Coté Memo #071: How to eat a bubble at #ApacheCon

Apr 14, 2015

In this episode: who comes up the ApacheCon booths, a seemingly coordinated conversation about tech bubbles, and “how to eat.”

The Cloud Foundry Summit is coming up on May 11th and 12th, in Santa Clara. It’s a great chance to dive into Cloud Foundry ecosystem both on the technology side and to hear how organizations are using Cloud Foundry to become Software Defined Businesses. Register now with the discount code COTE and get 25%, which will bring the price down from $250 to about $187.

Follow-up

None this week.

Tech & Work World

ApacheCon 2015

It being in Austin, I’m at ApacheCon this year. The ASF was nice enough to give me a media pass, which Pivotal being a big sponsor wasn’t necessary, but I thought it was a sweet gesture, the kind of sentimental stuff I appreciate. I used to do media training with them (come sit with a real analyst for 5 minutes) which I always enjoyed immensely.

I’m helping man the Cloud Foundry booth a bit (we have plenty of folks keeping the Pivotal booth humming since we do a lot of data stuff in this community and launched Geode today).

Today the traffic was pretty slow (the data folks had more), but the nature of people we talked with was more interesting than volume. I’ll see how it pans over the next few days, but my theory is that ApacheCon is good more for business development (partner, etc.) than for “lead-gen” (finding potential customers, working on retaining existing ones). Indeed, I talked with one of the fellas at another booth and he turned out to be their biz-dev guy, who echoed this theory back at me.

Also, they served lunch at Threadgill’s. Yuh!

(“Introducing a Canadian to chicken fried steak” photo not actually from today. Also: pie!)

A bubble-talk bubble

It’s like there’s some coordinated PR effort going on: have you noticed how much “there’s a bubble talk, yes/no?” talk has been going on of late? There’s this interview with Marc Andreessen, some horseman of the digital apocalypse vitriol, and more from Scott Kupor at Andreessen’s outfit.

The most recent Exponent podcast is the best overview of the topic, which I’d recommend, along with Ben’s write-up.

Quick Hits

Check out the annoyance of explaining enterprise strategy to the world in the ongoing story of HP re-jiggering their public cloud approach. The initial “HP exiting the public cloud” framing was all bonkers (as I noted in last week’s Software Defined Talk podcast), and now HP has finally tried to clarify it.
“[W]e could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub.”

Fun & IRL

How to eat

One day I hope to do a “series” called “how to eat.” It’ll go over the proper eating procedures for various types of food. When I pitch this to people, they get confused. Why would you need that? Well, for example, what’s the proper way to eat sushi? How would you explain how to eat a hamburger and onion rings to someone who’d never seen it? What do you do with all those little bowls of stuff you get a Korean restaurant? When you’re eating at one of those European hotel breakfast buffets, what’s up with all that lunch meat? How do you eat a taco properly, or a chalupa (as we call all tostada like things in Texas)? You get the idea.

Just think of how fun it’d be to make videos of all that! And then blogs-cum-books, and so on. Even a podcast.

The further part of the dream is couple it up with the series my wife would do called “You’re doing it wrong.” Each episode would be about the modern day etiquette practices that people often overlook. People would be going about putting on a wedding (“if you’re family helping out, don’t try to hijack the agenda”), a baby shower (“don’t just buy random stuff, figure out the style they want and don’t deviate”), visiting with friends (“ask if you should strip the bed when you leave”), and so forth, and Kim would bust in after the initial montage of things going wrong and say, “you’re doing it wrong!” and then go on in the rest of the episode to explain things like, for example, “you can’t have a pot-luck for a baby shower,” or how you need to figure out if Christmas gift-giving is done on the “give them whatever you think they want” vs. the “give them only exactly what they asked for” methods.

The “cross-over” would occur every now and then (maybe during the credits) where I’d stumble on with some food-related thing (“here’s how to eat at a wedding”) and basically be a buffoon that my wife would roll her eyes at (“as long as the bride and groom are having a good time, don’t be afraid to fill your plate with those mini steaks! Is this an open bar situation?” [wife rolls eyes])..and then she could come on my show occasionally and tell people how they’re doing it wrong (“always bring over a nice bottle of wine, no matter what the host said!”).