We all know how these things go, content creators create content, votes happen whether strictly or arbitrarily and then BAM! You get placed on a list!
It’s kind of interesting, kind of flattering, and well, I’m sharing it here because it happened! Here is the snippet of me, and behind the more there are the 99 other blogs mentioned and referenced! I do wish you the best in finding good content here and without! :)
I’m sure some of you have heard this term before “Eating your own dog food” it’s even referenced in this Wikipedia entry, but I think it’s high time someone appropriately draws the distinction of the DIFFERENCE of eating your own dog food and drinking your own champagne, terms often used interchangeably. Little shared fact. They are ABSOLUTELY NOT THE SAME DAMN THING. Yes I am extremely passionate about this, because it’s misused.
This term has actually seen some of the most widely adopted usage within Microsoft as a corporation, in fact they had a whole section of the business solely for the DogFood servers. But what does this mean exactly? Contrary to popular belief, Dogfooding is not “running on your own products”. It actually consists of taking the Alphas, the Betas, what eventually will become the products that your CUSTOMERS will eventually consume, and getting a large user-base onto these applications in a Production capacity. Imagine the difference it makes when you have hundreds of thousands of users running on an internal beta of an application. When things break, well, they get FIXED and FOUND faster. Not only that, but it forces you to write better code, be a better developer, do better QA. Why? Because when things break, it breaks HARD CORE for EVERYBODY. So what came out of these interests was not only better written, QA’d and run applications, but also harder and more rigorous testing from your own experiences. Sure you start off small with a pilot group, but then you continue to expand and extend that out to an even larger base. At the end of the day and a product cycle you have your business running in production on what started in Alpha and grew to release; long before you introduce your first beta customer. THAT is eating your own dog food.
Now there are these “cute” folks out there who are all “We drink our own Champagne” because they don’t like the message, the vision associated with dogfooding or dog food in general (Perhaps they hate Dogs, and likely hate cats? Who knows) But here is the thing about Champagne and drinking your own champagne. The production process to go about creating dog food takes approximately 5 minutes. Sure it can take more or less than that, but you can produce consumable, or horrible dog food almost instantly. Champagne on the other hand involves Harvesting, Pressing, Fermenting, Blending, Fermenting AGAIN, Lees Aging, Riddling, Disgorgement, Dosage, and Re-corking.
While this is not to be a fully in depth technical advisory on the process of actually MAKING champagne the interesting point of the metaphor is, the Aging process alone requires a MINIMUM of 15 months, not to mention all of the other efforts associated with things. So when you consider what it takes to drink your own champagne you’re looking at a minimum investment all-in of ~5 years minimum. I’ll tell you, if I had a solution, a technology, a product, and by the time I got around to actually consuming it, it was 5 years in the making; Yea. That is not a differentiator.
Oh but wait, your trite marketing or wacky sales guy is saying “No! Drinking your own champagne means we run our own products” Uh, I better damn well HOPE you have faith in your own BAKED and READY products you’re trying to SELL or POSITION to me, that you fricking run it internally. So no, I give you no grace period, I give you no safety net. Those who drink their own champagne better damn WELL run their own products, and that does not infer they are betas or early release or anything; because it’s eating your own dog food which really shows me you’re committed to your product.
So when you go out there on the road to message and position your latest and great product, or to talk about futures. I encourage you to understand your metaphors, your analogies and take heart that I expect you to drink your own Champagne and take great pride when you choose to eat your own dog food. Just because you eat your own dog food, does not mean it is GOOD, but at least it shows me you’re committed to the success of my business and yours.
Let me start off with a shout-out to every SharePoint Zealot out there who is going to seethe, scream and yell at the very presence of this topic; who will vehemently disagree with me before they even take the moment to disregard and throw away this article, because frankly they don’t need to read it at all! (Hi guys! :)) And for the rest of you, allow me to give you a journey in to some of the reasons I absolutely hands down DESPISE SharePoint; Oh did I mention that is also WHY you should not only be considering if, but be deploying it full-scale to take your business in that next direction? K, glad we got that out of the way!
Disclaimer: The following is a breakdown of entirely non-sarcastic statements with core sound, business and technical justifications of just why SharePoint is the flaming pile of destructive pleasure that it is and will continue to be part of your organizations ecosystem from this point forward. If you disagree, agree or are a contrarian this is the post for you!
Follow-up Disclaimer: I’ve decided to release this as a series instead of one really long blog post you likely won’t even read in the first place, so feel free to follow the entire series of why I hate sharepoint and why you should use it! :)
That’s right! Coming to a city near you (Or specifically very near me :)) Is the Launch event for Girls In Tech (This is a Co-Ed event, so don’t get overwhelmed guys)
Girls in Tech – Chicago Launch!
Girls in Tech is a social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent and influential women in technology. Everyone is welcome as we kick off and celebrate the launch of the Chicago chapter! Hor d’overs will be served.
What’s a cool way to use Twitter, Facebook, Twitpic and more? How about as a real time travelogue? Angela Dugan from Microsoft will talk about using social media to share your adventures with friends, family & co-workers in near real time!
If you are at all invested in technology, and want to see not only the future of technology continue to thrive but also to meet intelligent women of the world who will have a stake in that future – Your investment in an event like this will make all the difference.
And as an extra incentive, use coupon code “twitter” to save an extra $2 off of the event!
So, come on down and I’ll see you at TechNexus on Tuesday!
TechNexus
200 S. Wacker Drive
15th Floor
Chicago, IL 60606
Today was the big day! The launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, also known as the VCE Initiative!
CNN Broke the news as far as the link to the Webinar would go, with announcements being made by:
John Chambers, chairman and CEO for Cisco
Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO for EMC Corp
Paul Maritz, president and CEO for VMware
There has been a lot of chatter about this, over the weekend and even moreso leading into this announcement, with some highlights:
The launch of Privatecloud.com is only the beginning in the mass of places to find out information and content on this amazing initative.
VCE Beats out IBM with Melbourne IT
In unveiling the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Cisco and EMC also introduced Acadia, a joint venture focused on accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers. Acadia’s unique “build, operate, transfer” model for delivering the Vblock architecture, addressing people, process and technology, will offer customers further choice, flexibility and cost advantages as they seek to virtualize their IT infrastructures and evolve to private cloud environments. In addition to Cisco and EMC as the lead investors, the build-out of Acadia’s expanded capabilities in 2010 has also been capitalized by investments from VMware and Intel. Because the Vblock architecture relies heavily on Intel Xeon® processors and other Intel data center technology, Intel will join the Acadia effort as a minority investor to facilitate and accelerate customer adoption of the latest Intel technology for servers, storage, and networking.
In fact, many partners – both systems integrators, and service providers have all started lining up behind Vblocks. Here are just a few examples:
Most of the vCloud Express launch partners are using the VCE coalition, and want to move forward with a formal Vblock model. Examples are Terremark, Alphawest, Savvis, Orange and SunGard. (Thanks for this Chad!)
Virtual Compute Environment – Vblock Partner Ecosystem
Virtual Compute Announcement – Integrated Sales/Service/Support
Virtual Compute Environment – Solutions Venture and Investment
Virtual Compute Environment – Technology Innovations
Also, looks like there is some Twitter presence too! So, represent! @privatecloudcom
Today, is quite an exciting day, and while all of this is high level, I’d be glad to go into much more depth about this – something I’m sure many of those linked and referenced here can say and do the same. This is not intended to be a tutorial, but an advisory of what’s new, where to go, and I’ll have separate blog posts to go into the details :) It’s an exciting day! :)
