Disqus - Latest Comments for wattersj

Re: …Write A Long Business Plan

wattersj — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:51:25 -0000

:) Thanks...use and abuse.

Re: …Write A Long Business Plan

wattersj — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:52:20 -0000

The best reason to adopt this strategy comes from a general understanding of marketing--people form judgments quickly based on a few key variables. When looking for money you can either flip their yes switch or you can't.

Getting funded is just a very segment specific form of marketing.

Re: Cloud Collision: Epic Public vs. Private Debates Begin

wattersj — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:25:39 -0000

vmWare gets it; they just bought Springsource, they know they can't be consolidation kings alone.

http://blogs.vmware.com/con...

Re: Can Cloud Computing Fix Healthcare? Salesforce Says Maybe.

wattersj — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:52:32 -0000

I think its also important to know they are offering it for free (sure as a start, I know). Cloud computing, well dynamic SaaS will push to commodify many currently high value business process. Currently a DVD rom based practice management software might be $25K ++

Re: Plane and Simple: Conventional Wisdom Isn’t Always Wise

wattersj — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:25:50 -0000

I think the big take away for me here is that we begin intense problem solving once we have a clear problem. Often times the status quo will seem feasible etc, so sometimes you have to create a problem to focus the attention, creativity and idea iteration that drives innovation.

Re: You Can’t Spell Failure (or Success) Without ‘U’

wattersj — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:39:50 -0000

I really can't wait to write mine now, its length may not be very eco friendly though...

Re: How User Authority and Reputation Will Change Twitter (For the Better)

wattersj — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:44:11 -0000

This is a really interesting topic. Right now the rule is 'open' and 'free for all' with most of the power on the individual users as they filter out what to pay precious attention to and what to skim, unfollow and overlook.

The new system would take some of this power and give it back to the system.

What is more corruptible though? A mathematical system or the individual judgments of users.

I would be a fan of this if they implemented it ONLY for trending topics, and perhaps searches but in a very lightweight way eliminating only obvious abusers--as they seem to already be doing manually by just removing them from the system.

If the algorithm starts ruling the universe however I will leave twitter. Google is already becoming increasingly worthless for many searches for me due to massive gaming and SEO tricks. It has resulted in only already rich/massive sites being returned as results--and in a sense there is no greater engine of web-status quo now, because of this, than Google.

Re: Cloud Collision – The Angle on Why Dr. Eric Schmidt Is History from Apple’s Board of Directors

wattersj — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:00:55 -0000

"It’s clear the smartphone issue is obvious but what isn’t is the future of who powers the smartphone apps?"

The interesting thing about the cloud collision is its breadth and this is a great example. On paper a few years ago these companies couldn't have looked less competitive.

But with a huge change coming from a cloud architecture everyone feels rightfully entitled to owning the full potential breadth of it.

Re: Emotions and Reality of Covering Yahoo-Microsoft Search Deal

wattersj — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:46:03 -0000

Ahh it seems like only yesterday Yahoo was buying Inktomi...

Re: Time to Replace your Online News Room with Facebook!

wattersj — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:44:36 -0000

This is a great point, and something John infact already does for SA. Sometimes we get more comments on FB than we do on the blog. Shows the huge value of bringing your data to where the user habits already are.

Re: Yahoo! Searches Itself and Finds Nothing

wattersj — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:38:32 -0000

Favorite quote is "its complicated" as their relationship status. I'm moderately close to tech, and I have no idea in the world what yahoo is anymore. Who needs a portal company in an atomized web world--I don't know.

Re: Could the Zune Be Reaching the End of Its Life-Cycle?

wattersj — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:38:10 -0000

It seems like MS's strategy of 'following' only works well in durable markets. The market for the Zune was quicksand once the Iphone generation happened.

The follow and bully strategy isn't doing so well in today's rapidly evolving world..just look at recent MS results.

Re: Forbes’ Hosted Oracle’s Appliance Aporia

wattersj — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:34:27 -0000

John,

Thanks. Super agree on "things will change beyond recognition point" I think in 5 years that will be the case for sure. It makes for interesting observation.

Am working on a full piece on how the cloud collision is impacting a broad group of IT players...will surely annoy 20 PR departments in 1 day!

James W

Re: Amazon Fail: 1984 Edition

wattersj — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:54:16 -0000

It seems like a search and seizure property rights issue; once you are 'sold' data that data should be yours and even if the data was sold in error, they should have to ask for it back instead of taking it.

Its such an important discussion not because of the damage done by this one incident, which is the argument your opponent is making here, but because of what it said about search and seizure rights for digital goods.

I support the foul crying...

Re: NYT Kicks off Cloud Paranoia Editorial Series

wattersj — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:59:31 -0000

What's interesting to me is that his News week piece on Chrome earlier in the month before twittergate/Amazon 1984 was much less paranoid:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/...

If you look at the rhetorical change of tone between the two I think you can see the NYT editorial team trying to play into the current paranoia--and this time I think they stepped in it by going all the way towards innovation paranoia.

Re: Hello Boto: Cloud Computing Libraries Emerging

wattersj — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:41:38 -0000

Yes, it took $6B in specialized MS R&D to seed the cloud into exactly that form :)

Re: Hello Boto: Cloud Computing Libraries Emerging

wattersj — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:18:55 -0000

I think the motivations have been similar for a while. Lock in enterprises, and open up to consumers when you can. Lock-in tends to be the king maker even over quality/innovation, so this should be interesting to watch.

Re: “Silent Giant” Millennial Media is Majority of Mobile Monetization Map

wattersj — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:57:46 -0000

Everyone should remember it was only 2 short years ago that Apple was DEBATING about letting mobile apps be developed on the iphone by third parties. Its a brave new world.

Re: Rackspace and MS Take Further Steps to Battle Amazon in the Cloud

wattersj — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:59:45 -0000

Did anyone else expect Azure to be a much more virtualized, IDE centric approach with a much different pricing structure? I mean MS has 6B$ in R&D, for them to release a DB size limit in this project, while very honest and transparent, also makes it seem like they just repackaged existing software instead of making it a real research project.

I hope they step it up significantly. Right now it seems they are just going after existing business customers instead of targeting novel/new web developers.

Re: Infrastructure Capability and Value–Great Architectures need Great

wattersj — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:37:59 -0000

It seems there are two big points here at least; virtualization and the elastic scaling of the network capacity(to 10 lanes).

Its scary how little discussion happens about the network inside AWS. Right now the EC2 instances can pump out content often faster than the S3 storage or perhaps other nodes can handle it. I don't think we should accept that just because it's the way it is today?

Node-node network capability seems to be a big hurdle to moving away from the parallel, load balanced and batch oriented workloads we have today. Right now the software really is constrained by the hardware.

Re: Why is Google Launching an Operating System?

wattersj — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:33:43 -0000

The focus on growth is a really important theme to hammer on. So many people get caught up in the old fights vs. the new ones. Well done!

Re: Is the OS the new QWERTY keyboard?

wattersj — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:50:57 -0000

(dom design theory a big passion button for me...)

I think James Utterback has done a lot of research around dominant design theory re; QWERTY and other technology kernels that get embeded in future generations/innovations because of their critical mass. (the book on Amazon http://bit.ly/NxEWa)

What he finds is that there is a period during which a war is fought for a portion of the design/technology with many small companies being formed to attack the opportunity, but this growth period ends and it becomes cost prohibitive to enter the market. I believe that's where OS is now or close. We are pretty much stuck the OS design elements we have today for the long haul, with minor variations.

I think thats a different question than what you are asking though--namely, will the OS be the development/interaction layer of future applications. I absolutely think the OS will NOT be the interaction layer for most developers. Just do a Google search for jobs for C++ coders vs. Java. Almost all business applications are already written to Java (look at Oracle's new fusion stack).

OS ecosystems stick around as dominant designs mostly because of their network effects--they have critical mass so most tools are developed for them etc, its this ecosystem thats the sticking point. Twitter wanted to use Solaris as its base, but the RoR dev tools weren't as abundant there etc. This is classic Dom design tension--even better/faster solutions can't win because their innovation phase has passed and they are now an embedded standard, which Linux largely is today.

So, in a very long winded answer, Linux/MS/OSX will probably always be with us, but VERY few developers are really making an OS choice these days. Almost all of the interesting new applications are being written at a higher level of abstraction.

Take Google's preso at structure09; they write to GFS/MapReduce/BigTable. That's not an OS. Never mind the 400k Facebook developers completely removed from an OS, many of them making millions a year doing so. @wattersjames

Re: iPhone 3G S Dropped in Swimming Pool: Real or Fake? [Video]

wattersj — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:35:47 -0000

...just watched again and the guy is still on the float no big deal about it, if my buddy just dropped his phone while standing on the pool edge I'd be off my float to get it in a heartbeat. I can't even believe people are considering this as possibly real.

Re: iPhone 3G S Dropped in Swimming Pool: Real or Fake? [Video]

wattersj — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:35:35 -0000

Fake; the guy floating doesn't react. If I just saw my buddy drop a new iphone in the pool I'd flip out. Also how could he know its still working that fast he doesn't seem to turn the camera off or try any interface on the phone. Sure if the screen is still glowing its a good sign but if it happened I'd be worried even after I saw a glow.

Re: Writers Network Gets $1.25M in Angel Funding

wattersj — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:11:47 -0000

Hopefully they will have some good content. Content spam is getting to be a big problem on the web in our SEO driven paradigm.