Steve Duplessie: Facebook is now the metaverse, which is
horrible. One of the biggest problems with all things social
is the ability to hide behind a fake persona. Now Facebook is
taking that to the extreme with metaverse. Now you're not a
person, you're an avatar. You can be anything you want. Bully
everyone in anyone behind whatever facade you wish. This
is nothing but a diversion of an already broken system. Steve
didn't post lies on the web. My avatar did. Steve didn't bully
my avatar did. Steve didn't buy garbage market. It is the latest
greatest product on Facebook. My avatar did. Steve is clean, but
Steve's avatar is vile. None of this is anything other than
Don't look behind the curtain. There's nothing to see here. So
Facebook can keep on doing what it always has been doing pimping
itself to anyone and everyone who will pay the tax. In other
news, Google has joined Apple and Microsoft and the $2
trillion market cap club. At what point did these guys start
forming their own armies and declaring themselves sovereign
nations taxes, screw taxes, I'll just make my own infrastructure
and only invite my friends to use it. It sounds crazy. But at
these valuations, these companies are more powerful than
most nation states. And as such, they have the ability to do
really crazy things. Being a free market believer I hate the
idea of people who are out of touch with the new realities,
namely old white guys in the US government deciding how to rein
in free market economies. But at the same time, we do need to
protect society from the potential of the board. It's a
conundrum, but I still lean on free markets far more than I'm
going to lean on legislation. Computer weekly recently wrote a
story about workers in the gig economy. They reported that just
under 25% of workers in England and Wales work on a gig economy
platform at least once a week. That's up significantly year
over year. Platform. Examples include Uber or DoorDash, or
Deliveroo. For example, a platform is something that
connects buyers and service providers. The point of the
story is that platform providers have essentially been bad boys
and not providing adequate services or benefits to their
service providers by treating them as users instead of
employees. The theory is that this is old fashioned worker
exploitation in the modern era, and I could see how that can be
true. I'm not advocating abuse of power in any way. However, I
also see the eventual benefit of what these platforms enable. And
that's entrepreneurialism. Big companies with 10s of 1000s of
employees are wonderful, but they don't make the economic
world go around. entrepreneurs starting businesses do sole
proprietorships are small businesses are what makes the
world economies thrive. That and government controlled economies
they portrayed themselves as free market economies like
Russia and China. Innovation for good almost always comes out of
an entrepreneurial endeavor. Its first goal is not to get crushed
by the establishment it lives in. And if it can do so it can
literally change the world and the world's economics. Steve
Jobs and Apple are just one example of many try to remember
way back when that the iPhone was invented halfway through
2007, which wasn't even 15 years ago. But look at how the entire
world has changed within that timeframe. Anyway, these
platforms presuming they aren't used to create slave labor, and
they will those who never would have considered taking the leap
into self employment to take the plunge, which very often is all
that is needed to turn a lifelong employee into a new
venture entrepreneur. Having said that, I'm also all for the
companies who develop these platforms to get paid for them.
They are entitled to their riches, just not at the abusive
expense of their service providers. As an entrepreneur
myself, I know there are costs to doing business, I pay rent,
salaries, benefits, etc, like everybody else. And these
platforms are just modern era utilities. I could theoretically
have built and started my own electric company, but that would
be asinine and impossible. As long as you understand the costs
and you can deal with it. The choice is yours. Don't punish
the platform provider for providing you a platform. And
speaking of entrepreneurs Gone Wild Theranos have raised over
$945 million dollars with seemingly zero due diligence by
anyone, no one. Granted the company lied. They made up
validation reports with company logos, saying that the Theranos
super cold fusion water into wine time machine not only
worked, but it
worked great, clearly fraud, but no one checked. No one actually
followed up with any of those supposed companies and
institutions that claim to have proven the technology. Not one
investor tested the device. Everyone believes the fake
reports. So while I can almost understand the second investor
being duped by Elizabeth Holmes, I cannot for the life of me
understand how the next 28 investors came on board with
nothing but false data and a nice smile to collateralize
there has been a lemming mentality and Silicon Valley
investment communities for a long, long time now, but this is
beyond ridiculous. She got people to invest by being shrewd
and powerful, and a great liar. But interestingly, her defense
seems to be that she was naive and taken advantage of by her
partner, and really didn't know that she was full of crap. She
is she was, but who's worse, the liar or the establishment of
lemmings who jumped all over each other to throw money at
her. Senior Analyst Paul in the shadow away from ESG just
released some excellent research on the hyper converged
infrastructure market. If you thought this market has been
played out, I think again 68% of organizations have plans to
deploy a new HCI cluster in the next 12 to 18 months and these
are big clusters normally, growth in HCI is no surprise as
organizations are expanding from the core to the edge to the
cloud. Companies are considering HCI as the preferred platform
for rapid time to value as well as integration into their
existing ecosystem. 82% of organizations currently using
HCI expect to increase their spend on these platforms over
the next 12 months. Why does this market continue to be so
hot? Several reasons? First, it is complicated, still
ridiculously complicated, insanely complicated HCI if
nothing else, teams the savage it beasts and simplifies a big
hunk of the stack. Second HCI integrated into automation
platforms helps close the IT skills gap that is plaguing our
industry. 58% of IT pros indicate that improving it
automation integration is the biggest driver behind their
organization's decision to deploy hyper converged
infrastructure technology. Which means to me, the 42% think that
keeping things ridiculously complex is job security. It
isn't. The machine is smarter than the human. So you actually
believe that your knob turning specialization is good for your
company or yourself. You're delusional. History is littered
with the career carnage of people thinking they were
invaluable because they were the only ones who could perform a
certain task or tweak a certain knob, only to find out that that
task was ultimately destined to become automated. So either jump
on the bandwagon or get run over by it by friends. That's all for
this week. Thanks very much for watching and tune in again next
week.