April, 2011
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Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity
Larry Tesler is a computer scientist. He’s a software guy who’s got a rather distinguished persona as a “user experience guru” today, and some serious industry credits in his bio. He worked for Apple in the 1980s. Notably, beginning in 1990, Tesler led efforts to develop the Apple Newton, the grandfather of the iPad and [...]
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In An Era Where Cheap is Becoming Free, How Do We Get Clients to Pay?
In this intriguing piece from the Guardian, Cory Doctorow breaks down the most common strategies that content providers are leveraging in the Cloud Age to get clients to pay for things that they could easily “pirate” for free. Some might debate whether the consumer should pay for something that is available for free at all, [...]
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Why iPad Competitors Continue to Fail
In the pitched battle for form factor dominance, the tablet would probably be bringing up the rear of the pack, except for Apple’s phenomenal iPad. The iPad is basically untouchable. Motorola, RIM, and others have tried and are trying to unseat the reigning king iPad, but are failing because they’re focusing on the wrong competitive [...]
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What Can The Cloud Do For Me?
For an IT Solution Provider, the answer boils down to three major things. 1. The Cloud can offer you new ways to solve old problems. Cloud computing and hosted solutions can help to strengthen your value proposition and competitive position with your valuable clients. Whereas in the past it cost thousands of dollars to implement [...]
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What if the Vendor Fails?
Every Service Should Have A Strategic Plan Industry analysts have been hinting for months that continued adoption of cloud-based technologies will cause changes in the competitive environment that could cause some big vendors to fail. Which vendors? It’s hard to say exactly, but particular attention is being paid to whether or not vendors are agile [...]
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This Week’s Weather Report Podcast: Gazing Into The Future of IT Services, Part 1, With Special Guest Jay McBain, SVP of Autotask
Today in the IT industry we sit at a crossroads. A historian might call it “Interregnum”—the period after the old king has died, but before a new one has been crowned. What we do and the way we do it, delivering IT services, is changing, and fast. Even if it’s not destined to be the [...]
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Inside Out: Outsourcing Is Dead
In the past we came from a place where the starting assumption regarding business technology was in-house. On-premise. Owned by the business that operated it. The very term “outsourcing” implies this position and a kind of directional movement: “Internal” resources or functions being taken outside and fulfilled by an external organization. It’s a strong paradigm [...]
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And You Call Yourself A Solution Provider?
Solution Provider. What does this term mean? Why would I spend valuable time writing this morning about the definition of a term so seemingly self-explanatory? Well, for two reasons. First, if it were really so self-explanatory I wouldn’t feel the need to bring it up. Clearly we’ve got some issues around this, so I want [...]
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Unintended Consequences: IBM’s Black Team
Our industry has a few legends; tales that are told and retold, shared as examples and lessons for generations that came, and those yet to come, after. One of my favorites is the tale of IBM’s Black Team. This is a true story, perhaps slightly dramatized over 40 years of retelling. But a true story [...]
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Green IT: Not Perfect, But Making Progress
We wrote last week about Greenpeace’s “Dirty Data” report, in which the organization calls out the tech industry for its “…focus more on using energy efficiently than on sourcing it cleanly.” My initial take on this was basically that while we’re not perfect, we’re making progress. It’s good that Greenpeace is there to point out [...]
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Priorities: Cheap, Fast, Good
First, let’s define our three items: Cheap = inexpensive, good value for the money Fast = quick response, fast turnaround Good = high quality, did it right the first time, professionalism While there are three options, the reality is you (and your client) may only have two of them at any given time, on any [...]
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Rain Makers, The Weather Report
Behind The Amazon Outage: Post Mortem
(Prologue: I was out sick yesterday, so I’m a day behind on everything…including this story. Many apologies to anyone wondering yesterday what happened to me. –Kate) After about four days and hundreds of pages of whining on the blogosphere, I’m beginning to make some sense of what I can’t help but call “CloudGate.” And no, [...]
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Are Tablets Just a Fad?
the “traditional” PC market remains strong. We aren’t really inclined to think so, though we’re also not inclined to jump to any conclusions. The PC has been the dominant form factor for many years, yet there is some evidence that we are getting over the learning curve and may be nearly ready to incorporate the [...]
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How Green Is Cloud Computing, Really?
Greenpeace recently released a new report about cloud computing. Specifically, the energy choices that power cloud computing. While reduction of power and energy consumption IS commonly cited as one of cloud computing’s top benefits, Greenpeace points out a few issues. Let’s discuss. Here’s a quote from today’s LATimes Technology blog: “Many companies…tightly guard data about [...]
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Microsoft Exec Admits they Take A Bigger Piece of the Services Pie With Office 365
We wrote yesterday about some recent Gartner stats indicating a shift in the “software to services” sales ratio that has become so familiar to us in this channel. Historically, the ratio has been $1 of software to $3 of attached services. Gartner predicts that this ratio will be, thanks to increasing adoption of cloud computing [...]
