Category: Big Picture

  • Hayden: Google Acting as a Nation-State

    Great to see somebody on top of things, here Michael Hayden, previously director of the NSA and the CIA in the context of the Shady Rat attacks: “You see Google acting in some ways as nation-states used to act, exercising to the best of their ability some attributes traditionally associated with sovereign states. ‘We’re going…

  • The Hamster Business Model

    Dave Winer has a wonderful description of the model of many “leading” internet companies: the “hamster” business model. He writes: This is, btw, the user-as-hamster business model. The one where you sit in a cage and make the wheels spin around. Either you’re watching commercials while doing your workout, or you’re generating information about yourself…

  • From Stack to Cloudscape

    Nico Popp shows us a new way to think about the “cloud technology stack”, over at the Verisign Infrablog (or should that now be the Symantic Infrablog?). Unlike the old stack diagram, this one causes one to think …

  • There Is No Multi-Tenant Architecture: There Are Three!

    I’ve heard the term “multi-tenancy” hurled at somebody as an attack about once too often now. Could we at least agree that there are several different kinds (I count three) of multi-tenancy, and they have different tradeoffs? 1. Application-level Multi-Tenancy Salesforge, Gmail, and most SaaS businesses come to mind: they run all of their customers…

  • User-Centricity, App-Centricity and the Cloud

    This post has been prompted by a tweet exchange today between myself and James Urquhart. He wrote: Basically, as compute moves from server to app centric model, networking moving from switch/router to connectivity-centric ops model. Let me first totally agree with what he says there: things like OpenStack allow us to move up one level…