StorageMojo

Some Christmas cheer
Some, not a lot.

According to Sun, there have been some significant changes in the mutual lawsuits:

• In November, the two parties agreed to litigate their mutual lawsuits in northern California instead of east Texas.
• They are litigating both the original NetApp suit and Sun’s countersuit before a mutually agreed-upon judge.
• Sun has filed reexamination requests for three NetApp patents covering COW, snapshots and writable snapshots.

Catch up on your prior art over the holidays
Sun’s litigation documents page offers a selection of scholarly articles on related topics. Sun believes these document prior art that was not considered by the USPTO in the original patent examination.

The StorageMojo take
Bravo to NetApp for moving to a California court. Let’s get these cases settled on their merits, and soon.

NetApp needs to focus on their long-term marketing problem: NAS is a commodity. They’ve got 5 years to re-invent themselves for a world of Internet-scale data centers.

Unlike most minicomputer companies that the PC laid low, NetApp has deep core expertise, the respect of a broad customer base and a relevant brand. If any storage company can make the transition, NetApp can.

But sitting around hoping patents will protect their business won’t cut it. NetApp’s strategic planners need to be burning the midnight oil for the next 6 months. The secular trends are clear. The business cases follow. NetApp has a rich technology portfolio and a marketing edge. Will they put it together?

Comments welcome, of course. I’ll be on a light posting schedule this week. Happy holidays to one and all.

Email is the largest personal database for most people. Easy to search, my gigabyte of email contains contacts, documents, notes and the record of many relationships. I back it up both locally and remotely.

But how do I know it isn’t corrupted?

FastMail’s email data protection
FastMail is, I think [guys, how about a "what is FastMail" paragraph?], an open source email system an email hosting provider. In a recent blog post someone there talks about how FastMail protects user data from data corruption:

. . . we ensure that as soon as an email is delivered to a mailbox, a SHA-1 checksum of that email is generated and stored in the email index.

When the email is replicated, the email content and the checksum are sent separately. We then generate the checksum on the replicated email content and ensure that it matches the original checksum to see that the email was replicated correctly.

We also repeat this procedure when the email is backed up, ensuring that the backup of the email is correct.

We also run a regular check process that takes blocks of emails and recomputes their checksum to see it matches what is in the index. If there’s any issues, we’re alerted and can find which of the master, replica or backup email are correct and can correct the problem.

What do other email systems do?
To my untutored eye, this seems like comprehensive protection against data corruption.

Two questions:

• Is it?
• What do other email systems do?

Gmail presumably relies upon the triple redundancy of GFS to ensure data integrity. What do Exchange and Sendmail do? Are any of them demonstrably better?

The StorageMojo take
Email is looming ever-larger as a personal information management system. As volume and attachment size continue to grow, multi-gigabyte mailboxes will become the norm, if they aren’t already.

Are the data protection measures in email systems up to the task?

Update: Alert reader - more alert than me, anyway - Nathan, found the FastMail “About” page. They are another hosted email provider. I updated the post to reflect that. Thanks, Nathan!

Comments invited, of course.

I’m a judge for the Codie awards this year, so I’m getting to see some storage software that I might not otherwise. Today, Rick Clark, CEO of Aptare, demo’d their Backup Manager and Capacity Manager.

I was impressed.

Oh no, has Robin gone soft?
Maybe. But Aptare has 3 important features:

• Agentless architecture. They go direct to HDS and EMC arrays to get the info they need. More arrays coming.
• Deep reporting. Application databases, LUNs, array, allotted and consumed.
• Flexible GUI. Drag and drop the data you need to create a custom dashboard, like a web 2.0 mashup.

Managed from a browser
Capacity and backup management use Aptare’s StorageConsole Platform. The company plans further modules. Next up, a replication manager.

The StorageMojo take
This is the first backup manager and capacity manager I’ve seen that actually feels easy enough for non-storage geeks to use. That is important because as capacity continues to explode, some storage management tasks need to get pushed out to application owners.

If you are in the market for either backup or capacity management or aren’t fully satisfied with your existing tools, you owe it to yourself to get the Aptare demo.

Comments welcome, as always.

Most criticism of the One Laptop Per Child PC centers on the cost for what is a low-spec computer. As ASUS with its Eee machine is proving, a low-cost conventional laptop can be pretty powerful. But that misses the point. The OLPC is a fundamental rethinking of the computing experience.

[photo courtesy OLPC]

This child’s review of the OLPC is the first hint that suggests that Laptop.org may have gotten it right. As the 9 year old’s father writes:

So Rufus is using his laptop to write, paint, make music, explore the internet, and talk to children from other countries.

Because it looks rather like a simple plastic toy, I had thought it might suffer the same fate as the radio-controlled dinosaur or the roller-skates he got last Christmas - enjoyed for a day or two, then ignored.

Instead, it seems to provide enduring fascination.

I had returned from Nigeria not entirely convinced that the XO laptop was quite as wonderful an educational tool as its creators claimed. I felt that a lot of effort would be needed by hard-pressed teachers before it became more than just a distracting toy for the children to mess around with in class.

But Rufus has changed my mind.

With no help from his Dad, he has learned far more about computers than he knew a couple of weeks ago, and the XO appears to be a more creative tool than the games consoles which occupy rather too much of his time.

OLPC roots
Even though the OLPC is the only notebook whose industrial design chops rival those of Apple, its real innovation lies in software. Building on educational theorist Seymour Papert’s work - he invented the Logo language - the OLPC’s re-thinks the relationship between man and machine.

OLPC differences
The OLPC has activities instead of applications.

Activities are distinct from applications in their foci—collaboration and expression—and their implementation—journaling and iteration.

The collaboration comes in the form of built-in mesh networking that allows all local OLPCs to talk to each other.

By exploiting this connectivity, every activity has the potential to be a networked activity. We aspire that all activities take advantage of the mesh; any activity that is not mesh-aware should perhaps be rethought in light of connectivity. As an example, consider the web-browsing activity bundled with the laptop distribution. Normally one browses in isolation, perhaps on occasion sending a friend a favorite link. On the laptop, however, a link-sharing feature integrated into the browser activity transforms the solitary act of web-surfing into a group collaboration.

The connectivity seems to be powerful. Young Rufus is conversing with other kids who send him messages in Spanish from his home in England. How does that work?

Expression is the goal of the activities and collaboration. Rather than downloading music, the laptop is equipped to create music. The rethinking extends to the file system:

The objectification of the traditional file system speaks more directly to real-world metaphors: instead of a sound file, we have an actual sound; instead of a text file, a story. In order to support this concept, activity developers may define object types and associated icons to represent them.

Another aspect of the system’s UI is a focus on the Journal. This is more than written documentation of what a child has done.

The Journal combines entries explicitly created by the children with those that are implicitly created through participation in activities; developers must think carefully about how an activity integrates with the Journal more so than with a traditional file system that functions independently of an application. The activities, the objects, and the means of recording all tightly integrate to create a different kind of computer experience.

I’ll be interested to see how children who grow up with the OLPC think about computers. I fear we have a generation of children whose creativity has been permanently stunted by the desktop metaphor.

The StorageMojo take
Negroponte’s biggest mistake is that he did not market the OLPC in the industrialized world first. All the good intentions in the world won’t convince the 3rd world that something is good unless it has been embraced by the opinion leaders of the 1st world.

If I was Steve Jobs, I’d be taking a very close look at this machine to see what I could steal. Michael Dell could learn a few things too.

Comments welcome. OLPC has a beautiful web site.

Mighty Google is worried about getting the shaft from telcos. Shouldn’t you be too?

Larry Downes imagines the worst
Larry Downes’ arguments against net neutrality are button-pushing propaganda designed to inflame, not illuminate. I expect better from a University of Chicago trained lawyer.

In response I’m going to look at the text of a net neutrality proposal and then at Mr. Downes’ mostly irrelevant points.

What is being proposed?
Let’s start with Congressman Markey’s proposed Network Neutrality Act and decide for yourself? The PDF is only 11 pages, while the dread regulations are barely 4 pages.

Here are the core “regulations” Mr. Downs is so afraid of. From the bill, Internet providers may

not block, impair, degrade, discriminate against, or interfere with the ability of any person to utilize their broadband service

for lawful content, applications and services. I expect no less.

Furthermore, service providers are required to

clearly and conspicuously disclose to users, in plain language, accurate information about the speed, nature, and limitations of their broadband service

Truth-in-advertising? Telco marketing will never adapt!

How about this requirement?

offer, upon reasonable request to any person, a broadband service for use by such person to offer or access unaffiliated content, applications, and services

Requiring telcos to take new customers? Tricksy Mr. Markey.

Here’s what gets the telcos mad
The bill requires that a telco

not discriminate in favor of itself in the allocation, use, or quality of broadband services or interconnection with other broadband networks

Isn’t that a Communist common-carrier requirement? Gee, why own a big network if you can’t screw your competitors? No wonder the telcos are miffed.

This gets them madder
Broadband service providers will be required to:

offer a service such that content, applications, or service providers can offer unaffiliated content, applications, or services in a manner that is at least equal to the speed and quality of service that the operator’s content, applications, or service is accessed and offered, and without interference or surcharges on the basis of such content, applications, or services

Hm-m? Requiring equal treatment of unaffiliated content? Just like telegraph companies had to 160 years ago? Medieval.

Now telcos see red
Here’s the heart of the matter. The law would require that

if the broadband network provider prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type, prioritize or offer enhanced quality of service to all data of that type (regardless of the origin of such data) without imposing a surcharge or other consideration for such prioritization or quality of service

[emphasis added]

The heart of the matter
The telco can charge for more, time, speed or bandwidth, but they can’t charge more for preferential treatment of packets. This is what being a common carrier means.

The Downes critique, fearlessly knocking down straw men
Larry’s article is mostly a big cloud of smoke, irrelevant to the question of net neutrality:

• Railroad asset accounting has nothing to do with treating packets equally
• Airlines wanted the CAB’s regulation and fought to preserve it to avoid competition
• SOX addresses another financial accounting problem

There are many examples of regulation that works: the drugs we take; the airlines we fly; the building codes that make our homes, offices, schools and factories safer.

Network designers demand non-neutrality?
Mr. Downes then concludes that net neutrality would stymie web engineers efforts to optimize Web traffic.

He might be referring to Bob Briscoe’s IETF problem statement We Don’t Have To Do Fairness Ourselves which discusses the unfair use of TCP, a protocol designed to be fair. Briscoe says the IETF needs to:

. . . focus on giving principled and enforceable control to users and operators, so they can agree between themselves which fair use policy they want locally.

This is very different than giving the telcos a blank check to impose anything on a captive audience of Internet users. All our history with monopolies and duopolies tells us that without basic ground rules the telcos will ream the users.

The deep end
Then Mr. Downes goes off the deep end, positing that a complaint would force the FCC to open every affected packet on the network to determine if a telco were violating the law. This is silly.

It would be far easier to monitor a sample of disputed traffic as it is injected and measure its performance across the network. But how likely is a complaint if the telcos are prohibited from discriminatory treatment? Why would they develop the ability?

What is much more likely is that a telco whose unpopular policies have alienated the public would want government protection. Politicians would provide protection - for a price - such as ready access to the databases that store your surfing habits.

The StorageMojo take
Ultimately, net neutrality is a choice between private exploitation of network users by opaque, profit-driven companies or publicly debated ground rules that set minimum standards. The telcos and their claques whine about how hard all this is, but I’m confident the engineers can solve the problems.

Mr. Downes - like George Ou - doesn’t address the issue of fairness between users and providers. If Google is worried about getting reamed by telcos, why aren’t you?

I gave up watching much TV about 20 years ago. Other than a general incomprehension of new popcult references from Seinfeld, Friends, Monday Night Football and such, I can’t say I’ve missed much.

If it is really good, like Band of Brothers, I buy it on DVD to support the data storage industry.

But I do watch - on DVR - The Daily Show and the Colbert Report for my evening news fix. Since the writer’s strike started, no new shows. I’m bummed, but I’ll live.

What is it writers do?
Being writers, they put together, using Apple’s Keynote, an explanation. It is well written (of course), and worth a view.

The StorageMojo take
Home entertainment is a growing driver of the storage industry. But it requires content worth watching. Good storytellers are rare and they should be encouraged.

I hope the studios stop reaming the writers so we can get back to getting entertained.’

Comments welcome, especially from striking writers.

For some reason I volunteered to write something about vendors after the Wikibon con call today. That follows.

Vendors: responding to EMC’s cluster storage initiative

Context:
EMC’s support of cluster storage for archiving and backup will legitimize the technology. Vendors with competitive products have a window of opportunity to position themselves as a superior alternative. Make no mistake: EMC plans to own this market and will commit significant resources to the effort.
EMC’s market entry will be hobbled by several problems that competitors can exploit.

• Immature software: limitations, bugs and the eval cycle that implies
• Maintaining a bright line positioning between Hulk/Maui and Symms
• 60% gross margin requirement

EMC will be NDA’ing strategic customers starting mid-January to build major sales to reference at announcement. Smart customers will be calling other vendors, including the smaller, innovative ones, for perspective. Luck favors the prepared.

Strategy:
IBM, Hitachi, HP, NetApp IBM Global Services should be open to reselling/integrating suitable substitutes. There are efforts within IBM’s storage group to create a scalable, commodity storage infrastructure, but the chasm between IBM’s brilliant technologists and IBM marketing makes success problematic.

Hitachi doesn’t seem to be doing anything in this area. They will be looking at an acquisition and will take their time.

HP’s Polyserve acquisition may convince them that they have the cluster thing under control, but Polyserve isn’t competitive with EMC’s initiative. HP has a deep well of technology expertise from the DEC cluster products. Expect a cluster acquisition in 2008.

NetApp is vulnerable. ONTAP GX has missed the cluster market and their controller-based architecture has all the cost disadvantages of traditional arrays without the flexibility of clustering. Putting ONTAP 7G on commodity hardware bricks with software “mortar” - as Google does with GFS - would preserve their significant advantages with WAFL at a lower $/GB.

New competitors
Now is the time to get serious about what your product really does and what its appeal is to customers. Focus is critical to building a defensible position that can be used to win F500 business in areas where EMC is less competitive. There is also an opportunity to shift the terms of the customer debate. This market is still fluid and customers don’t have a clear mental map of the terrain. Smart, focused marketing can take advantage of that.

Action Item:
Small/new vendors: if you want to be acquired, now is the time to be shopping yourself to the big guys. If you want to build a big business, get your marketing focused on verticals and business justification.

Big vendors: start shopping now. EMC wants your scalp so you’ll want to be well-armed.

All: there is a lot more to know about Hulk/Maui. A focused competitive analysis effort will pay dividends.

Update: The audio is available here. If you are wondering if I mentioned your company, I probably didn’t.

Comments welcome, of course.

Here’s an invite to a Wikibon Peer Incite discussion I’ll be leading
Tuesday, 11 December. Call in on Skype and listen and ask questions. EMC’s AR and competitive analysts will be there. Shouldn’t you?

If you aren’t hip to Wikibon it is worth checking out.

Here’s the blurb from the invite with the call in number and passcode.

This is a reminder that the next Peer Incite research meeting is scheduled for Tuesday December 11, 2007. The topic for this meeting is: EMC’s Maui and the Future of Clustered Storage.

Google’s development of one of the world’s largest storage infrastructures based on commodity components, without reliance on traditional array technology, was a huge wakeup call for the storage industry in general and EMC in particular. Recent comments by EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci indicate two new products from the company, Hulk and Maui will address the market for so-called ‘Cloud Computing’ and hit the market in mid-2008. It is estimated that 85% of corporate data is unstructured yet organizations continue to spend billions optimizing storage for the 15% of information that is traditional database-oriented. Will this continue to make sense?

Key issues we’ll address on the call include:

• What does it mean to users that EMC is about to legitimize clustered storage?
• What do these advancements mean for user investments in traditional array technology?
• How will the industry likely respond to EMC’s attempt to lead this trend?

Here’s how to participate in the discussion:

• Date: Tuesday December 11, 2007
• Time: 12:00pm EST (9:00am PST)
• Call in #: 218-486-1300 Passcode: 509215

Moderator: Peter Burris (http://www.wikibon.org/User:PBurris)

See you at the meeting.

The StorageMojo take
The IT consulting business - as in Gartner and everybody else - needs a good shaking. Wikibon is a good idea that may be part of the solution. Let me know what you think after you check it out.

Update: If you miss the call check out the Wikibon archive.

Comments welcome, of course

The SF Federal Attorney is 2 and 0 on these backdating prosecutions. Stephanie Jensen, former VP of HR, said she didn’t know what she was doing was wrong, but the prosecution noted that she cautioned staffers not to email about it. The jury took a day to return a verdict. She faces up to 20 years in prison for one count of fraud and one count of falsifying records.

Former CEO Greg Reyes is still awaiting sentencing on his conviction for 10 felony charges. Jensen’s conviction isn’t good news for him.

Brocade’s marketing nailed by the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog
On a lighter note, the WSJ Law Blog had this comment on Brocade’s marketing:

Law Blog Corporate Self-Description of the Day: So we’ve done a little bit of reporting on backdating at technology companies, and we have to admit: for the most part, we have no understanding of what it is these companies do. We took a look at the Brocade Web site to gain some understanding. Here’s what we learned:

“Brocade provides key building-blocks for architecting and simplifying IT infrastructures to increase resource utilization, improve productivity, and maximize ROI.”

You can bet we’ll be dropping that into our holiday cocktail-party chat ASAP.

Much classier than shouting “party’s over!”

Seriously
What does Brocade do? Yeah, they build FC switches. But with 10 gigE coming in, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) coming in, that won’t be a growth business. Do you really want to compete with Cisco and Juniper in the Ethernet switch business?

How about storage connectivity? Maybe. Like QLogic, who took an enormous hit when Wall Street realized FC was over, Brocade is grappling with the post-FC world. More on that later.

The problem with Brocade’s self-description is that it could apply to dozens of technology firms - and does. Faster, better, cheaper is what everyone in Silicon Valley does. Working some of the “how” into it makes for a better and more memorable story.

And differentiates you from everyone else who claims the same thing.

Comments welcome. If you start seeing law firm ads here, that is Google’s doing, not mine.

Internet video is about where film was 100 years ago
I was talking to a company who will be announcing a video infrastructure solution when the CEO mentioned something he called the “video performance/quality vise.”

Here’s the problem: a video stream requires both capacity and bandwidth. Higher quality video requires more bits per second and more capacity. Bandwidth and capacity both cost money.

So as Internet video quality rises, the financial cost to provide the video rises too. An HD video stream is 4 Mbit/sec.

500,000 channels and somethin’ on
As cute as YouTube, et. al. are, they suck. Movies are small, picture and audio quality awful, and viewing options limited - like films 100 years ago.

Bandwidth limitations are part of the problem, at least here in the US. But those are being addressed, however slowly.

What happens when Internet video becomes competitive with broadcast TV in quality? Popularity will soar. As TiVo has shown, people love choice. And the Internet will have the most choice.

The price/performance/popularity vise
Digital Fountain’s raptor codes will change the Internet landscape for video. High quality video will drive be much more popular, just as long-form movies took film to the next level.

Bandwidth costs are dropping fast to pennies a GB. So infrastructure costs - especially storage - are critical to Internet video’s commercial success. The more popular it gets, the more storage will be needed. It is a huge opportunity.

The StorageMojo take
Massive data storage is still a very young technology. The ultimate cultural impact will be more profound than film because of the many-to-many nature of the Internet and the low barriers to entry. Should be fun!

Comments welcome, please. I don’t think the firm wanted me to mention their name, so I haven’t. If we get that cleared up I’ll update the post. Or maybe wait a while to write about them.

Update: Joe, thanks for catching the 4Mbit mistake I made. I corrected it above.

Google is sorry
I do a lot of research on the web using Google. Starting early last week I started getting these Google error messages:

The search term was “gutenberg” as in Gutenberg Bible.

This is happening 5-10 times a day. I enter the captcha and I’m on my way. But it is irritating.

What is going on?
The downside of “free” is non-existent customer service. I’ve written to Google’s comment address asking about this and, of course, no response.

I have seen reports that other people are experiencing this problem, so it isn’t just me. I’m running Mac OS 10.5.1 and as near as I can tell I am virus free. I even checked for the codec Trojan and it isn’t there.

There is a Windows XP machine on the home network, which has the virus protection our local Windows guru recommends. It is a business system and doesn’t get out much anyway.

The StorageMojo take
My sense is that the boffins in Mt. View tweaked something last week that started this. What makes a human-generated query look like a virus? Or a DoS attack? I’m stumped.

Comments and/or solutions welcome. Any thoughts?

Update: Ms. Mojo ran the virus/spyware/whatever software on her Windows machine and it located 17 suspicious files. Haven’t gotten the message since. Since Ms. Mojo is all business it gives me a new appreciation for just how vulnerable XP really is. Thanks to all who wrote in with suggestions.

Not “knowledge is power” or “information is power.” If you can’t store it, search it and retrieve it, you’ve got bupkis, friend.

Massive storage is a double-edged sword
And we’ll be forever in sorting it out. Cases in point from the Volokh Conspiracy a legal blog:

• A gang of bank robbers used text messaging to plan their crimes. The prosecution subpoenaed the content of their text messages from the service provider, who evidently keeps them all. The defense says that’s wrong: text messages are speech and therefore need a warrant, not a subpoena, to access. Are text messages records or speech?
• A North Carolina judge and candidate for re-election has evidently had a YouTube video depicting him in ethically questionable behavior pulled. Should politicians be able to hide such information from the public?
• Should the government be able to subpoena Amazon for the customer records of a merchant believed to be evading taxes? The prosecutor, judge and the poster seem to be out of line: surely there are other ways of tracking Internet-derived income - like credit card or PayPal payments to the merchants. Why involve the buyers at all?

The StorageMojo take
It is tempting to think of massive storage as culturally neutral, since it is only storing what people produce. But just as the printing press helped broaden literacy and fueled the scientific revolution of the 17th century massive storage broadens access to information in several ways.

• As Gordon Bell is showing, we will soon be able to record every waking moment of every person’s life. How should that data be used, and who should use it?
• Massive storage enables scientific advances that use statistics to tease out the truth. Like Partial Response, Maximum Likelihood (PRML) and those CERN shots, is reality merely probable?
• The courts will soon twig to the fact that it is cheaper for companies to keep all their electronic data than it is to keep all the paper that has been required for many decades. Highly intelligent search will be required to make sense of it all. “Corporate responsibility” will take on a whole new meaning.

Comments welcome.

With the flameouts of Ed Zander at Motorola and a number of hedge-fund managers whose “rocket-science” CDOs have brought the world’s financial system to the brink of ruin - oh, and the current US President - this free article at the Wall Street Journal is apropos. Titled Keys to Spotting a Flawed CEO — Before It’s Too Late management professor Terry Leap offers a set of warning signals.

Here’s a few:

• An overt zeal for prestige, power and wealth. A manager’s tendency to put his or her own success ahead of the company’s often is evident long before that person is ready to assume the CEO post.
• A proclivity for developing grandiose strategies with little thought toward their implementation. These executives may assume that others at lower levels will magically turn strategy into reality.
• An impulsive, flippant decision-making style. CEOs who approach decision-making with clever one-liners rather than with balanced, thoughtful and informed analyses can expect to encounter difficulty.
• A penchant for inconsiderate acts. Individuals who exhibit rude behavior are apt to alienate the wrong person at the wrong time.
• A superb ability to compartmentalize and/or rationalize. Some executives have learned to separate, in their own minds, their bad behavior from their better qualities, so that their misdeeds don’t diminish their opinions of themselves. An important internal check is missing. Others are always ready to cite a higher purpose to justify their bad decisions.

[emphasis added]

Prof. Leap offers several suggestions for the hiring process. My favorites:

• Don’t assume that past success is a predictor of future success. As CEO, an executive will face a whole new set of personalities and conditions, especially when switching companies.
• Determine how much of an executive’s career success has been based on favorable economic and industry conditions and the support of colleagues, and how much has been based on the executive’s individual efforts. Pay close attention to how candidates performed when industry conditions were bad, when controversies arose or when difficult decisions had to be made.
• Be clear about ethics. Provide as much information as possible to finalists about how the board expects shareholders, prospective investors, customers, employees, financial institutions, auditors, regulators, political figures and other stakeholders to be treated.

The StorageMojo take
I doubt Prof. Leap’s excellent suggestions will keep stop many bad hiring decisions. Hiring management - be they boards or voters - often fail to do the hard work of framing the problems that an executive needs to manage.

I’ve seen many executives hired whose experience and desires were only marginally related to the new job and who failed. For example, an executive in channel marketing being asked to take over marketing and product management for a direct sales company. Or a big company exec moving to a small company. Some people will surprise. Most will flounder.

Candidates are expected to put their best foot forward. The real problem is willful blindness on the part of the hiring management team. “We have problems. This guy comes from a successful company, so maybe he can solve them. Just because he never has before . . . .”

It isn’t always about the candidate. It’s the people doing the hiring. Perhaps the good professor can offer advice for that problem.

Comments welcome, as always.

Postscript
For StorageMojo’s non-US readers who’ve wondered what has happened to America: most Americans share your dismay. President Bush now has 50% of Americans strongly disapproving of his performance. Another 14% moderately disapprove.

That puts him in a statistical dead heat with Richard M. Nixon’s low point, just before he was forced to resign over the Watergate break-in coverup.

Mr. Bush is, of course, confident he will be vindicated by a higher power.