The Emerging Mobile+Cloud Stack and Its Natural Owners
Apple’s is set to launch iCloud in the next few days, and with it Steve Jobs plans to move the center of your digital life to the cloud. Amazon just announced the Kindle Fire, which Jeff Bezos calls a service, not a tablet. When you buy a new Android phone or tablet, the first thing [...]
I Was Wrong: The Next Big Thing is NOT Cloud Computing
Yes, after 5 years of being a big fan of cloud computing. I admit defeat. I am, as of today, changing my worldview. Cloud Computing is no longer the future. And that’s the bad news.
But the good news is that Cloud Computing is now an accepted reality …
Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage
As of the latest update this afternoon on Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard, only a handful of customers are still waiting for their EBS and RDS instances to be restored after Thursday’s harrowing outage. But for everyone involved (not least Amazon’s own operations staff) it’s been a very long four days (see latest Techmeme discussion). What [...]
People Using Amazon Cloud: Get Some Cheap Insurance At Least
I’m reading through Twitter streams, Amazon Forums, and other news sources trying to get a sense of how users are responding and what their problems are. It’s pretty appalling out there. B2B companies admitting they have no recent backups and just have to wait for it to come back online. A company that claims patient’s [...]
What to Do When Your Cloud is Down
As I write this, Amazon is having a major East Coast outage that has affected Heroku, Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and others. Heroku’s status page is just the sound of a lost sheep bleating repeatedly for its mother in heavy fog. What’s a poor sheep to do about this problem anyway? After all, isn’t a Cloud-based [...]
Any Hardware Company Not Investing Big in Cloud is Nuts
If the Cloud is here to stay, and the trend to move apps into the Cloud is only going to get stronger, then any hardware or infrastructure company that doesn’t invest big in the Cloud is nuts. The problem these vendors face is “Cloud as disintermediator”. Companies that buy into the Cloud are letting the [...]
Where’s the Amazon AWS App Store?
I was talking to the interesting folks over at DreamFactory the other day (courtesy of Phil Wainewright who introduced us, thanks Phil!), and we wound up on a fascinating topic of conversation. At a time when many companies are still not in the Cloud, DreamFactory is in 5 different clouds with as many as 8 different applications. [...]
Gartner: The Cloud is Not a Contract
There is a bit of a joust on between Gartner, GigaOm, and likely others over the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure. The Internet loves a good fight! Gartner launched their magic quadrant with some fanfare on December 22. Immediately after the holidays, on January 4, GigaOm’s Derrick Harris threw down the gauntlet by [...]
Salesforce acquires Heroku: Dork Move, guys.
I came into the office this morning to see a tweet that stopped me in my tracks. Salesforce.com is acquiring Heroku for $212m. In cash! Beyond the obvious bubbliciousness of the deal was a cold hard truth about the once and future kingmakers – developers. You see I didn’t first hear about Heroku from a [...]

