Month: January 2016

It seems like Twitter is getting hammered of late, ok may be not of late but ever since it went public. I have to admit, though I have had a Twitter account for years, it really is only over the past couple of years I have used Twitter.  That being said I actually use it quite a bit as my Social Media hub, even more so than Facebook.  A big reason is news. Twitter aggregates the news sources I want to view with out the opinion of  my acquaintances on Facebook , which in many instance I find offer opinions that I can either “Like”or not like (no button yet for this).   I really just want news so I can make my own opinion.  Twitter has become part of the internet dialog.  It seems all people of celebrity status, business, politics, and every day people have Twitter accounts and are tweeting.  With its troubles you would think they are like Yahoo even though as a daily activity they resemble Facebook.  At one time Twitter was feared and possibly is still feared by Google.  With its trending now service, Twitter was the pulse of the internet.   The question is why all the troubles, why all the worry?

It is easy to compare Twitter to Facebook.  Both are giants of Social Media and yet while Facebook has a good habit of continually blowing out earnings and capturing the hearts of Wall Street, Twitter has not enjoyed that same success.  Facebook has over 1 billion “users”, how active they are is another question but overall there are many people who are very active.  What this has translated to is Facebook has been very successful in monetizing the very large user base.  Twitter has “only” 320 million unique users and gets criticized for not growing fast enough.  I think there are a lot of companies on the planet who would like this problem.  Where Twitter has failed is not being able to monetize those users.  Where Facebook routinely beats Wall Streets expectations, Twitter seems to struggle to keep pace.

Another difference starts at the top.  Jack Dorsey left Twitter and then was forced to come back.  He also is CEO and Founder of Square, a mobile payments company.  The guy is an entrepreneur and a successful one.  However as companies grow and go public some needs change.  The startup mentality has to be replaced with a  sense of maturity tempered with a driving passion for the company you lead.  With Jack coming back we are waiting for the latter two.  Contrast this with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ,, who has stayed true to Facebook.  It went through a rough first year on Wall Street.  the initial IPO was mishandled, but through the process we saw Mark mature and maintained his belief in the company.  The results have been staggering.  Listening to Mark Zuckerberg he reminds me quite a lot of a maturing Bill Gates.  Bill could be very hostile to the media, but when talking to employees he was always very calm and certain of the direction of both the company and the industry.  He could inspire.  Mark seems to have that same demeanor, minus the ridicule of the press.  The question for Twitter has Jack Dorsey returned to be a Steve J0bs type of figure or will he look to hand the reigns over to someone else.

Twitter has very much become a part of the internet’s social dialog.  I cannot watch a television show, whether it be “Men in Blazers” or CNBC or my favorite soccer team without following them on Twitter or having them direct me to their Twitter account.  It is a good problem to have. This is why they are not Yahoo, which is a company that is struggling to survive.  Why Jerry Yang fought the Microsoft takeover will live as one of the dumb egotistical moves of business history.  Twitter just needs to become more professional and more disciplined.  the audience is there before them, they just need to develop a business model and fine tune it to monetize that user base.  Twitter needs to understand its users better.  Facebook has done a phenomenal job in doing this and the results show it, in amazing fashion.  This to me is job number one and then take that understanding and start generating ad revenues to match its user base.

An area where Twitter has stagnated is innovation.  Twitter has not gone on a grand buying spree or provided regular updates and new features to its service.  Where as their competitors have made big bets and thrown out some pie in the sky ideas, we have yet to see that from Twitter.  A large part of that is the instability in senior leadership.  I think if Jack Dorsey can provide some focus, Twitter can attract some talent.  Once that is done then the hope would be we would stat thinking a bit outside of the box.  There is a lot happening in the industry.  Big Data seems easy for Twitter to capitalize on as they house a lot of data.  Can it be analyzed and action taken upon that analysis?  Where will Twitter fit in AI, Robotics, IoT etc..These are all areas where there is potential for Twitter to play, we just need them to stabilize and deliver.

Twitter so far is a failure not because they are a bad service, quite the contrary in Social Media circles they remain a relevant and great service.  However they frustrate as they seem incapable of seizing a unique opportunity.  In many ways you hope a more mature organization like Google or Facebook would buy them out.  Twitter should succeed.  They have mind share.  Most young people are using Twitter today.  However these windows of opportunity only stay open so long.  We remember MySpace and now most people do not remember them.  they are one of technologies historical artifacts.  I will continue to pay attention to cable news and other media outlets to see if they still reference their Twitter accounts, are using hash tags.  It is time for this company to start executing upon its potential.  Otherwise they can join along list of companies in the technology cemetery.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann January 29, 2016

We live in a time where technology seems to have reached hyper drive or warp speed, which ever sci-fi genre you like will work. It seems as if we have a series of mega-trends before us ranging from Cloud to Big Data to Robotics, to name but a few.  Every major tech company seems to be hopping aboard.  The technology sector is notorious for creating these type of panics, god forbid we miss the next over-hyped trend.  In some instances the big players seems to want to tackle them all, be it Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Amazon.  At other points in time it is a Billionaires men’s club with Jeff Bezos or Paul Allen funding some pie in the sky idea.  But maybe it is bigger than they all think and as complex as it all seems maybe it is being made too complex.  We have before us a lot of “big things” – we have the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Cloud, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence etc.. All these trends driving tremendous change in society, in how we will live our day-to-day lives.  Is it wise to focus on one or will we need to focus on all.  From a company perspective it may be wise to place bets with just one or two of the big emerging trends, for the larger players they will, and may have to, tackle them all.  One thing is clear in my mind and that is they are all converging into one it what will be called, “The Great Convergence”.

Convergence is one of those industry overused terms.  Not long ago we talked about digital convergence.  First our music went digital with the advent of the compact disc.  Our computer networks were already digital.  Than communications went digital as we moved from analog to new services like Voice over IP.  In addition to voice we had SMS, email and a host of other forms of digital communications.  We had debates in the halls of congress as our television went digital.  How would we support all those old televisions?  As is almost always the case the advances in technology moved so fast it just swept over all of us like a tidal pool.   These debates and changes, which in reality were not that long ago, now seem like ancient history.  We now take these things for granted as we use services like Skype, WeChat and Netflix.  Like so many things in technology they just burst upon us and before we know it, the terms surrounding them and their use become part of our day-to-day living.  Think back to the washing machine, there was a world before the washing machine.  Hundreds of years went by with women washing clothes in a river or a tub.  Now no more.  However with tech it no longer can be measure in decades or years, the change happens very quickly and then in some instances it is gone (think of the FAX machine).

If we look at the emerging trends, the best way to visualize them is as a bunch of tributaries all feeding into a massive river like the Mississippi River (I purposely avoided the term Amazon river for obvious reasons).  One small river would be IoT, which would capture data from every device on the planet and feed into a mega data repository.  This “Big Data” would be centralized in a distributed database in the Cloud, from which we would perform complex analytics.  Other tributaries would be robotics, which would spawn more data.  Drones capturing data from the sky.  Vehicles capturing data from the road.  More humanoid devices wandering the streets and buildings capturing more data, perhaps observing human behavior and uploading that data.  As AI improves, these bots would start making decisions and based on the results if the decision uploading that data.  All converging and feeding Mark Twain’s, mighty Mississippi.

The days of gigabytes and petabytes are behind us we pass through exabyte and zettabytes and move right into a yottabyte.  As quantum computing takes off we can analyze data that used to take years down into minutes or even seconds.  A new form of computing will have emerged making our lives easier and yet more complex within the wink of an eye.  Algorithms that once took decades to solve not solved in minutes.  Predictive modeling will become more sophisticated.  We already live in an environment where online shopping s constantly analyzing our buying habits and trying to make recommendations based these habits.  The immense amount of data once utilized will change how we live.  Capturing data has become routine, the ability to analyze that data and act upon it will fundamentally alter our lives.

At times we may squirm hearing all this, but technology is like a tidal wave, once it has garnered momentum it is just a matter of time before it comes crashing down on those in its wake.  We fret over security and privacy even as we willingly give it up to have our iPhone locate us wherever we may be.  You may not want people knowing where you are but once captured that data is stored somewhere.   It can all seem so overwhelming but than what did you think self and immediate gratification would be?  Despite what biblical scholars may debate, paradise was never going to be free.  There are major positives coming through, in particular in health care as there may be alight at the end of the tunnel.  In the coming decades we may cure cancer.  We will have a greater ability to monitor our own health.  We will have our current state of life measured in real-time. We will be a part of the network, not separated physically but willingly opting into the digital world.  All you will have to do is hit the “OK”button.

The doomsayers now have a voice that only grows louder by the day.  They have been around for a while, as in humanities entire existence.  However now some of the areas traditionally reserved for science fiction novels and films.  As devices become more intelligent and AI improves the question of humanities future existence will become more pervasive.  In education we push for more STEM funding seeing that as the future of our economy while deriding the humanities as less important.  Part of it is simply our competitive nature in the US as we cannot fathom the idea of some other nation doing things better than us.  We make sacrifices rather easy in order to push ourselves to the forefront.  The Great Convergence is upon us.  Like it or not we have opted in. We will move forward regardless of the consequences.  In great part because we cannot help ourselves.  We more or less created the oil industry and all its environmental catastrophes.  As our nation grew so did our appetite for energy.  Now that the demand price for oil has taken a downturn we see the impact in our 401k plan as so much of our economy is based on energy.  The 20th century created that much like the 21st century.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann January 26, 2016

It has been an interesting week. On the one hand Windows 10 has surpassed 200 million in terms of installed base. On the flip side at this years Consumer Electronics(CES) show in Las Vegas the reports are there is next to zero presence by hardware vendors and next generation PC’s.  Microsoft has scaled back. Dell has scaled back.  HP has scaled back.  It’s as if no one cares anymore. There has been discussion of the demise of the PC for years now and many times I think it is misunderstood.  It is not like the PC is going away, it has just become a commodity.  I need it like I need tires for my car.  This does not however mean there is no future for the PC, it just means the sex appeal of the PC is kind of dead, actually it is really dead.  Is the future, one of death for the PC?  Can it be resurrected?  Is technology transforming so fast that the PC will fade into memory?  All valid questions, but maybe a bit to doom and gloom for me.  There is a place for the PC, it just may not be as central as it once was.

There are still a lot of companies out in the world who rely on PC’s to drive growth – still a lot of the big names out there that includes Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo, HP Consumer, Dell etc..All good companies with good products, but in an age defined by Apple and Google in the consumer space they have all found it hard to stay relevant.  This does  not mean the PC is dead, we just need to reassess where it fits into our lives.  Is it cutting edge or has it become more like my refrigerator? Maybe a better question is my household appliance becoming more like my PC?  If we look at some of the big announcements at CES a fair amount were around old household appliances like the Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator which has three camera inside and you can connect via a Mobile app so when you are at the store you can check if you may have forgotten anything.  It also has a screen on it with the possibility of streaming video content to the fridge.  It was cool this year but I think it will be even bigger next year.  For hardware manufacturers they need to figure how they co-exist in this new world.  More importantly how do they offer value to anew tech consumer market that will be much larger than their traditional market .

What does this have to do with PC sales?  The way to look at with each new IoT device a piece of functionality of the PC is being distributed so I do not need to stop and sit down on the couch and boot to perform a task or view content. When I stream content to my TV I use Google Chromecast and my iPhone as I can get all content via the iPhone almost immediately.  Where time is spent then over time it is usually monetized.  With the rules changing minute by minute and the traditional tech experience being transported across every item ever created by mankind our reliance of a confined experience is dissipating.  Samsung and Google are leading the way.  Samsung does everything from phones to PC’s to kitchen appliances.  Showing and understanding that these are all in some way connected.  Google via its acquisition if NeST is connecting the home and allowing you to control your home environment anywhere at anytime.

A question is where does this leave Microsoft? Where does the Windows experience go from here?  A company that laid the ground work for where we are today needs to recreate its identity or more importantly recreate the user experiences.  We are continually being given new ways of interacting with technology.  New home heating systems we tap into via an app and wi-fi connection. Home security systems we can view from our mobile device our laptop..  The challenge for many of these new Internet of Things scenarios is that they don’t need all the functionality and overhead that Windows provides but a very specialized subset, more suited for a OS like Linux.  That being said it makes sense for Microsoft, given its history, to be a major player in this space. It will have to make significant changes in how it thinks about an operating system.

For all the strides we have made I still find at times the PC an extremely frustrating piece of technology.  It still can lock up on me.  Provide me the blue-wheel of death. The mouse touch=pads at times can be way to sensitive this causing mysterious things to happen.  Boot times have improved but are no where close to what I have on my tablet.  These distributed tasks to new devices and form factors are welcome, as they are simplified and available immediately upon request.  My technology horizons are expanding as every day technology touches something new in my life, down to the clothes I wear.  As is so often the case with gadgets they always seem to get smaller and brighter.

Where does this then leave the PC?  The PC had been around for over thirty years now and has lost its glamorous sex appeal.  It is not the center of the technology world anymore, nor has it been for a long time.  Will we not need them?  Absolutely not as certain task are still best designed for a PC.  The need to have a keyboard.  But as noted earlier the big change is the need to actually sit down and use a PC is not as great and more scenarios will crop up that further distribute our use of technology beyond the PC.  The PC has become more of a commodity for the general user.  I believe that I will have a PC until I leave this earth, however my time spent with it will continue to diminish, never to zero, but even less than it is today.  I do not foresee the PC ever gaining its former glamour and luster, at least not in the current from factors.  However the offspring to the PC shall lead us into a brighter future.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans  Henrik Hoffmann January 12, 2016

 

With the release of the latest Star Wars I have thought a lot about the basic concept of impact. The film genre of science fiction had been around since the film industry had started but all of a sudden one film caused our expectations of what science fiction film should be had been changed.  I have been around technology for 25 years and seen a lot of great things happen in that time. Some of the simple things are amazing to me like PC’s with terabyte hard drives, memory in terms of gigabytes,flat screens, tablets that are useful, the list could get rather long. But things are happening in corporate america, the start-up community, venture capital, research labs etc..that will shake the very foundation the industry has been built upon over the last half century.  In a lot of ways these change agents are interlinked.  Terms we hear a lot of today in the industry: robotics, big data,artificial intelligence, cloud services,..these are all linked together as they share information between one another.  But when size-mic shifts happen they cause everyone in the industry to change focus.

We have been through a couple big changes in the industry.  The birth of the consumer internet.  It was unique in that the internet had been around a long time, but was really restricted to academics.  With the Netscape IPO in 1995 this all changed as all of a sudden every company and every person needed to be connected.   Companies panicked.  People were excited. We tolerated painful access and download speeds.  Video was not coming and where it existed was choppy and poor quality.  But the seeds had been sewed and the internet has changed how we interact on nearly every level of society.  The one problem we had with the internet was early on we were locked to our desktop.  Always needing to be connected to a power outlet.  Even laptops only took us so far.  Needing wi-fi access with limited battery life.  That all changed in June 2007 when Apple launched the iPhone.  It gave remote internet access a new meaning.  Our browsing experience was changed on a mobile device and more importantly we had apps to make the mobile web more accessible.  Touch screen was flawless.  We could stream video.  It changed the industry once again as all of a sudden every company needed a mobile app developer.

It has been a while since the iPhone and the last major technological impact.  Not to say nothing has happened.  A lot has happened.  In terms of the next great impact I do not think it will be “a single event” this time that transforms us overnight, but a broad brush stroke of multiple events happening in rather quick succession. The velocity at which technology is changing is driving fast changes in how society operates.  As I mentioned earlier we have Cloud, Big Data Robotics etc..On the horizon there are a lot of people making big bets with big money.  Elon Musk predicts they will have a fully self driving car within two years.  This seems ambitious and I am not sure it will happen but the sheer audacity of predicting something like this and believing in it is amazing and Elon Musk has a pretty good track record of delivery.  We have a space race going on, but this time it is not the Soviet Union versus the United States. A space race not funded by the public sector (NASA) but the private sector.  It is happening in the private sector as billionaires are building new rockets that can return to earth. Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin,Paul Allen with Stratolaunch, Elon Musk with SpaceX, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Even discussions of a mission to Mars and a Martian colony.  Other areas will be impacted as well.  As I am going through the wonderful process of choosing a healthcare provider I begin to think of my own mortality and my bodies limitations as my fiftieth year looms large, but the future will be bright for healthcare.  There is talk of 3D printed organs.  No need for a kidney donor, we will take your DNA and print a new kidney.   This year as part of his New Year’s resolution Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook wants to create a virtual assistant with AI,  Seems like the film ex-Machina is progressing quicker from fantasy to reality than anticipated.

All these great things seem to be converging upon us at the same time driving innovation further and faster.  The demand for engineers across disciplines has never been higher.  Great design will be ever more important to take form the simple engineering mind and making cutting ideas usable (sorry I have been around enough useless geeky presentations to slightly slam them).  There will be new opportunities as well  s displacement.  Every technological change in human existence has been met with trepidation and fear.  There have been protest already against a robotic future. Based on Mark Zuckerberg’s New Years resolution I am sure executive assistance may be worried.  Many companies are racing to buy AI startups, robotics companies etc..as the race heats up it will only intensify.  It is what we will call the Internet of Things world.

The impact of all these converging technologies will change the face of mankind in a way we have not seen before.  In part because it will happen very fast and challenge basic concepts of humanity.  How we exist, how we work, play communicate, entertain, it may even beg the question of should human race even exist?  Large questions to ponder and at this point cannot be answered.  Can we pull back?  I am afraid not.  the train has left the station and is only accelerating.  It is part of the human race to move forward quickly and in search of a greater future, not willing to recognize the consequences.  The next big thing is coming quickly and by the time it comes we will look back upon its rise before we know what has happened.  As I have quoted before and I shall quote Bill Baker again “The future comes slowly, change happens quickly”..

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann January 7. 2016