Social Media Round-Up

There has been so much chatter on social media channels of late about what work will look like in 2021 that it’s hard to think of where to start. To begin with, very few commentators believe we will see a return to work practices of the past. Forget about it! Initially, it was thought that our infrastructure wouldn’t cope and that the more we worked from home, the lazier we would become. But it seems quite the opposite has happened. With only a few exceptions – being schooled from home being one of them – our infrastructure has stood up to these testing times. As for encouraging laziness it seems that remote workers are putting in more time behind the screen.

Then there are the images and reports of companies departing large metropolises – who hasn’t read one observer or the other sounding the alarm bells over the exodus out of Silicon Valley. Want to live in Houston? Austin? Denver? How about, wherever? With news coming too that many businesses plan on making the working from home lifestyle permanent it would seem that normalcy has taken a back seat to expediency and in so doing, is ushering in a completely new approach to deriving an income. Or has it? From what some commentators have latched onto, this move back to homes started some time ago and has only accelerated with the global pandemic.

I have been reading about the demise of Silicon Valley since the early 1970s. At the time it was thought that the connection between universities, the military complex and sunshine was all that any city needed to foster hi-tech innovation. Think Stanford; think Ford Aerospace and all the government contracting; think Santa Cruz and Monterey – all the ingredients have been around the Bay area for a very long time. The lingering images of the massive airship hangers at Moffett Federal Airfield being a reminder that so much money has poured into Silicon Valley!

It was back in the late 1980s that I wrote a feature for Computerworld, Australia, describing how it would be possible to replicate Silicon Valley on Australia’s Gold Coast. There was plenty of sunshine and there was the new Bond University. There was even a trickle of Australian government funding going to research projects, something that continues to this day with defense and the Gold Coast company, Gilmour Space Technologies, joining “forces to work together on space technologies.” But you know what? The Computerworld editor thought that this was too much of a stretch and passed on publishing the article.

A picture grabbed off the Tandem Computers page
on Facebook – have you joined that page yet?

Nothing could be more iconic than the image of the new Apple headquarters depicted in the image at the top of the page. Iconic in the sense that “spaceship Apple” looks as though it could ascend into the heavens. For the NonStop community it is iconic in another way. After all, it took the demolition of many former Tandem Computers buildings to come up with enough land for the development. And yes, there were many of us walking the former campus of Tandem who remember seeing Steve Jobs, cap-in-hand, looking for financial help. Yes, Tandem could have bought Apple at one point, a circumstance that simply boggles the mind.

And yet, on social media channels, commentators continue to point to the success of Apple as an anomaly. A rags-to-riches story worthy of even more films being made around how it all happened: in Cupertino, no less! But with the global pandemic, there are murmurs that in time, this building may become a ghost city that returns to the city of Cupertino to be turned into low-income residences. Hard to imagine the ghost of Steve Jobs walking the circular corridors and wondering where everyone went.

One post that generated considerable interest was the news that some high-end hotels were looking to convert their prestige rooms overlooking California’s beautiful Pacific Ocean shoreline into short term offices. With room service, plenty of bars and restaurants and a pool, surely this would be a sure-fire way to attract new business from those who need to get out of the house and have businesses that could afford the tariffs. Already the elitist nature of these hotels’ marketing efforts are drawing criticism, but on the other hand, what are they to do as business cuts back on travel and on events. If we think for a moment that the Apple building in time could become deserted what happens to the hospitality industry?

As you read the tweets and post coming from the NonStop community as the holiday season approached, it’s hard to ignore just how important a role NonStop plays. As CIO magazine recently posted, all applications today have become mission critical. There is no application development being funded that isn’t in support of enterprises’ mission critical operations.  CIO magazine referenced Niel Nickolaisen, CIO, O.C. Tanner:

“But when we talked about whether there were IT projects to cancel or delay or suspend, we determined that all of them were critical enough that we couldn’t stop anything,” he says, adding that it illustrated the increased importance of pursuing only those technology initiatives that truly drive business goals and support organizational needs.”

We have frequently reference how it’s hard to hide any news given the many social media channels that exist. With the global pandemic, speculation is rife that work as we know it has changed irreversibly. Our metropolises will decay as we head to the hills. Our campuses will be repurposed in ways unimagined by those who lobbied hard for their construction. And yes, as a society we will figure out the best way to work productively, be that in our garages or rooms in fancy hotels. If it’s not mission critical, the application will not be developed; if it’s not resilient, it will not be deployed.

The metrics favoring NonStop are unmistakable – so when you see tweets and posts, make sure your voice is heard. Make sure you don’t miss an opportunity to broadcast the business value proposition of NonStop. You may not realize it but every story is being read today – so add your voice to the conversation and we will enjoy a more accommodating 2021 as a result. Now show us your 2021 New Year celebrations!