Eyvonne: 0:00

My kid had a school event last night and I got I kid you not four texts and an email saying that the kids had to be there at 530 to be ready for the program at six. We pull into the parking lot at 520 and the doors are still locked and there's a line of people around the school. I'm like, and it's, and it's freezing cold outside and I have this weird thing where my fingertips turn white when they get cold, like my blood literally stops circulating in the tips of my fingers and I'm enraged.

William: 0:35

I need to take a vacation to Canada during the winter. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Gambit. We are approaching the end of 2024, and this is actually going to be the last episode going out for 2024. I am William your host episode going out for 2024. I am William, your host, but with me I have someone that is so serious about the holidays that they put Christmas decorations up before the turkey is pulled out of the oven on Thanksgiving. That is Yvonne Sharp. How are you doing today, Yvonne?

Eyvonne: 1:19

Hello, and absolutely I fully own the pre-decorating in my defense. We were trying to have a holiday party uh, that that preceded a lot of the other holiday parties, so the people's schedules would be more open and could make it. I'm not sure that it was effective, though, because people are busy, everybody's busy now. We had 25 30 people in the house that day and we had a great time.

Eyvonne: 1:48

Um, you were at your kids hockey tournament, so you didn't make it, which I will try to forgive you for that, but uh yeah, we had all of our decorations up two weeks before thanksgiving in my house that's very, very.

William: 2:04

You know what? This is one of my first pieces of holiday decor. I'm just going to wear this thing.

Eyvonne: 2:15

I should have brought a holiday hat. I didn't even think about it. It's not even the regular one.

William: 2:19

It's checkered. It's like a flannel.

Eyvonne: 2:22

It's perfect for a Kentuckian. Exactly there we go. I just need the actual flannel. I look like a flannel.

William: 2:24

Hey, it's perfect for a Kentuckian.

Eyvonne: 2:25

Exactly there we go.

William: 2:26

I just need the actual flannel. I look like a lumberjack. Give me an axe and some wood to chop. Yeah, that's great Gotcha. So, anyhow, so this episode. So Yvonne and I were talking and we're like you know what. It's the end of the year and this has been a crazy year. A lot has happened, both personally, professionally, you know, the world markets. Everything seems to be a little crazy. So we thought, you know what, why not have an episode and just kind of look back and just take a time to reflect?

Eyvonne: 3:02

you know, it's our retrospective Love it, so that is what we are time to reflect.

William: 3:05

It's a retrospective. Love it. So that is what we are going to do. Do you want to kick us off, Yvonne?

Eyvonne: 3:12

Yeah, we thought we'd start with a few personal updates. So things have been busy in my world. I think most of you hopefully have noticed I've been trying to focus more on creating external public facing content. So part of that is joining the Cloud Gambit with William so that happened mid-year, so excited to be here and been reconnecting with some folks on LinkedIn, been hanging out a little bit more on X and Blue Sky. So, yeah, I've been focusing on that and I think for me, I've also been working professionally at Stretching and Growing as a Leader, trying to think more holistically and to also navigate times of extreme change. And how do you lead people through that and provide enough guidance so that they know what to do, but not enough, not so much that you're constraining and hindering creativity, and so I've been thinking a lot about those things. What's been up in your world, william?

William: 4:22

Well, so first of all, before I talk, talk about my world. I just want to get your perspective on something. So you're talking about like growing as a leader and you have, you know, direct reports and you're working for, you know, a big company. And one thing just my observations from in the past you know having like led teams but also being in like the engineer focus, like when you're an engineer or you're doing any of the boots on the ground work, you get so focused, of course, on details. You get so focused on all the like very granular maybe tunnel vision sometimes.

William: 4:57

But when you sort of move up that org chart a little bit, you've got to like widen that aperture and you have to like zoom out and you really need both of those things. And I remember, just when I was in that engineering mindset and I was doing a lot of the work, that used to drive me nuts because I would always think you know what these leaders. They just don't know what they're talking about, they don't understand, they don't see what I'm seeing, they don't know how important this one little thing is. But then as you move up and you get that bigger picture and that bigger vision and you start seeing all the things you know, it really changes your perspective. But any thoughts on that.

Eyvonne: 5:35

Well, I do think you know, the more your you know your aperture increases and the wider the breadth of your responsibility as a leader, it does shift your perspective, I think. For me it's trying to continually rethink. You know what is important for me to focus on as the leader. What is it that I need to be sure that my folks have the freedom and, frankly, the accountability to focus on as individual contributors. And then how do I be sure I have an effective feedback loop so I'm getting and understanding what are the real boots on the ground problems? And then how do I translate those to the broader organization to be sure that my individual contributors can be effective, right? And so it's continually trying to understand what's going on enough but then also framing that effectively so that you can get organizational buy-in to enable your people.

Eyvonne: 6:43

And it's a very hard thing to do. And I think sometimes it's as I see we can not really grasp the luxury that we have to focus deeply on a thing and completely deeply understand that thing to the exclusion of everything else. Because when you're a leader you don't have that, in a lot of ways, privilege anymore to just deeply focus on a thing. You've got competing priorities that you have to think about different stakeholders within the org. Who who's who's. You know who you need to satisfy um both just existentially and for the business. So it's it's. It's a very different um, it's just a very different job yeah, yeah, yeah, that was.

William: 7:40

you said that perfectly. I doubt that Better than I would have anyway. So, yeah, personal here, aside from traveling for work and stuff, my son plays travel hockey and they are crushing it this year.

Eyvonne: 8:02

So he's 10 and under.

William: 8:03

They've been going around and dominating. They actually won the Eastern Regional Silver Sticks tournament. It was so funny too, because we won the final game and I was walking back to the locker room and there was someone griping. They're like they just got beat from some team in Kentucky. Do they even have hockey in Kentucky? That just made me smile. I'm like putting Kentucky on the map Ice hockey. Who would have thought?

Eyvonne: 8:29

You know, there's this great line in the movies, in the culturally relevant movie Sweet Home, alabama, where the main male lead says honey, just because I talk slow it doesn't mean I think slow and I feel like there are times when I just have a moment where I'm like you know what, don't let the accent fool you and it's great when you have those moments, and especially when it's your kid. How wonderful is that to see your kid have an amazing experience that he probably can't even realize yet. What a big deal. It is right, yeah, that he'll be able to look back on and be man. We did that thing. That was pretty awesome, wasn't it.

William: 9:13

Yeah, exactly. And now it's on to the Canadian teams though. So we got to travel for the international finals up to Canada in January, and it's going to be a little crazy. So they're going to be playing some of the best 10 year olds out there, and you know you try and taper, cause I mean, I thought the regional one I didn't think we were going to win that. You had teams from everywhere that were really good, but these kids, just they worked so hard.

William: 9:41

Yeah, they're all conditioned Well. They're all conditioned well, they're all taking it, they're all eating.

Eyvonne: 9:52

good, it's like crazy, uh, like when I was 10 years old, like there's no way you'd get me to eat on a certain diet. To prepare, you didn't take away your kids halloween candy for hockey, did you?

William: 9:57

we just very severely limited it, but he wanted to limit it though.

Eyvonne: 10:00

That's what's cool about it, yeah.

William: 10:04

So there's all that Just travel lined up and I mean there's been like at their practices. We've had like a different news agency there, like WHAS, like Fox, I think, spectrum News, like they've all been like running little stories on them, but it's like such a big deal around here anyway, made for TV movie.

Eyvonne: 10:23

The mayor tweeted out about it. The governor tweeted out.

William: 10:27

What was that?

Eyvonne: 10:28

Made for TV movie. Yeah, Like you know, one of these great underdogs.

William: 10:32

I should have been documenting this whole time. You missed it. Man, I should have been documenting, I missed a moment.

Eyvonne: 10:38

Yeah.

William: 10:39

But yeah, Other than that, I have a new. We have a new addition to the family.

Eyvonne: 10:49

She's yes, over three months now.

William: 10:49

Yeah yeah, and let me tell you she's a good baby. So my, my first two, especially my first one, he, oh he, everything he's really easy now. He's so good. But when he was a baby he didn't want to sleep good, he didn't want to eat good. It just nothing was easy, nothing. And I remember after, after he came along, I was like I don't know about having a big family, I think one's good, you know. But then we had our second one and she was a little easier. But this, you know, our new addition is like, so easy. She sleeps good. Like last night she slept through the entire night. Um, she stocks up during the day. She just smiles a lot. She's very patient. Like she's just such a good baby. Like when I hear all these folks in the past talking about like they're good babies, like oh, we, I just go to sleep, or yeah, no, they really don't cry that much. And I always used to be so jealous, like where is this.

Eyvonne: 11:44

I had one of those yeah.

William: 11:46

Well, you know how it feels then.

Eyvonne: 11:48

Yeah, well, I've had four. I had one that was, you know, you could lay him down and he would lay in his crib for like four hours, like he would sit there and play for an hour and then he would lay down, would startle her awake and, uh, and nap time was over. So you know it, parenting like you get what you get and you don't throw a fit, that's what we tell the, you know the preschoolers, uh, in their little church classes. You get what you get when you and you don't throw a fit. You know the color of popsicle or the candy, and yeah, it's kind of that way with the kids too.

William: 12:31

Yeah, I like that Less control than you realize.

Eyvonne: 12:33

Yeah.

William: 12:34

Venerable, very good.

Eyvonne: 12:35

I may pull that out with my team sometime. Leadership, yeah, you know leadership lessons?

William: 12:46

No, I'm probably not, but it's fun to say yes. Other than that, um, personally, yeah, just busy, and I know you're busy too.

Eyvonne: 12:52

You've done a lot of conferencing and a lot of you know public speaking. You've had some big speaking events for yourself this year.

Eyvonne: 13:00

Um we did. We did some travel, so just a combo work, personal trip. So I've spent some time in London and Paris and my husband and I got to do that, which was great. We spent a whole year in our new house. If you followed the house build on Twitter, um, a couple of years ago, so we've been in there a full year, if you can believe it. So, yeah, it's been, uh, it's. It's, in a lot of ways, a really great year for the Sharps.

William: 13:25

Yeah, and what a house too, like the way that the cabinetry and everything is laid out, the shelves, the space it's yeah, it's very very optimized.

Eyvonne: 13:36

I'm really loving my choices, frankly. Yes, we worked hard and we agonized and we thought a lot about it and I'm very pleased with my choices.

William: 13:45

So yes, it's been good. If you want ideas, go over to Yvonne's place, if you're in the Louisville area.

Eyvonne: 13:51

ping me and I will show you around. You'll have to drive an hour and a half to the middle of nowhere, but I will absolutely show you around and cook you a meal. When she says middle of nowhere, folks, it is the middle of nowhere.

William: 14:08

It's very, very much out there over the river and through the woods that's where we are.

Eyvonne: 14:11

Yep the sticks, as they would say.

William: 14:11

Yeah, absolutely beautiful beautiful drive yeah over the, over the holler kentucky lingo just that's right now um. So what's next? The uh geopolitical stuff oh man.

Eyvonne: 14:24

So let's talk about what's going on in our world a little bit, right.

Eyvonne: 14:28

So William and I were kind of brainstorming like what are the big things that happened in 2024?

Eyvonne: 14:32

I wanted to kind of not lean into like recency bias, but there's a lot going on in the world geopolitically whether you're talking about what's going on in Ukraine and what's going on with Russia and China and Korea. And then you look at our national political scene and it seems that those things are, have invaded our consciousness, particularly in the last year, more than they have really for me in any memory in my adult life. They have been front and center more significantly, as significantly really, as COVID was a few years ago. So I feel like that's a big deal and it's had a big impact in the last year and will continue to have a big impact in the future. As we think about what's going on nationally in the US, with you know, talking about government efficiency, I think we're going to see downstream impacts of that. And then what's going on geopolitically? It's, I think we're going to continue to see economic and real life implications for that for us. What do you think, william?

William: 15:47

Yes, yes, yes and yes. And I kind of like we were talking about before, like you just said, optimization or efficiency and stuff, and we were kind of just talking through like how much of a you know our government government's huge and it's very rigid and lots of things that have built up over many, many years. And of course you know, every once in a while I mean even if you think of, like cleaning your garage you let it go a little too long but you got to go back and you got to like sort stuff out and organize it. And you know that's going to be no different for the government. It's just it's coming, I think, at a really aggressive pace now with the new administration coming in.

William: 16:29

But really at the end of the day, when you go through and you start undoing things like no matter, this is not political at all. But whoever does it, whoever starts digging through and trying to make changes, you know it's going to get worse before it gets better, because you're going to break things or it's going to be a lot of. You know the whole fence analogy. You know that Yvonne uses sometimes. You know you don't want to tear down that fence until you know why. You know, you know why someone put it up. So, yeah, I think there's going to be some major. I don't want to use consequences sounds so terrible because you, you need to go back and you need to make things more efficient. Um, you want to make sure you're using, you know, those taxpayer dollars.

Eyvonne: 17:08

Maybe unintended outcomes. There's going to be all kinds of things that could not have been foreseen. It is just when you look at our government and the geopolitical climate. It's so complex that there is no way we could quote Gandalf here and say even the very wise cannot see all ends Like. That's how I feel about the place in which we are right now, regardless of how you know who you voted for or what you believe is right or wrong. You know, I think we are staring down a time of, you know, significant change in many different facets, and it's going to be a wild ride.

William: 17:54

Yeah, and even like. So that's thinking completely domestic. Well, foreign and domestic, I guess. So, like one thing, I I'm going to have to try and find the article and dig it out and I'll definitely put it in the notes.

William: 18:06

But one of these critical, like rare materials that is used in like chip manufacturing, amongst other things, is gallium. I did an episode on it like way, way back before I had the privilege of you joining the pod. But the problem is a lot of that is brought in from China, so it's imported from China, and you can see where the conflict would be here, because you, you know, I think the goal is to have less dependency, you know, on other, you know, especially China, really. So, like earlier this year I don't remember, when a huge deposit of gallium, like really high um gallium, over like thousands of acres I think it was montana or wyoming, it's one of the two um was found. So this stuff is bound to be somewhere.

William: 19:02

Like the us probably has a ton, of ton of this stuff buried here and there, of course, but you don't know where. Maybe sometimes you stumble upon it, but it's a the the deposit they found was extremely high grade, uh, which is really awesome. So that'll. That'll be good, because the less you know, as we're trying to ramp up chip manufacturing here in the us, for you know, more fabs I think I don't know how many more were announced, but there's more in Arizona now we're trying to ramp this up and get on a, you know, sort of an even level playing field, which is thinking about the hardware required to do all the things these days, especially AI. It's sourcing that hardware and you know it is an arms race, like you you had said earlier. So pretty cool.

Eyvonne: 19:55

We found some cool stuff in the us less dependency on foreign nations, so yeah yeah, and as, as we talk about, you know, there's there's this national efficiency conversation going on. I think we are going to see, you know, continued impacts in tech based around that conversation. I think the notes that we made in advance really were like tech is growing up in a lot of ways. You know, we've had 20 years of significant growth in the tech industry. And what were these? You know, scrappy startups that had created a very new way of doing things have now they've changed the world, they've become their own economic powerhouses and we see across the board you know Google, meta, amazon, I should say Alphabet you know making.

Eyvonne: 20:49

You know we started seeing efficiencies in headcount in the last couple years, but I think what we're going to see is those organizations making decisions that are more driven by the bottom line than they have been up until now. I think we you know that, and to me this isn't even really a controversial statement, it's just an observable fact that there's going to be, you know, continued focus on how we measure outcomes and on profit, and I think we're going to see a focus not on efficiency, not just, at least, people talking about it at the federal level, but also talking about it in our big tech organizations and I think you combine that with AI and I think in a few years tech is going to look radically different than it has looked for the last decade.

William: 21:40

Good points, and this is such a compounding thing too, like something. We didn't talk about this, but something I just thought about was these big companies almost travel in packs. You saw it with the work-from-home stuff, amazon. They came out and they said, hey, everybody's coming back to the office. They went through a mountain of, they took the heavy hits as far as the initial negative publicity there being the big elephant in the room. But then you saw other companies coming out and you know it's like okay, hey, if amazon's okay with doing this, and they're doing it and it's actually working. Or maybe it's working, maybe it's not, but you know we're going to try and do it too. So then you saw other big tech companies doing it and then even feeding down into the enterprise space as well.

Eyvonne: 22:31

You know medium to large enterprise, so it's almost like a cascading effect, which is kind of interesting, and I think like there are going to be downstream consequences from those changes and it's going to take a while to figure out how to reoptimize, right.

Eyvonne: 22:50

I mean, I think we're going to see, you know, less focus, frankly, on DEI initiatives. I think we can see that happening culturally and we also just see a focus on revenue and what that means and how to be more efficient. And I think, as we sort of the slope of the curve for tech growth changes, we're just going to see a continued focus on bottom line, on outcomes and on revenue, and that's going to have significant impacts for how those organizations function. In my mind, that is the natural trajectory of organizations that do what big tech has done. They've shown up with new ideas, they've changed the world, they have recalibrated how the world operates and now they're going to focus on operational efficiency. That's a pretty normal trajectory and really shouldn't be a shock, and there will be new industries that come up behind it that follow a similar trajectory. We'll have to see how that plays out.

William: 24:09

We'll have to see how that plays out. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see some of the unintended outcomes. If you go fully back in the office, you're going to lose some people, and it might be some good people. So, just of course, most companies, especially the bigger ones, know there's a lot of folks that are willing to move, that want those jobs and they want to fill those seats. So maybe the impact won't be as felt as it would be for smaller companies. But even then too, like your comment about dei, if you think about a lot of the DEI initiatives and just social, I would say social issues in general are much more important to people today than they were Maybe not Maybe importance is not the right word but more out there in the public and they mean more especially and they're more important to the younger generation as well. So it'll be interesting to see any negative outcomes that hit businesses because of that, as they're trying to become more efficient.

Eyvonne: 25:22

I also think we've seen companies have sort of hit the boundaries of social engagement.

Eyvonne: 25:35

The boundaries of social engagement and what I mean is when you have a very broad constituency, at some point if you take a strong social stand with a hotly contested topic, you are alienating a good portion of your customer base. And I think we have started to hit some of those boundaries and started to see the negative impacts of that. And when those things begin to happen and actually impact the functioning of the business, you're going to see organizations say wait a minute like, do we really want to take stands that might be divisive, that impact the bottom line? I think there was a time when that was perceived and probably even demonstrated to be good for the bottom line, but I don't I don't know that that's the case anymore. It doesn't mean that organizations won't have moral or ethical stands, that they take, moral or ethical stands that they take, but I think we're just going to see everybody back off on choosing sides as much, because that's played itself out and is turned is not maybe the benefit that it was perceived to be at one point in time.

William: 26:43

Yeah, and plus, if you like, say you have two different scenarios or you have two different options or two different stances you can take. You know, stance A and stance b. Well, if you go and you make a public endorsement of one or the other, like you were saying, you could lose 30 of your. You know it could be an anhyzer was it anhyzer bush or whatever um beer I think it was manufacturer, yeah yeah, they, I mean they're they.

William: 27:12

They lost a ton of. Yeah, that was just crazy, uh, seeing that happen. So that's a very real thing. And yeah, I mean the business is there to. I mean, let's be real, you're you. You're beholden to shareholders, you're beholden to a board, or you know, if you're a private company, like you have all these different things, and if you're not growing or at least optimizing, or if you're doing things that are risking, you know, high risk to the, the bottom line and you, you don't want to end up on the news and potentially be in the place of okay, yeah yeah, this company could literally die.

William: 27:51

We could be facing consequences of doing this for the next 15 years, if we're even still around. And then okay, what was it for then? So yeah, remaining completely neutral or just not having a public opinion, yeah, I guess it just makes sense that that would be the natural progression at this point.

Eyvonne: 28:11

Yeah, I think that's that's where it's headed is. Just, you know, organizations themselves not taking as many, you know, stands on cultural issues. I think that's where we're headed.

William: 28:26

And it would be nice to just not see this stuff in the news anymore, because you have, you know, company A that's like, ok, we don't like Trump, or we don't like Biden, or we don't like conservatives, or you know, we're against X, y and Z, and then all these people strike and then you see about it in the news for a month and then you know it happens with another company, but with the alternate side, and you see the same thing happen and then both sides just complain about each other and that causes discourse.

Eyvonne: 28:53

So it's yeah, I think we're gonna see less of that yeah, so what is next? Oh, you know, we can't get through a conversation without talking about ai william oh you, you brought up AI yeah.

Eyvonne: 29:11

Yeah, make me the bad guy. No, it's. You know. I think you know we continue to see AI conversations increasing, but I also think that we're starting to flesh out more where it fits, where it makes sense. We've got, you know, our friends like John Capobianco out there talking about how to do AI and networking and how to really gain efficiency, and I think we're beginning to the world is beginning to understand it a little bit more.

Eyvonne: 29:43

You know there's still a ton of hype, but we're going to keep talking about it. It's it's it's going to be important for a long time to come. It's, it's, it's, it's. It's like saying, maybe, that there will be a day when we don't talk about, like, mobile phones anymore. And it's like you know, they're never going away. They're part of our life now and we're going to be continually talking about apps and new use cases and how we're using that technology to change our lives in the world. And AI is going to be the same thing Like. If you're hoping that someday we're not going to be talking about it anymore, I'm afraid you're going to be sorely disappointed.

William: 30:22

I totally agree, and with that so I I don't know if you've heard of this company, google, by any chance. They have a cloud platform Time or two. Yeah, google cloud platform, uh, yeah, so they, they developed so in. So one thing I wanted to talk about anyway. It was like, okay, if I can look back through 2024, what was like something that stood out to me as far as like a gigantic like that stood out to me as far as like a gigantic like wow, like tech innovation, um, and so this sort of fits in neatly with ai as well. But hold on, I actually copied a summary so I can just read it.

William: 31:00

So google has developed a new quantum chip called willow. I like that reduces errors as it scales up a major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Willow also performed a computation in under five minutes that would take a supercomputer 10 septillion years, demonstrating its potential for solving complex problems beyond the reach of classical computers. This achievement marks a significant step towards building commercially relevant quantum computers that can revolutionize fields like medicine, energy and ai. And this is just such a cool thing, you know, because if you think of like we were talking about, I think before we hit the record button, but this quantum computing thing is really kind of a crazy paradigm to wrap your head around.

William: 32:00

So in the traditional sense, like a classical computer, everything is ones and zeros. So things are processed in a sense through these things called logic gates with conditional type things. So these gates basically take up to two bits you know one or a zero is like inputs and go into the machine and then they return a single bit as an output. And when you think of like quantum, there's these things called qubits, like q, quantum bits, and it's I don't know if the right word is three, three dimension. I wouldn't be three-dimensional, it doesn't make any sense.

William: 32:40

Um, it's like a uh, like a two-dimensional vector of of numbers, like real numbers. So basically it can hold a lot of information, you know, rather than just a single bit. But the problem then becomes erroring out, because if you think of like an individual qubit, it's almost like you know. I heard AI described as like a game of probabilities a while back. There's a talk on YouTube Again I'll try and go back and find it, but it was a really good one. But this is almost like a distribution of probability, in a sense, and averages. So because you don't have a concrete value and then you have, you end up getting into a thing of like the observer effect as well, and this is why in the article they mention like the multiverse. There's a little blurb in there.

Eyvonne: 33:36

Can I read that sentence?

William: 33:37

Please do.

Eyvonne: 33:38

It's talking about the size of the numbers and the speed of the computation, and it says this mind boggling number exceeds known time scales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. So this is next level, otherworldly, literally, kind of discovery.

William: 34:14

That is a bold, crazy sounding statement. That is a bold, crazy sounding statement. Yes, machine, uh, if you will, um, each of the, the, the qubits, like the, whatever 64 qubits, they can all kind of like talk and communicate through this phenomenon, again known as, like uh, quantum entanglement. And that's where you see, honestly, like I was watching this new uh tv show like that came out a few months ago called dark matter really cool show. But, yeah, it goes into like, it kind of like takes everything we're talking about and it's from a book, um, first, and then the book. I actually went back and read the book. The book's so much better than the show. So, if you're listening, read the book or listen, listen to the book, great book. But it kind of goes in and takes a lot of these principles and applies it into a really compelling and engaging and awesome uh narrative um, from a, an author named blake crouch, I think his name is.

Eyvonne: 35:22

So, yeah, very cool the the other thing to think about, and and we didn't talk about this in our initial discussion, william but as you think about the rise of quantum computing, you've got to think about PQC, which is post-quantum cryptography, and what quantum computing would mean for our current cryptographic systems. Cryptographic systems, everything that we have right now is secured by cryptography that could potentially be broken by quantum computing, because you suddenly have I'm going to say infinitely it's not completely accurate, but seemingly infinitely more computing capability, and you think about everything from Bitcoin to SSL transactions. What does PQC mean for that and what are the long-term impacts and how do we have to evolve our security measures in light of this new computing power? It's really it's a lot to think about and and it's going to be an interesting evolution to watch over the next few years. As you know, quantum computing can begins to become a true reality at a scale beyond. You know what Google can prove in their lab, right.

William: 36:46

Yeah, and like back to that summary, like it was. It was like it was like taking steps towards building commercially relevant quantum computers. Cause right now it's like I see all this game breaking research with quantum computers over the past five years and it's mostly like nothing. Nothing burgers. There are a few, you know, ibm and so forth that have actually built these things out. But when you think of like commercially relevant, you know it's like okay, this technology can be used and has an impact on the rest of us and that's where this is going. This is just one of those steps in this big staircase.

Eyvonne: 37:25

But it always starts in a lab somewhere right Big staircase but it always starts in a lab somewhere right, like there's always an initial proof point and there are theories, and then there's the practical you know, the proof point, the application in a lab, and then there's the commercialization of that technology, and so we're going to see that trajectory play out in the future and it's going to have significant impacts on computing at scale. All of it, you know, whether we're talking about our phones or our communications.

William: 38:01

You think about the reliance that the industry has on encryption today, about what that's meant from a regulatory standpoint and what happens to all of that when we have quantum computing power at scale can you imagine if there was just some scientific medic or just some crazy scientific breakthrough where all the pieces fit together and it was like, okay, we got to get this stuff out as quick as possible. Can you imagine the impacts on so many different things that would have? Everything? Would change everything. This is mainstream yes, it's.

Eyvonne: 38:36

Uh, I mean, I think we'll get there now, whether it will be slow and incremental or whether it will be like a flag day, kind of a you know crowd strike moment where we all wake up and nothing works anymore. Uh, who knows, right? Um, and actually that's another thing that should have made the 2024 list, but I digress.

William: 38:54

Oh yeah, I just wonder. You know, honestly, the big question here to really ask yourself is once this does hit mainstream, will IPv6 be completely adopted or not? I think that's the big question. Ipv6 be completely adopted or not? I think that's the big question.

Eyvonne: 39:10

No, it's going to be like the year of the Linux desktop. We'll talk about it forever.

William: 39:19

Yeah, good times. I think we have something else, don't we? Oh, yeah, a couple more.

Eyvonne: 39:27

A couple more. We would be remiss if we didn't talk about the X data center and what Musk has done to build a pretty incredible data center in less than a month that does some pretty amazing things.

William: 39:47

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It's even got a fierce name like the Titan or it's going to bother me now Colossus. I think that's what it is Colossus or Titan one of those two, the Colossus supercomputer.

Eyvonne: 40:07

that's the word you're looking for.

William: 40:09

Yeah, so it's just um, it's crazy. So when you think about the, the cost of like one, um h100 and they, they have like hundreds of thousands of these things and and that's basically being used to train um X AI model, which they call.

Eyvonne: 40:29

ROC.

William: 40:32

And just the time I mean thinking about. I mean that's just such a short window of time to actually get the hardware shipped in. How do you power all of it, which I think they're still powering a lot of it through generators that they have running, that they're shipping in a lot of gasoline for?

Eyvonne: 40:51

Racking and stacking, cabling, the logistical bits of it, right, I mean, and that's that's, frankly, like the easy part, like the, the architecture, the distributed configuration, all of that, and it's not and it's not something that's been done before, so it's not like they're established architectural patterns that you can follow it.

William: 41:15

it really is an incredible technological achievement yeah, even when jensen's talking about it, like, yeah, we us at nvidia, we didn't think this was possible and yeah, then someone else just comes and does it. You know, and part of the reason they did very unconventional things, that I never would have thought that you would do.

William: 41:37

So it's either in Finna band or ethernet kind of a thing, rdma, but like they went ahead and rolled, I think, their own infrastructure, I think they um as they were building it out like and they're trying to scale out to all these, these GPUs, they actually moved an offloaded TCP and into hardware, which is a very interesting, you know, on the surface, but when you think about the commoditization of some of this hardware and like trying to reach that point of, okay, we can scale as we need to, we can just keep adding, adding racks, adding racks, adding racks and really getting, you know, ramping up, like that Um, like, if you go through and you actually read, there was a presentation from the um, the um hot chips 2024, in which I think I don't know if it's tesla or whoever um presented at just as far as like how they view some of the things they're coming out with and I don't know like when you I know that the offloading of tcpip or tcp to I know that they did that for Tesla what they use to train Tesla's um, all these names, not, it's not claw dojo, they call it, they call it dojo.

William: 42:56

So what they do there may be different than how they've scaled up the um, the data center in Tennessee. I'm actually kind of curious about that. I'll try and find something. But just these are like very much off, very unorthodox approaches and ideas that apparently nobody else thought of, or they would have been doing it. Somebody else would have already done this and nvidia would have probably said, hey, you should do this, because hey you what? We're going to sell more GPUs if you can scale to a higher number, you know, so it's a very interesting space.

Eyvonne: 43:33

The thing that we see with Musk is he has a very different risk profile than most organizations. He is concerned more about accomplishing the thing than he is about the profitability of that, which, interestingly enough, has been a pretty profitable approach for him, right, apparently yeah.

Eyvonne: 43:58

But he, you know, hey, I want to do this, we're going to do this. What's it take to make it happen? Screw all the objective realities we think we know, like, throw those out the window. Let's start at the beginning. Let's say we're going to do this, now what do we need to do to get it done? And I think that approach has been incredibly effective. Now there's collateral damage when you take that approach that we've all seen. That can be true, and at the same time, this is an incredible technological feat. There's no other way to see it.

William: 44:38

Two things can be true at the same time Always, yep.

Eyvonne: 44:43

And in that vein, really the last observation that we have for 2024 is just the continued rise of a new hardware arms race. Right, we have seen NVIDIA is still on top from an earnings standpoint. There's a great conversation with Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, basically saying you know, we have a situation in which, even when our competitors make their product free, the cost of ownership of ours is still lower because it is so efficient and effective. And I think you know NVIDIA unlocked a ton of potential and capability there. And so we see this new hardware arms race. We see NVIDIA doing well, we see AMD doing well, we see Broadcom doing well and we see Intel struggling. Any comments on the hardware arms race before I talk a little bit more about Broadcom, William.

William: 45:44

No, it is an arms race. It is an arms race, I mean, when you think of the manufacturing, the, the amount of just land, the amount of engineering, the amount of, you know how complicated the supply chain is. And I mean even you know broadcom. You mentioned broadcom they're making don't they make gpus now.

William: 46:04

I think they make gpus now, which I didn't know. I think I read that. I'll have to double check, but yeah, it is definitely an arms race and I think, the ability to have more efficient, faster, more computing power. If you think of AI as like a nation-changing technology. Ai is like a nation-changing technology. Whoever has the most powerful and innovative infrastructure that runs it is going to obviously have some sort of advantage on the global stage.

Eyvonne: 46:40

And that has a lot of impacts. It makes hardware cool again. It makes power incredibly important. It makes power incredibly important. This wasn't officially on our list, but we see the rise of hyperscalers, investing in nuclear and new you know, small form nuclear and new ways to power, where we were talking about the effectiveness of GPUs to run AI workloads, and one of the metrics that we monitor is not just the utilization of that GPU but its temperature, because if the temperature is higher on the chip, we know that means it's working harder and it's more fully utilized, and so there's actually things you can learn about monitoring the performance of that chip. It is, how hot is it running and are we getting the most out of it that we could. So it's a whole new world of understanding efficiency, how best to utilize that hardware and also how to keep all those GPUs in sync, because it's not like packet delivery right, where you send a bunch of them and they get there when they get there and then it gets decomposed on the other side. That's not how GPU processing works.

Eyvonne: 48:26

And the other observation I'll make in about 2024 is with Broadcom. In many ways it was the best of times and it was the worst of times the day we're recording. We saw a huge jump in Broadcom stock price because of their recent earnings report and, at the same time, we have customers reeling from the acquisition Broadcom has done of VMware and how they are going to plan for the future of their VMware infrastructure. And I think Broadcom is making some efforts to roll back some of those changes and to be a little bit more customer friendly.

Eyvonne: 49:04

I think the thing that we're going to find out next year is whether it's too little, too late. Do they do irrecoverable damage to the VMware business? I think it's different, as we it will be a different organization than we've ever known it to be. But what's what's? What's the future of VMware going to look like coming into 2025? And where it's going to look like coming into 2025. And so Broadcom, for me, is one of the companies that probably generates the most cognitive dissonance, because we're seeing it's just puzzling to see what they're doing, both on the hardware side and on the software side with their acquisitions and try to puzzle out exactly what the future looks like with that organization yeah, it's wild, like, yeah, I mean even like, I think one I mean vmware was like channel, channel first, right um, so just they started they opened up the whole virtualization.

Eyvonne: 50:07

you talk about innovation. Like you know, virtualization, you talk about innovation. Virtualization really didn't exist at any kind of scale until VMware, and so, in a lot of ways, everything that we're doing in our hyperscalers absolutely is building on their shoulders.

William: 50:24

Yeah.

Eyvonne: 50:25

Conceptually.

William: 50:26

I remember so I was in tech. That was actually when I first started getting into tech Well, it was a little after but the whole physical, the virtual migration thing was gigantic. I remember sitting on a CTO town hall and it was just like the coolest thing, where they were like, yeah, we have this much physical servers today, this time next year, this percentage of that is going to be completely virtualized. So you had this whole numbers game. But then you started seeing, like you started seeing it happening. That's how I got into vmware and it was just a huge, a huge game changer and you think of how go ahead?

Eyvonne: 51:05

well, I was going to say it was an incredibly necessary technology when it happened in the early 2000s, because organizations had built out data centers, they had expanded to the max capacity of their floor space. Either they couldn't get more power, which is very similar to what we're seeing, or they just didn't have the floor space to put more gear of what we're seeing, or they just didn't have the floor space to put more gear. And I mean I remember working for an organization that was like we have reduced our entire data center footprint down to 12 floor tiles right by virtualization and by, you know, implementing this consolidation, and the financial benefit for that was incredible, I think, you know, and that kind of innovation isn't over. It's just going to happen differently, but it was. I mean, it was huge. You just can't hardly quantify what a big deal that was.

Eyvonne: 52:14

No-transcript Across the whole world and I just checked, broadcom's stock is up 24% today Wow, despite all of the craziness with VMware. So you know, regardless of how you feel about Hawk, his business from a numbers perspective is through the roof.

William: 52:42

Yeah, it's interesting times interesting times and I think if they dial back, I mean if they're showing, I mean of course they're gonna make changes if it's affecting their bottom line. But you know, ripping out the channel game and then saying, hey, we're gonna direct sell all this stuff, definitely, I mean I, anybody, most people that work in this industry could have said, hey, that's not a good idea. But I think they're trying to reverse that now and they're trying to do some reversals of some of the bigger oopsies. Because, hey, vmware has great competition out there, the technology is out there. You've got Proxmox, which is a fantastic hypervisor and all that it takes is a lot of those alienated partners to wrap up and scale up their business model to start, and then it turns into a rising tide, raises all ships thing because the partners are winning. You have some sort of things on the Proxmox side. More money is going to go into Proxmox, making it a better product, licensing and such, and it kind of would almost become the new VMware in a sense.

Eyvonne: 53:48

So yeah, and I'm biased here as a former VMware person, but I will still argue that for you know, enterprise on-premises virtualization technology, there are competitors out there, but as far as a holistic solution I don't think there's anybody who can still hold a candle to VMware today.

Eyvonne: 54:15

But they are gaining and I think that's going to continue to happen today, but they are gaining and I think that's going to continue to happen and, with public clouds, very competitive. That's a different paradigm. Sure, you can run VMware in public cloud. Lots of folks do it. I talk a lot about it. Google has a great solution for it, for example. But we're also just seeing a huge paradigm shift from the center of gravity not being OS-based virtualization hosts, it's container-based workloads or it's other higher order you know, platform services, and so you know I think that shift is as the industry matures, as software continues to be developed. That's the direction the industry is moving Full stop. You know there are still going to be VM workloads for decades, just like there are still mainframes out there doing their thing. I mean, I work in infrastructure and so a ton of my career is still centered on those kinds of workloads and they're incredibly important. At the same time, you know the time stops for no man or woman and things are going to continue to march forward.

William: 55:31

Yeah, I just I hope mainframes don't go away in my lifetime. They're so pretty, the zero down times from IBM. They're beautiful inside. It's like looking into Optimus Prime, like the Matrix, like those things are so cool looking but I would never want to run them anymore.

Eyvonne: 55:49

Okay, all right, you appreciate them for their aesthetic beauty.

William: 55:55

And they do crunch some major numbers. They do.

Eyvonne: 55:58

Well, and you know we're back to the what's the business justification for replacing this thing, right? And I know of more than one organization in which lots of people had resume generating events because they planned to replace a mainframe and it didn't work out. They spent a ton of money, found out that they couldn't really do it and then they ended up, you know, staying on one, and I'm not saying that that's always the right choice, because it's not. Sometimes you absolutely have to modernize, but I think it's smart to say, okay, what's this really going to cost, what's it's really going to take, and does it really make sense for us to put all of our efforts here, or should we put that innovation effort somewhere else? And it's a smart leader, technical leader, who does that for their business and their use case, because there's no one right answer.

Eyvonne: 56:59

I know organizations that are rebuilding everything to replace mainframes that are being wildly successful both technically and in the marketplace, and I know organizations that are keeping their mainframes that are being wildly successful and innovative, both technically and in the marketplace, right? So there's no one answer for that question. And I think we're going to see the same thing play out for VM workloads. We're going to see like eventually there's probably going to be a delivery mechanism other than a container. I know I'm insulted.

William: 57:35

No, just kidding. No, you're right, though you know it's just going to keep on. I mean it's funny because containers are kind of like re. You know they're modernized jails of old. You know they're kind of like a kind of the same technology. You know it's the whole. You know rule 11 thing repurposed, reoptimized for a new world and new workloads and new application designs and things.

Eyvonne: 58:01

It's a different, more contained abstraction that can be more managed and deployed in code, and it provides more consistency and less dependence on the underlying infrastructure, including the operating system. Right, um, and and that's a great thing like we love abstractions right, we just want to be sure we're using the right ones we.

William: 58:29

You know what we ought to do. I know we probably need to tie up, but where we need to get a cobalt developer. We need to get a cobalt developer on here to kind of discuss, or somebody that's very in tune with mainframe architecture and the tie-ins to infrastructure and all the like. What, what are the? What would it actually require to get rid of mainframes? Because they're still in the dna of a lot of our core infrastructure and cobalt developers are aging out?

Eyvonne: 59:00

I would also love to see somebody do a. A. There's a word that I'm thinking, that I'm that I want to use, that I can't pull magical musical chairs? Yeah, no no, you're not helping shoe manufacturer. No, you're not helping.

Eyvonne: 59:19

Shoe manufacturer, I would love to do a discovery of all of the abstractions throughout the history of computing, like on a timeline, right, you've got binary, you've got assembly, and then on top of assembly you've got your programming languages, and then on top of your programming languages, you've got your compilers and interpreters, and then there's a code level abstraction, and then you've got like the hardware abstractions, right. I think it would be fascinating.

William: 59:52

Because then when my stuff moves to software, they, you know, offload certain pieces of it to hardware again and then like it's yeah, stuff, that would be a great conversation. I'm down, yeah, if, uh, the world is listening, if you know anybody that wants to have that conversation and is an expert it takes about like five people and then you can talk about networking abstractions.

Eyvonne: 1:00:12

Right, a whole nother kind of abstraction. You start with the bits on the wire and then you talk about protocols and encapsulation and then encryption and then, yeah, the osi model like it's. There's so much fun stuff you can talk about yeah, that sounds like a nice round table that's a project for 2025, william sounds good.

William: 1:00:33

Well, we better wrap up. We went over the normal time, but this was a lot of fun, a lot of unplanned, just off the cuff conversation, and I just want to extend, you know, happy holidays to all of you. You know, no matter what you're doing, try to find time to relax. Um, if you're in cold climates, find a good warm tea or hot chocolate, uh, whatever, relax, read a book, you know. Get off the screens for a little while, maybe do something, play some board games.

Eyvonne: 1:01:04

Watch a Christmas movie.

William: 1:01:06

There you go. A Christmas Story is my all-time favorite. I love that movie.

Eyvonne: 1:01:11

It's a Wonderful Life is one of those nostalgic favorites, and I might be a sucker for a Hallmark Christmas movie or two. I can't watch too many of them, but every now and then there's something comforting about that and you can cringe all you want. It's fine, go watch people blow stuff up.

William: 1:01:32

Yeah, I mean those Hallmark movies are great, though, like if I'm really having a hard time sleeping I can just crank one on.

Eyvonne: 1:01:40

I have a few of those too. Yeah, hey, there's nothing wrong with that nice, nothing wrong with a predictable story when you know what it is and you need just to feel good for a minute.

William: 1:01:51

Yeah, yeah, all right whatever you got to do to naturally generate that dopamine right there you go, exactly, go, exactly, all right. So, yeah, thanks for the time, merry Christmas.

Eyvonne: 1:02:04

Happy Hanukkah.

William: 1:02:05

Yeah, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

Eyvonne: 1:02:06

Enjoy yeah.