Sun’s just wrapped-up its Customer Engineering (CEC 2007) conference in Las Vegas; for obvious reasons I was not able to attend, but several weeks ago I had committed to present:
IT FuturologyWhat will happen when the MySpace generation grows-up? When employees want Facebook rather than a phonebook? When your monthly report is on your iPhone, your spreadsheet’s on your Wiki, your e-mail’s moved to Google, you haven’t got a home directory (or a PC) any more, and blogging’s no longer a buzzword – it’s just what everybody does to stay employed?
If these questions aren’t on your mind, then they should be. Sun’s internal culture is three to five years ahead of the market, and even we’re running to keep up with the pace of change; if that’s *our* challenge then imagine what will happen when investment banks want to hire top talent five years hence? Employees will vote with their feet, and staff retention will be proportionate to environments which let staff do what they want, how they want, and Sarbanes-Oxley may no longer be enough of a lever to control their behaviour. Will your customer’s predicament become a matter of “do what your staff want, or die?”
So rather than cancel the whole thing, I thought I would try something different – another Lessig-like presentation, though without an audience which did make the process somewhat harder; plus I was really pushed to find time for script generation and recording amongst all the other stuff I had to do – so it’s not quite come out the way I wanted, more texty rather than visual – but it’s good enough for a wider audience and I would prefer not to delude myself that I will “re-record it and publish a better version, later” without first getting some feedback on the content.
The result is now available on blip.tv; it runs for almost 40 minutes and is will be obviously meant for an audience of techies who make hardware and software, but the ideas – including what you could do with a 1 Terabyte iPod, or how you could do away with the intermediation of a web server – should be of interest to quite a lot of folk.
If I had the chance to do it again the talk would be a little different, I would like to record the audio with a small audience (or with an audience of more than just Bart Blanquart, who helped me greatly but alas does not constitute a laugh track) – and then host a discussion to open up more ideas and possibilities.
Maybe next time. Herewith the video:
It’s probably nicest to play the video directly on the blip.tv page (provides for a bigger video / better graphics) but the embedded player version above should work OK.
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