Not often this happens (and the first time I’ve seen it)…from the lounge at Zurich airport today.

tilting

It’s funny how trails of information flow across different media.  Today, on the train home, I picked up a (now free) Evening Standard and caught an articleabout how fashion designers are trying their hand at architecting buildings, mainly interiors.  In that article it mentioned someone called Paul Virilio and his book “The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers” which sounded intriguing.  Getting home I googled for it and found a bunch of pictures, leading me to this site with stunning pictures and a translation of Virilio’s preface to the book.   Some have an other-world, almost Star Wars, like quality of the structures embedded and strewn over bleak landscapes – as if pushed in by gods.  WWII era constructions some have an intensely modern feel – finding them as moon base structures wouldn’t be any more surprising.  This one, “tilting”, evokes a crashed space craft, chunky as it is!  Great to find art and philosophy in surprising places.  And the possibly final link from newspaper to search engine to website exhibition to blog via a tweet is made.

Where could that money have come from?   How about all that money NASA spends on space exploration.   A scientist by education, it strikes me as exhorbitant that we should spend such extremely large sums of money on achieving things that should matter less than saving lives.  The space program to land a man on the money cost, at today’s money, cost $145bn.  The money alone spent by the US on this program would have funded the World Food Program or 20+ years.

If the world was one household, then would there be any disposable income, whilst it’s children were dying?  And if the world was a prosperous, healthy and happy village would non-essential spending be accepted in that village, whilst it’s children were dying?

• Successful goal: NASA getting a man on the moon and back again alive. JFK in 1961: “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.“
• Un-successful goal:  General Motor’s fixation on getting back 29% of the US market-share

An email thread I was on recently with thousands of smart recipients questioned the value of setting specific goals at a high level; that they can damage an organisation more than they help.   Are S.M.A.R.T. criteria enough?

The larger the organisation, typically the larger the number of explicitly different goals throughout the organisation at different levels, functional and regional groups, individuals, etc. – and the harder it is to align and set them so that they are a compelling, non-conflicting set.  That some group achieving one goal will help another group achieve one or more of their goals directly or indirectly – and definitely not disadvantage them.  This linking of goals is critical, but what kind of links?

In the S.M.A.R.T model the only stated element that directly addresses other goals (or activity supporting those goals) is the R = Relevant.  Relevance requires explicit relationship with other activity/goals.  The rest of the elements can all be calculated in a much more isolated manner (though nothing is actually isolated, e.g. Time normally has to be spent on other goals, but they need not defined explicitly).  This R citeria element is, I’m beginning to understand, the most critical 1 of the 5 – get this wrong and not only is that goal at risk, so are others they are linked to.

Unless there is a compelling argument otherwise, of all the elements in S.M.A.R.T. goals, the most important is R=Relevant.  And I’d better give that more focus that I have done before.  Also am thinking of seeing what can be done to make it possible to link goals together between different individual and teams in the most popular goal tracking tool we use at work.

……”For the last two months, while we’ve been testing the Google Wave developer preview, we have been talking amongst ourselves about how this thing could change (or add to) what we do. So, here’s a list of a few wild ideas we had for using Wave.” Covering…

• Collaborative reporting
• Record and archive interviews
• Live editing
• Smarter story updates
• Discuss while you read
• Transparent writing process
• Instant polls
• Wiki news aggregator

Back in March in Beijing, I decided to stay in a Hutong house, not a conventional western-style hotel.  It was relatively easy to do, just settle on one (4 Banqiao), find the best deal online, then call them up to negotiate directly.  It was about an hour away from the office and 3 metro trains, but I liked the commute seeing how Beijingers got to work and not just by taxi or a short walk from the most local hotel.   It also meant my rooms was near “food street” (Dongzhimen nei da jie) where I ate a few times at bustling restaurants, eating hot stuff and, once, Beijing duck.

The folks in the office were great, a really nice bunch.  I like they eat all together (not just split in smaller groups) and we went out to a great restaurant they like.

A trip to the Forbidden Palace and the Great Wall with Lin Gang got me fascinated with the wall structures used in China.  In particular their use in the Hutong and encircling city walls with gates that were locked at night.

And how recently they proliferated – the picture above of Beijing’s wall is from just 100 years ago (from Ernst Boerschmann‘s classic book of visit to 12 provinces between 2006-2009 – note the roof damage showing significant disrepair).  In England the towns and cities with walls had crumbled into ineffectiveness by the end of the Middle Ages – so for me the realisation that Chinese walls were around much later and in full use as originally intended (and there are still a few left) was astonishing.  Perhaps it is something to do with school history lessons about castles which provided protection to people living outside its walls in times of danger.  Or why I like taking pictures of doors (in walls).  Or because my postgrad studies were connected to boundary layers.  Whatever the reason I find these Chinese walls, their design and use, somewhat fascinating  This old map of Beijing shows the inner and outer walls.

This is a huge opportunity for OS vendors. Whilst some got rich on “commodity computing” that was just for openers. The real commodity/utility computing is now:

- millions of of very cheap computers in the cloud
- millions of of very cheap computers in the hand (netbooks and cellphones)

both 100% require a cheap OS – there is 0% likelihood of demand for an expensive per server license.  The $1500 per year OS is yesterday’s today that does not realise it is today’s dinosaur.

There is a lesson to be learnt from Dell’s desktop pricing model in the UK.  For years it absolutely refused to sell cheaper than £999.  Every new advance meant that the spec was upgraded but the price was the same.  Then the model broke and desktop prices came tumbling down.  I think the same thing will happen here to OS vendors with an expensive per server licensing model.   Far better to augment with very affordable per cloud unit (bunch of server) pricing.  Maybe keep that $1500 per year price but for 20 identical stripped down servers not 1.  Figure out what needs to be done to minimize server complexity and support costs, yet maximizing specific compute power.  Support customized stripped down kernels and OS footprint for specific services (web, db, load balancers, whatever) – and commoditize them.  Then pile them high and sell them low.  Otherwise the cloud providers will simply do that themselves and hire all your best support people to run them.