(car spinning tires)
- [Narrator] It's lunchtime,
and this is Brad Anderson's Lunch Break.
(fast music)
I get invited to attend tech events
all the time in Las Vegas.
And whenever I can I like to make the quick trip
from Redmond and meet with other tech leaders
and learn about what they're doing.
This week I speak with Microsoft technical fellow
and the creator of PowerShell,
the one and only Jeffrey Snover.
(fast music)
(car horn honking)
(playful music)
- Jeffrey, hey, that door weighs about two tons.
- Oh man, what've you got goin here?
- 1971 Cadillac Eldorado, how you like it?
- Perfect car for Las Vegas.
- Exactly right.
- Jayce Thompson car.
- You got it. You got it.
Alright, get your seatbelt on.
Back in 1971 they didn't have shoulder harnesses
so it's just around the waist.
- Well, hello.
- How you doing?
- So, Jeffrey, I tell you if there was somebody
that's gone out to lunch with me on these
who needs no introduction, like the first IT rockstar,
it's Jeffrey Snover, creator of PowerShell.
And I think the only person I've ever seen
signing autographs at an IT show.
So tell me about what you do at Microsoft.
I know that, but tell everybody else what you do.
- I'm the chief architect for the Enterprise Cloud group.
So that's the team that brought us Windows Server,
Azure Stack, Systems Center,
and Operations Management Suite.
It's all cool stuff.
- There's like an urban legend
of how you created PowerShell.
- Oh yeah.
- Right.
What I heard is you were, like, trying to hang a picture
over the toilet.
You fell, hit your head, and came up with the idea.
Is that true?
- It's almost true, almost true.
- No, I got that, that's Doc Brown from Back to the Future
and the flux capacitor, sorry.
- Oh, that's what it was.
- Alright, Jeff, we're going to play a game called
this or that.
I'm going to give you two seemingly different subjects
and then I'm going to list off an attribute
and you gotta tell me which one it applies to.
- Okay.
- The two subjects are Las Vegas Convention Center
or an on premises data center.
Okay. - Okay
First one is full of flashing lights
that may or may not mean anything.
- Ooh, that's sort of both.
I'm gonna go with data center.
- It is, okay.
It's unbelievably expensive to buy the whole thing
but unbelievably cheap to just rent a portion.
- Oh, that's definitely the data center.
- Alright.
- That's the Cloud Economics.
- Everything was going fine until Brian from Logistics
spilled his Mountain Dew on everything.
- That's gotta be the Convention Center
because Brian should not be in the Data Center.
- There you go. That's exactly it.
Okay, there are slot machines in the bathroom.
- I hope that's the Convention Center.
- Most times of the year a Cloud would be welcome there.
- The Data Center.
- The talk is an issue about digital transformation
and, you know, you're right in the middle
of helping to drive a digital transformation
as organizations are really kind of moving
on on-prem to Cloud.
So what does doing Cloud or mobility the right way look like
for an organization going forward?
- The first is you want to focus in on the things
that drive your business forward.
This shows up in lots of different ways.
A lot of people talk about DevOps.
And I go to a lot of DevOps conferences,
and there's a lot of conversations about what is DevOps.
Nobody ever walks away from those conversations
saying oh, I got it.
To me DevOps is very simple.
It's basically saying I'm gonna put the customer
and the customer value proposition
at the center of everything
and I'm going to re-engineer everything I do
in order to advance that, to optimize for that
so that's really to me what the Cloud transformation
is all about.
It's about saying, hey, I am going to build
the things that differentiate me
and drive customer value
and then buy the things that don't.
- Okay.
- So that's why I'm actually not a fan
of OpenStack, right, because first very few people
are successful with OpenStack.
Those who are, you ask one simple question
how many engineers do you have working on OpenStack.
And the answer is, anyone who's successful
it's a very large number and typically
- Because they're maintaining it.
- And they're trying to get it all together.
They're doing the systems integration
and these teams have open source software developers
contributing code, the software defined networking,
and blah, blah, blah.
And my simple question to them is how's that help you
put more people on an airplane?
How does having an open source developer
on software defined networking help you sell more shoes?
- More profitable to allow your customers more.
How does that help with your core mission?
- Zero, none.
So the Turks have this great phrase, and they say
when you find out you're on the wrong road turn back
no matter how much progress you've made.
And I think a lot of folks in OpenStack
are kind of coming to that realization
like oh, okay, so I'm sorta making progress here
but what the heck am I doing.
- Yeah.
- I'm trying to sell airplane seats or shoes or cars
and I got all these people who are open source.
It makes no sense, and they shouldn't be doing that.
They should buy that stuff because it doesn't help
drive their value proposition.
- So what's key and fundamental?
Buy everything else.
I mean, build what is key and fundamental to you,
differentiate on your mission.
- Yeah.
- Buy or lease everything else.
- Yeah, and that's why it's the transformation.
- Yeah, it is a fundamental shift in how people
should be thinking about it.
- Yeah.
- When I see Jeffrey, whether it's in the halls
or whether it's on the stage, I can almost guarantee
I'm gonna see a couple of things,
a gray tie, and footwear.
- The footwear I use the V-Run FiveFinger.
- You've been for years, like a decade.
- Yeah.
- You're the first person I think I ever saw in them.
- Yeah, you know at some point I'd
been doing a lot of running, and I kept injuring myself.
So I heard about this barefoot running
and these V-Run FiveFingers that would help
decrease running injuries, so I did two things
and my running injuries stopped.
I started wearing these, and I stopped running.
And miraculously my running injuries just went away.
Since then I've been a huge fan of them.
(playful music)
- [Narrator] Next time on Brad Anderson's Lunch Break
- You ever been on vacation somewhere, you know,
and someone finds out this is Jeffrey
who created PowerShell?
- Yes.
- What's that like?
Okay, so think back on your 17 years, what would be
like the missed opportunity you think back
and you go like man, I should've done?
(playful music)