Inspired by Paul Grahams Todo List post
- Pursue your dreams & Live in the moment
- Work smart
- Focus on the positive thought = happy
- Say (or write) what I think
Archive for the ‘Commentary FWIW’ Category
Top Of My [TODO] List
Genuine Windows (dis)Advantage
This weekend I configured a three-tiered backup system to protect the three Macs in my home. Throughout the research and implementation process I kept thinking “Gee… If I were trying to do the same three layered approach for three Windows PCs it wouldn’t be this easy.”
Now I have found another difference between Mac and Windows…. Microsoft’s draconian Windows Advantage.
First the back-story:
I use Quicken to manage personal finances, and Intuit can’t seem to get Quicken Mac right, so I run the Windows version on a Mac using VMWare Fusion. This has worked great for years. A 30 Gb VMWare partition manages the Windows XP install and I have never had a problem with stability, upgrades or security.
Current problem:
The latest Quicken release requires 1 Gb RAM, so I bumped up the RAM setting for the Windows XP virtual instance, and now Windows Genuine Advantage thinks this perfectly legal copy of Windows is not licensed. All because the OS detected a RAM “upgrade.” After a wasted hour of research, it appears the only way to “license” this copy of Windows is to input the CD key, of which I do not have anymore, since this setup has worked great “for years.”
Lessons Learned:
- Make a photo copy, or snap a photo, or otherwise find a place to store a copy of the Windows activation key.
- The Mac’s unified approach to hardware and software doesn’t require Apple to have to resort to excessive OS copy protection.
“Cloud Killed the (SaaS) Rock Star”
“Cloud Killed the (SaaS) Rock Star”…
… well, not literally, but definitely in a figurative sense.
The press release below is the all-points-bulletin heralding the cloud has “won.” Why do I say this? Because LiveOffice, a non-cloud SaaS start-up, couldn’t compete against the new generation of SaaS start-ups powered by true public cloud computing like Sonian.
LiveOffice was the rock star of SaaS archiving. Ten years in business and they deserve the credit as one of the pioneers to legitimize the SaaS market. When LiveOffice launched a decade ago, they had to operate their own data centers. (This is called “Co-located Powered SaaS.”) But during the past five years, the world changed underneath them. Usually, market dynamics cause this kind of disruption, but the SaaS archiving market size didn’t get smaller, rather it’s bigger than ever. What changed starting in 2007? The advent of the public cloud. Suddenly, any SaaS company running their own data center became vulnerable to competitors able to harness the cloud. This is the beginning of the cloud-powered SaaS era.
Seriously, I wish all the best to the LiveOffice team. Sonian and LiveOffice competed vigorously from 2008 to 2011. Symantec acquired a great team, and the fit between LiveOffice and Symantec makes a ton of sense, and it’s understandable why Symantec made the acquisition.
Although LiveOffice called themselves a “cloud archiving” company, that was stretching the truth. The cloud moniker is so overused at this point, the public is deceived into believing they are using a cloud service, when in fact, it’s really just re-packaging the same old SaaS with a new label.
Why did this Happen?
Operating a SaaS infrastructure on a pure cloud environment is vastly different compared to a co-located system; it’s the reason we’re going to see more of old-world SaaS companies change control or fade away. It will be exceedingly difficult to re-tool a co-located hosted SaaS business to use the cloud. Not impossible, but very difficult. The whole architecture would need to change. I say this having lived in both worlds — with the cloud battle-scars to prove it.
What do GitHUB and GrabCAD Have in Common?
During our last board meeting one of our directors mentioned a start-up he thought was interesting: GrabCAD. Awhile ago I had read about this company on Techcrunch, but since the company was in the CAD/CAM space I filed a note in a brain cell memory register “interesting company, but not something I need to follow closely.”
But a different thought took hold; Hmmm… GrabCAD is to the CAD/CAM professional the same way GitHUB is to the software professional. We’re witnessing the rise of start-ups that cater to “niche” audiences who create a certain kind of content as their prime means of professional affiliation. Don’t take offense to the term niche audience applied to software or CAD professionals. It’s just a way to say “not a mass audience” that is served by a general purpose content creation site like Tumblr, WordPress.com, etc.
GrabCAD targets the CAD/CAM professional with a CAD-specific sharing space augmented with a thin “social network layer.” Create a drawing, upload to GrabCAD, post a link “hey look what I created” and share, trade, and sell your work product. It’s not a place to generate generalized content (like Google Docs, ZoHo, or Office 365), but rather a sharing space for affiliated professionals that want to showcase “their wares.”
GitHUB is a content sharing system that targets the software professional. In this case, “content equals source code.” It’s really “social source code management” with a bunch of other goodies like wikis and pasties mixed in. Source code management has been around forever, but GitHUB makes it really easy to share and integrate code from various projects. Developers don’t actually write their code in GitHUB, they do that in their own developer environments, just like CAD professionals don’t use GrabCAD to create drawings.
In the software world, it is now common for developers to tout their GitHUB account URL as a living resume. You can imagine the CAD/CAM professional one day sharing links to their GrabCAD creativity just like software developers share their GitHUB awesomeness.
Catering to a large niche audience with a custom experience is a successful end-run around mass appeal social networks like Facebook. The core required features, such as file upload, link sharing, and comment curation exist in many platforms, from WordPress to Drupal, to Facebook. But a generic user experience will not suffice. GrabCAD speaks the language of the CAD industry. GitHUB does the same for the software industry.
There are other examples of this trend, although none as focused as GrabCAD or GitHUB:
- Prezi and Slideshare for presentations, although not specifically targeted toward a specific profession.
- Scribd for documents. But not targeted to a specific industry.
- Disqus for comments? Would it be a stretch to cite Disqus for the professional commenter? Probably, but an interesting idea.
- Basecamp for project managers.
- Sortfolio for web designers.
I can imagine other industries ripe for this niche audience approach: legal (specialized documents), chemical (formulas), teachers (lesson plans), music (lyrics). Easy and clear content owner attribution will need to be resolved for some of these ideas to be successful.
I’m excited to see the next GrabCAD come to life. If you know any vertically aligned professions where content creation is the core work-product, scratch your entrepreneurial itch and create a niche audience user experience now.
Apps as Entertainment and Other TV Paradigm Shifts
I was at dinner the other night with a business partner and the Sonian Customer Development team. The conversation turned to sharing our observations about how the commercial entertainment business struggles to embrace new technologies they view threatening to their “status quo.” Seems anytime a bunch of us technophiles congregate, this conversation theme comes up.
It’s because we see what’s technically possible and tantalizingly just around the corner. It’s because we are tired of being forced to pay for content we do not want. And it’s because the studios, and the providers (Comcast, TimeWarner, etc.) are fighting like hell to defer the inevitable.
It’s the beginning of a great battle brewing between old Hollywood & old infrastructures, versus Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Roku, Boxee, etc.
[Sidebar: I was part of the first act in this play: On the forefront 10 years ago with Tivo, ReplayTV, and the like as these pioneering companies took the first step to change the way consumers watched the provider's content. Now Act 2 is a different set of vendors still fighting the same battle.]
At the dinner several of us have either already “cut the cord” or were about to do it. At the dinner several of us remarked that the iPad or Kindle Fire was the place where they consumed more content than ever before.
The Joy of a Mobile Phone Free Agent
Hooray… starting this month I am a “mobile free agent!”. My two year lock in with Verizon Wireless is over. And boy are they trying harder than ever to keep me from straying.
So far Verizon Wireless has offered me a $50 cash gift card if I re-commit to another two years. (Wow… they must think I’m an easy mark!), or a new deluxe handset like an iPhone for $199, or a Droid at $149 or couple other offers that promptly went to the recycle bin.
Now I can re-think my mobile needs without incurring an early termination fee.
A quick calculation shows that over the past two years I spent $199 for an Android handset, and $125 a month for voice, data, text and tethering. That’s $3200 for two years of cell phone service. Pretty staggering when I look at that number with some perspective.
But what I *think* I get from Verizon, such as a supposedly superior network, makes me re-question my assumptions for why I should continue as a Verizon customer. The “strength of their network” was my primary appeal to VZW.
I’m in a good position to change carriers. Line number portability and Google Voice make the process really easy compared to just a few years ago. I can keep my number, and use Google Voice as a continuity bridge between the old and the new.
I investigated my options and found Ting. I like their whole approach to buying a mobile phone. Choose a handset, choose an al-a-cart voice/data/text plan, and no termination fees. But what gives me concern is that Ting is a MVNO for Sprint. An MVNO is basically a marketing and provisioning layer on-top of a second-tier wireless provider. I’m now confronted with whether I want to leave Verizon for another CDMA carrier, but one that may not have as an extensive network as Verizon.
This is an example of my inner-reasoning focusing on an extreme edge case, (what if I were driving in remote mountains where only VZW had towers?) instead of the majority situation condition (It’s very rare I am driving in remote mountains.) Why should the 99% suffer for the 1% fringe?
Ting will save me about $500 a year on a two-year contract compared to a comparable VZW suite of services. If I traded down from a smart-phone to a feature phone then the savings are even more dramatic; $1,300 a year.
I’m not ready to give up a smart-phone for a feature-phone, but I may be able to get over the fact that a second-tier mobile provider may be just fine.
I’ll post back here when I make my decision.
“Playing the Cloud” is the positive alternative to “Gaming the Cloud”
What’s the difference between these two commonplace bumper sticker slogans?
– War is not the answer…. End War
– Peace is the answer…. Make Peace
Both statements have the same good intention, except “end war” puts the emphasis on the relatively negative word “war,” while “make peace” puts the emphasis on a very positive thought. Words matter, just ask any political pollster how they craft their surveys & slogans, and you’ll learn the persuasive word science of Frank Luntz . Written words are the results of thought, thoughts are the results of “energy,” and putting energy out to the Universe creates results.
Internally at Sonian I coined the phrase “gaming the cloud” as a rally cry to describe how we manage the cloud to our benefit. We’re not doing anything unsavory or nefarious, just architecting software and creating processes that take advantage of all the positive attributes of cloud computing. We’re innovating exactly how cloud infrastructure vendors hoped would happen when they welcomed ISV’s to innovate on their platforms. It’s the best of all times to be creating cloud-powered software as a service.
So when I say “gaming the cloud,” what I really mean is seeking our best economic advantage. When we make the right software design decisions, we’re not only getting the best cost of goods, we’re also getting the best reliability. But I realize the phrase “gaming the cloud” carries an unintended negative pall. The mental image is not in the true spirit of our mission.
So what’s the positive alternative to “Gaming the Cloud?” …. Playing the Cloud.
“Playing the Cloud” to create superior economic advantage!”
Deconstructing the new phrase, the pivotal word is “playing” as the antidote to “gaming.” Gaming has a negative connotation, while “playing” is neutral at worst, and can be used in a variety of ways as a play on words. In an economic sense there is “playing the market,” or “playing the ponies,” and in a mission sense there is “playing to win.”
The cloud is a system of pricing rules. Prior to the cloud, system architects thought in terms of “servers” as their building blocks. In the cloud, the building blocks are compute units and API calls. Servers have costs, fairly easily understood since that was the reference standard for the past twenty years. Architects could determine overall system costs by knowing how many servers they need. In the cloud, compute units and API requests also have costs, but priced very differently than a piece of hardware. Cloud architects have a more difficult time figuring out total “infrastructure expense.”
The future looks great since the cloud is all about “infrastructure as code,” cloud-powered systems can be made self-aware of their own internal operating costs. That’s a dramatic paradigm shift from the old co-location days. And we’re witnessing this shift in real-time as cloud adoption rises.
So when you hear the phrase “gaming the cloud” don’t imagine the dark-side… think about the positive alternative “Playing the Cloud” for superior economic advantage.
State of Cloud Computing in Europe
I have just returned from a week in the United Kingdom meeting Sonian customers and business partners. The purpose of the trip was to expand Sonian relationships, but an added benefit was the opportunity to glean perspectives and adoption attitudes toward cloud computing in the greater EU market. Sonian is in a unique position to observe cloud adoption trends since our SaaS service is powered by true cloud computing infrastructures, and the conversations with EU business and technology leaders revealed their true thoughts about the state of cloud computing and indicators on adoption curves in 2012, and beyond.
The Buying Market
The EU market is not one single cohesive market, but rather smaller subsets that share some ideas, and diverge on others. UK and Ireland are (as you would expect) similarly aligned, and appear to share more in common with the Scandinavian countries, than with Germany and France, which have their own country-centric view of the cloud. The French language institute can’t even come to agreement on what to call “cloud computing” in France, settling on ”informatique en nuage” as a placeholder, but still searching for a unique French term that doesn’t break their rules on language purity and consistency (other examples: Software development is called “software addition” and the people that create software are called “software editors” since they literally “edit” source code files.) From my observations, the UK, Ireland and Scandinavian countries share more in common with the US thinking about the cloud, compared to Germany, France, Italy and Spain, which diverge on a number of key issues around data locality.
The total addressable information technology market in EU is roughly equal to that of the US. Except instead of a single national set of business rules, the EU market is fractured into separate countries, languages, tax systems and local business customs. This separation dramatically reduces the business efficiencies of technology providers attempting to service the EU community. The cloud could be seen as an antidote to inefficiency. Imagine an “EU Cloud” operating in a locality that pleases all consumers, and is the trusted provider. But it feels like a stretch goal to expect a single EU cloud to be accepted with the current barriers to a cohesive EU business strategy.
The Role of Government
The role of government in EU countries is more pronounced than we see in the United States, but there is no evidence yet that EU governments are pushing cloud computing as generic trend onto the private sector. Just recently the UK government established their “G.Cloud” initiative which looks similar to the US government’s “Cloud.gov” and Data.gov initiatives. This trend could be described as a “lead by example” scenario, with central government adopting cloud computing as proof it’s safe, cost effective and viable for the private sector. A myriad of data handling regulations seek to enforce “privacy” and “resiliency” to ensure citizens are protected from un-authorized access to personal information.
Kindle Fire Un-boxing and Review: +1
I rarely write a new gadget “un-boxing” experience but feel compelled to share my experiense starting to use the Kindle Fire. Full disclouse I am a big Amazon fan-boy. I have been using Amazon Prime since it was first offered, been pioneering on the Amazon Web Services cloud for over 4 years, and the UPS person probably delivers an Amazon box to my house one to two times a week. Amazon Kindle Fire is the intersection of Amazon Store, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Cloud.
This morning I have just returned from a visit to our UK office in Bracknell, and while travelling I tried to use my iPad 2 extensively, so the rapid shift to Kindle Fire will be a great compare and contrast time.
The Un-Packaging
Kindle Fire is shipped in Amazon’s new, unique, environmentally friendly packaging system. Most of Amazon’s small electronics are now shipped in a plain-looking cardboard box that acts as both the shipping vehicle and the packaging. It’s hard to explain until you see it yourself. Pull a tab to open the package and no there is finger-cutting plastic or hassles of extra cardboard to cut through. Contrast to Apple that prides itself on elegant packaging, which I can also appreciate. But let’s face it… the package is seen once and usually never again unless the device is sold. Apple feels they can justify the elegant packaging as part of their branding, but I’m sure the cost of Apple devices are higher because the packaging is more expensive. While Apple famously reminds you upon opening their goodies “Designed in California, Made in China,” Amazon could easily claim ”Designed in the Cloud, Made in China.”
The Cloud Storage Wars, Part… ? (I have lost count)
Wait… wait… wait… we’ve heard this before, right? GDrive is eminent because tantalizing mysterious screen shots and hints of the phantom service observed in source code & robots.txt files tell us so. But when GDrive does finally arrive (no one doubts it will eventually) will it be a yawn or a yelp of applause?
I love Google Docs, so anything Google does to blur the lines between GDoc content and file-system data will be appreciated. I already have a workflow that would make any Rube Goldberg fan beam with pride. My little Frankenstein is a combination of Dropbox, Cyberduck/Amazon S3, Arc 2, all syncing cloud, Macbook and iPad. GDrive will surely create more options.
When GDrive launches, the “cloud storage” landscape will look roughly like this (pardon me for missing a vendor in my quick search):
Primarily Consumer & SMB Focused
Primarily Enterprise Focused
Serves both Consumer and Enterprise with dedicated focus
Wow… this space is getting more crowded every Techcrunch news cycle. There are plenty of folks pontificating who ultimately “wins” this war. My guess: There will be less than a handful of major providers and less than a dozen minor players.
The majors will be Microsoft, Google, Apple and two others. Maybe Amazon, but not sure if AWS is a “major” on it’s own or because it will be supporting all the minors behind the scenes. The majors may buy a startup like Box or Dropbox. Otherwise Box and Dropbox both become large minors, distinguishing themselves with super sweet user experiences. The majors all have big eco-system-platforms that feed customers to their cloud storage aspiration appetites.
Read more…
Posted on April 23rd, 2012 in Cloud Compute, Commentary FWIW | 1 Comment »