Previous annual retrospectives: 2019
This is presumably my last post of the year. I managed 15 posts this year (not including this one), of which three were Cloud City Meetup event updates. The other 12 substantive posts just top last year’s 11 posts. Word count crept up by 670 words to 12,773 words (sorry!). Traffic was down slightly from 2019, but 2020 was still the blog’s second highest trafficked year by a long shot. The top three sources of traffic are search, Hacker News, and then Twitter.
Three of those posts were on cloud CAPEX, but I didn’t get around to applying the CAPEX lens to some new targets. I didn’t update the Cloud Not Flat/Seattle is Cloud City series for the latest Gartner Cloud Infrastructure Magic Quadrant simply because it has gone asymptotic. I was yet again triggered by preposterous claims by IBM and Salesforce, but hope to exhibit greater resistance in the future (or they could dial back the marketing megalomania). Like fake press releases, my political and geopolitical posts didn’t attract many readers, so I will keep doing them until others appreciate them as much as I do.
I started a bunch of posts early in the pandemic lockdown, but published very few of them (and published nothing in Q2 which is embarrassing). I have unpublished posts I hope to revisit and finish on edge computing, the scope of AWS, perfidious financialization, a look at the Western States Pact, the New York Times’ amazing lack of self-awareness, startup fallacies, and some Microsoft Flight Simulator history. I’ll reiterate my plea for GPT-3 access to accelerate finishing these posts.
Looking back at specific 2020 posts:
Teeing off IBM’s CEO transition, this post looked back the outgoing CEO’s dismal performance and chronicled IBM’s “uncharacteristic bout of out-performance by packing more than a decade’s worth of decline into just eight years.” I regret not characterizing that tenure as “a regime of despair”. This was my most viewed post of the year, and went to the top of Hacker News (to reverse the cause and effect). I fondly recall the days when IBM partisans would dispute my contentions about the company, but those days grow ever more distant.
Follow the CAPEX: Cloud Table Stakes 2019 Edition
The annual update on hypercloud company CAPEX spending: Amazon, Google and Microsoft collectively spent almost $73.5 billion on CAPEX in 2019. “The three companies cumulative CAPEX spend since 2000 is over $347 billion, with $142 billion of that occurring in the last two years.” Remember that when other companies talk about doing “cloud”.
The Geopolitical Game Board – March 2020
My favorite post of the year. Few of you agreed. So naturally expect it to be a recurring feature.
Characterizing Taiwan as Arrakis is brilliant and I’m jealous I didn’t come up with that.
A check in on the old, CAPEX-light hyperclowns (IBM, Oracle) but also a welcome to some new clowns in town (Bank of America and an agglomeration of European nations). It is going to be fun to track a cloud developed by European bureaucrats, assuming they can find the time when not using their product chops to design phone batteries, connectors, and cookie notifications.
Can Brian Hall Fix What Ails Google Cloud?
I used to believe Google Cloud was about fifth on Sundar’s priority list, but with three new US antitrust suits (and counting!), it can only move down the list. I wimped out on the title and the last paragraph of this post, and got called on it.
A rare foray into politics. “Loser” is all over the zeitgeist but has yet to be taken to the logical and practical end this post proposes. But yet another voice howling in the electoral wind was unnoticed.
A fake press release on geopolitics is pretty much a guaranteed damp squib, but it did trigger a interesting, related discussion.
IBM’s “Cloud” Business (or Lack Thereof)
It is amazing to see so-called analysts and so-called media continue to hype up IBM’s latest promises, despite the company having gone 0-for-the-21st century. Admittedly, they’re not the most coherent or assertive of takes. At what point is skepticism the default response to yet another set of IBM promises?
Pandemic CAPEX — Q3 2020 Update
After looking into the cloud capacity issues through the CAPEX lens (hammer, nail…) for Q2 on Twitter, I managed to move the Q3 look to the blog. TL;DR: the early pandemic capacity crunch was alleviated by Q3.
Slackforce and the Beginning of the End of SaaS Sprawl
It is both ironic and amusing to see Tom Siebel dismissing Salesforce as “all marketing and very little technology.” Perhaps what comes around does in fact go around. But with all the hype, Salesforce keeps upping the pressure on itself to actually write some software.
This post touched the distant past (Microsoft’s antitrust ordeal) and the near future (Google and Facebook’s coming tribulations), but seemed of little interest in the present. Hopefully, it will be better appreciated as that future unfolds. I look forward to being an antitrust spectator.
Previous Year’s Posts
In 2020, the world caught up with some of my older posts, which makes me optimistic for some of this year’s posts.
Regulating Facebook: A Proposal (May 2019)
Facebook’s race towards an antitrust reckoning has been on full display for years. But we can do better than “break them up”, assuming the regulatory apparatus can be bothered to do the necessary work.
The most popular remedy is to “break them up”, with a Facebook co-founder and self-styled public policy expert most recently joining this chorus. Chanting “break them up” is fun if you’re six years old, President of the United States (maybe I am confusing this with the similarly nuanced “lock her up”), or an academic mesmerized by the sound of your own voice on television, but it makes for a flaccid policy prescription.
Breaking up Facebook may seem straightforward, punitive, and probably cathartic for podcast populists and hipster antitrust hobbyists, but it fails to answer very basic questions like along which seams you would chop the company up and how that slicing and dicing would actually alleviate the many sins swirling around Facebook. As some have pointed out (in some cases again and again), separating Instagram or WhatsApp from classic Facebook doesn’t fix any of the problems that plague those specific services (for the record, Mr. Zuckerberg concurs with this view, though his optimism that his company can resolve these issues by itself does not seem commensurate with the company’s track record to date). And in political hands, the case for a break-up gets downright incoherent.
Facebook and other online advertisers eventually came around to my proposal. They liked it so much they even extended the blackout beyond the election.
A Very Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud Hyperbole
This is an aside to an aside, but this paragraph on McKinsey could be updated to add opiate crisis culpability to their corporate CV:
And what kind of an aspiring industry leader has to go out of house to figure out the size of their market opportunity? McKinsey should be your go-to for propping up authoritarian regimes, CEO insider trading, and pioneering the Enron business model, but not for forecasting technology markets.
