February 2009 Archives

I find it comical that there were users writing in on Google message boards during the 2 hour outage with pleas like: "Get this going; I have a deadline to meet." At least one company mentioned in a WSJ article said they were unable to fill orders during the down time. It's hard to tell if the outage affected paid users of the Google application suite. Presumably, when you pay, you get a service level agreement. I doubt they have server farms sectioned off for business users, especially for such a huge application like Gmail.  Google also suffered a phishing scam this week with Gmail chat where a link to a site called "ViddyHo" asked them for their logins and passwords. This is why federated social authentication scares people. Sometimes when corporate email goes down, the sysadmin goes down too. For Gmail, there is no throat to choke and no face to ask when the outage would be resolved. They introduced an application dashboard today to help us feel better. Since Gmail is still in "beta" maybe users will continue cut them some slack. 

The Stratus Project announcement focuses on partnering with a variety of companies in the data center ecosystem to assemble a converged "data center fabric."  The release describes a flat, non-blocking and lossless layer to support converged traffic at 10 GigE. It sounds great. The problem is given number of players in the Project, who is responsible for delivering on this SLA? Will it be Juniper or presumably a systems integrator? I only see a mega router and switch that gives some operational improvement on implementing JUNOS in a data center but not much more. The website provided in the release was 404. 

Rather than launching Windows Mobile 7.0, Microsoft introduced an intermediate step in its quest to stem the Smartphone market share decline during 2008. The new platform has a touch-friendly honey-comb style main menu, wider menus with big icons and an online service called Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The success of the Apple App Store has prompted other manufacturers such as RIM and Nokia (Ovi Store) to follow suit in promoting the developer community. Before the iPhone, Microsoft had split the Smartphone market with RIM. Now it competes in a crowded marketplace (i.e., smaller world) where creating separation from competitors becomes a challenge. They should let RIM battle Apple and focus on differentiating against the Palm Pre. To me, "Pre" means "Pre-iPhone" and "Pre-Blackberry," I'm watching out for Palm, they're still getting noticed. 

Blackberry's new Argon Enterprise Server BES 5.0 doesn't make mention of any administrative features to support MVS. Device management including customizable roles, permissions, groups and resource access is important to maximize the end user's experience and minimize support costs. You still need to provision users for their handset feature set. It doesn't look like RIM has integrated the tools from Ascendant Software into the new Enterprise Server. 

The Kindle is not a game changer like the Apple iPod was with music. This product has less of a growth curve than iPhones, NetBooks or other consumer devices. People are questioning the grayscale, the price and the experience but some like the aluminum case, the Stephen King eBook, "Ur" and the ability to get any printed book in 60 seconds. For $359, you can shop for a Netbook and get more functionality. The total cost of ownership of Kindle is higher because with newspaper subscriptions, books and other additions, you could run up to $100/month easily. Amazon doesn't break out the sales of their eBook business but they claim it is 10% of overall titles sold. The Kindle is Amazon's call option on the future of reading. I'm afraid that call option will expire worthless, there's a reason books haven't changed for 500 years, they still work!

Super Bowl advertisers kept the connection going after the game using Twitter. New Media Strategies estimated there were over 49,000 post-game posts. Pepsi, E*Trade and Overstock used Twitter for feedback. H&R Block asked users to guess who the voice of Death was in their commercial. One software engineer from North Carolina won a free copy of TaxCut after responding "Abe Vigoda" within minutes of the question. Even with the weak economy, NBC sold a record $206M for the 69 TV spots. Combining traditional media advertising with live hash-tagging provides a high level of real-time feedback on the ads. The question now is whether advertisers will utilize the Twitter community to tailor or change their messaging strategy given the fact that not all the feedback was positive.