networking-info

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's technology chief talks about everything from Vista's low sales numbers, cloud computing, competing with Google, Linux desktop, and his Spotwatch in this long interview . No surprises so far. Cloud computing: He believes that the world is not black and white and that people won't ditch their desktop lients anytime soon to completely migrate to software as a service. I think this makes sense. Microsoft is significantly investing into cloud computing via their "live" initiative but the strategy is to complement the on-premise model to achieve the client-server-service deployment model. Vista: He admits that number of Vista copies sold so far is a small fraction of Microsoft's overall customer base. He calls it a cycle of diffusion and exploitation and Vista being in diffusion cycle waiting to be exploited. This is a chicken and egg problem. There are not enough Vista consumers out there and that's why developers are not that exc...

The conversation with Brandon Schauer , design strategist at Adaptive Path , about design thinking is worth reading. Brandon talks about topics such as critical thinking and design thinking, design attitude versus decision attitude, and the importance of business fluency amongst designers. I agree that for a business problem, you do want to apply design thinking to explore as many alternatives as you can , but you do want to critically think through all the alternatives before you reach a solution and keep your stakeholders informed about your decisions. Not only business fluency is critical to do this but a designer needs to have empathy for the stakeholders as well. Traditional ethnography techniques such as contextual inquiry can be used to understand user's goals and aspirations, but the designers need to go a step further and understand their stakeholders better and for that the designers need to acquire skills in the business and strategy area.

eBay has come a long way from the infrastructure architecture perspective from a system that didn't have any database to the latest Web 2.0 platform that supports millions of concurrent listings. An interview with eBay's V.P of systems and architecture, James Barrese, The eBay way describes this journey well. I liked the summary of the post: "Innovating for a community of our size and maintaining the reliability that's expected is challenging, to say the least. Our business and IT leaders understand that to build a platform strategy, we must continue to create more infrastructure, and separate the infrastructure from our applications so we can remain nimble as a business. Despite the complexity, it's critical that IT is transparent to our internal business customers and that we don't burden our business units or our 233 million registered users with worries about availability, reliability, scalability, and security. That has to be woven into our day-to-day pr...

Today Slashdot has picked up a story column-oriented databases . The story claims that one size fits all approach does not work well for the current data warehousing requirements and that the organizations should explore other options beyond legacy RDBMS. The post says "Hence, my prediction is that column stores will take over the warehouse market over time, completely displacing row stores." The fundamental assumption here is that somehow the data warehousing solutions are drastically different than OLTP ones and that's why has different storage, or I should say access, needs. What the post is missing is that many modern OLTP applications require real time analytics side-by-side and cannot really depend upon a separate data warehousing. The technology such as in-memory databases and materialized views that run on top of OLTP RDBMS make it feasible for an application provider to just have one hybrid system - OLTP or data warehousing, whatever you want to call it. This wa...

SugarCRM announced Sugar 5.0 which has multi-instance on-demand architecture. This is opposite to multi-tenancy model where many customers, if not all, share single instance. Both models have their pros and cons and adding flexibility for an on-premise option complicate the equation a lot. But the fact is that many customers may not necessarily care what on-demand architecture the products are being offered at and any model can be given a marketing spin to meet customers’ needs. The multi-instance model resonates well with the customers that are concerned with the privacy of their data. This model is very close to an on-premise model but the instance is managed by a vendor. This model has all the upgrade and maintenance issues as any on-premise model but a vendor can manage the slot more efficiently than a customer and can also use utility hardware model and data center virtualization to certain extent. The customizations are easy to preserve for this kind of deployment, but there is...