| | Fri, 02 May 2008 10:41:44 -0500 | | As Microsoft and Yahoo continue with their interminable modern-dress staging of Hamlet - it's longer than Branagh's version! - the transformation of the software business goes on. We have new players with new strategies, or at least interesting new takes on old strategies. One of the cornerstones of Microsoft's competitive strategy over the years has been to redefine competitors' products as features of its own products. Whenever some upstart PC software company started to get... | |
| | Thu, 01 May 2008 12:12:57 -0500 | | Yep, today marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of my article "IT Doesn't Matter" in the Harvard Business Review. I thought I should mark the momentous occasion, even though I'm as sick of the whole thing as everyone else is at this point. Still, "IT doesn't matter" has taken on a happy life of its own, largely independent of the original text. I saw today some IT columnist terming the article a "screed." I... | |
| | Thu, 01 May 2008 10:11:03 -0500 | | "Captcha" is the official term for those wavy strings of numbers and letters that you have to decipher before setting up an online email account or gaining access to other types of web sites. The acronym, coined by someone at Yahoo a few years back, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Captchas are intended to separate men from machines in order to prevent spammers and other nasty folks... | |
| | Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:39:17 -0500 | | The inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, has joined the great Peter Max painting in the sky, but the dreams he spawned live on. Publisher and sometime savant Tim O'Reilly tells the BBC, on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the World Wide Web, that a true "global consciousness" is at last emerging, thanks to the Net. "It really is going to happen," he says, and "it's going to happen mediated by... | |
| | Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:59:08 -0500 | | A new study, to be released today by McKinsey & Company, reveals in some of the clearest terms yet the sea change that is under way in business software. The consulting firm surveyed more than 850 corporate software buyers, from firms of all sizes, and found that software-as-a-service is rapidly "becoming mainstream," with three-quarters of software buyers saying they are "favorably disposed to adopting SaaS platforms" for software development and deployment. The rapidly growing embrace... | |
| | Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:10:44 -0500 | | The new issue of Wired has a feature article on Amazon Web Services, the online retailer's computing utility. The article gives a sense of how rapidly the utility business, and its underlying infrastructure, is expanding. When AWS launched in earnest a couple of years ago, with the S3 storage utility, Amazon's computer system was at times running at just 10% of its capacity, according to CEO Jeff Bezos. Now, AWS demand has "far exceeded the... | |
| | Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:06:18 -0500 | | A new report from the Linux Foundation reveals the extent to which the most famous and successful open source software project - the development of the Linux operating system - has shifted from being a volunteer effort to being a corporate initiative. Of the many thousands of changes that have been made to the Linux kernel over the past three years, fully 73.2% came from employees working on behalf of their companies. (Three companies -... | |
| | Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:57:45 -0500 | | The top-ranked post at Hacker News right now is from a software developer who asks, "How do you stay emotionally efficient?" The question, with its assumption that emotions, like work flows, can be managed with greater or lesser efficiency, strikes me as another small but telltale sign - along with the rise of "social networking" sites and the structuring of "friending" as an automated process - of the insidious colonization of our personal and social... | |
| | Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:56:38 -0500 | | Over at the University of Chicago Law School, the students in Randal Picker's Tech Policy Seminar have been reading The Big Switch and commenting extensively on it on the class blog. Last week's postings were on the first half of the book; this week's are on the second half. The discussion is particularly interesting when it delves into the legal and regulatory implications of cloud computing.... | |
| | Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:44:39 -0500 | | I've looked at clouds from both sides now, and they're really freaking expensive. Google's capital expenditures, the lion's share of which go to building and outfitting data centers, soared to a record high of $842 million in the first quarter of this year, up from $678 million in the fourth quarter of '07, notes Data Center Knowledge. Should the company maintain its current pace of investment, its spending on data centers and related infrastructure will... | |
| | Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:37:01 -0500 | | Reposted from the new edition of Edge: What is the compelling urgency of the machine that it can so intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world? - Joseph Weizenbaum Somehow I managed to miss, until just a few days ago, the news that Joseph Weizenbaum had died. He died of cancer on March 5, in his native Germany, at the age of 85. Coincidentally, I was in Germany that... | |
| | Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:30:31 -0500 | | The clouds open and . . . the face of Google appears. As long anticipated, Google is now allowing outside developers to write applications that will run on its vast network of data centers. The company's App Engine, now in a closed beta, provides a new cloud-based development platform that will compete with, and perhaps complement, the platforms run by Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, and others. As it happens, I'm about to give a talk... | |
| | Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:05:16 -0500 | | Arianna Huffington likes to say that her Huffington Post blogsite is becoming an "Internet newspaper." There's just one problem: there's no such thing as an Internet newspaper. That, anyway, is my contention in The Great Unbundling, the initial post in Encyclopaedia Britannica's weeklong forum on Newspapers and the Net: "The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the... | |
| | Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:39:28 -0500 | | Edge has posted Eliza's World, a brief article I wrote about Joseph Weizenbaum, who died last month. It begins with my favorite sentence from Weizenbaum's classic Computer Power and Human Reason: "What is the compelling urgency of the machine that it can so intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world?" Read on.... | |
| | Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:58:32 -0500 | | Here's my latest column for The Guardian, which appears in this morning's edition: Neuroscience and marketing had a love child a few years back. It’s name - big surprise - is neuromarketing, and the ugly little fellow is growing up. Corporate pitchmen have always wanted to get inside our skulls. The more accurately they can predict how we’ll react to stimuli in the marketplace, from prices to packages to advertisements, the more money they can... | |
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