner’s response was to restructure IBM, change the company’s promotion and compensation policies, and most importantly, push IBM to better understand customers and then leverage its size to offer services they actually needed:

Our bet was this: Over the next decade, customers would increasingly value companies that could provide solutions— solutions that integrated technology from various suppliers and, more important, integrated technology into the processes of an enterprise. We bet that the historical preoccupations with chip speeds, software versions, proprietary systems, and the like would wane, and that over time the information technology industry would be services-led, not technology-led.

This is why the Microsoft 365 announcement and Nadella’s talk of integration is so interesting, and IBM plays a role in this story as well.

IBM’s Cloud Miss

I’ve previously written about how IBM, specifically Sam Palmisano, who succeeded Gerstner as CEO, missed the cloud. Remarking on Palmisan’s declaration that “You can’t do what we’re doing in a cloud” I wrote:

Something that is interesting about most cloud solutions is that few are really doing anything new. Rather cloud service providers are simply taking operations that were formerly done on premise and moving them to a cloud that is available for any enterprise to use. And, as Palmisano realized, the inherent lack of customization in such a model means that most cloud services are on a feature-by-feature basis inferior to on-premise software.

The reality, though, is that the businesses IBM served — and the entire reason IBM had a market — didn’t buy customized technological solutions to make themselves feel good about themselves; they bought them because they helped them accomplish their business objectives. Gerstner’s key insight was that many companies had a problem that only IBM could solve, not that customized solutions were the end-all be-all. And so, as universally provided cloud services slowly but surely became good-enough, IBM no longer had a monopoly on problem solving.

To put it bluntly, enterprises don’t need a systems integrator for their data center if they no longer have a data center. Once again IBM is stuck competing for a shrinking market, which is why the company’s revenue has now declined for 21 straight quarters.1

Microsoft’s Cloud Opportunity

Still, the fact that enterprises no longer have data centers doesn’t mean integration is no longer valuable; rather, the locus of needed integration has shifted to the cloud as well. The average enterprise customer uses 20~30 apps, data is often scattered on and off premise, or stuck in email or personal accounts, and while IT departments may be happy to no longer upgrade servers, managing identity and security across all of these services and on a whole host of new devices far more likely to be used outside a company’s intranet calls for the same sort of integrator Gerstner wanted IBM to be.

This seems to be the long-term goal of Microsoft 365. Microsoft said in a blog post:

[Microsoft 365] represents a fundamental shift in how we will design, build and go to market to address our customers’ needs for a modern workplace. The workplace is transforming—from changing employee expectations, to more diverse and globally distributed teams, to an increasingly complex threat landscape. From these trends, we are seeing a new culture of work emerging. Our customers are telling us they are looking to empower their people with innovative technology to embrace this modern culture of work.

With more than 100 million commercial monthly active users of Office 365, and more than 500 million Windows 10 devices in use, Microsoft is in a unique position to help companies empower their employees, unlocking business growth and innovation…

Microsoft 365 Enterprise:

Unlocks creativity by enabling people to work naturally with ink, voice and touch, all backed by tools that utilize AI and machine learning.

Provides the broadest and deepest set of apps and services with a universal toolkit for teamwork, giving people flexibility and choice in how they connect, share and communicate.

Simplifies IT by unifying management across users, devices, apps and services.

Helps safeguard customer data, company data and intellectual property with built-in, intelligent security.

Wait, inking?

Here’s the big concern I have about the Microsoft 365 rollout, and Microsoft generally: Nadella and team deserve plaudits for working through the first two post-monopoly problems. Microsoft has embraced its bigness and focused on services, and has the business model to match (although, it should be noted that it was Ballmer who was responsible for shifting most of Microsoft’s enterprise business to a subscription model years ago). That’s great!

I’m troubled, though, that I just articulated what I think is the Microsoft 365 strategy — or what it should be — far more clearly than either Nadella or Kirk Koenigsbauer, the corporate vice-president for the Office team that wrote this blog post. Indeed, Gerstner articulated the strategy best of all, and he wasn’t even talking about Microsoft or the cloud!

Then again, I’m not entirely sure a focus on cloud integration is Microsoft’s strategy after all: maybe the cynical take — that Microsoft is just stealing a successful name for yet another enterprise licensing bundle — is closer to the truth. It is striking that the primary reason Microsoft gives for Microsoft 365 is that it already has a lot of users.

Stepping back even further, Nadella loves to say “Our customers tell us” or some derivative thereof, but an actual articulation of customer use cases is consistently missing from his presentations. This keynote was not dissimilar to Nadella’s Build keynote, which featured a full 30 minutes of theory about the future of computing, that, while fascinating, seemed much more like a justification for Microsoft’s continued relevance as opposed to an articulation of demonstrated customer needs.

Can Culture Change?

The most bittersweet paragraph in Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? is the final one:

I was always an outsider. But that was my job. I know Sam Palmisano has an opportunity to make the connections to the past as I could never do. His challenge will be to make them without going backward; to know that the centrifugal forces that drove IBM to be inward-looking and self-absorbed still lie powerful in the company. Continuing to drive change while building on the best (and only the best) of the past is the ultimate description of the job of Chief Executive Officer, International Business Machines Corporation.

Palmisano completely failed the challenge: what was the aforementioned reliance on IBM’s seemingly impregnable position as a systems integrator and dismissal of the cloud anything but the result of being “inward-looking and self-absorbed”? The same point applies to Palmisano’s obsession with profit-per-share: customers, Gerstner’s obsession, were totally forgotten.

That is why Gerstner’s IBM should be a potential inspiration to Microsoft, but Palmisano’s (and current CEO Ginni Rometty, who has hewed far more closely to Palmisano’s example than Gerstner’s) IBM a warning: culture is a curse, and for better or worse, a company can recover but never be fully cured.

By the way, Gerstner predicted the public cloud in the first appendix of his book, which was published in 2003, four years before AWS was launched:

Put all of this together—the emergence of large-scale computing grids, the development of autonomic technologies that will allow these systems to be more self-managing, and the proliferation of computing devices into the very fabric of life and business—and it suggests one more major development in the history of the IT industry. This one will change the way IT companies take their products to market. It will change who they sell to and who the customer considers its “supplier.” This development is what some have called “utility” computing.

The essential idea is that very soon enterprises will get their information technology in much the same way they get water or electric power. They don’t now own a waterworks or power plant, and soon they’ll no longer have to buy, house, and maintain any aspect of a traditional computing environment: The processing, the storage, the applications, the systems management, and the security will all be provided over the Net as a service—on demand.

The value proposition to customers is compelling: fewer assets; converting fixed costs to variable costs; access to unlimited computing resources on an as-needed basis; and the chance to shed the headaches of technology cycles, upgrades, maintenance, integration, and management.

Also, in a post-September 11, 2001, world in which there’s much greater urgency about the security of information and systems, on-demand computing would provide access to an ultra-secure infrastructure and the ability to draw on systems that are dispersed— creating a new level of immunity from a natural disaster or an event that could wipe out a traditional, centralized data center.

IBM misses him. [↩]

BruceFav Bloggers via Stratechery by Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com July 27, 2017 at 03:47AM

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