James Watters
Latest from James Watters
NYT Kicks Off Cloud Paranoia Series
This just in—cloud computing, the technology founded on the principle of speeding developers from concept to creation to IP will stifle creativity—thus spake a Harvard Lawyer in the New York Times. After listing the usual security and privacy concerns he leapt into this flourish: But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to ...
Hello Boto: Cloud Computing Libraries Emerging
Its one thing to have a cloud API, but it’s even better to have a library. Programming libraries provide proven abstractions where global variables can be set and reused at will and systematically smooth over the transition from an API/web-service to a programming language. They can save you a lot of time and effort–but they ...
Forbes’ Hosted Oracle’s Appliance Aporia
Did anyone else catch Dan Wood’s Forbes article on hosted Oracle appliances today? I’ve read it ten times. I’m still not sure what he is saying. Let’s take a closer look, as I believe the inherant aporia of his argument reflects on the complex collision between cloud services and existing enterprise IT. He starts with ...
The Themes of Structure ‘09
Primitives The two biggest web technology players at the event (Facebook, Google) used this term often in referring to their programming discipline. The Register has a nice piece covering a passionate exchange between Microsoft and Google engineers on adherence to consistent primitives. Google said MS would fail at matching its speed because they lacked discipline ...
Facebook Calls Out Traditional IT Vendors at #Structure09
I felt the tension in the morning, saw the developer revolutionaries in the street, and in the first talk of the afternoon a shot was fired by the Jonathan Heiliger CTO of Facebook: "I don’t know why they don’t, we’ve tried to communicate with them, but the system vendor OEM’s don’t get what it takes ...
Speed, Scale and Commodity: Notes from The Morning at #Structure09
Some great quotes so far this morning: "Clouds help speed you from idea to IP" Bryan Doeer, CTO Savvis "Enterprise IT has moved so slowly, now you can grab a credit card and have 1000k server cluster up and running during this panel." Joseph Tobolski, cloud computing director, Accenture "The on-ramp to infrastructure for individual ...
Finding Shape in the Cloud: #Structure09
I’m looking forward to the discussion at OM’s Structure 09 tomorrow. For fun I’ll be filtering and tweeting (@wattersjames) what people mean/imply when they talk about clouds. Vendors have a propensity to re-label instead of innovating . Commentators (ex: @DavidLinthicum) have called them on it. But marketer’s are just doing their job, and are able to be so ...
Sun’s Supernova: The Death of Rock
Several years ago I sat laughing with a coworker behind a closed glass door in Sun’s beautiful Colorado campus. We couldn’t get over the name of the new systems announced to come out in 2008: Supernova. Why did Sun name the hail-mary, company saving, server line after an explosive event marking the death of a ...
Awesome Cloud Demo: IBM Cloudburst.
I’ve been noisy about my chagrin at IBM’s cloud offerings, but secretly I hope I’m wrong. I want the world’s largest and oldest computing company has something amazing up their sleeve. I’m obsessed enough to watch all of their product demonstration video’s on YouTube. My latest find is a series on using their new Cloudburst ...
Repeat After Me: “Structured Intent”
In the Twitter founder’s interview highlighted yesterday by John Furrier Biz Stone uttered an important phrase “structured intent.” As far as I can tell from web research its not part of the existing parlance of web strategy, but it ought to be starting now. I will explain in a moment, but first the full quote: ...
