A collection of things that seem to have pivoted in 2012.
Mobile Bandwidth Greater than Fixed Bandwidth
I've been talking about
LTE and the growth in mobile since 2008, but I started 2012 with a Verizon iPhone 4 which maxed out at 2Mbit/s over 3G and at home in the mountains I would get less than 1Mbit/s. I ended 2012 with a Verizon iPhone 5 which is about ten times faster at home, I regularly see 8-9Mbits/s, and the best speed I have seen anywhere so far was in downtown Los Gatos at over 50Mbit/s. My home fixed wire Internet is a 3Mbit/s DSL that has neighborhood congestion at peak times. I now find it works better to have WiFi turned off on my iPhone at home.
This is one of those pivotal changes, similar to the change from having predominantly fixed wire telephone service at home, to having many people use mobile phones exclusively. It costs more, but if you already have a high bandwidth connection to your phone with a high data cap because you use it a lot, why pay to also have a low bandwidth connection to your house? Bandwidth caps and data usage plans will slow the switchover, but the writing is on the wall.
Cutting The Cable/Satellite TV Feed
In 2013 we finally turned off our TiVo and shut down our DirecTV account. We weren't using it enough to make it worth while. For some of the sports events (Laurel follows the Stanford Cardinals), we go to a sports bar to watch, which is more fun anyway. Everything else that we have time to watch, we can watch online, and we get all our news updates from Twitter, RSS feeds and Facebook posts. By the time it's on TV or in a newspaper, it's already old news.
The TV has an AppleTV connected to it, which gets almost all the usage. We watch a few things on laptops, and sometimes I connect a laptop to the TV. I also stream music from my iPhone to the AppleTV because I can't get Pandora or Spotify on it. Come on Apple, where's the AppleTV App Store? Maybe that's a 2013 thing.
The Netflix Open Source Cloud Platform Got Traction
We started the year with a handful of disconnected projects, and ended it with a large chunk of the platform on Github, and some high profile users. Most people are still picking it up piecemeal but in 2013 we plan to get the whole thing put together as an installable bundle. This is the Alan Kay approach, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it". Netflix has been out in front of the industry in terms of cloud adoption, inventing the future. Next we make it easier for others to join us in that future, and have some ideas for how to drive adoption to new heights.
Netflix Cloud Architecture Presentations
I was going to list all the talks I gave, but there are too many, so go see the slides I posted at
http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco. Highlights were QConSF, QConLondon, Gluecon in Colorado, GOTO in Aarhus and of course
AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas. The impact of these talks grew through the year, reaching a peak at Re:Invent, where we had lots of speakers and attention to the way the Netflix cloud and open source story was bringing value to the company and reaching out into the technical community. A big thanks to everyone who came to my talks, and all the other Netflix speakers who have been out there broadening the story. It's almost impossible to write an article or do a presentation about cloud without mentioning Netflix. In 2013 there will be even more talks, I focus on local and US based events that are strongly developer oriented like
QCon,
Gluecon, and
GOTO. We will definitely be back at AWS Re:Invent next November.
The Concept of Anti-Fragility Took Off
Nassim Taleb's latest book crystallizes the way I tend to approach things and gives it a name. The Netflix cloud architecture is anti-fragile, we run "Chaos Monkey's" continuously to try and break it, and that makes it stronger. The Netflix culture is anti-fragile, it's decentralized with as little process and rules as possible and a lot of local autonomy. Netflix management is not afraid of change or of being first to do something and tends to navigate disruptive transitions well. From the outside this can look chaotic or confusing, but it works, and recovers well from missteps, which are always going to happen. If you're not failing occasionally you aren't trying hard enough, and you are missing opportunities. Getting stronger through failure is the basis of anti-fragility. Avoiding failure at all costs (as many people try to do) makes you brittle and vulnerable to unexpected Black Swan events that will have a much bigger impact.
Cloud, Open Source, SaaS and the End of Enterprise Computing
Taleb makes the point that big companies become increasingly fragile as they lose agility and the ability to move with the markets, and we are seeing that play out in the Enterprise Computing space. There is still money to be made from the late adopter customers, but the trend is clearly towards development using exclusively open source tools, with applications and infrastructure delivered as a service. There is zero revenue for traditional Enterprise Computing vendors in this model. The current interest in building out private cloud infrastructure is real and will continue to support traditional vendors into 2013, but it's a short term investment. At best you end up with a much better automated datacenter, but it isn't elastic and it has far fewer features than AWS, so it's going to be marginalized over time. At worst, you discover just how hard it is to run a reliable private cloud based on immature software, with incompatible upgrade paths, and it turns out to be much more expensive to run.
The Enterprise Computing vendors haven't been able to build a public cloud that competes with AWS on scale, price or features, and AWS is now focused on building everything their customers need to take the next generation of application investment out of the datacenter, so the high margin revenue is going to gradually go away for the traditional vendors.
The most interesting development in 2012 was the re-launch of Google as a public cloud infrastructure vendor, and the mini-price-war between AWS and Google over instance and storage costs makes it clear where the real action is. During 2013 we will see if Google manages to invest heavily and execute well enough to build up a big user base. In mobile, as I predicted years ago, we are now in an iPhone vs. Android battle that is wiping out everyone else. I personally think in 2014 we will likely see a similar effect as the scale, features and price point of AWS and Google clouds make everyone else irrelevant. The only question in my mind is whether AWS runs away with this on their own, or Google manages to get some traction as the alternative.
Note to sales reps (who won't listen), I'm not interested in anything to do with datacenters, private cloud, or other public clouds in 2013. I'm only interested in SaaS apps, things that run on AWS, and interesting open source projects.
Solar Powered Electrics Cars Are For Real Now
We drive our Nissan Leaf all the time, it's fun to drive and the first car we pick for most trips, adding up to almost 1000 miles a month. The marginal cost of running the car is near zero. New tires and a cabin air filter at 15K miles is all the maintenance it needs. We have an excess of solar power generation that added up to $500 in unused electricity over the year. At 10c/KWh and 3.5KWh/mile that's plenty for us run a second electric car before we start paying for the power, and there are a lot more choices coming in 2013. There are many charging stations around the Bay Area, lots of other people running Leafs, and the Tesla Model S got car of the year awards. It takes a test drive to realize what fun it is to have instant torque and no gear shifts. This is a case of the future being unevenly distributed. If you don't live in California, it's a bit further out, but it's coming.
A friend recently got a quote for Solar Power installation which was about half what we paid two years ago, and we got a good deal then. Prices have dropped fast and are much lower than most people think. If you don't already have solar panels on your roof, you should get them. If you don't use enough electricity to justify solar panels, get an electric car as well, and save at the gas pump.
Global Warming Arrived in the USA in 2012
The well funded
Merchants of Doubt (read the book) managed to confuse and suppress public discussion of global warming in the USA for the last few years, but the effects just became too obvious this year and it broke through, creating the scenarios that James Hansen warned of in
Storms of My Grandchildren. The arctic ice cap melt continues to accelerate, seas are warming and rising, drought and record heat hit most of the USA, and everything wrapped up with Hurricane Sandy, pushing the topic onto the front page. The dice are all loaded now, and 2013 is already rolling those dice as the drought continues and the Mississippi river is empty. I've been saying for the last few years that if you own property at sea level, you should find someone who doesn't believe in global warming to sell it to, because it's going to become increasingly uninsurable and end up as worthless as the houses along the New Jersey shoreline that were swept away.
The Republican party is still in denial, a combination of funding from big oil companies and an inability to accept or admit that their demonized Al Gore could have been right all along. In 2013 it will be interesting to see how they deal with losing the election, and perhaps there will be a split into a group of Republicans that see the path to re-election in 2014 as needing to accept reality by voting for some Global Warming related legislation, versus the hard core that are trying to pray their way out. The current battle is over stopping the Keystone XL pipeline that would move the dirtiest kind of tar oil from Alberta Canada to Texas. It may be symbolic, but if KXL is stopped, the tide will have turned.
Carbon needs to be left in the ground. For 2013, I'm going to try and re-balance my 401K retirement accounts to divest from oil companies. Many students are now
pressuring their colleges to divest from oil as well.
Twitter and Snapchat
Personally, 2012 was an excellent year for me, I've made lots of new friends and learned a lot by being active on
twitter, ending the year with about 6500 followers. I joked on twitter that I posted my new years resolutions for 2013 to
Snapchat, but you missed them. If you don't know what Snapchat is for, ask a teenager. You'll probably hear a lot more about it in 2013, then, when their parents figure it out and join too, the teens will be onto the next thing....
