Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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.
The "dude from Cisco" is a woman. But she's not really "from" Cisco, she came there in the past year from Motorola. And my impression is that she didn't do that great a job at Motorola, and I haven't really heard anything worthwhile out of her while she's been at Cisco. So, I'd go with the other dude.
Obviously you have done zero research into these two candidates. To begin with the "dude from Cisco" is a female who used to be CTO for Motorola. Let's take a look at how well Motorola had been doing under her "direction". They are still feeling the ill effects of that. While I know nothing about Vivek, I do know that I would not want someone who has run a historically innovative company like Motorola into the ground!
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.
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").
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.