When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · December
· · · · 12 (1 entry)
Discipline? · Having recently agreed with Nicholas Carr on search economics, I’d now like to disagree with him on the subject of my employer. Carr is obviously a smart guy, but his recent Sun and the data center meltdown seems bafflingly simplistic. He’s complaining, it would appear, that we’re doing too many things: we give Dell a hard time (yep), we holler that eco-responsibility is good business (yep), we ship what we claim is the fastest Web-server CPU on the planet (yep), we focus on volume (yep), we let anyone try our software for free (yep), we seem to be having fun (“pod duel”—yep). Hey, I’m with Carr on one item, I don’t want to go anywhere near “Web 2.0”, but as for the rest... because we ship fast chips, we shouldn’t worry about volume? Because we think Dell is losing focus, we shouldn’t push the free-software idea? And so on. This is a big company. We’re working on a lot of things. Is this perhaps nostalgia for a simpler era in which companies had one simple message at all times and spoke it with one voice? I don’t think the world in general or the IT world in particular are like that; there are a lot of problems and a lot of opportunities and we have the scale to address a bunch of them. Anyhow, Carr left out Microsoft interoperation and grid computing and new pricing models and and observability and lots of other good stuff we’re working on. Right now is not the time to be doing less.
