Cloud Wars: Why History Will Repeat Itself
Cloud Wars: Why History Will Repeat Itself
From Pat O’Day @ www.sys-con.com
“Battles over formats and standards in the technology industry aren’t new. Whether it was e-mail, word processing, graphical images or even some more current like the apps on your smart phone, each new innovation typically starts out somewhat proprietary and incompatible.
Today we live in a world where a lot of those battles have been fought and won while some are only starting to heat up. Formats tend to resolve themselves through standards so that things like e-mail and web pages “just work.” That or at a minimum the technology we use evolves and hides it all from us via various forms of automatic conversion. In a world where so many technologies seem to get along – why shouldn’t clouds? The answer isn’t so simple and, as is often the case, history has a way of repeating itself.
Just as email initially emerged inside of private datacenters, so has cloud infrastructure. It was initially based on virtualization technology and, depending on what kind of IT shop was involved, you most likely ended up on VMware if you were trying to make your core datacenter more efficient by virtualizing legacy servers; Xen if you had a significant Linux or Java developer presence where the need to rapidly provision test and develop machines was important; and maybe even Citrix if you were using Metaframe for serving up applications to remote users or thin clients. For some companies, cloud adoption started outside the corporate datacenter inside of the VMware vCloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS).”
Brier Dudley’s Blog | Amazon enters tablet battle with Fire and Silk | Seattle Times Newspaper
Brier Dudley’s Blog | Amazon enters tablet battle with Fire and Silk | Seattle Times Newspaper.
From Brier Dudley
My Kindle story for Thursday’s paper:
NEW YORK — It was widely known that Amazon.com was working on a color, touch-screen version of its popular Kindle, the gadget that established the market for e-readers.
But founder Jeff Bezos still surprised the world Wednesday by unveiling the Kindle Fire, a polished and potent 7-inch device with a $199 price that will disrupt the surging market for Web tablets and erode the dominance of Apple’s iPad..
My Take> A great alternative to the iPad for many users, especially kids. I love my iPad, but this is a great innovation and example of where cloud computing and consumer technology are going. Using Amazon compute power on the server side to do the heavy lifting and optimize the content for the light weight and more affordable Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet.
I won’t be getting one, but what a great (more) affordable gift for the kids to keep them from continually stealing your iPad!
Hosting_Guru 