Thank God for Internet Porn: the story behind the title


So what's with the title?

I wanted a title that was catchy and expressed "techno-fetichisme". And what better example of tech and fetishism than the Internet plus porn. Plus I am French and, in theory, I can get away with it.

Seriously though, it is an insider joke from the early JBoss days. We were talking among developers about the "Holy Trinity" of IT customers with the most stringent up-time requirements. See, if your product is succesful it will quickly be adopted by the Holy Trinity: telco, banks, and of course, the porn industry.

Banks are very aggressive when it gets to new technology, they will usually look for that added value in software and will almost always aggressively evaluate technology. Making it in production is another story. It is easy to get in the door, much harder to sit at the table.

Telcos are a very different profile, what they usually look for is technology they will deploy for the next 10 years. It is extremelly hard to get in the door but once you are in, you are a friend of the family for a long time, and that is a good thing from a vendor standpoint.

And of course there is porn. I use to joke about the uptime requirements of these people :) you could never go down was the slapstick joke in presentations. In the early days, we recieved a check by Hugh Heffner's daughter, Christy, that we left on the office wall for a long time.

The irony is that it was really difficult to find somebody who actually could do the consulting engagement for Playboy in the field. Of course, when we signed the deal, EVERYONE volunteered to go onsite. We all had the mental image of a datacenter in the middle of the Playboy mansion with bunnies massaging your back while you type away.

What we didn't count on was that ALL THE WIVES AND GIRLFRIENDS put their veto on going there. A lot of us were married (we were doing professional open source, remember?) and the ladies said 'no way'. No one could go. We finally sent one of the few single guys in the company, Adrian Brock, onsite. He reported the Playboy datacenter was about as dull and boring as any other datacenter on the planet. Maybe so, but the ones and zeroes on the disk represented something pretty cool, even if we couldn't do like in the Matrix and visualize "blonde, brunette and red-head..."

One of us, might have been me (I can't remember) came up with "Thank God for Internet Porn" not so much for its intrinsic value but more for the business value (kind of) it represented for JBoss at the time.

Peace, love and good uptime,

marcf

Comments

Michael Neale said…
That album cover is the most disturbing ever. Every time I see it it reverberates in my mind and scares me at some deep level.
Thats aphex twin? he was the one who put his ghostly face in a specral image of a song? (so you saw his face if you left the winamp spectal analyser open in part of the song, he is an evil man).
adt43wt342 said…
Yeah, that is aphex twin. good guess. I have been mixing some of his stuff. The man is obviously a deranged genius and also a bit bi if you look closely :)

I agree with you, that picture is totally disturbing, there is something totally wrong with it, although I can't figure out exactly what, I am fixated on the boobies :)
Unknown said…
It started off there, but actually the conversration had digressed into censorship in American culture and I mentioned something about how in Europe after 8 you can watch porn for free on TV in phone sex ads. You said something that concluded with the crux of your point "Thank god for Internet Porn". Then you tried to tie that back to JBoss. I remember because I showed up late and used the quote as a root password (FYI: Eric Brown changed them all). The other "root password" quote that most people had was a Julien quote from the "company meeting place" in which he expressed his admiration for the "performance arts" practiced there.
adt43wt342 said…
Right, it was to do with "I love cheetah" nuff said :)

BTW, Larry Augustin wrote in after reading this porn saying that a good friend of his at SGI was running sales and ****25%**** of his business was selling SGI boxes to the porn industry. Apparently it was considered "a vertical" at SGI, with dedicated sales rep and all. How cool is that. Your mother: "So what do you do for a living these days my son", You: " I sell hardware to the porn industry". Go and drop THAT in a cocktail discussion.

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