Why do customers agree to open-source work I do? In the past, we have discussed the benefits of open-sourcing your own software: Reputation Recruiting Contributions Recently, I had the pleasure of walking half an hour from a Tokyo train station with Matthew Garrett, who does some impressive work on core operating systems (pun intended; Mathew works at CoreOS). One of the thing I asked him is why a company open-sources its entire stack?

Over the last few month, I was reminded - twice, painfully each time - about the impacts of good vs. bad software design choices, especially the impact those choices can have downstream. Ironically, it is not only - or even mainly - the creators and primary users of the software who are impacted, but others unforeseen at design time. Installing an Operating System Anyone who has installed an operating system on their laptop or server - or even smartphone - is familiar with a series of questions, choices and answers, as they configure the operating system.

Yesterday, we looked at how the market values Yahoo, and tried to understand why a company with $6.3BN in net assets, and another $31BN in a fairly liquid equity investment is valued only at... $31BN! Interestingly, Daniel Morris pointed out an article in CNBC from September which argued that the issue is taxes. Essentially, Yahoo's investment is encumbered by a potential tax bill. If an when they liquidate it, the tax bill will be enough to wipe out the rest of Yahoo's assets.

Steve Denning has a great short article in Forbes, referencing Peggy Noonan on what Steve Jobs had to say about why big companies fail. The article is worth reading - actually, the entire Isaacson biography of Jobs is a great read - but here is the money quote: The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.

Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage and use. Personally, I think Docker containers are great. They provide a far more efficient level of isolation than VM virtualization, without sacrificing manageability. Docker itself, however, is a young company, and every now and then young companies, whose products are moving very quickly, make silly mistakes.

In earlier articles, we discussed How to Outsource and When to Outsource. Today, we turn to when not to Outsource. At first blush, we expect not to outsource when our candidate does not meet at least one of the criteria for outsourcing listed in When to Outsource. Better Results: Your outsourcers can get you better results, improving any one or more of quality + time-to-deliver + cost without negatively impacting the others.

For many years, business was assumed to be "staid" or "proper". Certain dress and behaviour was appropriate for outside the office, and never to be seen inside. While the distinction between professional and unprofessional behaviour (thankfully) still exists, businesses have begun to open up to the distinction between "inappropriate" and "just plain fun." Those businesses that do embrace their humourous and playful sides have begun to realize significant customer loyalty and even pricing benefits.

I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and then easily scale them up to production scale. As an aside, the very design encourages them to develop their software in a well-architected fashion; see "The 12-Factor App." Just as Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) EC2 abstracts away hardware, so a PaaS abstracts away the operating system, allowing software managers to focus on software.

Normally, I dislike the phrase "soundbite". It implies a shallow, bite-sized saying that misses all of the depth, nuance and complexity that exists in the real world. Nonetheless, soundbites are successful precisely because they can convey - for better or for worse - a key idea in a short, memorable and often inspiring phrase. Earlier this week, Josh Bernoff, in his bluntly named blog, gave the "Parable of Ray's Helicopter Company"

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.

Now that we understand what the cloud is, the types of cloud services, the difference between true cloud and hosting, why true cloud matters greatly, and how it makes you nimble, the inevitable question is, how do we get there? Or, to use our question from our last article, how do we get to say, "YES", to the customer who offers us $500,000 - or $5MM - if we are ready to run tomorrow?

What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit. Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed. On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies:

"The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer." - Peter Drucker No matter how many times we say it, we forget it. We get caught up in operations, or competition, or marketshare, or share price. Yet a business, like a life, has a purpose: to create and keep a customer. I might add, "to keep that customer profitably satisfied." Earlier this month, a very well known Apple developer, one of the "

Years ago, a young man, let's call him D, with whom I had once gone to summer camp followed his dream and opened a meat restaurant. They had great big burgers, flaming wings, fresh onion rings and fries, a meat-lovers dream. Not only did I enjoy going there, but when a group of friends helped me move apartments before I got married, I took them there for a "thank-you" dinner.