Episode 90: These strategies work really well except for when they’re totally fucked

While it's unknown how much time you should let your kids play Minecraft, it's equally unclear at the moment who'll win the second cloud wars. Between Google, Azure, AWS, and all the others, how companies differentiate themselves and what customers will buy on isn't sorted just yet. We discuss Google Next, Pivotal's momentum announcement, and serious theories for Okta IPO'ing.

Pardon the shoddily formatted show notes below, Coté was in a hurry to get to Spring Break.

Google NEXT

• Competing on features? Or just pricing and brand? The "complete solution."
• Richard summarizes announcements
• More from Google...
  • Cheaper, faster, more data centers
  • Google Cloud Dataprep for cleaning up data for ingestion
• Cloud Opinion's Keynote Day 1
  • "Differentiation from other cloud providers — "we are Google, damn it" isn't working too well"
• Hangouts to take on Slack? This space is getting crowded
• Customers: Snapchat, Evernote, Disney, Coca Cola, Home Depot, Whirlpool.
• Hosted container builder service
• Pivotal was the Google partner of the year!

Mid-roll

• Coté at a Meetup next Tuesday, March 21st, in DFW. "Digital transformation in the streets." Hopefully some new material from my ImpossibleDevOps writing.
• Coté: CF Summit - June 13 to 15th, 2017.
  • 20% off registration code: cfsv17cote
• Matt:
  • DevOps Melbourne March 28th Talking Compliance as Code
  • DevOps Days Tokyo April 25th
  • Chef Meetup - Singapore April 29th
  • ChefConf May 22-24 ChefConf 2017 Teaser, early-bird pricing through March 31st

Pivotal: we make money, cause we have paying customers

• "over $270 million in bookings in one year"
• Previous years:
  • 2015: In 2015Q3 "Pivotal Cloud Foundry has crossed $100 million in annual bookings run-rate"
  • 2014: "In less than a year, Pivotal Cloud Foundry has booked ~$40 million in software sales"
• In addition to customers mentioned there, see some more testimonials in John Allwright's post.

Okta files to go public

• S1 filed.
• I don't get it. This is going to be a disaster.
• Whatever the fantasy running SFDC and MSFT running identity.

BONUS LINKS! Five AI Startup Predictions for 2017

• Link
• "Pure hype trends will reveal themselves to have no fundamentals behind them" <- GOLD
• Bots go bust
• Deep learning goes commodity
• AI is cleantech 2.0 for VCs
• MLaaS dies a second death
• Full stack vertical AI startups actually work
• Facebook Bots are failing.

Enterprise product management

• The Enterprise Ready SaaS Feature Guides
• Coté summarizes Brandon's rant.

USAF locks in with Oracle

• "consolidates the 745,768 Oracle licenses already in use"
• $293,247,466 with Mythics, Inc.

US Immigration's "Code Test"?

• I'd fail this.

Recommendations

• Coté: The Art of Business Value - I haven't even finished this yet and it's already fantastic.
  • Also, I added most all of the DrunkAndRetired.com Podcast to archive.org. As Matt Ray used to say it's "better than half the stuff out there."
  • Also: Patriot in Amazon Video.
• Brandon:
  • Missing Richard Simmons podcast.
• Matt:
  • Tripit Pro's Seat Tracker
  • While reading James Clear's post on Reading Comprehension Strategies he linked to his Book Summaries which are amazing good. I really like this idea, have to try to implement it for myself
  • Hypnotic video of global earthquake data