Software

Now For Something Completely Different

President-Elect Barack Obama has announced that when he’s in office he’ll appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the whole darned USA. Though Google CEO Eric Schmidt already said he isn’t interested in the job, I am.

I accept, Mr. President.

And while the idea of Cringely for CTO may seem lame to most everybody I know (including my Mom), I think I can make a strong case for why I am EXACTLY the right guy for the job.

For one thing, unlike Eric Schmidt I don’t have a lot of money. Schmidt can’t afford to take the job because Google stock is down and he’d lose a fortune. Not so for me. I come encumbered only with debts, which is to say I am a true American. I’d be perfectly willing to put those debts in a blind trust ASAP.

The U.S. CTO would have to be a dynamic leader capable of speaking his or her mind and holding his or her own against a tide of critics and special interests. Hey, that’s what I do every week (sometimes twice)! Maintaining and defending technology opinions is my only business and some people think I do it too well, which I take as a compliment.

Now we need to consider why President-Elect Obama thinks the country needs a CTO in the first place. The President has long had a Science Adviser, so why appoint a CTO? It’s the distinction between adviser and officer that I’d say is the whole point; one simply advises while the other implements and leads directly. And I think there is plenty of room for new leadership in this area.

America has always been tops in science, tops in research and development, tops in medicine, tops in industrial development, tops in technical infrastructure -- tops, tops, tops. But are we tops today? I don’t think so, and I’d say we’ve been slipping steadily for the last eight years and probably for many years before that. The rest of the world has caught up and some other countries now lead the U.S. in many respects. Yes, we have technical traditions and deep institutions, but those traditions are weaker than they were and the institutions are, too. I think something can be done about that.

My belief that something CAN be done is critical, because most of the usual suspects for this job probably think it can’t. The reason I am so optimistic is because of the very financial disaster that is the current U.S. economy. Things are so bad right now that I am greatly encouraged.

Huh?

Sometime in February the new Obama Administration is likely to propose the mother of all economic stimulus packages. It won’t be a $650 check that comes in the mail. It won’t be a $700 billion equity injection in various financial institutions. It WILL be a public spending plan modeled after the New Deal of the 1930s, injecting $600+ billion primarily into infrastructure construction and reconstruction. The difference between this New New Deal and the first one is that while plenty of roads and bridges will be rebuilt, a lot of the money this time will probably go into information infrastructure. Well that’s my bag.

The U.S. CTO – at least this FIRST U.S. CTO – will be the buyer-of-cool-stuff-in-chief for the entire nation.

I would make a better buyer-in-chief than almost anyone else because of two important characteristics in my warped personality: 1) I would be immune to special interest groups so this wouldn’t turn into another National Information Infrastructure boondoggle, and; 2) yet as a true enthusiast I would buy with such reckless abandon that I’d easily fulfill the economic stimulus needs while spewing money widely enough to guarantee at least a few good technical investments for the nation.

This latter point probably requires some explanation. As we can see from the current $700 billion bank bailout, the ranks of those actually benefitting are pretty small. We’re $325 billion into the thing and consumers – the people paying for it -- have yet to benefit at all as far as I can tell. Most banks haven’t even benefitted. And those that have benefitted have done little to share their wealth. To put things in the most positive light I can, let’s attribute this to the very surgical nature of this process. To put it more honestly, nothing really changes except the rich get richer.

Look at Al Gore’s National Information Infrastructure program of the 1990s, which was intended to build for us all exactly the sort of data network enjoyed today by people in Japan and Korea. $200 billion in tax credits were distributed, primarily to telephone companies. That’s $200 billion in government revenue foregone, which is just the same, it seems to me, as writing a check. And what did we get for it? Limited Internet service in schools and no Internet service in homes. The DSL we have today we paid for, believe me – phone companies sell that stuff at a profit. However well intentioned Al was, his system was gamed by the phone companies who took the money and ran.

That can’t happen again.

If we are going to have a huge economic stimulus package that we’ll pay-off as a people over the next 30+ years, I say we should get something for it. If we hire as CTO some slick-talker from IBM or GE this won’t happen. If we hire Bill Joy it won’t happen, either. Bill’s too smart and too gentle and too darned rich for the job.

We need someone with just enough savvy to know good technology, enough independence to make the right decisions, and crazy enough to do it all 24/7 right out in public so that vaunted “transparency” we keep talking about yet never see can be proved to be more than just a modern myth.

I’m the man for that job.

AND I can use the work.

That’s because December 15th will mark my last column for PBS,

After 11 years and more than 600 columns I’ll be moving-on, perhaps into that big CTO job in Washington, but then maybe not. This is my decision, not that of PBS, which has been nothing but good to me these many years.

In the month I have left I will be filing many columns, trying in a breathless rush to put a cap on this part of my career and leave behind a few ideas of how things should be and where they can go if done right. Though it will be a couple weeks early, the last column will be my predictions for 2009.

Stick around until then. I’m right most of the time, you know.

Love-Hate

Love-Hate

Steve Jobs is not like you and me. He has millions of customers, 32,000 employees, and a board of directors who think he can do no wrong. Running a company that is immensely profitable, gaining in market share, has no debt and $20 billion in cash, he can afford to make bold moves, the most recent of which is his decision to replace Tony Fadell, until moments ago head of the division that produces Apple’s iPod. Like everything Jobsian, Fadell’s departure is part of an Apple GRAND PLAN.

The variables at work here are (in no particular order) ego, competitive advantage, ego, management technique, ego, strategic thinking, and ego.

To say that Steve Jobs’ ego can expand to fill any known space might be an understatement but I’ll stand by it anyway. Fadell’s failing in this regard is his being hailed as the “father of the iPod.” What does that make Jobs? Who made THE BIG DECISION? Who committed the company? Who – most importantly of all – seduced all the record companies? That last guy would be James Higa, but since I don’t want to get HIM fired, too, let’s just attribute it all to Steve Jobs – for all intents and purposes the REAL father of the iPod.

All hail Steve.

Apple exists solely as an extension of Steve Jobs. Remember that. Anything attributable to Apple is really attributable to Jobs. Other people work at Apple, of course, and excel at their positions, but that is primarily because they were chosen, anointed, or inspired by Jobs.

Not that Jobs doesn’t make the occasional mistake. Look at the Mac Cube, for example. But that was our mistake as consumers, not realizing that it really ought to have been worth an extra $500 to us to have a computer with no cooling fan.

Steve Jobs makes very few such mistakes, in fact. That, and his total domination of Apple at every level allow the company to be literally the only PC vendor to have anything like a strategic plan. Dell and HP have the odd strategic initiative, like getting into or out of media players or TVs, but the idea of a comprehensive corporate strategy, well that’s too much to expect from companies that are managed, not led.

Steve Jobs is a leader 100 percent in the mold of General George S. Patton. Rent the movie and it will start to make sense. Heck, rent it on iTunes.

So here’s what’s going on with Tony Fadell. First, he was vulnerable as a charismatic leader in his own right who has been talked about in the press as a possible heir to Jobs. That alone meant he had to die, but it wasn’t enough to mean that he had to die just now. That decision required an external variable in the form of former IBM executive Mark Papermaster.

Steve Jobs wants to give Tony Fadell’s job to Papermaster. It’s not that Papermaster would be any better at the job than Fadell, but there are two over-riding factors here: 1) Jobs can only have so many direct reports, and; 2) he thinks putting Papermaster in Fadell’s job is the best way to get past any legal objections from Papermaster’s former employer, IBM.

Papermaster most recently ran IBM’s blade server division and in the mind of Steve Jobs blade servers and iPods couldn’t be farther apart. One is an enterprise sale while the other is consumer. One is a clear IT sale and the other has nothing to do with IT, really, since iPods and iPhones aren’t aren’t computers or computer peripherals. Jobs thinks Apple can make this point stick with a judge and he might well be correct.

Papermaster has to be gone from IBM for a year before he can take a job that clearly competes with his last position at IBM. But Jobs doesn’t want Papermaster for blade servers, nor does he even want him for iPods. Jobs wants Papermaster for the expertise he showed two jobs ago at IBM running Big Blue’s PowerPC operation. Jobs wants Papermaster to lead Apple’s PA Semi acquisition and create a new family of scalable processors optimized for Snow Leopard and beyond.

Having Papermaster run iPod hardware is a placeholder to let him get used to Apple and get ready to take over the Apple processor job, some of which will be used in iPods and iPhones, so the job isn’t a total waste. But for the few months he’ll be running iPod hardware, Papermaster will mainly be overseeing the implementation of Fadell’s strategy.

If that seems like a game of musical chairs in the Cupertino executive suite, well it is. It’s also a game we’ve seen played over and over again.

Back to point 1 from five paragraphs ago: Jobs can have only so many direct reports. Steve Jobs believes the key to his success is in finding, hiring, retaining, then firing the best talent in the world. He would maintain in the very moment he’s firing Fadell that Tony is better at his job than anyone else on Earth. Yet still Fadell must go and that’s because – ego issues aside – Jobs had to make room in his inner circle for Papermaster.

Everyone close to Jobs is under continual analysis: is this person really (or still) the best in the world? If they aren’t, or if someone else is just as good but more important for some additional reason, then the incumbent has to go. Steve Jobs ultimately betrays all of his direct reports in this manner. It’s just the way he is. And if it costs Apple a few million to remove one extra head from the room, well that’s okay with a board that KNOWS (as we all do, to put it fairly) that Jobs really is the secret of Apple’s success. His system may be brutal, but it works.

So Fadell was already in danger because he had become known as an individual. Remember that when PortalPlayer (now part of nVidia) was making the guts of every iPod the company was forbidden by Apple to acknowledge that. Even in its financial reports PortalPlayer was forbidden to use the “A” word and simply had to attribute to some unnamed company 85 percent of PortalPlayer’s revenue.

Just as Jobs was scourging Fadell, though, he was seducing Papermaster. Jobs can be VERY seductive. And he was hardly going to seduce the IBM executive with a promise to put him two levels down. So as the most vulnerable person in Jobs’ inner circle, Fadell had to go. That Fadell’s wife was head of Human Resources for Apple and was forced, essentially, to terminate her own husband, well that was just gravy and yet another reason for Apple employees to take the stairs rather than risk sharing an elevator with Jobs.

Fear can be a remarkable motivator.

Don’t feel bad for Fadell, though. His $8+ million golden parachute stock grant is coming at a time when Apple shares are depressed and could easily double by the time he can sell them in 2010. He get’s $300,000 per year to “advise” Jobs (I’d like one of those jobs, too, Steve) and then there’s his wife’s departure package, which hasn’t been mentioned. Clearly out of the picture as an heir to Jobs, Fadell will next appear in 2010 as a CEO somewhere in the South Bay.

Of course IBM with its largest corporate legal department on earth has filed suit against Apple, trying to block Papermaster from taking the Apple position. Apple’s legal department is fairly accomplished, too, and Cupertino is a much stronger company than Armonk, which will lead to the ultimate solution to this legal problem. Apple still hopes to convince a judge that it is correct about Papermaster. But if Apple fails in that, Steve Jobs will just pick up the phone and choose IBM Microelectronics as the fab to build the next generation of Apple’s PowerPC processors – a contract worth billions, but ONLY if IBM drops all legal action.

Apple will win in the end -- I guarantee it. And the way Jobs negotiates, Big Blue will probably end up losing money on the chip deal, too.

links for October 2, 2008

• PlayOn Media Server streams Netflix to PS3 / Xbox 360 today
• Google CEO: How to fix U.S. energy problems | Green Tech - CNET News

links for September 7, 2008

• Technical Brief for Windows Home Server Media Sharing