Shutterfly Giveaway Winners!

Thank you to everyone who entered my Shutterfly Giveaway! The 3 lucky winners are...

15 Beth

6 Amanda G

21 Lindsey of My Dolce Vita

I'll be emailing you ladies tonight with your codes for 25 free holiday cards!

Again, a big THANK YOU to Shutterfly for hosting this giveaway!

Happy Halloween + OOTD

Carving pumpkins is so hard! Next year, I'm definitely following this Halloween Decor post and going with other creative themes instead. Matt's is a scary face and mine was supposed to be a wedding dress and a tie/pants with the words I Do on the side. Totally obvious right?

LC Blazer, Scarf, Nordstrom Tank, Mossimo skinny jeans

Benchmarking Tungsten Parallel Replication

Tungsten parallel apply on slaves, or parallel replication for short, has been available for about a year.   Until recently we did not have many formal benchmarks of its performance.  Fortunately the excellent Percona Live Conference in London accepted my talk on Tungsten parallel replication (slides available here), so Giuseppe Maxia and I finally allocated a block of time for systematic performance testing.

In a nutshell, the results were quite good. In the best cases Tungsten parallel apply out-performs single-threaded native replication by about 4.5 to 1.  Both Giuseppe and I have verified this using slightly different test methodologies, which helps avoid dumb counting mistakes.  Our results also match field tests at a customer site over the previous summer, so we regard them as fairly robust.  In the remainder of this article I would like to expand a bit on the details of the benchmarks as well as the results.  The results shown here are from my tests.

Benchmark Test Design

Both Giuseppe and I used a similar testbed for replication testing:    

• HP Proliant server, dual Xeon L5520 CPUs with hyper-threading enabled, 72Gb of RAM
• 1TB HP Smart Array RAID 1+0 
• Centos 5.6
• XFS file system
• MySQL 5.1.57 with InnoDB buffer pool set to 10Gb and using O_DIRECT purge method 
• Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5 build 347  

For convenience we use MySQL sandbox to set up a master with two slaves, as shown in the following diagram.  It turns out that for measuring replication throughput there is no reason to set up on separate hosts, as the master does little or nothing during the test and we only operate one slave at a time.  

The Tungsten Slave is configured as described in a previous article in this blog, except that there are 30 channels instead of 10.   The exact installation command is given at the end of this article.

The test run uses sysbench to spread transactions evenly across 30 databases of identical size, then measure time to process them.  This is also known as a replication catch-up test. 

1. Load all MySQL servers with an identical dataset consisting of 30 databases pre-populated with data from sysbench.  Giuseppe wrote a new tool called Large Data Generator that is very helpful for capturing and loading such datasets.  
2. With the slaves shut down, store the master binlog start position and then run 30 sysbench oltp test processes against the master to update and read from all schemas simultaneously for one hour.  
3. Start the MySQL slave from the stored master binlog position and measure time to process the sysbench transactions. Shut down the MySQL slave at the end of the test. 
4. Start the Tungsten slave from the stored master binlog position and measure time to process the sysbench transactions using Tungsten Replicator with 30 channels (i.e. threads). 

Test Results

Database performance is substantially different depending on whether data are fully resident in the buffer pool (cache-resident) or largely read from disk (I/O-bound).  Tungsten parallel replication over 30 databases varies from 1.8 to 4.5 depending on which case you look at, as shown in the following table.   Processing times are in minutes (m).

Test Scenario	Rows/Db	Data Size	MySQL Slave	Tungsten Slave	Ratio
Cache-resident	10K	430Mb	30m	17m	1.8
I/O-Bound	10M	68Gb	228m	51m	4.5

Let's look at the results in detail.  In the cache-resident test the base dataset is relatively small and loads fully into the buffer cache within a minute or two.  Both MySQL and Tungsten slaves complete in well under an hour.  Here is a graph showing throughput as measured in bytes of binlog processed per 10 second increment.  

Cache-Resident Slave Catch-Up - MySQL vs. Tungsten Replicator, 30 Databases

In the cache-resident case there are virtually no reads from disk as all data are fully resident in the InnoDB buffer pool.  Tungsten Replicator is faster because multiple writes can occur in parallel but the speed-up versus native replication is not especially large.  Note that Tungsten processes around 40Mb every 10 seconds or about 1Gb of binlog every four minutes.

With I/O bound workloads, on the other hand, we see a profound difference in performance.  Tungsten Replicator is at least 6x slower than in the cache-resident case, but still processes updates faster than the master (51 minutes on the slave vs. 60 minutes on the master).   Buffer cache loading is correspondingly fast and Tungsten reaches steady-state performance within about 20 minutes.  MySQL native replication on the other hand is far slower. The slave not only does not catch up, but it would quickly lag far behind  the master under this workload.  It takes about 90 minutes for native replication even to achieve steady state performance after buffer pool loading.

I/O-Bound Slave Catch-Up - MySQL vs. Tungsten Replicator, 30 Databases

Overall we can safely say that single-threaded native replication is likely non-workable in the I/O-bound case without going to some combination of SSDs and/or slave pre-fetch.  


Further Improvements and Caveats

The current results of parallel replication benchmarks on Tungsten are gratifying especially when you consider that two years ago Tungsten Replicator performance was around 10% of the speed of MySQL replication.  Nevertheless, these benchmarks are not the final word.  It is clear there is room for optimization as we observe that Tungsten processes the cache-bound binlog at least 6 times faster than the I/O bound workload.  Much of the difference seems to be time spent reading from disk.   If this could be improved, Tungsten would go even faster.

During the London conference Yoshinori Matsunobu published some excellent performance results using slave pre-fetch, which has encouraged us to build pre-fetch into Tungsten as well.   I am curious to see if we can further boost throughput by adding pre-fetching on each parallel thread, though other people at the conference such as Domas Mituzas were not optimistic.  Either way, I am certain we will improve performance, if not using pre-fetch then with other tricks like batching inserts.

Finally, some caveats.  Our sysbench load is nice because it is evenly distributed across schemas of exactly the same size.  Most application workloads do not behave this way, though some do come very close.  The slides for my talk discuss practical issues in maximizing performance in real applications.  I suspect that a combination of parallelization with pre-fetch will in fact turn out to be a very good solution for a wide variety of workloads.

Fine Print

If you would like to repeat our results (or attack them as fraudulent), here are some parameters that may help.  The database settings in the MySQL sandbox instances are as follows:
default-storage-engine=InnoDB
innodb-additional-mem-pool-size=100M
innodb-flush-method=O_DIRECT
innodb-log-buffer-size=4M
innodb-log-file-size=50M
innodb-thread-concurrency=0
innodb_buffer_pool_size=10G
innodb_file_format=barracuda
innodb_file_per_table=1
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2
innodb_strict_mode=1log-bin=mysql-binmax-connections=500
max_allowed_packet=48M
skip_slave_start
sync_binlog=0

Next, here is the sysbench command used to generate load on each schema.  We run 30 of these simultaneously varying the database name for each invocation.  This example is for the I/O-bound case.

sysbench --test=oltp --db-driver=mysql --mysql-db=${db} \  --mysql-user=msandbox --mysql-password=msandbox \
  --mysql-host=127.0.0.1 --mysql-port=33306 \
  --oltp-read-only=off --oltp-table-size=10000000 \
  --oltp-index-updates=4 --oltp-non-index-updates=2 \
  --max-requests=200000 \
  --max-time=3600 --num-threads=5 run

The replicator configuration is given in the slides for the talk, but here it is again.   Options in red are required for sandboxes.  Production installations are therefore simpler than what is shown here.

tools/tungsten-installer tools/tungsten-installer --direct -a \

  --service-name=parallel --native-slave-takeover \

  --master-host=127.0.0.1 --master-port=33306  \

  --master-user=msandbox --master-password=msandbox  \

  --slave-host=127.0.0.1 --slave-port=33307  \

  --slave-user=msandbox --slave-password=msandbox  \

  --home-directory=/opt/continuent \

  --property=replicator.store.parallel-queue.maxOfflineInterval=5 \

  --svc-parallelization-type=disk --buffer-size=100 \

  --channels=30 --thl-port=2115 --rmi-port=10010 \

  --skip-validation-check=MySQLPermissionsCheck \

  --skip-validation-check=MySQLApplierServerIDCheck \

  --start-and-report

To equal the results shown above you will also need to assign databases explicitly to channels in the shard.list file.   Otherwise, databases will be assigned  channels using a hashing function, which tends to result in somewhat uneven distributions.  Look in the comments of the shard.list file for instructions on how to do this. 

Finally, all of our tests depend on two excellent tools from Giuseppe Maxia:  MySQL Sandbox and the new Large Data Generator program in the Tungsten Toolbox.  Once you get the hang of them you will become completely addicted as they make test setup both reliable as well as quick.  

Hot Man Parade

Just wanted to tell you guys that I love Joey Lawrence. 

I watch Melissa and Joey all the time (I love Melissa Joan Hart) and it's such good clean comedy. 

Kind of reminds me of TGIF when I was young. 

Happy Friday everyone!

"Inner Work Life" and the impact of Amabile

After years of painstaking research on the "inner work lives" of employees of several organizations, world-renowned creativity researcher Teresa Amabile offers valuable insights in her new book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. If you're a manager, she argues, then understanding and nourishing your staff's "inner" life is key to productivity and success--and specifically supporting progress and meaningful accomplishments, even in small steps, can make the greatest difference. Check out her video here, as she explains what helps people get more deeply engaged and satisfied with their work.

Amabile personally made a great difference in my life by introducing me to the field of creativity (who knew there was a field?) when I was still a teenage sophomore at Brandeis. Her pioneering research and writing (her Creativity in Context broke new ground as a comprehensive review of decades of key creativity studies) was so impressive that Harvard Business School soon snatched her up as one of their own.  Before they did, though, I decided to take her "Psychology of Creativity" course, which changed my life.  If you'll indulge me for a paragraph...

I still remember the feeling of the state Amabile would call "intrinsic motivation," as a class assignment led me to spend nights roaming the library, highly stimulated by ideas for perhaps the first time in my life. For my final paper and class speech, I felt so compelled to make an ambitiously-wide-ranging case about work and creativity that I sought out writers in different domains to see where they would lead me. I read social theorists and philosophers who had something to say about conditions for creativity--there was Dewey and Weber and Marx and others--and started to make direct connections between their conclusions and the findings of the psychological studies we were reading about in class. My wordy masterpiece, "The Stifling of Creativity in Work in Our Society" (yes, I still remember), was pretty good, but the speech I gave was, I believe, my best work as an academic, delivered with no-notes-needed passion and breaking the rules of academia (When I finished my diatribe, with smoke still coming out of my ears, I remember the stunned and lengthy silence in the room until the sole graduate student asked, "Do you have statistical evidence for this?"). When years later I learned that Amabile did not remember this greatest-student-speech-of-all-time, I realized the impact was made primarily on me, but it was, indeed, a lasting one. In any case, thank you, Teresa.

Amabile's The Progress Principle (written with her husband Steven Kramer) is distinguished by what she does best--unparalleled research, clear-eyed analysis and cogent writing full of evidence-based and practical human-centered principles. For the last several years, Amabile has been focusing on the workplace, using research findings to help guide leadership in organizations in ways that best leverages the talents, motivations and creativity of the humans who work there.  This book is a culmination of reviewing, coding and making sense of more than 12,000 journal entries from the work trenches.



"Of all the events that can deeply engage people in their work," she says, "the single most important is simply making progress on meaningful work." Managers can best boost positive inner work life, she explains, by reviewing and supporting people's progress everyday--which might sound simple but is more often ignored. Even small wins can yield "significant work life benefits," and the book reviews other influencers, catalysts and inhibitors that impact inner work life. Just like she did for me personally years ago, Amabile once again convincingly makes the case for how best to engage and inspire, and foster the conditions for optimal creativity and productivity in ourselves and others.

Steve Jobs Amazing Quotes

Steve Jobs was the greatest innovator and entrepreneur of our times, who created game-changing innovations including the Apple II, Macintosh, NeXT, iMac, iBook, iPod, MacBook, OS X, iPhone and the iPad, and made Apple the most valuable company in the world. Steve Jobs was the co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs Amazing Quotes is a collection of over 250 quotes assimilated from various sources including Apple press releases, published interviews and public information. In honor of Steve Jobs who inspired us with his great vision, amazing products, infinite drive, incredible passion and never-say-die attitude!

Steve Jobs – In his own words! Colorful, insightful, witty, direct, no-nonsense, mocking, uplifting and enthusiastic – Steve Jobs quotes are all of these and then some! Enjoy them and get to know him better through his words.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish!” – Steve Jobs

Download your copy of Steve Jobs Amazing Quotes:

Download Now!(please provide your email):
   

In honor and memory of Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Apple Innovation Workshop

How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success?


What is Apple's Innovation Strategy and Innovation Process? Attend this engaging workshop delivered by Sanjay Dalal, chief innovator of InnovationMain and author of Apple's Innovation Strategy. Get detailed information, innovation insights, case study and report, and learn to innovate like Apple... and think like Steve Jobs, the top innovator and CEO of Apple.

"There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote
that I love. 'I skate to where the puck
is going to be, not where it has been.'
And we've always tried to do that at
Apple. Since the very very beginning.
And we always will." — Steve Jobs, Apple CEO & Co-Founder (1955-2011)

REGISTER NOW!

Apple Revenue Growth is spectacular! Since 2000, Apple sales has grown 1,200%, profits have skyrocketed 3,000% and maket cap has exploded more than thirty times to over $300 billion.

Apple innovates through:

• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation Process
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs Leadership

This Apple Innovation Strategy seminar uses the latest Apple Innovation eBook that provides key insights, strategy, best practices, process, facts, Steve Jobs interview, and much more... Apple's Innovation Strategy eBook forms the basis of this workshop!

Apple has built an Innovation Factory – one that harnesses unbridled creativity from its people, stimulating bold & enterprising new ideas, and launching successful, profitable new innovations... time and again! Apple leverages its diverse ecosystem of employees, customers, suppliers, partners & global networks, proven innovation process, and a winning culture to seize new opportunities in the marketplace and grow its business... exponentially!

Key Benefits of Training Seminar
1. Learn how Apple and Steve Jobs innovate, and made Apple #1 innovator
2. Expand your creativity, and learn how to think different and generate new ideas
3. Create and architect process to make successful, innovative new products and services
4. Make innovation a key differentiator, and sustainable competitive advantage for your business

Workshop Schedule
Monthly Event - First Wednesday: 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (PT)

REGISTER NOW!

Learn to Innovate like Apple! Now!

How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success?


Download Apple's Innovation Strategy, and learn how Apple became the #1 innovator through:

• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs Visionary Leadership
Revised in 2011! Steve Jobs interview

Learn more...

Hosted by

InnovationMain - Creativity and Innovation Driving Business provides uncommon insights, strategy and solutions with proven processes that drive Creativity and Innovation at your business, create real market growth and success for your products and services, and achieve market leadership. We make innovation a sustainable competitive advantage, inspire you to build an innovation factory, effect and manage change, and accelerate your business. We have considerable experience and expertise in working with small, growing and established companies, product and marketing departments, and innovation teams. InnovationMain - Creativity and Innovation Driving Business is an Irvine Chamber of Commerce Member in Orange County, California.

About Sanjay Dalal, chief innovator

Sanjay Dalal is an Innovation Author & Consultant, Innovation & Marketing Speaker, Innovator and Community Leader. Sanjay is the author of the leading Business Innovation eBook & Resource Kit used by over 1,000 innovators worldwide including Nokia, Pepsi, HP, LG, J&J, TATA, SAP, major universities...and is the author of the all new Apple's Innovation Strategy. Learn more about Sanjay Dalal here


Web: www.InnovationMain.com
Phone: 1-949-288-6880
Address: 111 Academy Way, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92617

Stirring up Live Creativity

During the past few weeks, I've had the honor and challenge and pleasure of stirring up creativity with large groups in a range of settings.  Check it out:

A few minutes before "Who's Got the Biggest Fed Head?"

Last week, I designed and hosted a game show for a 100 Federal Reserve employees, which we called "Who's Got the Biggest Fed Head?" (email me for an audio clip of our theme song!),  testing the knowledge and collaborative abilities of teams in an interactive format.  As I've written previously, most people would be shocked to learn that our too-often maligned Federal Reserve embraces creative thinking and new approaches in service of innovation, learning and improving.  For the game show, I brought a percussionist, and we couldn't help wink at the irony of walking through the crowd of Chicago protesters, beating on their little drums, as we carted in two large congas to play for the actual Fed employees, most of whom, from what I can tell and from what Bernanke himself said recently, sympathize with the protesters.  By the way, that's a $100 bill tie I'm wearing (left).

I just got back from West Virginia, where I facilitated an innovation session for an energy consulting firm (Leonardo Technologies; check out the cool stuff they're working on).  In addition to exploring innovation and creativity through interactive exercises, we also discussed the importance of passion--how to empower employees to pursue their own creative talents and interests--and brainstormed possibilities for new clients and areas to expand their worthwhile work of shifting the energy paradigm in our country.

Stirring it up with kids and parents

I also had a chance to stir it up with younger groups recently, as a speaker for 750 kids at a middle school assembly and as part of the Malaise County Fair project I've been developing with a creative cast this past year. For Malaise, we had our first public performance with families as part of a fall festival here in Chicago, where we tested out new ways for an audience to participate musically and otherwise.  As those of you who know me know, I'm dedicated to helping all of us be creators and not just spectators, and Malaise County Fair continues to experiment with breaking down the wall between performers and audiences in new ways.

Next week, I'll be at it with another innovative program for kids, Poetry Pals, which brings together children of different faiths (in this case, kids from Muslim, Catholic and Jewish schools) to learn from each other and write poetry together.  We're always looking for volunteers to help us with this program, so please email me if you're interested in fostering interfaith relations with us.

Malaise County Fair performs

Quotes from Steve Jobs - worth a read

1. "Older people sit down [at a computer] and ask, 'What is it?' But the child asks, 'What can I do with it?'"

2. "It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do."

3. "When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever."

4. "This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy."

5. "[A computer] takes these very simple-minded instructions -- 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' -- but executes them at a rate of, let's say, one million per second. At one million per second, the results appear to be magic."

6. "The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people -- as remarkable as the telephone."

7. "But good PR educates people. That's all it is. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves."

8. "The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this Web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place."

9. "The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much."

10. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough -- it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices."

11. "There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love: 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will."

12. "We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off."

13. "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."

14. "A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets."

15. "The minute I dropped out (of college) I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting."

16. "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. "

17. "Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on."

18. "I was lucky -- I found what I loved to do early in life."

19. "Woz (Steve Wozniak) and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees."

20. "You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers."

21. "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

22. "For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

23. "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

24. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

25. "Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking."

26. "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

27. "My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that's what I try to do."

28. "And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

29. "Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products… We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we'll make some money. But we're really clear about what our goals are."

30. "We did not enter the search business. [Google] entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them."

31. "I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can't do that. I'd rather quit."

32. "I want to put a ding in the universe."

33. "I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do."

34. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works."

35. "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

36. "Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?"

37. "Be a yardstick of quality, some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."

38. "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

39. "Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."

40. "I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year.... It's very character-building."

41. "I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do."

42. "Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles."

43. "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

44. "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it."

45. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"

46. "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful… that's what matters to me."

47. "I was worth over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money."

48. "My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better."

49. "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

50. "I mean, some people say, 'Oh, God, if [Steve Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.' And, you know, I think it wouldn't be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple.
"

iSalute : Remembering Steve Jobs

I was about to board my flight at Chicago's O’Hare when the news of Steve Jobs passing away broke. When I landed in San Fran (My United flight did not have Wi-Fi)- my thoughts were with the family, Apple colleagues and the huge number of Steve Jobs and Apple supporters. Innumerable iPads, Macs, iPods inside the aircraft symbolized everything that Apple got out to the world. As I landed in San Francisco, nothing prepared me to see the huge global outpouring of affection for Steve Jobs. Today as I drove past Infinite Loop @ Cupertino, I just couldn’t stop recollecting the fact that From Tokyo and Paris to San Francisco and New York, mourners created impromptu memorials outside Apple stores, from flowers and candles to a dozen green and red apples on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue.

The speed and reach amazed me – not in a way surprising given the reach of the electronic media and social tools but what did surprise me was the fact that in this age where scandals, misdeeds make huge news, for news of Steve’s demise to make such an impression, completely swept me off my foot.

A creative genius, a perfectionist, someone who keeps pushing the boundaries of innovation, keep improving the state of the art in technology and provide flawless value to people and win their hearts and gain walletshare consistently is perhaps an unparalleled phenomenon in the world. That Steve could do this in this century – when choices abound and consumers are so picky and promiscuous is an incredible, unmatched saga of achievement.

Steve and Apple stood for unadulterated class. What to pick and what to ignore. From his legendary presentation skills to the new industry models that he created to the array of products that symbolized the very best of its genre stands testimony to his genius. From converting a consumer product space from a volume play centered around margin outreach, he proved that volume play can be done with very respectable margins and still make each and every consumer feel very proud of their status symbol as consumer of Apple products, While people may debate for ever whether Apple is a media company or an entertainment company or a company playing in the consumer non-durable space etc.. he truly made Apple as a lifestyle for its countless number of consumers around the world. In his recent presentation to the Cupertino city council on Apple new campus plans, he said that the architecture would be of so high standards that all students of architecture around the world would plan a visit to see the campus when it is brought up. I have seen in countless occasions the sort of work culture, full of focus and energy that Steve had brought inside Apple. For several years continually, he defined the norms through his products, the definition of what could be done in the high tech consumer space.
Its Jobs’ vision, and the design of Apple’s products — the touch interface, the easy to navigate non-computer-like operating system, the ease of use — and the well designed and now robust Apple ecosystem, the iPod and the iPhone and the iPad have each played a role in disrupting virtually every form of entertainment – the consumable media, from music to text to video.

Not for nothing people call him the best CEO in the world, which he proudly occupied or for some he is the greatest industrialist that America has produced. In and of itself, Steve proved to be the defining standard here. While the world was broadly aware of the deep set of concerns around Steve’s health for the last few years, not many would have expected the end to happen so soon. For many of his admirers, he could pull that magic out that so famously espoused in his product launch presentations. For several decades, the world will recollect the fact that while fighting these personal setbacks, that Steve and his team could keep rolling out category killers/creating products so consistently, create the volumes, maintain healthy margins (in a very tough business and competitive environment), making Apple in the process the top valued technology company in the world. A truly awe inspiring phenomenon ,indeed. The fighter and winner that he is nothing (except those who could have known his medical condition well enough) could make it look that he himself could fall soon.


Ever since he came back to lead the reigns of Apple, Steve and Apple were synonymous with success, His master set of strategies that helped turn around the prospects of Apple would be part of textbook history for ever. Why is it that in his passing away, there’s so much of feelings all around? Steve Jobs stood for the user in a computing world where missteps and mishaps get tolerated across the board. He single mindedly advocated the cause of users as seen from the range of Apple products that got launched - for a majority of Apple users he through magic worked to get whats in their minds and roll out not only products that meet their needs but provide more than those – teens, moms, father and older generation – virtually all strata of society shared similar adulation for Steve.

The PC industry’s most fascinating grandfather who also brought out the post PC–World into reality is clearly the greatest visionary and creative mind that unfortunately just moved into the shadows. In the last few weeks, ever since Steve announced that he is moving out of the CEO role citing his health concerns, some wrote premature obituaries, citing their personal admiration and the impact that Apple products have made in their lives. Some would like to see him as a combination of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Mozart. While some of my choice of technology usage could be different from that of Apple, Steve jobs never ceased to excite and create awe and inspiration in my mind.

That the world could see a 56 year old man in the most technological advanced nation on earth and for somebody who practically had all the global resources at his disposal could lose a fight against cancer( as widely reported), leaves a chilling feeling in the minds and hearts of his followers. There’s anger behind all the praise and sorrow that one man who has done so much to advance the state of the art , who could have given so much had he lived longer could be taken away right in front of our eyes.

Am sure Apple management would continue to take his journey forward, but what stands out is the fact that in this world innovators are always outnumbered and being a successful innovator and a business man is a deadly combination -that’s available only in its rarest forms – symbolized as with Steve Jobs. There is no substitute for Steve – its truly the end of an era. Hopefully this would be part of a continuum, where the new takes over from where where he left and keep running.


Words from Steve Job’s commemorative speech at Stanford rings resplendent with widom,” “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” From Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

Steve leaves us with this thought : A true hero in life who could change so much in the world leaves a great thought of substantive force in our minds.- at everyone’s level, given the vision, determination and energy, all of us can make a difference in what we set out to do – small or big. The world will never ever see another Steve Jobs – he is truly unique – one who cared about liberal arts and technology together keeping user needs in mind. It's still difficult for me to see how this great smart computing world would maintain its growth and innovation without a Steve Jobs touch to its advancement. Hope is the answer and as Steve has shown in resurrecting the prospects of Apple, for the determined, it is always possible to achieve. He started his business journey from a garage with a friend. How destiny shaped him & how he shaped his destiny.

As someone said to me in the words of Steve –“iCame, iCreated, iWent. And my legacy will live on.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Honoring Steve Jobs, innovator, co-founder & ex-CEO of Apple. He inspired us all by his amazing products, infinite drive, incredible passion and never-say-die attitude! He made us happy with his innovations!

We will miss you Steve! You have inspired me to innovate and work hard for my dreams! You embodied real American entrepreneurship! Thank You!!

Sanjay Dalal
CEO / Founder Ogoing
Connect

Steve Jobs Innovation Quotes

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."

"A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets."

"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."

"I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better."

"To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of discipline."

- Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, ex CEO and chairman

Open Source Hardware

Back in 2010 I stopped buying test servers from Dell and began building them from components using Intel i7 processors, X58-based mother boards, and modular power supplies from Ultra.  It was a good way to learn about hardware.  Besides, it was getting old to pay for Dell desktop systems with Windows, which I would then wipe off when installing Linux.  Between the educational value of understanding the systems better, selecting the exact components I wanted, and being able to fix problems quickly, it has been one of the best investments I have ever made.  And it didn't cost any more than equivalent Dell servers.

For this reason, a couple of recent articles about computer hardware caught my attention.  First, Dell is losing business as companies like Facebook build their own customized servers.  Open source database performance experts like Peter Zaitsev have been talking about full-stack optimization including hardware for years.  Google built their original servers using off-the-shelf parts.  Vertical integration of applications and hardware has since gone mainstream.  If you deploy the same application(s) on many machines, balancing characteristics like cost, performance, and power utilization is no longer a specialist activity but a necessity of business.  It's not just cutting out the Microsoft tax but many other optimizations as well.

Second, developments in hardware itself are making custom systems more attractive to a wide range of users.  A recent blog post by Bunnie Huang describes how decreases in the slope of CPU clock speed increase over time mean you can get better cost/performance by building optimized, application-specific systems now than waiting for across-the-board improvements.  Stable standards also drive down the difficulty of rolling your own.  Components on mid-range servers are sufficiently standardized it is easier to build basic systems from components than to put together a bicycle from scratch.  Try building your own wheels sometime if you don't believe this.

Easily customizable hardware has important consequences.  At a business level, Dell and other mainline hardware vendors will adapt to lower margins, but the market for generic, mid-range appliances has evaporated.  Starting around 2005 there was a wave of companies trying to sell open source databases, memcached, and datamarts on custom hardware.   Most seem to have moved away from hardware, like Schooner,  or folded entirely (like Gear6 and Kickfire).  The long-term market for such appliances, to the extent it exists, is in the cloud.

The other consequence is potentially far more significant.  The traditional walls that encapsulated hardware and software design are breaking down.  Big web properties or large ISPs like Rackspace run lean design teams that integrate hardware with open source software deployment.  This not just a matter of software engineers learning about hardware or vice-versa.  It is the tip of a much bigger iceberg.  Facebook recently started the Open Compute Project, which is a community-based effort to design server infrastructure.   In their own words:

By releasing Open Compute Project technologies as open hardware, our goal is to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects. That’s where you come in.

Facebook and others are opening up data center design.  Gamers have been building their own systems for years.  Assuming Bunnie's logic is correct, open hardware will apply to wide range of devices from phones up to massive clusters.  Community-based, customized system designs are no longer an oddity but part of a broad movement that will change the way all of us think about building and deploying applications on any kind of physical hardware.  It will upset current companies but also create opportunities for new kinds of businesses.  The "cloud" is not the only revolution in computing.  Open source hardware has arrived.