WSJ says Public Library beats Amazon's Kindle Unlimited, yep

Years ago I used to buy 1-2 kindle books a month.  Now I buy a kindle book 2-3 times a year.  Why the change?  Reading less.  No reading more with 4-8 books a month going through my kindle.  I stopped buying books and started checking books out from the Public library.  Not physical books, but kindle books.

I can check out a book at no charge for 3 weeks.  I figured if I don’t read a book in three weeks my probability of reading the book in future is less than 10%.

WSJ posts on its own analysis of Amazon Kindle Unlimited and they say the public library is better too.

A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to NetflixNFLX -0.30% to binge on movies and TV shows.

Don't bother. Go sign up for a public library card instead.

Really, the public library? Amazon.comAMZN -0.34% recently launched Kindle Unlimited, a $10-per-month service offering loans of 600,000 e-books. Startups called Oyster and Scribd offer something similar. It isn't very often that a musty old institution can hold its own against tech disrupters.

But it turns out librarians haven't just been sitting around shushing people while the Internet drove them into irrelevance. More than 90% of American public libraries have amassed e-book collections you can read on your iPad, and often even on a Kindle. You don't have to walk into a branch or risk an overdue fine. And they're totally free.

And guess what the public library has more selection than unlimited.

Though you still have to deal with due dates, hold lists and occasionally clumsy software, libraries, at least for now, have one killer feature that the others don't: e-books you actually want to read.

To compare, I dug up best-seller lists, as well as best-of lists compiled by authors and critics. Then I searched for those e-books in Kindle Unlimited, Oyster and Scribd alongside my local San Francisco Public Library. To rule out big-city bias, I also checked the much smaller library where I grew up in Richland County, S.C.

Of the Journal's 20 most recent best-selling e-books in fiction and nonfiction, Amazon's Kindle Unlimited has none—no "Fifty Shades of Grey," no "The Fault in Our Stars." Scribd and Oyster each have a paltry three. But the San Francisco library has 15, and my South Carolina library has 11.

Go to this graph the WSJ created to get the comparison and you can see your public library has a good chance to beat the paid unlimited services.  Oh by the way, you do pay for the library through your property taxes.

Flaw of Customer Research, customers inability to describe what they want when the don't know

A friend sent me this post by I, Cringely on creating solutions, Age of Supply, not Demand

Here are a few nuggets.

“Demand drove supply in the industrial age,” said Aurel. “You needed more steel to build cars so a new steel mill was built. But today it seems to me that supply is actually driving demand.”

...

“You can’t rely on customers to tell you what to build,” said Aurel. “They don’t know.”

Some people think that money is what is needed to build innovation.  One example is Google going cheap vs. Excite being Sun Servers.

We see this effect over and over. Look at cloud computing, for example. It’s easy to argue that the genesis of cloud was Google’s desire to build its own hardware. Google was nailing motherboards to walls at the same time Excite (Google’s main search competitor at the time) was spending millions on Sun computers in a sleek data center. Google’s direction turned out to be the right one but that wasn’t immediately evident and might well have never happened had not Larry and Sergey been so cheap.

The whole idea of market research is turned on its head now a days.  In the past, companies would spend millions on customer research, and what are you building?  The next instagram.  What customer survey would tell you to build instagram?

Mary Meeker's 2014 Internet Report

You can find Mary Meeker’s Internet Report here.

My favorite slides are these.

New Data Center Analyst at 451 Research - Dan Harrington

The data center community is a small one, yet important and whose influence in the industry continues to grow.  One of the new arrivals to the Data Center Analyst community is Dan Harrington with 451 Research.  I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with Dan and he has a solid understanding of how the data center works.  Here is Dan’s LinkedIn profile.

Daniel Harrington

Research Manager, Enterprise Datacenters at 451 Research

Dan worked on IT Capacity Planning at Pfizer, then Research Analyst at IDC.  He moved out to Seattle to work for Microsoft in a few positions and he is moving back to Boston to join the 451 Research team working on Enterprise Data Centers.

The First Graduate Degree for Datacenter Systems Engineering Program is at SMU

I have an engineering degree, and most of my data center friends have engineering degrees too.  But, no one has a degree in datacenter engineering.  SMU announced the first Datacenter Systems Engineering graduate degree.

SMU’s Master of Science in Datacenter Systems engineering is built around five core courses that address the industry broadly, while offering elective specializations in three technical areas:

• Facilities, infrastructure and subsystems
• Datasystems engineering and analytics
• Computer networks, virtualization, security and cloud computing

”SMU’s Master of Science in Datacenter Systems Engineering program addresses a long unfulfilled need in the datacenter industry,” said Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters. “Its comprehensive, cross-disciplinary curriculum provides the breadth of knowledge professionals need for success in this complex industry with numerous interdependencies.”

The SMU Datacenter Systems Engineering program is directed toward preparing professionals for a leadership role in this field, whether specifically as a technical contributor or more broadly in management. The program is designed to build a solid foundation for continued professional growth consistent with modern datacenter engineering practices and the changes that lie ahead for this industry.

SMU has a unique opportunity to play a significant role in educating engineering professionals in this field both locally on-campus and nationally via distance education. Approximately 50 datacenters exist within the greater Dallas area.  

There are some so called data center experts out there with no engineering degree so they can’t get their graduate degree in datacenter systems engineering.

In addition to meeting Lyle School admission requirements for a Master of Science degree, applicants are required to satisfy the following requirements:

• A Bachelor of Science degree in one of the engineering disciplines, computer science, one of the quantitative sciences or mathematics.
• A minimum of two years of college-level mathematics including one year of college-level calculus.

Part of what is needed in the data center industry is a pool of knowledge and SMU will enable a place to go to look for datacenter knowledge.

Key factors which determine successful competition in today's global environment are: timely and rapid response to customer needs, high product quality, and flexibility of operation. To achieve these objectives, the common element is an effective and knowledgeable organization oriented towed customer needs and requirements.

 We should all buy Chris Crosby a beer to show our appreciation to start something that hopefully will grow over time.