Bickel Blog

Mike Olson recommended this book a while back on Facebook. It is a dense book, and so full of information (all of history from the beginning of Homo habilis thru today) that I am having trouble keeping up. A passage last night convinced me that I had gotten a couple of big concepts out of it, and figured I would write them down before I forgot them... The book is written by Ian Morris , who teaches classics, history, and archaeology at Stanford University. It takes an archaeological and social look at the history of mankind and how we developed. Four items stood out to me as learnings from history that could be applied to today. 1. Climate change has been happening for a long time and has very dramatic consequences. "In two or three centuries around 17,000 BCE the sea level rose 40 feet as the glaciers that had blanketed North America, Europe and Asia melted." Weather determined where humans could go (people migrated all the way from Africa thru Asia and Alaska to set...

We live in impatient times. 24 hour cable news, 140 character spurts of creativity, $1B companies created in less than 2 years by selling spa treatments at half off, LinkedIn has a valuation of $9B on $500M revenue and a new penchant for daily emails to remind us how relevant they are... Michael Cote and Bob Warfield both wrote interesting articles this past week on the unfulfilled promise of PaaS - "Touted at the next thing in cloud, Platform as a Service is receiving much attention now. While PaaS has been far from a failure, it hasn’t been a mega success…yet." and "There’s been plenty of time for PaaS to get big, but it is kind of lumbering along." Perhaps people forget that Salesforce is over 10 years old. I bought my stock in them in 2004 at $17 per share. It took 7 years to reach $154... All good things really don't always happen overnight... When we think of PaaS, we think about the next generation of middleware. This is a business that Gartner puts...