Benjamin Fried
CIO, Google Inc.

Benjamin Fried is Chief Information Officer of Google Inc., overseeing the company’s global technology systems. His extensive hands-on experience in technology includes stints as a dBASE II programmer, front-line support manager, Macintosh developer, Windows 1.0 programmer, and UNIX systems programmer. Prior to joining Google, he spent more than 13 years in Morgan Stanley’s technology department, where he rose to the level of Managing Director. During his time there, he led teams responsible for software development technology, web and electronic commerce technologies and operations, and technologies for knowledge workers.

Ben received his degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Ed Yourdon: Let’s start by asking about any role models or any early heroes or mentors that may have influenced you to get where you are now.

Benjamin Fried: I think there have been a lot. I’ve only had maybe four major employers in my career, three or four employers, but a lot of role models. I think I’ve been lucky in that in every job I’ve been in, there’s been one or more people I’ve been able to look up to and learn from.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Fried: Kind of different depending on the situation. When I was working my way through school, I was spending a lot of time reading, guess what? I think it was classic computer science texts.

Yourdon: [laughter]

Fried: And everything from reading [Brian] Kernighan and [P.J.] Plauger’s Elements of Programming Style [McGraw-Hill, 1978], the books of the Bell Labs guys, [Donald] Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming [Addison-Wesley, 2011], and the stuff he did. Did you guys [Bell Labs team and Ed Yourdon] publish together? I thought I remembered.

Yourdon: Well, because it took two years to get my books out—in fact, because of Bill Plauger, we had the first nonacademic UNIX license in the country.

Fried: Really?

Yourdon: And I said, “Is it free?” And [Plauger] said, “Of course not, it’s $10,000.” That’s what UNIX cost in the ’70s, which he loaned us, interest-free. That’s why I thought, “This guy is serious.” And we got a typesetter, on loan, and we were in the publishing business with TROFF.

Fried: Wow. Really? Wow. The typesetter’s workbench? Is that what it was called? The document workbench? Impressive.

Yourdon: Yeah, but the book that he and Brian Kernigan wrote was certainly one of the major books in the field.

Fried: Yeah. I’d say that, the corpus of books that came out of Bell Labs—Brian’s and Rob Pike’s and others—were really influential, as well as Knuth’s books. I guess I had a lot of time when I was a kid. I spent a lot of time teaching myself computer science in high school and in college, and so I had a bunch of academic and computer science heroes and people that I learned from. And then in jobs, there was always someone who was a mentor or someone I could look up to and learn how they were doing something, trying to understand what they were doing. I was very, very lucky. I spent almost 14 years at Morgan Stanley, in one place, and I think I learned a lot there about operating in a big company—what it means, the differences between great engineering and providing a great service.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Fried: And a whole lot about how … “reality” is a better way of putting it, but that great engineering without the ability to communicate and understand what people want [or] understand how to negotiate and compromise and discuss and so on … the great engineering on its own does you very little good if those other skills aren’t there, and there were a lot of people I saw who were able to work with that. So, I have a lot. It’s hard to pin it down to just one, but there’ve always been people who I’ve looked up to for things. I think that’s just … part of my personality.

Yourdon: Okay. That’s good. And how did you end up here? You were at Morgan Stanley for a long time.

Fried: Well, I was lucky enough that I had several friends who joined here, some of whom joined the place fairly early on, in 2000, 2001 or something like that.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Fried: As Google grew and grew, they said, “Oh, you should come and interview.” Even in 2004, for Morgan Stanley I worked on building a lot of the technology that was used to run Google’s IPO, which was interesting. I met a bunch of people who worked at Google, visited Google a bunch of times as part of that. And then in 2005, my name was submitted again … after the IPO experience, I came and I met a lot of people here. It was really, really interesting, but at the rate Google was growing at the time, they said, “You seem like a really interesting person. You know, we don’t have a job for you, we don’t have a particular role we’re trying to fill, but come on, come through the process, and if it works out, we’ll figure something out.”

And meanwhile, I had a great job at Morgan Stanley, where I knew what I was . . . and I thought, you know, this is a small company … they’re growing. That’s great, but they don’t really know what they want me to do. And so it wasn’t that interesting. Then, although in retrospect it was probably a mistake, but in 2007 … the same recruiter called me back up and said that [the Google] CIO was moving on to a different role. … They said, “We are looking to find a replacement … and we thought, maybe that’s something you’d be interested [in] talking to us about.” … [T]hat began a long process of many, many interviews and I thought, well, they have a job for me now. And that led to my meeting with a lot of people here and ultimately getting the job.

Yourdon: Now had you been a CIO at Morgan Stanley?

Fried: No, I wasn’t. I was not. And I honestly never thought I would be—this is probably an important thing to know about me—I had never thought I would be a CIO. I thought [about] the roles probably, the traditional CIO roles, even in Wall Street, where technology is this incredibly important part of competitive advantage and they’re very, very aggressive about pushing the envelope. I had never thought I’d be a CIO anywhere.

I was really interested in the engineering and computer science parts of IT. I thought of myself as someone who was the gearhead in the back, who was the person trying to bring engineering and computer science and so on into industry and that I thought I’d always probably be, as I was at Morgan Stanley in my last role, a direct report to the CIO but with more of a technical focus to my job. But it was the way that the CIO role was constructed at Google—I thought, well, that’s a CIO job I might actually like, I might actually be qualified for.

My observation was, and maybe it’s a bit cynical, was that most CIOs carry a heavy burden because they’re typically one of, if not the largest cost centers in their organization. Because so much of their jobs is operations, operationally oriented and execution-oriented. It’s this combination of things: you always have to be super, super good at kind of understanding the financial picture of IT because it’s such a big expense. You have to keep systems running really, really well all the time because the company depends on it, and that’s incredibly important. But I didn’t find the operational part of it alone to be that compelling. And then, finally, you’re only as good as your execution, right?

And I thought that those three—you know, any two of them were kind of interesting, although I hope our CFO would forgive me for saying this—this “running the books part of it” was by far the least interesting. I saw a number of CIOs on Wall Street and in other industries who I almost felt had a bulls-eye painted on their back as a result of being the large, enormous cost centers. And I thought, I just don’t want to have to worry about those things. You know, my passion and my excellence is in computer science and engineering and in building things, and in solving problems. And in building software and doing systems infrastructure and that kind of stuff. And I thought, CIOs don’t get to spend a lot of time on that stuff. They manage big portfolios, etc., etc., etc. But they spend a lot of time on governance, they spend a lot of time on things that are important, but not interesting.

But Google has constructed the CIO job, because Google views IT as an engineering discipline. . . I report to an SVP of Engineering, who reports to the head of Engineering and Research, and I sit in an engineering executive group with the people who run Google Search and Google Apps and Google Enterprise and Ads. I thought, while I think of this as an engineering discipline, this seems really interesting to me, and they have a strong, strong belief in building software.

I think the other trend I’ve observed is that there’s a lot of great IT departments and great CIOs who are really all about buying things, which is great. That’s fine, it’s one of the ways IT can be transformational, but not so much—you know, buying is great, but building is also where my passion is. I think it’s part of the advantage I can bring to the table: I can help; I can create an environment to manage engineers well. So Google defined the IT job very, very differently. There’s a real strong belief in building software. I thought of it as engineering—whereas at Morgan Stanley, I was kind of the gearhead in the back. I thought that at Google it would be the nontechnical skills that I had acquired at Morgan Stanley that would serve this engineering function. I thought they were asking me to serve really, really well—the ability to negotiate, create forms for governance, the ability to communicate well. I thought it was interesting that at the same time I’d still be able to kind of exercise my interests and passions as an engineer and someone with a computer science degree, too.

Yourdon: Okay. Well, that’s a good answer. But, clearly, one of the things that distinguishes Google and Microsoft from the typical “XYZ widget company” is that you guys are not in the business of building widgets or tangible things. You’re in the software product business—products or services.

Fried: Yeah.

Yourdon: So you tend to give a different kind of answer than I have been getting . . . [last week] I spoke to the CIO of a utility company. They’re in the business of making electricity. Now, clearly it depends a lot on IT, but historically, they still go back to the days when they thought of themselves in the business of distributing electricity around the country. And that leads into my next area of questions of, basically, how does IT and the work you’re doing as a CIO make Google more successful, more competitive, given that you’re in the business of building software and services?

Fried: That’s a really interesting question because, I’m not responsible for any Google products. I have peers who are responsible for all the products…. Yet at the same time I think IT here plays this incredibly important role in a number of ways. I think one of them is—I actually think a lot of this ties to the mission of IT, but I think it gets lost in the noise of the other parts of the conversation with CIOs—what’s amazing about technology is its ability to transform a company. To do things to a company, to be an influencer on an organization. And I think what’s great about IT is that having technologists at the center of a company who can fuse the understanding of a company, what differentiates it and what it seeks to be, with the opportunities of technology and understand what this incredibly rapidly moving, advancing area can apply to it.

That’s this amazing opportunity, and what does that mean for Google? There are a few ways in which I think IT is important at Google and differentiates it. Number one is that we’re a very young company and founded by people who grew up in the Internet Age and who are obviously all computer scientists. And there is this deep-seated cultural belief here that we want to change the company very, very quickly. In all kinds of ways we want to change it at a moment’s notice and we don’t want the company to…

I think all too often CIOs or companies make a decision that they will embody some best practices implemented by their ERP vendors or something like that: “We’ll, we’ll adopt the HR processes and technologies provided by the products that we bought to solve these problems.” Whereas I think Google starts by asking itself and frequently re-evaluating: “What do we want to be and how does, what does technology need to do to support that?” So as material examples of that, we have very unusual hiring practices in Google Engineering. Hiring managers actually have very little voice in hiring the people who work for them. There are standards set for Google software engineers, there is standard training for interviewers, there are panels that aren’t composed of people or are primarily not composed of people in the hierarchy of the job that you might move into.

Yourdon: And by the way, did I read somewhere correctly that you had 75,000 applications in one week recently?

Fried: Yeah. . . that is true. We have a corpus of millions of resumés, millions of job applications, I should say, that have come to us over time. We get many, many, many thousands of applications every week, sometimes every day. That in itself is a unique problem, I think, or a rare problem. I’m sure Walmart has some version of that, too, right? But we hire people in different ways. We value very much having an unbiased evaluation of someone’s skills as an engineer before we decide to place them into a job, and in fact, typically, people are made an offer to be a software engineer and then after they accept that offer are they placed into a job.

Yourdon: Oh, okay.

Fried: So, this idea of a consistent bar and the processes that support that and that maintain high standards—these are very, very important. So we hire people, and then there’s a series of reviews and approvals of offers to make sure that we’re hiring people in consistent ways and keeping consistent standards. That’s interesting.

Yourdon: Well, this sounds like it might be part of an answer to this question I had raised, which is how do you use IT to be more competitive? And part of it is, “We hire the best damn people in the universe.”

Fried: But I think it’s interesting that what we decided is, “Here’s what it means to hire the best people. Here’s how we have to do it. And now let’s build the software that will make this process work.”

Yourdon: Oh, okay.

Fried: And similarly, we have, I’d say, unusual approaches to performance, and to how we do 360-degree performance management. We both incredibly value the signals about someone’s performance that come from 360-degree evaluation while at the same time understanding the enormous impact it makes, it takes on a company to have everyone doing evaluations. Everyone has to stop what they were doing and do these other things. Not only that, but we’re always trying to tune it. What can we do to create better signals about how people are actually performing and how they need to improve, and so on over time. So the performance management systems here are very much tuned to these ideas of the skills that we value and to making it incredibly easy to produce these signals about people’s performance and capabilities. And we change what we want to measure and how we measure it and how we’ll gather information every performance management cycle. By the way, we have four performance review cycles a year.

Yourdon: Is that for everybody?

Fried: At least in engineering. I don’t know what the other departments do. But I think that that’s unusual. And, similarly, we take differing approaches to how we do compensation management. And how we compensate people, and interesting approaches to the philosophy and different kinds of components to the compensation. These are all places we’ve defined to get to the question of what is the role of IT at Google?

One of the roles is to enable Google to be the kind of company that it wants to be without the constraints created by pre-existing systems and to allow us to rapidly change. This element of allowing the company to rapidly change and redefine what it wants to be is prevalent in other parts of what we do, too. So the people who provide technology support, fix your laptop when it’s got a problem, giving you software and so on, that’s also part of my organization. And that same philosophy of allowing the company to change rapidly is embodied in how we do end-user support.

Often I’m seeing end-user support to be considered an activity where you rapidly try to manage as many costs out of it as possible, get it down, limit options, get it down to basic scripts, offshore as much of the work as possible, and get it so it can be done by people who don’t need to have a deep understanding so that you don’t have to pay them for that. Whereas our approach is: technology is always changing; we want to be able to make rapid changes to the technology environment here for a whole host of reasons. Sometimes it’s because we want to experiment with new Google software before we give it to other people. Sometimes it’s because we’ve observed that the world has changed or security requirements change rapidly and we want to implement those changes really, really quickly or we want to . . .

So the computer support people that we hire are generalists with deep skills. And the general approach is that the person you bring your problem to—and usually it’s in person, it’s a place we call it TechStop—bring your laptop and then you can ask them a [question].

Yourdon: Like the Apple Genius Bar?

Fried: Yeah, exactly, they should be able no matter what it is, that person should work with you and solve your problem with you, and they should have the skills, not that they can necessarily do it all themselves, but they can figure it out with you. They call upon other specialists. And that’s a very different model. It allows us organizationally to rapidly change the environment. There have been numerous cases where we’ve had products that we experimented on with Google, we got a lot of feedback on and we decided not to ultimately launch and maybe we shut them down. And being used in some cases by thousands of people, and we wanted to rapidly go from having thousands of people using them to shutting them down and moving on. That’s one of these cases where having generalists in the support organization has allowed the company to move really, really rapidly and change rapidly. So I think that that’s also an element of what IT is. I mean, I’m very fundamental now. When I think about IT, I think it’s about maximizing the productivity of your people in any number of ways.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Fried: So that philosophy and approach is that people who work at Google can choose to have a Linux machine or a Macintosh or a machine running Windows. And that’s because we believe you probably know how you can be most productive, and we want to give you the toolset that will make you most productive. And, I think that’s a very different kind of social contract from what you see in many other IT shops, where the philosophy is more along the lines of, “We’ve made a set of decisions that we, the IT leadership, believe are optimal and we will educate you, support you, and so on around the set of decisions we’ve made for you,” whereas we believe, “You probably know how to work best.” That doesn’t mean you go and buy a computer at Best Buy and bring it in to work. We do purchasing, we support Mac OS and Windows and Linux here, and we have teams who are experts in it, but by trying to give you a toolset that is one you would choose to use, the difference in the social contract is also that because you’ve made a choice about how you want to work, you probably don’t need the same kind of support as if we’ve given you one way of doing it that’s our way, not your way.

Yourdon: Good point.

Fried: So, users end up getting more personally involved in solving their own problems because there’s some level of recognition that, “Well, I chose this.”

Yourdon: Right.

Fried: “I wanted to use a Mac,” or “I thought Windows was best for me.” And I think that recognizes the fact that there’s something you’ll refer to later on, one of the great generational differences we’re exposed to is now it’s not just the first generation of people who grew up with computers in the workforce. But it’s the first generation of people who grew up with computers and with the Internet and with e-mail and with instant messaging are in the workforce. Whereas when I first entered a large enterprise in 1994 or something like that, expectations were completely different. People often first saw a laptop when it was given to them [through] work. Or first saw Windows when they got it at work.

Yourdon: Yes.

Fried: And the best computing experience you could expect to have would be the one that your company provided for you. But that’s all changed.

Yourdon: Oh, absolutely. There’s no question.

Fried: And, you know, we very consciously recognize that IT has a different role as a result of those changes, and I think that the role is about enabling the individual. It’s about creating maximum individual performance. It’s about allowing users to choose how to work. It’s about enabling an organization to rapidly change what it wants to be and kind of what’s important to it. I think that the opportunity that CIOs have, that technologists have, is to use technology to positively differentiate the organization that you’re part of. That isn’t just about competitive advantage. Competitive advantage and making your company more competitive is part of it, but there are lots of ways in which organizations, nonprofits, governments, and companies want to be different. They all have some sense of identity or they have some sense of individuality and identity. And I think we have to recognize that technology should be a part of it. It often is. Every company has some piece of internal technology that’s become a noun or a verb that’s entered the language, the jargon of that company.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Fried: And I think that’s in part evidence that technology can have these sorts of roles. What IT leaders need to do is recognize that that kind of differentiation is really important. It could be about making your company more competitive and productive or profitable. But it could just be about accentuating the differences that define your organization. And I think that, having CIOs, having IT departments at the center of a company that can recognize and enhance and create those opportunities, is kind of the core, the core of what IT’s mission should be, and it’s the only thing that will be durable given that the technology landscape is only accelerating the rate at which it changes.

Yourdon: Yeah, that certainly is true. Let me ask a related question if I can. You said that you’re not responsible for the Google products per se. But obviously the Google products run on server farms of hundreds of thousands of servers in various places. Are you responsible for that kind of day-to-day operational aspect of it?

Fried: Uhh, no. There are one or two small corner cases where we are, but we don’t operate those servers. It’s relatively well known that Google designs and builds its own servers. And I have a team that’s responsible for the supply chain and inventory and asset management of that manufacturing and repair and deployment work.

Yourdon: But in terms of keeping the lights on, that’s not your job?

Fried: No. I have groups that are responsible for keeping the lights on for things that operate what Googlers use.

Yourdon: Right, like her laptop [pointing]?

Fried: Her laptop or maybe even the server that it might be talking to.

Yourdon: Okay.

Fried: The servers that drive things that Google “corporate” uses, yes. The things that drive Google commercial products, no.

Yourdon: Okay, and that’s what I would have expected. I scribbled down a word also that came from Microsoft’s Tony Scott and I’d be curious to see whether you were involved in [it]. His word for it was “dogfooding.” And I’m sure you know what that means.

Fried: Yeah. I know what that means.

Yourdon: Do people look to you and your IT department as the first dogfood eaters for some new product that may be coming out?

Fried: Dogfooding is an enormous landscape within Google. And there’s a bunch of different flavors of it. It’s an incredibly important part. I’ve seen others refer to it as “drinking your own champagne” and “eating your own cheese.” But I’m a partner in a sausage-making company, so, maybe “eating your own salami.” So dogfooding is an incredibly important part of what we do. But there’s a bunch of dogfooding that happens without us. Keep in mind that Google is predominantly a consumer products company, a consumer services company.

Yourdon: Right.

Fried: And so in the realm of the consumer services that we offer, often it makes the most sense to have an un-intermediated conversation between the product management and engineering teams responsible for those services and people who work at Google who can evaluate them as individual consumers would. You know, one of the differences is … Microsoft has an incredibly large portion of its business devoted to serving enterprises, large and small, right? We have an important enterprise division. It’s not as large a percentage of what Google does as it is at Microsoft and what they do.

Yourdon: Though it’s growing rapidly.

Fried: Yeah, it is. It’s growing tremendously; it is thriving. We all think it’s an incredibly important part of what Google does, and where Google products are doing things that relate more to enterprise uses or organizational uses of technology, my organization is much more directly involved in dogfooding and providing feedback.

Yourdon: That would make sense.

Fried: And we also often get involved in looking at how we can come up with enterprise uses of consumer technologies, and we’re willing to be fairly experimental in trying out dogfooding enterprise uses of technologies that we’re aiming at a consumer audience. Because I believe this is one of the interesting opportunities and missions of my organization because of the company it’s situated in. Because one of the macro factors that made me believe Google was an incredibly important company was the dominance of consumer IT over enterprise IT that’s come about in the last 10, 15, 20 years.

I think everyone has observed or recognized that technologies often started out serving corporate purposes that had buying power and moving their way out to the consumer. I think that that’s changed with the likes of Google and a few other providers, whereas now you have all this innovation and R&D going into consumer products that find their way into enterprise uses. And, honestly, a lot of what Google Enterprise does is take Google consumer offerings and make them viable inside an enterprise. And it’s hugely successful for that. There are a lot of reasons why. You asked what are the great macro phenomena affecting technology.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Fried: I think that this is one of them. This is the one that I think is probably the most important. The rise of consumer-driven technology, consumer-driven computing, consumer-driven software-as-a-service offerings. I think that because there’s this motion from consumer to enterprise, I’m very focused on having my organization be in the avant-garde of trying to understand where there are new enterprise uses for previously consumer offerings. As one example, we’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to take Google’s consumer video chat product and turn it into corporate videoconferencing.

Yourdon: Okay.

Fried: And we now actually do that in partnership with the corporate videoconferencing group, the product group at Google who are doing that. But it’s something we’ve been working on for a long time. It’s one of these things that, if you think about it, seems quite obvious. So, you asked about dogfood, and I monologued on you for a long time.

Yourdon: Well, I see the distinction you’re making between dogfooding of things that are either already in the enterprise or moving in that direction, as opposed to consumer products.

Fried: No, we do often find ourselves in the position of having to provide some amount of question and answering for people who are dogfooding consumer-oriented products, They may just walk up and say, “I don’t understand why this isn’t working,” or “I can’t do this,” or whatever. And so you have to have support—this gets to the idea that there’s so much technology entering the environment that’s experimental, having support people who can react to that and learn on their feet is really, really important. I don’t know how we would survive if we tried to move to script-based, outsourced, level-one kind of support.

Yourdon: That certainly makes me realize a question that I would not even know how to ask a lot of the other CIOs that I’m talking to. For me, one of the things that I found so intriguing about Google [is that] for a period of ten years or so … every one of your products [was] a beta product.

Fried: Yeah.

Yourdon: And that you’re proud of it. Now I think that’s begun to change a little bit, but what that says, on so many different levels, is just mind-boggling, and I always thought that it was just a stark contrast from the old-fashioned IBM model … or actually it was a German company that I remember. Ten, fifteen years ago, I was over there consulting for them about a software engineering tool. And I’ll never forget a project manager who said, like the old TV commercial, “We ship no product before it’s ready.” And I said, “By the time you do, no one’s going to care anymore.” And he said, “I don’t care.” You know, it’s this Teutonic kind of mindset.

Fried: Yeah, the precision engineering.

Yourdon: And you guys totally reversed that. Does that reflect an IT culture that is still a big part of Google?

Fried: I think you touch on that when you asked about agile. You have an interview question about agile methods.

Yourdon: Yes.

Fried: I had looked at that question as a great observation. … [T]here’s a document I believe called “Ten Things We Know to Be True”¹ trying to describe Google’s core values, and one of them is the value of this idea of launch and iterate. That great products often become great through triangulation.

Fried: And those are my words, not, not the words of the authors. But this value of launching and iterating—releasing what you think is right, what you think is good, getting data… We have a deep, deep belief in being data-driven in our decision making, including decision making about even subtle features about applications. There’s a story somewhere—and I’m sure this frustrated the user interface people to no end—that we actually did experiments to understand which color blue in an icon people responded to the best. And the UI designer probably was not happy [about] who thought this was an expression of their artistic creativity. But there was actually data that we could get about which color blue people clicked on more, or were responding to more, and that was how we made a decision to do that. And so this idea of being data-driven, of realizing that the world is changing, you can’t be perfect, and you have to launch and change and change and change—and have an environment where you can do that—is absolutely core to us.

__________

There’s a very deep part of the understanding reflected in the question that you asked, which is that Google is predicated on the notion of software as a service, where we’re running the software on servers that we control and we deploy it on a timeframe of our choosing—whereas all traditional technology companies are predicated on the idea of software that customers installed on their laptop, or on their personal computer, or in their own data center.

And the pain of doing software installation, doing upgrades, and the necessity of it, all the difficulties in it lead to a “better get it right” mentality. I don’t think it’s even consciousness so much, but I think it finds its way in the DNA and the muscle memory of organizations even if consciously they understand that it’s a web world and even traditional downloaded, traditional shrink-wrapped software can be updated through Internet downloads. But there is this very deep industry muscle memory that comes from customer installation, whereas we don’t have that. We’ve virtually never had that. We have a small number of things that people install on their computers, but even the products like Chrome that you do install are essentially designed to give you the always up-to-date model of software and service of the software you installed yourself.

Yourdon: That is true. Fascinating. Well, I’ll have to give some more thought to that. I might come back to you with a follow-on question or two.

You had already started touching on a couple of things on my next major area: what are the significant new trends that are likely to influence Google and ultimately all of us over the next few years?

Fried: So … thank you for such good questions.

Yourdon: Any one of these could keep us going for quite some time.

Fried: So the technology trends that I see shaping the next few years. The one that was the most educational to me was understanding the domination of consumer-oriented technology over enterprise technology coupled with the enormous economies of scale only available to enormous software-as-a-service providers like Google. You know, these terms like the “cloud” have been hijacked by everyone. They can mean almost anything.

So the … phenomena we’ve already talked about: the fact that personal expectations of technology and the role of technology [are] defined by people’s expectations outside of the workplace, instead of people’s experiences inside the workplace. I think that that’s number one, and there are all kinds of interesting corollaries from that. And often you’ll find the most advanced technology people encounter now is their home technology. The best computer they use is the computer they bought, not the computer that their work provided to them, as companies have had to do things like go from three-year depreciation cycles to four- and five-year depreciation cycles.

Yourdon: Right.

Fried: And personal computer equipment, more and more consumers would never stand for having a five-, four-, or even three-year-old computer.

But then the expectations extend to these free software-as-services, software as a service powered by ads and other mechanisms. Those offerings—like Gmail—could never be successful if you had to have an enormous customer support organization around them. So … this is an interesting observation and this is what makes it such a powerful force in the enterprise, that traditional enterprise software is incredibly complicated and feature-rich because enterprises have asked for all those features, but the result of that is you can never separate yourself from an incredibly expensive support cycle around those things. Outlook is an incredibly complicated piece of software. It does many things that many, many enterprises have wanted for a long, long time. Microsoft is doing all the right things, it’s being responsive to their customers’ needs, they add features to it. But the net result is a piece of software of such enormous complexity that it’s almost unimaginable that you would not need a support infrastructure for it. On the other hand, with Gmail, you don’t really need it—many, many millions of people use Gmail on their own without any customer support, every day.

Yourdon: Right.

Fried: So that allows you to do something different. So part of the changing world of technology and the scale parts are just—without going into the numbers—because Google has so many computers and such large data centers, you can’t get the pricing of computers and … resources that we get if you’re not of the size we are. It’s just not the same, and I worked at a large Wall Street bank that had a lot of very advanced computing, and we got great pricing from our vendors, but we were not comparable to the kind of pricing that Google gets at all.

Yourdon: Well, the thing that you just said a moment ago, I’ve not heard yet from any other CIO. And I think I’m going to have to keep it quiet and see if they volunteer it.

In terms of the fundamental worldview change of free stuff: I’ll tell you just a quick story because it’s in the news right now. In 1992 I was in Cairo at a conference with my friend Tom DeMarco, and he and I turned out to be the only Americans there. Somehow I got into an argument with somebody who was saying, “Why doesn’t Microsoft provide more support in Africa for its stuff?” And I, being the smartass that I am, said, “Well, if you guys weren’t stealing so much software, maybe they would.” And he said, “You don’t understand. One copy of Microsoft Word is the annual salary of a university-educated person here, anywhere in Africa.”

Fried: Yeah.

Yourdon: And he said, “How can you possibly think that we’re going to pay full price for that?” And, of course, now, they’ve got Google apps.

Fried: I had a lot of “Aha” moments just like that over the last ten years prior to my joining Google. I had a very similar moment. It’s fascinating you described that. Morgan Stanley was considering buying a company in China, and I don’t have the precise numbers in my head, but consider these to be directionally correct. We looked at all the costs, the books and all that. We got a lot of pushback from the business development people trying to do the deal. It looked like the cost of one Morgan Stanley PC plus all the infrastructure required to support it was about equal to the average annual salary of the employees of this company, right? And that furthermore, if we wanted to take a Morgan Stanley front-line technology support person and move them, and put them there, then those costs, that person’s salary and the cost of putting them there, were greater than the combined payroll of this entire sixtyish-person company.

Yourdon: [laughter]

Fried: And this is not in any way a commentary on Morgan Stanley having bloated costs. It didn’t. It reflects exactly the phenomenon that you observed.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Fried: Meanwhile I saw the rise of, “Well, if I was doing this from scratch, I would just get an Internet connection or I would just get a computer that could connect to the Internet and then I wouldn’t have to worry about having a private network and having to provision file servers and print servers and a whole personal computer software stack in the developing world.” The thing that I thought was a great opportunity for this Google-like world we were in was that all of these companies trying to find new sources of revenue in the developing world, being faced with first-world cost structures. It struck me as this incredibly important impediment that was actually probably slowing down things like business development and revenue opportunities in the developing world.

What I really wanted to be able to do was have the technology offered and say, “All right, you want to open an oil exploration office in Kyrgyzstan,” or “You want to try to do something in Ho Chi Minh City, right? You know, all we need for you to go out there and be successful is an Internet connection and some very basic personal technology and you can have everything you need: apps and telephony and videoconferencing and everything, but at reasonable costs.” And allow companies, these first-world, cost-driven companies to actually be far more experimental on how they approach new markets, and I think they can be.

Yourdon: Well, in terms of the next few years, though… We kind of drifted off. Do you see just more of this phenomenon that we started experiencing in the last couple of years or any radical changes?

Fried: I think that these changes are a tidal force, but they have not yet had their full effect because there’s been a tipping point that hasn’t been reached due to what I believe to be generational demographics.

Yourdon: Really?

Fried: You still have enough decision makers in large enterprises who are—you know, either IT decision makers or the people above IT decision makers—who arose through the previous mindset, one of those “my vendors comes to me, I tell them what I want, they try very hard to sell to me, my wants go into their R&D, the money I pay them funds that R&D,” right? I think that generationally you have people who grew up in that model: “I control everything that my people use. I build our data centers. I work with software vendors that do exactly what I tell them to do because I’m paying them and if I didn’t pay them and the other people like me didn’t pay them, they wouldn’t do that.”

Yourdon: Yeah.

Fried: And I think that generationally, there’s a generation of decision makers, check writers, who are still of that mindset. But the world’s changing around them, and I feel that the water’s rising around them, and I feel that at some point either they will start to retire or there will be companies that are able to move to this new model and demonstrate competitive advantage that these other companies don’t have that will cause a tipping point. It seems to me this is inevitable. I couldn’t tell you exactly when, what it is that will cause the tipping point.

It’s interesting—when I joined Google, I couldn’t have predicted the emergence of Chrome OS, for example, but I think the idea of a personal computer that has no state on it, that you never have to worry about having viruses, that is always up to date, that you never have to worry about the data that enters and leaves your company as a result of its being on it, that is incredibly easy to support because it’s just running a browser, and that is furthermore lower cost because not only is the hardware needed in it to run a browser really well, that’s incredibly appealing to a CIO, right? It eliminates so many of the security concerns; it dramatically reduces support costs; it dramatically reduces equipment costs. Maybe that will be a tipping point. That will be one of these things I couldn’t have predicted… that as a tipping point and people being attracted by that model will lead them to more rapidly embrace this pure web delivery, software-as-a-service model.

I don’t really know. But I couldn’t predict when it’s going to happen, but I do still feel that these are tidal forces that will change our industry. It’s just a matter of when. In the same way that the first Apple IIs entered industry to do real work, and came on a typewriter budget.

Yourdon: Yeah, exactly.

Fried: But at some point then it became IT’s business to provide microcomputers, right? It will happen. I don’t know when. But the fundamental truths of what’s driving it are, are inescapable.

Yourdon: I also usually like to ask about what you think are the most significant landmarks looking back over the last five or ten years that have radically changed the way we do things. You know, I tend to think of Google itself.

Fried: Yeah.

Yourdon: Just the original Google search engine as an example, and the Internet and the Web, obviously—but are there any other not-so-obvious things that you can think of while you were growing up or in college, or the first five or ten years out of college?

Fried: I don’t know if I have any new things to report that others won’t have observed. The creation of the ARPANET, the creation of DARPA, without which we wouldn’t have had the ARPANET, without which we wouldn’t have had the NSFnet, without which we wouldn’t have had the Internet, without which we wouldn’t have had Google, right?

Yourdon: Yeah, that’s true. That is a good point. No one has mentioned that, and that obviously is a social or human creation, that led to all this other stuff.

Fried: And there’s this other unique—I’m a big fan of Steven Levy’s book, Hackers [Doubleday, 1984].

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Fried: There was this unique point in time where our culture was created that we now see evidenced in Linux and open-source software—and in a dramatically lower cost to compute that comes from that. And as a result now people talk about open-source hardware as well, but this notion that people should be able—if you believe what Levy has in the book, it came out of this belief that computers should be open, that anyone should be able to use them and experiment with them and learn to program.

It strikes me as we’re all kind of lucky. Everyone in the industry or affected by the industry is lucky that that ethos took hold there and installed the ability to create the Free Software Foundation. I think you can connect the dots there to open-source software, free software. The Free Software Foundation, open-source software, Linux, a whole bunch of things came from this interesting and unique place and time. Like I said, we’re lucky. If things had been a little different, we might not have had that. Some of that is open funding, Cold War–driven open funding, large, large checks being paid to research universities to support computing, giving great access to people. It’s interesting when we can see such good coming out of things like the Cold War. I think part of it is this ethos that emerged at MIT, some of which came from the fact that a lot of these people were originally model railroad hobbyists and…

Yourdon: TMRC, it was called. Tech Model Railroad Club.

Fried: Yeah. So, there have been these major junctures in the road, right? Timesharing, the personal computer, computer connectivity, inter-computer connectivity, Multics led to UNIX led to Linux—we’re incredibly lucky that that happened. We’re incredibly lucky that Steve Jobs visited PARC.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm. [laughter]

Fried: And, you know, they thought they were onto something there.

Yourdon: Now there’s one last aspect of that, which occurred to me just a minute ago and I’d like your take on it. Arguably, one of the next steps along the way of from Multics to UNIX to Linux to whatever is epitomized by Wikipedia, is described by a couple of books that you’ve probably heard of. One is called Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky [Penguin Press, 2010].

Fried: Clay—I found him fascinating.

Yourdon: There’s apparently a new YouTube video, which I haven’t seen yet, called “Minds for Sale,” which talks about the next aspect of everything we’ve already discussed: we’ve got six billion people on this planet now with lots of available brain power that they’re willing to contribute for good causes, whether it’s Wikipedia or Linux or whatever. And we now have this incredible Internet infrastructure that supports it. Is Google tuned into that? I mean, you guys are making wonderful products, but are you trying to take advantage of that phenomenon?

Fried: I think it’s easier for me to be a departmental spokesman than a company spokesman. We believe democratization of access is an incredibly important part of our mission. If you look at what we’ve done with Android, for example, in creating an open-source phone operating system, which will be the dominant computing tool of this next generation. To make them actually be phones that interact with the Internet really, really well; that are open; that people can collaborate with; that run really good software. So we really believe that we have a role to play there. We believe that the Internet is something that we need to do our part to get in and make better. I think that the belief that you expressed there about creating the opportunity for the world to collaborate with itself and for a community to find itself and for the cognitive surplus to be created—these are concepts that I believe in many ways are echoed fundamentally in other things that we do.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Fried: I never heard us state, “These are our explicit goals of Google as an organization,” but I do see very similar principles in all of these things that we do, and so many of these things that we do right. I mean, making a great free web browser. Making a great free smartphone operating system. In general, we have a deep, deep belief in things like the power of the Internet for collaboration. And if you look at, the major metaphor change, the paradigm—after Thomas Kuhn² and all, I hate to use the “p” word—but I think the paradigm change of our productivity applications, like Google apps, is that the first principle is that people collaborate on these things. It’s not features. They’re designed first around allowing people to work together—that documents whatever flavor are a product of collaboration. So it starts with making collaboration work.

__________

Yourdon: That’s a good point.

Fried: I’d say that I see those same values expressed in a different way. We believe that we have this incredibly significant enabling role in enabling responsibility.

Yourdon: Well, let me turn 180 degrees around now and ask about that “dark side,” about the problems and concerns and issues that you see confronting us in the IT world and that keep you awake, if anything keeps you awake, at night as a CIO.

Fried: I have three small children, so they’re keeping me awake.

Yourdon: [laughter]

Fried: But I’d say the first one for me is security. It’s the downside of the interconnected world we live in. The opportunity for compromise, for attack, I think one of the metaphors for the second half of the 20th century and now for this 21st century, is that society trails technology. Society evolves slower and the conventions of society and its mechanisms evolve far slower than technology does across a broad landscape in technology.

Yourdon: Right.

Fried: And I think this is true in these areas related to information security, information warfare. These things are deeply concerning to me, because, the technology’s evolved at such a rapid rate and these are powerful, powerful tools with a powerful, powerful ability to be misused, with many, many opportunities for attack. I’m really concerned about vulnerabilities and people’s ability to take advantage of them. Yeah, security worries me. Google’s security and the world’s security worries me. One of the lessons I took away from the attacks on Google that were spoken of so much in January of 2010 was the power of organizations with significant resources at their disposal. The attack surfaces of the software and internetworks that we use today are broader than we could have imagined; that even very, very significant users can be vulnerable; that there are very, very, very sophisticated attackers out there.

I’ve always tried to stay abreast of the literature, but I’ve found attackers to be way more sophisticated than I had thought. And the general level of awareness in the industry in the broadest sense of the word—not just the technology, but industry’s ability to recognize that this was taking place and respond to it was very far behind the state of the art of the attack. The state of the art of the defense and companies’ abilities, organizations’ abilities to respond was very far behind, very, very far behind. So, not much keeps me up at night. Not as much as it probably should keep me up at night, but I do find security to be one of these, these big things that we all need to spend time thinking about.

Yourdon: And, of course, every single CIO has said the same thing, in maybe slightly different ways. But I’m particularly interested given what you were saying earlier, that you are so influenced by the consumer level of use of technology and obviously consumers, generally speaking, are far less sophisticated about security issues than your typical big company.

Fried: Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting. There’s a whole set of technology offerings these days where “bring your own computer to work” is the part of the meme. And, one of my concerns about it is it makes security presumptions that are very much more backward-looking than forward-looking. Attacks that we know of in the past, really we think we can defend against, right? In the same way that we think that anti-virus is dead, we just don’t want to actually announce that it’s dead, right? But the traditional signature-based anti-virus is a technology that is just of minimal protection today.

I worry that’s there’s the same retrospective element of the security propositions made by these “bring your own computer to work” technology offerings. So I do have some concern that the end state of the domination of consumer-oriented technology is one that somehow makes enterprises vulnerable. Maybe not ours so much. We’re very lucky in having the most impressive computer security organization I’ve ever encountered. And we’re very, very lucky—we’re certainly not invulnerable. We have many, many very, very deep and capable thinkers. So there is this set of concerns I have that one recognition of the dominance of consumer-oriented technology is let them bring their own technology to work, let them bring whatever they want—it could lead to a world of less security because we don’t know what the set of attacks might actually be specifically against “bring your own computer to work” sorts of offerings. Honestly, we’ve only begun to explore the possibilities for evil of these enormous botnets.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Fried: I mean, the largest distributed computing environments in the world are these botnets. Wait till we get a few world-class distributed computing people and a few world-class malware hackers together in thinking about what they can do with hundreds of thousands or millions of interconnected machines and, uhh, eww. Scary.

Yourdon: It is scary.

Fried: Anyway, you can’t let yourself be driven off by that. One has to develop a plan of action and follow it as opposed to just let these things dominate one’s nightmares and one’s dreams. But of the things that worry me, I’d say security is one, is definitely one of them. It’s the one that’s most industry-specific.

And there’s a bunch of things that keep me up at night I’d say, or I spend a lot of time thinking about that. I think other CIOs probably do, too. You know, do I have the right kind of governance, the right mix of governance for my organization. Do we provide the right set of services for our customers? Are we engaging with them correctly? Those things definitely do sometimes keep me up at night. They’re common concerns among the people with my title.

Yourdon: One of the other common concerns that I’ve heard from a lot of the CIOs is the following: They say, “Here I am, running the technology part of our business and I’ve got a whole bunch of business peers around me that are responsible for various products or various services, and they’ve risen to their position of authority because they’re very good, obviously, but also because they have very strong personalities. And they feel that obviously they know how to run their business better than anybody else and, in fact, they even think that they know how to run my business in IT better than I do. And since my technology pervades everything they’re doing, I find myself butting heads with these people quite a lot—either trying to persuade them to do something that I think they need to do, or trying to prevent them from doing something that I think would be a disaster. And, of course, I can’t order them because I’m not their boss. So the problem or the concern is: how do I influence these other peers of mine about issues of technology that I probably do know more about, whether or not they believe me?”

Fried: Yeah, so, I think it’s one of the great universals. If you want to talk about larger-than-life personalities, I think Wall Street probably has a disproportionate number of them.

Yourdon: [laughter]

Fried: And I did work in Wall Street for many years…

Yourdon: And that’s where I first heard the concern…

Fried: Wall Street has this particular flavor of the problem as well, that you may have a profit-generating line of business that can just hire and [better pay] the people it wants to do the very, very specific sorts of things it wants.

Yourdon: Right.

Fried: There’s the whole class of people called “quants,” who are people with computing skills who sit next to traders and other people and make bets and kind of assist them in the technology to do that. And in fact, at hedge funds, typically those people may be the traders in a Wall Street bank, they might sit on the side. So anyway, that’s one of these concerns that we had on Wall Street, but I think it’s a universal. I think it’s always been there. It’s been there for a very long time. In one way or another it always will be there.

I do think that that problem is getting worse as a result of the rise in consumer technologies because at least 30 years ago, maybe IT was the first person to put a computer on your desk, whereas nowadays that’s not the case. You go home and buy your own computer and have your own opinions about the stuff. So I think that those people are more empowered. I think that CIOs have a forward-looking problem, which is that this model of the software enterprise hardware R&D cycle that I’m participating in and deploying to my users is going to be rudely interrupted by the person whose opinions were all generated by modern technology. And it grows rapidly at the top and they didn’t actually use any of the things I provided, right? You’re not needed, and I didn’t use you. You’re not needed.

Yourdon: Arguably that’s been going on since the introduction of the PC.

Fried: Yeah.

Yourdon: But not to the extent that it is now.

Fried: Exactly. And it’s certainly with people buying Apple II+ on their typewriter budgets so they could run Visicalc, so they didn’t have to rely on the overnight cycle of the mainframe to do the books. But it’s gotten tons worse. The set of activities that people can perform without needing central IT offerings has grown. So it’s one of the hardest parts of the CIO’s job. On the other hand, here are my beliefs about it. There’s always going to be some technology among your client organizations. It’s a question of how much and what, and the number is never really going to be completely zero, and generally you shouldn’t expect it to be. It’s a question of how much technology they’re going to want or have or control. You have to think about what’s right for them as part of it. The other thing I think is that at least in the United States, in a post–Sarbanes-Oxley world, you look at the scandals of the last 12 years, you look at the regulations that have come up in the world, and enterprises are more regulated than they were before and that, literally mandates having more standards than would be maybe necessary, and so when CEOs and CFOs can go to jail because their attestation about the accuracy of the books and records of the company was incorrect, that has certain repercussions for what happens with technology. So, I think CIOs have overplayed that card, to tell you the truth.

Yourdon: Oh, okay.

Fried: But that said, it’s a changing reality that does define certain hard limits to the parameters of what organizations can do on their own. And I think that the final piece of it is, the thing that is painful but good, is that it’s far better to have technology offerings that win on their merits rather than are forced upon your users.

Yourdon: Good point. That is a good point.

Fried: Now, it’s difficult in conversations about matters of security. At some point you may need to get the CEO or top corporate leadership involved in setting the parameters or frameworks around things like security, around protection of physical security, computer security, protection of intellectual property. Things like that you probably need to have corporate policies on that that need to be centralized in their enforcement. But in general, it’s better that you woo and win your customers. It’s probably better that way. The environment is harder for you to do that, to woo and win, than to be the sole provider. That’s not to say that it’s efficient or good to have multiple competing providers for the same set of things. But it’s as they say, better to win in the marketplace of free ideas.

Yourdon: Okay, interesting. One last question in this area, and then I’m going to go on to the generational thing. This whole question that I had about agile development: since the CIO is usually the one that’s in charge of developing new at least internal systems, this transition from a waterfall approach to an agile approach has initially been seen just as a methodology issue, but the more I see it, the more impact it seems to have on how you go about managing people and organizations. A lot of CIOs that I’ve spoken to say that that’s been a problem for them. And, of course, everything you guys do, I suspect, has this overwritten thing of this agility on it, so maybe that’s just part of your DNA.

Fried: I’d say it is part of the DNA. So, in general, it’s the right thing to do, right? Especially for internal software, I think that it’s much better to start off with the implicit assumption none of us really know what it is we need to do here, but let’s do enough so that we can actually define based on evidence and feedback and data what it is that we need to build. Build a front, build a slice of the application front to back—does this solve the problem, is that what you wanted to do? You know, observe how it works and either change that piece until it does what you want or if it was right, then move on to the next piece. I think that it solves a huge number of problems for us, which is … like waiting for Godot, waiting for the software to appear, in the traditional waterfall model.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Fried: And that’s just not acceptable. I mean, business changes faster today than it did 30, 40, 50 years ago when this was considered to be state of the art, and we have to realize that with long, long delivery cycles, no one can actually assure you in most cases that the software at the end of that delivery cycle will need to do the things that it needed to do on the day you kicked the project off. So, it’s absolutely necessary. That said, here are the things that are hard about it. On the one hand, there are large classes of users I experience who don’t want to look at just a single front-to-back slice of something even if you’re on a weekly release schedule and they can see another version of the thing, a week from Wednesday. There are a lot of people who are just more comfortable seeing the whole thing.

Yourdon: Mmm.

Fried: I think that in technology we’ve generally embraced and understood the advantages of this, but I think our users are catching up to it, especially being agile in the early parts of the development of an app, when you really don’t have very much to show, but it’s even more critical that you take those agile approaches. I think that that’s part of it. I think that a more recent conclusion that I came to about agile methodologies is that it’s easy for them to devolve into a rapid-release cycle that doesn’t actually appear to change much. So there’s a whole art in planning the scrum, in understanding what goes into the next release, and I’d say that it’s very easy to embrace the philosophy and embrace the rapid release and all that comes with it, but if you don’t also embrace the notion of focusing on what’s going to change, rapid releases that don’t seem to actually have any difference to your end user produce an interesting pathology that is obvious when you think about it, but you might not have expected when you went down this path.

Yourdon: You keep mentioning this point about getting real feedback with real metrics. So we’re beginning to see agile projects in regulated industries with distributed project teams and all kinds of things where people had previously said, “Well, that will never fly.”

Fried: “That will never happen.”

Yourdon: And it is, it is.

Fried: That’s really comforting. That’s great to hear. I guess another pathology of agile—and an IT framework in particular, as opposed to a product framework—I think is your users can become kind of pixel-level negotiators.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Fried: It doesn’t actually work well if users are telling you what color to make radio buttons or “that needs to be left-adjusted not right.” But it’s all too easy for agile to enable that because you can make the turnaround so rapidly, so it’s another pathology to avoid, that there has to be some kind of art to avoiding. I’m not a dilettante about any particular agile methodology so much as the overall results that you get. I also think I’m a big believer that enabling rapid releases produces a result in tooling and testing that ultimately leads to higher-quality results. In order to be able to release rapidly, with any quality at all, you probably have to embrace automated testing.

Yourdon: And regression testing and so on.

Fried: Exactly. Unit regression system testing, smoke testing—all these things have to happen as part of the release cycle. As a result, you get to a better state in terms of quality than you would without a significant investment otherwise.

Yourdon: So, let me go on to the generational issue. Is there anything else you would like to say about the good things or bad things of the whole generation of workforce, whether we call them digital natives or whatever, that are not just coming into your IT department, but they’re coming into the entire workforce—with their toys and gadgets and their social media?

Fried: And with a different set of expectations. And they don’t want work to give them a cell phone, right? Or work to give them a separate smartphone. And the technology is still catching up to that—catching up rapidly but still catching up. It’s not just Google and the consumer landscape. It’s other companies, too. Tablets are redefining people’s expectations of what their personal technology’s going to be. So I think you probably phrased the situation more articulately than I do. I think there’s another generational concern that you hint at in your questions here. That is the decreasing number of computer science graduates.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Fried: It’s a huge problem for us. And I think that academia has struggled with what the answer is, with what to do about it. You know, trying to make computer science more relevant to practice or specializing it, changing the curricula. I’ve never attempted to validate this, but one theory I’ve had for some time is that there was certainly a point where studying computer science was a way of getting access to technologies that were otherwise impossible to get access to.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Fried: And I think a number of people kind of entered the field—they were curious, they had heard about computers, they entered, they took a class because they were curious about it, and they got hooked, whereas today you don’t need to take a class to get a deep exposure to computers. I met a surprising number of people who were great programmers, great software engineers, but who hadn’t majored in computer science because, why would I? I can just go do that on my own. I don’t really need that. I think that this generational change in access to computing may be also partially responsible for the difficulty in attracting people to the discipline.

Yourdon: Hmm. That’s interesting.

Fried: And it’s demystified it. And I think the mystique was, for some, part of the attraction. I think I was always interested in it, but one of my first jobs was working in the university computing center at Columbia and it was all about—that was the only place in the world where I knew there was an Imagen laser printer that I could possibly get access to—and getting access to a laser printer, too. Access to technology that was unavailable in any other way was one thing that drove me into, uhh, the discipline. And it’s not needed anymore. But that’s a very, very deep problem that we have because we need a lot more computer programmers than we’re producing.

Yourdon: Well, there’s a variation on this: the superficiality and glibness of the current generation with regard to technology. Of course, you have access to whatever you want on the Internet, but it’s something I’ve noticed having written a whole bunch of books: nobody wants to read a book anymore. Nobody wants to spend more than ten minutes focusing intellectually on anything. Nicholas Kristof wrote something saying that in today’s world you could never read War and Peace because who’s got time for a 1200-page book, whether it’s a novel or a computer science book?

Fried: Yeah.

Yourdon: Who’s going to read Donald Knuth’s four volumes?

Fried: Yeah, I just got the new one, the 4A just came out, right? So, that’s interesting. There had been this period of time when many of us had thought or hoped that the prevalence of e-mail would lead to a second great, generation of letters, of people of letters. But of course, what happened instead was instant messaging and tweets and so on—more and more sharding of one’s attention. I think it’s a trend that technology’s created. On the other hand, I was incredibly skeptical of e-books. I didn’t want others recording in their logs what I was reading, and I liked the idea that books represent the cash of ideas.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Fried: Right? They are—cash, not cache, right? Books are liquid, they are untraceable, and they represent the ability for people to transfer and share ideas and thoughts, and they have all these properties that cash has and is this great and enabling thing. So on a personal level I was very suspicious of e-readers, because it seemed to violate these cash-like principles that I thought were important to books. But then, I got an iPad, and the convenience—I just read more, I actually read more books, and not all small books, you know? But I read a lot more after I got that than I ever had before.

Yourdon: Hmm. Interesting.

Fried: And so I have some hope. I have some hope that I didn’t have before. And I see it, not just in me, but my son is six and, you know, highly digitally enabled, enough to make us all kind of uncomfortable.

Yourdon: Hmm! [laughter]

Fried: He just goes and starts reading books on the iPad or Google books on my iPhone—we’ll be in a restaurant or something and he’ll be bored and he’ll read Google books on my phone. He just read a book called I Am Number Four [by Pittacus Lore (Harper, 2010)]. It’s a book aimed at teens. He read it all, on his own, over the course of several weeks. He found it on my phone with the little screen here and he read it, the whole book!

Yourdon: That’s amazing.

Fried: You know, interspersed with many other things. It definitely sharded his attention, but like that gives me hope. And he knows how to find other books in the Google Books apps and download the free ones and ask me if I’ll type in my password so he can download a paid one, and I think he reads more than he would otherwise.

Yourdon: There’s a collaboration aspect to that that just terrified me when I saw it on my Kindle. You’re reading along in the book and all of a sudden you see this thing saying, “Ten other people thought that this phrase was really significant.” And I thought, “Well, I don’t care what they thought.” I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but it’s obviously, it’s a part of the process.

Fried: Yeah, it’s a—I have a friend who’s responsible for the whole digital books thing at Amazon, and I should talk to him about it, because some of these things are distracting. Get a dictionary, right? So double-click on a word and you get a definition.

Yourdon: That part’s good.

Fried: Like for my son, he’s in first grade—who knows how much of the book he read he was able to figure out on his own, or he wasn’t able to figure out on his own? Things like that are, are game-changers. I wonder what the Folger Library editions of Shakespeare are going to look like in this digital era, right?

Yourdon: [laughter]

Fried: You know, you won’t have the facing page with the kind of “this is what they mean.” You can just kind of integrate it. And the e-reader can integrate it into the text in new ways that are probably less intrusive.

Yourdon: Let me ask you just one last question, and it’s the obvious kind of final question: where do you go from here, you know? Or if you have any plans or dreams or thoughts?

Fried: No, no plans or dreams. My last job I thought was a great job and could have been the last job I ever had. And then they called me here and I thought this was an amazing thing that I wanted to try, the only CIO gig I’d ever heard of that sounded appealing to me. So I don’t know…

Yourdon: Well, that’s fair enough. You know, when I interviewed the CIO from Detroit [DTE] Energy last week, she said she had never gone looking for things, but opportunities always presented themselves, and so she had no idea what the next opportunity would be, but she had an existence proof that there would be one, at some point.

Fried: I’m sure those things will emerge. By personality, I’m someone who tends to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make things better. So I always tend to think that there’s more opportunity than what I’ve been doing, and it’s been good for my career. It’s worked out, right, so, we’ll see. I don’t have an aspiration to politics or anything like that. Google is a unique company at a unique point in its history at a unique place in time, and I’m thrilled to be … here in that place in that time.

Yourdon: Well, you’re very much at the crest of the tidal wave, so, you know, you might as well stay on top as long as you can. It makes sense.

Fried: It’s pretty all-consuming.

Yourdon: I can imagine. Well, thank you. Listen, I really appreciate your time.