Category Archives: medium business I.T.

Cloud computing and carbon dioxide–how exciting!

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The funny thing about cloud computing is that even cloud computing experts have a hard time enumerating the unique characteristics of the solution given this buzz-ridden name.  That is, software as a service, application hosting, web hosting, and server virtualization–concepts that have been around for more than a decade–are all ingredients in the cloud computing recipe, wrapped in the cellophane of Bill Gate’s long-in-the-tooth “utility computing” billing concept.

But the exact measurements of each ingredient–that’s where the experts start shrugging. And if the experts are shrugging at this late stage, then what SMB owner is going to pay the trend much mind, to say nothing of spending their hard-earned, highly-taxed dollars on the cloud?

“Well, these cookies look really good, but we’re not sure what’s in them exactly, and we’ve no idea how they taste.”  I wouldn’t buy one of these, and neither would you.

My definition of cloud computing is this: an unstandardized way to add computing power for situational, often experimental, applications over which the constituent has very little strategic interest or risk exposure.

That’s because cloud computing isn’t a well-defined, best-practice, productized, rigid thing. Indeed, from one cloud vendor to the next, the cloud is described differently.  One thing is certain, the biggest web service data centers in the world, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, got so big that, one day, an executive walked into the board room and said, “gee, there are times of day during which our infrastructure is hardly being used at all. How can we sell our excess capacity?”

The whole thing kind of reminds me of the waste gas utility market, the highly abstract idea that places a currency value on “carbon credits”, units of carbon dioxide that are “spent” during the process of, well, existing.  That is, if you’re a company and you exist, you’re “spending” carbon credits. In the process of your spending, your purchase is a “carbon footprint”, a virtual shadow of all the carbon you’ve put out during your pursuits. Never mind that carbon is already being produced, or that the majority of its production is something over which nobody has any control.

Oddly, though, the paradigm of spending doesn’t even apply to carbon, because what you’re doing with these credits, in effect, is depositing them (not spending them) into a debt account. This is how nations handle it, anyway. This debt account follows you everywhere you go reminding you just how inefficient your firm (or nation) is at using energy (well, if your definition of efficiency has to do with co2, rather than producing something valuable for people, but I digress).  And then, to make the strange even stranger, credit traders can bargain with you for your carbon credits.  If your account is empty, they can sell you some of their nasty baggage because there account is chock full of the stuff.  How exciting!

No?

Is there one thing that this system does to actually appeal to the rank and file business owner? To somebody like me or you?  Or do we just look at it and say, who thought of this and what does it accomplish at the end of the day?

So we come back to cloud computing, whose definition is a moving target and whose role in servicing the needs of a small business is, well, unknown at this point.  Like the carbon footprint system that some have envisioned as a way of combatting global destruction, the cloud computing model asks us to agree that a problem exists–even if we can’t see the problem.

Right, you say, Ted’s just a small business owner in Cleveland. He’s taking a very short view of the matter. Those who wonder what about the ‘real’ motivations of the Kyoto Protocol and Cloud Computing must be hillbillies, right?

The cloud exists because supercorporations have excess computing capacity. The cloud is touted as a solution because those supercorporations want to make money. Those are two indisputable truths, and nothing deplorable about them. But the notion I hear repeated–that the cloud has specific benefits for SMBs–is not verifiably true at this early stage.  Heck, it’s kind of fun to read various definitions of cloud computing penned by the pundits.  Some of this stuff reminds me of teenagers getting caught red-handed pulling a horrible prank, but trying to explain it to their parents, to whom the explanation just doesn’t add up. What is the solution?

If you’re General Dynamics or Lockheed Martin, cloud time may be of interest and value.  But if you’re an SMB calling the line of business app you run remotely via Citrix a use of the cloud, think again.  This really isn’t anything new. Hosted apps and remote computing are far different in scale and scope from what Google and Amazon are shooting for with the cloud.

Google’s strategy, at least as evidenced by the proliferation of web-smart devices and software, from ChromeOS to Android to Google Apps, seems to be to create reliance on a sort of federalized computing utility. Had Microsoft been so obvious about their desire to accomplish this precise goal back in the nineties when the DOJ was heckling them for bundling Internet Explorer, they’d have never survived antitrust. Indeed, if Microsoft had been open about their plan for computing singularity back then, they wouldn’t be around today for us to feel sorry for them over how far they’ve fallen from the top.

Of course, by federalized, I don’t mean it in the governmental sense, but in the participatory sense. The strategy of driving all private computing to one or two meganetworks controlled by a few scrappy startups from the nineties a la Amazon (hey man, we just want to sell books on the Internet, you want in?) may have value to those who need the power of 2,000 processing cores simultaeously, like Lockheed, just as a secondary market in carbon credits may have value to people hoping to profit from eco-energy concerns, like GE.

But to me and you, the small to medium business owner?  Well, we’re still not convinced.

Microsoft will rely on entrenchment as its primary market motivator

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It’s clear to me now that Microsoft, one of the “great American companies” I often refer to when talking to my kids about things I admire in business, has switched from advancement to entrenchment as its retention strategy for existing customers.  That is, rather than move their platforms forward and pull global businesses along with them, a more defensive strategy is emerging–one where Microsoft tries not to hemorrhage too much business to Google and even Apple by reminding companies how cheap it is NOT to migrate away from the Microsoft eco-system.

A fantastic example of this dynamic came to light today when it was announced that the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac will replace Redmond’s clunky Entourage e-mail app with an actual Mac OS X version of Outlook, the predominant e-mail application used in medium and large enterprises.  My company alone supports somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve-hundred Outlook nodes at about fifteen different firms.  So a Mac version of Outlook, as the t-shirt saying goes, is “kind of a big deal.”

But what’s an even bigger deal is that Outlook once ran natively on the Mac–on Mac OS 9 anyway–and shared a great deal in common with its Windows cousin.  And, suffice it to say, it was a better product than its redheaded stepchild, Entourage.  It makes me wonder why they ever canned Outlook on the Mac to begin with.

Now I’m beginning to understand that Microsoft is on an all-hands mission to get as many enterprises, large and small, as entrenched as possible before Google and other market players really step to the plate with something that competes with Microsoft, and in particular Outlook and Office.  (Anybody who suggests that Google Apps currently beats Microsoft Office is smoking some pretty harsh crack, sorry guys.)

Entrenchment is the key to damage control: keep the customer believing that it will cost them more in dollars and difficulty to move away from Microsoft, no matter how compelling the alternative, and they’ll stick with Microsoft.  This was how they (soundly) destroyed Lotus Notes, and Redmond’s incredible staying power may allow it to stave off Google Apps for quite a few years to come.

Why does Microsoft still insist on using crummy brand names?

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“Windows Marketplace for Mobile”.

OK, does this name strike anybody else as particularly dumb?  On the syllable count alone, the marketing folks at Microsoft should’ve shot this one down before it had a chance to get into the wild.  Now, it seems, it’s going to have to stick.

Compared to Apple’s “Appstore” (2 syllables) or Nokia’s “Ovi” (barely 2 syllables) or even Blackberry’s “App World” (seeing a pattern?), Microsoft’s elephant-sized name for it’s application store clocks in at a whopping 8 syllables. Imagine the water cooler discussions that will never happen as a result:

“Hey man, where’d you get that sweet pinball game?”

“Well, I got it from Windows Marketplace for Mobile!”

Riiiight.  Who seriously is going to call it that?  Microsoft’s history of self-defeating brand names hasn’t been on display this starkly since “Microsoft Windows Server Base Operating Systems Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005“.  Srsly, who uses this wordy terminology?

With Apple having already coined the de facto term “Appstore”, why doesn’t Redmond take advantage of the growing strength of the Zune brand and call their wordy app store something like “Zune Store” or “Zune Place” or even just “Mobile World”?  Even HandMarket, a third-party app store for Windows Mobile, beats Microsoft to the punch in succinctness.

The Intrigue of an Appstore for Windows and OS X

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Let’s face it.  If you can support selling 5 GB downloads (which Apple does in the form of movies) through your e-commerce solution, iTunes, then there’s certainly no intrinsic barrier to doing so with applications, or drivers, or other forms of digital content.  If we fail to think of applications as content, we fail in our understanding of content.   Yet here we are thinking it’s a bold new idea to license and sell application software online–fully confining the novelty of such a thing to the mobile space.   Heh, we’re smart.

An old friend, Fleecy Moss, who was among the architects of the independent takeover of Amiga in the early 2000′s, once gave a talk at a tradeshow in the nineties–and his espousal of the content designation to software was, at the time, a revolutionary concept.  As with many ideas that bubbled up from the ill-fated Amiga wellspring, this concept proved true, and was ahead of its time.  It would be another ten years before the idea was accepted by the greater community.

The app store paradigm has brought this idea to the forefront of the way we think about distributing content.  Yet there’s something holding up the adoption of online app stores to distribute software, and I can’t quite thumb it.  Shareware authors have been distributing license credentials through e-commerce sites for a decade already, yet Apple and Microsoft still don’t sell their developers’ software through their flagship web sites.

Perhaps even more silly is the fact that consumers, vis-a-vis bloggers, don’t already demand such a solution.  If I can buy and download a DRM’d episode of Lost, why can’t I download a credentialed, licensed copy of Squeeze, or Microsoft Office for Mac, or my favorite blogging application, Ecto?   Yet nobody complains.  Indeed, it seems that the idea of a desktop app store is some kind of new idea. Technologizer, the “smarter take on tech”, just ran a piece about it today.   Yet I was talking about it a year ago, and longer.

Nokia is not an American brand, pure and simple

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(or: why Nokia gets trounced in the U.S.)

I have a healthy amount of respect for Nokia.  Before the iPhone they were the only devicemaker offering half of what Apple now offers with the 3GS.  Indeed, I toted a Nokia N95 for a while, and an N81 8GB for a while.  Both were excellent phones, but I’m convinced now that Apple’s iPhone, even as it arrives as a better all-around phone than Nokia’s current flagship (the obviously Blackberry-inspired N97), is more appealing to American consumers because it is made by an American company.

That’s right.  Nokia’s brand is obscurely perceived in North America, particularly the U.S., as an upscale European oddity not unlike Fiat or Porsche, to use an automotive analogy.  So while it may be the number one brand globally, Nokia has failed to make an impression on American consumers precisely for the reason that they’re a non-American company.

Apple owes a helping of its iPhone success to that fact.  The product is American; the company is American; the marketing is overwhelmingly American, with sitcom-style television commercials, extremely stable revision control (how many models of phone does Apple have on the market compared to Nokia?), and a least-common-denominator hardware engineering approach that appeals to the maximum number of simultaneous consumers instead of offering a specific style or feature set to five or six different niches.  Fewer buttons, more software.

The other American-friendly thing about the iPhone is the nature of its name.  Nokia is some Scandinavian meme as Sony is some Japanese one.  The difference is that Nokia’s name hasn’t been overcome with a mass-market product the way Sony’s cross-cultural name has been with the Playstation, and earlier, the Walkman. Same with Nintendo.  Who didn’t have a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990?  And for that matter, who doesn’t have a Wii today? Far fewer carry a Nokia product than own a Wii in the United States.

But there’s more to it that the brand name. Say what you like about Nokia’s lack of good carrier support in the United States (Apple still has only one official carrier), or their botched execution of an application store model (Apple a lot to harm themselves on the appstore anyway), the real problem with Nokia’s phones isn’t the name on them.  It’s the way they look and feel.  While the majority of American consumers still haven’t obtained a smartphone, the daunting physique of a Nokia N81, for example, could give a buyer pause.  The lack of fluidity of form in Nokia’s products means that the user is exposed to as many features as possible, whether or not they want to use them, and perception is that there’s a long learning curve.

To the degree that the iPhone is simple-to-use, Apple has more or less beaten Nokia by exploiting that one shortcoming. Forget about the crummy app store, the weirdly-perceived brand name, and the GSM-only carrier support for a moment.  Nokia needs to embrace the “downrightly simple” mantra that had early adopters falling all over themselves trying to lay hands on an iPhone. Indeed, if it weren’t for AT&T’s customer retention strategy, Apple may’ve sold twice as many iPhones as they have.

But then, I believe most iPhone sales occured at Blackberry’s expense, not Nokia’s–and that, of itself, does not bode well for the European giant.

Global Accountability Live and in the Flesh

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It’s hard to argue against the realtime global accountability that Ken and Sheryl have been talking about lately, especially in light of this story about a fifth grade teacher whose home-made DVD of classroom memories, distributed to all students in the class, accidentally contained a totally graphic clip of her performing a sex act.  The DVD, made using the teacher’s personal computer, was all over the web in a matter of hours.
The DVD incident illustrates an item of particular importance in the global accountability discussion: personal conduct matters, online or off. Like a crude counterpoint to the global accountability token phrase Ken and Sheryl referred to: “We can fact-check your ass,” it seems that “we can see your ass” would’ve been the more poignant choice.
Digital content responsibility is something that has become abundantly clear to those of us who use Twitter, Facebook, and the like.  If you say something stupid, you pay for it.  If you wear your emotions or political beliefs on your sleeves, you are guaranteed to receive an argument from somebody.  Yeah, stating the way you feel about something to the realtime web is like whispering to people ten thousand yards away during a windstorm–but they can all still hear you. So–paying the price for impropriety is practically a given in this world of realtime reaction.
But what’s most ironic about this sex video spat in Sacramento is that it didn’t occur as a result of the teacher’s involvement in the realtime web continuum.  Instead, she made a “real-world” mistake, distributing a hugely embarrassing video to her students.  The fact that such mistakes can be so easily made with digital content is the underlying point.   And such mistakes are exponentially magnified by concepts like duplication, syndication, and realtime distribution.  I guess it’s a good thing she didn’t vid-tweet this thing to her students. (Ultimately though, the video made it around the globe in a heartbeat–no tweeting necessary.)
Online or off, we as a society of content-addicted consumers are still struggling with the management of such content, struggling to put a handle on our collective use of new outlets for our own worthwhile expressions, and yes, our own sensitive and private ones.
I don’t know if the lesson here is that more young professionals than we’re willing to admit actually make videos like this, or if those of us using digital content (which is everybody now) should just be more selective in our judgment about the type of content we decide to create.  Which would be an easier lesson to teach our kids?  And that, at the end of the day, is the painful downside of global accountability.
The realtime web, and related digital toolsets (like Apple’s iDVD and a stack of blank DVD-R’s), can really, really punish you if you’re not honest, wholesome, accurate, and appropriate. Defanti is learning that lesson the hard way.

Green I.T.: stick it in your ear along with your bluetooth headset

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Following on reports that the EPA is suppressing documentation that argues against the notion of man-made climate change, it appears that the agency may be running interference for the administration, whose warming stance is both idealogically and politically erect.

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. “My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide),” he said. “There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down.”

It’s amazing to hear this stuff starting to come out. I wonder if the people in the trenches are finally beginning to realize that the monumental rush “Everything Eco”, the so-called Green Movement, is a collossal misallocation of fiscal resources at a time of 10% unemployment and a collapsed real estate industry. The federal government gives Tesla a half-billion dollars in what is a considerable R&D gambit, and I’m scratching my saying why isn’t our government keeping that money in order to stop destroying the credit of the American people?

Green I.T. is one of the chief offenders.  Even as we seek to move mobile apps to the cloud, we centralize power consumption in “hot spots”–the very same thing heavy industry did during the twentieth century. Load goes up, demand goes up, carbon is emitted. Manufacturing of mobile devices moves to China, whose plants are half as clean as American ones, and we’re worried about their Kyoto-boggling pollution instead of their murderous, liberty-defiling, anti-human regime.  Is all this the price of this Going Green?

Too rich for my blood.

When are our industry leaders going to get their heads screwed on tight again and get back to the business of innovating to help people instead of helping superstitious, political science?

Counterpoint to Om: The word Cloud is just a brand.

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Om points out in his recent post that the concept of cloud computing is muddied–that is, different marketeers have different definitions for what the cloud actually is.  I remember having the same debate about the definition of Web 2.0 a few years ago.  What it really boiled down to, in the end, was the Web 2.0 included two components missing from Web 1.0: 1. a healthy dose of non-browser web services, and 2. social-driven or preference-drive functions.

The same argument is occuring over what the Cloud is and isn’t.  I have my own theory that the symantics will ultimately give way to widespread social adoption (as was the case with Web 2.0) or cultural irrelevance (as is arguably the case with VoIP, thank you very much AT&T/Verizon).   In the end, Cloud computing will either get over the hump because there’s something truly compelling in it, or it will fade away into abscurity along with push web, active desktop, Vonage, and a thousand other nifty concepts that have had their 15 minutes of fame.

So what IS cloud computing?  In my estimation, the cloud is the same thing we used to call web hosting up until about 2006–with one arguable, barely-noticable difference.  Since 2006, the availability and cost-effectiveness of both Blade infrastructure and virtualization technology has increased substantially, meaning that it’s now possible to compartmentalize and virtualize the core pieces of hosting technology that run the server side of the web.

In essence, you can turn networking resources on and off when you need them, serving peak loads and ignoring moments of non-demand.  Indeed, before we had this monicre, “the cloud”, we had other words for the same idea, chief among them “on demand computing”.  Thanks IBM.  The reason we’re using the cloud to describe  this now instead of on deman computing probably has something to do with the Web 2.0 thought evolution.  People view the web in a much more organic way now.  It’s a playground, a garden, and an ecosystem, serving as a center point between instant communities of millions of people and interest.

That degree of just-in-time social organization requires a name that lends itself to mud, muck, cloudiness, and disorganization. Hence, the cloud, not on-demand computing. Not Web 3.0, which itself offers little meaning beyond a chronological sequence.

Yet the cloud is merely a brand, a catch-phrase designed to market the engineering ideas we in the tech community get all hot and bothered about to people whose purse-strings ultimately power the fulfillment of those ideas.  With that goal in mind, the cloud is a very poor brand indeed.

Now I know IBM was selling servers, but maybe they had it right with on-demand.  Guys, the “cloud” doesn’t need to marketed.  Let’s stop trying to hard-sell something that we’ve been using for years already.