Think Different

There are not many occasions when somebody passes that you have never met, 

has had a huge influence on what you use, 

has inspired you to strive for more, 

has taught that failure is simply another lesson on the path to success,

and has brought a smile each time you consider his achievements.

RIP Steve Jobs, you touched so many ....

You only have a Scale of 1: Why org's should consider cloud solutions

Recently there have been a number of occasions when I have been asked to explain what the potential benefits are for an enterprise organisation of a "cloud" deployment over a typical enterprise CPE (customer premises equipment) deployment.   There is so much hype, and marketing generated positioning that tries to pretend that it is a complex value proposition, where in reality the answer is fairly simple ... simple common sense I think.

Firstly, the value proposition for "cloud" and its potential benefits are not complex (that does not necessarily mean that the techniology underneath is not); and secondly the difference between an in-house controlled CPE deployment and a cloud based deployment can simply be articulated as one of scale.  If one is deploying an in-house CPE solution, no matter how small or large the organisation, the only economy of scale benefit that can be gained is directly related to the size of your organisation .. the level of aggregation is always 1.

Gartner Magic Quadrant's: Any use to anybody on their own?

The post summer phase of the year often brings new challenges, and this year is certainly no different as we gear up to start really building new capabilities in the business.  Part of that process has meant that I have had the opportunity to attend many a vendor briefing, and what has struck me is how the "Gartner Magic Quadrant's" get interpreted and used in presentations.

In 9 out of 10 times, a single view of the latest Magic Quadrant is trotted out to justify a marketing statement.  If I had a penny for each time that a vendor claimed that they were now the market leader and used a MQ graphic to justify the claim ...... I should long ago be sitting very comfortably on a beach in the Bahamas with a tall cool drink in hand.

Practitioner's that are tracking the market generally will examine fairly large volumes of data in order to be able to spot a trend and draw any sort of meaningful conclusion.  MQ's are not comprehensive data sets, and are simply one set of data points, they simply do not tell the whole story.

The proliferation of mobile platforms

If you are interested in the proliferation of different mobile platforms and their respective lifespans, then a new post by Horace Dediu will certainly be worth a minute or two of your time.  He lists the mobile platforms already announced for 2012 and plots them against all previous and current mobile platforms. See below:

Certainly an interesting view of the mobile world!  Go here to read the complete post.