Dead Ink Vinyl

Daniel B. Honigman shared a bit of Sunday morning wisdom:

The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you that you’re not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don’t take it personally when they say “no” — they may not be smart enough to say “yes.” (Keith Olbermann)

When I was younger, I believed that success = capability + luck. This implies that the more capable you have, the less luck your require to be successful. Since you cannot control luck, the rational path to success would be to build your capability. This is the reason parents send their children to college, right? Sure, there is some abstract notion of broadening horizons blah blah, but nobody pays $25,000+ a year (plus room and board) for “broadening horizons” — they pay $25,000+ a year so that their child will land a good first job.

Thus, an observation of successful people should indicate that the majority are exceptionally capable at their professions. But this reasoning has other consequences, too. If the role of luck is to be minimized, then failure is a reflection on the person, not the circumstances. Thus, failure is feared and the drive to avoid failure can easily overshadow the drive to be successful — and so we take the safe bets, work 9-5 jobs, take shelter in big companies, dread change, and avoid risk. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

However, my observations of successful people — entrepreneurs in particular — indicate that greater part of success is simply not fearing failure. The role of luck is accepted and managed by trying again and again.

Keith Olbermann is right. And his advice is just a coffee-cup-length, modern regurgitation of the timeless insight eloquently made by Teddy Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. (April 13, 1910)

All of us chooses to either be ruled by circumstance or to create our own. Each day, decide anew which is the right path for you.

Somewhere in the last six months, the iPhone overtook the MacBook Pro as my primary computer. I don’t know when it happened—it was an imperceptible, gradual shift in the way I organized my life. I intended my iPhone to be used as a lifeline for those times I didn’t have WiFi for my laptop. I knew this included all of the time I spent at work, but I’d gotten along fine for the prior three years being disconnected from my personal communications during the business day. I thought would be using the iPhone’s email capabilities for “emergency” communications: last-minute Toastmasters meeting coordination and the like¹.

Now, I use the iPhone every day and it handles my the majority of personal computing needs. It’s convenient and (generally) a joy to use. I don’t appreciate being sent to my secondary computer for tasks I should be able to accomplish on my primary device. I don’t like opening my MacBookPro to surf the Web. Or to read email, record appointments, update contact information, or even to tweet. In fact, I only look forward to using my MBP for coding, blogging, writing documents, and image manipulation. For my everyday online activities, I far prefer using my iPhone. When I have to use my MBP for an “iPhone activity”, I get irritated.

The irritation has been increasing over the last couple of months. Mostly, my irritation is incited by Web sites that don’t lend themselves to ease of use on the iPhone (for example, my beloved Highrise)—or worse, completely disrespect the fact that I’m on a low-bandwidth EDGE connection (for example, Grub Hub, which I saw advertised on the CTA but had to dismiss because the home page took more than three minutes to load).

With the release of the SDK, the iPhone is graduating to become a full computing platform. It will move beyond email and Web sites². I anticipate that the coming year will see the release of all the applications I need to avoid cracking open my MBP for any of the mundane stuff. Finally, I’ll get to use my iPhone for instant messaging, enjoyable Twittering, Highrise, and WordPress.com administration.

Even if I have to build those applications myself.

¹ Of course, looking back on it, I note that my first mobile phone was purchased “for emergencies”, but very quickly became my primary phone service. Perhaps this is a general pattern for adoption of new technologies.

² To be honest, Web applications have really carried the iPhone farther than I expected. There are some very talented and dedicated people out there who pushed the Web on MobileSafari far beyond what I imagined possible.

I noticed Nicholas Carr’s short article about Why S3 Failed about the root cause of the outage to Amazon’s hosted storage service on February 15th. The root cause — a surge in authorization requests — is not the interesting part of this story. Rather, the interesting part is the ensuing discussion about the pros and cons of using a hosted storage solution versus keeping storage in-house.

In a comment to Carr’s posting, Marc Farley — a long-time author and analyst in the storage solutions space — pointed out:

Nick, storage customers tend to be far more conservative about risk than your average web services customers. Paranoid skepticism about storage creates different market dynamics. In other words, it ain’t cost-driven. Yesterday I wrote about it on my blog.

It makes sense to me that storage solutions — whether hosted or in-house — are (or should be) subject to a higher level of “paranoid skepticism” than other types of Internet services. For users and companies, it’s all about the data. Service disruptions are annoying, but data loss is terrifying.

However, I think Marc misses several points. First, S3 is has a lot going for it beyond being “cheap”. The primary attraction of S3 is its programmatically accessibility and its ability to handle random reading and writing of files (rather than bulk update and restore). This makes it appealing to incorporate into many online and desktop applications.

Second, Marc says in his blog entry:

If you expect something like 5 nines, then I would suggest that S3’s problems today cast a different shade of cloud over those expectations.

I say that the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement — more than this week’s outage — should be the instrument that “casts a different shade of cloud” over expectations that S3 will provide 5 nines¹ availability. The SLA only commits to 3 nines² in any billing period. Businesses and individuals requiring higher availability must look elsewhere or provide their own redundancy (and read Joel’s insights about the realities of high availability).

Marc’s not entirely wrong, though. In this segment, he mostly hits the nail on the head:

The bottom line question is whether you think you can do better on your own?

That’s close to right. Expressed more fully, the bottom line is whether you think can either do it better for the same cost or do it cheaper with the same level of service. But I digress.

I imagine that Marc’s professional history is largely devoted to working with large institutions and enterprises because those have been the traditional customers for professional storage solutions. With that perspective, Marc goes on to say:

Today, most storage customers think so and I believe most will continue to think so for a long time, despite what market analyst thinkers like Nick Carr believe.

Traditional storage solution customers probably can do better on their own than by using Amazon S3, but what Nick Carr realizes that Marc Farley doesn’t is that Amazon S3 isn’t aimed that that market.

I don’t think that Marc fully appreciates the dramatic market shift that is taking place today in the storage services space. I would be shocked if a significant proportion of Amazon S3’s customer base was traditional storage solution customers. I expect that most S3 customer are small businesses, startups, sole proprietorships, and individuals. Customers in this market don’t need petabytes of storage with carrier-grade availability (at least initially) and they almost certainly don’t have the technical expertise in-house (or the money to contract for that expertise) to build their own storage solution. What these customers do need is a storage solution with low up-front costs, pay-for-what-you-use billing, and access to lots more storage on short notice in case they’re an overnight success.

Thus, Marc might be surprised by Friday’s Wired article: Customers Shrug Off S3 Service Failure, but Nicholas Carr and Wired’s CTO understand:

For startups (and even for our own startups), it is a calculated risk to put all eggs in the EC2/S3 basket. Considering the cost savings overall, today’s glitch may have been acceptable for startups that use S3, like Twitter, given the bigger picture.

Indeed.

¹ “Five nines” is 99.999% availability, which allows only 25.9 seconds a month or 5.26 minutes a year of unplanned downtime.

² “3 nines” is 99.9% availability, which allows 43.2 minutes a month or 8.76 hours a year of unplanned downtime.