Authentication as a Service: Slow Progress, But Are We There Yet?
Authentication as a Service solves a problem every Cloud Developer, mobile or desktop, has to solve. As one player in the space, AuthRocket, puts it: Do you really want to write code for users, forgotten passwords, permissions, and admin panels again? To that I would add, “Do you really want to have to be a world class […]
How Moore’s Law Put Apple in the Driver’s Seat and Cost Steve Ballmer His Job
With the Mac’s 30th anniversary, lots of folks are writing all sorts of articles about it, so I thought it only fitting to bring up my own thoughts on what happened and how Apple got control away from Microsoft. It’s not a theory I have seen anywhere else, but it’s the one that makes the […]
Big Data is a Small Market Compared to Suburban Data
Big Data is all the rage, and seem to be one of the prime targets for new entrepreneurial ventures since VC-dom started to move from Consumer Internet to Enterprise recently. Yet, I remain skeptical about Big Data for a variety of reasons. As I’ve noted before, it seems to be a premature optimization for most companies. That post […]
From Dreamliner to Nightmare
Complex systems fail in complex ways not anticipated by engineers. You can over-engineer the systems, test every imaginable scenario, build redundant system coverage, test again. and you can still fail. Boeing’s nightmare is just beginning, their latest generation airplane, the 787 Dreamliner, has been grounded because of fire danger in the lithium ion batteries […]
Saw the Microsoft Surface Tablet and Liked It
I was at Houston’s Galleria mall during the Thanksgiving weekend and got a chance to spend some time in both the Microsoft and Apple stores there. I had read a few articles praising the device, such as Jeff Atwood’s piece (which fairly gushes), but was skeptical. I’m not at all an Apple Fan Boy nor […]
The Two Most Desirable Features of a Platform as a Service
Big Data? Multitenancy? Uber DB scaling? Mad Hadoopishness? Faster app development? Universal Social Connectivity? Not so much. Some platform or other claims all of those things, but the two most desirable features of a PaaS appear to be revenue generation and commodity pricing, not necessarily in that order. Let me first say that I’ve come […]
Conspiracy Theory: the Vista-ization of Windows 7 has Started…
Three years ago I wrote: Windows Seven in 2010. Does Anyone Still Care? I simply don’t get it: Vista is barely out, nobody seems to like it, CIO’s refuse to upgrade, analyst firms tell them to wait, individual users who tried it switch back to XP, others time their new PC purchase so they can […]
Remember HP’s New Wave? Here We Go Again!
Sam Diaz has gotten clarification on the future of Windows in the light of their Web OS announcements. It should come as no surprise that Windows isn’t going anywhere, and certainly won’t be replaced by Web OS any time soon. Instead, HP is saying: HP will integrate the WebOS experience into Windows, but not through […]
Scoble Discovers Developers are Schizo About New Platforms
I just listened to Scoble’s bar interview of @longview (Nick Long) and @renatto (Paul Robinett), two Dreamworks developers who are building a mobile app of their own. They’re talking about the Mobile World, and there are some great sound bites coming from the interview. BTW, the Cinchcast tool he used to do the interview was pretty […]
Forget SaaS vs On-Prem, Here are 8 Application Styles to Consider
The EI discussion about Microsoft’s poor handling of Silverlight brought out the different viewpoints swinging. The “RIA was never a good idea” camp was in full force as was the “this confirms everything about HTML5″ and the “Flash is on the same train as Silverlight” camps. I don’t see these developments nor the evolution of […]
