Yesterday, Vala Afshar tweeted out the following https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/706678404884652032 ... to which Paul Graham of YCombinator fame responded: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/706710881652965376 I beg to disagree with Paul, but not how you would expect. One of the valuable intellectual behaviours one learns from studying Talmud is to analyze a situation from all directions, teasing out all potential logical explanations, no matter how strange or absurd they appear at first. If all of the following is true:

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:

How did Lenovo do something so inane as fundamentally breaking their customers' laptop security by installing Superfish? What is Superfish, and what is wrong with it? I have often asked clients to consider, "what business are you in?" The right answer is not, "to make profits", or "shareholder return", because those are bland, meaningless statements. Every business wants to make profits and return value to their shareholders. Peter Drucker said, "

What would you call a global, enormous, Fortune 500 company that 95 out of 100 of its employees strongly recommend it as a place to work? Sure, an exciting new startup, but an old-school 70-year old company? What if that company was IBM? In a great article by a former IBM manager, he explains how they used to have: Merciless manager reviews Managers much younger than their employees who took severe criticism from those employees.

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: