Looking back to go forward; what was I thinking in 2005

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of networking and how to build a solution and business in the future, call it a 12-48 month window from today – not in the present day as I am fully convinced that there is a high rate of external change in networking.  I am engaged in the process of thinking about technology decision drivers, technology adoption, what is or will be important to people and anticipating the actions of competitors.  By far the best tool for that process is the O-O-D-A loop developed by John Boyd, but that is best left to a separate post for another day.  After a week of intellectual exercises, starts, failures and restarts, I found myself on a Saturday morning espresso in hand, looking back on documents and presentations I did over the last ten years.

I surmise that most people think this exercise is a waste of time; but I have posted on thought anchors and biases before.  I also believe we are all susceptible to diminished breadth in our creativity as we get older.  Diminished breadth in our creativity the root cause as to why history repeats itself and another reason why when we change companies we tend to take content and processes from our prior company and port them to our new company.  This is especially true in the technology industry.  We recycle people; hence we recycle ideas, content and value propositions from what worked before.  Why be creative when it is easier to cut and paste?  As a casual observation it seems to me that most people working in tech have a theta calculation as to their creativity.  I believe a strategy to guard against creativity decay is to look back on the past and critique the work.  That is how I spent part of my Saturday.  I was looking back, to go forward.

I found a presentation that I had produced and presented in January 2005 – almost seven years ago.  I started going through the presentation and I found many elements of the presentation are relevant today and to my surprise represent elements of projects I am working on or thinking about.  I have attached a link to the presentation below (JAN 2005 for SIWDT) and it is mostly unedited, but I did remove one slide specific to my employer at the time and removed a reference to the same employer on another side.  Excluding those two edits, the presentation is intact and readers are welcome to laugh at my presentation with perfect hindsight.  Here are my thoughts and you are welcome to review the presentation before or after reading my thoughts.

JAN 2005 for SIWDT

–         Slide 1: Everything on this slide was accurate.  Our exit from the rampant waste of the client/server era continues to accelerate as we enter a new era, which I call the datacenter era for IT and I posted about last week.

–         Slide 2: Many elements are still true, but I have seen an acceleration of enterprises wanting to bring external elements of their outsourced network in-house.

–         Slide 3-4: Still true today.

–         Slide 5-6: Everything proves true today and I would argue that in sourcing is accelerating.

–         Slides 7-8: All still true.

–         Slide 9: This is the key slide.  Everything I am thinking about today to create in the network is encapsulated on this slide.

–         Slide 10: In 2005 I called the cloud, grid computing.

–         Slide 12: At every marketing meeting I attend I think of Dr. G.Clotaire Rapaille.

–         Slide 13-14: Just directed points for breakouts…

I am not a huge Jack Welch fan, but I do appreciate the honesty and succinctness of this quote which I used on the cover the presentation “When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight.” – Jack Welch

/wrk

* It is all about the network stupid, because it is all about compute. *

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