A good story adds value to a product

Originally posted on my blog.

The more you can spread the narrative, the greater the potential force for your business. To what extent is impossible to know. As Shiller writes in his concluding paragraphs, “there are serious issues of inferring causality…these issues are not surmountable.” Even if we can’t measure it, or directly attribute causality, the effect of stories and narrative economics is real and powerful. (Source)

We’re uncomfortable admitting that a totally made up “story” about a product increases the price for it. Luxury brands play off this: a Yeti is more expensive then a generic cooler, handbags and all that. The story of a brand makes the price higher. The same can be true for technology, no matter how targeted it is to engineers who believe they can’t be beguiled.

The right story can make a huge difference for technology adoption. Kubernetes’ success is due in large part to better stories than its rivals. It was just as hard to install, often had less features, definitely didn’t have the enterprise software ecosystem around it, had few enterprise reference cases…and so on. It’s story was fantastic though – you can be like Google!

Only the losers think this is a bad situation, of course. The winners see the story as_helping_adoption. The losers see good stories as cheating, as_creating_adoption.

Not all marketing is this, of course. Most of enterprise software marketing is about genuinely explaining the technology, describing how other organizations are using it (case studies and reference customers), and the hidden part of marketing, finding and reaching prospects: demand generations

Marketing!

Original Content

Article: State of Kuberntes

In this article, I go over some of the interesting findings in VMware’s kubernetes survey. I’m most interested in the misalignment of perception between executives and developers. They focus on and worry about different problems: that seems…unhelpful?

See an excerpt below as well.

Podcast: The Real Kube MoMs of Cloud Candy Land

This week’s Software Defined Talk episode:

Microsoft nails the Linux desktop and it’s cloud MoM’s for everyone. Plus, Coté goes over the thrilling world of Outlook email rules.

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Video: Shorter release cycles are better

Reduce risk with more frequent software releases - YouTube

Too much planning is riskier than just enough planning, with software, at least. Or: waterfall vs agile risk management.

It’s another one my tiny videos!

Check out the free books for more.

Misaligned

People always think they’re doing a good job, esp. when they’re not doing the job. From Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos:

Wherever the Taylorist approach thrives, the perception gaps between senior executives and team members are large. Senior executives describe the company’s agile initiatives as successful and satisfying. Team members, who are closer to the action, describe them as disappointing and frustrating, not much different from traditional task forces.

But, the plot thickens!

At first we thought the executives must be lying, but we soon discovered they are merely out of touch. They are so distant from the agile work that they only know what subordinates tell them, and subordinates tell them only what they want to hear.

This happens all the time for most things, e.g. in diagnosing software bottlenecks:

the study shows a significant disconnect between what company executives view as the impediments to developer productivity and the way frontline developers see the world. 46% of executives think the biggest impediment to developers is integrating new technology into existing systems. Meanwhile, developers themselves cite waiting for central IT to provide access to infrastructure as a top impediment (29%), while only 6% of executives recognise infrastructure access as an impediment.

Beyond the basics of telehealth

From “Telehealth’s future is bright. Here’s what it’ll look like in 2025”:

In other words, the narrow set of things health providers can do for us via a Zoom call today will soon include a broad set of services that are delivered through things like apps and connected devices.

There’s some other ideas for “remote health” in there, stuff beyond just video calls.

All the great ideas aside:

1. If each system is closed (you can only do it inside of one app), it’ll fail because the company will fall behind innovations (the app will seem old and creaky), less people will install it because it’s some weird app off in the App Store.
2. I think we’d make huge advances (more efficient w/r/t to time, money, and access) if doctors and clinicians just used FaceTime and other consumer video services.

For example, I see a therapist in Austin over Skype each week. Before the virus stuff, they didn’t want to do remote sessions, now they do, have to.

Analogous to all that wasted time going to “meetings that could have been an email,” there’s also a lot of waste in how basic health care is done. Back in the States, each year I had to renew my mind-drugs prescription with my doctor. As with all US clinic visits, they uselessly would weigh me and take my blood pressure when I’d go in (the Dutch don’t do this). Then my doctor would ask me a few questions (basically, “do you think about committing suicide?”), and then renew my prescription. All of that could have been a few minute video conference call – an email, a DM in Twitter even.

There seems to be a huge amount of healthcare provided in person that could just be done on video, just audio even. As ever with technology innovations, there’s an additional benefit to be had by just innovating practices and norms, the meatware.

Rolling out into agile too quickly

Agile as a Quick Fix A few companies, facing urgent strategic threats and in need of radical change, have pursued big-bang, everything-at-once agile transformations in some units. For example, in 2015 ING Netherlands anticipated rising customer demand for digital solutions and increasing incursions by new digital competitors known as fintechs. The management team decided to move aggressively. It dissolved the organizational structures of its most innovative functions, including IT development, product management, channel management, and marketing—essentially abolishing everyone’s job. Then it created small agile “squads” and required nearly 3,500 employees to reapply for 2,500 redesigned positions on those squads. About 40 percent of the people filling the positions had to learn new jobs, and all had to profoundly change their mindsets. 5 Experience has revealed countless problems with this approach. It confuses and traumatizes the organization. People aren’t sure where to go or what to do. It assumes that thousands of individuals, most of whom have no experience or knowledge of agile, will suddenly understand and work according to its principles. Although radicalized converts have publicly touted their success, overall results frequently failed to meet unrealistic promises; stock prices (including ING’s) have often declined, sometimes by 30 percent or more. Behind closed doors, these executives and their subordinates are more balanced, typically offering assessments that sound something like this: “Our leaders and culture were not ready for such radical change. The more we recited conventional clichés about ‘ripping off the Band-Aid’ and ‘burning the boats’ of retreat, the more we believed them. But nobody in our senior team had ever worked in an agile environment. We did not foresee or plan for the unintended consequences. Worse yet, we lost some great people who were branded as obstructionists for trying to point out those consequences. Our approach to agility was not very agile.”

— Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos by Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk, et al.

Relative to your interests

• Kids staying at home likely to damage women’s careers - ‘If women, who are mostly responsible for homeschooling, can’t take on additional work, “their careers will suffer”; “working-class women, or factory workers, are the most precarious, and they may have to leave the job market.”
• VMware numbers - VMware bought Pivotal last year for $2.7 billion, and it acquired Heptio for $550 million in late 2018. At its VMworld 2019 event, the vendor unveiled its overarching Kubernetes portfolio called Tanzu, which included both acquisitions plus Bitnami, which it bought for an undisclosed amount last May. And earlier this year, VMware embedded Kubernetes natively into vSphere, which allows developers and IT teams to use a single platform to manage both legacy workloads built on virtual machines (VMs) and newer, containerized apps.... Wavefront, meanwhile, is VMware’s cloud-native monitoring platform with microservices capabilities that it acquired in 2017.... While its Modern Applications unit is another one where VMware doesn’t break out specific revenue numbers, Gelsinger echoed Rowe’s statement about that part of the business beating Q1 expectations. He said he expects its Kubernetes portfolio to be “the most critical product area for us over the next couple of years.”… “The whole Tanzu business area performed well in Q1 overall ahead of our expectations,” he said. “We’ve seen it starting to come into our big deals as well. Five of our top 10 deals this quarter included Tanzu.”’
• Docker’s deal - ‘“I can’t think of too many tools I’ve used that long without wanting to find something better,” he said.... The new strategy is based on converting developers one at a time. The current pricing model for its software-as-a-service tops out at $9 per user per month, or a fraction of what most enterprise SaaS applications cost.’
• People who have more control over their lives are happier - ‘“Managers should provide employees working in demanding jobs more control, and in jobs where it is unfeasible to do so, a commensurate reduction in demands. For example, allowing employees to set their own goals or decide how to do their work, or reducing employees’ work hours, could improve health,” Gonzalez-Mulé says.
• It’s hard to predict when innovation will go mainstream - ‘Complexity theory has established that a process dominated by preferential attachment has a power law distribution of times between adoptions. The power law distributions observed in practice have no finite means or standard deviations. That means that traditional statistical methods of predicting the time till next event, or the number of events in a time interval, all fail.2 This puts project leaders into a bind: they cannot use standard statistical methods to predict how successful the future adoptions of their technology will be.’
• From seven to four - ‘The four are all from the Management Domain and all need to be VSAN Ready Nodes – the storage-centric servers with plenty of disk slots and at least half a dozen Xeon or EPYC cores. Unlike Raspberry Pis or home-lab-centric micro servers from the likes of HPE or Supermicro, which are all options for testing Kubernetes clusters, Ready Nodes are not cheap or small or something you’ll plug into that old power board in your bottom drawer.’
• Installing apps is a blocker to use, as is Bluetooth - ‘“What we can say is the quality of the Bluetooth connectivity for phones that have the app installed running in the foreground is very good,” he said. “And it progressively deteriorates and the quality of the connection is not as good as you get to a point where the phone is locked and the app is running in the background.”’