Content Log

A Month in the Bay Area

Sixteen years ago, my wife, my 9 month-old son and I left the San Francisco Bay area to live in the UK. I was still at Documentum, but I had always wanted to return after starting a company, which ended up being Documentum. Since then I have constantly flown back and forth between the UK and SFO. 

Friday before last, I returned from one month in the bay area with my family. This is not something I tweeted about or put onto Facebook. There were enough warnings about this on the Internet to make sure I didn't say "Hey burglars! You still have 31 days left to rob my house!" In fact, I unintentionally made it a one month holiday off of Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and most things SocialNetwork.

That's me on the left - that little dot next to the Golden Gate Bridge

The purpose of the trip was to re-establish connections in the Bay Area (I'm a Cal grad!), to network in Silicon Valley and do a reality or "sur-reality" check on the state of technology. As William Gibson noted "The future is here, just not evenly distributed." Living in Europe has its own interesting sur-realities and in most cases stuff just moves faster (too fast?) in the valley. I have tried to take an extended period of time every 5 years or so and the last time was much longer than that. Besides, I have a lot of family in California and a day trip into SFO or San Jose just doesn't allow any sort of good catch up time.

I guess the way to think about it was that I was doing good old fashioned social networking, not internet social networking. I also had a few objectives that I wanted to accomplish.

First, I wanted to understand how consumer and enterprise were intersecting. As Geoffrey Moore noted in working session with AIIM, end users of software are asking "Why am I so powerful as a Consumer and so lame as an Employee?" The conclusion that most enterprise software companies have come to as the antidote is to make their software more like consumer software. "We are the Facebook for the enterprise!" they will exclaim. I have never been convinced of this and wanted to get other opinions, particularly of consumer internet companies. I also wanted to see if the traditional enterprise software guys are staring to get it.

Second, as we are approaching the launch of our Software as a Service later this year, I wanted to explore what the best practices are in operating SaaS in the Cloud. What are the adoption rates? What are the hardware requirements? What are the best practices in pricing and billing? How do you value a Freemium service? Etc., etc., etc.! Interesting there is more experience of this in San Francisco than on the peninsula. A real reversal of fortunes from when I left the bay area in 1995, not that either is doing too badly!

Third, I wanted a first hand observation of the Clockspeed effect first introduced to me by my friend and Documentum co-founder, Howard Shao. (It's too bad he was skiing in South America, which he always does during the North American summer.) The book Clockspeed (http://www.amazon.com/Clockspeed-Winning-Industry-Temporary-Advantage/dp/0738201537) by Charles Fine says that markets consolidate to a point of unsustainable Oligopoly or Monopoly until their whole ecosystem is exploded by a new wave of either vertical or horizontal integration. One example given was the horizontal integration of the Wintel platform that is now being challenged by new vertical integration platforms. These new vertical integration platforms have everything to do with cloud, mobile, social and consumer. This is going to lead to radically new ecosystems and I wanted to meet and work with the participants in these new ecosystems.

Finally, it's hard to overemphasize the role that personal life can have on professional life and the need to balance the two. I am of a generation that didn't do this very well and I can only try my best. Normally, I fly into SFO, try to see some of my siblings, niece and nephew, and the then head out to non-stop meetings as jet lag takes it toll. This is no way to do either. As my sister said last year, "Of course John, we love to meet with you and watch you fall asleep over dinner. :-)" I not only want to get some quality time accomplishing my professional goals, I wanted to see old friends and spend time with my family. I wanted my kids to see where we used to live and what it's like living in the bay area. In the end, I could have done better on this and everything really, but the trip was very fulfilling.

I will be blogging (I hope) about the first three points over the coming days and weeks, but not the last part. If we are connected on Facebook, you can learn all about that side of the trip. However, in the meantime, I thought I would include this photo of some of the old-timers from Documentum. We were able to meet up at the Hopyard Brewery in Pleasanton. It was great to see everyone so well and so healthy given how old we all are. ;-) I hope we can get more people next time I do this. 

Jim Donahue (Dr. Object), Kendall Smith, Nicki Crosswhite, Dana Ford, Roger Kilday, Lalith Subramanian, John Klassen, me, Cathy Herbert, Jeff Miller.

Brainstorming at Fortune Brainstorm in Half Moon Bay, CA

Groucho Marx once said, "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." That was my original concern about attending the Fortune Brainstorm, a three day technology conference in Half Moon Bay California. I met one of the conference organizers, David Kirkpatrick at a couple of the World Economic Forum events and he is a very bright and insightful guy. But I thought it might be another one of these conferences where you spend a lot of money just to attend. Our marketing team convinced me otherwise.

Brainstorm last week was a very connected event with some very influential people. I recognized at least a quarter of them from Davos. The bloggers were also there in force with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Kara Swisher participating as the first evenings entertainment. The subject matter was also generally more relevant that Davos as well given its proximity to Silicon Valley. Given how far I came, I used part of the time on Monday to do some interviews in San Francisco on our Alfresco Labs 3 launch, so I missed the opening sessions with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Brad Smith from Intuit. The setting for most of this was somewhat intimate with main room laid out like a giant conference room with lots of Herman Miller executive chairs. (Herman Miller was a sponsor.)

The environment was set up like an office. So everyone ends up doing work.

Although this was a tech conference, some of the focus was on how relevant tech is. The level of discussion was what you would expect in an article in Fortune magazine. That level of discussion is good to understand how the big trends are moving to affect everyone's lives, not just those in tech. The first breakfast session that I attended was on Cloud Computing with Marissa Mayer from Google, Adam Selipsky from Amazon, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, and Zach Nelson from NetSuite. Cloud Computing is increasingly attractive from a cost perspective, but enterprise customers are still worried about security and reliability. Google does not allow encryption and Amazon does not guarantee recovery and recommends that you back up your data on S3. So I asked the panel when we can expect security AND reliability. Marissa didn't answer and the other panelists answered the part of the question that they wanted to.

Cloud Computing: Michael Copeland (Fortune), Charles Fitzgerald (Pi/EMC), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Adam Selipski (Amazon Web Services), Marissa Mayer (Google)

Mark Anderson hosted a session on the direction of technology with several CTO and technology leaders including Sophie Vanderbroek from Xerox, Padma Warrior of Cisco, and Bob Iannucci of Nokia. The discussion range as far as their technologies. Xerox is looking at collaboration and sees the future in intelligently understanding the content being handled in that collaboration in something called content-centric networking. This is something that Alfresco can get its head around. Cisco sees the internet morphing from a primarily messaging based platform to more of an entertainment platform. Video being a more natural form of communication will become more pervasive and that the real requirement will be more filtering rather than generating. Nokia took us on a cosmological tour of technology trying to show us that the bigger issues are around mobility and the data that affects our lives. In addition, data privacy will become one of the biggest issues to tackle.

CTO Forum: Mark Anderson (Strategic News Service), Sophie Vanderbroeken (Xerox), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Bob Iannucci (Nokia)

Vinton Cerf, inventor of the Internet and now at Google, kept sitting in front of me and always asking questions. It made it difficult to get a question in myself since the moderators would always move to another part of the audience. Get your own seat Vint!

Nicholas Negroponte showed off for the very first time a dual-boot One Laptop Per Child XO machine (the famous $100 laptop) that is now configured to run both the OLPC operating system and Microsoft Windows.

David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Negroponte showing of the latest dual boot OLPC XO

In "How Green is Your (Silicon) Valley?", VJ Joshi from HP, Rob Lloyd from Cisco,  Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, and Michael Spliter from Applied Materials discussed the role that Silicon Valley can play in creating green solutions. By and large, as you would expect, IT makes things more efficient and eliminates the need for travel and face to face meetings. VJ kept it relatively small with the practical steps that HP is taking like making two-sided printing the default. Jonathan kept it big getting us to think about what will happen when IT services as a utility will be 10 times bigger. Jonathan Schwartz talked about MySQL's approach of no office buildings at all. But, I found Rob's and Cisco's point more insightful. When we start architecting our buildings (and homes) with information systems and controls in place, that is when we will really start to reduce our greenhouse footprint. Meeting rooms, transportation and environmental control facilitated by IT (and of course internet routers) will allow us to reduce transportation of ourselves and our resources.

Greening the Valley: James Manyika (Fortune and hidden by the Fortune sign), VJ Joshi (HP), Rob Lloyd (Cisco), Michael Spliter (Applied Materials), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)

David Kirkpatrick is writing a book on Facebook called The Facebook Effect and used this position to interview new COO Sheryl Sandberg. She puts on a much more media savvy front than Mark Zuckerberg, but not quite as much out-of-the-garage appeal. It all sounded a little too glib. Apparently she used to work in the White House at some point and Google. I was surprised to learn that co-founder Matt Cohler had left Facebook, although he was attending the conference. She announced that he was becoming a partner at Benchmark Capital. I bet Peter Fenton had something to do with that. I had interacted with Matt in relation to some work that we were doing with the World Economic Forum and it seemed that at least part of his role at Facebook was now taken up by Sheryl.

David Kirkpatrick and new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

At this point, my camera ran out of battery :-( I participated in a Lunch Lab on Healthcare facilitated by Marissa Mayer of Google and Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation, but they did most of the talking. There were a few experts who got a word in edgewise, but I didn't really feel that I could participate despite having working with pharmaceutical companies on information management and classification for the last 15 years.

In World without Exits, Andrew Braccia (Accel), Danny Rimer (Index), Dana Settle (Greylock), David Siminoff (Venrock) and Quincy Smith (CBS Interactive) all talked about how there are no exits aside from acquisitions. Danny, one of the best investors in Europe and backer of MySQL and Skype, said that there are still acquirers for good companies. He said all of his portfolio that had been acquired since the beginning of the year had been enterprise software companies. Andrew said that he is telling his portfolio companies to hunker down for the next couple of years. I have heard such talk since 1994 before the big launch of Netscapes IPO.

Life on the Net 2018 was pretty interesting, although probably a little too diverse like several of the sessions at the conference. We had Larry Lessig - open source intellectual property specialist, Phil Rosedale - founder of Second Life and Half Moon Bay resident, Joichi Ito - chairman of SixApart. Larry's "the sky's falling and your privacy is gone" position was pretty scary. He said that the Patriot Act came in so fast that it must have been pre-written before 9/11. He said that he had sources that have told him that is exactly what happened and that there is an internet-based Patriot Act waiting to be put in place as a result of any sort of catastrophic disaster on the Net. Phil believes that virtual worlds of some sort will be the future of user interfaces to the internet because they are easier for older and non-experienced users to use. Obviously, we need more technology improvements for this to happen. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to be overcome is the notion of a single identity that is secure and non-repudiable.

The evening event started with a Tweet Out in the platform overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I now have more respect and interest in Twitter as a result of meeting so many Tweeters. Dinner was hosted by the government of Singapore and I met so many people that evening I can't recount it all. However, I didn't stay up so late that I didn't get a chance to get up early and take some pictures of the harbor I was staying next to. I waited too late to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, but sometimes that can be an advantage, especially cost wise.

   

An early morning stroll around the harbor at Half Moon Bay.

I was up early enough to sit in on a breakfast roundtable on Programming for the Web and Social Networking. Now I thought this meant programming like programming a computer. They meant programming like NBC is setting up it's Fall line-up. Still interesting. I am getting a sense that there is still a new big wave of video and much richer content coming than just YouTube. And the opportunity to manage it, organize it, categorize it and monetize it will be huge.

Finally, I sat in on a real programming session with the Future of Code, featuring David Hansson of BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails fame, Grady Booch - early pioneer of Object Oriented Programming and at IBM, and Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software, creator of Microsoft Office and Space Tourist. They all take very different approaches to architecture and they spent a lot of the time telling each other that the others were wrong. They all have points and my biggest insight from this is what prejudiced guys they all are.

Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks and moderator), David Hansson (37signals), Roger Simonyi (Intentional), Grady Booch (IBM)

Grady Booch: "There are systems built upon systems and then you have a lot of crap. But that's enough about the Bush Administration."

I missed the rest because I had to head off to Sun Computers, but you can read more below about Eric Schmidt and Neil Young. We had gone to meet with Jonathan Schwartz who had left the conference the day before. He said that although there were interesting things there, he does go to a lot of those things. I asked him if they were all the same. He nodded. Lucky guy. Living 5000 miles away from the valley, I don't get to go to that many events of this quality.


Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life.  Is He In Denial? - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

A glimpse into the future of the Internet - Tom Forenski, ZDNet Blogs

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: Making money isn't a priority (except for her) - Nicholas Carlson, Valleywag

Liveblogging Eric Schmidt/Google Interview at Brainstorm - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

The best Fortune Brainstorm Tech Talk: Neil Young challenges tech industry - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

The blog editing system in action - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

Summer Davos in Dalian China

Last week I was in Dalian, China for the World Economic Forum Inaugural Meeting of the New Champions. That’s a mouthful, so the Chinese simply called it the “Summer Davos”. It makes sense as this feels very much like Davos only a bit smaller and slightly more relaxed and less intimidating. It is still difficult to be really relaxed with some many diverse bright minds, but the scope of topics was more manageable the number of sessions made it easier to choose. There were still the same types of plenaries, panels, board room discussions and collaborative workshops. The focus was global, but the star of the show was China as the world's manufacturer, major outsource destination, next consumer society, and next world economic power.

Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People's Republic of China, speaking in Dalian. Photo courtesy of the World Economic Forum by Natalie Behring.

Given where we were, the Chinese government made a concerted effort to put on a really good show. Dalian is a city that most of the participants that I spoke to, including myself, had never heard of before this conference was organized. Few of us expected a large city with tall, new buildings, clean streets and significant infrastructure. While I expect some small, seaside fishing town, what I found was a major industrial port with tourist attractions and resembling a Chinese San Diego. Everything was big, clean and shiny. What I have heard is that Dalian was the point of Japanese invasion during World War II and the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. For good or ill, there has been a long history of connections to Japan that has encouraged investment in this industrial capacity and outsourcing. Much of the city looks like it has been built in the last decade. Companies such as Intel, HP and British Telecom have very large development operations there.

Due to the location, the spectacular growth and potential power of China, 1500 attendees came to the World Economic Forum event to learn more about China. The majority of the agenda of the conference focused on the role that China and the other “New Champions”, India, Russia and Brazil or the so called BRIC countries, will play in the global economy, including in information technology, outsourcing and innovation. I was particularly interested in software and technology development in these countries. As discussed in numerous sessions, by many measures China is the third or fourth largest economy and is on track soon to become the second largest economy. During the conference, several people described the United States as the Great Britain of the 21st Century and nobody disagreed. Still with large numbers that means a GDP of under $5000 in the coastal areas and $1000 in the interior and obviously still a developing country.

I was invited to a private lunch that benchmarked venture capital investment between China and India that featured some key venture capitalists like Joe Schoendorf from Accel Partners (who are an investor of Alfresco). One of the presenters, Professor Martin Haemmig from the Center for Technology and Innovation Management, has probably come up with the only analysis of the VC investing between the two countries and the US. Martin stated that over the last five years the median return on investment in Chinese technology has been an astounding 25 times, a top quartile return of 40 times and lower quartile return of 14 times. This compares with the US where the median return of venture capital is 6.8 times. Even the bottom return of a Chinese fund exceeds the best return of a US fund. As Martin points out, “No wonder all the VCs are piling into China.” Although China doesn’t really come close to matching the amount of VC investing in the US, it is now number two in the world. There is six times as much VC investing in China as there is in India.

Everyone anticipates continued growth in China, especially as the boom moves westward from the coastal cities. As in Davos, I focused much of my time on the interactive workshops that allow us to engage more directly the other participants of the conference. I will be writing up what I learned at those sessions and interviews with some of the people that I met that are from the IT sectors. I also like politics, so I will write up my views on what I learned just from being in China and one of the most controversial sessions featuring Thomas Friedman, the author of “The World is Flat”.

Going to Dalian, China

As part of the Technology Pioneers program of the World Economic Forum Inaugural Meeting of the New Champions, I will be attending the  in Dalian, China (map).  (See my blogs on the World Economic Forum at Davos) The organizer of the event  Klaus Schwab has said that the event of Dalian will become a second pillar to Davos recognizing the rise of Asian emerging markets and new players in the bigger economy. Many of the people from Davos will be there. I plan to arrive on the Sept 5 and go back to England on the 9th.

One of my objectives is to help determine our strategy for Asia and building up Alfresco in the east. China in particular is already one of the top ten countries using Alfresco and participating in our forums and wikis and Alfresco has been translated into Chinese for awhile now. We are looking for ways to bridge the big geographical divide to participate and share in one of the biggest economic explosions of all time.

In addition, I will be part of a panel discussion on New Internet Technologies on the 8th moderated by Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribute along with the CTO of Nokia and the CEO of Netvibes. It should be interesting.

Since I have never been to China, I plan on stopping off in Beijing and seeing the forbidden city. If you live in Beijing and are around the morning of September 5th, perhaps we can meet up there. Just drop me a line.

England at It’s Best

I am often asked do I like living in England? My answer is generally that it’s great as long as I can leave every once in a while. We have quite a few vacations in Britain, but we often chase the sun during the summer and winter going to places like the Mediterranean, Caribbean or back home to the West Coast of the US or Hawaii where my parents live.

However, this Easter weekend reminded me how glorious England can be in the spring time. The temperatures were creeping up toward the upper 60s Fahrenheit with 75 expected by the end of the week. Warm enough to be comfortable, but cool enough to feel fresh. Very different from the east coast lately. Cherry blossoms, hawthorn and various fruit trees were blooming everywhere in a riot of color by the road side. We explored the Chilterns this weekend, a low range of rolling hills a few miles north of our home and stumbled on a fantastic pub in the tiny village of Russell’s Water called the Five Horseshoes. We sat on a bench overlooking a green shallow valley with sheep grazing below, red kites (a type of bird) above and enjoyed a cold drink. I had the best burger I have had in a long time with a nice cold lager. Perfect.

On Saturday, I took my son and a friend to the Arsenal game in the new Emirates stadium. But it was our first time in the new stadium and even though they lost for the first time in that stadium (Sorry Matt!), it was a great day out. Perfect weather for a football match. Arsenal clearly had better control on the ball, but I guess West Ham had more to play for to avoid relegation and the sea of light blue supporters confined to their corner were almost as loud as the rest of the bright red stadium. On the sullen march back to the Underground station, you can see what an eclectic collection of people Arsenal supporters are. No wonder that even a guy from Utah can be a supporter.

On Sunday, we and our friends had an Easter buffet at Monkey Island in Bray, not too far from Alfresco’s headquarters. How appropriate that we sipped champagne before dinner in the Alfresco tables outside the hotel under bright blue skies. Monkey Island is really an island that was built for local monks to catch fish and was developed by the 2nd Duke of Marlborough as a hunting lodge. For lunch, there was the traditional English carvery with roast beef and all the food we could manage to cram in. Still more chocolate for the kids. The French doors were wide open to a patio that leads down to the river where we can watch the small private boats sail past us on their boats to and from Windsor.

There’s more, but I have to get back to work. There are a lot of downsides to global warming, but every once in a while there are some upsides.

Multi-disciplinary Collaboration at Davos

Photo of me outside the Davos Congress Center taken by Commissioner Annette Nazareth of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, who just happened to be passing by when I asked if she could take my picture.

It has been nearly two weeks since Davos finished, but I still haven’t written up all my blogs from Davos. It was the most intense intellectual experience I have ever had and I could probably write a book about it. Just goes to show, I need to change my style of blogging.

There are many reasons for the intellectual intensity, the plenary sessions with some of the most important people in the world, amazing people are standing right next to you with whom can you can just start a conversation, you have the world’s experts on panels discussing the most important problems in the world, and there are dinners on many eclectic subjects that attract people from all walks of life.

However, one of the unique aspects of Davos is the ability to attend workshops that bring together people interested in many subjects from different backgrounds. You can probably set up a one on one meeting with anyone if you try really hard. You can watch the talking heads say the same thing they said on television what they said at Davos. But where else can you work in a group of 4 to 6 people who are experts in there own respective field and may actually be able to affect some of the changes recommended by the group? Where else can you sit next to a major CEO and understand where he is coming from and influence his thinking in a somewhat unguarded environment? I think this is part of what they describe as the Spirit of Davos.

These workshops attract high-level CEOs, subject matter experts and political leaders and are facilitated by people who are some of the best people I have ever seen in these types of sessions. Workshops generally have around 36 people who break up into 6 groups of 6. It’s generally potluck who you get paired up with, but chances are they share common interests. The groupings are either by subject or by the leader of the group who might be an expert who might actually be a Nobel Prize winner. The sessions are generally a little over two hours long - the time slot of two regular sessions. A typical agenda would be to have experts discuss the scope of a major problem, participants breakout into groups to brainstorm on implications of the problem, groups share results with the whole, groups go back to brainstorm on solutions, everyone shares and summarize solutions. During these breakout sessions, we get magnetic tiles to summarize our results and many people create colorful pictures to convey the message more succinctly.

I attended four of these sessions and here are the links to my blogs on each:

• Demystifying Growth and Productivity which was really a session on Global Competition.
• Collaborate to Innovate to which I was invited to attend as a contributor by the Forum.
• Designing Sustainable Cities which is an area on which I am a complete novice, but I thought I would get a chance to harangue the Mayor of London.
• Living in a Connected World - Life in 2015  was so fascinating that I am still writing up my notes

The conclusions I came to from these sessions were that:

• Working with incredibly intelligent people is humbling, but very energizing
• Pulling together highly competent people from multiple disciplines creates off the wall ideas that just might work
• By bringing your own unique competence to solving a problem, you can interact with anyone, no matter how high or mighty, as a peer
• Most CEOs are actually good listeners, but have their own strong opinions - providing a new idea or concept from a completely different angle will at least get them thinking differently
• Communicate your own perspective with a story that is personal to you - it will come out as genuine and engage the other members of your team. Make sure it is a short story though
• With that many powerful and influential people in a room, it is tempting for some to grab the agenda - just see what happened to Sharon Stone
• He who has the pen sets the agenda, unless John Chambers or Arianna Huffington are in the room
• Try to carry on the conversation after the workshop is over - blog or email. Hopefully, WEF’s plans for electronic collaboration will carry over
• Try this at home - pull together people from very different competencies and discuss one of these big problems in a book club type of format - you might surprise yourself
• Workshops are the best thing about Davos

I'll bore you with one last blog from Davos on the Life in 2015 before going on to my regular ramblings.