Smalltalk with James Robertson

Didn't Sun try (multiple times) to sell useless bricks... err, "network computers"? Here's Google, trying the same thing for gosh knows what reason. This example of the baseline problem is pretty good:

But, there are some things you can't do strictly on the Web--like play Portal 2 or Minecraft, and living completely in the cloud takes a significant culture shift. There is also a huge trust factor with storing your entire life online, and the small issue of what happens when you can't get connected to the Internet and your Chromebook is a glorified paperweight.

Business travelers often need to work on planes, for instance - and it's a minority of flights out there with a network connection (and when they do exist, they are sloooooooow).

Technorati Tags: netbooks, chromebooks

I wonder whether the growth of variant data privacy rules around the globe will impact the outsourcing push much. The author of this piece seems to think it will. If nothing else, it gives any firm that uses Inidan outsourcing a decent sized headache to deal with...

Technorati Tags: privacy

The Blogger outage at Google doesn't bring "the cloud into question" - what it highlights is the folly of relying on anything that leaves you with a single point of failure:

My question is, “What if this had happened to another Google service?” Say, Google Docs? What if every document you wrote and saved on Wednesday was suddenly taken offline on Thursday, and you no longer had your presentation or your notes or your research for a client meeting today?

What if I had all of my documents stored on a file server at corporate HQ, they weren't doing offsite backup, and some disaster occurred? The issue isn't "the cloud" - it's relying on a single point.

Technorati Tags: cloud

If this is true, then I don't hold out a lot of hope for the future of Skype:

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier tonight that Microsoft in what would be its most aggressive acquisition in the digital space was zeroing in on buying Skype for $8.5 billion all in with an assumption of the Luxembourg-based company’s debt.

Why do I say that? Microsoft's track record with this sort of thing. First, they tend to push all staff to come to Redmond - that will cut down on the core development team right there. Second, Microsoft pushes an "eat your own dogfood" philosophy. While I think that's a great idea in general, it's not so great for mature products. If MS does that, and decides to spend an eternity rewriting the core of Skype to be a Windows specific service, then it's just death. Not because Windows is terrible, but because that's an awful lot of wasted motion for an existing application.

That's not all though - consider the revenue picture:

With Skype, which has been aggressively expanding, Microsoft will continue to lose money in its Internet efforts. Skype lost $7 million on revenue of $860 million. Operating profits, which Skype preferred to highlight, were $264 million.

The last thing that Microsoft needs is bigger losses from their online division.

Technorati Tags: skype

The new high speed Comcast service - available in my area - sounds interesting. 105 mbps down, and a not terrible 10 mbps up (FIOS gives me better than that up, and while 105 is better than 20, I'm not unhappy with what I have). Here's the killer though: the 250 gb data cap is still on that deal. That may sound like a lot of data, but at that b/w, that's 5 or so hours of HD video. I can totally believe that I'd blow through that much in a month - 3 Netflix rentals might do it.

Why do that? Well, Comcast wants to sell you their triple play (phone/net/tv), and shove you over to on-demand, which won't be capped (but will be charged on a per use basis for all the good stuff). Net Neutrality, you say? Hah - look into the proposals. They all aid and abet this sort of thing with the blessing of law. The net neutrality advocates are today's "useful idiots" as far as the big ISPs are concerned.

Technorati Tags: comcast

Looks like the future involves capped data - AT&T just announced new limits:

AT&T claims their average DSL customer uses around 18GB a month, and these changes will only impact about 2% of all DSL customers -- who the company states consume "a disproportionate amount of bandwidth."

That sounds reasonable until you consider increased use of things like iTunes movie rentals, Netflix, Hulu (et. al.). If you grab a few HD movies, you can start running into those limits faster than you might think.

Of course, the providers would rather have you use their "free" on demand services....

Technorati Tags: data caps, bandwidth

Ok, this is just silly. A French consulting firm wants to get rid of internal emails and "use social platforms" instead:

Another French consulting and services company, Atos Origin, has similar designs for a social media transformation: Chairman and CEO Thierry Breton wants to eliminate internal e-mail from the company within three years, replacing it with social platforms, he announced in February. "E-mail is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business," he said.

Why? I understand that email can be overwhelming (I get well over a hundred emails to my gmail box per day, and that doesn't count the ones I get from work), but: email does serve a purpose, and it's slightly different than the way social media works. If nothing else, you can track emails centrally, which is necessary in some legal contexts.

An old phrase comes to mind: it's a poor workman who blames his tools....

Technorati Tags: email, social media

While I sympathize with this post by DHH, it suffers from an interesting case of myopia. Take this:

You no longer need a tech person at the office to man “the server room.” Responsibility for keeping the servers running has shifted away from the centralized IT department. Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.

If you assume that tmost of IT is email and shared folders, maybe. In truly large enterprises - like the one I work in now - it's more about large production databases with mission critical (sometimes classified as well, depending on the customer) data. You can't run that kind of thing on Amazon's RDS, or on BigTable.

DHH may be correct about small firms - it makes perfect sense for them to outsource nearly everything to the cliud in order to lower cost. For big enterprises though? DHH simply has no idea, probably through lack of experience in the subject.

Technorati Tags: enterprise

I think that Apple's latest restrictions on subscriptions - that vendors have to sell through the app store, and can't provide a link to external services - is going to cause a lot of problems. Rhapsody is is the first to complain, but I doubt they'll be the last. I can hardly wait to see what Amazon does with the Kindle app (if it applies to Amazon; that's unclear right now):

Rhapsody has issued a statement, which says that it's not going to play ball and even levels a bit of a threat: "We will be collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development." The big trouble stems from the fact that Apple requires anybody offering a subscription service to offer that service for the same price or less through Apple. That means you can still sign up folks through your own methods and get all the cash, but if anybody signs up through your app, Apple gets a 30 percent cut. In addition, Apple is no longer allowing applications to include a link to an external site for purchasing, which means vendors will have trouble getting new users to pay them directly instead of using Apple's simple but heavily-taxed option.

This is going to get uglier for Apple as more vendors start to follow Rhapsody's lead. I tend to be very cynical about government involvement in this sort of thing, but this much is clear: Apple really, really shouldn't want that kind of attention.

Technorati Tags: apple, app store

Dave Winer has a thoughtful post up about our ability to trust vendors with our public content - what if they decide to pull the plug (as numerous vendors have done with WikiLeaks)?

The question is this: What service-level guarantees do we need from vendors to make it possible to use their services in our public writing.

The problem runs even deeper, I think. Even if I bought my own server, and then paid to have, say, a T1 run to my house - I still have to rely on my domain being registered. Heck, even if I register a non US domain (or, if a person outside the US registers one beyond their borders), that doesn't get out from under the problem.

Right now, the entire system runs on trust and a general lack of centralization. That's why I worry about the FCC and their "net neutrality" rules - to my way of thinking, centralizing runs the very real risk of making control easier to assert. I think the best we can do here is leave the system with as little central control as possible.