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Loading ...Fifteen years of the Web, and Facebook 15 years from now
Without Tim Berners-Lee, we might all be slaves to Gopher by now.
You could probably celebrate an online anniversary of some kind every day, but April 30 marks the moment, 15 years ago, when Berners-Lee and CERN renounced all claims of intellectual property around the protocols that allow users to access information over the Internet. Until then, the best we had was Gopher, a spin-off from the University of Minnesota which gave away browsers for free but charged for its servers. The World Wide Web knocked Gopher aside like a troublesome rodent.
In a thoughtful, easy-to-read overview published on the BBC Web site, CERN director of communications James Gillies points out that CERN’s altruistic approach meant we had a uniform way of navigating the Internet, “instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.” We still, however, might end up with a Facebook Web.
Although I set up a Facebook profile in order to administrate our publication’s group, I had put off filling out the details because it’s not a way I tend to communicate. A friend of mine – who has recently surpassed the 1,000 friend mark – changed my mind, when he pointed out that there are many people he knows he can contact through Facebook, but who tend to be unavailable any other way. Although I’m more of LinkedIn guy, that got me thinking, so I have added more information to my profile.
The World Wide Web was set up to read things in cyberspace, but a lot has changed in 15 years. After years of discussing its promise, social networking is putting the emphasis on relationships rather than information. Even as some organizations ban Facebook and similar sites, there is a growing recognition that a shift is talking place in online communication. Just as there was a time when we realized that some people were more likely to respond by e-mail than return a phone call, some people are using social networking services to avoid interaction by more traditional means.
The difference is that we tend to congregate as users not in open, public services but in those owned by a single company, like Facebook. If CERN had invented Facebook, its focus would probably not have been on the advertising opportunities but the chance to enlarge the online conversation.
In a recent interview with Esquire, Vint Cerf admitted there was no great “ah-ha!” moment when he and others set the Internet in motion. “They see the Internet now and think, Well, thirty-six years ago someone imagined what it would look like in 2008, and that is what drove the process. It wasn’t like that at all.” The same holds true for the Web. Although we tend to think those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it, we have to make sure as we wax nostalgic about the early days of the online revolution that we don’t lose sight of the principles which guided it.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...AMD offers breathing room with Business Class PC
AMD’s decision to move into the business PC market this week reminds me of the first line of Shopgirl, a novella by Steve Martin, which points out that working in the glove department at a large retail store means “you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.”
Of course, someone has to be buying new PCs somewhere, but with more people concerned about software licence terms and the ability to save the Windows XP operating system, updated hardware seems kind of beside the point. It’s intriguing, then, that AMD would not only move into such a saturated segment but that it would offer absolutely no innovation. The company’s Business Class line includes its Phenom quad-core X4 9600B for US$230, the Phenom triple-core X3 8600B for US$175, and the Athlon dual-core X2 5400B and 5200B for US$120 and US$110, respectively. There is also the Athlon X2 5000B and 4450B for US$95 and US$80 and the single-core Athlon 1640B for US$50.
In place of enhanced features AMD is pitching stability. The company is and guaranteeing that processors will remain available for two years and is extending warranties from one to three years. Forge about good enough computing. This is peace of mind computing, and, much like Oracle’s pledge for lifetime support in the software space, it’s not a bad strategy.
I’m not sure how well this competes with Intel’s processor lifecycle, but given that its product roadmaps often seem to stretch from Toronto to Vancouver, something tells me it’s more focused on moving customers to the next generation of technology than preserving their investment in the previous one. AMD admitted its Business Class line will probably resonate with small businesses first. That’s because corporations, if they’re big enough, are probably able to wrangle the lifecycle they need with Intel’s product line.
Although all the major business PC makers leapt on the announcement, the big beneficiary might be Dell, which is trying to regain its No. 1 position and could nicely piggyback its traditional reputation for quality service onto the longevity of AMD’s platform. Remember that three years ago, former Dell chief exec Kevin Rollins caused major upheaval in the market by considering AMD-based Dell servers. It’s a sign of AMD’s progress that an OptiPlex 740 with AMD inside is almost a foregone conclusion.
Intel’s own business processors and chip sets, Vpro, is not that old, and AMD hopes to win with features like out-of-band management, which allows IT staff to access machines even if the OS doesn’t boot. Although Vpro’s Active Management Technology allows this, AMD is touting an open standards approach. That may not make much of a difference, though, when the proprietary option, Intel, owns more than 80 per cent of the market.
Perhaps the biggest issue of AMD will be its own financial performance, which has been dismal lately. Although Intel has had its own operational screwups, missing product deadlines has been an ongoing problem since AMD’s early days. It may be difficult for IT managers to think of AMD as a business-class PC provider if it can’t keep its own business running smoothly.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: A seranade for beta testers everywhere
So all I know is that a German company called Popula is planning to launch an online event calendar, or something like that. Until it arrives, you can enjoy these extremely weird, oddly melodic tributes to those who decide to work with technology before the rest of the world does. This is actually part thee of “The Early Adopter Song,” which appears to be a cross between the Backstreet Boys and . . . . Sprockets?
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Yahoo! A social networking strategy that makes sense
There’s a reason you don’t often see someone compile a top-10 list of the coolest Yahoo applications. Yahoo isn’t cool enough to attract cool applications, and until this week it wasn’t that easy to build on top of them. Now that it is promising to remove the first barrier, it might be possible for Yahoo to overcome user inertia, too.
At the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco the portal player’s CTO, Ari Balogh, announced a plan by which Yahoo will build on its existing open API strategy and streamline the process by which developers create tools on its various platforms. It will also bring all its user profiles – a Yahoo visitor’s e-mail account, instant messaging, Flickr albums and so on – under one virtual roof.
Though it is being touted as a radical depature, Balogh’s strategy is very much in keeping with Yahoo’s traditional modus operendi. While Google pushes visitors out to other sites through its search engine, Yahoo was more concerned with keeping visitors within its borders, whether it was to read news or look at photos. It took a wrong turn with Yahoo 360, which would have been a great social networking service if it hadn’t lagged so far behind MySpace and Facebook.
Like a lot of other startups that flame out (but which receive far less attention), Yahoo was forcing asking users to create yet another profile, when few of them have time to do any of that. Instead, the company has realized it can mine its installed base and the information they have already entered into its database. This is, effectively, a master data management project, one that recognizes how much easier it is to get more business out of an existing customer than it is to find new ones.
What a difference a couple of years make. Not long ago Yahoo was behaving like enterprises in the early days of the Internet, who would announce a Web site redesign as though they had created a new model of automobile. Now the company has realized it can get a lot more mileage out of simply following the lead of the social networking services which have sped by it. If Yahoo doesn’t get swallowed up by Microsoft – which may have its own API strategy for a combined entity – it might become a much more interesting player. That’s not to say Yahoo entirely gets this market.
“We don’t think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension. It infuses every element of the consumer’s experience on the Web,” Balogh told IDG News Service. Wrong. Social is not just a destination but a series of destinations, which is why more developers are thinking about Facebook than MySpace, and why they’re probably thinking more about both MySpace and Facebook than they are Yahoo. There’s no point in creating, say, the next Scrabulous if you put it on a platform where no one’s going to play it. Social networking is about real estate. Yahoo’s three biggest priorities right now are to prove it is an choice location, location, location.
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(1 votes, average: 6 out of 10) Loading ...Microsoft’s Live Mesh: The IT department implications
Even though it seems to signal a shift from its PC-centric corporate philosophy, I wouldn’t call Microsoft’s Live Mesh offering a disruptive technology. If anything, it’s an accommodating technology.
Released this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Live Mesh allows users to share data folders across different PCs and devices, storing information both on the hardware and on the Web. It’s not pure cloud computing. It’s kinda-cloud computing. Which may give cloud holdouts the peace of mind they need.
Much like Adobe’s Apollo project (which morphed into AIR last year), Live Mesh is about moving data between the online and offline worlds, which is the real “last mile” of mobile computing. As much as vendor promised anytime/anywhere/any device access, Internet connectivity is not ubiquitous and probably never will be. Nor would all users necessarily want everything stored in a single place. Live Mesh would avoid that problem by synchronizing changes made to information in folders and updating them every time the user downloads them to a client device or links back to a portal. Good for customers, good for developers. Not necessarily good for businesses.
So far Live Mesh has been restricted to a private group of beta testers, and in the earliest iterations Microsoft seems to be targeting consumers. There have been vague mentions of security features to be offered to corporate users, but nothing of any substance. And that kind of thing was fine in a world where businesses took their sweet time migrating to new platforms and environments, but not in a world where consumers buy their own devices. Microsoft suggests this doesn’t matter.
The issue is not the technology – sharing folders between devices and the Internet is undoubtedly useful. The issue is the data, or more precisely, the information that might make its way through Live Mesh. If we’re talking about sharing and synchronizing your recipes, no problem. It gets trickier when we’re talking about sales data, expense reports, marketing materials or other content that may be more vulnerable when it’s moving back and forth from a Web site to a cell phone.
Microsoft is also, oddly enough, behaving with Live Mesh as though it were a dot-com startup in the late 1990s, in that it has not revealed any ideas around the business model it will use to support the service. We can assume that users will be stuck looking at ads in their folders and businesses will be charged subscriptions, but the details are as important as the technology itself in determining how well Live Mesh will be accepted.
Online file storage, file sharing and remote desktop technologies are not new, but a combination of them in a package from the world’s largest software firm make for an important launch. I don’t think it’s a question anymore of whether Redmond “gets” the Internet. The task now is to prove it gets how customer adoption patterns and the subsequent IT management headaches are changing, too.
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(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Five ways of defining cloud computing
As with nearly every IT trend, including service-oriented architectures and Web services, just because we’re all talking about cloud computing doesn’t mean we’re talking about the same thing.
I recently joined a LinkedIn/Google group on cloud computing, a member of which posted what should have been an innocent question: Is there a difference between cloud computing and what we know as grid computing? I was ready with my own answer, but overnight about a dozen responses had already flooded in, creating an e-mail chain that offered some interesting nuances on the terminology.
I hope this doesn’t get me kicked out of this group, but I thought it might be interesting to reproduce some of these as food for thought. In the interests of privacy I’m not publishing anyone’s names, and I’ve edited some of the definitions for the sake of clarity and length. Here are the top five:
1. “Vendors, as always, blur the real definitions of new terms. In my opinion (and the opinion of others, cloud computing isn’t the same as utility computing, which isn’t the same as grid computing:
“Grid computing generally refers to resource pooled environments for running compute jobs (like image processing) rather than long running processes (such as a Web site or email server).
“Utility computing generally refers to resource-pooled environments for hosting long running processes, and tends to be focused on meeting service levels with the optimal amount of resources necessary to do so.
“Cloud computing refers (for many) to a variety of services available over the Internet that deliver compute functionality on the service provider’s infrastructure (e.g. Google Apps or Amazon EC2 or Salesforce.com). A cloud computing environment may actually be hosted on either a grid or utility computing environment, but that doesn’t matter to a service user.”
2. “Cloud computing = Grid computing. The workload is sent to the IT infrastructure that consists of dispatching masters and working slave nodes. The masters control resource distributions to the workload (how many slaves run the parallelized workload). This is transparent to the client, who only sees that workload has been dispatched to the cloud/grid and results are returned to it. The slaves may or may not be virtual hosts.
“Cloud computing = Software-as-Service. This is the Google apps model, where apps are located ‘in the cloud,’ i.e. somewhere in the Web.
“Cloud computing = Platform-as-Service. This is the Amazon EC2 et al model where an external entity maintains the IT infrastructure (masters/slaves) and the client buys time/resources on this infrastructure. This is ‘in the cloud’ in so much that it is across the Web, outside of the organization that is leasing time off it.”
3. “The cloud simply refers to the move from local to service on the Web. From storing files locally to storing them in secure scalable environments. From doing apps that are limited to GB spaces to now apps that have no upper boundary, from using Microsoft Office to using a Web-based office. Somewhere in 2005-2008 storage online got cheaper and more secure than storing locally or on your own server. This is the cloud. It encompasses grid computing, larger databases like Bigtable, caching, always accessible, failover, redundent, scalable, and all sorts of things. Think of it as a further move into the Internet. It also has large implications for such battles as static vs. dynamic, RDBMS vs. BigTable and flat data views. The whole structure of business that relies on IT infrastructure will change, programmers will drive the cloud and there will be lots of rich programmers at the end. It is like the move from mainframe to personal computers. Now you have a personal space in the clouds.
“It is a gimmick yes, just like Web 2.0, but there are real changes these are based on. The marketing has been made around the technological advances.”
4. “Grid and Cloud are not exclusive of each other… Our customers view it this way:
“Cloud is pay for usage (i.e. you don’t necessarily own the resources).
“Grid is how to schedule the work - regardless where you run it.
“You can use a cloud without a grid, a grid without a cloud. Or you can use a grid on a cloud.”
5. “I typically break up the idea of cloud computing into three camps:
“Enablers - These are companies that enable the underlying infrastructures or the basic building blocks. These companies are typically focused on data center automation and or server virtualization (VMware/EMC,Citrix,BladeLogic, RedHat, Intel, Sun, IBM, Enomalism, etc.).
“Providers - (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft). The ones with the budgets and know-how to build out global computing environments costing millions or even billions of dollars. Cloud providers typically offer their infrastructure or platform. Frequently these ‘As a Service’ offerings are billed & consumed on a utility basis.”
“Consumers - On the other side of the spectrum I see the ‘consumers’ companies that build or improve their Web applications on top of existing clouds of computing capacity without the need to invest in data centres or any physical infrastructure. Often these two groups can be one in the same such as Amazon (SQS,SDB,etc), Google (Apps) and Salesforce (Force). But they can also be new startups that provide tools & services that sit on top of the cloud (Cloud management).
“Cloud consumers can be a fairly broad group including just about any application that is provided via a Web-based service like a Webmail, blogs, social network, etc. Cloud computing from the consumer point of view is becoming the only way you build, host and deploy a scalable Web application.”
At least we’ve gotten that cleared up.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Why Canada’s IT managers should sign up for Blogging Idol
I’m certainly no Ryan Seacrest – I just don’t own enough hair gel – but for better or worse, I’m going to be your host for IT World Canada’s very first Blogging Idol. Let me explain.
ComputerWorld Canada decided we would host a contest on our blog network where IT professionals could come online and offer their thoughts on a variety of issues. We’re ponying up some serious cash for this: $1,000 for the blogger who drives the most traffic overall, and a Nikon Coolpix digital camera, among other prizes. Although we’ll be keeping an eye out for anything libellous, we’re going to be pretty hands-off in regards to what’s posted, too. You can sign up here.
We’re asking a lot of those who contribute, of course. Blogging on a regular basis for four weeks straight – May 19 to June 13 – is a demanding job for people who already have pretty demanding jobs. Putting your thoughts into print can also be intimidating, especially if you haven’t done a lot of blogging in the past. It’s also not easy to be strategic about it, because blog entries can heat up based on who links where, the topic being discussed or even the kind of keywords you use. We couldn’t put a ringer in this contest even if we wanted to save the prize money for ourselves.
To provide some inspiration, I recently posted my personal choices for the 10 best technology bloggers in Canada, which ranged from ex-newspaper reporter Mark Evans to Startup North’s Jevon McDonald. The one thing I didn’t do was connect the dots and point out what these bloggers shared to make them so successful. A lot of it is hard work – most of them were doing this long before blogs became a popular vehicle for self expression. A great deal of it is sheer talent, both what they’ve gained on the job and what they are able to do with words. But another significant factor is their passion for the topics they blog about. These are not, by and large, bloggers who are in it for the money (several of them would probably laugh at that notion). Instead, they blog because they want to be heard.
IT managers often have a difficult time making themselves heard. They speak about useful applications, bad surfing habits or poor use of resources, and are ignored. They are asked to speak at vendor conferences but are stuck dealing with a pre-written script. They get quoted – or, as some have told us, misquoted – in publications like ComputerWorld Canada. Blogging is obviously not a replacement for face-to-face contact, but it can be a way for IT managers to articulate their thoughts and opinions in a way that provides links to supporting evidence and an electronic paper trial. It’s a communication skill that may become more important within the next decade than it has been in this one.
Although Blogging Idol is a contest, the “competition” is only a part of the plan. We’ll also be profiling some of our top contestants, offering tips on better blogging and creating opportunities for coworkers to pledge their support. Best of luck to everyone who enters. I can’t wait to starting reading these posts.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Not-so-service-oriented architecture
Users always complain that the IT department is hiding when they really need them, and finally we have video evidence. This brings back good memories of building forts as a kid, although it looks a more like a cardboard igloo. Love how this little laptop-box sanctuary is the neatest thing in this otherwise garbage dump of an office. I just hope no one in this particular company was in a hurry for their Dell notebook.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Alberta told by Auditor General to get its COBIT on
Pretend for a moment that Alberta is not a province but a really large company that has managed to enter a lucrative market at just the right time with some great products and is experiencing some tremendous growth. This is the point where, amid the scramble to milk as much revenue as possible and scale the business, problems within the IT systems creep in which prove fatal, or least near-fatal, when the company enters a rough period. That’s what makes the recent Alberta Auditor General report so important.
According to Fred Dunn, whose staff conducted a sweeping review of all the government departments, the systems that manage public data lack the controls, or anything that would measure the effectiveness of Alberta’s IT investments, the risks to which they are exposed or any real best practices.
“No department has an overall well-designed IT control framework, or has completely implemented well-designed and cost-effective IT controls and processes,” the report says. The implications Dunn’s team outlined are that Alberta’s systems could face security breaches, data could be lost, or service costs could escalate due to downtime or other problems.
What’s interesting about Dunn’s report is the case it makes for COBIT, or Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology. As I reported earlier this year, the IT Governance Institute (ITGI), which publishes COBIT, conducted a survey this year which showed many companies have a high awareness of COBIT but say they lack the employee or other resources to properly implement it as a framework. This is the kind of excuse you might expect the government of Alberta to make, but Dunn’s report pre-emptively responds to it.
“This process does not have to be onerous, time consuming or expensive. The cost of adopting a control framework is, in itself, not high. The cost increases only as specific controls are implemented,” the report says. “And, a disciplined approach requires organizations conduct a risk assessment, determine their exposure to risks, quantify the costs of mitigating them, and then implement controls only if they are cost effective. For example it is not cost effective to implement a control costing $10,000 to safeguard an asset worth $1,000.”
The same thing could probably said of many other private sector organizations that have put off COBIT adoption or ignored the need for an IT controls framework altogether. The impression I sometimes get from organizations is that controls projects never seem to end, and that’s exactly true. As your environment changes and evolves, controls may have to be updated in tandem, depending on your goals and the level of governance you’re trying to reach. ITGI recently said, in fact, that it will be coming out with an additional framework later this year, which one executive described to me as a sort of add-on to COBIT, that deals specifically with risk management. Although Alberta is reportedly set to implement COBIT within the next year, Dunn’s office may suggest they look more specifically at the risk management piece.
Although the current boom in Alberta doesn’t necessarily mean everyone there is getting rich, it puts more pressure on the government there to show it can manage its good fortune effectively. Its IT systems will be a part of that, because a good controls framework ensures things won’t just run well when the oil strikes, but when everything dries up, too.
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(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Dave DeWalt and the mission for McAfee
You didn’t have to know that Dave DeWalt is the CEO of McAfee to realize he is an American visiting Toronto this week. No one up here is quite so tanned in April. But that wasn’t the only way DeWalt stood out to me as a leader of the world’s second-largest security software firm.
I was invited to a customer-only briefing session at a posh downtown club called the Fifth, where I discussed the state of the CIO in Canada and tried to put some of DeWalt’s keynote remarks in context. Not that he was unpopular with the crowd. Tall, handsome and highly approachable, he was surrounded shortly before the event like a debutante out at her first ball. His message to attendees was pretty simple: there are a lot of threats out there, and McAfee has a number of its own products or ones it has gained through acquisition to deal with them. The most memorable image in his slide presentation, which he repeated a couple of times, was a picture of a man’s feet, standing on the ledge of a building, followed by an animated Batman-style “Splat!” that filled the screen.
This was standard stuff, but I was intrigued by some of the questions from the crowd, which were perhaps more sophisticated than DeWalt had bargained for. One guest was interested in learning more about security as a service – ways in which protecting data can be offered in a utility fashion similar to other compute infrastructure. Another attendee pointed out the absence of wireless threats in his keynote, which Dewalt admitted he wished he’d had more time to discuss.
DeWalt, meanwhile, surprised me by mentioning Symantec by name as its greatest competitor. Usually vendors in McAfee’s position like to pretend that they’re the only game in town, as though mentioning the other leading brand will make customers more predisposed to consider their alternatives. He also said he speaks to about 40 CIOs a month – an approach that, based on the data I presented, might not be the right move.
According to IT World Canada’s annual CIO survey, for example, only six per cent said they see security planning as an important job activity, and only 14 per cent suggested they spend much of their time there. Instead, 64 per cent focus on interacting with other CXOs and developing strategy, leaving the more tactical work to their IT department staff. DeWalt, in other words, may find it increasingly difficult to get CIOs’ attention, at least here in Canada.
DeWalt was an intriguing choice for McAfee. He came from Documentum, a constant management firm that was taken over by EMC. Content, obviously, is one of the assets that firms like McAfee are trying to protect, which is probably why EMC branched out last year into the space with its purchase of RSA. Symantec, meanwhile, moved into storage with Veritas but has left the content hole unfilled. It would be interesting if DeWalt were to shake McAfee up by taking on a content management firm – Waterloo’s Open Text, perhaps? – that would make it a more pivotal player in the overall handling of information, as well as making it safe.
I told the crowd that as much as CIOs want to become more strategic, they shouldn’t limit themselves by thinking of security as tactical. If you’re really innovating, I said, you’re probably taking some risks by opening up new ways to communicate with customers, partners or employees. That in turn opens up new avenues of attack or vulnerabilities. Security needs to be as strategic as all the other elements of IT which CIOs oversee. If he wants McAfee to gain traction over Symantec, DeWalt is going to have to tell his customers the same thing.
