What does selling clothes to Macy's have to do with selling software, and cloud services, to enterprises? Everything. Earlier today, I was speaking with my brother-in-law, entrepreneur and consultant Kevin Pearl. Before starting a firm to improve capture of billing time for attorneys, accountants and consultants; before serving as a turnaround consultant; before building a firm that sold software to manage venture capital portfolios; Kevin ran a firm that sold clothing to large well-known clothing retailers.

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.

In a world full of email, then SMS, then Twitter-based abbreviations for everything - ttyl, afaik, iirc, rtfm - do good, clean, clear writing skills still matter? Yes. Unquestionably, and without a second's hesitation, writing certainly matters, not solely for the pedantic nitpickers. Good writing skills greatly affect your business success. Secret of Success I once asked a very successful executive what he thought was the single most important factor in his success.

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.

Continuing our series on cloud services, especially our most recent one, "How to Do True Cloud", we now turn to the technology that enables true cloud services. This article will go more in depth than the previous ones; after all, we are discussing technology services. However, it will not go so deep as to lose the business-side executives. Indeed, any great executive in technology needs to hold to two principles simultaneously:

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?