Entries Tagged 'The Geek Factor' ↓

I was just thinking about what back room wrangling may have gone on to have the iPad contract-free 3G service through AT&T happen.

Obviously, as a book reader, Apple could offer the Kindle up for comparison, and Steve could certainly make the case that ubiquitous connectivity would have to be better than that offered by the Kindle to make his device transcendent. He could get people to pay for that transcendence — it was going to be a premium experience, so people would pay for it. But people hate cell phone companies, and contracts in particular… so it had to be easy to enable and disable, with the option to bump up your plan if you’re running over, without the possibility that you’d get a $5000 bill from AT&T because you left a video stream going.

Steve had a few things to offer up. First, he’d go along with the whole mini-SIM thing to appease AT&T. People couldn’t use their iPhone SIM in their iPad, so they’d have to get the additional service. They’re not going to get rid of their iPhones — you can’t carry the iPad everywhere. Average revenue per Apple fanboi would go up, and with the simplified pricing plans and self-service provisioning, the cost of servicing the additional load is just a technical problem, something that can be solved by using money.

So Steve might have said, “OK, we’ll tell Verizon to screw off, make it so people can’t just use the one subscription for iPhone and iPad, and increase your ARPU. You give us a self-serve no-hassle unlimited-use option and another at a lower price for those who aren’t yet sure how much they’ll love our magical boogie board. And this iPhone 4? It’s gonna be awesome, too, and bring even more folks into the iPhone fold. It’s going to do Skype, so invest in the data side, and you can even drop your spending on the voice side. You do this for us, and we’re going to make you THE carrier of mobile data. Buy the towers, buy the routers, run the fiber — just be ready.”

It seems logical to me to have gone that way. Even if the details are off a bit, we can’t know.

One of the most troubling things about exclusivity agreements is that we know so little about them.

When does an exclusivity agreement between market leaders turn into anticompetitive collusion? Isn’t the team of Apple and AT&T almost its own vertically-integrated market monolith?

Additionally, the terms of such agreements are obviously incredibly material to the financial health of both companies, and investors are prevented from accurately gauging corporate prospects without access to that data.

It would seem to me that disclosure of such terms should be required to be disclosed publicly, with well-defined regulation around what can be redacted, and what the allowed reporting delay can be after contract execution.

I’ll admit that I’d be happy to see the side effect of increased competition when the light is shined into dark corners. I’d love to see service providers competing on the price and value of their service, rather than relying on exclusivity agreements and paying kickbacks. They should be competing for my business, not Apple’s.

I’m finding myself in a personal career crisis, which I tell here only to explain how I came to this point of reflection. I write this post both to record something that I should never forget, and in hopes that it may someday help someone who happens across it.

I am a ninja.

Were I to describe what I have to offer in the line of Information Technology, I’d have to refer to the slogan of German chemical company BASF. Like BASF, I don’t make the products you use, I make the products you use better. Until now, I’ve considered myself an expert in nothing — jack of all trades, master of none. Books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Matthew Syed’s Bounce illustrate how much more useful practice counts than “talent” in likelihood of extraordinary success. They discuss how 10,000 hours of useful practice are required to achieve mastery.

I’ve gotten far more than 10,000 hours of useful practice in being an IT ninja since I entered the professional workforce in ’99.

After a year in hosting operations (in which I was promoted twice), I hopped on a plane at 24 to go live in London, and work with some people who knew that I was good at what I did. Over the course of the next year, I played the role of unix engineer within operations, network architect(?) within engineering, and a stint in presales for a young division in a telecom which was on its way from $2B market cap to bankruptcy. When I look back on the things I did at 24 and 25, I have to marvel at it. I defined requirements for, designed, performed vendor evaluation, did CapEx planning with finance for, ordered and implemented the managed hosting network infrastructure for hosting facilities, including VLAN tagging and trunking, traffic prioritization with QoS, dynamic layer 3 routing, spanning tree, and a fully redundant mesh to the head-of-row racks. I didn’t even have a CCNA, and someone was crazy enough to let me figure that all out. There was oversight, but they trusted me, and it paid off. I had a few other victories there, but in the end left before the debt defaults brought the company completely down the drain.

I’ve worked as the top technical resource in a hosting center, with ultimate responsibility for keeping customer systems up and running well. Whether “managed” hosting on standard platforms, or “Time and materials” work for which my time was billed at $210/hr to fix problems with whatever was wrong, be it servers, switches, routers, load balancers, or storage. It was my job to be good enough at figuring out whatever came my way that I could get it working again, or working correctly if the customer required a change.

My first (and only, I haven’t reordered since changing positions) business card at my current employer had me listed as “Systems Guru”. My official title went from administrator to architect, but I was still working hands-on with everything from network to server to storage, and I was even writing some code to make things work better.

Now I’m a manager of a team of java developers, and I have responsibility for the application architecture. I find that my breadth of experience in other areas, as well as what I’ve learned about building scalable applications and decoupling components, allows me to decompose a problem into parts which will “just work”. I don’t have to force myself to think in service orientation precisely because it works the way my mind does — it encapsulates design and implementation at all of the layers of the stack, just like my mind can encapsulate all of those layers of the stack into a symbolic representation in my mind. My experience allows me to peel back the layers like peeling back the transparencies of an anatomy book to see the underlying organ systems.

Though I am only a jack of all trades, I am a master at decomposing problems without being limited by a subject-area-expertise mindset. A service is simply providing an interface to what Information Technology fundamentally is — data processing. Data goes in, gets processed, and comes out. I can see the big picture by using symbols precisely because I know that I can zoom into any of those symbols, and know what’s important to know about any portion of the stack that is providing those services.

I’ve been a ninja for over a decade, and I’ve always known it.

What I’d forgotten to appreciate is how I’d become an expert at it.

I’d encourage anyone to take this almost journeyman-seeming path. I can appreciate the guys who are the absolute best at a specific thing, but when you get to the point where you really and truly know that you can figure anything out, it leads to what I can only explain as a beautiful experience “seeing” elegantly simple solutions based upon fundamentals.

The only curse is that it’ll make you want to change the world. Anyone need a ninja to help them change the world?

To quote Vanilla Ice, “If there’s a problem, yo, I’ll solve it. Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it.”

I am consistently finding myself challenging assumptions about the role of IT and information systems in business. I’m also finding that I’ve not been able to consolidate my ideas in a way that provides the value of aggregation and integration, and I’ve decided that thinking my way to a comprehensive belief system and approach on this blog is as good a place as any.

Perspective
The most fundamental asset in IT planning, as well as one of the most important deliverables from IT to its customers including itself, is perspective.

Information
The most valuable asset in gaining perspective is information. Information, as distinguished from data, is the product of analysis of data.

Service
Service is about providing information — whether interactive views of real-time data sources, analytics of user behavior, usage reporting, billing data, user authorization information — in a usable format, reliably and predictably. Service orientation isn’t just about SOAP and Web Services. It’s about providing access to retrieve, store, or modify information and data, and providing a service level agreement for that access.

Data
Data is the heart of IT. Before it was called Information Technology, it was called Data Processing. Collection, storage, management, performance, and availability of data are essential to generate the information required to run IT and provide value to the larger business. Core business entity data, metadata (data about data), service and access data (logging), and authorization data are core business assets and are required to provide information and services and perspective. Effective structuring of business data should be considered a core responsibility of the IT department.

Having laid out some of my principles (and I welcome comments and discussion), I’m looking forward to the next post in this series, where I will start to look at the value chain within IT.