Gmail offers surprising innovation lessons for the Fortune 500
If you’re familiar with the story of Gmail, you know – for a fact – that it was a 20% time employee project by Paul Buchheit. A little bottom-up experimentation that grew into something big. Surprise! That story is wrong. It was a desire by Google, the company, to offer its own email. From Harry McCracken’s great piece How […]
Amazon’s Cloud Price Reduction, A Desire To Compete Hard And Move Up The Value Chain
Recently Google slashed price for their cloud offering. Amazon, as expected, also announced their 42nd price reduction on their cloud offerings since its inception. Today, Microsoft also announced price reduction for their Azure offerings. Unlike many other people I don’t necessarily see the price reduction by Amazon as waging a price war against the competition. […]
Cloud Just Got Real – The Race Begins
This week, Google hosted its Cloud Platform Live event. Some people were a little surprised at my enthusiastic live twitter coverage for a number of Google’s announcements. I have been waiting for them to “go big or go home” for a while now. My biggest surprise was how long it took Google to get up […]
The Case for Tiered Storage in Private Clouds
Fall of last year I wrote a controversial whitepaper detailing my concerns about how distributed storage was being marketed. The blog introduction and the whitepaper were both entitled Converged Storage, Wishful Thinking, and Reality. There was a certain amount of expected blowback from folks at RedHat and Ceph as well as more thoughtful replies from […]
What Entrepreneurs Should Learn From WhatsApp
Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion has dominated all news in Silicon Valley for the past 48 hours. Yesterday, I was at a urinal, and a group of people asked me what I thought. Most of the discussion seems to be around whether Mark Zuckerberg was crazy to pay so much for a relatively […]
Why Multi-Cloud? Evolution, Freedom
What drives the creation of countless apps, tools and platforms in the IT market today? The ever-growing web as well as the `consumerization of IT` provide end users with an abundance of options and full discretion. We now understand the vital need to internalize the concept of spreading knowledge and information across a variety of […]
Google is Amazon’s Only Real Competition
Recently, Barb Darrow wrote a great note to Google Compute Platform, suggesting “8 things it could do to freak Amazon out.” As long term readers know, I predicted Google’s entry into the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market long before anyone else. Cloudscaling is also well known for having created the Google Compute Engine (GCE) APIs for […]
Cloud Model 2014: Hybrid, Google, Brokerage, Startups and The Enterprise
2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. […]
Will Success Ruin Silicon Valley?
Everywhere one looks, Silicon Valley seems ascendant. Tech companies like Apple and Google are among the world’s most valuable and admired, while tech titans like Larry and Sergey, and Mark and Sheryl are given the first-name-only treatment of offline celebrities. Silicon Valley has even stuck its nose into broader society, helped by the fact that […]
The Dark Side Of Big Data
Latanya Sweeney, a Harvard professor Googled her own name to find out an ad next to her name for a background check hinting that she was arrested. She dug deeper and concluded that so-called black-identifying names were significantly more likely to be the targets for such ads. She documented this in her paper, Discrimination in […]
Innovation Through Logo Design
OK, I stole that title from Krish. It’s a telling title, almost as good as this one from Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing. Oh, and I really don’t want to write about a logo. Especially about a fugly one. One that the entire world hates. But what can I do, the world is abuzz with […]
It’s Cheaper In The Long Run To Pay For A Professional
I firmly believe in the truth of the old saying, “It’s cheaper in the long run to pay for a professional.” It’s an axiom that applies in nearly any situation, from decide whether or not to attempt to fix your own plumbing problems, to dealing with groupies if you’re a young All-Star. Yet while most […]
We really all thought it was Google, only to find out it was the person’s employer
We really all thought it was Google, only to find out it was the person’s employer Yesterday the web site Medium posted that they got a surprise visit from the Joint Terrorism Task Force to talk about some Google searches they were doing about pressure cookers, back packs, and other interesting things to search for. […]
Amazon, Microsoft and Google: The Cloud Leading Trio
Following several discussions with fellow bloggers and industry executives, I found it quite fitting that the natural cloud leaders are the top software and web giants: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While Amazon’s AWS is The public cloud today Google recently reported that it is doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, […]
Missing the Point on Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud APIs
At the recent Structure event in San Francisco, I watched Werner Vogels’ presentation, along with about 500 others in a packed auditorium. Werner is the CTO of Amazon Web Services and one of the industry’s more prophetic voices. (I was honored to share the keynote stage with him at Cloud Connect a couple of years ago.) During Werner’s conversation with […]
