While I generally tend to write more about technology than I do about politics, and with Obama having a cogent technology platform, of course I watched the speech last night. If you have not seen it, put your feet up on your desk, and listen/watch this 45 minute video on youtube.

It was an interesting reach through history, famous democrats, and how democrats have been in place to do many good things for the country. Of course this was a political speech, but the imagery and discussion were interesting to see. While many may cut it off as rhetoric, the contrasts in the speech were well worth noting.

Kennedy that promised that within a decade we would put a man on the moon, and Obama’s promise that within a decade we would be free of oil. While he used the dreaded nuclear word, the rest of the commentary was all about green based power, solar, wind, more likely wave power. Harnessing that for a data center, a data center’s own wind farm (given that they are being built in the middle of nowhere lately). Less dependence on the grid, more dependence on what you can do locally, from a corporate viewpoint, it is an interesting idea and with the promise of government support for this might actually be in the interest of the company to try to do this and see what happens in the near future.

Rewarding companies with tax breaks if they build/buy in the USA and hire USA based workers. While there are many discussions about the H1B visa program and its influence on technology workers in particular, would say IBM or NEC, or Microsoft or Google actually put a preference on hiring American workers if there was a tax break in it for them? This one is harder to quantify because the debate has always been about the qualifications of American technology workers. If you look at what is happening in colleges with computer degrees still on the decline this could go one of two ways, or a mixture of both.

The short term payoff for the tax breaks would be to boost enrollments in computer science based degrees if someone thought that there would be a job for them afterwards. More over the computer industry needs to paint itself as sexy, there is very little point in showing that computer geeks rule if we are all painted with the “nerd” or “geek” labels. Some of that is going to have to come in at a different label; we have to be sexy or stable to get the boost in hires.

Short term the colleges have to change, there is no sense in teaching something that is five or six years old. These are people who want to learn how to build the next Facebook, digg, or other network. Not someone who wants to work on yet another Windows form or Linux driver. While there will always be people who want to make those kinds of software, the sexy part of computer programming lies in what you can make it do to help people communicate or come together. That is not something government can do, it is something that business and computer geeks themselves can do to help themselves. If Obama gets it and does the tax break, we need to market the state of “geekdom” as something that yes, cool, sexy, fun, take a look at blogmaverick, that is who we need to appear to be, not the comic book store owner in Homer Simpson. It starts in college with good professors who grock Web 2.0, who understand social networking, and who are committed to helping students raise the bar for them and for society at large.

We need to in the longer term stabilize IT and remove the fear and doubt, this again is a business thing, not something that government can do. Government can help stabilize the industry by offering tax cuts to corporations that hire Americans first, but with the same turmoil in IT as we had in the aerospace industry in the 1970’s as NASA near shut down; there is a long way to go here. Industry needs to take this and turn it into something that people will want to do, show a career path, show that they can build cool sexy things. If it takes a tax cut to help make this change happen, then I am cool with this.

While I really just focused on the technology bits of the speech, if you take the things that Obama said, and then extrapolate them into a meaningful action (Strategic versus Tactical thinking), there is some excellent potential to recover on multiple fronts here. Education, business and technology can all benefit from a clear strategic vision, funded by tax cuts that turn into tactical considerations that allow the business to grow. While all businesses at some point are cyclic in nature, and there will be a point in the future where all this simply does not work that well. If we can make great things happen as a collation of workers, business, government and education, everyone wins.

And isn’t that the thing we all want to do? Have a shot at winning again? Have a shot at doing something wonderful?

Tags: Obama, speech, technology, tactical, strategic, thinking, government, business, education, workers, work, IT, information technology