Three Stories from Convention City Seattle

December 11, 2024

1. Cloud Atlas -- Still waiting for the bricks-and-mortar retail superstore for cloud technology.

2. Upstairs, Downstairs -- Look under AWS and you'll find an art school.

3. Dollars to Doughnuts -- Where's the salad bar at?

1. Cloud Atlas

I recently completed the four-part, 14-hour training for "Becoming a Cloud Practitioner" at AWS Skills Center, located just blocks from Seattle Convention Center Summit. (See my earlier posts here and here.) It was a well-paced and practical course introducing topics including data centers, regions, and availability zones (part 1); networking, compute, and storage (part 2); identity, security, and reliability (part 3); and a full lineup of storage, database, and analytics tools (part 4).

Think of it like an extended tour of Home Depot, with patient guides explaining how you might build your own cabin one day using something from this aisle, something from that aisle. And that's fun! I mean, who doesn't enjoy checking out the latest plumbing fixtures?

The best part about the AWS Skills Center is that it exists at all. It's a remarkable show of good citizenship for a company to have a physical space for people to learn about cloud technology.

And it got me wondering about the future of retail in cloud services.

If you're going to spend $100,000 on a luxury car, you can find a showroom in any city.

But when you're ready to spend $100,000 on cloud services, you'll find yourself on a website playing with calculators.

Where's the showroom?

AWS Skills Center has a roomful of canned displays like at a kids' science museum, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

I want to see a high-end showroom, like at a fancy furniture store or a luxury car dealership. You should be able to walk in off the street and talk to a dealer who can put you in a nice Aurora DB with a special deal on the undercoating.

You should be able to walk in with a tricky research problem and walk out with a functional business intelligence dashboard pulling from live data sources.

Walk in with a business plan and walk out with a working website.

You run a doggie daycare? Here's an out-of-the-box CRM (Canine Relationship Management) system and a live video feed.

You sell hot dogs from a cart? Here's a "Where to find me" button that works across social media.

Artificial intelligence makes it possible to deliver these kinds of rapid results, mass customized for just about any situation.

But it's not going to sell itself. This is where we need an entire workforce of trained cloud practitioners with a customer-service mindset, matching people with the right set of cloud services for their needs.

I predict that in the next five years, we'll see a rapid build-out of physical spaces to support predominantly digital services. It's far from new territory. Think of the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. Or just about every single bank branch.

And where should Amazon and others build up their retail cloud presence?

The obvious answer: Convention City Seattle.

2. Upstairs, Downstairs

While we're giving Amazon credit where credit is due, here's a round of applause for their support of Gage Academy of Art, which offers classes for adults and youth at every skill level.

With assistance from Amazon (article), the art school recently opened its new facility in the ground-level retail space in Amazon's 37-story re:Invent building, just across from the Amazon Spheres.

With the Amazon Web Services offices upstairs and the art school downstairs, it'll be exciting to see what happens when these two worlds meet.

And now, I'll be able to attend open studios for life drawing and take workshops and classes, all right here in Convention City Seattle!

Since 2012, I've taken over a dozen courses at Gage (at the old location and online), including, during the pandemic, the year-long Faigin Atelier in Still-Life Painting. I started with zero experience in drawing and painting, and before you know it, I'm making recognizable shapes, drawing heads and bodies, tracing Durer sketches in pen-and-ink, honing my compositions, learning color theory, mixing paints and filling canvases.

It's literally changed the way that I see the world. That's not surprising given the extent to which our brain consists of visual systems. And that's why I'd heartily recommend a sideline as an artist to anyone in the AWS orbit.

Pencil on paper. "Chris" at Drawing Jam 2024 / Ivan

3. Dollars to Doughnuts

I've come up with a simple exercise regime: Peloton for a lower-body workout, and for upper-body, carrying groceries.

Last week, I was going up past Seattle Convention Center and a conventiongoer notices my grocery bags. -- Oh, Whole Foods! Is it nearby? -- Not really, it's about a fifteen-minute walk. -- Where's Pike Grocery? -- It's just up the hill a couple blocks, but it's not much of a grocery, it's more of a bodega.  -- Oh. I'm looking for a good salad bar. -- Then you want Whole Foods.

And off she went on a long walk.

With that brief encounter, I became reenergized about the concept for Convention City Seattle.

Think about the word "hospitality" for a second. Our economy has an entire industry devoted to hospitality, but what does the term mean? (*)

Suppose someone arrives at the airport, takes a cab to the hotel, rides a shuttle to and from the Convention Center, stays inside all day and eats only at the hotel restaurants for the duration of their stay. Has that person visited Seattle? Is that hospitality?

Or how about someone who limits their stay to the Pike-Pine tourism corridor going from the Convention Center to Pike Place Market and the Waterfront; and the Seattle Monorail to Seattle Center and the Space Needle. Not a bad itinerary for a first-time visitor, but is that all there is? When you welcome someone to your spacious home, do you limit them to the "guest wing"?

My vision for Convention City Seattle: To share our entire city with visitors. To provide information about amenities of all kinds, connections with friendly locals, and journeys that go far beyond the hotel lobby.

If you're not visiting Seattle's cloud showrooms and art studios, what are you even doing here?

And one of the first things we should say to a guest: "Are you hungry? What would you like to eat?"

We just got ourselves a 24-hour Voodoo Doughnuts just up from the Summit.

yes, and?

It's a 15-minute walk to a good salad bar -- if you can find it.

Seattle can do better than that. Our visitors deserve better.

*Here's what Jacques Derrida said about hospitality (via London Review of Books article, 10 October 2024, by Jonathan Rée):

"Consider the classic scene of welcome, in which a host invites you in with greetings, smiles and open arms. The gestures may be a sincere expression of friendship, but they are also, unavoidably, a sly assertion of privilege: this is my place, they say, and even if I tell you to 'make yourself at home,' you must remember that you are here on my sufferance. The double-edged truth of hospitality manifests itself in words as well as deeds. As Derrida points out, the French hôte means 'guest' as well as 'host', while historical dictionaries trace it to the Latin hospes, which is allied with hostis, which can also mean 'stranger', 'foreigner' or 'enemy'. He then turns to the prodigious Vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes by the semiotician Émile Benveniste, which pursues the word 'hospitality' back through Greek, Sanskrit and dozens of other languages to link it to hotels, hospitals and hospices; also, plausibly enough, to hostages and despotism; and finally to 'ipseity' (meaning personal selfhood) and thus to command, authority and control. Hospitality, it seems, is a nest of paradoxes: not so much hospitality, Derrida suggests, as hostipitality."