Coté Memo #031: Avoiding Showing Up, Yet Another Private Equity in Tech Story, Cyborgs, and more #VMworld

Sep 04, 2014

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #31. Today we have 39 subscribers, so we're +1. I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you're reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.)

See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote.

Follow-up

Tech & Work World

Quick Hits

There's a markdown spec out now. Lovely!
I haven't listed to it yet, but it's obvious that this episode of Mindful Cyborgs with RU Sirus will be fun. I mean: Mondo 2000, am I right?! (Anyone...anyone...?)
Also in the "unfinished WIP" category, episode #2 of Inquisitive has a delightful re-cap of the history of podcasting, including the dark years.

It's a real project if..., or, avoiding showing up to save time

I liked the quick summary of determining if something is a real project or not on this week's Back to Work. I spend much of time sorting out if I should get involved in a project or not, both internal to 451 and externally. In analyst life, there's lots of people looking for open-ended projects with no budget, and those become time-sucks that marks like me end-up carrying the water for.

I spend a lot of time observing behavior of other people in the companies I work for, mostly the people who are considered "successful." What I've noticed is that those successful people don't do much, in a good way. They're highly selective of the projects they get involved with, and even the email threads they answer.

If you're the kind of person who subscribes and actually reads this newsletter, you likely have the problem I have: you get bored easily and use work as a way to entertain yourself...instead of using work as a way to get paid. I've got to shift more and more of my efforts to that second part, because the first creates a stream of unfinished projects that go nowhere and becomes a terrible loop of boredom on its own.

451's VMworld 2014 pieces are coming out

For 451 clients (and folks who have a trial), Peter ffoulkes has a nice, brief piece on VMware's usage and planned usage, broken down by pre-#VMworld2014 brand-name. A sample of the analysis:

The names may have changed, which makes it quite difficult to track both historical usage and forward-looking plans, but at the end of the day marketing departments like to change names to protect the guilty. Whatever the products are called today, or may be called in the future, it is clear that the hypervisor-level technologies that are the basis of VMware’s current market dominance are commoditizing. This provides leverage but no guarantee of future market share for VMware in adjacent markets (management and cloud platforms), which have notable established incumbents and a set of engagement rules that are not necessarily aligned with VMware’s historical success factors.

Al Sadowski has a piece out on the VMware OpenStack API-layer-as-distro too.

Hey, don't worry: that vRealize one is on the kitchen island ready to cook up.

Private Equity, which was the style of the time

All the sudden so many large tech companies are looking to go private. TIBCO did the obligatory hanging out a sign recently, it seems. Of course, I'm sure many are all like "TIBwho?" which is fine (and if you're a TIBwhu? person, you'll love this discussion of Compuware!). If you couple this trend with another macro-theory, that IT spending is slowing down, permanently, then you've got something slightly interesting. Tech becomes normal.

Fun & IRL

There's only two days left to upload several years worth of photos to my newly TB'ed Dropbox account. Yup. Try not to do that.