Even Clouds With Silver Linings Can Burst
O ver the past few years cloud computing has gone from an obscure topic to the hottest property in the tech sector. Being a devoted cloud advocate this news pleases me in many ways, however, underneath that silver lining there may be trouble looming. Company valuations in the sector have sky- rocketed to a stupendous level. For anyone who remembers the dot com bomb the alarm bells are already ringing. Take for example, Salesforce.com, as I write Salesforce has a P/E ratio of more than 700, for a relatively mature company this makes very little sense to me. Granted a small high potential start-up might be able to justify this kind of a valuation but I cant see how Salesforce can increase its profitability 50 fold to bring its valuation in line with the rest of the...
Read MoreAmazon Web Services – Double Failure
A s many of you who use Amazon Web Services will know there was a major failure in the EU west region yesterday (Sunday 7th August). The failure was initially categorised on the Amazon Status Website as a “Connectivity issue”. Hour by hour the status was updated to include a power outage, then a generator fault and after 14 or 15 hours Amazon announced that they were getting back on track and should be fully operational soon. This morning, after nearly 24 hours of outage Amazon announced that most instances were back on-line, but they were now running into capacity problems and anyone with non-running instances should basically set them up again. As it happens, most of the instances I am running were back on-line with the exception of 1. I was very...
Read MoreTech Company Lawsuits – Who Sues Who
A number of people have asked me questions recently about who is suing who in the tech world. I was going to write a post about the subject – but then I came across this great diagram from Bonkers World which explains it all perfectly clearly.
Read MoreJonathan Zittrain on Amazon Mechanical Turk
T his is a great video from Google Zeitgeist Europe 2011 in London. Jonathan Zittrain talks about the good, the bad and the ugly with innovation on the cloud and in particular the dark side of Amazons Mechanical Turk. He uses examples to show the correlation between tasks, performance and human beings.
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