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US CTO Choice Down To a Two-Horse Race
theodp writes "Barack Obama apparently didn't return CmdrTaco's call. BusinessWeek reports that the choices for the first US CTO have narrowed, and it's now a two-horse race between Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's CTO, and Vivek Kundra, who holds the same title for the Government of the District of Columbia. Two very different resumes — which would you advise Obama to pick?" I just know I was #3 on the list.
seriously? I worked at Motorola when Padmasree was there and I have seen more tech success in that period watching my lawn grow.
Is a big advocate of Google -- he transitioned the entire city government to Google Apps.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
the dude from cisco is a woman.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
On the basis that Cisco functions and makes money, while DC is a disaster, Cisco_guy++.
Have you ever worked with Cisco? I have and it was a nightmare. They are a horribly inefficient bureaucracy that makes money by leveraging their existing client base and giving purchasers all the hookers and blow they need to get them to sign. They owned 10% of a company I worked for, then decided to buy one of our failed competitors and try to compete against us. Said competitor failed for a reason, so when that flopped they tried to strong arm us into canceling our product in that market. When that failed they spent millions more to buy two more firms we had driven out of business because their products were so much worse than ours.
Their main problem is that they can make okay hardware, but they suck at software and they really, really, really suck at user interfaces and integration of products. Their corporate ethics are in the toilet with their standing layoffs policy and they're more than happy to push crappy solutions on all their "partners" and big customers while forgetting to mention that they won't touch the same solution with a ten foot pole for use on their own network.
So yeah they're terrible, which is still probably not as bad as Washington DC.
Well, Cisco sucks. And the government of D.C. sucks.
Right, the government sucks, so by no means should you consider working for the government
I won't defend the guy's attitude, but if you RTFS (S = summary), one of the candidates worked for the Government of DC. So he wasn't saying "All governments suck so I wouldn't work for one," he was saying "the DC government sucks so I wouldn't promote one of their C?Os."
Uh-huh. You do realize that one of the first actions of our founding fathers was to buy up state debt to establish national credit, right?
Most posts here seem to be generalizations based on little to no facts, and I can't see how that's helping the discussion.
Can't speak for the Cisco lady, but Kundra has been kicking serious butt in DC. He's run tech start-ups and runs his agency the same way: aggressive, frugal, and with little tolerance for those that don't performance. Here's a Washington Post article on him from a few weeks ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/04/AR2009010401235.html
He created hundreds of data feeds in his first few months in office to make DC one of the most open governments around. Then a few months ago, he hosted an open competition with $20k of prizes for anyone to create innovative applications using these data feeds.