Handful Of Monopoly Infrastructure Players – Not So Fast
This is the second post on the topic I have been emphasizing on many different forums. My earlier post, Handful Of Monopoly Infrastructure Players – A Shortsighted Idea, laid out philosophical and economic reasonings against the idea of the emergence of handful of infrastructure providers. This idea is a pet theme for many cloud pundits. [...]
Intel Relaxes Rules on NetBook Resolution. Next Obstacle is Screen Size
I often spoke up against idiotic screen size / resolution limits that render Netbooks close to useless, yet the de facto industry standard appears to be 1024 x 600. What’s wrong with that? Well, nothing, unless you plan to browse, or in fact interact with web sites, since websites today are designed at a resolution [...]
Handful Of Monopoly Infrastructure Players – A Shortsighted Idea
Some commentators in the field of Cloud Computing like to promote the idea that there will be a single (or a handful) monopoly player(s) in the Cloud infrastructure market. The biggest reason quoted to justify this claim is the high cost of building and maintaining the datacenters. The supporters of this school of thought argue that not many companies can [...]
Network Effects Will Lead to SaaS Vendor Lockin?
As people in US enter the long weekend of July 4th (independence day), we have something to ponder about the independence of SaaS users. Alistair Croll, writing on GigaOm, points us to the possibility of SaaS vendor lock-in as a result of network effects. Once a SaaS provider hits a certain size, secondary business models [...]
Microsoft Bans Netbook Use When the Sun is Shining, the Sky is Blue and on Weekends
Which is about now… so in compliance, I am typing this on a desktop. Joke apart, the latest Decree From The Monopolist: hybrid netbooks (both SSD and harddisk) are banned from sale with Windows XP Home edition. No kidding. Nothing new, of course, just another attempt in a series of blows by Microsoft to try [...]
Screen Size: The Next Plan to Cripple Netbooks in Order to Protect a Dying Market
The proliferation of affordable netbooks is good for everyone – consumers, that is. Computer manufacturers loath it (high volume, low margin business) and so does Microsoft: they can’t exactly sell $100+ worth of software on a $200 machine. So they come up with all sorts of evil plans. First there was the Windows 7 plan: [...]
Market Share vs. Popularity
Who am I to question the great Walt Mossberg? But when he says Internet Explorer is the World’s most popular browser I have to wonder… Here’s a definition of popularity from Wikipedia: Popularity is the quality of being well-liked or common. Looks like Mossberg is right if we focus on common. Internet Explorer is no [...]
Resistance is Futile: Google is Unstoppable
Two seemingly unrelated items: Today Hitwise reported on how Google Maps is catching up on Mapquest, which once was the king of online mapping. Perhaps more important than just the numbers is the source of traffic: 61% of Google Maps traffic comes from links placed in organic Google Search results. Contrast that to Mapquest, [...]
