2015 Mar 12

It's Always About the People (Even in Tech)

Two months ago, I posted an article about a United Airlines series of failures that, if not so painful for their paying customers - and their employees too - would be laughable. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading an interview with the legendary Gordon Bethune, who turned around Continental Airlines in a single year, from a loss of $600MM in FY1994 to a profit of $225MM in FY1995.

2015 Mar 11

Licenses as Premium Pricing

Two weeks ago, we argued that, in the face of competition (and there is always competition), "Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last." At the same time, there always will be premium priced products - Tesla and BMW, Apple Watch Edition, Oracle - but the question is how long these can maintain significant market share? A smart commenter, amelius, raised a fascinating point. Amelius compares premium pricing for substitutable products to restrictive licensing for software.

2015 Mar 10

Kill the SIM Card

About five months ago, I looked into the "Not-So-Simple SIM Card." In short, I called for the abolition of the SIM-to-carrier-to-number tie. For those who never change carriers or travel, this doesn't matter much. You get your phone, you go to your carrier store - or a local retailer like RadioShack (RIP) or BestBuy - sign some paperwork, get a card, insert it into your phone... and never worry about it again.

2015 Mar 9

Whence Private Clouds, and Why Amazon and Google Should Spin Off Cloud

After our article last week discussing the economics of moving into AWS vs. do-it-yourself (DIY), Jim Stogdill wrote an excellent follow-up about when enterprises aren't moving into the public cloud; Simon Wardley - whose strategic situational awareness mapping is in a category by itself and should be required reading for anyone responsible for strategy - continued with his input. In Jim's words, private clouds are like SUVs; they rarely make sense economically, but sometimes you buy them anyways because:

2015 Mar 5

Design for Failure in the Cloud. Actually, Everywhere.

In one of our earlier discussions about cloud, an astute reader pointed out that one "downside" of public cloud, especially one like AWS, is that they make very few guarantees about your instances. While the system as a whole has service level agreements (SLAs), your particular instance does not. To quote: "If your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it" The underlying assumption, of course, is that you have better control over the level of availability of your particular instances and their underlying hardware, especially scheduled maintenance, when you control the entire environment rather than leaving it to a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace.

2015 Mar 4

Kill Your SLA

Do you have SLAs with your customers? Dirty little secret: they don't matter. All that matters is customer expectation in real time. You are running a service. You know that your enterprise customers are highly sensitive to availability, since they use your service to help them make money. Perhaps they even use you as part of their customer-facing platform. Nonetheless, you know you cannot provide 100% availability, even discounting planned maintenance.

2015 Mar 3

Does Amazon Web Services Pricing Follow Moore's Law?

Yesterday's article on the short life span of premium (and especially ultra-premium) pricing led to a robust discussion on Hacker News. In the article, I used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example of a company that actively tries to cannibalize itself. A smart commenter pointed out that AWS pricing, while falling continually, has nonetheless fallen more slowly than Moore's Law, according to which equivalently-priced capability should double roughly every 18 (or 24) months.

2015 Mar 2

Premium Pricing Just Doesn't Last

If there is one truism in the technology market, it is that premium pricing just doesn't last. If you are first to succeed in a new market - which is distinct from first to a market - then you often have a premium price product because you are the "first" and often the "best". The problem is that it just doesn't last. No matter how good your IP (Intellectual Property, like patents, not Internet Protocol), eventually competitors catch up with "

2015 Feb 27

Youth Makes You Young, Not Coca-Cola

It is oft-stated that most people really do not get statistics. Just say that word, "statistics," and most people's eyes glaze over. Confession from this engineer and MBA: I did horrifically in my undergrad stats course. (Fortunately, I did better in my MBA course, thanks to a big dose of good teaching from Bob Winkler, and a small dose of being a decade more mature). What does all of this have to do with Coca-Cola?

2015 Feb 25

Hiding Fingerprints in Your Browser for Privacy

The browser is the single most ubiquitous piece of software on the planet. Nearly every computing device has at least one one. Because of its ubiquity, and its use across multiple applications from open (Google "how much does a banana weigh") to private (browser-based email) to secure (office applications or banking), it is also a source of many risks. This article will dig a little deeper into issues of browser security and privacy.