1. New Kingmakers: The Social Renaissance in Tech
10.20.2005
SAP Palo Alto September 2012

2. Software is Eating the World
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3. Gaming eats Pharma
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4. Quantified Self eats Healthcare
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5. Internet of Things
“If you add up all the smartphones and the
tablets and the digital televisions and the PCs...
we see a large opportunity of perhaps 3 billion
to 4 billion units per annum, but we see an
embedded market that’s maybe 30 billion to
40 billion units per annum”
- ARM CEO Warren East
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6. Fragmentation of Everything
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7. Language Tiers
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8. API Choices
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9. Software in the 20th Century
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10. Software in the 21st Century
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11. The Developer Strikes Back
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12. Foraging vs Farming
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13. Forage For Code
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14. Then Forge Applications
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15. On Quality
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16. Skills Transfer and Practice
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17. Purchasing First
“Operating systems, databases, web and application servers, dev tools
all required money. To get anything done, then, developers needed
someone to write checks for the tools they needed to build. That
meant either raising the capital to buy the necessary pieces, or more
often requesting that an employer or other third party purchase them
on the developer's behalf.”
Stephen O’Grady – New Kingmakers
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18. The CIO is the Last To Know
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19. Accelerating Innovation
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20. Social, Local, Mobile
Facebook:
1bn monthly active users
500m+ are mobile
30 Petabyte+ Hadoop cluster
Foursquare:
3m Check-Ins Per Day
500k Merchants
Twitter:
340 million tweets per day
24m – Lady Gaga’s followers
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21. Transactions in the Age of Engagement
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22. Celebrating Downtime
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23. The New Rockstars
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24. Old School Outsourcing
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25. The High Cost of “Low” Bids
President Whitmore:
“I don't understand, where does all
this come from? How do you get
funding for something like this?”
Julius Levinson:
“You don't actually think they spend
$20k on a hammer, do you?”
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26. Outsourcing Contracts as CDOs
“These [huge] contracts were meant to be about lowering risk. But when you
package up a huge range of functions into one contract the risk becomes
impossible to manage”
Tariq Rashid, Lead Architect at the UK Home Office
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27. From Farming To Foraging: Digital Abundance
Foragers Farmers
Heads up Heads Down
Diversity - healthier more varied diet Monoculture- prone to disease
Better exercise More sedentary
Love nature, travel, and exploration Travel less, and move less often from where they grew up.
Move more often to new communities Are more polite and care more for cleanliness and order.
Work fewer hours, more mentally-challenging jobs. Work longer hours at more tedious and less healthy jobs
Talk more openly about sex Are more faithful to their spouses and their communities.
Are more sexually promiscuous Make better warriors
Have fewer kids Have lots of children
Care less for land or material possessions. Expect and prepare more for disasters like war, famine.
Spend more time on leisure, music, dance, story-telling Have a stronger sense of honor and shame
Less comfortable with war, domination, bragging Fewer topics are open for discussion
Group decisions, with everyone having an equal voice. Better accept human authorities and hierarchy
Deal with conflicts more personally and informally Believe in good and evil, in powerful gods.
Prefer unhappy folk to be free to leave. Think people should learn their place and stay there.
Leaders lead more by consensus. Leaders lead by rules
Inspired by Overcoming Bias
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28. Foraging in Wartime
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29. “It was at this very plantation that a soldier passed me with a ham
on his musket, a jug of sorghum-molasses under his arm, and a big
piece of honey in his hand, from which he was eating, and,
catching my eye, he remarked sotto voce and carelessly to a
comrade, "Forage liberally on the country," quoting from my
general orders.
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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30. “In a well-ordered and well-disciplined army, these things might be
deemed irregular, but I am convinced that the ingenuity of these
younger officers accomplished many things far better than I could
have ordered, and the marches were thus made, and the distances
were accomplished, in the most admirable way.
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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31. “By attempting to hold the roads, we will lose a thousand men
each month, and will gain no result. I can make this march, and
make Georgia howl!”
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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32. “I have known the skirmish-line, without orders, to fight a
respectable battle for the possession of some old fields that were
full of blackberries.”
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
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33. Acqhiring: Foraging for Talent
Google: Aardvark, AppJet, Apture, Like.com, reMail, Slide.
Facebook: Beluga, Digital Staircase, Drop.io, FriendFeed, Gowalla,
Hot Potato, MailRank, Snaptu, Strobe.
Twitter: Backtype, Dasient, Fluther, Hotspot.io, Julpan, Summize,
Whisper Systems
LinkedIn: ChoiceVendor, IndexTank, Mspoke
Zynga: Area/Code, Unoh
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34. Even Microsoft is Forced to Forage
“We need to think more like the web…. one stack to run them all has gone
away. This stuff about single vendor stacks is behind us. The days of recruiting
developers to where you are is over. You have to go to where they are.”
Tim O’Brien Microsoft Platform Strategy Group general manager
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35. New Kingmakers: New Patronage Economy
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36. Recommendations and Wrap Up
Embrace Open Source – patronage and contribution
Get in Early, Encourage Hacking and Play
Hire Algorithmically – skills foraging
Let Developers Choose Their Own Hours/Location (But Keep them Close To The User)
Build a Practitioner Purchasing competence
Invest in Developer Relations and Developer Experience
Github First (with enterprise governance in mind)
Cloud First (with on prem in mind)
Social First (with enterprise directory in mind)
Mobile First (with desktop in mind)
Practice Pace Layering/Timeless Software
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37. Credits
Photos:
SF in Cloud – SF Chronicle
Craftsman – A. Davey on Flickr
Berlin Wall, man with hammer – gavinandrewstewart on Flickr
Berlin Wall – antaldaniel on Flickr
Barbed Wire by tacitrequiem on Flickr
VC chart data from the National Venture Capital Association and the
Center for Venture Research, via @cbtacy from AppFog
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