Bill Baker did a quick piece on this last year in “Don’t Overlook Legal Issues in the Cloud”, as did Chris Edwards in “Uncovering the legal issues behind cloud computing”, and a host of others.

And yet, even with all those pieces out there, where is the firestorm that should be building? Most customers want to talk about public and private cloud but when I bring up the legal side I get blank stares half the time. Its like they know there is a party going on, but either they weren’t invited or they don’t want to hangout with Denny Crane and Alan Shore any longer than they have to.

The legal party is heating up around “Guarantees” – like what will, and what will not be guaranteed a consumer of cloud services by the provider?

-         Will they guarantee where your data is?

-         Will they guarantee that the regulations of your home area will be applied to their services delivered from another part of the world?

-         Will they guarantee up-time, privacy, security, bandwidth, or anything having to do with living up to your expectations?

Denny Crane would probably just ignore those issues and bribe the judge whenever he was challenged. But back in the real world, those are still outstanding questions among many others that might relate to future legal action in the cloud.

But don’t worry, it may not be as gloomy as it might seem assuming you don’t like to party with those esteemed and educated jurist jockeys. Just keep in mind that, in many ways, the lawyers will be the ones who urge cloud providers to get off their collective “briefs” and start providing some of the guarantees Enterprises need from cloud services.

So, I recommend this – if your cloud planning meetings do not include legal staff, get them there now. If your legal staff is not rapidly coming up to speed on cloud computing issues, get them on the phone with me before breakfast. And, if you don’t think you need legal representation in cloud computing efforts, get ready to be deposed.

For the few things we adults see as thankful-giving are echoed in the heart of the giving that came when we were put together as children.

So conceive again the child…

Conceive every day the living breath…

Conceive again the joy of light seen through eyes not blinded by fear…

Conceive of the hollow emptiness that exists when we don’t notice the little things of God around our every breath and beat.

The days of thanks are leading our steps and following our lives.

I am thankful just to know that.

Happy turkey day!

Where Mike leaves off, I feel compelled to comment. Certainly, we are at greater risk of losing something we come to value when it is out of our control. But there are two things that Mike did not mention which leave me less concerned (Oh, and I had never heard of this Debbie Downer person but I ain’t inviting her to the next investors club meeting).

1 – The Ecosystem: Who is to say that when a cloud provider goes out of business that they don’t have assets to sell? If something is important enough to draw a lot of eyes or attention then somebody is usually willing to step in and to buy up whatever assets are left to capture those eyes for another purpose. So, providers may disappear, but content might not. Who is to say that a site we relied on won’t morph into something different while we move on to other sites? Many of the forums I have used over the years have morphed or changed membership or even content. I just keep following where the interesting noise is. Who is to say that our stuff stored in the cloud is not valuable to a number of potential suitors? Buyouts happen all the time in the physical storage word, why not in the cloud world? Imagine the brand-value of “Wikipedia”!

Sure, some providers will disappear with all our stuff or will lose it to bad processes (e.g. T-Mobile Sidekick) or something but those types will either correct their failures or be weeded out over a short time; and, the ones that remain will become much more reliable. That is the way of the market and business ecosystems. (Oh, and remember that the T-mobile failure was a process failure, not a cloud failure but we have to live with the results).

2 – Regulation: The dreaded R word. We hate it but we must acknowledge that some Cloud services or Web 2 sites may grow to a point where they become subject to regulation or government support. Perhaps not the Wikipedia of today but I suggest we are not far off from an online crowdsourced information utility that gets either industry or government regulation. If it becomes important to the masses and important to government, it will get regulated.

Don’t mistake my position. Mike has pointed out some practical realities of the Web 2 and cloud movements. He will undoubtedly be right and we should be cautious (especially about the backups). But let’s not forget that this stuff is still in its infancy. It is not a mirror of what happens with technology. It is a mirror of what happens in the real world – which has dealt with service-orientation for thousands of years. The mechanisms are out there. All we are waiting for is the cloud to catch up on how to use them and to discover new ways to reduce the risk.

In the mean time, back it up yourself, find a broker to protect you, or don’t use the cloud – not many other choices. I think the rewards will be well worth the risks and the inevitable failures.

Unlike “Go” which is a high productivity and fast system programming language, “Stop” is actually a low productivity and slow campaign to get people to stop asking for so much freakin innovation. In fact, Google executives have decided that the only way to stop the rampage of innovation and complaints from competitors is to cultivate a culture of sloth.

Said an unnamed Google executive, “I mean, with all these young people running around inventing new stuff all the time, we hardly have any time to figure out what to do with all of it, let alone figure out how to make money from it. So far, we just throw stuff out there and people lap it up like thirsty puppies. We don’t even test the stuff! I mean, that was fun at first but now it’s just a tedious job at an accelerated pace. With “Google Stop”, we hope to slow things down a bit and get back to more traditional growth of software companies…”

In trying to put “Google Stop” in perspective, we decided to talk to the development team that created “Go”. Unfortunately, by the time we got there everyone was so active that all we could see were the blurs of people going about their business at near-light-speed from such great productivity. It was like trying to dodge a colony of bats, and we considered bringing in San Antonio Spurs basketball guard Manu Genobili to swat one out of the air but he declined saying “…as fast as those guys are moving, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all rabid!”

But we did get a sense of why Google executives are so keen on slowing things down. It turns out that such near-light-speed productivity is subject to Einstein’s equations like everything else and all of the developers innovating on “Go” and many other Google projects were actually aging slower than the rest of us. Then the vicious cycle of innovation gets worse and those accustomed to simpler times were just getting tired while the young “turks” doing all the innovation just keep stirring the pot.

So, in comes Google Stop. The initiative centers on five key principles:

 1 – The Principle of “Whiny Competition”: Developers will only be allowed to create something new after it is approved by a competitor. This way, innovation proceeds in a collaborative style, giving others time to catch up and making Google seem much more in step with old times. It also lets competitors begin to figure out how to address new business models that Google innovations invariably expose before those models begin to erode price margins in the competitor’s traditional models.

2 – The Principle of “Closed Source”: It works for Apple and it worked for Microsoft. We could learn something from those guys, don’t you think? Droid does.

3 – The Principle of “Actually Leaving Beta”: All Google products will need to go through a full beta cycle with an actual end date before hitting the street. This is compared to the practice of products never leaving beta even after customers have paid for them for years. Certainly will slow things down a bit.

4 – The Principle of “Hiring Legacy People”: No problem with age discrimination here since elderly in Google means 25 years old. But even hiring those in their seventies now, with the aforementioned near-light-speed deal going on, they will stay sharp and fresh for years to come – or at least until they slow those danged young-uns down.  Besides, they remember history and can help us repeat it! – over, and over again.

5 – The Principle of “CEO Product Naming”: This is the kicker. Like with some other large vendors, the CEO will begin to name products. Not only will this slow down those productive people by making them hold releases until the CEO makes up his mind, but it will also make marketing a nightmare and get customers all tangled up in non-sense naming schemes.

So, Google Stop is set to sweep across the company in a far reaching attempt to turn the clock back to a time when slow and steady actually won the race. We asked a few more executives to comment and one said,

“With this new initiative, we will innovate on how to stop innovation. In fact, the only way we can survive is to stop trying to survive. When we figure that out we will have a real competitive edge because we can finally start figuring out all this cool stuff we have. Google Stop will…”

He actually never got to finish that sentence as a group of blurs moving at near-light-speed scooped him up and disappeared down a hallway. About 10 minutes later, Google announced the release of a new Hadoop based analytics system that will change the world. Man, that was fast!

>>> For those of you who have not figured it out yet, this article is totally fiction -  Child, please! Just Stop.

But for the moment, here are the original G-Men cartoons where we make it plain – “You run the risk of derailing your BPM effort if you don’t consider the impact of BOTH sides of your BPM psyche.

Click the image for a larger view. Enjoy.

See the Note for the deep dive:

• Don’t Let Emotions Blow Up Your BPM Effort: A Guide to Making Objective Decisions
• View Summary |

Business process management project work is composed of two work streams: analytical and emotional. Your project can be derailed by unanticipated reactions to the changes. If you are launching a BPM project, follow the tips in this research and stay on track.

Save + | Published: 4 September 2009 | 5 pages

Well, people tend to hang onto the concepts they grew up with and still use the same words even when confronted with a new reality. Really!  I mean, I had a friend of a friend ask me recently if I still used “record players” when I said I have a collection of 200 gram LPs for my high end stereo system (My not-inexpensive VPI turntable with digital speed control is still insulted at that). But now-a-days (note the outmoded form of “today”), people are starting to just use the words in whatever way comes easiest to mind. And the latest form of this seems to be all the odd uses of the word twitter floating about.

Have you heard these?

“I twittered last night about my son’s graduation.”

Or, “My friend Beth is a big time twitterer”.

Or, how about “My kids are always twitting about nonsense” – thanks, dad.

Well, I have heard them all and more.

So I was all ready to get outraged and then I did a search of the Web. Why outraged, you ask? Well, that’s because I learned early on that the verb form of the word “Twitter” is to “Tweet”, not to “Twitter” and it always annoyed me when people said it wrong. But then, low and behold (outmoded form of “check this out”), my web search showed me a funny thing. The Free dictionary defines twitter and “twittered”, and “twittery”, and “twitters”, and “twittering” – all with not one mention of the social networking site for which “tweeting” is the normal form of communication. Now ain’t that a hoot (wow, two outmoded words in one sentence!).

That was a not so subtle reminder that the word “twitter” (in all its forms) has been around a lot longer that social networking sites; and people have used it without any troubles so far (It was also a not so subtle reminder that dictionaries need to update their definitions more often). And, it does mean that saying “I twittered” is actually grammatically correct, even if it is not socially adept.

So, it seems that we can either accept the real English words defined in the free dictionary and use them as we wish to refer to Twitter (the site), or we can be rigid and insist that all the hip-kids (need I say more about outmoded forms of words?) use “tweet” properly. Now that is either cute, or quaint, or annoying as hell depending on the degree to which some combination of the words “retentive” and “anal” make you giggle like Beavis – or is it Butthead?

So, I am putting my annoyance back in my “waste of time” box and getting back to drawing another cartoon strip – probably about Twitter. Besides, I have come to the realization that, one day, we will all sound as quaint as those people who still say – “I have to get home in time to tape my favorite program.” Never mind that there is no tape involved with a digital video recorder and never mind that we can set the danged things to record from our iPhones without going home anyway.

But I leave you with a warning. Generation gaps can be propagated faster on social networking sites. So, if you should find yourself on twitter, tweeting about how cool you are while using the wrong words (that show how cool you aren’t) – you may find yourself feeling just a little bit like – a “twit”.

Oops. Sorry about that, gosh-darn-it.

If you’re wondering, all of this comes from a dream I had last night when I fell asleep with the David Letterman show blaring on my TV. So, then I start dreaming and wind up doing a Letterman routine about IBM in my dream (apparently, a lot of IBM commercials run during letterman – go figure). For those not interested in Letterman or my dreams, just snip on the doted lines below and jump down to the section called “Now here’s the real part”.

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So, in the dream I had delusions of grandeur and decided I was letterman and I would do a “Top 10” list about IBM. I mean, even the real Letterman had done one about the “Top 10 signs you work for IBM“, so I figured I was good to go. Even in the dream, Paul (the venerable sidekick) tried to talk me out of it but I did it anyway. And here is the result. Remember, it was just a dream.

Top Ten Reasons Why IBM couldn’t care less about being “Cool”

10.“Competition? What competition?”

9.“So you bought Java, what do you want me to do about it?”

8.“Would you kvetch about “cool” if YOU owned Hursley Park?”

7.“We ran out of standards committees to lead.”

6.“So what if Gartner coined the term SOA. We turned it into coin.”

5.“When we learned cool vendors don’t always make a lot of revenue, we said, ‘Screw it’”

4.“IBM means business because if you write it backwards, the initials almost spell out MBA!”

3.“Yeah…open source…it’s free…suuuure!”

2.“Talk to us again when we run out of other companies to buy.”

And the number one reason, why IBM couldn’t care less about being cool…

1.“IBM Global Services. Our motto is: ‘Don’t hate the player! Hate the Game!’”

By that time I had to wake up because in the dream several guys in blue pinstriped suits riding Gecko’s while talking on iPhones and screaming “there’s an App for that!” were advancing on me in two by two cover formation. Damned commercials!

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

So, here’s the real part.

IBM has started to deliver some interesting solutions. Sure, they are a big company with lots of issues but I found myself this week wondering if we should give them more credit than we do for some of the things they get right. Even our competition has done this recently so I don’t feel alone in suggesting that a number of areas warrant something more than just tacit approval. 

• Business space is a credible and interesting introduction from a company with all the technological pieces to pull off a business operations platform. Sure, it could be less techie-oriented but when you see it, you might want to keep looking.
• BlueWorks is new but even BPM mavens are starting to take a look with an excited sense of hope for something that actually solves problems they have had to deal with for years. Others got there first (Lombardi, Software AG) but IBM is starting to make some really interesting noises around this “BPM platforms in the Cloud” thing. Check out a take by Bruce Silver from BPMS Watch. http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2009/05/06/ibm-takes-bpa-to-the-cloud/
• SOA: IBM made SOA a major marketing theme and it has worked for them. Sure, there are people who question the success of SOA but those people are apparently not actually looking at what is happening out there. SOA has entered the mainstream and IBM has ridden it there.
• LotusLive is just cool. Collaboration, people!
• Smarter Planet is an interesting way to talk about the ecology, business, people, styles of work, and technologies all rolled into one. Usually those kind of big campaigns go nowhere but at least this one starts with real world examples of stuff that the last 40 years of computing has made possible.
• Cloudburst….well….nobody’s perfect. But at least they got in the game. Oracle? SAP? Please say something soon. Please?

Now, I await friends and associates from other major technology companies to comment on this but I want to hear it. Post a comment to tell me whether or not you think IBM got cooler in the last three years or if you think they haven’t changed.

If I get enough responses I just might do a Top 10 list about Microsoft’s Cloud strategy – I think they may have something there.

Ok, so I have a lot of friends who like to depend on me for technical support whenever they want to get some piece of content or media like videos, songs, or made-up ringtones, etc. I usually point them to some site or another where they can download the stuff or point them to where they can buy what ain’t free or I let them download it from me.

What with the recent passing of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, the requests were starting to get a little too frequent.

The reason why is because I have been an MJ fan for a long time and have every song and video he ever put out plus a number of snippets of interviews and odd photos and videos that I have come across over the years like the recent release of the “hair catching on fire” video that’s all over You-Tube. Not sure when I first saw this but it was a loooonngg time ago.

So, what has this got to do with cloud computing, you ask? Bear with me.

I am also a closet Farrah fan. Loved her since the 70s (although Kate Jackson was my real favorite angel) – You can stop laughing now because all my friends have already laughed it out. Got lots of pictures of her from over the years – and no, you cannot have a link to the download site.

So, here is the cloud angle. One day, I get “a bug up my cloud” and decide to host all of my different links and some of my friend’s data and links using my windows Home Server and a few other trinkets like some Seagate RAID storage arrays. Microsoft and Seagate did a good job with these products so I figure, what the heck, I might as well try my hand at becoming a simplistic cloud service provider using it. I decided to let friends upload pictures and video to it and I would just keep it running and expand it as needed. One day, I figured I would move it to goGrid or Amazon or some such cloud-like place and…

…ahh, hell, forget all that. Here is why it failed.

So, I’m humming along with my Home Server ready to go and I check the public web access to it and – nope, won’t work. Can’t access the server from outside my home network. So, I start looking at the setup and checking the cables and checking everything I could think of to figure out where this glitch was. Then it hit me. I had just switched everything over to ATT U-Verse Internet and the router has a different firewall configuration utility than my NetGear routers.

By the way, if the next few sentences mean nothing to you then don’t feel bad. They shouldn’t have to. That’s my whole point.

After about three minutes of searching for the problem I decide I just need to forward the TCP ports 80 (http), 443 (https), and 4125 (remote desk), through my ATT firewall and I’m good to go! Nope! So, I dust off my old hacker genes and use some software that would get me banned from some eastern European countries. And, after about 5 more minutes I discover that ATT (or the 2wire router they gave me) is blocking port 4125 for some reason only the Gods can understand. What that now means is I would have to reconfigure the Home server to redirect port 4125 to another assigned number and set the registry to recognize it and violate the usage agreement with ATT to boot! Can’t do that. What the Alexander Graham Bell is going on here?!?

So, I calls up my friendly neighborhood ATT tech rep (this process took four hours) and I’m told that not only do ATT service reps not support issues like port forwarding (a way to open holes in your firewall so people can get to selected services on your network) but that he would be happy to give me the address of a web site that could teach me about router ports.

I would have slapped him had he been standing in front of me. No help there.

So, in a fit of funk, I decide to take a break and go watch some football but there’s nothing on but baseball. I  figure God hates me at this point.  And, not only that but my friends are all leaving me texts with ROFLMAO and LOLs all over them because they thought I was some Cloud expert and now I can’t get them access to my “Farrah’s best photo-sessions” archive. Not to mention that they can’t get to my MJ discography and all the online stores are swamped with people trying to download everything Michael ever did.

Ok, so here is my point:

Cloud computing is supposed to make things so we can share and deliver service and use other people’s resources and stuff like that. But this rather trivial example of networking glitches could be magnified ten-fold when people try to do things that are not so trivial if the service providers take no responsibility for making sure the path is clear. ATT takes none in this situation, and so I had to figure it out for my self. If we all (individuals and businesses alike) have to engineer our own solutions to problems created by providers who are supposed to be trying to help us, we are not likely to find satisfaction in the cloud easily.

Or, for laughs, I could say it this way. After a thriller of a ride doing some off the wall things it looks like I needed an angel sent by Charlie to help me straighten out the bad problems caused by underestimating how annoying it was to fight this problem and beat it! Where is Billie Jean when you need her, anyway?