Software Defined Talk: Besides Getting Drunk, What Do You Do at Annual Kick-offs?

Jan 18th, 2016 6:01am by Michael Coté

At the start of the year, companies love annual “kick off” meetings where goals and strategies are elucidated. We discuss how to best take advantage of these events, aside from drinking. Coté also reviews the Apple Watch, and we discuss a smattering of tech world news.

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Show notes

If you like video, see this episodes’ video recording.
Pineapple upside-down cake.
Oracle buys Austin-based StackEngine – Docker! docker! Docker! StackEngine raised $4.5 million and was sold for $1.3 million? We loved the “I don’t know, it’s some nerd shit” tone of coverage here, e.g., “And then when the developer sends the app to the cloud, it sends it to a Docker container running on a cloud, and all that stuff just works, no troubleshooting.”
Meanwhile: Austin Docker Meetup – Coté on panel with some other folks. Much interest in the crowd (60–80 people for an Austin meetup!). Questions around security, the two standards group. See Coté’s industry data round-up, mostly from DataDog and New Relic, but a 451 cameo. Industry analysts have very little quantitative data on Docker/containers.
Joe’s Crab Shack on Town Lake – not too bad!
What’d you get for Christmas? Gift cards; impact drill; Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch review from Coté.
Things to Stop Talking About in 2016 – Unicorns, Wearables, Marissa Mayer, Sharing Economy, The Bubble

Bonus links not covered in show

Nice visualization of all the world’s money– That’s a lot of fuel units!
“Carlos Slim” – funny name.
Big Shot IBM execs leaving: Steve Mills, Dr. Danny. Meanwhile, the IBM union shut down, citing low membership: from 400 at its peak to 200 now.

Recommendations

Brandon: The Audible
Matt: Tons of interesting global commentary & insight, always enjoy reading the annual “State of the World” by Bruce Sterling @bruces & Jon Lebkowsky @jonl
Coté: one investor’s (hedge fund? SpringOwl) opinion on Yahoo, in 99 slides. Some good commentary on this deck as guerilla marketing.

Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books "Changing Mindsets," "Monolithic Transformation" and "The Business Bottleneck" cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451...