Sun In The Clouds. I Smell Fail

I'm feeling pretty dumb these days. Yesterday I said I really didn't get Twine, and today I am not getting Sun's announcement about their new cloud computing offering.

Today Sun announced that they are going to launch a kind of Amazon Web Services competitor.

I am not going to get into the details here. If you want you can go to their announcement website and try to figure out what it is. Good luck with that.

My impression is this. It is an announcement of a bunch of gobbledygook. No specifics. No prices. No APIs. Nothing but some broad crap about how they want to make interoperable clouds. Pages and pages of pure abstract nothingness on their website. I am not sure what the announcement is. I am not sure what I am to do with this information other than sign up for more information when they are ready to share it. I can't figure out how this compares to the offerings of the Amazon 800 pound gorilla.

What a horrific way to launch. I can't imagine such foggy thinking leading to a competitive success against Amazon.

Today it was also announced that IBM is trying to buy Sun. I hope for Sun shareholders they succeed. The stench of fail is heavy with Sun. Or perhaps that is just what decomposition smells like.

I Just Don't Get Twine

Today there is a very positive article about Twine in ReadWriteWeb. Twine is a semantic bookmarking program that automatically categorizes your bookmarked articles. The ReadWriteWeb piece discusses the fact that Twine may soon surpass Delicious, Yahoo's bookmarking system, in terms of page views.

Now I would like to see Twine succeed. But one of the problems endemic to the semantic web space is the total failure to consider user interface. The last time ReadWriteWeb wrote about Twine, they were brutal regarding the quality of the user interface, but this time they are somewhat more kind.

But I have to say I just don't get it. Perhaps I am just too dumb or too unmotivated. But Twine is a bookmark manager, right? So I just have to ask one question. How do you bookmark something?

I am sure it is there somewhere on the homepage, but I certainly can't see where. Now to be clear this is a bit of a rhetorical question. If I really was focused I am sure I could figure out the steps to add a bookmark. But the point is I *don't want* to be that focused. I, like many people, need to be coaxed into an application. It needs to be easy, and there needs to be some obvious payoff. And I would submit that if there is not some big easy-to-see button on the front of a bookmark manager that says "bookmark" or something like it, then there is a problem.

Or perhaps Twine is just over my head.

The Role of Real Technologists

I have spent the last several months thinking about the role of computer scientists, technologists, developers and tech entrepreneurs in these modern times.

I have often lamented the short term focus of those of us who create products and services based on bits and bytes. The last decade has, in many respects, been depressing to me. The internet did a great thing in that it made all kinds of services accessible to more people. But it also redefined what "technology" means. Today, a web page is considered tech. And so, Alltop, or Digg or Blahgirls, are considered technology. This kind of stuff, which may have merit, muddies the waters, when it is stirred in the same pot with tools that require serious technical depth to create. The other thing that has happened is that an enormous amount of our focus and mindshare has moved to quasi-entertainment focused tools such as Twitter.

As I see it we need to refocus. While there is nothing wrong with Twitter, we as a community need to get serious. The reason our economy is failing is because we have had what I would call a fake GDP. We have been booking growth where there really wasn't any, or wasn't enough. Real growth, or real wealth as a society is, at the end of the day, measured by the number of people we are feeding and the quality of food we are feeding them. It is measured by our ability to house our population. It is measured by the quality of life that we can offer, not to the wealthiest among us, but to the most regular among us.

And by these measures, we have not been doing particularly well. GDP growth has been an illusion.

And so as information technologists, what can we do about it? Well obviously we don't make food. But we may create a tool that helps farmers increase yield, or perhaps distribute more effectively. We can't build a new power grid, but perhaps we can develop a new modeling tool that helps develop insights into the most efficient way to organize such a grid. We will not, for the most part, be teachers, but perhaps we can develop software that helps increase the efficiency of learning.

The point is that we don't tend to solve the most important problems directly. But we can make it easier for those that are solving the problems to do so. We create tools that increase efficiency, and that indeed may make new more effective approaches possible.

And given that this is what we can do, this is what we must do. We must all be focused on how we can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of our front line. For those of you that care deeply about your role in this world, and that have the skills and the capacity to do so, solving the important problems is where your focus should be.

Stimulus

I was reading Business Insider this morning and Joe Weisenthal has an article about the fact that shovel ready projects are not really shovel ready, and that maybe we should be thinking more long term.

I tend to agree that we should be thinking more long term, but I have to say Obama is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. There is a strong chorus of people that think he should only focus on the short term and that all of this focus on the broader agenda such as health care and education is irrelevant when the economy is broken.

I believe it to be true that the banking system must be fixed, but I also believe it is true is that the reason we are here is because of serious systemic problems beyond banking. And the keys to fixing that include education, health care, and yes, infrastructure.

In the Business Insider piece, Weisenthal suggests that some of the stimulus money should be aimed at the power grid. I agree with that as well. The grid is a huge issue which was reinforced for me this weekend. I read a piece (which I cant find but I am sure someone will help out with in comments) about a new battery invention that, if it makes it to market, will allow us to recharge batteries in seconds. That sounds great, but the problem is that such a technology, which is *exactly* what we need, would cause our current power grid to fall over. I haven't done the math but I would presume that using such technology, charging a car in seconds would suck thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of amps. In other words it would quite literally melt the power lines into a charging station based on current electrical infrastructure.

Basically, if we are going to move from depending on electricity to power our cars, not only do we need to be able to do things like move the electricity from wind farms in the middle of the country via some kind of smart grid, that new grid needs to be several orders of magnitude more brawny to support the kind of demands that an electricity based mobility infrastructure would require.

And this brings me back to the larger point. I don't know whether it should be called stimulus, but I think we should be spending several trillion dollars on infrastructure over the next five or ten years. We need to catch up with what we haven't spent for the last several decades. This kind of spending should be focused on making us more efficient and more effective. Yes to education, but also yes to high speed rails and new power grids, and repairing our bridges, and building new ones. This kind of spending, properly managed, would not, as some argue, be a waste, and it is in fact what I believe the role of government is. Imagine for example where this country would be without an interstate highway system. These big ticket big vision items are the kinds of things that only the federal government can do, and therefore should, and must do.