Tuesday May 20, 2008

Interesting view on making money in business

I had the chance to be a key note speaker at PROMISE (and ICSE workshop) last week. The group uses datamining and A/I techniques to look for patterns and make predictions on a variety of things, like where in code defects might occur, or how much effort a project might entail. 

I was there because we had  a project a few years a go running to predict which bugs might cause customer escalations, using similar techniques. I was responsible for implementing the fixing of these bugs proactively. My talk was geared around how to put a business case together and run such a project, and ultimately why in this case it was wound up before major benefits were realised.

There were loads of other great talks and papers, but the other keynote speaker, Murray Cantor from IBM had some interesting points, one of which I wanted to pull out here.

He said that there are three things you can monetize. Innovation, Customer Relationships, and Cost structure. For example, you can Make money by having the first product to market, or a good close relationship with the customer or buy doing it cheaper than anyone else. He  drew this in a triangle like this

So this got me thinking as to where Sun fits in to the picture. First off I'd say it's a different place from IBM who put huge resources in to having a close relationship with the customer (Murray indicated he felt IBM was somewhere on the Innovation/Customer line). However It isn't purely at the Innovation point either. We provide Innovative technologies to help lower costs both for our customers (hey Free Software anyone - check out http://opensolaris.com), but also by automating things like system management thus removing cost and complexity (Take a look at our xVM strategy to merge virtualization and system management at http://openxvm.org, thus removing some of the headaches to running a virtual data center). Oh and did I mention our coolthreads hardware? So I think we're probably somewhere between the Cost and Innovation points.

I'm not saying this is a full theory of business, but I found it a useful thought experiment to see the different value propositions of various companies business models.

Monday April 30, 2007

Surfing kernow I had a fantastic weekend down in Cornwall. Saturday's highlight was the boys up to their middles in the sa before they realised it was cold. Followed by my own vague attempts at surfing. I decided to take my camera to the beach to see if I could become a famous surf scene photographer. I don't think that'll happen but I'm pretty pleased with these.

What is he doing ?


It's a paddle !



I hope I look like this


but I know I don't

I even wish I managed a wipeout as good as this (and yes I did take hundreds of phtos for the exact wipeout)



Incidentaly these are just random snaps at the beach. If you were at watergate bay over last weekend (especially if you're in the piccies) please leave a comment.

Chris Posted by cwb ( Apr 30 2007, 10:17:11 PM BST ) Permalink

Wednesday April 11, 2007

Two years of prevarication and 5 days hard work and finally ....

Friday January 26, 2007

Snow A little late I know but we had some snow in the South of England this week. The usual 1 or 2 inches causing the rail and road infrastructure to break down, schools to be closed and food rationing to be enforced.

Fortunately our boys school wasn't closed but we did have a great snowball fight before and on the way to school.


Plus this was the first experience for our spaniel in the snow


I might post some more as I go through them.
Posted by cwb ( Jan 26 2007, 02:36:29 PM GMT ) Permalink

Monday January 08, 2007

Is it 2007 already?

Spider-Man 70% Superman 65% Robin 60% Green Lantern 60% Iron Man 55% Supergirl 53% Wonder Woman 43% The Flash 40% Catwoman 35% Hulk 35% Batman 35%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Friday July 07, 2006

Action Shot The new Pup still doesn't seem to stay still , but we can now take him for walks. As I was working from home today that's what we did at lunch time. He's pretty good at coming when called these days Posted by cwb ( Jul 07 2006, 06:00:00 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Wednesday June 21, 2006

Extreme Close Up The new Pup doesn't seem to stay still long enough for a photo. This is the best we've got this week Posted by cwb ( Jun 21 2006, 10:24:00 AM BST ) Permalink

Monday June 12, 2006

New Pup After a 2 month wait our new pup finally arrived, He's a Cocker Spaniel in Chocolate Brown with Tan socks and beard. Very unusual. He settled in pretty well but the last couple of nights have been a bit disturbed. Any way - here are a few photos for good measure Posted by cwb ( Jun 12 2006, 09:15:00 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday June 05, 2006

Disneyland Paris - which land are we in? Just a quick comic interlude. We had a weekend in Disneyland Paris this weekend. Overall a fantastic trip though very tiring (and I wouldn't bother with Eurostar again unless you get the direct service. The TGV to Lille on the way back was incredibly busy). But it's the little things that stick in your memory. My 5 year old and I were walking from "Fantasy Land" in to "Frountier Land" My youngest is very eloquent for his years and has the usual childs ability to say what he really things. "Daddy, which land are we in now?" "We've just gone in to Frontier Land" "Oh. I thought we were in Fat Land!" "What?" "Well everyone here is fat and we're skinny like Mr Skinny in the book at school" Made me laugh! Posted by cwb ( Jun 05 2006, 03:10:00 PM BST ) Permalink

Monday April 03, 2006

Cool firefox plugin

I just saw this really cool plugin for firefox. Actually it was from another Sun employee and it makes editing any text pane within firefox a breeze.

It's called xinha and this blog entry was created with it so I'll see what it looks like

It allows you to generate links embed images and  do all those clever and annoying font things

 and do Colours backgrounds

 Any way see if you use it I'm certainly going to try to.

Thursday March 16, 2006

Trouble Shooting I was in the process of composing a blog entry about some of the things I've been up to so far this year (but infact I'll make it several later on) when a colleague pointed me at Chris G's entry on SGR SGR (Sun Global Resolution) Is Sun's internal development of the Kepner Tregoe Analytic Trouble Shooting Technique. The idea is to provide a consistent and reproduceable technique which will help solve problems. I have to be honest that when I first heard of it I was really sceptical. I fixed customer problems - how could they have a process for that? Well to be honest what it does is force you to not ignore the obvious, not to jump to conclusions and to write things down in a way that others who understand the process can understand and progress. Chris's Ephihany is a great example of this. In SGR language You have 4 processes. First of which is Situation Appraisal (Finding out what it is you need to work on) This leads in to one of three other processes, one of which is Problem Analysis (I'll talk about the others another time). To decide if you need to do some problem Analysis you ask yourself three questions 1) Is there a deviation: In this case is the system doing something it shouldn't? 2) Is the cause unknown? 3) Do I need to know the cause to take meaningful action (eg. if the Espresso machine in the cafe is broken I don't need to know why, I can walk the 50m to the cafe in the other building to get the coffee to wake me up tomorrow) So in Chris's case he is doing Situation Appraisal with a bit of Crashdump Analysis to find out what the concerns are. At which point there is probably a deviation but Chris knows the cause so stop trouble shooting. There is a forth process that is unofficially recognised by most ATS/SGR Programme leaders like myself. That is the JFDI process. Once you know what to do, just do it.

Tags: Sun SGRT Troubleshooting

Friday December 16, 2005

Neglecting my blog as usual OK So I'm guilty of neglegting my blog. This time I was prompted by my friend Kimberley who has a much more interesting blog than mine. She bought a hourse farm out in New Hampshire recentley and it's snowing.... I've just got back from another business trip to India where I helped the group set it's priorities for the next year. This was important for me and the team as we're part of the support structure here at Sun and now we're not charging for software (just for service) we're the part of the software organisation that can most directley effect whether it's worth paying Sun for support. Believe me it is. Did you know that for supported Solaris customers you have 24x7 source code expertise down to the most obscure parts of Solaris. If we don't know the answer then we will know how to find it out PDQ. Any way, I always suffer with jetlag and with Christmas coming up I'm doubly snowed under. This weekend we have a family get together at my parents which will be fun, though it's a bit of a rush as Andrea has to cram in 3 different things over this weekend (due to me being away the previous two) Still mustn't grumble. I've just taken on a large backport of a project that's recentley gone in to Solaris, so that should keep me interested for a while. As I learn more about it I'll document what I find out. That should be a useful thing for a blog (and by the way - mileage this week was 20 very stiff road miles) Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris
Posted by cwb ( Dec 16 2005, 03:33:00 PM GMT ) Permalink

Monday October 31, 2005

Back from Holiday and a new Blog tool I have just had a weeks holiday. It was great to spend a week away from work with the family. We had a brief trip to Cornwall to play on the beach for a few days, and returned mid week. My sister and her family came to visit on thursday and spent the weekend. Cornwall was great. OK it's october so it rained a bit, but that doesn't matter when you're on the beach. The sunny day's were great. Boys on the beach wading in streams. When we got back my eldest son continued his emergence as the next Steve Peat by going to Swinley Forest and showing him a nice bit of twisty singletrack. He liked the down bit So the purpose of this post is really to test the new version of blogroller that was rolled out while I was away. Not much different from what I can see, just a bit prettier. I guess I'll have to read up on what it gives me. Technorati Tags: cycling cornwall swinley Posted by cwb ( Oct 31 2005, 04:19:00 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday June 27, 2005

Goodwood Festival of Speed Just a quick non work related blog. On Saturday I went to Goodwood Festival of Speed. This is a fantastic event in which you get hundreds of cars doing the hill climb at Goodwood. I took the boys and they had (to quote the youngest, who is 4) "The bestest day I've ever had". So we got there just as some historic McLarens were going up the hill. To start with the youngest was scared of the noise till I put him on my shoulders and he could see them coming. We then walked around the F1 paddock (which is open to everyone) We were there as this years McLaren was being unloaded from its lorry and we following them to their paddock place. We then saw the F1 cars do their thing up the hill. I have an xD card full of empty track but did manage to get a couple of shots of F1 cars. Nothing can prepare you for the noise. It's like having someone suddenly scream in your ear. We then looked around the stands with my cousin and headed up to the top of the hill to the top paddock. It was a really long walk, but the boys managed it. At the top they had a forest rally stage which was really cool We also got to see the F1 cars come in after their second run. We got the tractor ride back half way down then watched one of the last runs of the day from just above the flintwall. Fantastic view. Home then, which took a while as the roads out were not really designed for ~30000 people trying to leave at the same time, but well worth going. Tags: F1 goodwood
Posted by cwb ( Jun 27 2005, 02:34:07 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday May 24, 2005

It's been a while. Thoughts on vast amounts of data Now I'm back in the UK things are back to there usual hectic nature and I've neglected my embryo of a blog. So I'm going to make a conscious effort to try and blog before going home. So I was sent a very interesting paper today by Clay Shirky. It started me thinking about the nature of file systems. UFS now supports 16 TB of data in a single file system. OK there are limitations on the number of files, but that's still a heck of a lot of data that needs to be organised. The trouble is our file systems and email folders and many other things we do on our computers assume that the "thing" we're looking at can be easily categorised and infact many times they can't. The paper describes many examples, but the paper itself is as good as any. I wanted to provide a link to the paper in this blog entry, I remembered it have been emailed to me, but email folders tend to run rampant with things I think are going to be useful. I never remember where I've put something. I also remembered it had ontology in the title, and was sent to me by by Peter Harvey. These could be described as metadata for the paper. By searching for this meta data I found the link to the paper again. Where it was was irrelevant. The extension that Clay Shirky makes is that if you get a large number of people to add the meta data they think is important to a document (eg a URL) then you get, on average, a good classification of the document which can be used to find it. The beauty is that the quality of the cateforisation, and hence the ability to find the data increases with the number of people adding the meta data (refered to as a tag) From a technical point of view this could be done now using UFS extended attributes. What would be needed would be a simple tool to add the tags to the data and search the extended attributes for the documents. Sounds like an RFE for Nautilus. The only trouble is I guess one of scale. How would it work unless we have a large number of people adding their tags to the files. I need to give this more thought, but I the paper really got me thinking and I hope it does you too. Posted by cwb ( May 24 2005, 04:50:47 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]