Amazon outage -the view from the mainstream press

When a story that gets the IT world excited actually makes it into the mainstream press – then for once the IT world was right to get excited.

So when The Economist covered Amazon’s and Sony’s problems last week, it was proof that cloud computing (and its teething problems) had broken out of the IT world and into general business consciousness.

Interesting to note that The Economist main recommendation was that SaaS vendors should not rely on just one hosting supplier, as I prescribed in my last blog.

Finally, Less is More

My favourite rag The Economist has a great little editorial on how the IT industry is finally coming around to the idea that less is more. The article says that consumers are suffering feature fatigue as vendors pile on new features of limited use that just make the products less easy to use, and that “frugal” innovation, delivering equivalent products for radically less cost, is breaking out of the new economies into the old economies.

All of which is music to my ears. But why does it take a recession for people to realise that products that have everything you need (and no more) and that are easy to use, are actually better than products choc full of features that you’ll never use that just make it slower and complex? And will we all revert to our lazy ways once the good times come around again?

Thunder in the Clouds

I’m sure you’ve read about the IBM’s Open Cloud Manifesto, Microsoft’s reaction to it and then the press reaction to both. If you haven’t, see Paul Greenberg’s summary. Even the worthy Economist covered the story, so it must be big news.

“Open” initiatives are always launched by a consortium of second tier vendors who want to challenge the first tier vendors’ grip on the market. Unix v Open VMS, CORBA, the Open Software Foundation, we’ve all been here before. The market leaders will have their own “open” systems that are open as long as you use their products, whether their platform is Amazon’s, Google’s, SAP’s or Salesforce.com. And there is no way any of those vendors will want to make it easy for users to use products outside of the fold. Not surprisingly, the loudest noises are coming from Microsoft, the vendor with the most to lose from the whole concept of cloud computing – not just the application revenue, but the whole stack of client and server operating systems, middleware and databases.

When playing the “Open” card, vendors have to tread a fine line between making their systems sufficiently “open” so that customers are attracted to them, but not so “open” so that they can leave easily. Think lobster pot and you get the idea.

As always, the market will decide, despite different vendors’ attempts to set the agenda. Thank goodness!