 You will want to have a seat and enjoy what Barton George has brought for us today I first met Barton at UDSQ when they were starting the Sputnik project I would like to say as we introduce him He's well worth a round of applause because he's been spearheading projects button within Dell. Dell is one of America's the world's leading manufacturer of PCs and Project Sputnik is a major effort to ship PCs with the Ubuntu pre-installed That's very visionary and the machines are wonderful. I'm looking forward to you telling us about it Barton Can you hear me? Okay great Thank you very much I'll try not to yell into the microphone And I know you all came to hear me it has nothing to do with the raffle for the free Sputnik after this So I appreciate it. So anyway, I'm Barton George I'm from Dell and I'm here to tell you about this Sputnik story and really from two main angles one about how We worked with the community to develop it and also to give an insight into a large company How does a 60 billion dollar company which at one point was in somebody's dorm room and very nimble and could change on a dime? Then when it goes to be 60 billion and is and is set up to deliver millions of PCs How do they innovate and how might you be able to get something new going there? So the story started with an idea. This wasn't my idea. It wasn't anyone at Dell's idea We had Steven O'Grady from Red Monk if you know him come in and he basically came in to talk to us about how we might better serve Web companies and how we might reach developers. So he said, you know what? There's no major OEM That's offering a pre-installed version of Ubuntu on Linux And if you guys did that, I think it would be a really great way to curry favor with the developers who are so Significant and I thought awesome idea very impractical, you know, as I said, we're tuned to do millions of Laptops people here are gonna laugh at me when I talk about the thousands that we're gonna ship So I thought great idea put it on a shelf didn't think about it for a while until I learned about the Dell Innovation Fund And so this was started by Michael Dell's EA and he said there's probably a lot of folks within Dell Who have great ideas locked up in their heads? Why don't we act as an internal angel fund bring people in front of us? They can pitch ideas if we like it we can give them a tiny pot of money give them six months to try and Prove out their theory and see if it actually can become real So I went I was the first one to present and this is basically the highlights of what I was presenting and this type of these type of ideas Maybe are not so strange or foreign to people in this room But once again to a large company like Dell these are kind of freaky Right the whole idea of involving the community and more importantly not involving the community behind closed doors The idea wasn't let's bring them all in under NDA ask them what they want and then tell them They can't tell anybody else and then come out with a product The idea here was let's do this out in the open through social media Through my blog through Twitter and let people know how we're going and how we're doing it every step of the of the way And of course we did want to sell some of these because we are a business but the greater return to the business was actually in Getting mind share with developers and also changing perceptions getting people to think that hey Dell does have a clue It does understand what the developers want So obviously I presented this people knew it was amazing idea Not really so they peppered me with all sorts of questions. You're proposing what now Why is this a good idea? Couldn't HP do the same thing? We tried this before blah blah blah So they went away and they thought deliberated for about a month six weeks and then finally on the eyes of March That is auspicious day. I got the green light So this is how we approached it now I said we wanted to do this out in the open that being said we had a don't embarrass our selves phase in the beginning because the idea was we didn't want to come out and say hey Here's this laptop We'd like your input on and have people in the community go wow. Dell just does not get it That is a stupid idea. So we started with three alpha cosmonauts three developers in Austin I don't know if Dustin Kirkland is here. He was one of the the strong the proud the first three who gave input Once we got that and got their thoughts We then went out took this to two large web companies on the west coast and said to them What do you think of this and so while they didn't say okay? We will put in an order for ten thousand they did say that sounds like a pretty pretty interesting idea When you get further along please come back and talk to us So with that we went and we tinkered we got things ready. We wrote a bunch of drivers all those except for the The touchpad that was something that was that took us a lot longer than we had hoped and So we put out an ISO and we announced it and so we announced it on my blog And you can see well These are pretty small, but you can see the whopping numbers of viewers. I had on my blog 65 99 whoa 174 So obviously I was one of the top blogs in the blogosphere at that time So but then so this is May 6 May 7th. Bam Okay, so all of a sudden they go up to six thousand nine thousand 15,000 and over the total life of this blog entry. I've now had over 70,000 views and so once again to put it into perspective my average Total life views before projects, but Nick was about 500. So this is a little bit more than I had before So the same day we did this and launched it We also launched something called idea storm and basically this is a forum where you can put in ideas Vote them up or down as far as what you think is is appropriate and so these are the the top six things that we We heard from folks a lot of them are not that fancy, right? So don't make it more expensive than windows No windows pre-installed that seems to be pretty obvious but we had we had made a foray into this before and Hadn't gone as well as we had hoped at that point. It was a different positioning We thought well not we some people thought that hey free OS Let's put it on our cheapest machine will able to be able to sell at a real low price point So people bought it for their moms their mom freaked out. We've got all these things shipped back to us So the idea with Sputnik is hey developers aren't going to get Ubuntu because it's free It's because that's the OS that they want. So why don't we put it on our highest end system? So and then because you know getting back to these processes and procedures of Dell That work great for when you're making millions that are kind of trickier when you're doing small things What would happen at different time is through the machine the mechanism that is Dell they would run say a promo on Windows which would drop the price which all of a sudden so it was here all of a sudden Ubuntu would look more Expensive and that was just because of all the as I said the processes and so that was a big black eye So we wanted to make sure that wouldn't happen again So that was a gathering of feedback and then we went into beta So the first thing because everyone uses their tongue for a touchpad We wanted to make sure that we had the touchpad driver So we worked with come all it kind of canonical. We worked with Mario on our side and then Cyprus To work on on getting this together So we were able to deliver this and once we did and pushed it up to the 3.9 kernel We then said okay, let's expand and we need more cosmonauts. So we went out to the beta cosmonauts And we said okay We want you if you're interested, please fill out this form and it wasn't just a tick box. Yes, I'm interested it was How big is a company you work for what kinds of applications do you work on what type of system? Do you have what type of industry etc etc? And as you see there? We've got 6,000 people from around the world and that was really the tipping point We said if this many people in the community are interested in this let's make this a real product So that being said boom We had promised it worldwide When we went back to the team that said they could execute on this to make the the beta units available worldwide We found out that it was going to be much more difficult than we thought and we had to think about Doing a trade-off do we stick with what we said we would do which would probably Given the resources it would take to do that would push the launch out Or do we come back and say hey we screwed up and we're only going to be able to do it in the state so that we can make The launch sooner so we went with the mea culpa And apologized for it So with that nine months later. We finally launched. I said finally to develop a product from green light PowerPoint slides open office library office sides to To launches is is pretty fast and Dell Now as a side not only did we want to make a Developer laptop we had some grandiose plans. We were going to create a profile tool Basically, these are going to be language stacks that you would you know Ruby Android Etc that you'd be able to pull down from github and then install on your system We are also going to a cloud launcher We you'd develop in micro clouds and then you'd push to the to the clouds itself Well, we soon found that this is a bit tricky So we were going to focus on the profile tool and man We tried this so many different times and on my blog I every so often I'd say no this time It's real now. We've got the real resources and we're really going to make this happen and unfortunately It just stayed perpetually under Construction we had to come back and say hey, sorry that we're not able to do it So back to our main story. How was it received? We got a little we got a lot of great press Wall Street Journal O'Reilly radar tech crunch and this is my favorite from our technique a Dell Substantial investment pays off. It was myself It was Jared here a dog and somebody else basically that that put this thing together But it's great. Yeah, and his bunny, right? So it's great to see that we sort of cast a big shadow and then on the interwebs. Here's just some of the Tweets we got I think my favorite is that d-fed said spoiled by my del sputnik linux laptop on Mac today Feel like I'm computing with crayons And then this is my absolute favorite on the bottom. Well, I did something. I never thought I would I bought a brand new High-end Dell laptop for full price me hell will be freezing over shortly So that gets back to that wanting to change perceptions, but not everybody was always happy Here's a friend of ours in Denmark. This is on On Google plus basically he read an article went to try and find this on the Danish site He couldn't that's Denmark Oh, I guess you don't ship these models to Denmark fuck asses not the first time it happens That is why I never buy Dell products never ship the products and see a bigger profit And this kind of stuff happens every so often communities if you're part of one you might be familiar with it So I came back and after I sort of cooled down walked around the block a couple times came back my keyboard and said hey The m3 800 with the boon to should be definitely available in Denmark I shot off an email to the team to find out what's going on. Thanks for flagging it stay tuned And then once you acknowledge it and you and you realize and you share the fact that there is an issue You're gonna look at it you come back very nicely sounds really nice Barton George Thanks for the quick answer and I think that's one thing I found through this process is eight out of ten nine out of ten times When people would flame us for how stupid we were and how lame our Execution was you'd come back and you just explained. Hey, we were really trying to do it this way It didn't work out or let me look into that for you They they toned way down and oftentimes they become supporters so remember that that great dream We had well, we didn't quite execute on it But as history would happen serendipitously this thing Docker came along and so this is now creating that Micro cloud that we talked about and it really has then Been able to deliver that this client-to-cloud solution that we had hoped for and then Coming to a del.com to you del.com near you shortly Here's the fifth generation and this is the one if you saw it outside by the table It looks just like this the one that's coming out. It just has a faster processor and a few other neat things And so the one we're raffling off. It will be the new one when it comes out And then we have a second one of the precision laptop And that will be coming out as well, which is actually based on the work that Jared did back in the day we we he went and Put together a hack for how you'd run this on the precursor to this And then it became a real boy the next year after we did all the work So just to wrap up with what were the lessons that we take away once again from trying to develop at a large company And working with the community First one is both get a champion and be a champion and what I mean by this is in a champion We had Michael Dell's EA and so that name sort of carried us through quite a bit that being said If you ever work at a large company Sometimes the stuff that the CEO or their people say doesn't work all the way down at the bottom They just say yeah, whatever he's so many layers up. They'll never catch me So you also need to be very much a champion for yourself So particularly in the beginning when we started this the zombies would come out every so often and try and kill this And I can see how there they they would think about that because often times at a big company You don't even have enough resources to do your project and thinking about this project taking away resources Would make them angry. So That being said this has gotten much and much easier as we've gone on and the number of people popping up and saying Why are you doing this has really tapered off? Second thing is Leverage and execute so the idea doesn't have to be your own It's more important that the idea you have or the idea you take is one that you can actually execute on awesome ideas are a Diamond doesn't And so when you're talking about executing if you want to be successful It's really important to start small. So when we first when I first pitched this I had kind of grandiose ideas. We do a beauty in the beast lined up We'd have multiple configs of each and luckily somebody talked me out of it and said, you know what to launch Pick one system pick one config and then you can go from there and we have every year. We've expanded more The other thing is just don't over promise air on the side of caution and I think this is true of a lot of products Even within Dell we feel because we're a big company We have to come up with these huge boil the ocean plans and oftentimes what happens Is they collapse under their own weight? Number four turn you to the community be humble be human As I said, this was a bit of a different approach in that we were doing all this out in the open and getting feedback So speak directly and be transparent and then it's like our friend in Denmark and there's more than that There was other people as well don't write off anyone too soon Like I said, you might have to go away from the keyboard and cool down for a bit and then last not least No one is perfect. So it's not are you going to screw up? It's when you screw up. How are you going to recover? So basically you need to own it, right? We had a couple of screw-ups here We had the biggest ones being the hey, we're going to do this worldwide Oh psych we're not going to and then the other one was this grandiose plans like I said for the profile tool and the cloud launcher So that is the end of my presentation. I think we might have