Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I adore Randall Munroe's xkcd comic, mostly for the math jokes. I define "geek" as someone who uses epsilon in a sentence, so anything that references irrational number or NP-completeness is good for several laughs.

And here I thought I was the only one who made Erdos number jokes. Unfortunately, Erdos number theorists would dispute validity of newly acquired Erdos deuces (my newly minted term, flame my way) using Hank Aaron as a counter-example of how not to hit a theoretical home run through signature power alone.

Tip of the hockey bubble to Eszter Hargittai - an early morning tweet pointed to the fact that Google searches trying to grok the punchline were trending up this morning.

In case my nerdiness was in doubt, net summary of first hour of consciousness on this Friday: Saw a Facebook status update via Twitter that referenced an online comic that made a math joke about Erdos number 2 and made me think of Hank Aaron.

So I blogged about it. That's where my kids say "Dad, you're a nerd". That's a geek round-tripper.

I had a great time meeting the sales team in Mexico City. We had close to 200 people at our town hall, and I was struck by the pre-meeting activity. Nearly everyone was congregated in the back of the room, talking to each other, rather than filling seats or checking email and messages. Despite traffic that added nearly an hour to some quasi-local travel, everyone was more interested in real-world social networking, the kind that requires coffee and breakfast sandwiches.

My peer Denis Heraud, Senior Vice President of Sun's Emerging Markets Region, made a fabulous point during the question and answer session: someone had asked about compensation for complex deals, and Denis pointed out that everybody - commissioned sales people and engineers, those on bonus plans, even engineers - derives the majority of their pay as salary. Salary is not deal specific. It's a function of teamwork and execution. As the company gets smaller, flatter and leaner, our ability to use teamwork -- internally and externally with our partner community -- is going to make our combined output greater than the sum of individual efforts.

I saw the seedlings of that kind of teamwork in the back of the room, persisting after the huevos ran out, and it came through in meetings with our systems engineers.

Logistics for the 2nd leg of this trip required that I leave Mexico City about half a day after arriving, although that was enough time for me to exhaust my (primarily food oriented) Spanish vocabulary. I believe I ordered fish tacos and hot peppers for lunch; sadly I can't phrase the gradations of caliente or picante that properly represent what my mouth felt like for the next half an hour.

Next stop: Johannesburg for a similar set of meetings. Long non-stop flights are an opportunity to completely disconnect from the non-stop stream of email, phone calls and sports score updates. It was nice to get a flurry of text messages with Devils score updates from their first-round NHL playoff game when I changed planes in Paris, but at 2:00 AM New Jersey time I had no chance to connect with my family or friends to celebrate their victory in a more personal way.

I wrote most of this from 39,000 feet, literally passing Kilamanjaro on the way, while also finishing the first book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and knocking off a backlog of ESPN Magazine issues whose predictions and commentary seem dated only a month after being printed. There's a stark contrast between the two that goes far beyond heft and format. Stephenson uses four centuries of historical context and deep creativity to create a tale that spans 900 pages (per book); with less than 10% of the page count and perhaps 5% of the content volume, one of my favorite sports publications had trouble holding my interest given that real-time updates (scores, standings, and public fan outcry) reduced its time value rapidly.

Sidebar and specific data point: ESPN, The Hockey News and the last issue of Beckett's Hockey Card Guide, all plane reading material, all mentioned the NJ Devils' Travis Zajac as a player to watch during the NHL playoffs. Interesting in that all three keyed on the same fact at roughly the same time; less interesting in that those of us who follow the team with a mascot that looks like the cross-breeding of Steven Van Zandt and Hellboy were aware of Zajac's prowess before "bailout" became a breakfast word.

What's the point? What's the aggregation and mash-up of the time value of data, journalism, interpretation and face to face meetings? Simple: In every employee meeting I've had in the past few weeks, from one-to-ones to one-to-Mexico City, people have asked about press headlines involving Sun. I don't have comments on the headlines, but I do find myself commenting on the press:

Copy & Paste isn't journalism. Look carefully at the "hundreds" of stories on any topic, and you'll find that most of them are syndicated stories from AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, or other news sources with varied headlines. A hundred local writers banging out headlines isn't news; it's redistribution. I don't have details but I'm betting that the number of hockey writers learning to spell "Zajac" started with either of the Devils' beat writers - Rich Chere or Tom Gulitti.

The internet isn't killing newspapers, newspapers are killing newspapers. The internet has dramatically changed the time value of news, especially for real-time data (financial, sports, weather). On the other hand, the internet doesn't create commentary, insight, and interpretation (flame wars in comment threads not included); that's why we have reports and news organizations. I still get ESPN Magazine and the Hockey News because I like their commentary and analysis; neither of them publish standings or statistics unless it's in support of a critical analysis. I subscribe to my weekly town newspaper; but I don't read the Newark Star Ledger or Bergen Record - I get better Devils coverage out of Devils blogs where physical constraints of column inches and financial burdens of ad support don't limit the content.

I'd prefer we write our own headlines. One of my favorite youth hockey coaches (known affectionately as a Real Screamer) used to tell his players never to read their own headlines. He wouldn't let me, as manager, keep statistics, he refused to see milestones such as qualifying for the state playoffs as meaningful because he believed that they caused players to look at the headline, and not the whole story that needed to be developed. Focus, teamwork and execution write the headlines.

Without putting on the rusty propeller hat, I can clearly recall the trade press writing about Apple in 1995. If you believed those headlines, put your iPods and iPhones down. Apple figured out what it was (consumer products company), how to get there (leadership and cost), and did so. The spectacular output of my trip through multiple hemispheres is seeing first-hand how Sun has the people, product and energy to write its own headlines.

Went to the MoCCA show again this past weekend, for the second year in a row. Once again, it was an incredibly hot day in SoHo; but it was equal parts fun, laughing and meeting people. Got many compliments on my metallic Clango shirt, and R.Stevens himself noted it was the same shirt that had been on the Great Wall of China with me a mere three months ago. He was in awe that I saw that much on business; I was in awe that he can draw that much for business; we called it even.

[Warning: links may contain content that is strong-R, not work appropriate and definitely frowned upon by someone's parents. I know you'll click from home]. Finally got to meet Meredith Gran of Octopus Pie creative talent, as well as Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content. I was truly bummed I missed Randall Munroe of xkcd because he may be the only other person in the world who makes jokes about NP-completeness, and yet he does it professionally.

A few things struck me this year: It was much more crowded than last year, which I take to be a good sign for the self-publishing Internet comic crowd. Richard Stevens was doing a brisk business in themed socks; I ended up coming home with stickers, buttons, a Jacques sketch, an Octopus Pie book, and a hardbound copy of Rutu Modan's graphic novel Exit Wounds. It was something of a Woody Allen movie setting, with my father (an artist) and sister (a fairly stereotypical New Yorker) accompanying me as we kept running into Jewish themed work and I dreaded that we should feel guilt over having so much fun with the material: Rutu Modan's work, Hereville (a comic about a young Orthodox Jewish girl), talking to Miriam Libicki (and buying a copy of Toward a Hot Jew, her comic treatise on the Israeli soldier, all puns intended) and leafing through a copy of Joan Sfar's Klezmer comics (later purchased via amazon.com after I regretted not purchasing it at the show). My take-away was that comics provide another medium for telling short, powerful stories; the graphic novels popularized by train-bound Japanese salarymen convey more than just a simple train of thought. One of the exhibitors, Marek Bennett teaches the value of comics as educational vehicles.

Comics aren't serious business, of course, because they're comics, and even Michael Chabon's story about the comic book lives of comic book creators can't make them mainstream. I think that's why they appeal to closet system administrators like me. But I was left the with distinct impression that as an art form ideally suited for online syndication and serialization, one that benefits tremendously from relaxed copyright enforcement (Diesel Sweeties, Octopus Pie and xkcd are all available under Creative Commons licenses) to drive recommendation and readership, and the quenching of our thirst for graphical content with creative use of space and color to convey context as well as information, self-published web comics are in their infancy - the start of another golden age of things parents still don't approve of.

Haiku:

FM dial temps

Gran, Jacques, and R. Stevens pix

Missed Randall Munroe.

To quote Peter Wolf, this one has a little introduction, starting just across the river from the WBCN studios where the Woofer Goofer got his start. If you have heard of "blue ocean strategy", skip to dolphin puns below.

Otherwise, my take on the Sun-mySQL deal starts with an article in the Harvard Business Review by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Their proposed blue ocean strategic model looks for previously non-consumptive or non-existent markets. The corresponding premise is that "red ocean" markets are those already in existence, with each player growing as a function of overall market growth and through taking market share from others. The blue ocean strategy focuses on finding new, non-consumptive markets based on the relative value of product or service features demanded by consumers in those markets. The disruptions come from combining the most valued features in non-intuitive ways to create a new market. Bagged lettuce combines the produce aisle and the convenience of the prepared foods aisle in the supermarket; nobody knew it would be a billion dollar business. One of my favorites (indicated by waistline) is Pret-A-Manger, the UK based sandwich shop that combines the speed of ordering lunch in a fast food outlet with the fresh ingredients and healthier eating choices of a local deli. The name itself is a play on pret-a-porter, the notion of high-end clothing (or food) ready to consume without the time intervention of a tailor or the guy slicing turkey one sandwich at a time.

Blue ocean strategies overlap in two ways with the digital world. First, open source software is a key entry point to non-consumptive markets. The best way to get someone who has never used your software to try it, evaluate it, or take an interest is to remove all barriers to entry. The analysts (and occasional) customers who ask me "How will Sun make money by giving things away?" miss the fact that "giving things away" is a blue ocean strategy that expands markets, while "making money" is a red ocean tactic to compete and take share in those newly entered fields of play. The second dip of the network endpoint in the blue ocean is the use of blue ocean strategic thinking to define new, small markets and identify the attributes that drive consumers to value them. It's Chris Anderson's Long Tail as seen by an MBA, not a web site developer.

Now I'll put those mySQL dolphins in the blue ocean.

I'll argue that mySQL -- and open source databases in general -- form a blue ocean of opportunity. Put another way, customers who want Oracle, Sybase or DB2 are looking for vertically scaled, commercial software that tyipcally has a suite of packaged commercial applications on top of it. Very red ocean, coming from a guy who has seen his share of Jersey shore red tides. Anyone who would buy Oracle (or others) probably wasn't looking at mySQL in the first place. Conversely, mySQL customers probably didn't consider Oracle or DB2; they wanted a free database with a different (not better, not easier, not fewer, but different) set of prioritized features. The purest definition of a blue ocean. They are willing to do more work on availability at the application or monitoring level and use shards to scale horizontally. Different features with different priorities: blue ocean there.

[Sidebar: if you look at the database market in terms of red and blue oceans, it makes Dvorak's diatribe on the situation amusing in both its simplicity and disconnection from actual business strategy. Then again, Dvorak claimed that Motorola was poised for cell phone dominance just 9 months ago, and today's news kind of throws water on that theory too.]

I've read a number of other theories and comments on this deal that seem to ignore the actual physics of the open source, middleware and database software markets:

It's anti-(company) or meant to disrupt (company). Actually, it's a new market for us. Doesn't change, dismiss, disrupt, or interfere with any of our other database partners. Most of them have application and web servers, too, while we have the open source Glassfish project, and the world hasn't ended. On the other hand, Sun has had a database group for at least 15 years, and when you put some really creative database people on these types of problems, well, maybe Solaris and our systems and storage products get better for all databases.

mySQL has a small revenue stream and its customers are small businesses. True, my personal sports blog is written in WordPress, and therefore I am a mySQL customer (indirectly, through the company that hosts my blog), but Google, Facebook and a host of other brand names use mySQL too. See previous comment about companies that want free database software and wil invest in the upper layers of the stack. See also "non consumptive markets".

Sun doesn't do acquisitions well. The X64 products based on the Kealia intellectual property, our market-leading identity management suite build on top of Waveset, the corresponding professional services practice that grew out of Neogent, and the ever-expanding OpenOffice.org community say "bzzt, but thanks for playing the home version of our game."

Sun will make mySQL proprietary. Theoretical computer scientists love trapdoor functions, that is, a function that only goes one way and can't be reverse engineered even if you know the full range of inputs and associated outputs. Open sourcing a project is a true trapdoor function: once the code is released, attempts to make it "proprietary" amount to trying to reverse engineer the trapdoor. The bits don't go in that direction. And I'll add that optimizing code or adding features don't count as making something proprietary. Again, bad behavior generates vitriol and and reversion; the code gets edited out by the community while the comments get piled on. This week's example involving Apple and Dtrace has a comment thread that runs from the DMCA to correctness of performance data.

Bottom line: the mySQL deal is pretty exciting. Normally, I reserve the redline of excitement for Really Big Things like the NFL Giants in the Super Bowl (check), Princeton ice hockey riding the ECAC (check), or my youth hockey team in the playoffs (check). This deal has the same sense of huge opportunity for all involved.

Combining my love for off-beat comics with an overtly fan-boy consumption of Cory Doctorow led me to my own Brighton Beach Memoirs moment of perfect mash-ups: I'm now in possession of the first three Cory Doctorow comic books based on his short stories.

The artwork is fantastic, the realizations of the characters contain enough subtle hints and jokes to make each panel worthy of a Hidden Mickey-like scan, and they're, well, cool comics. If you didn't know that Doctorow and other current fave Charles Stross collaborated on a few stories (and that Stross' work draws heavily on H.P. Lovecraft), you'd find the sysadm sporting a "Hello, Cthulhu" t-shirt only mildly amusing instead of an entreaty to open "When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth."

To quote Jerry from Craphound, each one is a poem in colors and a story in layout.

I've blogged at various times about Diesel Sweeties, including characters and panels from the egregiously funny mind of R. Stevens to illustrate a point. Now I'm forced to admit the truth: I love comics. While I'm a huge fan of animation in all forms (from Pixar films to Disney classics to the stop-motion Gumby shows to Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds), comics hold a special spot in my entertainment spectrum. I don't collect comic books, but I am a fan of compendiums, collections, and anthologies that piece together some of my favorite serialized strips: Calvin and Hobbes, Diesel Sweeties, Funky Winkerbean, Dilbert, and at some point in the future, xkcd (linked to a software- and work-appropriate strip).

There's something resembling engineering in setting up a joke or cultural reference in just a few frames, building on everything from internet memes to cross-references with the author's personal likes and dislikes. Charles Schultz, a hockey fan, made sure Snoopy had a miniature Zamboni for Woodstock's frozen birdbath-turned-hockey rink, popularizing the Zamboni more than TC coverage of the NHL. Bill Watterson had recrurring, and hilarious, snowmen riffs appearing in Calvin and Hobbes.

Despite following most strips online, I still love to pick up the occasional book. This week's acquisition was the first set of Diesel Sweeties syndicated strips, which I ordered with the souvenir Clango t-shirt so that it arrived personalized by R. Stevens. If he thinks I'm the "King of Jersey", who am I to argue? In the comic world, you can suspend all belief, three panels at a time.