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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.
Well, Cisco sucks. And the government of D.C. sucks. So if I had to choose, I'd go by whoever was wearing the longest tie last time I met them.
Comment of the year
Sorry Mr. Taco, I have to go with the CowboyNeal option here.
The Iraqi Information Minister? He'd at least be entertaining..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Can't they off shore this position to Pune? What better choice for corrupt politicians than to choose Satyam? Sounds like a match made in... whatever.
Didn't know either existed.
On the basis that Cisco functions and makes money, while DC is a disaster, Cisco_guy++.
Either way, the position is going to be mostly a figurehead. Unless Obama delegates some serious executive power over the federal bureaucracy, this will just be a cushy job for the next several years.
The CTO needs to be able to override agency decisions, put mandates on them and punish them for non-compliance. I seriously doubt that Obama is going to go that far. One of the first ones should be to stop the Oracle lovefest, and make it federal policy to stop using Oracle on most federal systems that have less than a few hundred users.
If I had to choose between the two, which apparently I would (not that my decision makes ANY difference whatsoever), I'd have to go with the dude from Cisco. He at least has his roots, however good they may be, in a business and not a "cushy government job."
SMARTnet contracts in perpetuity for everyone provided by the US Government!
Does not matter who is chosen: the industry guy will tire of the endless petty bureaucrats and quit in 18 months. Then we get the government lacky anyway; and, we get free technology for everyone.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
seriously? I worked at Motorola when Padmasree was there and I have seen more tech success in that period watching my lawn grow.
What?!? Ted Stevens wasn't available?
We need someone in there that understand that the internets are not like a big truck but rather a series of tubes.
Two Indian born CTOs are the two top runners. Is this a statment about.
1. Diversity?
2. The lack of US citizens going into the tech sector.
3. Stereotyping?
Me I would vote for Vivek Kundra. I think he would see things from a customers point of view vs a vendors point of view.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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
also, vivek and kundra talent trees need more buffs.
You leeches, you scrimp on your taxes, never thank the government, and then have the gall to tar all public servents - people who spend their best years serving YOU - with the same, tired accusations. Tell me, how to you square the 'public service = cushy' claim with the 'US = most powerful country' circle? Do you think the infrastructure, social safety net, military, judiciary, etc., all just run on automatic?
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.
Given that Cisco is the company that provided China with most of its network solutions for the so-called "Great Firewall", I should hope that tips the scales slightly in Kundra's favor.
i actually think either of these guys would be fine. the fact that we are getting a US CTO is a good first step. face facts:the first US CTO will prolly have a hard start until the rest of the government finally step in line and actually realize that a CTO is needed in these times.
there's gonna be some oldtime hardliners who'll remember "a time when there wasn't a fancy-pants US CTO, and don't really see a need for one..." once the prejudice and ignorance are washed away, then the CTO will actually make a difference.
on a side note, what happened with talk of Bill Joy becoming CTO? not to taut nativism, but he is an American(born and bred), author of vi, backbone of the original BSD rollout and co-founder of Sun.
whats up with that?
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
No, they're just hiring a fall guy.
Twinstiq, game news
Leo Laporte!
It sounds better I agree. But so does spending the next 4 years with my left leg in a cast.
I'm not saying Obama will be terrible, but it's not really a challenge to be better than Bush, so if that's your only hope for the next decade I'd suggest you consider raising the bar.
Have you ever worked with Cisco? I have... They... [give] purchasers all the hookers and blow they need to get them to sign.
You are complaining... Were you the hooker, or the blow?
He's the guy who had to blow the hooker.
Do you want to die by way of eaten by sharks, or would you rather have wolves?
I honestly don't think either candidate is qualified for the position. We already know that Cisco is willfully ignorant, even hostile, towards FOSS and I imagine quite a lot of that mindset is endorsed by the CTO's office.
Is it too late to clean the slate and start over?
Maybe it's just a sign that the latent racism which assumes that just because someone was born in India they can't be a US citizen is coming to an end.
Heh. True.
Padmasree Warrior grew up in India and went to IIT, but she majored in Chemical Engineering and later got a masters in the same subject at Cornell. She started at one of Motorola's fabs and went on to management later. As far as I can tell, she's never been part of the software and systems side of the IT industry outside of management, instead working her way up through the fab side. (Much like I wouldn't consider John Sculley of Apple fame to have been an "IT guy" having an architecture major who went into marketing and management at PepsiCo before becoming an infamous Apple CEO.)
Vivek Kundra, while ethnically Indian, grew up in Tanzania not India, speaking Swahili. He came to the US at age 11, and I'd bet a dollar that he was a US citizen by the time he went to college. He has a BS in psychology and a MS in information technology from the University of Maryland. He also has private sector experience.
So, to sum up: One Indian-American never went into IT so much as into plant design and later management, and the other was not only probably a US citizen at the time, but was more African than Indian in cultural upbringing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I can't say anything about the other person, but Ms. Warrior would be a disastrous pick, IMHO. I had some contact with her when she was CTO at Motorola and I came away from that experience thinking she was:
1. Was a poor leader
2. Did not consider opinions other than her own on making decisions.
3. Was really not very knowledgeable
4. Was only out for her own advancement
Perhaps these are the attributes of many successful executives, but don't strike me as qualities you want in a civil servant.
Did you ever have contact with a person of real power/wealth/influence and come away thinking "How did they EVER get to where they are?" The older I get, the more I think success requires some work + many connections + a lot of luck.
It looks like the last might strike Ms. Warrior here again pretty soon.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who helped create Al-Qaeda while under Zbigniew Brzezinski in Carter's Administration. He was very much involved in the Iran-Contra affair. This was enough to stop him from being DCI in 1991, but now it's perfectly fine.
Attorney General Eric holder wrote a brief to the SCOTUS on the DC gun ban and said that there is no individual right to own gun. He was apart of the Clinton Administrations Justice Department when Clinton pardoned all of his cocaine trafficking buddies.
Rahm Emanuel is crazy, a duel citizen of Israel and the U.S. and while in charge of who to give money to in the 2006 election cycle decided to acitvely shun anti-war candidates.
That's just a start.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
So yeah they're terrible, which is still probably not as bad as Washington DC.
I'd like to point out that the guy from Washington DC also has private sector experience if you're worried about icky public sector cooties getting all over your new public sector employee. He's also very big on open and transparent government. His resume's a bit light to figure out how good he'll be, but he's probably got a huge leg-up on working with people in Washington.
The lady from Cisco, however, managed a doomed subsidiary of Motorola based on an uneconomical GaAs-on-Si technology before eventually presiding as CTO over the continued slow decline of a company that hasn't had an exciting product since the RAZR years ago before moving on to fill a position at Cisco which had been vacant for two years. While she does want to see more funding for fundamental research and development (not surprising given her fabrication background), the association with Motorola and Cisco does not scream the best and brightest of the private sector to me. Given her academic credentials, she's probably very brilliant, but I don't see how that's translated into success for her companies.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Kundra replaced all of D.C. gov's word and exchange infrastructure with google apps.
Wonder if he would push that for the whole federal government?
As Cisco's CTO Padmasree Warrior has led many changes inside of Cisco.
1. Green DataCenter initiatives - She has led the charge in lowering power consumption of existing DataCenters by utilizing new technologies, as well as consolidating sites. This has a direct financial impact, as well as being good for the environment.
2. Focus on collaborative tools and teams - she has really pushed to break down the silo's between teams by providing the tools and technologies to seamlessly share information between teams.
Most importantly, she is a forward thinking technologist, not a bureaucrat. If I am going to trust anybody to drive the technical vision of the federal government, I am going to trust Padmasree.
Colin McNamara - CCIE #18233 "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer"
It took a Bush to bankrupt the USA[1].
[1] In fact, the USA declared bankruptcy on 15th August 1971, and it was Nixon wot did it.
Deleted
Not to quibble, but isn't this really a Chief Information Officer position, rather than a CTO position? I would expect a Chief Technical Officer to know much more than just information technology.
Lord knows I am going to get slammed for this...but where is the white guy?
I am afraid that Congress, behind closed doors, is still a racist institution. I'm afraid that either person will not be as succesful in navigating those waters with ties back to India. (Or Russia, or China, etc.)
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.
... No self respecting person with a competent technical background would ever stoop to making their living regurgitating phrases like "win/win" and "low hanging fruit". Go with the CISCO chick with the wicked cool name :).
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Then I hope it starts to get better soon, because there's nothing particularly interesting here.
Actually I think all those are interesting factoids. Mind you, they aren't necessarily representative of Obama's appointees or for that matter as bad as ones Bush made.
So the AG is from the Clinton admin. So he isn't a gun nut. Cry me a river.
It isn't a matter of him being a "gun nut" and trying to paint people who interpret the second amendment sanely as "nuts" does nothing to help your case. Whether they want to admit it or not, the second amendment clearly presents gun ownership as a personal right and there is tons of supporting documentation for that interpretation while pretty much just wishful thinking from the opposing camp. People who claim otherwise are just playing politics and trying to justify unconstitutional actions and laws because they thing it will get them or their party votes (which it often does). If a person is willing to basically lie about what the constitution says and usurp rights it protects (rather than getting the amendment overturned) then they are being unethical. You also have to wonder how they will interpret other very clear subjects in the constitution when it is to their benefit to misinterpret them.
Wake me when they're championing torture, bribing commentators, and making shady business deals in secret.
This is the "we're not as bad as China" defense constantly used by the Bush administration to try to paint their unethical acts as not as bad as others and therefor acceptable. It didn't fly then and it doesn't now.
I hate to break this to you, but neither one of those initiatives is unique to Cisco. Both of those were corporate initiatives at Motorola while she was there, and they weren't even novel then -- most companies had them, the green initiative due to EU regulations and public relations in general, and the breaking down of silos because it was the latest wave in management self-help books. (Motorola, in particular, had a severe silo problem, known as the "warring tribes.")
After watching her career for the last ten years, this is par for the course. She is absolutely not a "forward thinking technologist" -- her career over this time has been a series of steps in which she took her "vision" from her superiors, trashed her own organization, then moved on before the mess became apparent to those above her. Just look at the organizations she's left: Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector (now spun out as Freescale Semiconductor) and Motorola itself (in which Motorola labs, the corporate research arm of the company she once led, is now down to less than 300 individuals, less than ten percent of which are engaged in wireless research). Not to mention the company's centralized software group (over 3000 individuals) which she also led, that was disbanded upon her departure.
Does that sound like the work of a forward thinking technologist?
You are either exaggerating or are mistaken.
USA (Brzezinski or whoever) did not create Al Qaeda. It is true that many Al Qaeda members fought Russia in Afghanistan and that the Afghan Mujahedeens were funded by USA through Pakistan -- But Al Qaeda is a much later group formed in Saudi Arabia (according to Bin Laden against US presence in Holy Land). Very different times, different places.
Rahm Emanual Dual-Citizenship allegation is baseless according to Wikipedia.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2