Category Archives: Technology

The Internet is Big

The Internet … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is …

… but if you want to take a shot, Royal Pingdom has some numbers for you.

Users: 1.97 Billion Internet Users Worldwide
Email: 294 Billion Messages per Day
Images: 5 Billion Images on Flickr
Videos: 2 Billon YouTube Videos Watched Daily
Websites: 255 Million Websites
Blogs: 152 Million Blogs
Domains: 111 Million .COM, .NET, and .ORG Domains

In other words, 2 Billion Users who send 147 messages per day while watching a Youtube video and surfing over 400 Million Websites and Blogs when they are done with Facebook (where they spend the majority of their online time).

Is a New Era Beginning For the Iconic Bunny?

Last year, we discovered that Playboy outsourced production of its monthly magazine and struck a deal to outsource its Asia operations to IMG Licensing Worldwide in a cost cutting effort that was expected to trim it’s staff by 50%. The only thing that went unscathed was the lavish lifestyle that Hugh Hefner was famous for. It looked like the American Dream was coming to an end and that the iconic bunny was about to go the way of its Lagomorphic ancestors.

But it looks like the bunny has a new lease on life. If this post from Appmodo is true, Playboy for iPad [is] Coming in March, Uncensored. With over 15 Million iPads out there, and a (conservative?) projection of at least 28 Million iPads by year end, that’s one heck of a digital market — especially if they are the first to break the Apple Nudity Barrier! Time to do the bunny hop.

Let’s hope that “Supply Management” gets to take credit for this one!

Ariba Redefines What?

I usually don’t make a point of promoting vendor blogs, or posts therefrom, as those posts are usually designed to promote the vendor that owns the blog (and, to be honest, the post I’m about to reference does promote the vendor’s solution to a limited extent), but this post over on Coupa Cabana (the Coupa blog) on how “Ariba Redefines What?” is totally awesome.

If you follow the press-releases (which, I must admit, I try not to as most of them are just steaming piles of marketing and PR BS, regardless of which vendor they come from), you’ll see that Ariba has recently announced that it has redefined enterprise software. (And if your first thought upon reading that isn’t Get Real! How stupid do you think I am?, then you need to read more of Sourcing Innovation’s rants, particularly my recent rant on the cloud. Or, if you don’t have time, just listen to Larry .) Puh-leaze!

If I knew where the Sourcing Maniacs were right now (as they have been missing in action for a year … they said they were going to visit their European Neighbors, and I haven’t heard from them since), I would have asked them to have their way with this announcement as Ariba is just asking for it with this one.

But, fortunately, Noah found it and he did a dissection that would make even Wacko proud. Ariba Redfines What? is a piece that truly put[s] it up to eleven.

Steve Jobs Needs Another Billion or Two? There’s an App Store for That!

Maybe D&B have it right — forget the traditional browser interface and go right to the iPhone App! After all, the App Store is expected to pull in $2 Billion in revenues this year (TUAW.com) while our entire niche space, from a software sales perspective, depending on who you believe, is only worth 3 Billion to 5 Billion (especially if you believe Ariba).

Dogbert Translates Cloud-Consultanese

Check out today’s Dilbert strip. With the help of Dogbert and the Pointy Haired Boss, Scott Adams cuts right to the heart of the cloud craziness that has overtaken us.

Simply put:

Dogbert (the consultant) … Blah Blah Cloud. Blah Blah Cloud. …
Pointy-Haired Boss It’s as if you’re a technologist and a philosopher all in one!
Dogbert (the consultant) Blah Blah Platform.

That’s exactly what I hear when people start blabbing about “The Cloud”. That’s exactly what any smart technology person hears when people start blabbing about the cloud. And I say this with confidence because even Larry doesn’t know what the cloud is. (What the Hell is Cloud Computing?) He’s one of the smartest technology guys out there … and if he doesn’t know what it is, how can your average technology genius know what it is?

The reality, and please say this aloud three times, is that THERE IS NO CLOUD. (THERE IS NO CLOUD. THERE IS NO CLOUD.) It is a myth perpetuated by sales people and consultants who don’t have anything new to sell, but who know that if they speak the truth, they won’t sell anything … so they go around talking about this mythical magical cloud in a wonderful and confusing manner until they get some of the more dimwitted middle managers with a budget to bite. Then these dimwitted middle managers start perpetuating the myth because they know that if there isn’t enough hype for the technology they just overspent on, they won’t be able to justify their decision, and they’ll look bad. Then everyone else starts playing follow the leader because they don’t realize that it wasn’t Organization X that bought “the cloud”, but some dimwitted middle manager with a silver tongue and a charming smile. And then we have another technology craze around technology that doesn’t exist.

If someone is selling you “cloud technology”, then, if you’re lucky, what they are really selling you is a multi-tenanted hosted SaaS solution with open APIs that allow you to upload, manage, transfer, and download your data at your convenience and to manage how much processing is done when. (Something you should have been able to do since day one, but couldn’t with most multi-tenant SaaS providers that knew that only way to lock you in was to lock-in your data.) That’s it. Multi-tenant SaaS with open APIs that interoperate with an open standard so that you can, if you wish, suck your data out of one “cloud” instance and spit it into another “cloud” instance that uses the same API. If you’re really lucky, it might also have some good graphical management software that you can access through your browser (instead of undocumented command line RPC calls that take expensive coders weeks of time to figure out).

If you’re unlucky, it’s a traditional hosted ASP provider that has implemented the basics of an API that, through a lot of sweat and manpower in the offshore development centres, lets them fake a multi-tenant SaaS solution if you don’t look under the hood (as the best these providers can really pull off is single-tenant SaaS).

And since multi-tenant SaaS and open APIs have been around for years, it’s not new, it’s not magic, and it’s definitely not a new fluffy magic box.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of multi-tenant SaaS (done right) and have promoted such technology for years. But I am sick and tired of this marketing BS. It’s a cloud all right — a cloud of smug produced by conceited marketing types. (If you don’t know what a smug cloud is, Trey Parker and Matt Stone produced a South Park episode that explains it quite well. If you are in the US, you can find video clips on the South Park Studios site. Warning: TV-14 to TV-MA, possibly NSFW)

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