File under 'inspiration': a collection of Steve Jobs stories

Sure, I spent some time mulling over my own resignation letter over the past few weeks, but someone else had one around the same time that was much more impactful and far-reaching (and, honestly, was much better written). Timing is about the only thing that connects my workplace good-bye with the one that had the most impact on high tech in 2011: the resignation of Steve Jobs.

In the days following Steve Jobs’ departure as CEO of Apple, many folks in the industry who had felt his influence – as a manager, a visionary, or news maker – took pen to paper. Actually, many took fingers to backlit keyboard or glass touchscreen, thanks to Steve. And they wrote some interesting stories.

As these stories flew by on Twitter, I found that they were speaking not only about Steve Jobs, but about a whole lot more. I started grabbing links and stashing them to digest later. (Hey, I was busy.) I really didn’t have time and breathing room to process what they meant until now, a few weeks later.

Today’s Chronicle story about the new proposed Apple HQ in Cupertino (the big, donut-like “iCon” that the urban design critic called “refreshing” and “a sci-fi fantasy best viewed from a helicopter”) reminded me about all the stories I’d been collecting. I decided I should post a bunch that had relevance (and were even a bit poignant) here.

I figure that they are good for reference and useful for a little reflection on what kind of impact Steve Jobs had on cynical and/or fanboy journalists, employees, competitors, and the industry in general. They talk about an amazing figure in our industry in particular, but also get to important points about how to be a leader, how to build a company, how to be an entrepreneur, and the impact all those can have on individuals and even on Silicon Valley as a whole. I’m filing them under “inspiration.” Perfect timing for me, actually.

What folks learned spending time with Steve Jobs

Many stories were essentially quirky anecdotes from many of the people that had worked with or crossed paths with Jobs. And what they learned. For example: “CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.” Read Google’s Vic Gundotra’s story about his phone call from Steve for details. Steve’s interest in design and attention to detail resonated in Glenn Rossman’s story about his day pitching the media about NeXT and IBM with Steve Jobs as well.

Robert Scoble gives a good account of the impact of Steve and Apple had through nearly his entire life, ending with his decision to watch Steve’s iPad 2 announcement up close (and without his camera). “It’s one of the few times when I was forced to just soak in a performance, and not try to capture the event I was viewing,” Scoble writes. And in the age of Twitter and Facebook, that’s a rarity. “Jobs didn’t disappoint.”

What was Jobs like? I’ve never met him, though was in a presentation he gave with Larry Ellison to some of us then-Oracle employees way-back-when showing off the NeXT machine. I know some folks from the NeXT era who all have great stories.

Om Malik likens him to Howard Hughes. Saul Hansell at Tech Crunch called him the patron saint of perfectionists: “Steve Jobs was an impresario, in the tradition, more than anything, of a classic Hollywood studio boss (which he also was in his spare time).”

This impresario approach, of course, didn’t (and still doesn’t) make Apple a “pleasant company to deal with or work at,” noted Hansell. “Everyone at Apple worked with the anxiety that they must meet the impossible demands of Jobs or endure his anger.” Hansell compared Apple to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory: “no one went in and no one ever came out.”

The bigger picture: what Steve Jobs meant to innovation and Silicon Valley

Those negatives quickly melt away when talking about all Steve has accomplished, however.

Om Malik wrote a wistful piece that outlined some of the best things to be learned from watching Steve Jobs in action. “If you want to change something, you have to be patient and take the long view. …When you are right and the world doesn’t see it that way, you just have to be patient and wait for the world to change its mind.” Plus, Om highlighted one incredibly difficult piece of advice, especially for big companies: cannibalize yourself.

Chris O’Brien from the Merc noted 3 things that Steve Jobs meant to Silicon Valley as a whole: inspiration, innovation, and revolution. “It wasn’t just the way he bootstrapped an idea from nothing, but the anti-establishment flair with which he pursued his singular vision,” said O’Brien. He believes Jobs showed that even though it is the “harder, riskier road,” innovation can be the key for a company to reinvent itself.

O’Brien also noted that Jobs “saved his best for last” – the iPhone. It and the iPad are helping to end the era of the PC, a comment Paul Maritz underscored onstage in his keynote at VMworld last week.

Intersection of technology & liberal arts

Mark Sigal (@netgarden) talked about Jobs finding a way to be the point where technology and liberal arts intersect. “The realization that one man sits at the junction of cataclysmic disruptions in personal computing, music, mobile computing, movies and post-PC computing is breathtaking in its majesty. A legacy with no equal.”

Sigal notes that Jobs has been about “bringing humanity back to the center of the ring,” not speeds and feeds. He was willing to “think different” and make it look “ridiculously, deceptively simple.”

As someone who was late to the party on iPads (though my family and I have had our fair share of iPods and iPhones), I have to agree. My iPad is easy, elegant, and really useful. My expectations were exceeded so completely, it’s almost embarrassing. Our challenge now is to fit that simplicity into the way the rest of the world (and IT) works.

What do people see for the future of Steve and Apple?

So what does the future hold? As David Pogue’s New York Times article mentioned, most of the reactions to Job’s resignation “read like obituaries – for Steve Jobs, if not for Apple.” It’s one of the reasons I was always leery about investing in Apple stock (though I thankfully gave in). Once Steve left, for whatever reason, would there be any possible way to keep things going, while living up to the standards he had set?

“There’s one heck of a huge elephant in the room,” writes Pogue, “one unavoidable reason why it’s hard to imagine Apple without Mr. Jobs steering the ship: personality.” Pogue thinks Apple will do well for now, but will have a hard time knowing “where the puck will come to rest” once the Jobs-influenced “pipeline is no longer full, and when his difficult, brilliant, charismatic, future-shaping personality is no longer the face of Apple.”

However, Harvard Business School fellows James Allworth, Max Wessel, and Rob Wheeler point out that the “Steve-infused culture” that he is leaving behind is, in fact, the point. When Jobs returned to Apple for his 2nd stint, “he wasn’t just interested in building great products himself. He was interested in making sure everyone else within Apple was able to build great products, too – to be able to think like he did.”

These guys are so confident, they created a Twitter hashtag to follow the mantra they believe Apple will continue to leverage to success for a long time to come: #wwsd. As in: “What would Steve do?”

How would you like to remember Steve’s departure?

Before any of this had come to a head, Fritz Nelson of Information Week had been creating his own script for what a Steve Jobs departure would – or in his view, should – look like. It has a geeky element of fantasy to it, but is an interesting read about how Steve Jobs could have ended his tenure. Cool ideas, though the white turtle neck is a bit over the top.

The one thing I liked best, I think, is the Stanford commencement speech that Jobs did in 2005 (thanks to John Millea of CA Technologies and Jean Bozman of IDC for pointing it my direction again recently). As a Bay Area local, I remember being tempted to go. I wish I had, but the magic of YouTube at least ensures that I didn’t miss what he said. The graduates aren’t quite in sync with Jobs at the start, laughing at weird times, assuming that his speech is about, well, them. They eventually figure out that it’s not about them. At least, not only about them.

The speech has some great insights about how doing what you have a passion for is the most important thing. He talked about serendipity: how a calligraphy class he took (because he loved it) saved the world from ugly PC fonts. He talked about getting fired. He talked about being diagnosed with cancer.

If you can find a way to wrap all those things into one life and build great things from them, you’re liable to make a huge difference for yourself. And for a whole lot of other people, too.

So, I’ll hereby submit my comments to the mix of everything that’s already been said and end with something pretty simple.

Thanks, Steve.

BusinessWeek's Hamm: Recession harms Silicon Valley's ability to contribute, but helps cloud computing

Believe it or not, there are still people who get paid to watch and report on the ins and outs of Silicon Valley. They see a lot of what's going on and probably think that those of us in the business are alternately drivers of a pretty interesting part of the global economy -- and in need of therapy. (Example? How about Larry Ellison's most recent anti-cloud computing rant and the flurry of commentary that followed.) But such dynamics come with the territory.

Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek is one of the guys who has been on the case for years. I met him through my work with Cassatt and have followed his work about the goings-ons in the Valley closely. With the economy still struggling to find its footing (certainly on the job front) but the buzz still at full volume about cloud computing, I thought some of his thoughts would be a useful contribution to the dialog here. He's been in the middle of some heated discussions on these topics. Plus, I find it's always interesting to interview the interviewers now and again.

If you don't know Hamm, he has been writing about the tech industry for 20 years, first in Silicon Valley and now in New York City. At BusinessWeek, he covers innovation, globalization, and leadership. He's also the author of two books, The Race for Perfect, about innovation in portable computing, and Bangalore Tiger, about the rise of the Indian tech industry.

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: You've been watching Silicon Valley and its cast of characters quite closely for a while. You've also had a chance to watch the economic downturn's impact on the Valley. What do you think will be of lasting importance in the way this recession is playing out compared with previous ones -- or even compared with early predictions about how this one would proceed?

Steve Hamm, BusinessWeek: Because it's so cheap to create Web 2.0 companies, and because most of the services they create are free to the consumer, this recession has had no discernible impact on creativity and use growth in social networking and social media. However, I believe that the funding squeeze, paucity of IPOs, and risk-aversion among venture capitalists has caused a slowdown in innovation in other areas that need attention -- green technologies, for instance. So while this recession hasn't had a devastating effect on the Valley and innovation, like the dot-com bust and '02 recession, it has harmed the Valley's ability to contribute as much as it could to solving the world's systemic problems.

DCD: Your BusinessWeek cover story back in December featured some big names (like Andy Grove) questioning whether Silicon Valley has the big, long-term thinking these days to deliver major, technological breakthroughs, rather than just incremental improvements. Do you think 2009 has provided evidence one way or the other?

Steve Hamm: I don't think much has changed. While IBM continues to invest aggressively in fundamental science-oriented breakthroughs, HP has narrowed its scope. Start-ups seeking money to do deep, long-term, transformative work continue to have difficulty getting funding.

DCD: Last month you blogged about the effect that consolidation is having on the IT industry and Silicon Valley entrepreneurship in general. In your interviews for the article (with senior Valley execs Bill Coleman and Craig Conway), you heard opposing views: that consolidation will be very tough for vendors -- or that the possibility of acquisition will still inspire start-ups to invent, despite a mostly dry IPO market. "I'm looking for some smart and brave CIOs to begin to experiment with start-up technologies again," you said, "--and get the innovation stream flowing again." Have you seen these brave CIOs yet? What do you think the increasing consolidation in hardware, software, and IT service providers means?

Steve Hamm: I found a few brave CIOs this year. They include the people who were aggressively embracing the combination of cloud computing and mobility, whom I wrote about in my story, "How Cloud Computing Will Change Business." They include: Donagh Herlihy, chief information officer of Avon Products, and Todd Pierce, vice-president for information technology, at Genentech North America. These guys aren't taking big risks on unproven technology. They see ready-for-primetime technology that's really useful for them and deploy it widely and quickly.

I think the continued consolidation of enterprise technology providers gives IT purchasers fewer choices, less negotiating power, and less innovation.

DCD: Have you seen any truly innovative business concepts or technologies appear on the scene despite (or because of) the downturn?

Steve Hamm: I think one of the potentially most powerful technologies that has advanced in spite of the downturn is using mobile phones for banking in emerging nations. There are a lot of pilot programs underway. Once this stuff gets widespread, it has the potential to transform the economies of poor nations.

DCD: What was the thing that caused you to think that cloud computing was worthy of BusinessWeek coverage?

Steve Hamm: It's the newest iteration of Internet computing, and will make it easier and cheaper to put the full power of computing in everybody's hands.

DCD: In June's special report about cloud computing, you mentioned that this "may be the largest growth opportunity since the Internet boom," but that it's going to take a while. Some have speculated that cloud computing might be the innovation that comes out of this downturn. From what you've learned covering the topic, what's your view on the evolution of cloud computing and what its impact might be? Has it lived up to its billing so far?

Steve Hamm: I think it has lived up to its billing so far, through there still is a long way to go. Adoption of SaaS by businesses has accelerated during the downturn, as companies look for ways to do more things with technology while avoiding capital spending as much as possible.

One of the most important things to get done by the industry is to assure that individuals and companies can easily shift from one cloud service provider to another without undue stress. No lock-in! Efforts are starting along these lines, but they could get bogged down by the desire of companies to gain profit advantages through using proprietary technologies.

DCD: How difficult is it to pick up a relatively technical topic and write something for the BusinessWeek audience? After that June special report on cloud computing, for example, I saw criticism from industry insiders that some of the examples you used were not actually examples of what cloud computing actually does. How do you approach complicated, nuanced, or -- like cloud computing -- ill-defined technical issues?

Steve Hamm: I don't write about the plumbing of technology, so it's not hard to make something accessible to our smart and aware BusinessWeek readers. The critiques of my story were silly. My critics didn't seem to be able to register the fact that the story was about the melding of cloud computing and mobility. Also, they were hung up on narrow technical definitions while I was writing about broad shifts in the computing landscape. My advice: Get a life.

DCD: What's the relationship you generally have with the technical press and industry analysts? How much do you rely on them to vet technologies or trends before they get your attention?

Steve Hamm: I don't read trade publications very often, though I respect the best of them. I do talk to industry analysts frequently and respect many of them. Important technology shifts usually come to my attention through meetings with the innovators themselves. They (actually, their PR people) know what I'm interested in and e-mail me asking for meetings.

DCD: When I was last at your offices, the outlook for BusinessWeek (and journalism's current business model) seemed pretty bleak to me. How are things looking for BusinessWeek at the moment? Do you think there's a solution to "reset" the business of journalism that can work financially? How do you think you and your peers will come through this all?

Steve Hamm: BusinessWeek is being sold by McGraw-Hill and its future is very uncertain. The business model for serious business journalism, especially in print, is under assault. The search for truth by professionals is very expensive, and isn't supported by current print or even online revenue trends. I think that eventually new business models will emerge that support serious journalism, but I don't see them yet. If you think of something that will save journalism, please send me a note.
…

Thanks to Steve for spending the time to do this interview. Many of the issues discussed here will obviously continue to have a big impact on businesses -- and the IT and data centers supporting them. One of the more interesting angles to think about is that decisions being made now, under the duress of a deep recession, could play out over a vastly different backdrop as economic conditions change. Cloud computing has the chance to help shrink the time it takes a business to respond as the economic climate shifts, but only if an organization's IT department has made significant progress toward adopting this new operational model. And, of course, cloud computing needs to do what it has promised for each individual customer.

In any case, I'm pretty sure that all of this will continue to give Steve and BusinessWeek plenty of things to cover for as long as they can navigate these same rough waters themselves.

You can find Steve Hamm's Globespotting blog here.

Bill Coleman: Cloud is still v1.0, but he has an idea or two for entrepreneurs

Silicon Valley seems to breed serial entrepreneurs. My former boss, Bill Coleman, is one of those people. He has put many years into high-tech ventures, including Sun, BEA, and now Cassatt, and has made a huge impression on the industry.

One of the questions I kept getting asked after CA picked up the Cassatt people and assets earlier this summer was "what's Bill Coleman going to do next?" So, I figured, why not ask him to do an interview for Data Center Dialog, and get him to answer that question directly. Bill, always generous with his time, agreed.

I didn't limit my questions to his current activities, though. Bill has run a billion-dollar company, been president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, is currently on the Palm and Symantec boards, and has shown up on the cover of Forbes. So there's a wealth of big-company experience there. He has also repeatedly put his reputation on the line in start-up ventures chasing big ideas, so I wanted to get his take on the economy as a whole and his advice for other entrepreneurs right now. And, while I was at it, I couldn't help but ask him a few things about what he might have done differently with Cassatt and where the cloud computing market is in general.

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: I saw the recent announcement about your joining the advisory board for 3Tera. What can you say about your work with 3Tera and your thoughts on their market and approach?

Bill Coleman: As you know, I believe that cloud computing will disintermediate all current models of computing over the next decade or so. A key element of this is to be able to migrate existing three-tier applications from their current model to a cloud model. 3Tera has developed a simple solution that can easily address a significant part of these environments. It is a natural complement and starting point to what we were doing with dynamic, policy-based cloud computing at Cassatt.

DCD: What else are you working on that you can talk about now?

Bill Coleman: I continue to explore new options in cloud computing with start-ups such as 3Tera and Replicus. I think the Replicus Cloudplane technology has the potential to re-invent storage by replacing our complex and expensive model with a simple model that uses replication, bandwidth, and commodity storage to replace all the technologies we use today. I am also spending a lot of time delving into the emerging dislocation that will take place as the smart energy grid is built out. Finally, I am trying to help the Committee to Establish the National Institute of Finance gain traction in Washington, DC.

DCD: Given how rapidly the cloud computing market is changing these days (recent examples: the Cassatt acquisition by CA, DataSynapse being acquired by TIBCO, and Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud announcement for starters), where do you think we are at the moment? How does the technology map to what customers need and want now?

Bill Coleman: Unfortunately, I think that we are still in the "1.0" version of simple, public cloud implementations. These will evolve to support more general applications with more sophisticated data models and interoperability with enterprises over the next five years. Where we are just beginning to see something real is in private clouds for the enterprise. Today, it is mostly a lot of market hype to sell low-end virtualization capabilities and "bulldoze and replace" sales. However, that will change. I do think that companies such as CA have the opportunity to catalyze that part of the market, which will ultimately commoditize the economics of enterprise IT.

DCD: So, you've been "retired" three times now: once after you left Sun, once after BEA, and now after Cassatt. Why is it so hard for you to stay retired?

Bill Coleman: Good question. The answer is that after trying to retire a couple of times before I know what makes me tick a little better than I used to. I am a self-admitted Type-A personality and an extrovert. What that means is that I get energy from stress and I lose energy when I don't have it. So, I am hooked on the adrenalin that comes with passionately pursuing a cause to "change the world" in some small way. For me that has always been in business, so I will be back in the saddle pretty soon.

DCD: I've heard you talk over the years about the "epiphanies" you've had that led to the founding of BEA and then Cassatt. Have you had any epiphanies about what to focus on next?

Bill Coleman: Well, mostly they look like epiphanies in the rear view mirror, but I have a couple of ideas that seem to be coming together. Stay tuned!

DCD: How do you judge whether a market is worth the time, effort, and resources necessary to build a company around and to go after?

Bill Coleman: For me, it is about identifying a market dislocation that is about to begin that can be catalyzed with a technical solution. It has to be something that will present the opportunity for a new entrant (large or small) to undermine the incumbents with a value proposition that brings customers enough value to justify their switching costs. Finally, it has to be something that I can build passion about.

DCD: What do you think Cassatt got right – and what do you think it got wrong?

Bill Coleman: We really got the product right. The "Skynet" version that would have shipped this year was the version 3.0 implementation of cloud -- totally general, global, and a true utility supporting any policy in any heterogeneous environment and spanning clouds arbitrarily. We had two problems: (1) timing. We were too early. Enterprises are not ready for the full cloud model yet. They are still playing with the first baby steps (e.g. virtualization and cloud 1.0 -- Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service); and (2) the way enterprises run their IT infrastructure. The market has become conservative when it comes to taking risk on start-ups with their mission-critical systems. They are still having difficulties even moving VMware into their mission-critical applications.

DCD: What would you do differently if you were starting Cassatt over right now?

Bill Coleman: Well, enterprise infrastructure software is a large-company game now, except for incremental capabilities designed to get enough traction to be bought by the big guys. These companies are the big guys' innovation laboratory. Today I would focus on vertical market dislocations like clean tech or health care. Or I would focus on Web 3.0 capabilities that bring monetization to social networking. Or on a big-play, leveraged buyout of assets to attack the cloud services market for enterprise-scale private-to-public cloud migrations.

DCD: We're starting to hear some positive signs on the general economy. Where do you think the U.S. economy is right now? Is Silicon Valley poised to play a leading role in the recovery or not -- and has that changed since the beginning of the year?

Bill Coleman: I am not an economist, but my gut is that we are at or near the bottom. That said, I think jobs will continue to be lost for another year or two and the economy will take at least five years to climb back to the levels we were at in 2007. I think Silicon Valley will be part of the new economic growth particularly in clean tech, bio and nanotech, and cloud computing. However, I am very concerned that the U.S. is rapidly becoming less and less competitive internationally because of the continued deterioration in education. And I'm worried about the regulatory drift making it harder to attract the best and brightest from the rest of the world and making it harder for a start-up to succeed. Finally, I fear that the negative drift in our tax structure and our trade policies are discouraging new business growth in this country relative to our competitors in Europe and Asia.

DCD: Based upon your experiences and your view of how the economy is faring right now, what advice do you have for the management teams and investors that are working on start-ups right now?

Bill Coleman: Focus on dislocations. Find and build great teams who have a maniacal focus on customer value. This has not changed. What has changed are areas of focus and the ability to monetize their investments. I don't think that the opportunities in traditional computer or communications software and hardware will be as productive going forward, we are now moving toward commoditization of those technologies. The investments there will be mostly incremental capabilities that will end in acquisition, if successful. The areas I see of most interest in technology are what this commoditization will enable: the Web 3.0 "pull" economy, commoditization and consolidation of all ICT services, biotech, nanotech, and the application of IT to transform service delivery in areas such as energy, health care, and -- ultimately -- education.
...

Thanks for the chat, Bill. I, along with many others, will indeed be staying tuned.

U.S. CTO Chopra: 'What can we deliver in 90 days?'

For the United States' Chief Technology Officer, the first visit to Silicon Valley is probably a bit like a new Secretary of State's first visit to Russia, China, or the E.U. All eyes are on you (is he a partner? adversary?), sizing you up, wondering who you really are and what change you can possibly bring.

For Aneesh Chopra, who took on the role of U.S. CTO in May, the challenge is even bigger: he's the first-ever U.S. CTO in history, with the opportunity to make or break the role. I attended the Churchill Club event Aug. 4 that was part of his first Bay Area trip to get a sense for what he intends to do.

If this quick snapshot is an indication, he’s a refreshingly charismatic personality, with little interest in waiting for the wheels of government to gradually spin through their normal machinations to deliver some eventual results (maybe). He talked innovation. He talked action. He talked about using quick, simple approaches to gnarly topics like visibility into what the government actually does with its $74 billion IT budget.

And, most appealing to many in the audience: he talked about doing it soon. Repeatedly during the presentation he highlighted not only an interest in doing things right for the long term, but in making tangible progress now. He kept coming back to this directive: "What can we deliver in 90 days to show progress? What can we do in the here and now?"

In fact, I think there's a broader lesson in his remarks for anyone (IT ops folks, especially) who has to manage major infrastructure and technology changes in pretty conservative, slow-moving environments. His approach is a good one: have big goals, but make sure you can show short-term progress. And, then, of course, be a phenomenal communicator and sell that vision, baby.

IT is a driver in this White House

The goals he outlined were no big revelation. He talked about infrastructure (like broadband), R&D collaboration, and educating a 21st Century workforce. He talked health IT, smart grid & energy independence, and education technology. He talked government transparency and consistent federal IT platforms. “In public policy, we eat our own proverbial dog food,” Chopra noted. All fine, but it's his more dynamic approach that's really the thing worth noting.

One of the amusing slides Chopra showed was of President Obama clicking around on a Web page, checking out one of his administration's first IT deliverables -- a site about where IT spend goes. "That’s my boss," Chopra noted with understated amusement. It was good for a chuckle, but there are two good things about that picture: the hands-on approach that Obama himself and his administration are taking in pushing technology to fill a role in government it has really never been very successful at: transparency & access. Second, because technology seems to be at the center of a lot of Obama's management approach, it's no longer a siloed discipline inside the government, but instead is being used to drive everything else.

This is obviously trickling down in many of the other remarks Chopra made:

It needs to be easy

Our personal embrace of the "digital life," said Chopra, "has not translated to global competitiveness and our public policy. It should be just as easy to get things going in government as in your personal life with things like Facebook or Twitter," said Chopra.

Of course, he admitted, it's "not the easiest thing to bring those innovations to the federal government." So the question is how.

There's simple stuff we can do

In answering questions about how to help use technology to enable higher education, Chopra emphasized a practical, get-something-out-the-door approach he underscored a number of times. "There's some simple stuff we can do," he said, with no extra money, no new laws required. Chopra told a couple stories of his time working as CTO for Virginia, including one in which technology approaches like a wiki (and asking for free contributed content from experts) helped new physics textbook content go from idea, to creation, to school district availability in less than a year -- 3 years faster than business as usual. (Thanks to @herrod for the link.)

"We need to harvest this same spirit," said Chopra.

Entrepreneurs, Chopra said, can help lower costs for public services with innovative ideas, but not alone. And also not by getting some huge government grants. Instead Chopra talked up collaboration. We may develop innovative ideas "though government contracts, but more often than not, you'll do it with each other." (He called this the "spirit of the commonwealth," being from Virginia and all.)

Listen, listen, listen

Chopra repeated the often-lamented fact that IT and business are often on completely different pages. It's like "IT people speak French and business people speak English," he said. Why? "In large part [this is] because we don't listen very well. We must listen, listen, listen for customer needs."

When taking action, talk about verbs, not nouns

After listening, and then trying to make fixes, Chopra showed a bias toward rethinking what should get done, rather than just making a list of what to buy. In figuring out how to make progress on using IT to assist with education, Chopra said, "there are lots of debates about the nouns -- what we should be buying for education." But, he said, "in the short term, the focus needs to be on the verbs" -- what actions are actually being taken.

A Silicon Valley honeymoon?

Chopra seemed to get a pretty good reception from the audience at the event and in comments from people using Twitter to report on his presentation (I saw good tweets from @timoreilly, @Jakewk, @DavidHurwitz, @mmasnick and others at #churchillclub and #aneeshchopra for starters). Backlash, of course, is probably already underway, but I think most of this should play well with the IT industry and IT folks in general. Aneesh Chopra has a big battleship to turn. If he can show the short-term, entrepreneurial progress he advocates, though, he's going to have a lot of folks clamoring to help turn it.

More background on Aneesh Chopra

TechCrunch did a good summary of the August 4 Churchill event here. Also, take a look at Tim O’Reilly's glowing assessment of Chopra just after his appointment was announced. The Wall Street Journal also included industry reaction to his appointment in this piece, also from April.

Update: "My very dear friend" Ashlee Vance ran a good overview of the event in his New York Times blog. Chris Preimesberger of eWeek also wrote up the event.

Will cloud computing be the innovation from this downturn?

Entrepreneur Magazine recently ran a list of significant innovations that appeared during previous times of economic duress.

From the Great Depression came Scotch tape. Miracle Whip. Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup. The fluorescent light bulb. From the stagflation/oil crisis/Vietnam era, the scanable supermarket bar code. From the dot-com bust and 9/11, the iPod and the Blackberry.

It's a cool list that provides you exactly that warm, fuzzy glimmer of hope that watching the stock ticker and the news certainly does not right now. Hey, it says, even if things look pretty grim at the moment, someone somewhere has just had his or her aha! moment. Don't worry, he or she is frantically working on something that we won't be able to live without in a decade or so. Hopefully, they can get financing. (Note to financing types: say yes, it'll be worth it.)

So what will be the great contribution to society during this particularly nasty downturn? More specifically, will cloud computing be one of the great innovations that comes out of the Great Recession?

I discussed that possibility in a post a few weeks back, just prior to a Churchill Club event about how Silicon Valley itself can survive this recession. In addition to the reasons I posted about why cloud computing may (or may not) be what comes out of this mess, I thought I'd add a few more points on the topic.

Jason Clarke and James Walker of Bitemarks quoted Cassatt CEO Bill Coleman at the Churchill Club event with some advice for start-ups (cloud or otherwise). "Startups need to learn to monetize their offerings quickly or risk going out of business. ...Coleman states we are at the next major inflection point in the evolution of the technology market." The invent-boom-bust-build-out cycle that Bill has seen over his career in high tech certainly points the way to a lot of opportunity atop the cloud computing wave. (If, of course, clouds have waves. Well, you understand.) But, your business has to deliver value to your customers while building a coherent business model for yourself.

Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, formerly with the Financial Times, covered several intriguing, related topics with Bill Coleman recently. The first part of that interview is available here.

One of the other tidbits the Bitemarks guys pulled out of Bill's Churchill Club comments was this: "As for those of us who are working through our first recession, it's worth remembering -- as Coleman stated -- you learn far more during a downturn that you do at any other time."

Entrepreneur Magazine's columnist Brad Sugars agrees. Not only is there a lot to be learned now, he gives 10 good reasons to start your business now, because of the downturn. He lists a bunch of reasons why, from the fact that everything is cheaper now, to better availability of good people, to the fact that the media coverage is a lot easier -- the media loves things that buck the trend, you see.

In any case, no matter if you subscribe to any of these beliefs or not, it'll be interesting to watch this cycle and even more interesting to participate in it. That's certainly why I and my other industry colleagues are here putting the effort into cloud computing and the big changes in IT operations it enables.

And, let's hope that in terms of innovations that come in down economic cycles, cloud computing is more like the transistor radio. Or the pace maker. (Both from the Eisenhower recessions.)

But, please, let it be nothing like the hula hoop.

Who will save us now? Not Silicon Valley, apparently, but optimism lingers

So apparently new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is not the superhero the stock market was expecting to rescue us all, banks included, from an economy in a downward spiral. At least, that's the message that the markets telegraphed (broadcast? texted?) following the introduction of the Obama administration's government bank bailout plan, part deux, earlier this week.

Uh oh. Now what? We'll have to look elsewhere for our savior.

Hey, how about Silicon Valley?

The credentials are certainly here. Silicon Valley was a contributor to a good deal of economic growth in times past: microchips in the ‘70s, PCs in the ‘80s, all things Web since then. The innovation engine of Silicon Valley even managed to right itself after that whole dot com bubble fiasco earlier this century.

So, how about this time around? The global economy certainly could use the help. And, aren't we currently in the midst of inventing and working the kinks out of, among other things, this cloud computing thing that should go great in leaner times: a new way to do IT that delivers only the computing power you need without all that capital outlay. (For more on cloud computing in this economy, you can see what the 451 Group, IDC's Al Gillen, and cloud journalist Derrick Harris have to say.) Sounds ideal, right?

Not likely, say a few folks who’ve watched this kind of thing before.

The recession may have arrived too early for cloud computing to help

According to Gartner analyst Mark Raskino, the Great Recession may have arrived just a little too early for cloud computing to have a role in helping us get out of it. "…[C]ompanies looking for a significant new round of IT cost cuts are having to tackle the challenge creatively," Mark wrote in his blog recently. "That makes many of them very interested in cloud ideas. …The problem is that the cloud isn't ready for corporate prime time. …[Vendors] are doing it as fast as they can -- but a lot if it just isn't ready for the mainstream, moderately risk averse centre of the market. Which is a shame." Understatement alert.

Looking beyond just the realm of cloud computing, Fortune's Jessi Hempel chronicled Silicon Valley’s growth-accelerating history in a recent article, and came to a similar conclusion: "Alas, economists and executives believe that this time tech won't lead the country out of its slump."

Deeper problems with Silicon Valley?

Part of the issue is the near-complete evaporation of money that can be borrowed, the fuel for a lot of the innovation in Silicon Valley. That piece of this puzzle wasn't working against us after the dot com bubble burst. It certainly is working against us now. Without fuel and no way off the highway (as in, no IPOs), the trip of an innovative start-up is a lot rougher right now. Even so, some companies (like business-model challenged Twitter) are still able to attract new funding.

Other commentators, like a few highlighted in the December Steve Hamm cover story for BusinessWeek (which I don't think made him too popular with entrepreneurs or even his own staffers in the Valley), question Silicon Valley's innovation more fundamentally, citing "short-term thinking" and "risk-aversion." He quoted Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, saying that today's start-ups "give us refinements, not breakthroughs." The man who said "only the paranoid survive" now says Silicon Valley doesn't worry enough (unless they're talking about an exit strategy).

Short-term pessimism, but still long-term optimism

Hamm and others acknowledge ups and downs in innovation in the Valley. The region has been one of the greatest examples of creative destruction (whereas Detroit, as discussed on Twitter recently by James Governor, Tim O’Reilly, and others: not so much).

Another business press editor that I had lunch with this week had a couple interesting comments on this whole situation. First off, the situation is indeed dire. "This is the kind of downturn where we come out different as a society," he said. But from that comes good news for Silicon Valley: "Every downturn forces a tech change. This is good news for people in cloud."

So back to the cloud computing move as a potential economic catalyst, then. Even Mark Raskino at Gartner speculates that the current timing misalignment between what cloud computing can do and what the economy needs now (two items that he described as “annoyingly adrift” of each other) might just accelerate the whole market evolution out of necessity.

Bill Coleman, our CEO here at Cassatt, has seen a downturn or two in his career at BEA, Sun, and a couple other places. He (quoted in the Fortune article I mentioned above) is somewhat pessimistic about Silicon Valley's ability to help launch the recovery in the short term, but reiterates his long-term belief that this place understands how to invent things -- and reinvent itself. "I have every confidence in the Valley," he says.

"The very, very early adopters, I believe, are the people who use a downturn to re-engineer themselves," Bill told Quentin Hardy of Forbes in a video interview posted this week. He rattled off Intel, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, and FedEx as examples of companies who have successfully increased investment during previous economic slides, and have been rewarded for it. Investing while everyone else is running for cover means "you get to buy everything at a discount," Bill said. (More tidbits from Bill on managing a business through a downturn turn up here in Forbes.com as well.)

And as for Silicon Valley, specifically? The Fortune article points out that even in economic depths of late 2001, a couple of guys were already working on a start-up to try to make money on Web searches, creating a company in the process, whose name is now no longer a noun, but a verb. Says Jessi, "the moment that conventional wisdom suggests that innovation is dead is probably the perfect time to go peeking inside Palo Alto garages again."

If you're interested in jumping into the discussion about Silicon Valley's reaction to the recession, the Churchill Club is sponsoring a panel at the Stanford Law School on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009, featuring Lisa Lambert of Intel Capital, Bill Coleman from Cassatt, and Patricia Sueltz of LogLogic. Joseph Grundfest, co-director of the Rock Center on Corporate Governance and former commissioner of the SEC, is moderating.