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A recent article in PC Magazine laments the slow death of Usenet. If you don’t know what Usenet is then don’t worry you haven’t missed anything. Usenet served a purpose back in oh… 1993. I remember reading the rec.music.makers groups every night. The content was useful and the participants maintained a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio.
But slowly over time most of us moved over to the web. It was simply a richer information management solution. I’m sure there are some diehards that are still on usenet today. And their threads are probably valuable and relevant. The problem is that the vast majority of content on Usenet isn’t valuable anymore. Once you get rid of the porn and the warez there just ain’t much left.
I just spent the last three days at HostingCon 2008 at the Navy Pier in Chicago. I attended the event last year so I pretty much knew what to expect. HostingCon is generally attended by mass-market hosters and smaller SaaS companies with a consumer and SMB focus. I don’t lump my company into this category — although we do offer services that overlap with this market segment.
My biggest takeaway from the event was the peer-to-peer networking opportunities. I made interesting conversation and connections with other business owners in the hosting and datacenter infrastructure space. I’d say that based on those conversations alone the event was worth it. That being said I’d like to see the new event owners iNET Interactive make some changes to the format next year.
First, focus on providing content during the educational sessions. Many of the scheduled 45 minute sessions only contained 20 minutes of presentation material. Two-thirds of the presentations were obvious vendor pitches. I heard serious grumbles from fellow participants regarding session content. I’m not sure if the producers had a hard time finding presenters or if presenters just didn’t understand the format. The presentations were a bit painful at times.
Second, add at least one more session on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon. We know the producers want to herd attendees into the exhibitor hall. But you don’t need 10 hours of time over two days in order to mingle with a relatively small exhibitor group. This was just too much dead air. Attendees will skip conference sessions if they really need more time to talk to exhibitors.
Finally, create more opportunities for attendees to network with one another. Try to connect people together based on common interests, company size or geographical location.
Computer scientist, inventor, teacher, humanitarian, and father, CMU’s Randy Pausch passed away today after a long battle with terminal pancreatic cancer. His last testament video inspired millions and altered the lives of thousands. The tech industry lost a great teacher today. Our civilization lost a great person. May God gentle his passing.
My good friend Graeme Thickins landed on the front page of the Star Tribune business section this morning promoting one of his recent start-up gigs, DoApps. The company released a popular application which turns an iPhone into a flashlight, strobe light, or night light. I’m envious of the article placement. Well done Graeme!
Amazon’s S3 storage service was down for almost 6 hours this past weekend. Just imagine you were running a SaaS company which used S3 for all its storage. Ouch! On the other hand is this level of uptime any worse than what you would expect from any mid or low-tier storage vendor? You get what you pay for.
If you’ve been in IT long enough you probably remember the famous motto stated by Sun CEO Scott McNealy in the 90′s: “The network is the computer”. McNealy’s promise was a decade ahead of its time. I think it is safe to say that today the network is a big part of the computer. But is the network ready to fully supplant our local computing devices? Despite recent proclamations that “everything is a service” I believe that technologies such as cloud computing have a long way to grow before replacing traditional computing architectures.
A number of trends are pushing the development of cloud computing:
– Consumer technology innovation is pushing business technology innovation
– Businesses are adopting collaboration and team-oriented work methodologies
– Cloud computing is driving down CapEX and OpEx for businesses
– Barriers to entry such as connectivity, reliability, and security are decreasing
These trends are great for small businesses and start-up companies. But I believe that cloud computing faces a number of adoption challenges in medium and large enterprises. Here are just a few:
No standards. All the big guys (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc…) are building out cloud computing platforms today. The problem is that all of these application publishing platforms are different. I can easily move my Windows applications from a local Dell server to a local HP server. I can’t move my application from Google’s cloud to Amazon’s cloud. I can’t see enterprises betting the farm on a single cloud computing platform.
Legacy code. Large enterprises are running legacy code written decades ago. Cloud computing does not offer the cost savings to justify a rewrite of these legacy applications yet.
Performance. A cloud storage technology like Amazon’s S3 will not come close to matching the performance of local storage resources like a NetApp SAN in the foreseeable future. The use of cloud storage is limited to applications with low performance requirements.
Security. Cloud computing and storage vendors will have a tough time convincing large enterprises (and their auditors) that data is securely managed in their cloud infrastructure. I work with businesses every week that dismiss shared computing architectures in favor of dedicated computing resources. Until businesses are comfortable “crossing the streams” we won’t see large adoption of cloud computing by enterprises.
I’m declaring this week VMWare Week because I’m out of the office in VMWare technical training for the next four days. And in the spirit of this week here is VMWare’s shot across the Microsoft Hyper-V bow. The good people at VMWare definitely have a fight on their hands. Yes it’s not all about price — it’s just mostly about price…
I’ve been hearing buzz the past few days about a huge flaw discovered in the Internet DNS (Domain Name Services) protocol. Apparently this flaw would allow attackers to perform cache poisoning on DNS servers. All world-wide DNS servers contain this flaw. I asked three different technology people today if they had heard about this DNS flaw yet. None of them had heard about it so obviously the message needs to get out.
DNS cache poisoning is serious stuff. If this flaw was widely exploited it would cause untold worldwide financial damage. Imagine being able to route traffic destined for a website to any place you want. You could siphon off user logins to savings and mutual fund accounts. You could disrupt online retail and B2B transactions. You could direct Obama website visitors to the McCain website. You get the picture.
So far security researchers are keeping quite about the exact DNS cache poisoning attack vector. All DNS servers world-wide will need to be patched. Wow.
I was the presenter on a corporate customer webinar today where I talked about the benefits of server virtualization. I extolled VMWare as the gold-standard of virtualization. How did VMWare repay me? Well, they decided to fire CEO and co-founder Diane Greene.
Oops, bad timing I guess. I really should have spent some time surfing the tech blogs last night. I still think VMWare technology is gold but it may be a little more tarnished today.
Some analysts still feel that VMWare will retain their market share over the next few years despite growing competition — especially from Microsoft.
Others feel that the Microsoft wrecking ball is moving towards VMWare headquarters.
VMWare technology is good but it is overpriced today. Businesses will benefit greatly from the increased competition between VMWare, Microsoft, and Citrix/Sun/XenX in the next few years.
I read a good article in the Star Tribune this morning about staying motivated in a slow-changing business environment. It’s hard to stay motivated as a visionary if people around you are afraid to change or people are content with the status quo. The article was written from the perspective of a counselor but it could easily apply to any CTO or technology leader.
