Tag: McAfee

Recovering in Joseph’s way

There are some positive upward movements today.

Brought to mind Joseph story i.e. recovery from the seemingly bottomless pit (put there by who else but his own brothers).

But Joseph managed to press “reset”, reinvent himself (befriending the warden), to eventually rise to be Chief of Staff.

What did he have ? Persistence, ability to turn revenge into reward, and finally took the high road (of forgiveness).

We can take a page or two from that play book.

Great men were great not because they managed to avoid the bottom.  Precisely the opposite: they face it and not face down.

(Churchill’s line : never, never, give up. Although he later admitted to making a mistake by going by the gold standard during post-war resettlement).

Just make sure your stance is sturdy . My trainer said he could tell the shape you are in by watching how you squat.

What ever the stage of grief we are in, press “reset” and move on .

I have seen companies that thrived (McDonald’s and McAfee), folded (Circuit City and Bebo) or acquired

( Burger King by 3-G Capital and Hertz by Dollar.)

In crisis there is opportunity (builders in San Bruno are called back to work).

So begins our long climb out of the pit. One step at a time. Oh, don’t forget our Joseph who decided early on that the best revenge is sweet success, success that spills over and lifts everyone, frien-emies included.

 

From Bay Bridge to Bong Bridge

It took 20 years for me to reconnect with a childhood friend.

The last time we saw each other was near the Bay Bridge.

This time, 2 decades have passed, and he picked me up on his motorcycle near Bong Bridge, in the heart of Saigon.

You might think that his ability to weave in and out of chaotic HCMC traffic is a sign that he is a local. But you would be surprised to find out that Hung Nguyen used to work for Electronic Arts, and now CEO of LogiGear, with HQ near Bay Bridge, and offshore office near Bong Bridge.

When the other Clinton was here, he checked out Pho 2000.

Now that Hilary Clinton’s turn to visit Vietnam, she will have more choices to visit, from software parks to hardware parks, many of which were start-ups by Viet Kieu and other expats.

I am here to witness a new transition, which leap-frogs from an agrarian to an information society.

I found myself a Rip Van Wrinkle, coming back to a city of  10 million, all of whom on two-wheels, and software engineers, ten years ago, were probably playing games at internet cafe. They are here now, with “bug-hunting” contest, while in the Bay Bridge areas, their counter parts used to do Egg Hunting on Easter.

Hung Nguyen co-authors a best-selling text-book on Software Testing,

and he envisions Vietnam as a premier destination in South East Asia for this particular sector. The work force are young, which means they can stay and scale with the projects. They are ambitious, working long hours and yes, there is a crash-landing play room on the 6th floor, and cafeteria on the 8th floor for reboot.

The campus-like infrastructure was no where near Google’s,  Cisco’s or Salesforce.com’s, but for Vietnam, it does the job. VISTACON , Hung’s brainchild on software testing conference, welcomes speakers from Microsoft, EA, McAfee and FIT to the convention center near Bong Bridge every summer.

It will be just like any conference on software testing near the Bay Bridge, except for sponsorship banners, buffet and bunch of people who are eager to learn.

I can’t get the song out of my head “sur le pond, D’Avingon…” or the Vietnamese song “Ai dang di tren cau Bong, rot xuong song uot quan ni-long”.

Broadband build-out gave off-shoring industry a head start in places like India and Ireland. Now CAT5 is running up and down the stairs here at LogiGear, HCMC the same way.  The world is not only flat.

It is getting flatter every day with each IT graduate.

Out of my school and class, emerges people like Hung.

Out of many colleges and universities here in Vietnam, I am sure there will one day see a Bill Gates, who commands a huge rock-star turn-out in Bac Ninh. It’s not the “origin of species” here, but the process seems to favor the fittest. We got a bunch here but they do need a half-hour nap for reboot. In that half an hour, the machine takes over to do the downloading, upgrading and whatever else a contractor is asked to do. I don’t doubt the day when these semi-automated testers can afford a full-length nap while files are traveling back-and-forth from Bay Bridge to Bong Bridge.

BYOD

The Economist Christmas Special was about America, a Ponzi scheme that works.

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108634&source=hptextfeature

It projects 1 Billion Americans by 2100.

With its many niches, America seems to offer a bit of everything, for everybody: hunting, boozing, gambling, church-going and freedom to protest.

I remember my first Christmas, living humbly in a cold basement. But I created my version of America by inviting Vietnamese Students at Penn State to come over for a party, albeit makeshift. We dimmed out the lights and had a disco party (mid-70’s).

My America.

No eggnog, fruit cake or tinsel. Just foreign students away from home, sharing a common bond of humanity and most pressingly, in need of  heat (it was cold in Winter 76).

People who wouldn’t otherwise have been friends: a hippie guy with hair down to his knees, a short guy majoring in Agronomy and a French-major gal with a condescending air about her.  Yet, they came, at my invitation. First Christmas in America was our common denominator. It could have been a Roger Altman‘s movie: post-card X-mas outside, Saigon-like inside.

With sweaters over shiny shirts, every guy in the room had hair down to his neck.

Winter in cold Pennsylvania. Stores were closed and foreign students had no place to go.

With plenty of snow outside (by then, our early fascination with the white stuff had been melted away), and over hot chocolate, I remember quoting Shakespeare, that “life is just a stage, and we are here to play out our role -“.

We were joined by a throng of immigrants, before and after us, to becoming American.

The language and culture part came later (naturalized).

The lingering part was hard: neither here nor there.

(like the shopper gauging which cashier to line up behind just to end up in the longest line).

Back then, we couldn’t use the phone, since it was very expensive if possible at all.

Some people even had their calls patched through Canada. Now, even the I-phone got de-commoditized via I phone 5c.

To me, it was a one-way journey (25 years later, I found I had been wrong then).

Whatever America has to offer:  from McCafe to McAfee, Morse code to Moore’s Law, it wasn’t without a price :”ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.

And church services would close with “who among you would stand up and give your life for the mission”, F/T or P/T”

(silence, organ music, and peer pressure to solicit your time or donation to the cause).

The Ponzi scheme that works. More will join us here in America, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy: your wish will come through, because America is not a place. It’s a platform, where you can launch your dream. America is Cape Canaveral, a dream launching pad. Be prepared and fasten your seat belt, It’s not a walk in the park.

By the time you land, you will wonder where the heck you have been, and most of all, who you have become.

American? That’s the answer from German, Italian, Irish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Serbian, Somalian and soon Syrian, who have arrived and bought into the scheme. BYOD (Bring your own dream), the sign says at the door. Not “Welcome to America.”  The Native Americans perhaps never put any sign up in the first place. The best you can get for free here is workplace frozen turkey (pre-recession years).

And that takes some cooking. And with that kind of party, I would put BYOB in the invitation, just to make it clear: it’s a potluck dinner, because, Ponzi, by definition, manufactures nothing except for a dream of getting rich, but never something for nothing. Buy now, pay later (either by us or our descendants, but pay we will).  It has worked so far.

But we need more MLM recruits for it to work. The new sign will have to say “BYOD”, bring as many dreams as you’d like, but no preexisting condition preferred.