Disqus - Latest Comments for timwessels

Re: A blast from the past - Microsoft accused of monopolistic practices

timwessels — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:33:35 -0000

Well, wasn't it Mr. Gates who touted OS/2 as the company's next OS? So WordPerfect and Lotus actually believed him and started to build versions of their popular software for OS/2. Then Mr. Gates got upset with IBM over the OS/2 Presentation Manager and decided to call off their joint OS/2 development efforts in 1990. After the "divorce" Microsoft proclaimed that the company was going with Windows and IBM would continue with OS/2. In hindsight, it looked like Mr. Gates "sandbagged" WordPerfect and Lotus so he could jump ahead of them in the Windows market.

Re: Cloud Computing in the Enterprise – Private (Internal) Clouds

timwessels — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:05:28 -0000

Hi John,
Saw you at CloudCamp Boston this past July. Enjoyed the event. You and
Dave did a great job.

2009 is turning out to be one of the worst ever years for IT investment.
Maybe large corporations will actually have access to capital and credit to
build their private clouds, but small and medium sized businesses won't. I
doubt that they will be able to borrow or obtain credit for the next round
of server upgrades and licenses for proprietary software upgrades.

Many small businesses I work with rely on credit and credit cards to operate
their businesses. The credit card companies have already reduced the number
of accounts by 15% and they are decreasing credit lines for everyone else
based on their exposure to defaults, which are now running at roughly 10%.
The more unemployment increases the worse it will get for small and medium
sized businesses. IT in small and medium sized businesses is not immune to
these changes.

The economy has entered a deflationary cycle that could last for a decade.
There is way too much private and public debt and not enough income to
service it. I suspect most small and medium sized businesses will finance
their IT operations out of accounts receivable or barter. Cloud-based IT
services are what they will turn to because they are all opex and no capex.

The economy is in much worse shape than most people are willing to admit.
Public cloud computing is one thing that will help many small and medium
sized businesses slash IT costs and hopefully survive.

tim

Re: Cloud Computing in the Enterprise – Private (Internal) Clouds

timwessels — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:56:53 -0000

I think you hit private clouds right on the head...the amount of effort for any IT organization to get this done correctly out of the box is probably pretty high. So the question is how much are they going to "invest" in creating their private cloud and how much better will it really be than using a public cloud? My guess is they will have to invest a lot and it will never be better than using a public cloud as the technological forces affecting public clouds will outstrip the capacity of any private cloud to keep up with them. My conclusion is that for the short to mid term private clouds will be very expensive to build and operate and will constantly lag behind the services and features that public clouds will offer.