Cubegeek

The Sad Truth About Microsoft

Cringely writes something about Microsoft that I learned the hard way last year, emphasis mine:

This is not to say that Microsoft isn't still ambitious, but its ambitions are bounded by the company's own success. Starting any business that is perceived as having less than $1 billion in sales ought to make no sense at all for Microsoft unless NOT starting such a business might lead to the company's failure. That's certainly the case with MSN, for example, which is too small for Microsoft to bother with yet too important for Microsoft NOT to bother with. The only logical move for Microsoft, then, was to make the MSN business big enough to matter and the only way they could see to do that was by acquiring Yahoo, which explains this year's failed acquisition. Microsoft's failure to buy Yahoo doesn't change this scenario, either, so look for Microsoft to do something -- anything -- to grow that business, because they can't strategically afford to do the logical thing, which is to kill it.

I think it's really sad when a company like Microsoft makes promises about the kind of presence it intends to have on the industry and doesn't follow through with an ambitious and focused program supporting its partners. That was the distinct and unfortunate feeling that I got working in the PPS market for the relatively short time I was involved. I can recall that Microsoft people speculated that it was their investment in PPS that hastened the consolidation of the BI industry, but I think that was ego speaking, not strong senior management with irons in the fire.

At my current distance from happenings within Microsoft and their partners, I don't have a first hand view of whether or not such things still apply. But out here in Oracle/Hyperion land, we don't think about PPS much. Different universes? Perhaps. But Cringely still resonates.

Microsoft is a culture. It feels today very much like IBM used to in the 80s. As the big pig of the industry thinking that everybody is going to work their way. As Bill leaves, maybe it's long overdue for a huge culture change from the top by an executive team that's ready to really shake them down, split them up and force the pieces to communicate all over again, in the software world. It could be the revolution we all need.

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Let me add the following explicit corollary. Although I came back a little late this year to get in on the goodness of Kaleidescope and ODTUG, I am so very convinced that the level of information sharing that is bound to come out of the masters our field, like Tow, Roske and Schwartzberg, is going to propel the state of the application art beyond the capabilities of the competition.

Twit Agents

I've been using Twitter for about a month of so and I like it so much that I think that it should replace IM, but that didn't happen until I got Twhirl. The client makes all the difference. Knowing that, there is some potential for applications of this IM technology, if the client is built well and integrated into something reasonable. So I'll ruminate about how I would apply Twitter to enterprise applications.

The obvious application is workflow. There are times when you need to know exactly when something is happening. The moment it happens that's all you need to know, and once it has happened you don't really care so much. An IM is a perfect thing, but what's better about Twitter is that I can think of it as a notification system - which is to say that the thing on the other end of it can be a process, not necessarily a system. The difference between a twitter stream and a set of emails is that, well an email is a memo and a tweet is a doorbell.

I have hundreds of backend notifications in my Google mail going back over a number of customers. This is clutter that I don't need and don't want to be responsible for cleaning up. But if I had something like a massive log file that I could access someday... That's a tweet stream. So the enabling of notification systems to which I can subscribe and automate is a very nice way of thinking about making communication more efficient when a significant number of people want to know:

When is that Websphere server going to be back up?
When did the last defect run on the number three manufacturing line?
When did the Cleveland office submit their closing numbers?
When did the review board approve the preliminary budget?
When did the ambulance pull up to the emergency room?

Twit agency is a pretty cool idea. I would attach it to any number of complex workflow systems. Loan approvals, budgeting cycles, manufacturing processes. Any time people collaborate over distance and there are critical path milestones that are of interest suggests to me an opportunity to informate with twit agents. The more complex the schedule, the more nuanced the dependencies, the more I want it.

At a level above these transactions are opportunities for meta-scheduling and planning and feedback. At the human perception level, the crowd will be moved and grow to get some sense of when certain events flash over time, but keeping records of such events can allow for computer aided analysis. I expect that I will get a tweet anytime there is a serious traffic accident on my primary route to work by subscribing to the traffic net on my section of the freeway, but after three months of daily notifications, I don't have a good sense of whether or not I should simply plan to take a different route or play it by ear. That's the kind of thing a longitudinal analysis would give.

Not bad eh?

Essbase 11 Sneak Preview

Hey look what I found.

Download Essbase11Preview.pdf

Risk & Decision Reading

Kevin Kleen from Burbank, CA has the following Listmania list at Amazon. Risk & Decision. It's a pretty good list.

Extremistan

From Tom Nutall's review:

The black swan was the example used by John Stuart Mill to illustrate the problem of induction in the philosophy of science, which states that no amount of empirical evidence for a proposition can ever prove conclusively that it is true.

For hundreds of years, zoologists assumed that all swans were white, because they had never seen any evidence to the contrary. But then with the discovery of Australia came the sighting of a black swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book of the same name, has a more specific definition—for him, a “black swan” is an event that meets three conditions: a) it was unpredictable b) it had a big impact and c) after the event, we tried to explain it and make it appear more predictable than it actually was.

I first came upon Taleb via the Long Now Foundation, whose seminars + my reading of Iain Banks is opening up my mind very wide after a long, eventually boring cycle. On that note, when I think about it, I have really only encountered 2 very big ideas in the past decade, the first was eCommerce and the second was Hayekian Conservatism. One of those ideas was new, the other fairly old. And so now I am looking for a couple more big ideas and I have begun to stake out several dozen individuals in whose work I think I can find them. The Long Now is an excellent source of futurist thinking and so is Bank's science fiction. Along the way to these big ideas are a number of intellectual tools, and I expect that I may be able to use these tools in my career in Business Intelligence. The conceptual tool of Mediocristan and Extermistan is one such tool. If you'd have asked me a month ago about the brilliance of markets, I might have pointed you to the <strike>Black Shoals</strike> Black-Scholes (thanks nick) model in general, and the book My Life as a Quant in particular. But Taleb said that Black-Scholes is a joke, and he should know. He worked many years on Wall Street. While I have noticed a significant number of people sniffing at the practices of hedge funds, not least Mr. Ron Paul, in the past several months - often dripping with populist rhetoric, none has convinced me that what they do is fundamentally wrong. But as Taleb describes the phenomenon of the unexpected, I now see the light. Knowing whether or not one is in the domain of Mediocristan or Extremistan will be very helpful in assessing the ultimate utility of Business Intelligence tools. If you apply them to domains in which the extraordinary is probable, you may find them of little use. How one might go about determining the nature of the domain is what I need to chase down.

Taleb describes Mediocristan in terms of human height and the applicability of bell curve-like statistics. If the average human is about 5 foot 9, you can calculate with some assurance that you will see a 6 foot tall human. You might even be able to predict with some accuracy that if one million humans walk through your door, you'll probably see some seven footers. The chance that you'll see an eight footer, maybe one in a billion. But the chance that you'll see someone twice the height of the average Joe? Probably not even human. Human height is in Mediocristan. Human wealth, on the other hand is in Extremistan. If the average wealth of an individual measured in income per year. You might figure that somebody with an order of magnitude more comes in at some fraction and two magnitudes at a very minute fraction. But thinking about wealth, you might have a million people walking through the door and have somebody 1000 times wealthier the average. Extremistan.

APB-1 Benchmark Release II

Download OLAPBenchmarkReleaseII.pdf

I just wanted people to know that I have this one for posterity. Just in case you forgot.

DBAs Beware

I just discovered Mike Ault. I was looking for some information about Flash Drives vs Hard Disks because I want to do some performance research on Essbase total memory resident cubes, and I'm thinking..hmmm. It's a no-brainer to see that a goodly percentage of Essbase cubes can fit in under 8GB. Why not set them out to flash?

Anyway, the following is Ault's warning:

The indicators of course deal with the increased automation of the Oracle DBA job by Oracle coupled with the large supply of (at least on the low end) DBA services as outsource resources. It is difficult to compete with DBA resources that are happy to receive a small fraction of the salary you need to live on in the USA. I predict that the DBA job for Oracle will cease to exist as we know it within 3-5 years. Perhaps rather than being part of the large out flux of skilled but overpriced Oracle talent at this future date it is time to evaluate where you want to be in 3-5 years.