Impact of Cloud Computing

I have a theory that Cloud Computing is the biggest thing EVER happened to humans: bigger than invention of fire, wheel, agriculture, automobiles, and even Internet. When I mentioned this to a friend a couple of years back, he thought I am crazy and he didn't see any obvious connection between what was happening in IT (webex, salesforce etc.) to human evolution.

Crazy as it may sound, I feel cloud computing has all the hallmarks of science-fiction, and will accelerate human evolution like no other technology ever did before.

By Cloud Computing, I mean ubiquitous utility computing - ability for anyone in the world to utilize huge amounts of computing power at any point in time at prices that are much cheaper (than what they are right now) - very similar to voice-calls offered by the current telecommunication industry.

While I am not an anthropologist, I believe technology has a strong influence on how we evolved and it is what made us a dominant species on earth.

• Use of fire - helped us move to colder regions, cook food, and protect from other animals. There is a new theory that cooking food is one of the factors that contributed to increased human brain size (cooked food provides more calories than raw food, and requires fewer calories to digest - coupled with the fact that brain uses the maximum number of calories).
• Use of tools - helped us hunt better, reach longer distances, and protect better from other animals (a knife cuts much better, spear/arrows help kill from longer distances).
• Domestication of animals - helped us with improved food supply (hunt bigger animals, provide meat, milk, transportation etc.). It is no wonder one of the current metrics for energy is horse-power.
• Advent of Agriculture - helped us get predictable source of energy, forced humans to form larger groups and work towards the collective, and resulted in quite a number of other changes (development of larger villages & towns, languages, religions, culture & tradition, social hierarchy, governments, specialization of trade, development of art, science  etc.).
• Use of coal, fossil fuels & electricity - resulted in industrial revolution, and all the good things we see in  the world today including light-bulbs, refrigerators, heating & cooling, automobiles, airplanes, ships, telecommunications, industrial machinery, and all the other good stuff.

While I don't have the numbers for it, I am sure each of the above changes brought about increased human activity (population) & domination to where we are now.

At a fundamental level, I believe there are 2 things that are required for any entity to survive:

• Energy required for self preservation (food & shelter, procreation, taking care of offspring)
• Knowledge required for self preservation (acclimatization, where & how to get the above energy)

We have done well in one area so far i.e. finding new sources of energy (most of the technologies mentioned above: fire, tools, domestication, agriculture, fossil-fuels etc.), but not as great in the second area (knowledge).

The biggest source of knowledge is our genes - which supposedly haven't undergone radical changes over a long period of time. The next source of knowledge comes from our ability to communicate  & teach (through language & writing and recently printing-press, telecom & world-wide-web).

I believe that cloud computing enables us to accumulate, store & retrieve enormous amounts of knowledge, and thus provides a big boost to the second area (i.e. new sources of knowledge).

As humans, our ability to synthesize large amounts of data/information, store the knowledge and retrieve this when required  is very limited - out of the hundreds of thousands of people we encounter - in airports, shopping malls, conferences, train-stations, movies, TV-series; we can barely remember 1000 faces, and a cheap laptop computer these days can do a much better job than that.

We know we don't know the answers for lot of things happening around us. We don't know how human bodies work, we are still trying to understand the basic structure of our genes, we don't know how our brains work, there are thousands of diseases that we weren't able to find cure for. We still don't know all that is happening on our planet: we can't predict the weather, earth-quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes & volcanic eruptions; we still don't know all that is happening under the ocean floor, we still don't know what is happening under the earth's crust. We still haven't explored our planetary system, our galaxy and the vast universe that we are part of. And we don't know what we don't know.

I believe Cloud Computing will provide the economics required to create huge compute facilities - that will enable us in the end - to understand better about our biology, our planet, and the universe; and in the process possibly create new/better energy resources (which in turn can help the pace of evolution). A car gives us a 200 horse-power (or 200 horses at our disposal) - energy that we can use to go wherever we want; think about cloud giving each of us 200 additional human brains - knowledge that we can use to understand everything better and to make better decisions. I am sure we will have more Einsteins going forward.

I believe - Cloud Computing will positively impact every aspect of how we live: enable governments to do better centralized planning (e.g. building cities without traffic jams), corporations to improve productivity, common people to improve their health (and other aspects of their standard of living) etc.

Another industry similar to Cloud Computing in its evolutionary impact (on a smaller scale) is Telecommunications. While telecom did have a profound impact on how we live our lives (think what will happen if all the radios/TVs/mobile-phones/ATMs/POS-counters in the world suddenly stop working); it took more than 100 years to get to where we are now. Most of these early telcoms are state-run or state-sanctioned monopolies, operating in strong regulatory environments with very little incentive for innovation; and that slowed the pace of innovation and its impact on humans.

Each one of us should hope/pray that Cloud Computing will not take the same route taken by the telecom firms - we should hope this will turn out to a vibrant industry with lot of competitors - innovating in ways to bring cloud computing to everybody in the world.

Immortal Burgers

Came across this article on the web: http://www.naturalnews.com/030074_Happy_Meal_decompose.html, and watched the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYyDXH1amic, and thought I should blog about it.

I am really glad I read the article, and I really hope more people watch the video. The article is very well-written, and I am sure the mainstream media would not have published it in its current form. We have to thank the "democracy of publishing" enabled by the world-wide-web and the social media tools.

There are multiple worrisome points from the article:

• Some of the fast-food chains are selling hamburgers that don't decompose over long periods (15 years). Even micro-organisms like bacteria/fungus/mold/yeast etc. don't want to touch these burgers for some reason  - and the conclusion by the author is - that it is not food (and that these are laced with chemicals, sodium & pesticides)
• Not clear how the government approved the food in spite of this funny feature. A huge number of Americans (25%) eat at fast-food restaurants every day, and this can be a major public-health issue (or even worse a national security issue as well)
• This phenomenon was observed by a consumer in 1989, but none of the mainstream media  published  this information till now (in-spite of the shock-value of the news). Fast-food restaurants spend lot of money on advertising (tens of billions every year), and possible this has something to do with it.
• The corporation in question here is McDonalds - one of the top brands in the world. You would imagine good brand-image brings about some social responsibility (even for marketing sake), but that doesn't seem to be the case here. More worrisome is how most of their marketing is done to entice children.

While the relationship between edible/healthy food and its decomposition-characteristics is not very clear to me, it definitely goes against my experience with food thus far, and thus worries me a bit. I most probably will stop my urge to visit a fast-food restaurant in the near future.

I believed that corporations are the solution for my anti-Malthusian theory (food production overtaking human population growth), but am not so sure any more. Hopefully, consumer activism - more than government regulation - will help reduce the dangers posed by these industries.

Data sources, persuasion & marketing

Some years back, during a discussion at a small gathering at a friend's house - I argued that nature has a way of controlling things, and that we can't fool nature (e.g: if humans find a way to live longer/forever, something to the opposite effect will happen - reduced human fertility rates, natural calamities, resource depletion etc. - and that nature has a way to self-regulate). The quotation "we can't fool nature" drew some derision from one guy, and I was mocked about my qualifications to make the statement. To gain some credence, I attributed the quote to a British philosopher (I don't know if he did, but thought he must have at some point :)). There was a slight pause, and the person came around - and said the quote is very profound, and he is sold on the idea.

This incident happened a long time back, and it did surprise me at the time. I used to think - the strength of the argument is more important than who makes the argument, but I learnt a great deal from my experiences over time. Persuasive tactics (using our inherent biases) can easily steer us away from rational thinking, and in the process - drive us to take irrational decisions.

For example - when a well-known analyst/researcher/industry-group publishes/takes a position on a certain issue, the argument gains a lot of credibility, and the general public are easily persuaded to migrate towards the argument, and make it their own. We believed that the earth was flat and that we are the center of the universe for a long-time, and even persecuted people who said otherwise. In the end, we came to know the truth because of some seriously adventurous folks who were willing to question the authority. 

And for marketers, this piece of social psychology is of great help. Next time you have to sell a product/service, buy the most credible analyst/researcher/industry-group relevant to that product, and get their endorsement - and people will start buying.

I feel that - lot of us are victims of this practice (bought a particular argument/product because of the credibility of the source and got burnt) at some point or the other. And yet, we seem to have an innate ability to fall for the same trap again and again. 

• We all know that we need to buy the soaring internet stocks to make money during the dotcom bubble - these dotcomers are going to revolutionize the world, and make trillions of dollars (thanks to the marketing dollars spent by dotcom companies and the credibility of the market research firms like Gartner, IDC etc. - everybody believed this). The most rational of the human institutions - equity-markets - failed to check the simple facts, and in the process - lot of ordinary people lost their money.
• During this time (dotcom bubble), every telecom company knew that they need to lay fiber to meet the exponential growth in internet traffic, and they needed to move faster than their competition (CEOs at these companies are reading the same news and analyst reports that we - ordinary folks - were reading). They borrowed huge sums to create new telecom infrastructure, and went bankrupt in the process. Ten years after the bust, only a small fraction of this laid-out fiber is used.
• We all know how real-estate prices are going to hit the roof, and why we should buy a house right away in-spite of the insane prices (thanks to the persuasive real-estate industry, and the bankers). Each one of us - including the revered Alan Greenspan - with his army of economists, all his econometric-simulations - fell for this, and did very little to regulate the market. We lost trillions of dollars, and lot of ordinary people lost their life-savings, and jobs.
• We all knew how well our financial institutions are run, their risk-management experts, their ingenious ways of making money, and nobody can match these guys in brain-power (great brand-building by the financial institutions). Again, every one of us were sold on the idea including the Fed and the equity markets, and nothing was done here resulting in the recent major financial crisis - only matched by the great depression.
• We all know that the Fed-stimulus money is going to the poor citizens out there who lost their jobs (thanks to Henry Paulson), and it is so urgent that we need to write a check right away without going to Congress. Now, we know where it actually went.

In all the above cases, majority of the public believed in the data pushed out by a few, and never questioned the methodology or the sources. Even the most rational decision-makers (equity markets, Fed, CEOs) followed the crowd, and never questioned the data. The press which is supposed to conduct due-diligence to bring out the facts failed miserably. In each of the above cases, the press/analysts published articles/reviews that only exacerbated the situation.

I still remember the analyst recommendations about the impending world-transformation by dotcom companies, the huge number of newspaper articles on why real-estate market has to go up, and regulators gloating about how ingenious our financial institutions are. This could have pushed the skeptical minority to follow the gullible majority (which analyst could write negative information about the dotcoms in 1999?, or go against Greenspan and talk about impending real-estate bubble).

I feel understanding the study methodology, strength of the argument, and the incentives of the research team is as important than the data itself. Also, I feel relying too much on the credibility/branding/authority of the source is a big mistake.

Before using a piece of published data by a credible source, you should make sure

• to understand the incentives and the motivations of the data publisher
• to spend sometime understanding the study methodology & the assumptions made
• to have some skeptics on your team (in addition the yes-boss types), and let them ask questions
• factor in the variability of data when working on your plans (what-if scenario analysis).

Corporations, their influence and government regulation

Had a chat with a good friend recently about free enterprise and government regulation, and I thought I should share my thoughts on this topic.

I believe that corporations brought about lots of changes in the way we live, play, learn & work (and quite a number of other verbs) over the past 400 years.

• We go to work in a car/train/bus produced by one of the half-dozen or so corporations
• Most of us work for corporations (after government, aren't corporations the largest employers?)
• We listen/read/watch news/movies/ broad-casted by corporations
• We communicate using phone-calls/sms/internet-chat using phones/laptops produced by corporations
• the water we drink, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the medicines we take, the energy we consume and the list goes on....

Whether we like it or not, corporations are playing a major role in our everyday lives - wherever you live in the world.

It is also possible, human evolution got a big boost by these corporations. First it is the monarchies that set the pace of evolution, then it is the religion, and now it is the commerce (or corporations) that is ruling the world. 

• Who could motivate millions of people to work hard toward a common cause under their own free will? Religion and Monarchies provided the impetus for our ancient cousins, but neither could match the motivation supplied by the current day corporations. Unlike their ancient brothern, the current day corporations invest huge amounts of money & time to figure out what motivates the minions without coercion (salary, power, title, bonus, stock, awards, travel, houses, cars, gym, parties, sense of empowerment, self-actualization and what not - talk to your HR if you are in doubt).
• Who is willing to sell products and transfer technology without any national/ethnic/religious boundaries? Advances made by governments are never shared with other nations (competitive advantage in cases of war), while everything is for sale for a price when corporations are involved. Profit maximization motive makes sure that corporations engage in cross-border commerce. I think this global, multi-national aspect of the corporations can be the biggest factor for speedier evolution:
• it made transfer of all kinds of technology to remotest parts of the world possible
• it brought the entire world under one umbrella - think about economies of scale & efficiencies in everything that we do
• in the end, it is possible corporations hold the key for peace between religions/nations/ethnicities - because war is not good for commerce
• Who could make more efficient resource utilization than corporations? Maximizing stock-holder value combined with the invisible hand of Adam Smith - makes sure that corporations and thus societies employ the most efficient utilization of the factors of production.
• per-capita of US is around $45K ($14trillion/330million), per-capita of India $1K ($1.2T/1.2B)
• per-capita of a Microsoft Employee is around $600K ($60B/100K) 
• This means - from a productivity stand-point - each Microsoft employee ~ 13 US Citizens or 600 Indian Citizens (I am comparing GDP to corporate revenues here - possible gross-profit is a more accurate comparison - in which case Microsoft per-capita is down to $500K)
• Think about moving the CEO of Microsoft to India, give him absolute power and ask him to run it like Microsoft (with slightly different metrics) for 10 years - I am sure India would be a much different country (I am not advocating that CEOs will be good at public policy, but I am assuming they are good at placing the right incentive structure in place and in improving organizational efficiencies)

In lots of ways, each one of us - is much better off because of the corporations than without them.We are living much longer (pharmaceutical, food, clothing, housing & security industries), we are more connected (telecommunications), we can visit more places (airlines, automobile & hospitality industries), we know more about each other and about the world (telecom/internet, media & news industries), we are enjoying more (media & entertainment industries) than our brothers who lived on this earth only 100 years back.

If somebody asked you to build your own car/refrigerator/house from scratch with absolutely no help from anybody (imagine Will Smith in "I am Legend"), I would doubt if you can build any of these in your life-time.

So what is the problem? In spite of all these advantages, there are problems posed by some of the corporations. Some of these corporations are becoming too big for our own good ("market failure") with a possibility of causing serious damage to our way of living, and for our future generations. Like what was said of the monarchs of the ancient times - absolute power corrupts absolutely; in the case of corporations: absolute stock-holder value maximization corrupts absolutely.

There are quite a number of instances about the unethical excesses of corporations for profit maximization at the cost of their employees, their stake-holders, and their neighborhoods - from the early days of corporations    (1600s: British East India Company, Virginia Company) to the recent financial crisis (Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, CitiBank, Goldman Sachs etc.).

There are instances where corporations are involved in human-right violations, coercion of the work-force, violating labor laws, inhuman working conditions to regime changes, supporting brutal regimes, controlling corrupt governments, enacting favorable laws,  to polluting rivers, dumping industrial waste, endangering the ecosystem, exposing populations to dangerous chemicals, to collusion, anti-competitive practices, tax-avoidance, and other corrupt practices.

I have quite a number of examples to cite here - showcasing how corporate negligence effected/killed thousands of people, how corrupt governments were bribed to let the perpetrators go scott-free etc..
But the most important debate should be on how we can regulate these corporations, and to avoid market failures - whether it be through government controls, or social activism, or removing informational advantages or through putting the right incentive structure in place.

I think I should leave this to my next blog topic.

Android & Google Maps

Came across this announcement about Google Maps on Android:
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/10/announcing-google-maps-navigation-for.html

I thought this is really cool given it is bringing the power of Cloud Computing to everybody's palm. Most important of all, this is free to the end consumer. I really hope the service works, and hope Google invests enough money to make it available to everybody in the world.

I have a Garmin in my car, but I always felt Google Maps are much better:

• Information is more accurate and up-to-date (Garmin/Navteq has 1000 employees to collect map data, Google has millions - advantage of crowd-sourcing)
• User-interface (Garmin is pretty bad here - no word-completions, no good search interface)
• Computing power (You can never beat the cloud - it takes 5 minutes to zoom the picture on Garmin)
• Cost - I paid $400 for my Garmin, have to update the data every year and more if I want POI data

If I can get more accurate information for free - I don't see a reason why I should buy another GPS device. Effectively Google is killing the entire auto/mobile GPS industry (>$10billion?) with this one announcement. Garmin makes 70% of its revenues from auto segment - and I am sure it will see some rapid declines there. You should feel for Nokia - it bought Navteq for $8billion in 2007 (on a company that was making ~$500 mil in annual revenues) - I can bet Navteq will be worth lot less than $8B in the coming years.

Overall, I think this is a significant event to the mobile industry, and very good for the world -  it redefines mobility and it will have a similar effect that email had during the 1990s. It would have taken decades for this democratization of location data - if we left it to the current GPS vendors.

This service can be a very good move from Google's point of view:

• More android based devices in the market, and more users for Google Maps
• Better map accuracy (crowd sourcing) than competing vendors
• More ad-revenues for Google (they now know where you are in addition to what you think)
• More cloud-based services for the mobile users from Google (economies of scale & scope for Google)

Of course, I am discounting the fact that Google will become the super cop - and will know every bit about you: what you think (your search terms), all your favorite locations (including where your friends live), all the businesses you visit etc. But again, most telecom companies already track lot more information about you (how much time are you on phone/online/watching-TV/resting, which urls you visit, whom do you call & with what frequency, who are your friends etc.), but never give you anything for free in return. So - not much to complain there.

On a philosophical note, it makes you wonder what will happen to humans in another 100 years: everybody follows directions from one of these GPS clouds, and there is a possibility we completely lose our map reading skills - the genetic code that our ancestors so patiently built over the past 100,000 years.

I can imagine a couple of science-fiction movies on this theme: somebody hacking the GPS cloud and making drones out of humanity, all GPS systems destroyed by terrorists causing mayhem everywhere (airlines/marine/auto navigation systems all driven by GPS), far into the future - humans lose their dominant species status to rats - because of the poor map-reading skills. If these movies are already made, pardon my ignorance.

I had Garmin for the past 4 years, and  I am not proud to admit that I am addicted to it - I just follow the directions given out my Garmin, and don't care to remember if I visited the place a hundred times before.

Running, Evolution & Health

After I heard about persistent hunting, and how early humans used their ability to regulate body temperatures (through sweating) as a competitive advantage in hunting; I thought running is part of our genetic code, and that every one of us can run long distances.

I also believed that running and exercise are good for health, and I used to spend 2 hours a day in the gym burning 800 to 900 calories a day (4 miles of running, 6 to 10 miles of cycling, and 30 minutes of weight-lifting - four days a week). I used to feel good about my health during these periods of exercise (possible runner's rush). It has been a while since I ran that long, and feel guilty these days for bowing to worldly pleasures and not going to the gym.

But, I came across a couple of articles over the past few weeks that made me re-think about both of these assumptions, and gave me a reason to maintain the statusquo (running vs. sitting on the couch - it is an easy choice I guess :)) :

Here are the data points I am talking about:

• Recent deaths of marathoners: Detroit (3 deaths), San Jose(2 deaths), NY (2 deaths) - in all the these incidents, the runners who died went through rigorous training for the event. While 7 deaths is a very small percentage of the millions who run marathons (statistically insignificant to draw any conclusions), it still is something to think about (psychological impact) for a would-be marathon runner. (Imagine a gamble with the following payoffs - you will win $1 mil 99.9% of the time,  you will lose & die 0.1% of the time - will you play that game?)
• A blog in NYT (14th Oct, 2009) talks about how intense exercise reduces our immunity: The article cites studies done by multiple research groups about the relationship between exercise and immunity - and concludes that intense exercise (defined as a workout or race of an hour or more during which your heart rate and respiration soar and you feel as if you are working hard) can significantly reduce your immunity; and that you are better off doing something productive (like watching TV) than running.

I guess - after thousands of years of relative-sedentary life style of the agrarian societies, running is no more an evolutionary in-thing; and it is possible mate-selection is not happening based on good running abilities.

Homeless People in Bay Area

Came across an interesting fact this afternoon, and I thought I should blog about it. A co-worker tells me about an article in the Time magazine about HomeLess in America. He says there are more than thousand homeless in San Jose alone, and similar number in San Franciso.  I didn't believe him, and started searching for the right numbers.

I came across this article in SF Chronicle that counts homeless in SFO alone at: 6500.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/04/BAG416SGRA.DTL

Another site that had more info:

http://www.endhomelessness.org/section/news/press/2009countsmap

Came across this article on wikipedia that counts the total US homeless population at 1% of the total population (~3mil), and of these 23% are war veterans:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States

Just for comparison, this number (3 million) is about 

• 30,000 times more than the number of people who died from H1N1 virus (swine flu) in US but it still receives very little media attention
  
• 60 times more than the number of people who die from common flu every year in US (~50,000), yet there is no flu-vaccine like drive to prevent this 
• 60 times more than the number of road fatalities in US (~50,000), but still doesn't have a trillion dollar insurance like industry to safe-guard

It is sad to see these numbers - the richest country in the world not being able to provide for its citizens - especially for veterans who fought for the country & mentally disabled who can't fend themselves. But again, we are living in a market-driven economy, and we believe in Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest - or should we?