HTCAP: Chapter 9

Last chapter! It came too soon!

Dave Hitz realized that "whining is the evil twin to vision" so he started writing a future history of the company. Rather than writing his good ideas for what he wanted the company to become in the future tense, he'd use the past tense as though those things had already happened. He never says exactly what was in that future history. I wish he had, but I guess those are secrets OR they've already happened by now!

Then Dave Hitz talked about how there was the personal computing age, then the networking age, and now we're in the data age. Individual computing and being on the network is no longer as important as gathering and searching through data so the people who sell data storage really rule the world!

Wow, what a great book. The last line was an oh shit moment though because Dave Hitz wrote "Always listen to my mother." Almost a year ago, I took advice from Dave Hitz from the first chapter to never listen to my mother. I thought he was totally right at the time, and Mom and I haven't really spoken since. But I get it now, so here's my future history.

After finishing HTCAB, I sent my mom a copy with a note telling her to read the whole thing. Then I called her up, and we laughed about the whole thing and talked for an hour about our favorite parts of the book. Later, Dave Hitz offered me a job so now I'm working directly for him, learning from his every move!

I've said it before. Dave Hitz is a genius. I hope you've enjoyed these reviews. We'll see where this blog goes from here.

HTCAB: Engineers

In HTCAB, Dave Hitz had some great stories about engineers that I wanted to share:

On a walk in the woods, an engineer sees a frog sitting on a rock. The frog says, "Hey, I'm not really a frog. If you kiss me I'll turn into a beautiful princess." The engineer picks up the frong and looks at it.
The frog says. "Aren't you going to kiss me?" The engineer shakes his head and sticks the frog in his pocket. The frog pokes its head out and whispers, "Look, if you kiss me I will do anything you want . . . anything." The engineer says, "Nah," and stuffs the frog deeper into his pocket.
The frog shouts, "I've got to get out of this frog body. I'll be your girlfriend for a year." The engineer says, "Who has time for a girlfriend? But a talking frog: that's really cool."

So true! I haven't had a girlfriend for a long time.

A young engineer was leaving the office at 7 P.M. when he found the CEO standing in front of a paper shredder with a document in his hand. "Listen," said the CEO, "this is important, and my secretary has left. Can you make this thing work?"
"Certainly," said the young engineer. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button. "Excellent, excellent!" said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the machine. "I only need one copy."

Man, CEOs are dumb! I hope Dave Hitz's CEO never saw that or he'd be pissed. Or maybe that's a real story about his CEO!

The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer says, "This glass is twice as big as it needs to be."

Q: What's the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer?
A: The extroverted engineer looks at your shoes when he talked to you.

So true. I guess CEOs are dumb, but I guess the message is that at least they'd make girlfriends out of their talking frogs.

HTCAB: Chapter 8

It took me a long time to write the review for this chapter because I didn't understand all the details. I guess they were trying to decide if they should do SAN when they already did NAS. Dave Hitz "created the NAS market" because it was better than SAN, but then the dot com bubble burst, and the chairman of the board said, "In this economy, if someone wants to give you their money, I recommend that you take it." So then they did both SAN and NAS. I wish this book had come out after the latest recession so Dave Hitz could show how that compared to the dot com bust, but I guess that means there's room for a sequel!