"catatonic leadership"
"catatonic leadership"
IBM is the best positioned to nail enterprise AI...if they try? 2023 IT spending forecasts. Avoiding being a turd on podcasts.
2023 IT Spending Forecasts from Gartner and Forester - software and cloud stuff has good/OK growth
Summary: There’s always money in the banana stand.
Gartner’s IT spend prediction:
Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2023, an increase of 2.4% from 2022, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. This is down from the previous quarter’s forecast of 5.1% growth.
While that’s declined, software and IT Services still have a lot of growth, hardware is pulling growth down: “The software and IT services segments are projected to grow 9.3% and 5.5% in 2023, respectively. The devices segment is forecast to decline 5.1% this year as both consumers and enterprises lengthen device refresh cycles.”
There’s a continual dissonance in jobs between tech companies that are laying off 60,000 people and normie enterprises that are struggling to find people: “Job vacancy rates have been increasing every quarter and the open jobs per unemployed rate is at record lows in many countries. High competition for talent is challenging CIOs to hire skilled IT staff, limiting growth for companies who struggle to scale without the requisite talent.”
Meanwhile, Forrester says US Tech Spend Is Going To Slow To 5.4% In 2023.
Software and cloud, and related services driving growth: “Software is forecasted to dominate growth, representing 34% of tech spend growth in 2022 and 42% of tech spend growth in 2027.”
And: “Accenture’s cloud business grew 48% in local currency in FY 2022. IBM’s annual hybrid cloud revenues grew 20% year-over-year at constant currency in Q3 2022. Cisco expects software and IT services to contribute to 53% of revenues in 2022, up from just 42% in 2017.”
See a little more commentary on IT spending forecasts from Tom Krazit.
How to be a good guest on a podcast
In a podcast interview, you need to answer in a “yes, and” mode, not “no, but.” The second often comes in the form of “I think a better question is…” or “I want to challenge your assumptions…”
This isn’t to say that you have to agree with or even validate the question. Rather, that you need to think about the smoothness of your answer.
Also, there’s a rhetorical tactic to it. You want to win over the audience, have then enjoy the noises coming out of your mouth, the conversation you’re having with the podcast hosts.
To do this, you have to be friendly with the hosts. Many podcasts listeners consider the hosts their friends (even if they think if it exactly that way), listening to the podcast each week is part of their routine (their life!), and brings the listeners comfort even. You might think this absurd for a podcast about programming or cloud, but, it’s true nonetheless.
Listeners are loyal to the hosts, they are part of the podcast’s community, and they The Birth of Tragedy on the host. So, as a guest in this community, when you “no, but” you’re often directly confronting and arguing not just with the hosts, but with the audience! So, many of them will be bozo bit you and/or fall into ad ad hominem trap and dismiss anything you say.
You’re being a turd and your ideas will get flushed.
If you’ve taken media training, that training is more likely to screw-up your podcast guessing. A lot of corporate media training is, really, training you how to be a turd with a smile. You prepare ahead of the interview to evade answers to questions you don’t want answer. You learn to pivot to what you want to say and memorize scripted monologs. You learn to be brief by sacrifice detail and even interestingness.
What you learn in standard media training is the opposite of the toolkit you use to be a good podcast guest. It’s possible to apply these principles and get a good podcast, but it is extremely difficult to do and there aren’t many people who can.
Now, some shows are fine with “no, but”: Conversations with Tyler can do well with “no, but,” and even encourages it as a method of discourse.
But, if you’re going to be a guest on a podcast or any other long-form interview, start with the default of “yes, and” until you figure out the style of podcast you’re a guest on. Only be a turd if you’re invited to shit all over the listeners.
Our annual conference for developers, operations people, and anyone who’s looking to improve how their organization does software is coming up: SpringOne. There’s lot of programming, of course, and also a good overview of the platform engineering and developer tooling stuff we’ve been doing. It’s free to attend and there’s a whole bunch of other talks (including one from me) that will be trickled out over the weeks after the event.
It’d totally free to register and online, making it super simple to attend. Register now and tell me what you think of it.
Also, if you’re the Amsterdam area on January 25th, I’ll be hosting a watch party for our developer and operations conference, SpringOne. It’s free to attend and “you could win a Lego Technic McLaren F1 car. Refreshments and food will be provided!” I bet I don’t qualify for the Lego set. BOO! Register for it, and I’ll see you there.
Relevant to your interests
The champion in sales and marketing - Another overview of a core sales and marketing concept: finding, nurturing, and helping the champion. The concept is widely covered in sales, but not in marketing. Hinada covers the second well.
Pickup owners moving to SUVs (like everyone else - “the segment’s retail shares in Q3 2022 and October 2022 were 7.8% and 7.5%, respectively - lower than in any other quarter dating back to Q3 2012” // When we were back in Texas for three weeks, it sure seemed like they’d reached peak pick-up over there.
Extremely Hardcore - Great article on the Twitter saga so far. There’s so many good/worst practices to draw from this as a case study. You need some kind of event (success, acquisition, bankruptcy, etc.) to close off the study period, but there’s a lot already.
IBM accused of mislabeling mainframe sales to cheat market - This article starts with a mainframe revenue allocation lawsuit, but is mostly about Watson strategy and product stuff…and then back to EULA artistry.
Avoiding catastrophizing - “it is not the incident itself but the negative interpretation of the incident that leads to catastrophic thinking and the subsequent snowballing of negative emotions.” // Most self-help content streams like this are dumb, but The Cure is consistently good and helpful.
Not happy about the shitification of our town squares - “the places we grew our careers and social circles on have all been damaged beyond repair by men who, despite having billions of dollars, look like they have the suds and the emotional intelligence of a paper straw 5 minutes after it has entered my iced latte. they’re surrounded by yes-men with less-money who are about half as smart as the character i played in my early satire days. i truly hope they all find the immortality they seek, and also that they then get trapped in quicksand, respectfully.”
Here is a good thread on how throwing social bombs with one hand and trying to give out tech advice with the other can mess up the credibility of the second. (You’ll have to join the Software Defined Talk Slack to read it.)
AI Corner
IBM struggled to do enterprise AI - seemed tough. They were clearly too early. I bet if they had the OpenAI technology now, it’d go better. They’d need to scale back their claims and ambitions, but if they stuck to entry-level automation in (boring) industries, they’d have a great foothold.
A HUGE part IBM’s high potential to succeed in enterprise AI now would be all the existing contracts they have with large organizations globally. One, you wouldn’t have to go through 12 to 24 month enterprise sales cycles, finding champions, displacing the existing contracts in place, and put in place new ones. IBM could start right now, like literally in hours. (There are many other enterprise vendors in a similar position, but few have the existing corpus of enterprise AI brand/work on the shelf.)
IBM would have the richest, best stream of feedback on how to productize AI for enterprise uses. I’d go even further and say that they’d have the only meanigful stream of validated feedback you’d need for good product management.
Imagine seeing every week how 100 to 1,000 large organizations (you know, the “middleware for banks or whatever” funbunch) were using AI. SO MUCH INNOVATION TO JUST GRAB FROM THE SKY.
I mean, I hope they can do something there - I am a secret IBMophile after all those family hot-dog socials in the 80’s.
Meanwhile:
A list of “filler” journalism that The AI will likely replace. - Quoting from another article: “The role of a media company is changing because most of what is produced is unremarkable, lifeless filler that can be replicated by a machine fairly easily.” // More from my principle: if it’s bullshit work, have the bullshit artist do it: The AI.
Dr. ChatGPT - Yup, makes sense for tier 0 to 1 support, whether it’s software or meatware.
Wastebook
“catatonic leadership.” Here.
Ibid.: the first entry for biz word-salad of CY2023: an "impact-focused, egalitarian and empirical culture, where any team member, with a strong data-driven justification, gets the metaphorical center stage.”
It me…? “‘The most irksome thing of all is that I am always having to impersonate someone—the teacher, the philologist, the human being,’” [Nietzsche] wrote after taking up the Basel professorship, and it was hardly a surprising feeling given that he was a young man dressing like an old man to impersonate wisdom, an undergraduate impersonating a professor, an exasperated son impersonating a good son to his irritating mother, and a loving and dutiful son to the memory of his dead Christian father while in the process of losing his Christian faith. As if these everyday impersonations were not enough, there was the question of his statelessness, the formal identity within which all these impersonations existed. Utterly fragmented, he knew himself in the Schopenhauerian state of striving and suffering: a man far from understanding his true will let alone realizing it.” -I Am Dynamite!, Sue Prideaux
“More billionaires slipping on the streets of Davos.” ?!
Colophon
I wanted to point out one of my best sources for links: Ed Grigson, one my Tanzu Talk podcast co-hosts. He does an extensive round-up of VMare Tanzu related news each week that I look forward to and always find good stuff in.
I should list out my other sources someday. Feedly used to have a way to share what you read - a profile page - but I can’t find it anymore. Yup.
Where do you find stuff nowadays? I always hunger for more.
Logoff
The executive dinners we do are typically private. I guess CIOnet is more public with their events, cause you can see an afterward post from them in LinkedIn. You can check out the types of people who’re there giving you a sense of the fun topics we discuss and see what it looks like:
Meanwhile: we’re recording today’s Tanzu Talk later this morning. We’ll probably discuss some of the things in this newsletter episode, and more. You should subscribe to it if you’re someone who’s read this far. Related: we did this week’s Software Defined Talk yesterday. If you don’t already subscribe to it you should subscribe because this week Brandon really nailed how to think about “unlimited PTO” in a non-shit-post way. It’ll be out Friday at 7:30am Amsterdam time.
I’m finishing up a (way too deep because I find this stuff, you know, relaxing to do) analysis of my content and shit in FY2023. I’ll have to find some INSIGHHHHHIIIITZZZ to share soon.
Alright, hopefully see y’all tomorrow.