The questions and discussion reminded of talks I’ve done in the past on the topic, esp. the one on DevOps I gave at Devoxx and the really short one on hybrid cloud.

It was a fun time, including chatting with people afterwards.

The main thing is: they’re curious about everything and love ideas. They’re explorers of a world that doesn’t exist and that they’re creating more of each day.

As mentioned earlier today, we launched a new project, named Sputnik, around exploring what a developer laptop would look like, here at the day-job. Part of what we want to make is a cloud-hosted service that allows developers to quickly setup their Sputnik machine with various profiles and, as we get into, allow the overall community to contribute profiles as well.

In the video above, Charles Lowell (of The FrontSide) and I talk through some thinking about what that service would be. As we emphasize, it’s just brain-storming at this point. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Today one of the projects I’ve been working on at Dell is launching: Project Sputnik. Barton George is the one running it, while I’m just pitching in here and there. We started an internal incubation/innovation program a few months back to encourage ideas like this and Sputnik was the first project we picked.

Barton has a super-detailed post, but the upshot is: we’re exploring the idea of a developer-centric laptop starting with Ubuntu running on an XPS 13z. Canonical has been kind enough to get Unbuntu up and running on the laptop (thanks!), and now we’re doing some open innovation to explore the idea of what a developer laptop would look like.

We’ll be developing a tool-chain and a tool-driven service that lets developers layer on various pre-wired profiles, like “PHP developer,” “JavaScript developer, etc.” Ultimitly, I’d like to see us come up with an end-to-end approach that helps DevOps-minded folks out…but we’ll see where we end up! One of the participants in the program, Charles Lowell (of The FrontSide), and I recorded a white-board session going over some early thinking along these lines which I’ll post soon.

Our early reception has been great. People really like the experience of the XPS 13z, all the way from the packaging to the fast boot-up, to having a a solid developer environment.

We’re collecting input in an IdeaStorm session, and I’d love to hear any ideas you have. Also, if you want to snag the image Canonical built just for the XPS 13z, it’s available!

Back at DevOpsDays Austin last week, John and I sat down for a (now-a-days) rare recording. He was interested in talking about the presentation I’d given the day before on lessons learned form working on a DevOps product, Crowbar, at Dell.

A video debriefing of the talk I’d given the day before on innovating at a large company.

Here’s the slides for the talk I gave this morning on lessons learned from working on a DevOps product in a large company, that is, Crowbar in Dell.

The abstract:

Sometimes it seems like It’s near impossible to get anything innovative, interesting done in a large company – it’s as if BigCos are goaled to prevent just that. While you can’t type a URL without hearing how a Ramen-fueled startup got ground breaking product out the door, you rarely hear about how the other side of the exit lives in Large Company Land. This talk will use the story of Crowbar at Dell to grope out how to get good things done in big technology companies, esp. when it comes to something as BigCo esoteric as DevOps!

I’m amazed when I find a skunk-worked project that’s blossomed into a valuable, strategic asset for a company. In the case of Dell and Crowbar, it’s even more astonishing: Dell has traditionally been a stone-cold hardware company focused on shipping more boxes each quarter, Crowbar is an open source piece of software whose business model depends on the nuanced dynamics of open platforms strategy. You’d never think these two things would go together. And yet, Crowbar exists and has had amazing success (both externally and internally) in an extremely short time. With the access I have to the “real story,” being at Dell now after six years at RedMonk covering tech from the outside, I’ll go over lessons learned on getting DevOps and a DevOps product through the Brazil-like pneumatic tubes of a $62.1B company.

To read most of the coverage from afar, Microsoft did an excellent job of messaging that 2012 could be a big year for WindowsPhone 7. As one piece puts it:

There’s a curious thing happening in the smartphone space at this year’s CES. Two Windows Phone devices — the HTC Titan II and the Nokia Lumia 900 — are the most hyped, talked-about phones at the show. Yeah, that’s right: Windows Phones.

From what I can tell, I’m one of the few people who’s used two WP7 phones over the past year: a Samsung Focus (sent to me by Microsoft for reviewing while I was RedMonk) and a Dell VenuePro (my current “work phone”). They’re both beyond just fine: they’re good phones in hardware and operating system. The core problem they have is a lack of apps, specifically, the apps I already use and like in iOS-land.

Anchored by Apps

There are, it should be said, lots of apps for WP7 (30,000+ back in August…but, compare that to 500,000+ in iOS-land). The problem is that they don’t have the apps I want to use, specifically, all those iOS apps I’ve spent money on over the years. As Ed pointed out to me awhile ago, the annoying catch here is that, even if the pay apps I wanted were in WP7…I’d have to pay for them again. And, with estimates of 60 apps downloaded per iOS device, that’s a lot of apps people need to take with them. Of course, this is just the case when you switch between Windows and Mac (or Mac and Windows): a license for Office or Creative Suite in Windows won’t translate from Windows to Mac.

Thankfully, most mobile apps are cheap – much cheaper than desktop Office ($119) or Creative Suite (from $280 to $1,500, or so). In reality, I make enough money that I’d pay for the apps twice. But, they don’t always exist in the first place. Indeed, many of the apps I depend on in iOS land aren’t (or weren’t last time I looked) available in WP7-land: Flipboard (hands down my most used app), EchoFon, even an official tumblr app.

For WP7 to be successful, Microsoft needs to ride all of those app authors to create WP7 versions of their apps. The same is true for Windows 8 – where, at least, Microsoft already has one of the world’s most important “apps,” Office (important as in “the [army|company|etc.] runs off [PowerPoint|Excel]“). App vendors like Evernote have a good track record of going balls out here, and I’ve seen a handful of apps developed for WP7 that are more than just quick ports: they take advantage of the tiles, integrating into the sharing functionality through-out the phone, and so on. It’s got to be tough for an app vendor, though: supporting iOS, Android, and WP7 is a hefty bought to sign up for.

HTML5 is good for who exactly?

Arguably, “HTML5 fixes this,” but I’d argue that each platform vendor (Apple, Google, Microsoft) is just barely incented to make HTML5 as good as their native app frameworks. What we’re discussing here is a major point of customer lock-in, thus, a major element of any mobile/tablet strategy. Each of these “post-PC” platforms (iOS, Android, WP7, and Windows 8) needs to differentiate on the entire platform experience – HTML5, really, takes away the ability of any OS to be different. If I can simply take all my “apps” (written in HTML5 so that they’re really web apps or web apps that I download a la Tiddlywiki to my mobile “desktop”) with me when I go…there’s little reason to stick to one mobile platform: I just skip around to the one that has the beast hardware and network. (Imagine if you actually selected a device because of the carrier’s QoS!)

Don’t get me wrong: as a user, I’d love my apps to be cross-platform and achieve that HTML5 nirvana existed and I could just take my apps with me from platform to platform. But that’d make these “smart phones” into “dumb phones,” which is definitely not anything the mobile platform creators are looking to do. On the other hand, I’d suggest that the cross-platform dreams of HTML5 suite just about everyone else’s interests: the app makers would be available on everyone’s devices, the handset makers would avoid this whole app lock-in problem, and the carriers could differentiate on service instead of platform exclusiveness. Historically, the platform providers tend to win out because they’re willing to play the long game of locking users into awesomeness, while the other parties go for quick wins quarter to quarter. We’ll see if it pans out differently this time.