Cubegeek

Where Have All the Xeroids Gone?

(from the archives 2005)

I talked to my boy Marty this long weekend. He runs part of the facilities department over at Xerox El Segundo. His was a tale of woe. I owe a lot of my professional development to the management style of Xerox - continuous quality improvement and all. So it was hard for me to hear what he had to say.

I started my first internship for the Big X back in 1983, my first summer in college. Since I had some real-world work experience, I was fortunate enough to land a spot with the MBA candidates and worked in the Centralized Printing Systems Division several levels beneath the legendary Hoshi Printer. Yes, Printer was his last name. Last time I checked, he was making moola at Cars.com. So I had seven years of Xerox on my resume by 1990 when I went full-time into the software business.

About that time, Xerox had proven two things. Number one, it was master of the copier and printer business. Number two, it didn't know squat about the computer, software and networks business. Xerox stock limped along in the low 20s for my entire career there and its employee count was about 100,000. Here in El Segundo, where we used to actually sweat about being a target of Russian nukes, there was a vigorous set of employees of Xerox. The legendary A&E building housed first rate engineers and brown shuttle vans took folks around the campus of about 18 buildings. I myself had worked in CP-8, CP-10, XC-1 and XC-2. I sometimes had lunch in one of the 'M' buildings, the big M1 cafeteria. As an intern, I toured through M2 where some of America's first 'surface mount' technology was being deployed for Xerox printer circuit boards.

Marty says that there are about 60k people who work for Xerox now. A&E is down to about 600 employees and only two of the eight M buildings still even belong to Xerox. Over in Xerox Centre, office space had been empty so long that Xerox was renting to all comers for as little as 1.50 per square foot. The boom days of El Segundo are long gone.

Today, Lexmark printers are no joke. HP dominates the 'decentralized' print world. Warnock made Adobe and all the rest is history. But it remains stunning to me that these very buildings, the whole of the Xerox campus has been so drastically reduced. Where have they gone? How long are those who are left going to stay?

It's all design work, so I've been told. It's what we do best in the US, come up with new ideas and figure out ways to sell them. But I miss the days of end to end, where you could be on campus and know you were 10,000 stong. Where the spirit of a company pulling together, from design to test to manufacturing to sales and marketing distribution and support were all in walking distance. The virtual corporation is real. We in IT and our crafty MBAs made it possible. Now El Segundo is less than it used to be.

I wonder what's going on at Northrop.

 

via cobb.typepad.com

Xerox is in the news as FujiXerox takes over.

(from the archives 2005)

I talked to my boy Marty this long weekend. He runs part of the facilities department over at Xerox El Segundo. His was a tale of woe. I owe a lot of my professional development to the management style of Xerox - continuous quality improvement and all. So it was hard for me to hear what he had to say.

I started my first internship for the Big X back in 1983, my first summer in college. Since I had some real-world work experience, I was fortunate enough to land a spot with the MBA candidates and worked in the Centralized Printing Systems Division several levels beneath the legendary Hoshi Printer. Yes, Printer was his last name. Last time I checked, he was making moola at Cars.com. So I had seven years of Xerox on my resume by 1990 when I went full-time into the software business.

About that time, Xerox had proven two things. Number one, it was master of the copier and printer business. Number two, it didn't know squat about the computer, software and networks business. Xerox stock limped along in the low 20s for my entire career there and its employee count was about 100,000. Here in El Segundo, where we used to actually sweat about being a target of Russian nukes, there was a vigorous set of employees of Xerox. The legendary A&E building housed first rate engineers and brown shuttle vans took folks around the campus of about 18 buildings. I myself had worked in CP-8, CP-10, XC-1 and XC-2. I sometimes had lunch in one of the 'M' buildings, the big M1 cafeteria. As an intern, I toured through M2 where some of America's first 'surface mount' technology was being deployed for Xerox printer circuit boards.

Marty says that there are about 60k people who work for Xerox now. A&E is down to about 600 employees and only two of the eight M buildings still even belong to Xerox. Over in Xerox Centre, office space had been empty so long that Xerox was renting to all comers for as little as 1.50 per square foot. The boom days of El Segundo are long gone.

Today, Lexmark printers are no joke. HP dominates the 'decentralized' print world. Warnock made Adobe and all the rest is history. But it remains stunning to me that these very buildings, the whole of the Xerox campus has been so drastically reduced. Where have they gone? How long are those who are left going to stay?

It's all design work, so I've been told. It's what we do best in the US, come up with new ideas and figure out ways to sell them. But I miss the days of end to end, where you could be on campus and know you were 10,000 stong. Where the spirit of a company pulling together, from design to test to manufacturing to sales and marketing distribution and support were all in walking distance. The virtual corporation is real. We in IT and our crafty MBAs made it possible. Now El Segundo is less than it used to be.

I wonder what's going on at Northrop.

Data Mining & Easter Eggs

Q: Why do they call it data mining? Isn't it knowledge mining?

A: No, it's data mining. Knowledge is two steps up the added value chain. Once something becomes knowledge, you don't really need data mining. So let's first talk about the added value chain.

Data is less valuable than information. You can have bad data. It’s still data. You cleanse the data and organize it then you have information. Encrypted data is still data. It’s not information until you decrypt it. That’s the difference between data and information.

Good, clean, organized data = information. It’s not knowledge until it tells a story. That means a human can understand what it is. Knowledge is information in context. If I say “35 Units are in Department 7” and “27 Units are in Department 8” I have information. But it’s not knowledge until I have complete information. I don’t know the date. I don’t know how many departments there are.

Intelligence is actionable knowledge with appropriate qualifications. We could get into what make makes something actionable. But that has been done here[1].

All of these elevations in value come from human organizing data into information into knowledge into intelligence. But humans have a particular way of organizing and thinking about where to find intelligence. Think of how children search on an easter egg hunt. They don’t brute force search every square inch for things that look like eggs, they try to emulate the thinking of ‘Easter Bunnies’, the parents who hide them. Machines, on the other, search more exhaustively and find patterns that humans don’t consider relevant. A machine might notice for example that light colored eggs were hidden an average of 2 inches from tall vertical surfaces. Children would not notice, they just count the eggs. But machine can surface patterns in the DATA that create a different kind of information, knowledge and intelligence. For example, data mining an easter egg hunt might show based on proximity of egg colors and the color of occluding objects, that some of the people who hid the eggs might be colorblind. Their inability to distinguish certain colors made the hunt easier for non-colorblind children to find the eggs, and therefore the hunt rewarded faster running children without sophisticated hunting tactics. That is surfacing information in the data that humans would never have the inclination or patience to discover, which is the point of having machines do the mining rather than humans.

As soon as you have a machine-sensed pattern in the data, it changes how you organize the data into information. That is what adds value and it changes the way you think about analyzing easter egg hunts in the future.

Footnotes

[1] Barriers to Added Value in Data Analysis

 

Waiting for Dot Gov

Somebody asked me: Could blockchain technology be used to implement Social Security or Universal Basic Income?

I sez:

Yes, it’s possible. It’s coming from a side angle though. Basically Congress is going to have to admit at some point that the credit card companies keep better track of individuals. And then the credit card companies will have to admit that the new crypto devs have a more secure way of keeping individuals in control of their own identity. And then somebody at Apple is going to make it easy to integrate anonymous identity with iCloud and ApplePay.

Basically, the interest around blockchain and cryptocurrency is going to drive the development of secure identity management and peer to peer payment tech.

If you look at something like Keybase you can get a feel for how a single ID can federate other well known IDs.

I forget the name of this other company, but they have the ability to take your one credit card and make it authorized for all your online purchases except you use a different ‘credit card number’ for each transaction. So your single, real credit card ID is never used online. It’s just used to authorize, from your desktop (or thumbprint as Apple has proven), an on-the-spot value card. This technology is similar to Amazon KMS and HashiCorp’s Vault. IE it’s already done and well understood.

This combination of technologies already exist. The question is basically who is going to mainstream it best. I bet Apple will. Now let’s say they do that next year or late this year. How many Congressmen do you have to buy in order for them to

1. Get it
2. Regulate it
3. Authorize it’s use for Government things.
4. Get bureaucrats across the US to understand it.

Yeah almost never. Which means somebody needs to hack the other two credit bureaus to prove what we already know. Current identification schemes that dominate US commerce are insecure and outdated. Then of course you’ll have to deal with millions of paranoids about the possibility of a National ID, seeing as it’s ‘racist’ to have people show a driver’s license when they vote.

Bottom line. Stop hoping for the masses. Do the math, figure it out, and do it with people who already get it now. And yes I did triple my money in Bitcoin (and in Amazon stock before that (and in Google before that (and in Netscape before that (and in Inktomi before that)))) and no I’m not hurt by the price collapse today.

On the other hand, there will be people who will slowly duplicate old tech with new tech, and maybe they’ll be able to sell this stuff. The old dis-spirited workers at the NSA and CIA are going to have to work somewhere.