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Love this quote I stumbled across today:
“An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile in hopes of being eaten last.” – Winston Churchill
This sounds like most politicians today — and even some CEO’s I know. Do we spend too much time today trying to appease voters or fellow employees? Do we sacrifice our values or the momentum of our organization by feeding crocodiles?
Citrix announced this week that they are now licensing XenServer for free. They are also including the management tools and the always-awe-inspiring live motion capabilities. It looks like they are trying to one up Vmware with this move and gain a foothold in the enterprise market before Microsoft lowers the hammer. Curiously they are not providing HA (high availability) functionality with this license. You still have to buy that type of advanced management in the form of Citrix Essentials.
I’m very neutral on this announcement. I don’t mind when technology providers give away stuff because then it forces competitors to do the same. And it ultimately shifts the focus of the battle to more important stuff. Competition is good. On the other hand most enterprises absolutely require HA. Live motion is more of a nice-to-have type feature. So this announcement might create some publicity for Citrix but don’t look for enterprises to increase their adoption of XenServer because of it.
Google’s Gmail service crashed earlier this morning impacting users around the world. It sounds like people were able to access their Gmail accounts through traditional mailbox protocols like POP and IMAP, but not via the web.
The sheer fact that this is national news just underscores the scale of Gmail and other global email services. I actually think that Gmail is pretty reliable for a free (or very cheap) email service. In my experience it has better uptime than most enterprise-class Microsoft Exchange email service providers.
