Comments (1)

I read the book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance by former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner several years ago. For people don’t know the author, Lou Gerstner became IBM CEO in 1993 when the company was on its way to losing $16 billion. The book is about his insider story of IBM’s historic turn around. Unlike other books by top executives, the book was really written by the author himself.

The book is just great with insightful observations and thoughts. So when I saw it in library weeks ago, I borrowed it back home again. This time I found something new or something that I didn’t pay enough attention the first time. Lou actually had the buzzword “cloud” in his book of 2002. Let’s see what he had to say about the cloud:

It had to be in one of these early discussions with Dennie that I was introduced to “the cloud” – a graphic much loved and used on IBM charts showing how networks were going to change computing, communications, and all manner of business and human interaction. The cloud would be shown in the middle. To one side there would be little icons representing people using PCs, cell phones, and other kinds of network-connected devices. On the other side of the cloud were businesses, governments, universities, and institutions also connected to the network. The idea was that the cloud – the network – would enable and support incredible amounts of communications and transactions among people and businesses and institutions.

Comment: The meaning of the cloud seems limited to networking, and quite different from what’s known today. Networking is still important today in the new cloud because the connectivity is a must for accessing cloud services. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Comments (0)

I just read a book by Ram Charan What The CEO Wants You to Know? Using Business Acumen to understand how your company really works. Having grown up in India, the author has earned D.B.A and M.B.A from Harvard Business School, and has taught at Harvard and Northwestern.

In the book, Ram coined a new term “business acumen” to describe the fundamental capabilities for business success. He claims, “Every business is the same inside, cutting through to cash margin, velocity, growth, and customers.”

Here are more quotes from the book:

When you come down to it, the business is very simple. There are universal laws of business that apply whether you sell fruit from a stand or are running a Fortune 500 company. Successful business leaders know them. They have what I call business acumen – the ability to understand the building blocks of how a one person operation or a very big business makes money. You, too, may learn the fundamentals of cash, margin, velocity, return on investment, growth, and customers.

You can develop your own business acumen. While these ideas may sound complex, they are not. Think more about your best teacher in a subject like chemistry. Once you understand that the atom was made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, you then had the fundamentals to solve any problem in chemistry. I want to show you that it’s the same with business . When you know the fundamentals, you can “get” the basics for how any business works.

This made me think what the CTO wants you to know, and what “technical acumen” is. Here is my paraphrased version: Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Comments (2)

Just read part of the book Founders At Work over the weekend. Although I haven’t decided to be a founder of a startup company, I found the stories there are trully inspirational. You can read part of the book at Google book.

One interview with Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bahatia is very interesting with his thoughts on the differences of software and hardware designers:

Livingston: … Did your backgroud in hardware help you in terms of building servers that could handle massive loads?
Bahatia: It helped us because we knew what kind of hardware we would need to be able to handle the kind of traffic to our site. Also, when you are hardware designers, you have tremendously more discipline in writing and describing software because in hardware you cannot get it wrong. Every turn of every chip costs you millions of dollars, so when hardware designers design any piece of software, they normally get it right. They use something called state machines to describe the funtioning of the software. When you do that, you are very deterministic: if this is the input, then this will be the output.
So you write it in a very deterministic fashion and therefore you tend not to make too many mistakes. Whereas the pure software writers – they way they think and architect software is very creative. They put in lots of bells and whistles, but they think, “No big deal. If there is a bug, we’ll fix it. Put in patch.” You can’t do that in hardware. There is no patch. Once you ship a chip, it has to work all the time. So in terms of being able to test it out, there is somewhat of a difference, but I just think that hardware designers would be pretty good software designers as well.

Given his first hand experience from hardware to software, I would give much credit to his thoughts. The key point here is hardware designers make far less mistakes than software designers because hardware designers cannot afford hardware mistakes that are far more expensive than software mistakes.

Now if we make the software mistakes as expensive as hardware mistakes, will software designers build better quality software? Well, that is against the whole point of dividing a system into hardware and software. In the past, the complexity of hardware hasn’t increased as much as software. It’s mainly the software that handles the most logics and complexity of a system. It’s therefore expected for the software to be more vulnerable to bugs than hardware.

Having said that, software designers should definitely take the bugs as seriously as the hardware designers. Because we can have patches, we sometimes take it too lightly.

To get the attitude as hardware designers, it may be worthwhile for software designers to work as hardware designers at the start of professional career. But when the hardware training is over, will the creativity remain?

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Comments (0)

When asked what books to read, I always recommend the following two books:

Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is by Donald C. Gause; Gerald M. Weinberg

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

“But, they seem nothing to do with software!” You say.

You are right. But remember the blog title has a keyword “top.” If you want to stand out in any profession, some of the extra skills may well be outside your typical set as others expect.

The same is true for software profession. I assume you already know the basics of software programming, process, design patterns, etc., so another programming book doesn’t help you much to the top technically.

Let me explain why and how these two books help you. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

Comments (5)

When I start to use a new API/SDK, I always look for the object model diagram before digging into the API Reference. With that, I can have a good overview of the API, from the concepts to the structure. This can save a lot of time.

Unfortunately, we don’t find such a object model diagram in any official document. The following is the UML diagram from my book VMware VI and vSphere SDK. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.