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

A break from the emerging markets travelogue.

A few weeks ago I vowed to spend at least a little time each day helping people I know who have been affected by the current economy find new job opportunities. The local economy is nasty; I realized that half (literally) of my close friends are technically unemployed. Through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and email, I've been trying to connect people, and along the way I discovered Dave and Deb Levy's blog about married life under the pressures of job friction. I have known Dave for a while (he's a fellow Devils fan and hockey head); his admonition not to treat your friends who are between jobs as if they have the plague is sage advice.

And now for a travelogue in the middle of an emerging trend: I adore Kevin Carroll. I heard him speak five years ago at an NHL event, and was hooked. His point, then as now, is that we excel at play -- and we should treat work as something that we love, something that motivates us to play with others, something that gives us joy in the smallest facets. If you can't "play" at work, then you're in the wrong job, or positioning yourself the wrong way. Today's job market is an opportunity to re-think work, and the pleasure we get from our jobs. I'm reminded of a talk by Shoshana Zuboff, in which she said "It's not about division of labor, it's about division of love, if you are separated from the things you love to do." She was referring to management as a disintermediating function (this was pre-Internet boom, circa 1995), but the theme is organization chart invariant.

So onto a trend in middle of a travel-blog: Dave's wife Deb quotes a friend of hers describing the chaotic interplay of adult life themes - job, health, home, family. We juggle them all, and they are all glass balls, not to be dropped or mishandled. Except for work - a job is a rubber ball. Drop it, bat it, or have it swatted away, and it bounces in a new direction.

Back into something resembling a chronological sequence: blogging from the front row of the ITC Window hotel meeting room, where we'll host the Bengaluru Sun employee Town Hall later this morning. I arrived in Bengaluru after a semi-redeye that left Johannesburg and deposited me into Mumbai airport a few minutes after midnight. After a transfer and an early (3:30 am early) flight, I found myself in the new Bangalore airport. This is my first visit to India in nearly two years, and Bengaluru seems quieter, even perhaps more organized. The freeway from the airport to the city was easily navigated (although it was 5:30 in the morning).

There is a movement under way to officially change the designation of the city from Bangalore to Bengaluru, recognizing and celebrating its correct local pronunciation rather than a Westernization simplification. Of course, I was tempted to try to align the Western "Bengal" prefix into some root of Bengaluru, but I've been corrected that the two words have no common etymology. It didn't stop me from thinking "Bengal tiger" however, and noticing the airport posters promoting conversation and protection of the black and orange cats.

Part three in a continuing series of random thoughts about technology and local issues: a great story about using telemetry to track tigers and therefore improve the efficacy of tiger conversation efforts. Taking digital pictures of tigers as they cross fixed points is as strong as single-factor identification (unless there are tigers prowling with pirated stripes). Easier than collaring, less intrusive than tracking, and another example of using technology in support of future-looking, local culture.

It's so rare for me to have an "off day" while traveling on business that I'm remarkably lazy about preparing an itinerary. My usual plan includes: find some entertainment in a local casino and/or Hard Rock Cafe, if they exist (I'm a creature of habit); look for local Jewish historical culture (I've been to the synagogue in Shanghai); explore a museum with unique local significance.

I wasn't mentally prepared for my trip to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg; it's a moving and intense experience that could have easily taken four hours to absorb fully. I was drained after two hours, and I described the intensity of the exhibits and story-telling as similar what I felt in Yad VaShem, the Jerusalem museum and memorial to the Holocaust.

I had a two-part reaction to the timeliness of the museum -- first, it's remarkable that a museum has been developed and gained popularity in less than a full generation since the deconstruction of apartheid, and yet the museum chronicles the roots of issues going back two or more centuries. Second, some of the intensity derives from many of the events chronicled occurring in my adult life; from mid-1980s on-campus protests for universities to divest of holdings in South Africa to the freedom of Nelson Mandela and the victory of his African National Congress. Others, like the death of Stephen Bantu Biko, I had heard about in song (Peter Gabriel's "Biko" was ringing in my ears) but for them I had little context until I walked through the story personally. It was at that moment that I drew the parallel to the Yad VaShem memorial, which exhorts us to continue to "bear witness" so that we develop a collective history and resistance to broad-scale human rights and dignity issues. Those of us who witnessed the joy of Mandela's release from prison have a responsibility to re-tell the context of the basic human rights issues that made it the literal turning point in a museum gallery. The Stephen Biko Foundation puts a simpler point on it: "a foundation of ideas; a memory bank for the nation." Discussion and respect.

However, my first hint that I was in over my jet-lagged head came when I bought my ticket and was handed a card that said "Whites" on it. Approaching the entrance to the museum, guests are separated into two turnstiles clearly labeled "Whites" and "Non-Whites". The first exhibit as you proceed through the turnstile explains the racial classification system that was the basis for enforcing apartheid.

Classification is something we take for granted in the social networking space; we use hash tags on Twitter and Technorati tags to better provide context for our content. Just as my encounter with the Mozambique hawker made me think of technical opportunity in a positive way, seeing the effort put into classification of people for the purpose of deciding their rights made me shudder. Not to dismiss Richard Stallman, it's not just about software being free; it's about software enabling freedom.

Despite my luggage trailing me by twelve hours, the Johannesburg leg of the trip got off to a good start. My hotel was adjacent to a casino, and where there's a casino there's usually a men's clothing store amidst other shopping adventures. Sure enough, I arrived at the door of a popular South African menswear store two minutes after closing time. But the store staff let me in, I bought the only thing that fit me (a cotton sweater), and was set for Day Three of the trip.

Friday morning was spent with customers, Friday afternoon with Sun employees in a Town Hall format. It was another great set of discussions with employees about team work and customer focus. While it's impossible to understand the culture, politics, and people of any country in just a few days, I left with a few strong impressions.

Johannesburg has no natural barriers. Many cities are built nestled against a mountain range, on the banks of a river, or around a natural ocean harbor, springing up with defense or low-cost transportation in mind. Johannesburg arose up on top of the gold mines, and driving around the city you'll see small mountains of mine excavations and the constructs of mine heads.

Sports are an international language; rivalry is an international boundary-drawing technique. Cricket, rugby, field hockey, and soccer are a big deal. Hotel staff wore jerseys from their favorite soccer teams on Friday, extending the notion of what constitutes a "uniform" and providing grounds for a lot of discussion and good-natured kidding. Preparations for the 2010 FIFA World Cup are well underway (that's the pixelated style stadium under construction), and the road construction has a pronounced impact on weekday traffic in and around the "business area" of Johannesburg. The Indian Premier Cricket League began play on Saturday in Johannesburg, mixing a bit of American-style cheerleading and in-stadium "production" (read: theme music) with international cricket. Saw a field hockey team in the airport and felt a bit sheepish wearing an ice hockey t-shirt. In the airport, I picked up a VodaCom Cheetahs rugby hat, and was asked "Do you support them?" I only answered that I liked the hat, out of concern for stepping into the local equivalent of Red Sox-Yankees politics.

With the national election coming up next week, political posters abound in a truly multi-party system. It was equally interesting (to me) to see the surfeit of attention given to Barack Obama, from Shep Fairey-style portraits of ANC candidates mimicking the "Hope" poster to t-shirts of Obama for sale in a local mall. In the airport, Obama's books line the top shelf of the news stand side by side with those of South African writers and political figures.

Saturday afternoon had me in an open-air market, haggling over the price of a beaded zebra figure. The "hawker" showed me his "cash register" - a combination of his Mozambique passport, his South African visa and neatly folded bills. He brings his handcrafts over the border at regular intervals, sleeping in or near the market for weeks at a time, repeating the process in a commute that includes an international boundary described in at least half a dozen languages. I was immediately reminded of Kiva, the micro loan, crowd-sourced company that helps micro-scale businesses grow by infusing them with capital in reasonable sizes and terms. When the zebra joins the menagerie of other figures I've purchased on various long-haul trips, it will remind me of boundaries, and how we have a technology opportunity (and imperative) to help cross them.

Tim Bray and I sat down (albeit 2,600 miles apart) to talk about the Sun Cloud APIs in all of their RESTful grace. We got into why a Creative Commons license makes sense for an API, why the top-level API set is so small, how and why a cloud deployer might want to expand the APIs, and what lessons Tim learned from slogging through more developer documentation than is considered healthy, even by Canadian standards.

Hockey was not discussed.

Transcripts and pointer to the audio are on the Innovating@Sun blog or click to play away below:

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.

Day two of my emerging markets trip had me leaving Mexico City, changing planes in Paris, and continuing on to Johannesburg, South Africa. The departure side of the trip was a pleasure, including an extra spicy fish taco lunch and a smooth exit/entrance/rescan going through the gauntlet at Charles De Gaul airport. Despite the fact that airport security confiscated a bottle of whiskey I was toting for a friend in SA (they claimed it had to be bagged, even though it was sealed, in the original gift box and I had the duty-free receipt, someone in Paris is enjoying a bit of Jacques du Tennessee), it was almost too easy.

When I went to board the plane, though, Air France didn't find my ticket. This should have sent off loud klaxons for me, and should have initiated something of a "tie off the loose ends" set of transactions -- if I wasn't auto-checked in, then my bag was likely not going anywhere either. The gate agent re-assigned me into a seat, but the transaction died on the network vine. Somewhere around the equator, a flight attendant handed me a message saying I should contact baggage service in Johannesburg. Good news: they found my bag. Bad news: it was enjoying a vacation in France without me. As soon as AF realized that my ticket wasn't checked in, a series of transactions to find my bag, route it to the plane, and verify if it could be loaded within the departure window should have commenced without any whining or outside influence. Wasn't this the whole point of SOA?

While some analysts proclaim the death of SOA, the idea isn't bad, as long as the focus is on delivering some sort of result. What Air France needs is a mix of real-time request routing, SOA, and a focus on customer service.

Thirteen hours after landing, and 2 hours after my bag supposedly was supposed to arrive behind me, I still haven't heard from Air France. No idea where my bag is, or if or when I'll see it. They're doing their best to ensure I don't fly with them again, as it appears my luggage experience is far from unique.

If SOA is dead and social networking is alive, here's an idea: What if Air France's customer service people follow negative threads on Twitter or blogs? The "service" that matters here is customer service, whether automated or not, and human intervention in human problems frequently goes further than automated admissions of cluelessness.

Personally, I think it's the evil karma of wearing a suit that has come back to re-route the suits themselves away from me, but I don't have the tweets to prove it.

I'm about to leave for a 4-city trip to our emerging markets region, visiting Mexico City (April 15), Johannesburg (April 17), Bangalore (April 21) and Mumbai (April 23). I'm hugely looking forward to talking to employees, customers, partners, and the media along the way. I'm going to remain Jersey-connected, at least virtually, as the NJ Devils start the NHL playoffs on Wednesday, and I'm also scheduled to keynote the virtual Cloud Clamp 09 on April 23rd.

Time zones can work to your advantage: my April 23 keynote is at 10:00 AM Eastern but 7:30 PM Mumbai local time, so I'll be webcasting from my hotel room. Most of the Devils games are at either midnight or 5:30 AM in local time. Caffeine and bandwidth will bend space-time, or at least it may seem that way. I've made a mental note not to add my own Sterling tones when Matt Loughlin announces a Devils goal. However, the increasingly superstitious part of me knows that the Devils won the Stanley Cup in 2000 purely because I rebroadcast the exploits of Patrik Elias and Sergei Brylin using the reverberation of my Boston hotel bath tub for dramatic effect.

Speaking of bath tubs (and here you thought it was a non-sequitur)...

My Cloud Slam talk will tie together levels of abstraction and Bath Tub Curves with an emphasis on how they shape the reliability mechanisms used for cloud computing. Seriously.