Dinner with Cloud Opinion

(What follows is a fictional account of a dinner event — this did not happen, will likely not happen. We present to you purely for lulz ).

Cloud Opinion: “Hi D and J. Thanks for accepting my invite to join for dinner. BTW, are you surprised to find out who I am?”

D laughs: “We know everything about everyone, including your weird thing for _____s. Wasn’t much of a surprise. So, Cloud Opinion is your nickname? I have one too. My boss calls me The Salvation. Kind of like The Rock, except for the sophisticated enterprise techniques like not telling customers they’re stupid to their faces.”

J: ”I understand your team members are an open secret, so I asked our open organization and they told me. You really should be open about your team running this account. Open organization makes you happy.”

CO: “Maybe. Today I wanted to catch up on Cloud with you guys.”

D: ”But, tell me one thing, why do you keep harassing our guys?”

CO laughs: “No, I don’t — I really like your guys, they remind of the nerds when I was a kid. So much certainty. So little empathy for mere mortals.”

J: “So, what can I tell you about open organization?”

CO: ”J, J, you are doing incredible work on that front, its great. But, today, I want to talk about something completely unrelated. I want to talk about Cloud.”

D: ”Its good work J. Also you should check out research our HR did on what kind of people to hire. Yes, CO, basically, Cloud is virtualization 2.0. We have parameterized our VMs in 127 ways and use tensor calculus to orchestrate deployments. It really blows customers away.”

J: ”We have Cloud, we even just announced a deal with a Redmond company to let their customers buy our OS licenses if they want to.”

D: ”No offense J, but no one uses your OS in the Cloud. Nobody pays for OSes in the Cloud. Happy to keep that to ourselves if you don’t want to be open about it.”

CO: ”Ok…ok…let’s relax a bit here. What do you guys think about Cloud being a disruptive technology that’s changing how developers and operations work?”

J: ”You mean DevOps? DevOps is enabled by open organization. DevOps is really good.”

D: ”Our Ops can deploy billions of containers every hour. And you know we have some of the world’s best Devs at our company.”

CO: ”Ok, so what are your customers telling you about that leading Cloud from Seattle?”

J: ”Have you read the NY Times article about their culture? They need an open organization.”

CO: ”Yes, they probably do, but what do you folks think about their Cloud offering?”

D: ”We have the world’s best Cloud.”

J: ”Yeah, you do, D. Their Greek ship can orchestrate more containers than all the stars in the Universe. I understand that is a pretty common mid market use case.”

CO: ”I was hoping to talk to you guys about your strategy to compete in the Cloud space.”

J: ”Containers are great. Containers are open source.”

CO: “Which containers exactly are you using? I read recently you are tilting at windmills with your El Cid containers?”

J: “That is the beauty of the open organization. We decide what a container is and what they can do.”

D: ”We have been running containers ever since we started in a Palo Alto garage — although some of our guys are not happy to change their strategy presentations from 2010 because this tiny company with a whale logo decided to think for themselves and not stay irrelevant like all startups hoping to get acquired. You know how hard it is to change presentations on Docs? I really miss PowerPoint, but don’t tell my boss.”

J: ”I had one of my guys come up to me with tears about how he had to think about building some new things for the first time in 15 years, because this little company was making trouble for us. But now that we have an open foundation, things will be back under control. Much like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects open innovation.”

CO: ”Moving on guys, what do you think will make you competitive in the Cloud market?”

J: ”Open source from an open organization. Of course.”

D: ”Our infrastructure is the best in the world. We serve more cat videos in the world than all other companies combined.”

CO: ”Good answers, your marketing will be proud. Now, What do you think about this serverless architectures?”

J: ”Containers make serverless irrelevant.”

CO: ”How so?”

J: ”Open organizations with open containers can do open things. But I think we have serverless support planned for the pivot after the next pivot for our open PAAS.”

D: ”We build our custom servers and our VMs can start fast. Why does anyone need serverless?”

CO: ”Well, some are saying it is the next big thing.”

J: ”No, open organizations are the next best thing.”

D: ”We have the best cloud in the world.”

CO: “Shit, I gotta run, I see bunch of PMs coming here with baseball bats, there may be a bug in my COBOL code.”

D, J: “Hey, who is going to pay the dinner bill, we aren’t as rich as L, who just claimed to be 20 years ahead of every other Cloud.”