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Packed ballroom at 9, 10, 11
Packed rooms
Enterprise technology is hard to watch spread, because you can't see it. The Gartner IT Symposium, which 30,000 American CIOs attend, is one place where it shows.
Splunk, then an amazing database company, had a session room that was standing room only. VMware did the same about 30 years ago, when it virtualized the server. With AWS, the grand ballroom was completely packed at nine o'clock and still completely packed at ten and eleven. Corporate demand could be seen exploding before it happened.
Grove's rule
Andy Grove's rule for strategic inflection points is that the data can't be trusted, which leaves intuition and anecdotal evidence. Mobile video games gave the same kind of signal. For years the screens were small and the processing power weak, so the games were casual ones. Then in China, a 12-year-old boy with a huge phone was playing an awesome video game, and mobile games had arrived on the phone.
Why can't early data reveal inflection points?
Andy Grove, Intel's longtime chief, defined a strategic inflection point in his 1996 book Only the Paranoid Survive as a roughly tenfold change in one of the forces acting on a business. Early on, that change is a trickle in the numbers, so it looks like noise. Grove wrote that the first warnings tend to come from the periphery, from salespeople and engineers, rather than from management reports. He counted Intel's 1985 exit from memory chips as one such turn.
How did VMware change the server?
VMware's virtualization software lets many virtual machines share one physical server. Before that, a company often gave each application its own machine, and most of those machines sat mostly idle. VMware was founded in 1998 and shipped its ESX server product in 2001. Its early sales pitches cited typical server utilization of only 10 to 15 percent.
Why did mobile games start out casual?
Early phone screens were small and touch input was limited, and people played in short gaps between other tasks. Simple one-touch games fit those gaps and ran on modest chips. As phone processors improved year after year, richer 3D games became practical. Apple's App Store opened in July 2008 with about 500 apps.
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