Today, Don Tapscott, author of “Wikinomics” presented a keynote about how mass-collaboration is changing the way that value is created in the world economy. This stems from both software functionality and network economies of scale. Obviously the enablement of new forms of economic co-operation is also a factor at continuing to drive specialisation. Tapscott quotes Carr’s “IT does matter” and mentions that he has often debated with him, which is hard because Carr is good, but he (Tapscott) says “I have an advantage in this debate, he’s wrong”. The last three days has made me question about how one can innovate in corporate IT. …
More Futurology, Gartner’s “Emerging Trends”
I am in Barcelona, attending Gartner’s European Symposium and Expo. They have two of these each year and the spring event is positioned as broader and more forward looking. It was opened by a tour de force from Peter Cole, (CEO) and six of their top researchers. Later discussions brought home to me that one needs to be very careful when listening to clever people, as sometimes one (i.e. I ) can assume that they mean the same things as yourself, this isn’t always so. …
Project Blackbox, it’s real you know
Yesterday, Sun’s Project Blackbox Tour visited the Thames Valley at Sun’s UK HQ Campus and today we have taken it to the National Army Museum so prospective customers, journalists and analysts can inspect it and ‘kick the tyres’, and I am one of the engineers answering the mediumly hard questions. The really difficult ones have been handled by Joe Carvalho, one of the designers. …
Improving my mind
I’m have returned to California to attend Sun’s top technology conference, and I shall be travelling on to Menlo Park and visit Sun’s campus for the Sun Labs Open House. Once again, I have failed to improve my mind on the plane and instead of watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, I watched “Shut up & Sing”, a documentary about the Dixie Chicks. They are not a band I’d listened to before, but I did read about the furore created when they stated on stage that they didn’t approve of all the policies being pursued by a certain American politician. …
To Firenze
I spent the weekend in Florence where I visited the Oltrarno and visited most of the usual sites. We flew to Pisa and then took the train to Florence. The trains are nationalised, old and no longer run on time. …
Sun’s Connected Customers
Steve Wilson led a presentation about the changing nature of Sun’s connected customer response and where the provisioning and image maintenance tools now sit. This means that he’s responsible for network support, subscription services and what’s left of our N1 management suite. …
Coming to a Desktop near you
Or near me anyway, and not necessarily all that soon! This morning’s presentation on the Sun Ray technology road map suggests we’re planning to to do local VPN some time this year and Video next year. Its getting there! The presentation covered a number of technologies showing Sun recommitting to the desktop and offering a number of Linux/Windows interoperability solutions …
The economics of open source in the world of storage.
Brian Wong, one of Sun’s Distinguished Engineers spoke this morning and stated categorically that the “Storage [Market] is right to be disrupted”. He argued that the general purpose OS (such as Solaris) offers massive developer economies of scale, by which we mean operating system developer economics. …
The Future of Solaris, by the man that makes it happen
Jeff Jackson, VP of Solaris opened our conference. He’s now been in the job for a while and is beginning to stamp his own ideas on the future of Sun’s implementation of OpenSolaris. He characterised his view as moving from function to velocity; velocity has a direction. He wants Solaris releases to meet a customer constituency rather than become the result of a race between his developers. …
Back in the USA
I have arrived in Palo Alto, after my flight since I am spending the week at Menlo Park for some readiness training. I wasn’t feeling very intellectual, so instead of watching the Al Gore’s polemic on the environment, “An Inconvenient Truth” I checked out Mitchell & Web, who you can see asking if any of the Nazi’s Wermacht questioned the fascist imagery of the Nazi state, and advertising Macs [See Charlie Brooker’s comments at the Guardian…] all over the world, I then watched Tenacious D: the pick of destiny. Jack Black swears a lot. The journey was made more exciting by forgetting to move my clock forward and the worst queue for security I have ever seen, but I made the flight with a couple of minutes to spare. …