Choices Narrowed for First U.S. CTO

Padmasree Warrior is so obviously suited for this job. After all, she was one of those incompetent, political executives who ruined Motorola, then exited with golden parachutes into the arms of new companies (which, of course, extended a warm and hearty "golden hello" to them). People like her are part of what is utterly wrong with our economy - there's an entire group of people running large portions of government and industry in America whose only talent is in manipulating people and assets; they don't actually create ANYTHING.<p>And of course, we have the business press more than happy to engage in a round of brown nosing, as they are always in need of "sources familiar with the matter" and "unidentified executives" for their gossipy insider stories (how do you think all of those articles come to fruition? Looking through garbage?).<p>As thbe CTO of America is likely to continue the grand tradition of Corporate America wherein people make lofty public statements, issue press releases, and then hope someone else will take care of that oh-so-difficult task of actually getting something done, I wholeheartedly support Padmasree Warrior for this job.<p>If you Google for my name + Motorola, you will see where I am coming from on this matter.

Karma Warrior, awesome name.<p>On a more serious note tho' you have to be real careful about giving entrenched industry people political power by appointment. Here in the UK we are still feeling the aftereffects of Beeching, a lifelong auto-industry man appointed by the UK government to look after transport. His plan was to tear up railway tracks, who needed them after all, when there were cars? Only now public mass transit is "in" and it's too late, the tracks are gone, the land has been sold off, what's left of the system is overloaded. You want to be real careful she doesn't start tearing out bits of physical infrastructure, it's hard to replace.

Wow, I did some quick research on Padmasree Warrior, and she's incredibly smart. From the Mobilize '08 keynote:<p>"We have this question today, this question of where mobile devices will go in the future. So the question at hand is, 'What is mobility, really?' And in my view, mobility is not the device. It's not the network. It is the mobile experience.<p>Mobility as a term has existed for quite some time, and for most of the time it has been synonymous with 'cellular network' and 'device'. This is because cellular networks were the first time we were truly free of wires. I think this has changed though, mostly because of the massive, enormous scale of adoption. More than three billion people on earth use a cellular device to communicate. Every second, four babies are born. In that same second, thirty mobile devices are sold. And we're just now starting to see the innovation beyond mere two-way communication in mobility."<p>This is a really, really amazing talk: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5K-xXUKlec" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5K-xXUKlec</a><p>She gets mobile. And she understands the future of the internet.

Why does the US need a CTO?<p>“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand” - Milton Friedman

I've worked with Vivek Kundra a bit with his very revolutionary "Apps for Democracy" contest. The guy really gets it. He's smart and understands the power of openness and involving the outside for helping Government.<p>An interesting thing about him: when coming into power here in DC one of his first mandates was "District Government will operate off of the same data we make available to the public."<p>As such, remarkably, public data feeds coming out of the district got significantly better, more organized and more available.<p>Sounds obvious, but it was a big step for even a municipal Government to take.

Title is misleading because a choice hasn't actually been made yet. But Warrior (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmasree_Warrior" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmasree_Warrior</a>) is really impressive as a possibility.

Some days I hate the Web.<p>Why does even business week get nailed with a bunch of jingoistic nonsense in their comments. I was hoping to read some interesting and informed thoughts, instead the comments read like Digg.

Is the CTO of the US handling software patent stuff or is that someone else's problem?

Last I heard, Lessig was at the top of the list. What happened there?