Cloud
« Previous EntriesApples and whoozits?
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Apple’s profit line has beaten Microsoft’s profit line.
It’s an occasion whose importance rivals one of a bygone era: The day the “Whopper beat the Big Mac,” back when the burger wars were upon us.
Comparing very much of anything having to do with Apple to anything having to do with Microsoft is about as sensible as [...]
Unstructured data design – the missing methodology
Monday, May 17th, 2010Microsoft has just announced Office 2010. Surprisingly enough, it has genuinely interesting new features, most of them revolving around SharePoint and support for collaboration.
And, of course, The Cloud, where to Microsoft’s credit, alone among major software vendors its product makes serious use of the PC’s processing power instead of limiting its role to running a [...]
Core American Virtues
Monday, April 5th, 2010I’m promoting a new business model: Whole Business Outsourcing (WBO). It’s the next logical step after Full Functional Outsourcing (FFO) and its successor, business process outsourcing (BPO). Here’s our value proposition:
A popular means to personal wealth is to start a company, create the illusion of success, then get rid of it for a large chunk [...]
A Cloud in time
Monday, January 18th, 2010The first article I ever published in InfoWorld began, “Does anyone else find the Gartner Group annoying?”
While no longer a Group, the annoying part is alive and well, as evidenced by its recent prediction, reported in Network World, that by 2012, “Cloud computing will become so pervasive that by 2012, one out of five businesses [...]
State of the industry, 2009
Monday, December 14th, 2009Revenue, cost, and risk.
These are the three goods of business — the three and only three reasons for expending money, effort and attention.
To increase revenue, companies either attract new customers or sell more to the customers it already has. As an alternative, some companies acquire another company to buy its revenue … usually for more [...]
Cloudy disruptions
Monday, August 24th, 2009What if the Cloud really is a disruptive technology?
It’s been called that enough times. Usually, though, those using the term never actually read Clayton Christenson’s seminal work in the field, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business.
These folks will tell you “disruptive technology” means a technology that disrupts [...]
Lost and found
Monday, August 10th, 2009Tell me how this makes sense.
Sitting on every corporate desktop is more computing power than existed in the average 1980 data center.
We’re going to use that computing power to run a browser and nothing but a browser. Through a complex combination of networking, virtualization, elaborate security provisions, and even more elaborate management and invoicing systems, [...]
Outlook partly Cloudy
Monday, July 20th, 2009The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is on my mind. I’ll get to why in a moment. Right now I have a project for it to take on: Public Infrastructure.
Here’s why: Right now public discussions of political issues such as taxation are frequent, top-of-mind, polarized, and controversial. They are also entirely divorced from [...]
Outlook Cloudy
Monday, July 13th, 2009Professor Irwin Corey would understand …
The “World’s Foremost Authority” once explained, “Today we’re going to talk about the universe. Why? Because there isn’t anything else!”
I’d hoped that when I deconstructed Nicholas Carr’s paean to Cloud computing — officially titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google but more properly titled The Joys [...]
Carr-toonish engineering
Monday, February 11th, 2008If someone does something that’s patently ridiculous, but manages to draw enough attention that it generates a lot of discussion, has that person performed a valuable service or just wasted our time?
But enough about Paris Hilton, Kiefer Sutherland and Lindsay Lohan. In our own industry we can ask a similar question about Nicholas Carr, who, [...]
Bob Lewis is president of 