Crawling Out from the Ashes | Insider Lite | TalkingPointz

It’s been an interesting year so far. The Marshall Fire did burn on our property, but most of the damage we sustained was from smoke.

Fire soot is a vile substance. It gets into everything and is hard to remove. Smoke damage caused the insurance company to total my wife’s car, and flames never touched it.

The past five weeks we’ve been emptying the house in order to de-smoke it. Every room, closet, and drawer. It’s been exhausting, and I’m happy to report it’s almost done and I am back online.

Things can be replaced. What people fear losing the most from fires and other potential home disasters are irreplaceable memories. The ability to store our memories is a uniquely human characteristic. It’s been fascinating to me during my personal archaeological dig just how ephemeral memory technologies are.

I own four boxes of vinyl records, and it’s time for them to go. Records were a technological breakthrough, and were one of the first methods invented to store and playback audio. The phonograph actually led to the telephone. Yes, I have a lot of old phones in my home too.

Records were popular for decades, but many archival technologies don’t last long at all. In my home I dug out out audio cassettes, data cassettes, floppies (5.25 and 3.25), zip drives, iPods (USD and Firewire), CDs, DVDs, Blurays, VHS, Hi-8, USB drives and sticks, 8 and 16 mm films, and of course boxes of printed photographs. Pro tip: storing memories is not particularly useful unless also saving a means of retrieval.

in 1977, NASA sent the Voyager spacecraft into deep space with a golden record of greetings in 55 languages. The hope was that some alien race might be able to play the record. A bit optimistic considering we are running out of earthlings that can still play a record.

Print some photos for your great grand kids as they won’t know what to do with (or what to call) JPGs.

While the news/announcements of enterprise comms are slowing down, activities seem to be increasing. Everyone is getting ready for Enterprise Connect. It looks like it will be a great event.

It’s been a long pandemic, but that seems to be behind us now. Not that it’s safe to go out, but because we are done staying home. It’s time for a reunion tour. The industry that enabled remote and distributed work needs a gathering.

I often think about how much things have changed since the last EC, but this year the last EC was 2019 – and a ton has changed. Not one of the keynote speakers was in their current position in 2019. Beyond leadership, look at the vendor landscape: Mitel isn’t a cloud provider, Dialpad and Microsoft are now CCaaS providers, Cisco is a CPaaS player, and Zoom is a heavyweight. I feel like Rip Van Winkle, but I haven’t slept.

See you in Orlando in March.

Meta is having a tough month. Earlier it set a new record for the biggest one-day stock loss (stock -26% and valuation -$230B). There’s a lot of reasons to sell that stock, including lack of growth, Apple’s (and soon Google’s) restrictions on tracking, TikTok, antitrust concerns, the cost of its recent pivot to the metaverse, and more.

Last week, Meta fumbled its Super Bowl VR concert with the Foo Fighters. Meta promised front row seats to an exclusive post-game VR event. This should have been a PR coup - a pre-recorded, VR concert after the biggest game of the year. Instead, it was a comedy of errors.

The servers crashed when all the ticket holders arrived at the same time. The max number of viewers topped out around 13k instead of the expected 61k. Those that did arrive were not in the front row as promised, but back a ways with sub optimal views of both the band and the camera crew recording the 2D version for Facebook.

Evidently, Meta is going to have to spend more than $10B on this pivot.

From the January 2022 insider Report:

Atos Surprise: I was expecting Atos to make news this month. Last October, we learned that it was in advanced talks to sell Unify. Instead, the big news that arrived was a major profit warning. It turns out that the demand for outsourcing in the cloud era is rapidly declining. 

Unify is a tragic story. Project Ansible was previewed to analysts in 2013 and subsequently launched by a different leadership team in 2014. The delivered product was scaled back, but the name Circuit probably doomed it more. Circuit was ahead of its time: Its initial vision, as I understood it, looked a lot like Microsoft Teams (launched in 2017).

I believe Circuit now belongs to RingCentral, where it will die (long live Glip), and it’s unclear what is to become of Unify … or Atos. It is likely that Atos acquired Unify to better support Siemens, a major Atos (and Unify) customer, and Unify’s value expired after Atos completed Siemens’ migration from Unify to Teams. 

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