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How G.E. Is Transforming Into An IoT Start-Up (nytimes.com)
Slashdot reader mspohr shares an article about "General Electric 're-inventing' itself as a software start-up." Jeffrey R. Immelt, the CEO of America's largest manufacturer, describes how he realized that data collected from their machines -- like turbines, engines, and medical-imaging equipment -- could be as valuable as the machines themselves. Now G.E. is hiring software engineers and data scientists from Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google to try to transform the company into a "124-year-old startup" to take advantage of the Internet of Things and offer futuristic new services like predictive maintenance.
The Times calls it "the next battlefield as companies fight to develop the dominant software layer that connects the machines," adding that by 2020 there will be 100 times as much data flowing from G.E.'s machines. Now G.E. Digital is using the open source PaaS, Cloud Foundry, to develop Predix, a cloud-based operating system for industrial applications like monitoring and adjusting equipment in the field, whether it's an oil-field rig or a wind-farm turbine. To help transform the company into a digital powerhouse, they're building a 1,400-employee complex in San Ramon, California "designed to suit the free-range working ways of software developers: open-plan floors, bench seating, whiteboards, couches for impromptu meetings, balconies overlooking the grounds and kitchen areas with snacks." And they've also launched the Industrial Dojo program "to accelerate the ability for developers to contribute code that enables the Industrial Internet".
The Times calls it "the next battlefield as companies fight to develop the dominant software layer that connects the machines," adding that by 2020 there will be 100 times as much data flowing from G.E.'s machines. Now G.E. Digital is using the open source PaaS, Cloud Foundry, to develop Predix, a cloud-based operating system for industrial applications like monitoring and adjusting equipment in the field, whether it's an oil-field rig or a wind-farm turbine. To help transform the company into a digital powerhouse, they're building a 1,400-employee complex in San Ramon, California "designed to suit the free-range working ways of software developers: open-plan floors, bench seating, whiteboards, couches for impromptu meetings, balconies overlooking the grounds and kitchen areas with snacks." And they've also launched the Industrial Dojo program "to accelerate the ability for developers to contribute code that enables the Industrial Internet".
Let's hope the first item on their agenda is how to handle security in their internet connected machinery and what to do in the inevitable event of breaches. Or they could just learn their lessons the painful way.
nt
Where do you go if you need to concentrate? You know, like on actually getting stuff done? I guess that's all passe now.
That is all.
Many years ago I worked for a startup subsidiary of GE and I was not impressed with the management style. I don't think it's just sour grapes due to my being pushed out the door, because the entire subsidiary died a couple of years later. Some kind of Internet thing. Of course it was doomed, eh?
Then again, after reading Jack Welch's book, I think there are grounds for concern. If GE is still as he made it in his image, then it's a dangerous and sociopathic entity. If it were an actual human being, then it is probable that we would all be dead now. Shades of the vicious ASI (artificial super-intelligence) in Our Final Invention (My quasi-review at https://ello.co/shanen0/post/g... as of last week?) No respect for your humanity after GE gets enough IoT devices into the market, and they still design lots of devices for the Chinese to build. Of course the Chinese involvement creates another layer of concern.
We need an economic system that rethinks things in terms of freedom. Cf my sig, eh?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I guess nobody's told the big guys that the majority of small businesses fail, fail hard, and fail quickly, but not quickly enough to be cheap. Anyone want to bet that within 4 years, 50% of their currently-american software folks will be outsourced and within 8 years that number will be closer to 75%?
Quoting TFS:
designed to suit the free-range working ways of software developers: open-plan floors, bench seating, whiteboards, couches for impromptu meetings, balconies overlooking the grounds and kitchen areas with snacks
These "open-plan floors" are, in many cases, the worst thing imaginable for developer productivity and information security. Then again, it's one of those "modern and trendy best practices" that's still widely and blindly adopted by tech companies these days, so it's gotta be good, right? -PCP
Indian executives say early investments by GE in India gave their technology and business service sectors crucial credibility and cash when other companies still viewed the country as a risky backwater. Moreover, exposure to Mr. Welch's culture of cost-cutting and efficiency taught them business skills they are now using to compete globally, often against U.S. firms.
...where so much of the economy is driven by harvesting personal data to sell to advertisers that there aren't enough companies creating real products left anymore who want to advertise?
Perhaps the disruptive visionaries of the next generation can innovate their way into a future where consumers no longer expect anything at all in exchange for their money. We're already on the road to it, phasing out the archaic concept of property ownership in favor of such ideas as the cloud, the sharing economy, and Windows 10 PCs.
A company the size of GE cranking out insecure, hackable crap.
Which is a brilliant move from a company point of view. Never again they'll have to deal with warranty claims since the first thing the customer now has to do is to fry the wifi part of his new fridge, voiding the warranty in the process.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"open-plan floors, bench seating,"
WTF? Software developers dont WANT those things. The executives want those things because it is cheaper to shove everyone in a table in a room.
Why did it take GE so long to load up on sensors, and computers, for its multimillion dollar turbines? This could have been done 15 years ago. For the stuff GE sells, it is worth hiring people to squeeze out an extra few percent of performance.
I'm not sure what in the hell this is all about except as MBA babble. GE turbines, fixed and mobile have had an extensive sensor suite for years. Does anybody think you're going to run a multi million dollar device with a couple of gauges and an on / off switch? Maybe they're going to rethink how they put together toaster ovens but that hardly seems to be much of a headline.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Who ever heard of a startup with that many people! You'd need a bureaucracy just to manage that many people. But then, GE is very comfortable with bureaucracies.
GE transforming to a startup? Yeah, and on the same note I'm sure that the local circus elephant will learn to fly and soar through the skies any day now. Seriously, as someone who's been working as a contractor for GE for almost 2 years now, the notion of them becoming a startup is utterly ridiculous. In practice the "startup" changes have meant abandoning personal office space for noisy productivity-destroying open plan offices, appointing someone as "scrum master", slapping a parody of scrum on top of the waterfall model and calling it agile.
Seriously, what the would need to do is shave off about 7 layers of bureaucracy, because right now, something as simple as trying to get QA to accept that the test reports generated by the test automation are not going to be identical to the ones that were previously used when testing was done by hand is a six month political struggle where managers of different departments have to assert themselves in a dick measuring competition. I'd say these guys are about 123 years away from being a startup... :-P
*nod* I had friends getting degrees in programmable sensors & controllers in the 80s.
This is just another instance of "We'll do X... on the Internet!", only it's about 10 years late.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
For the record some of us HATE this idea. I don't want to be that close to my coworkers. I can't work with people staring over my shoulder. I need a reasonable amount of privacy. Since I spend over a third of my life there, I want to be able to bring a couple of personal things and not move them around all the time.
What makes people think professionals known for introversion want to have absolutely NO privacy?
And they'll wind up building version 10 of GECOS and then sell it off again. Oh wait they already did that.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It's nice that GE is thinking about this now, but this is far from a new idea.
Predictive maintenance was a new thing 25 years ago. Companies like Computational Systems Inc (CSI), which was later acquired by Emerson, pioneered this technology.
CSI's first product line used accelerometers placed on each axis to analyze vibrations, which was then graphed and analyzed by software. Based on vibrations, they were able to tell when ball bearings were wearing out so that they may be replaced as part of scheduled line maintenance and avoiding downtime often rated in the $100Ks per hour.
They branched off into other products such as oil analysis, where they magnetically detected metal in engine oil to determine wear. Etc.
Very interesting stuff. (Disclosure: I worked for them in the early 90s.)
"You have liberated me from thought."
What GE is doing is not unusual. Many corporate giants are trying this in one form or another. They're realized that due to their size, the business can't operate on "internet time"; they're responding too slowly to opportunities, and they're losing ground because they're just not competitive with the little guys.
But "startup" is the wrong term; it's really an attempt to escape the straightjacket of large company bureaucracy by spawning an internal skunkworks to bypass the slowdowns inherent in any giant top-down organization that was built around yesterday's business objectives and is now unable to change as quickly as the marketplace's rapidly shifting dynamics demand.
For example, I work for a top 5 pharma. We're spawning two "startup" groups in Boston and Silly Valley, physically separate from our existing campuses. This is *not* because we want to be more like a startup by adopting their funding model or superfast time-to-market deliverables. It's because our (smarter) C-suiters know the existing business practices of a huge company must change faster than a 50+K employee behemoth can possibly move. If they tried to refactor our every role and taskgroup to the degree needed, it'd be so disruptive that we'd die the death of a thousand cuts (literally). But if we don't somehow change faster, we'll also fail, due to having "overfit" an obsolete business model and our inability to "refactor" ourselves quickly.
So our bigwigs are creating two "innovation" centers that will live *outside* the mainstream of the company -- play by different rules, wages, and cultures, and do so in geographies where that's more the norm. It's hoped that by adopting a faster cycle time for our critical development processes (as a startup must do), we can respond faster and with less of the top-down excessive layering of internal bureaucracy that ossifies big corps into oblivion.
We shall see.
They've had most of my adult life to figure out how to set up a Universal Remote Control to connect all the devices in my living room and every universal remote marketed has been a cruel, cruel lie. If they can not figure out how to do this for my home theater, given the relative simplicity and low (or no) security concerns for my cable converter, television, DVD, amplifier... what makes me believe that they will do this on a consumer level with everyone trying to control the user interface (and revenue stream) by establishing their Dominant Software Layer? They may get it close to right on the industrial level, but too much greed and sloppiness on the consumer level will delay or prevent the IOT from happening on the consumer level. Look to your lack of ease for moving music and movies that you have bought (licensed) from one platform to another and the major impediment is not a lack of technology, but greed and control.
They bought a startup called Smart Signal a few years ago.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
What is the licence of Predix? CloudFoundry is on apache license, so non-viral... Which means that Predix could be as open or closed as GE would want it.