Graham Glass called this article “thought provoking”. Calling that an understatement is an understatement it and of itself. The article is by John Taylor Gatto, former NY State and NYC teacher of the year. In this article, he completely shreds the modern school system. He describes our education system as “deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’”.

I’ve long had issues with the education system (I’d say “of this country” but it’s fairly universal) but I couldn’t ever articulate them. I’ve been known to say stuff like “a diploma is evidence of attendance, not intelligence” and “never let school stand in the way of your education”. I got better at understanding the problem after reading The Third Wave. Toffler points out the need for an industrial society to have a mass education system to turn children into factory workers. But Toffler doesn’t really get into the downside of the mass education approach the way Gatto does. Note to self, pick up Gatto’s book The Underground History of American Education.

As I type this, I wonder if I’ll regret blogging this when my kids are in school. I can almost hear the argument now: “Dad, why should I have to go to school if you think it’s designed to produce mediocre intellects?” Frankly, I don’t have a good answer for that now and I doubt I’ll have a good one then. (“I don’t know. Go ask your mother.” Kidding!)

You know, now that I think about it, I’m looking forward to that conversation with my kids. Gatto suggests teaching your own children to be leaders and adventures instead of letting schools train them to be employees and servants. A frank discussion about the value of school sounds much more like leadership than servitude to me.

Update: You can read the book online for free or you can buy the book (and others) online from Gatto’s website.

I’m in sunny San Diego for the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit. I’m presenting a sponsor session and case study tomorrow (MSFT is a platinum sponsor for the event) but I came in yesterday so I could attend a few sessions, meet a few customers and work the MS booth in the Solution Showcase. It’s my last event and deliverable for my old team before switching to the new role full time.

The first of two keynotes today was Richard Buchanan’s session on The New Enterprise Architecture: Time for Leadership. Pretty decent session, though much of it was pretty obvious. He even said at one point that this was “Strategic Enterprise Planning 101″. Not exactly the best way to kick of an EA summit, IMHO. However, he did make some interesting points:

• It’s hard to quantify the value of business effectiveness. Richard’s quote on this was great: “What’s the dollar value of staying out of jail?”
• He compared most of how IT is operated today as “looking in the mirror” (i.e. focusing on running what we already have). He suggested instead “looking out the window” (i.e. at the industry and the future).
• I always say that architecture is the intersection of business and IT. Richard said “Architecture is a translation from business strategy to technology implementation. Architects must institutionalize this translation.” Close enough.
• He also suggested that architects need to learn to speak the language of business. That’s good advice.
• Richard did do a good job capturing the dynamic aspect of enterprise and IT architecture. It’s about change, not structure. He said “EA is not about the past or the present. It’s about the future.” Couldn’t agree more.

The second keynote was Werner Vogels talk Order in the Chaos: Building the Amazon.com Platform. This was a great talk. I know a little about how Amazon has evolved, but I had no idea that it powered websites like Target and Bebe. His talk was a little scattered – I’m guessing he’s not as used to speaking at events like this than the Gartner folks. There’s no way to do the talk justice without basically repeating it verbatim, but my key takeaways were:

• Amazon naturally evolved from an application into a platform. This is fascinating and worthy of more study, esp. as I’m making the switch to MSFT’s internal IT department. Microsoft knows a thing or two about platforms, but I’m not sure how it applies inside IT.
• Amazon sees it’s “secret sauce” as their ability to automate operations at scale. For example, handling over a million sellers in their system. That helps explain their moves into services like S3 and MTurk which at first glance seems at odds with their retail web site.
• One of the key values to becoming a platform is being able to open it up to partners. Again, Microsoft knows a lot about opening a platform to partners, but I’m not sure how it applies inside IT.
• Money Quote: “At Amazon, things are always failing. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a fact of life.” I’ve started theorizing about this on my own, good to know where to start looking for people putting this into practice.
• Towards that end, he made probably the most interesting observation of the day. At Amazon, there is no wall between development and operations. Combined with the secret sauce of automating operations at scale and there is a good recipe for how enterprises need to run their IT department.

The final session I went to today was Nick Gall on Architecture for the Agile Enterprise: Integrating EA & SOA. The use of the term “agile” in this context was unfortunate, as he had no discussion of agile principles. He primarily focused on what he called Web Oriented Architecture or WOA. His formula for WOA was ‘WOA = SOA + WWW + REST” which seems redundant. Isn’t REST an attempt to capture the architectural style of the WWW? Anyway, this session wasn’t very good. He had about 15 minutes of really good content but you had to wade thru the other 45 minutes of crap to find it. For example, he spent about ten minutes talking about the value of using a small set common modular operations (i.e. the REST / WS-Transfer approach) before he used this great analogy:

Modularity can be open or closed. Closed modularity is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are lots of individual pieces, but they can only be put together one way. Open modularity is like a tangram puzzle. There are only seven pieces, but they can be put together in hundreds of different combinations.

That was a great analogy that really got the point across! Why not just start with that and skip the mumbo jumbo?

I missed the last session as I had to prep for booth duty. Even though this audience is very different from a typical MSFT event like TechEd, they still mobbed the booth for swag and a chance to win an Xbox 360. I had a few interesting architectural discussion, but mostly it was about the swag.

My session is tomorrow at 11am. I’m presenting Beyond SOA and a case study session on the Dell Integrated Desktop . Then there’s two more hours of booth duty tomorrow, but I’m hoping it’s more content and less swag this time as 1) I will have just presented so I’m hoping to get some questions and 2) everyone has already gotten their swag ration for the conference.

I’m not sure what a “Preliminary Beta” is but QIT has released a one for their Ruby.NET compiler. They expect to achieve “full semantic compatibility” (can you tell this is an acidemic project?) by the end of the year. Thanks to David Ing for the link.

They claim to “pass all 871 tests in the samples/test.rb installation test suite of Ruby 1.8.2.” which seems odd since later they say “We have a plan for how to deal with continuations but we have not yet implemented them.” Doesn’t the Ruby test suite test continuations? I wish they would provide more details on this plan, continuations might not be the most interesting thing in Ruby, but it’s up there and it’s probably the hardest thing to implement on top of the CLR.

BTW, there are two other projects @ QIT that Ruby.NET leverages that look interesting. The Gardens Point Parser Generator is essentially a YACC clone written in C# and making extensive use of generics. Personally, I’m more interested in Parsing Expression Grammars, but there’s no C# implementation as of yet. QIT also has a library for reading and writing program executable files (i.e. EXEs and DLLs).

As a quick aside, I’m getting pretty tired of all the different euphemisms for “alpha”. In the age of perpetual beta, isn’t alpha the new beta? But everyone seems worried about calling their releases alpha as if it means “it might not cause your machine to explode, if you could actually get it to compile”. So we end up with things like “Preliminary Beta” and “Community Tech Preview”. We all KNOW what these terms mean, so lets just call an alpha and alpha, shall we?

Last weekend, I finally got around to picking up an Xbox 360. Things have been a little busy this week so I haven’t had a ton of time to play it. I bought Oblivion and Kameo, but have spent most of my time playing Xbox Live Arcade. Seems sort of stupid to shell out $400 to play Hexic and UNO, but it actually a compelling experience for a number of reasons. First off, they’re games you can play for 10-15 minutes at a time. Playing Oblivion for 15 minutes is pointless, but it’s perfect for a Live Arcade game. With two kids, 15 minutes of play time is much more common than 2 hours. Second, you don’t have to get up to put in a game disc. Sure it’s lazy, but aren’t we all lazy sometimes? Third, I can play them in front of my kids. Fourth, they’re cheap and easy to download on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Marketplace is a thing of genius. My son Patrick’s favorite is the Cars movie trailer in HD. Being able to download demos is awesome, rather than keeping track of the discs that come with OXM. For example, I’ve downloaded every racing game demo there is so Patrick can play them. He hasn’t got the hang of it yet (he is only three) but since it’s a demo it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care that he keeps racing the same car on the same track. (He did see the new Cars game at Blockbuster the other day, but it’s for the original Xbox and not on the back compat list.)

Finally, the ability to play music and look at pictures from a standard XP machine is pretty cool. The User Experience for lots of photos and music isn’t great, but the end result is worth it. My wife quipped “I could watch this all night” as we looked at a slide show of photos we’ve taken over the past three years while listening to some of custom tunes. I don’t have a Media Center as I’ve been waiting for HD cable support. However, I know the MCE experience for navigating thousands of songs and photos is much better than Xbox 360’s, so I might make the switch early. Plus, I would also get support for remote video viewing – something Xbox 360 doesn’t support for reasons that escape me.

All in all, I’m really digging the Xbox 360. Only downside is not enough time to play.

This is even bigger than Scoble leaving, much less me moving to a new role.

Microsoft Announces Plans for July 2008 Transition for Bill Gates

Microsoft Corp. today announced that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.

The company announced that Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume the title of chief software architect and begin working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities, to ensure a smooth transition. Similarly, Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie will immediately take the new title of chief research and strategy officer and will work closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company’s research and incubation efforts; Mundie also will partner with general counsel Brad Smith to guide Microsoft’s intellectual property and technology policy efforts.

Wow.