Lydia Leong

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I am a big fan of Amazon’s Kindle. People like Roy Blount fear it, but smart guys like Seth Godin really get it. Authors shouldn’t fear the future. Devices like the Kindle open up a wealth of opportunities to authors who are willing to seize them.

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A few days ago, an unexpected side-effect of some new code caused a major Gmail outage. Last year, a small bug triggered a series of cascading failures that resulted in a major Amazon outage. These are not the first cloud failures, nor will they be the last.
Cloud failures are as complex as the underlying software [...]

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For many months now, CDN industry insiders have gossiped that Panther Express was in financial trouble. Panther was caught with the bad luck of mistiming the funding cycle, leaving them to try to raise capital at a point when the capital markets were essentially frozen. Moreover, a large percentage of their revenues were tied to [...]

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A bit of a link round-up…
My colleague Daryl Plummer has posted his rebuttal in our ongoing debate over cloud infrastructure commoditization. I agree with his assertion that over the long term, the bigger growth stories will be the value-added providers and not the pure-play cloud infrastructure guys, but I also stick to my guns in [...]

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GigaOm has an interesting post on HP’s cloud vision, which asserts that HP’s view of the future is that service providers will reducing complexity by delivering only one application (scaling up their own infrastructure in a monolithic way), and that generalized infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers will not be able to scale up in a profitable manner.
Setting [...]

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I have found at a partial solution to my communication proliferation problem. The tool I’m employing, at least for the moment, is Digsby, a free client that combines cross-platform instant messaging with access to social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This has replaced my usual IM client (Trillian, which I like a lot), [...]

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I’ve recently read Pete Blackshaw’s Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, which is a well-written, methodical introduction to consumer-generated media (CGM, also known as UGC, user-generated content). I’d recommend the book to anyone who hasn’t read a book on the topic; if you’re social-media savvy, chances are you won’t learn much (if [...]

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A long-standing puzzle for myself and my various colleagues who cover application-fluent networking: Why don’t more SaaS providers adopt application delivery networks (ADNs), either via a service, or via application delivery controller (ADC) hardware?
Even if a SaaS vendor perceives their performance as being just fine for the typical US-based user, performance is often an issue [...]

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Too many service providers (and companies in general) use “discipline” as an excuse for “lack of agility”. Discipline does not mean appointing a committee to study the problem for the next year. Exercising caution and prudence does not mean failing to act. Laying a solid foundation does not mean standing around doing the equivalent of [...]

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My colleague Daryl Plummer has mused upon the future of cloud in a blog post titled “Cloud Infrastructure: The Next Fat Dumb and Happy Pipe?” In it, he posits that cloud infrastructure will commoditize, that in 5-7 years the market will only support a handful of huge players, and that value-adds are necessary in order [...]

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