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ie8 fix

stephen o'grady

Open source may be your only ticket out of the cloud

Enterprise IT sometimes behaves like the group of teenagers I counsel on a weekly basis as part of my church responsibilities: "Damn the future, let's live for the present!"

Stephen O'Grady offers a pungent critique of this nearsighted tendency in enterprise IT, especially as it pertains to the cloud:

Very much like Apple on the consumer level, (commercial cloud providers) Google et al demand sacrifices in return for convenience. Perhaps--or make that likely--realizing that businesses will invariably sacrifice the future at the altar of the present. We'll give you the convenience and time to market … Read more

There will definitely be more than one major cloud vendor

Unlike search or Web browsing, using cloud resources is not, and won't soon be, a drive-by event.

For the foreseeable future, you will have to actively choose to use the cloud. As such, there is little room for total domination. The cloud requires you to opt-in to participate. Google and Microsoft's Internet Explorer are more passive in their usage.

Even with a new breed of tools like RightScale and GoGrid, you are still an active participant. And considering that the cloud is generally discussed as enterprise nirvana, there are some major flaws in the theory that there will … Read more

The price Microsoft pays for its patents

I hate to keep beating this drum, but I read Stephen O'Grady's report on Brad Smith's keynote at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) and thought it was worth highlighting. Stephen isn't prone to exaggeration or zealotry. So when he writes these words, it's worth considering:

Microsoft has a standing annual legal bill, we're told, of ~$100 million dollars to defend itself from patent related litigation. Unless the licensing revenue stream easily eclipses that amount, why is the current system worth defending? Why does Microsoft insist on speaking out in defense of a mechanism that appears, if anything, to negatively impact its shareholders? It seems like a flawed equation.… Read more