Reaction: The Pace of Innovation
Dave Ward has an excellent article over at the Cisco blog on the three year journey since he started down the path of trying to work the standards landscape (called SDOs) to improve the many ways in which these organizations are broken. Specifically, he has been trying to connect the open source and open standards communities better—a path I heartily endorse, as I have been intentionally trying to work in both communities in parallel over the last several years, and find places where I can bring them together.
While the entire blog is worth reading, there are two lines I think need some further thought. The first of this is a bit of a scold, so be prepared to have your knuckles rapped.
My real bottom line here is that innovators can’t go faster than their customers and customers can’t go faster than their own understanding of the technology and integration, deployment and operational considerations.
Precisely. Maybe this is just an old man talking, but I sometimes want to scold the networking industry on this very point. We fuss about innovation, but innovation requires customers who understand the technology—and the networking world has largely become a broad set of meta-engineers, Continue reading
Versa hires SVP of Sales; Former Dell exec joins NetApp; Aryaka snags two from Big Switch.
The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully understanding them. Factors contributing to rising obesity levels, for example, include transportation systems and infrastructure, media, convenience foods, changing social norms, human biology and psychological factors. Designing an aircraft carrier, to take another example, requires knowledge of nuclear engineering, naval architecture, metallurgy, hydrodynamics, […]