Lydia Leong

On my more cynical, read-too-many-press-releases days, I wonder if there’s some hapless, tortured PR gnome at Amazon whose job consists solely of vetting one empty cloud fluff piece after another, proclaiming how such-and-such a vendor is now offering deployments on EC2, and how this therefore gives them an on-demand cloud offering (”please think of me [...]

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We’re in the midst of a fascinating discontinuity in IT purchasing patterns. Even the dot-com crash didn’t cause this kind of disruption. Practically everyone is scrambling to save money immediately, and some organizations are looking at long-term belt-tightening.
The most obvious immediate impact is that buyer tolerance for paying a premium is rapidly diminishing. Quality [...]

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I heard a radio ad today for Google Federal. It sounded like every other “please, government IT purchasing person, buy our stuff” ad that you hear on news radio in Washington DC. It was a far cry from the sort of ad that one expects to hear from Google, and to hear a federal-targeted ad [...]

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If you deal with pricing, or for that matter, marketing or sales in general, and you’re going to read one related book this year, read Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely. (I mentioned an article by him in a previous post on the impact of transparent pricing for CDNs, [...]

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The New Scientist has an interesting article commenting that the long tail may be less potent than previously postulated — and that peer pressure creates a winner-take-all situation.
I was jotting this blog post about Gartner clients and the target audience for the Magic Quadrant, and that article got me thinking about the social context for [...]

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Businesses everywhere are video-enabling their websites. Over the past year, I’ve handled a ton of inquiries from Gartner clients whose next iteration of their B2C websites included video. Given what I cover (Internet infrastructure), most of the queries I handled involved how to deliver that video in a cost-effective and high-performance way. Most enterprises hope [...]

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