The Refined Geek

As any IT admin will tell you users aren’t really the best at coping with change. It’s understandable though, for many people the PC that they use in their everyday work is simply a tool with which to accomplish their required tasks, nothing more. Fundamentally changing the way that tool works means that they also have to change the way they work and often this is met with staunch resistance. As such it’s rather difficult for new paradigms to find their feet, often requiring at least one failed or mediocre product to be released in order for the initial groundwork to be done and then the next generation can enjoy the success that its predecessor was doomed to never achieve.

We don’t have to look that far into the past to see an example of this happening. Windows Vista was something of a failure commercially which can be traced to 2 very distinct issues. The first, and arguably the most important, was the lack of driver support from vendors leaving many users with hardware that simply couldn’t run Vista even if it was technically capable of doing so. The second was the major shift in the user experience with the start menu being completely redesigned and many other parts of the operating system being revamped. These 2 items were the 1-2 knock-out punch that put Vista in the graveyard and gave Windows 7 one hell of an up hill battle.

Windows 8, whilst not suffering from the driver disaster that plagued Vista, revamps the user experience yet again. This time however it’s more than just a simple splash of eye candy with a rearranging of menu items, it’s a full on shift in how Windows PCs will be used. Chief amongst these changes is the Metro UI which after being field tested on Windows Phone 7 handsets has found its way onto the desktop and any Windows powered device. Microsoft has made it clear that this will be the way they’ll be doing everything in the future and that the desktop as we know it will soon be fading away in favour of a Metro interface.

This has drawn the ire of IT professionals and it’s easy to see why. Metro is at its heart designed for users, taking cues from the success that Apple has achieved with its iOS range of products. However whilst Apple is happy to slowly transform OS X into another branch of their iOS line Microsoft has taken the opposite approach, unifying all their ecosystems under the one banner of Metro (or more aptly WinRT). This is a bold move from Microsoft essentially betting that the near future of PC usage won’t be in the desktop sense, the place where the company has established itself as the dominant player in the market.

And for what it’s worth they’re making the right decision. Apple’s success proves that users are quite capable (and willing) to adapt to new systems if the interfaces to them are intuitive, minimalistic and user focused. Microsoft has noticed this and it is looking to take advantage of it by providing a unified platform across all devices. Apple is already close to providing such an experience but Microsoft has the desktop dominance, something that will help them drive adoption of their other platforms. However whilst the users might be ready, willing and able to make the switch I don’t think Windows 8 will be the one to do it. It’s far more likely to be Windows 9.

The reasoning behind this is simple, the world is only just coming to grips with Windows 7 after being dragged kicking and screaming away from Windows XP. Most enterprises are only just starting to roll out the new operating system now and those who have already rolled out don’t have deployments that are over a year old. Switching over to Windows 8 then is going to be something that happens a long way down the line, long enough that many users will simply skip upgrading Windows 8 in favour of the next iteration. If Microsoft sticks to their current 3 year release schedule then organizations looking to upgrade after Windows 7 won’t be looking at Windows 8, it’s far more likely to be Windows 9.

I’m sure Microsoft has anticipated this and has decided to play the long game instead of delaying fundamental change that could put them seriously behind their competition. It’s a radical new strategy, one that could pay them some serious dividends should everything turn out the way they hope it will. The next couple years are going to be an interesting time as the market comes to grips with the new Metro face of the iconic Windows desktop, something which resisted change for decades prior.

It’s a sad truth that once a company reaches a certain level of success they tend to stop listening to their users/customers, since by that point they have enough validation to continue down whatever path suits them. It’s a double edged sword for the company as whilst they now have much more freedom to experiment since they don’t have to fight for every customer they also have enough rope to hang themselves should they be too ambitious. This happens more in traditional business rather than say Web 2.0 companies since the latter’s bread and butter is their users and the community that surrounds them, leaving them a lot less wiggle room when it comes to going against the grain of their wishes.

I recently blogged about VMware’s upcoming release of vSphere 5 which whilst technologically awesome did have the rather unfortunate aspect of screwing over the small to medium size enterprises that had heavily invested in the platform. At the time I didn’t believe that VMware would change their mind on the issue, mostly because their largest customers would most likely be unaffected by it (especially the cloud providers) but just under three weeks later VMware has announced that they are changing the licensing model, and boy is it generous:

We are a company built on customer goodwill and we take customer feedback to heart.  Our primary objective is to do right by our customers, and we are announcing three changes to the vSphere 5 licensing model that address the three most recurring areas of customer feedback:

• We’ve increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions, including the doubling of the entitlements for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

• We’ve capped the amount of vRAM we count in any given VM, so that no VM, not even the “monster” 1TB vRAM VM, would cost more than one vSphere Enterprise Plus license.

• We adjusted our model to be much more flexible around transient workloads, and short-term spikes that are typical in test & dev environments for example.

The first 2 points are the ones that will matter to most people with the bottom end licenses getting a 33% boost to 32GB of vRAM allocation and every other licensing level getting their allocations doubled. Now for the lower end that doesn’t mean a whole bunch but the standard configuration just gained another 16GB of vRAM which is nothing to sneeze at. At the higher end however these massive increases start to really pile on, especially for a typical configuration that has 4 physical CPUs which now sports a healthy 384GB vRAM allocation with default licensing. The additional caveat of virtual machines not using more than 96GB of vRAM means that licensing costs won’t get out of hand for mega VMs but in all honesty if you’re running virtual machines that large I’d have to question your use of virtualization in the first place. Additionally the change from a monthly average to a 12 month average for the licensing check does go some way to alleviating the pain that some users will feel, even though they could’ve worked around it by asking VMware nicely for one of those unlimited evaluation licenses.

What these changes do is make vSphere 5 a lot more feasible for users who have already invested heavily in VMware’s platform. Whilst it’s no where near the current 2 processors + gobs of RAM deal that many have been used to it does now make the smaller end of the scale much more palatable, even if the cheapest option will leave you with a meagre 64GB of RAM to allocate. That’s still enough for many environments to get decent consolidation ratios of say 8 to 1 with 8GB VMs, even if that’s slightly below the desired industry average of 10 to 1. The higher end, whilst being a lot more feasible for a small number of ridiculously large VMs, still suffers somewhat as higher end servers will still need additional licenses to fully utilize their capacity. Of course not many places will need 4 processor, 512GB beasts in their environments but it’s still going to be a factor to count against VMware.

The licensing changes from VMware are very welcome and will go a long way for people like me who are trying to sell vSphere 5 to their higher ups. Whilst licensing was never an issue for me I do know that it was a big factor for the majority and these improvements will allow them to stay on the VMware platform without having to struggle with licensing concerns. I have to then give some major kudos to VMware for listening to their community and making these changes that will ultimately benefit both them and their customers as this kind of interaction is becoming increasingly rare as time goes on.

My last two years have seen me dabble in a whole swath of things I never thought I’d dip my toes into. The first was web development, arguably inspired by this blog and the trials and tribulations that went into making it what it is today. Having been out of the development game for quite a long time before that (3 years or so) I had forgotten the thrill of solving some complex problem or finding an elegant solution to replace my overly complicated one. This then led me to try a cascade of different technologies, platforms and frameworks as ideas started to percolate through my head and success stories of overseas start ups left me lusting for a better life that I could create for myself.

For each of these new technologies I pursued I always had, at least in my mind, a good reason for doing so. Web development was the first step in the door and a step towards modernizing the skills I had let decay for too long. Even though my first foray into this was with ASP.NET, widely regarded as the stepping stone to the web for Windows desktop devs like myself, I still struggled with many of the web concepts. Enter then Silverlight, a framework which is arguably more capable than but has the horrible dependency of relying on an external framework. Still it was enough to get me past the hurdle of giving up before I had started and I spent much of the next year getting very familiar with it.

Of course the time then came when I believed that I needed to take a stab at the mobile world and promptly got myself involved in all things Apple and iOS. For someone who’d never really dared venture outside the comfortable Microsoft world it was a daunting experience, especially when my usual approach of “Attempt to do X, if can’t Google until you can” had me hitting multiple brick walls daily. Eventually however I broke through to the other side and I feel it taught me as much as my transition from desktop to web did. Not long after hitting my stride however did I find myself deep in yet another challenge.

Maybe it was the year+ I had spent on Lobaco without launching anything or maybe it was the (should have been highly expected) Y-Combinator rejection but I had found myself looking for ideas for another project that could free me from the shackles of my day job. Part me also blamed the frameworks I had been using up until that point, cursing them for making it so hard to make a well rounded product (neglecting the fact that I only worked on weekends). So of course I tried all sorts of other things like Ruby on Rails, PHP and even flirted with the idea of trying some of those new fangled esoteric frameworks like Node.js. In the end I opted for ASP.NET MVC which was familiar enough for me to be able to understand it clearly without too much effort and modern enough that it didn’t feel like I’d need to require IE6 as the browser.

You’re probably starting to notice a pattern here. I have a lot of ideas, many of which I’ve actually put some serious effort into, but there always comes a point when I dump both the idea and the technology it rests on for something newer and sexier. It dawned on me recently that the ideas and technology are just mediums for me to pursue a challenge and once I’ve conquered them (to a certain point) they’re no longer challenge I idolized, sending me off to newer pastures. You could write off much of this off to coincidence (or other external factors) except that I’ve done it yet again with the last project I mentioned I’m working on. I’m still dedicated to it (since I’m not the only one working on it) but I’ve had yet another sexy idea that’s already taken me down the fresh challenge path, and it’s oh so tempting to drop everything for it.

I managed to keep my inner junkie at bay for a good year while working on Lobaco so it might just be a phase I’m going through, but the trend is definitely a worrying one. I’d hate to think that my interest only lasts as long as it takes to master (well, get competent with) and it would be a killer for any potential project. I don’t think I’m alone in this boat either, us geeks tend to get caught up in the latest technology and want to apply it where ever we can. I guess I’ll just have to keep my blinkers on and keep at my current ideas for a while before I let myself get distracted by new and shiny things again. Hopefully that will give me enough momentum to overcome my inner challenge junkie.

My opinion hasn’t changed much in the month since I wrote my first post on how I think BitCoin is a pyramid scheme, ultimately destined to unravel unceremoniously when all the speculative investors decide to pull the plug and cash out of the BitCoin market. Still the discussion that that post spawned was quite enlightening, forcing me to clarify many points both in my own head and here on my blog. Since then there’s been a deluge of other blogs and press chiming in with similar opinions about BitCoin and how its intended purpose is far from its reality. There’s been enough noise about BitCoin’s issues that last week saw the first major dip in the exchange rate, and it hasn’t been smooth sailing since.

The image above is the historic trading price for BitCoins to USD on the biggest BitCoin exchange Mt.Gox. The BitCoin “Black Friday” can be seen as the first dip following the massive peak at around $30. Since that day BitCoin has been shedding value constantly with the latest bid offers hovering around the $18 mark. This is not the kind of volatility you see in something you’d class as a currency where single percentage changes are cause for concern and usually government intervention. In the space of a week BitCoin has shed almost half of its peak value which in any sane market would have seen suspension of trade to prevent a fire sale of the asset. The market isn’t showing any signs of recovering either as the market depth report from Mt.Gox shows:

There’s a very large discrepancy between the majority of seller’s idea of how much BitCoin is worth and what the market is willing to pay for it. The vast majority of sellers are looking to cash out at the mid-twenties range when the highest buy offer doesn’t even break the $20 mark. Any rational actor in this sort of market would be looking to get out before the market wipes out all of their value completely and for what its worth I believe the main speculators have probably already withdrawn from the market which is what triggered the initial dip in price. Liquidity in the BitCoin market is fast drying up and that will only serve to drive the price back to (or even below) its initial stable equilibrium.

On the surface this would appear to be the beginning of the end for BitCoin since confidence in the currency is rapidly disappearing with all the accumulated wealth that’s being lost to the diving market. However whilst many who were hoping to make their riches with a nascent currency might be finding themselves short changed the diving price of BitCoins means that those who were working against the currencies intentions, I.E. those who were using it as a speculative investment vehicle, are more likely to leave the market alone now that it’s been pumped and dumped. Once the price retreats back to more stable levels BitCoin could then start functioning as it is supposed to, as a vehicle for wealth that has no central authority regulating it.

It’s not going to be an easy road for BitCoin and its adopters though as confidence in the currency has been dashed with even some of its earliest supporters withdrawing from it. Mining will then no longer be a profit driven enterprise, instead run by those who support the idea and large companies like Mt.Gox who run exchanges. Once the idea that BitCoin’s value would ever be increasing has dissipated we may finally see a point where BitCoins are primarily used as a vehicle for value transfer and not speculative investment. It will probably be another month or two before we reach a new stable equilibrium in the BitCoin market but after that I might finally stop harping on about it being an elaborate (though probably unintentional) scheme.

This still doesn’t detract from the concentration of wealth for early adopters in the BitCoin ecosystem but once their incentive to hoard currency has vanished then the impact of their vast BitCoin stashes means a whole lot less than it did during the speculative price explosion. This will encourage them to put those BitCoins into circulation adding much needed liquidity to the market and hopefully restoring some more faith in the system. Time will tell if this works out however as with market volumes so low on the BitCoin exchanges price manipulation is bound to happen from time to time and realistically can only be solved by having wider adoption. I’m still not convinced that BitCoin is a safe place for any of my wealth currently but once its recovered from this rapidly bursting bubble I may revisit it, should the want arise.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft was never a major player in the smartphone space. Most people had never really heard of or seen a smartphone until Apple released the iPhone and the market really didn’t heat up until a couple years after that fact. However if you were to go all the way back to 2004 you’d find they were extremely well positioned, capturing 23% of the total market share with many analysts saying that they would be leader in smartphone software by the end of the decade. Today however they’re the next to last option for anyone looking for a smartphone thanks wholly to their inertia in responding to the incoming threats from Apple and Google.

Microsoft wasn’t oblivious to this fact but their response took too long to come to market to save any of the market share they had previously gained. Their new product, Windows Phone 7, is quite good if you consider it on the same level as Android 1.0 and the first iPhone. Strangely enough it also suffers some of the problems that plagued the earlier revisions of its competitors products had (like the lack of copy and paste) but to Microsoft’s credit their PR and response time on the issue is an order of magnitude better. They might have come too late into the game to make a significant grab with their first new offering but as history has shown us Microsoft can make a successful business even if it takes them half a decade of losses to catch up to the competition (read:the Xbox).

More recently though I’ve noticed a shift in the way Microsoft is operating within their mobile space. Traditionally, whilst they’ve been keen to push adoption for their platform through almost any means necessary, they’ve been quick to stand against any unsanctioned uses of their products. You can see this mentality in action with their Xbox department who’s fervently fought any and all means to run homebrew applications on their consoles. Granted the vast majority of users modding their consoles do so for piracy reasons so their stance is understandable but recent developments are starting to show that they might not be adverse to users running homebrew applications on their devices.

ChevronWP7 was the first (and as far as I know, only) application to allow users to to jailbreak their WP7 devices in order to be able to load arbitrary applications onto them. Microsoft wasn’t entirely happy with it’s release but didn’t do anything drastic in order to stop its development. They did however announce that the next update to WP7 would see it disabled, much like Apple does with their iOS updates, but they did something that the others haven’t ever done before, they met with the ChevronWP7 team:

After two full days of meetings with various members of the Windows Phone 7 team, we couldn’t wait to share with everyone some results from these discussions.

…

To address our goals of homebrew support on Windows Phone 7, we discussed why we think it’s important, the groups of people it affects, its direct and indirect benefits and how to manage any risks.

With that in mind, we will work with Microsoft towards long-term solutions that support mutual goals of broadening access to the platform while protecting intellectual property and ensuring platform security.

Wait, what? In the days gone by it wouldn’t have been out of place for Microsoft to send out a cease and desist letter before unleashing a horde of lawyers to destroy such a project in its infancy. Inviting the developers to your headquarters, showing them the roadmap for future technologies and then allying with them is down right shocking but shows how Microsoft has come to recognise the power of the communities that form around the platforms they develop. In all respects those users of ChevronWP7 probably make up a minority of WP7 users but they’re definitely amongst the most vocal users and potentially future revenue generators should they end up distributing their homebrew into the real world. Heck they’re even reaching out to avid device hacker Geohot since he mentioned his interest in the WP7 platform, offering him a free phone to get him started.

The last few years haven’t been kind to Microsoft in the mobile space and it appears that they’re finally ready to take their medicine so that they might have a shot at recapturing some of their former glory. They’ve got an extremely long and hard fight ahead of them should they want to take back any significant market share from Apple or Google, but the last couple months have shown that they’re willing to work with their users and enthusiasts to deliver products that they and hopefully the world at large will want to have. My next phone is shaping up to be a WP7 device simply because the offering is just that good (and development will be 1000x easier) and should Microsoft continue their recent stint of good behaviour I can only see it getting better and better.

Just as the IT industry continues to reinvent itself every 10 years so it also appears do the people in that industry. Whilst the term IT is relatively new when compared to many other trades it has still managed to capture a stereotype. What is interesting however is how the image of the typical IT geek has progressed over the past few decades from a lab worker to now something completely and utterly different.

Image courtesy of the Computer History Museum.

In the early days of large computational clusters many technicians would look like this. Well dressed and with an almost business like demeanour. It was part of the culture back then as many of these types of systems were either for large universities or corporations, and with big dollars being shelled out for such systems (this was the IBM 7030 Stretch which would cost around $100 million in today’s dollars) this was kind of expected. I think that’s why the next generation of geeks set the trend for the next couple decades.

Image courtesy of Microsoft.

A young Bill Gates shows what would become the typical image conjured up in everyone’s heads when the word geek or nerd was uttered for a long time to come. The young, tall and skinny people who delved themselves into computers were the faces of our IT community for a long time, and I think this is when those thick rimmed glasses became synonymous with our kind. It was probably around this time that geeks became associated with a tilt towards social awkwardness, something that many people still joke about today. What’s really interesting though is the next few steps I’ve seen in the changing geek image.

Image courtesy of JustTheLists.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, the first of a generation of what most people call Internet pioneers. Whilst I can’t find a direct link to it Yahoo had a bit of a reputation for a very casual work environment, with t-shirts and sandals the norm. It was probably because of their success from coming straight out of university and into a successful corporate world, where they grew their own business culture. This kind of thing flowed onto many of the other successful Internet companies like Google, who lavishes their employees with almost everything they will ever need.

Image Courtesy of Robert Scoble.

Tom Anderson, one of the co-founders of MySpace is not what you’d call your typical geek with a degree in Arts and a masters in Film. You’d struggle to find him even associated with such titles, yet he’s behind one of the largest technical companies on the Internet. Truly the face of the modern geek aspires to something more like Tom Anderson then it does to a young Bill Gates.

I found this interesting because of the company that I keep. We all love computer games and the latest bits of tech, but you’d be hard pressed to find among us anyone you could really call your stereotypical geek. I think this is indicative of the maturity that the IT industry has acquired. The term IT Professional no longer conjures up an idea of a basement dwelling console hacker with thick glasses, more it gives the impression that you’d expect from a professional in any industry. Something which carries with it a decent chunk of respect.

I guess the next step is when we start seeing Joe the IT Professional used in political campaigns.