Forbes, and many other, report that GMail had an outage. Now I hear vast parts, in particular the security and privacy fraction, of the social bubble start crying “the cloud ain’t a solution”. Self-Hosting has sure benefits over managed offerings. This attitude ignores the fact that managed hosting, and multi-tenant (cloud-) applications in particular have one huge benefit over single instance solutions. This foremost means economies of scale. Any moderately successful cloud solution can serve plenty of users, and at a large scale, set a much higher standard for operations and security than the self-hosted application could have.
So while Google was off, it’s still much better available than most hobbyist projects.
“We are not working in this a ‘Agile‘-mode that you’re working in.” she said. She actually tried to disparage the lack of structure in the other team she has been assigned to work with. The team this lady belongs to consider themselves a marketing team. In a high-tech company. Marketing, but still: for technology.
After the assignment to the new team, this lady actually tried to mock the lack or absence of procedures in the new team. Her comment meant to refer to any processes but literally trying to differentiate herself.
The team she is working with initially tracks their tasks of deliverables in a so-called Kanban board. The same team conducts daily standup meetings, that are facilitated by a process owner. About once every other week there are so-called review meetings with the team manager and external stakeholders.
Of course, it is conjecture. At the same time, this pattern that can be observed in many places. People try to differentiate themselves from the working class, the programmers, the technical guys. While in reality, all colleagues contribute to the same product.
So ultimately, the differentiation between being technical and the business ends up being more hurtful to the companies culture. Not to mention the effects of digitalization, that is based on the assumption that technology will improve everybody’s life. Assuming more technical acumen, even as a business person, will make you a better, more efficient person. Being technical is independent of working in agile mode.
Today in dystopian news: Amazon, the book selling department, controlling about 40% of the US book market, collects reading habbits from their sales and Kindle. By now the corporation knows enough about it’s customers it could be generating best selling books. Spookey. And potentially game changing, when machines replace creative professions.
Amazon has the ability to track vast amounts of reader data and use it to change the landscape of American fiction.
