do
Not that long ago but in a place far away, I came to the conclusion that devices that purported to help people manage their days in fact made the problem worse. I was taking aim at everything from the Palm to the Franklin planner. The problem as I stated in my long lost archives of [...]
Some Economic Consequences of Dreamforce
It’s worthwhile to consider the economic consequences of Dreamforce — the products announced as well as the cultural issues it raised. Now, I am not an economist and I encourage you to think about that and maybe not read this if that matters. Many people might look at the news coming out of San Francisco [...]
Dreamforce 2011: Salesforce Forces its Way Onto The Top Table, Gets Big to Win Ugly
“Apps companies get acquired, and platform companies get acquired. To be a strategic supplier, with off the shelf solutions, and custom apps, you need to offer both.” So said Byron Sebastian, general manager at Heroku and Salesforce.com SVP of Platform at Dreamforce last week. Many of my peers have already posted about the event, so [...]
Previewing Dreamforce
People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce and Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. This is not new [...]
Every SaaS provider runs a private cloud
One of the highly misleading assumptions built into the term ‘private cloud’ is the notion that there’s no privacy in the public cloud. People talk as though cloud providers don’t use firewalls or private networks or encryption. But of course they do. In most cases, the technology infrastructure they use is far more secure than [...]
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 …
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 [...]
Considering PaaS
If there’s ready cash at hand, lock-in and “proprietary” is demoted in favor of a quick buck; if the developers are building a general application with a longer time between compile and cash, an open, standard platform is more attractive.
PaaS choices today
In the light of Salesforce.com’s swathe of announcements at Dreamforce last week and other recent developments, it’s a good time to take stock of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) landscape. What are the choices now available to developers and business people looking to build applications on a ready-to-run cloud platform? As part of this review, I’ll report [...]
Well, I am a systems guy…
It’s amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word unique, which means one of a kind, if you add very or any other modifier to it, you get mush. Today’s word might be amazing. There is entirely too [...]
