I’m happy to announce that my company Layerboom has been acquired by Joyent, a leading provider of Cloud Computing services and solutions. Here’s the press announcement.

Layerboom & Cloud Computing is something I’ve been working on for 2 years but I’ve been thinking about cloud since school. Startups require quite a bit of sacrifice, and this definitely wasn’t an exception. I had to give up a lot for the opportunity to try and for that reason I have a ton of people to thank. Most of you I’ve thanked in person already, but here it is again for ‘the record’.

A big thanks to our Investors for taking a chance on a couple guys with a laptop and an idea, and a big congratulations to the rest of the guys on the Layerboom team for being persistent, forward thinking, and above all a pleasure to work with.

I also have to thank my Friends for being really supportive and putting up with my bullshit over the last 2 years; You’re like family to me and in case there was any doubt, you’re worth more to me than anything.

As part of our deal I’ve taken a job at Joyent and I’m really happy to be working for a company with excellent leadership and vision . We can’t wait to show everyone the projects we’re working on!

ps We’re hiring, so if you’re a developer and you’re looking for a killer opportunity send me an email.

After seeing some buzz on Twitter about Mobilicity, I went to their website, which was so slow I thought I was on dial-up.

This amateur stuff from a Telecom?
No… It can’t be.

But after seeing a database connection error (This means shit is broken for all your non-techies) I realized something was really up.

Check this out:

# host www.mobilicity.ca
www.mobilicity.ca has address 173.201.38.96
# host 173.201.38.96
96.38.201.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ip-173-201-38-96.ip.secureserver.net.

Huh? Secureserver.net is….

# whois 173.201.38.96
 
OrgName:    GoDaddy.com, Inc.
OrgID:      GODAD
Address:    14455 N Hayden Road
Address:    Suite 226
City:       Scottsdale
StateProv:  AZ
PostalCode: 85260
Country:    US
 
NetRange:   173.201.0.0 - 173.201.255.255
CIDR:       173.201.0.0/16
OriginAS:   AS26496
NetName:    GO-DADDY-SOFTWARE-INC
NetHandle:  NET-173-201-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-173-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET
NameServer: CNS2.SECURESERVER.NET
NameServer: CNS3.SECURESERVER.NET
Comment:    Please send abuse complaints to abuse@godaddy.com
RegDate:    2009-09-18
Updated:    2009-09-18

Its GoDaddy. A telecom that hosts its website on GoDaddy.

Yikes.

The Help Desk will be going away.

It’s important to understand the meaning of the term “Help Desk”. I don’t just mean people who sit around all day with headsets, answering phone calls. It turns out there are a *lot* of people employed in IT whose job it is to just keep the lights on. Vendors, Integration specialists, Sysadmins, and the guy whose entire job it is to  click the right button to clear the printer queue. Entire countries have devoted a lot of resources to greasing the gears of computers. They all work in a Helpdesk somehow.

CTO’s and CIO’s are starting to appreciate that their function at a company isn’t about technology implementation – it’s about how technology can help their business. Who cares if your OS is running Windows or Linux if all you need is a Word processor (and Solitaire). It’s become totally irrelevant.

What matters is the applications that are delivered to the end user; everything else is just implementation dogma. The people doing these implementations are Help Desks too, they’re just a few degrees removed from the end-user and prefer snazzier titles like ‘Application Services Engineer.’

It’s gonna take awhile. The PC will be around for a long time and people still need to type. But as we shift to tiny, integrated, crash-proof devices we need help desks less and less. The intuitive nature of the computer will suggest that it’s no longer important to be adept at using them. Not only that, but as we cycle through generations of people, the technical citizens will supplant the technical immigrants

Sometimes I wonder if Embrace & Extend is the new R&D.

A lot of startup business models involve building products that fill gaps in existing platforms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and there have been a few success stories. But if you don’t own the platform, or if you aren’t wildly successful at filling the gap you’re taking a really big risk.

If you fill a gap in someone elses platform and you are moderately successful, then it means there is demand. You have done a fantastic job of demonstrating peoples willingness to pay for something. Twitter needed search functionality and acquired the company that was doing that, but instead of buying an existing control panel, Amazon just built their own. There isn’t a reason why the platform itself will buy you rather than implement the features you’ve spent all your time building.

The issue seems to be the massive amounts of startups going after ‘low hanging fruit’. It’s one thing to be lean and get a product out the door, but it’s entirely another to be able to sustain your market for any reasonable amount of time. Perhaps one of the issues with the low hanging fruit, is that they are problems which are (relatively) easily solved, but the market hasn’t been proven, or a set of ‘best practices’ has not yet been established.

The new model for services & platform companies (which includes companies like Twitter and Apple) seems to be

1) Create an ecosystem
2) Let the ecosystem figure out what your product is and how its being used
3) Cannibalize the features your ecosystem created for you.

It goes without saying that if you want to solve an Easy problem then you’re going to have a lot of competition (link shorteners, anyone?), and your chances for acquisition are actually much much lower. If you’re trying to solve a Hard problem then you will have less competition but you have to be careful – if you build your solution using someone else’s platform, what’s to stop them from taking your idea and just using it themselves? Does your idea work better as a Feature in an existing product, or would stand on its own? There’s nothing wrong with being a feature, but it’s really important that you know the answer.

You & Mii

A few months ago Susan* and her Grandfather were playing Wii. As every gamer knows, its not quite the same to play a Wii game without a Mii character. So Susan opted to create her Grandfather his very own avatar – at his discretion of course. After 30 minutes they’d perfected the essence of the man (playful in nature but I’m told had serious eyebrows).They then proceeded to bowl and golf in the usual fashion. They even managed a couple games of Tennis. All in all a great visit.

But Susans Grandfather got sick, and instead of getting better things got worse.

Dealing with the death of a loved one is difficult in most circumstances but this was particularily difficult for his family. The central figure in their family, he would often be the resolver of disputes, and the reason for their getting together. They attended the funeral grief stricken but mildly comforted by the understanding that a man with such a persistent sense of youth would no longer have to deal with the burdens of an ageing body.

A few weeks later Susans family was over for a relatives birthday. After catching up and eating dinner a few of them decided to fire up the Wii. To their amazement the character that kept popping up the most often was her Grandfather.

“It was as if he was still around, playing games with us”, she recalled.

“As if he would live forever.”

Perpetual Consciousness

If we could live forever what would that look like? While modern technologies may make it possible to sustain our bodies much longer than in the past, the fact is that our bodies are beautiful machines that eventually break down. Phillosophers and scientists have asked these same questions for quite a long time, and many movies and books have been based on the idea that a computer could actually contain your consciousness forever.

For technology extremists the moment that makes this possible is a predicted Rapture-like event dubbed The Singularity. The singularity is a point in the future where technology is able to make improved copies of itself. The concept is that once something smarter than a human can make copies of other ‘beings’ smarter than people then “all bets are off” – there is no way to predict what will happen beyond this point because anything can happen. The singularity is in effect a moment where a machine can actually be conscious, and could contain other consciousnesses.

What does this have to do with living forever? Many people suggest that we will be able to upload our consciousness into some ‘brain’ and in effect ‘live’ in a machine. Whether or not its possible is pretty tough to answer. The singularity, much like The Rapture or Alien Abduction, is one of those things that cannot be verified by the living.

Perhaps the experience of the living is the only element that we should really be concerned with. If the memory is almost as effective as the real thing then perhaps an avatar is enough to feel a presence.

For Susan and her family, her Grandfather was still very much a part of their lives – able to play tennis with them at the press of a button.

Pause, and ask yourself the following question:

“Do I want a Sysadmin? Or do I want a Developer who knows how to be a Sysadmin?”

Turns out there are quite a few developers who also know how to do operations work and do so really effectively. The people who do this kind of work have had all sorts of titles: Systems Engineers, Systems Administrators, Unlucky Developers, Operations, etc.

You want someone who can automate backups, and testing of those backups in a way that removes themselves as bottlenecks. You want someone who can write the API you need for your developers to push code updates every single hour to QA and production, and do so in a reliable fashion (with rollback)

These are the people you want to hire.
Trust me.

The key question you have to ask yourself is this:
“How many people does it take to keep my operation up and running 24×7?”

A ‘decent’ sysadmin can handle more than 50 computers on their own
A ‘good’ sysadmin can handle more than 200
An ‘Awesome’ sysadmin can handle more than 1000.

The new name for this role is is ‘DevOps’ for Developer + Operations. They’re people who keep lights on, and ensure that you’ll keep the lights on if you get 1,000,000 customers tomorrow. The kind of people who will work themselves out of a job because they’ve automated *everything*. The kind of people who actually enjoy writing code that manages other computers. Yep. They actually exist.

Stop asking for what you think you want. There’s a whole other class of developer out there – begging for a challenge.

I’ve been trying this thing lately. Every single time I sit down at my computer, instead of running straight for a website or my email, I try and write something first. What got me thinking about this was a thought I had about how most people spend more time online than watching TV, but the majority of those people are still consuming information.

Take a look at sites like Digg, Reddit, Boingboing, Facebook, etc. You can throw up a few pictures and vote on a few stories but for the most part it’s like watching TV. You didn’t have to create anything to realize the value of those systems – you just had to ‘participate’ by going there.

So what if you could measure the amount of stuff you consumed, and the amount of stuff you created?

Then you could come up with a personal ratio. So lets say for every blog post I write I read 100 websites. That actually seems like a reasonable ratio to me. So my ratio is

1:100

But if you’re not in much of a writing mood for awhile, maybe you’ll read 1000 websites for every blog post

1:1000

Something like this would be cool to track, and I’d be really interested in seeing what the averages are.

Its not a day that actually reduces power demand in the long term, and other than awareness is just a tiny tiny blip in terms of power consumption. We need to not only be aware of how much power we use, but take active steps in reducing consumption.

You can’t change people, and you can’t tell them they need to get by with less, however you can appeal to their pocket books, and you can put policies in place that improve power efficiencies in many of the devices you will purchase over the next few years.

Consider my computer monitor. I have an LG LCD monitor connected to my laptop. But most of the time I’ll unplug my laptop and the monitor will go into standby mode. The weird thing is, that standby mode – while using less power – doesnt stop using power altogether. Why doesn’t the monitor just say to itself “I’ve been in standby for awhile, I should probably just turn myself off” ?
Are people really that lazy? Their user experience needs to include moving the mouse and having the monitor pop back on? Why can’t you just press the button, its not as though the tubes need to warm up?

This happens with the majority of the devices in your house. Your DVD Player, Stereo, Cable Box, Television, etc ,etc – they all use power in ‘standby mode’. These vampire devices use what in a single household is a small amount of power, but when you multiply that by 1,000,000 homes, it starts to be a big number.

A lot of devices consumed power regardless of state because they had to keep information around. Like what channels were programmed into the TV, or what time was displayed on your VCR. Do we still need another clock? Manufacturers need to be told to integrate certain efficiencies. If these features are important then the market figure will out how to address them.

Critics will say that efficiency only goes so far, and that is true. However the effects of improving appliance and device efficiencies has been tremendous – and we can do way better. I think something on the order of 100 coal fired power plants didn’t have to be built, simply because of efficiency standards that were put into place by regulating bodies and lobbyists.

On the flip side of things we have a culture of consumerism that is very motivated to satisfy their need for self expression. This desire to  be ‘different’ and express ones individuality is often the motivation behind many purchasing decisions. It influences your decision about what car to drive, or what computer to buy, what software to purchase, or what sweater to wear. Every so often a counter-culture will erupt whose whole purpose is to be hyper-individualistic, hyper-free, or to challenge the status-quo which, ironically enough, is actually a method of self expression in itself.  It’s important to note that Companies are like people in this respect as well. Corporate culture and habit dictates a lot of their purchasing and ‘innovation’ decisions.

What if the need to make things just ‘a little different’ is over. What if we have too many choices? What if we just bundle up all the bits and pieces into something reasonable and say “You can have it in two colours: black and black”

We have two very different systems on our hands. One hand suggests that in order to make a product economically viable you need to have a process which makes millions of them. On the other we have a value system that suggests we customize and change things – in order to satisfy our desire of self expression and individuality. Where one decides to offer the ‘customizable’ part is what will make or break your business (unless of course, you’re in the business of customizing).

The placement and degree of customization have a lot of big implications.

1. The more different you make something, the more combinations of shit going wrong you have to predict and support.
2. More permutations = decrease in instantaneous knowledge transfer. For example, if you could make your iPod work 1000 different ways, when you hand it to your friend they’ll just stare at you and blink – nobody cares if it’s just covered in sequins.
3. Hyper customization results in a situation where you also can’t produce enough of something reliably or cheaply, which results in all sorts of messes. This is particularly interesting in software. What gets included as a feature? What ends up just being a plugin?
4. Usability and interaction / retention can be severely impacted. Where do you draw the line between custom color schemes and layouts, and being able to personalize & express yourself through your purchases instead.

(There are a lot of things these points can be tied into as well. For example, it seems as though people are much more willing to accept less customizable control over something if they’re subscribing to a service or purchasing an object that is indistinguishable from magic)

While many industries are designed with the understanding that we need things “just a little different” it also wastes a lot of resources and in some extreme cases delays progress. While I’m a firm believer that monopolies and globally homogenous environments are a bad thing, it’s interesting that the most successfull companies I know of today are the ones that have convinced people that they dont want things different; they want things the same.

It’s the Model-T all over again. Only now you can get your iPod in a few more colours.