COOP: Some are Probably Lovin' Cloud Computing Right Now

The aftermath of an unusual winter storm in late Fall left initially almost three million customers in the North East with out power.  Power companies are estimating that it could take days for power to be restored.  This affects not only residential customers, but also thousands of business both large and small.

Just a little while ago, there was a great uproar over the uncertain availability of Cloud computing and storage systems to meet the needs of consumer and corporate customers.  With day long outages at Amazon, Apple, and others, pundits rose significant concerns about the Cloud:

http://kaplowtech.blogspot.com/2011/05/excuse-me-you-are-talking-like-idiot.html

However, I am sure that there are now thousands of businesses that moved to Google Apps, Microsoft 365 (as well as the millions of customers that use Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc.), or moved their private corporate systems to Cloud service providers that are up and running in the middle of these massive power outages.  Getting their workers back on-line using 3G wireless, finding an Internet cafe, or alternate business location with Internet access.

Companies with critical business IT systems in buildings that are not true Data Centers are probably a bit out of luck.  Some believe that it is great to be able to hug their IT hardware, right now they need a hug from their "significant other" as the CEO is probably non-too-pleased.

As usual, it is all about risk management.  In this case, the potential of days of interrupted IT for your business against fear of moving some critical business resources into more shared environment.

It will be interesting to see there are Cloud marketing campaigns that make these points.

It Hits the RIM and Bounces Out…

When you have an older service model, problems just seem to build and build:

http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/industry-insights/technology/blackberry-breakdown-is-death-sentence

Update in Bloomberg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9QC2MF80.htm

The latest outage and performance issues with the Blackberry service is another indication that the executives at RIM have not moved with the times.  This has nothing to do with the quality of the network and server equipment or software that RIM employs to provide their service.  I am confident that they have updated their network and systems numerous times over the last several years to keep up with what they fooled themselves into believe would be never ending growth.

What has changed, or really dramatically improved, is the Internet services model that is the foundation of the competition between the major wireless carriers.  The “3G” wars have moved into “4G” and it is becoming about Mbps of LTE services and how many Gigabytes per month before you are sent to the penalty box (or, a very expensive bill).  These Internet services are the “Cloud” services that people are demanding.  With fully capable Internet Web-browsers on smartphones, the days of needing the Blackberry servers (in Canada) translating Web pages and serving a limited capability on Blackberry device are long gone.  The same is true for email.  Most people get their mail from a provider that is fully happy to provide IMAP or POP3 access to their servers (or, in some cases a proprietary phone App) directly over an Internet connection.  The need to go through a centralized email server complex (again through Canada?) just does not exist anymore.

Update: Along with my comparison with DEC (and below with the darkest times at Apple), here is another very good analysis:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/96f52cf4-f5c5-11e0-bcc2-00144feab49a.html#axzz1ake0JZ6r

The article in the Financial Times points out that RIM's focus on "the email application" is a "hard-wired attitude" that is very much like Wang Laboratories was with dedicated Word Processing systems.  In addition, the article points out that RIM has some stability as an important portion of its customer base are the slow moving government and legal sectors.  My comments is that this is exactly the problem, reinforcing the focus on simple messaging.

From an economic and technical standpoint, RIM has built a structure that is a real challenge for their continued success:

• People want their Gmail, Google Apps Services, Hotmail, and other similar capabilities.  The complex of Blackberry servers and network provides zero value to a customer and only additional cost to RIM
• RIMs costs for developing and maintaining several operating systems again only adds additional cost
• Application developers see a much larger platform space with Android and iOS.   What value does the Blackberry App World have long-term for developers?
• Blackberry was originally perceived as a strong business-class tool set which included both devices and services, including the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).  Again, RIM has to provide support for something that business will more and more determine adds little or no value to their IT environment.  Lower revenue for RIM and more cost to spread across the business

With the passing of Steve Jobs, the Blackberry product line today reminds me of Apple before Steve returned to Apple.  My first comparison was to DEC, back in April 2011:

http://kaplowtech.blogspot.com/2011/04/rim-goes-way-of-dec.html

Before his return, Apple was teetering on the edge of complete failure.  There were a succession of Macs that were at once all the same, different, and unremarkable. In addition there was the famed (infamous) operating system failure called Copeland.  Before that there was “Pink” and “Taligent” all tremendous wastes of time and effort.  Eventually, it was the NeXTSTEP operating system, from that Steve Jobs company NeXT that eventually saved the day.  And, of course it was the man himself returning to Apple and re-inventing Apple back into the company that develops “Insanely Great” products.

Without someone executive at RIM that is going to develop a Laser focus culture on differentiating their products and making them at least “Great”, making apologies for service outages will be the least of their worries.

The Business and Consumer Market: The Race for Relevance

There is a lot of activity in marketplace right now.  Much focus has been placed on “Cloud” services on side and tablet or portable hardware on the other.  I have found it hard to really put all of this in context and understand what companies are doing to leverage technology and make significant impacts in the marketplace.

To get a bigger picture of a company’s direction in a particular service or product area, I came up with a two element view of a technology or product.  The first part is an assessment of the capability of the service or product, and the second is a view of market share momentum.  Examples of this are shown below:

Applied to some interesting technology areas and companies, I come up with this admittedly subjective view of the current marketplace:

• Google has developed a wide range of infrastructure elements that cover both consumer and business needs.  Its mobile platform (i.e., Andriod) is becoming dominant, and it application environment (i.e., Google Apps) covers both desktop and mobile applications for home and business.

• Amazon is following suit, with a targeted set of capabilities focused on enabling businesses and providing wide scale consumer services including rich content.  Their “pad” (i.e., Kindle Fire) entry is completely tied to their existing and expanding consumer content model.  Not tied to a single vendor's set of devices (i.e., the Apple model), Amazon has a larger set of potential customers.

• Apple is tailored much more to the consumer, enabling rich messaging, content, and a full range of desktop to mobile applications.  Excelling at the user experience, Apple is the standard by which new devices and environments are measured.  In fact, I made a late update to the cart that reflect that Apple has now committed to a Cloud-oriented environment for the storage of user music, videos, etc.  It will be interesting to see how Amazon and Apple differentiate their services.  

• RIM, once dominant in the mobile market, is going sideways in the application environment, loosing traction in messaging, and not making an impact content distribution.  As a second tier player in the App landscape and with only a rumored music and video sales environment, there is not likely to be much market impact.  The launch of their pad (i.e., PlayBook) focused on the fact that is runs Adobe Flash (as opposed to Apple that is opposed to Flash).  Hoping to stir the wishes of the consumer market, this alone was hardly a reason to run out to buy.  In addition, they failed to take advantage of their strong business messaging position.  Without at least 3G connectivity to corporate email, contact, and calendaring, how is a business going to justify the expense.  Their previous market differentiation, Blackberry email service, is now an anachronistic method of email distribution – does all email have to cycle through Canada?

• Barnes & Noble is clearly focused on books and magazine subscription content on their mobile device (the “Nook”).  The main purpose initially is to sell electronic books.  However the Nook device is based on Android enables other provider’s content.

• HP.  Clearly, their attempt at a “pad” was not going to be anchored with content desired by consumers.  Without the draw of applications and content (see Apple iPad and iPhone commercials for what to do right) their entry was doomed.

The bottom line is that you can pretty easily see that the players that focused on integrated service delivery and content are the ones that are likely to have a continued to make new markets and have lasting market impact.