A new McKinsey report calls cloud a "Trillion Dollar Prize"
This is just the latest in a mountain of research and reporting. Look around your firm and ask yourself if there is a cloud native competency, because there's going to be winners and losers in this.
What I'm Writing
Metadata Debt: The story of Scones Unlimited and how they almost failed to compete.
Shaping Up: Ryan Singer's framework for product leadership changed how I work.
In the Buffer
The Presence Shortage: Daniel Gross lays out a very creative thesis connecting WSB, Clubhouse, and the pandemic. Pull apart everything that nourishes us about being present with each other into constituent parts and rebuild it.
Why There's No Such Thing as a Startup Within a Big Company: As somebody who wants to innovate within enterprise, I think this piece is fair. You can't try to transplant startup practices into the enterprise, innovation has to be different.
A complement to this piece on that note would be this great talk by Bryon Kroger about innovating within USAF.
Microcredit Pioneers Win Nobel Peace Prize: We're coming up on 15 years since Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel. I'm struck by how impactful the use of novel business models has been since then. The explosion of FinTech has been fascinating to watch as an outsider, and I suspect that its slow collision with Cloud Native Infrastructure will mint a new crop of ultra-wealthy pioneers.
The Doctor Will Sniff You Now: I think this is so neat. One thing that comes to mind when you read this is the sensor. The computer vision revolution was arguably aided by the fact that we are all walking around with great cameras on our person 24/7. Who carries around a mechanical nose?
File with "Meet the E-Nose That Actually Sniffs"
The Report
The McKinsey report centers around three ideas: going to cloud, going native, and the next cloud movement.
"Rejuvenate" (going to cloud) covers the table stakes for cloud enabled firms. You should embrace elasticity and ephemerality. You should build for security and resilience. You should automate the cloud with Infrastructure as Code (IaC). You should be able to adopt new technologies more quickly than in a datacenter (because you aren't constrained by procurement cycles.)
"Innovate" (going native) covers how firms can squeeze value out of their cloud competency. This includes things like encouraging experimentation ("fail fast"). The combination of hyperscale clouds and DevOps tools can help firms to transition from project mindset to a product mindset.
"Pioneer" (the next cloud movement) is up for grabs. Creating pockets of innovation within a company is hard. Adoption of new technologies is hard. What comes after Cloud Native? Serverless? Containers? Is it quantum computing, as the authors speculate? Is it edge computing? Mixed reality?
I'm not sure where we are in the IT Perez Cycle — it's very hard to tell when you are at a turning point. I think it's clear that long term survival for firms will be increasingly tied to some key competencies and that cloud is going to be one of them.