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• Now if only their gears scripts weren't as buggy as hell in firefox, you could actually get some work done on istockphoto In reply to: "Why iStockphoto embraced Google's Gears"

  October 30, 2009

  0 replies

• odubtaig, I agree with you. If you scratch the surface of a ruby on rails site, you're actually dealing with a lot of software that's written in good old C and C++. Sure, the application is written in rails, but the text indexing is done by Sphinx (C++), the web server is nginx (good old C), the database is MySQL (C/C++), your in-memory database (memcached) is written in C, your non-relational data storage is almost always in C or C++. And if you're doing heavy number crunching, you've probably shimmed a C library in there anyway. Without JNI, would Java have succeeded as well as it did? In reply to: "The media sells the Google cloud. The enterprise buys Microsoft on-premises"

  August 4, 2009

  0 replies

• Back in 1993, your title would have been "Media Sells Windows, The Enterprise Continues to Buy IBM". You have a shaky grasp of adoption curves. New tech always starts small and insignificant. The legacy business looks healthy until the moment the adoption curve hits the inflection point, and then the rot in the legacy business becomes obvious, and its decline inescapable.
  
  This is often relative decline. The IBM mainframe business is still nice and profitable, it just hasn't grown much in 20 years. Almost no applications are built for it, and certainly no ISV's base their business model on it. The Cloud is early, but inevitable. Much of it will be private, some of it will be public. But it will all work the same, and very little of it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
  
  VMware (probably), Xen, KVM will get the infrastructure layer, and the app layer will be an opensource hybrid of Java, Python, & Ruby, all managed by open source management software -- some SaaS some private -- and developed with open source tools -- some SaaS some private. In reply to: "The media sells the Google cloud. The enterprise buys Microsoft on-premises"

  August 3, 2009

  6 replies

• People should remember their history. Almost all technology franchises are not destroyed by competition, they're destroyed by a company's mis-steps. Netware 4 was a disastrous product execution that destroyed Netware's networking franchise. It was buggy to the point of tears, it was Netware 3 incompatible (I mean surely everyone has learned by now that you make your stuff backward compatible or suffer irrelevance - Google App Engine anyone?) In reply to: "Will 'good enough' virtualization topple VMware?"

  July 2, 2009

  0 replies

• First, loudcloud was the pioneer of all the marketing claims about self-healing, self-scaling yadda yadda, not cassatt. Second, the model did work, it was called Opsware and got bought by HP for $1.6 billion. I don't know why Cassatt couldn't execute. In reply to: "Cassatt is running out of runway"

  May 15, 2009

  0 replies

• Sadville is dying slowly. http://www.google.com/trends?q=second+life In reply to: "Second Life's economy is the envy of the real world"

  April 17, 2009

  1 reply

• John,
  
  The sooner you learn that blogging = reporting minus journalism's ethics, fact-checking and spadework the happier you will be
  
  -- baetica In reply to: "One Puppet to rule the cloud?"

  February 6, 2009

  1 reply

• Nonsense on stilts.
  
  First of all, Ford wasn't responsible for mass customization of cars. "They can have any color as long as it's black" - is I believe the canonical Henry Ford quote. GM was the first company to ACTUALLY offer multiple colors, and it had nothing to do with the use of assembly lines AT ALL. This is basic business history.
  
  Second, having worked on OS's and fairly complex pieces of middleware, I can tell you that guaranteeing supportability through a magic algorithm is about as achieveable as guaranteeing supportability through formal correctness proofs. This is mostly marketing fluff, and a less gullible reporter would smell the bs here. In reply to: "Suse Studio: Linux customization for the masses"

  January 25, 2009

  0 replies

• Zimbra is quite simply the best executed business-class mail product built in the last ten years. It's not at all surprising that it's taking significant share, and will continue to take significant share in the uncontested space of SME and non-profit. Unless yahoo screws it up (which used to be a good bet) it should continue to grow and eat the mid-market over time. People have no personal affection for Outlook. It's not a product people love to use.
  
  It was a scandal that Zimbra sold the company when they did for as little money as they did. I don't think they knew their own worth. In reply to: "Zimbra hits 20 million paid mailboxes"

  January 20, 2009

  1 reply

• Your analysis is overly simplistic. Amazon also provides power, space, cooling and provides labor time to unpack, assemble rack, cable and power your server. They will also "replace" it instantaneouly if any components break. Over the five year period, these costs are easily a few thousand. Advantage AWS.
  
  (I'd also dispute that the EC2 "large" instance is really equivalent to a $6k dell server -- it's got less processing power) In reply to: "The cost of cloud adoption"

  January 16, 2009

  0 replies