Links for 05-27-2009

• VC perspective: Can enterprise software companies do SaaS? | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com - "To some degree, economics and culture militate against large, established enterprise software players transitioning smoothly to SaaS delivery. However, in the end, I believe investment capability is the factor that trumps all others."
• eBay Dying Because It’s No Longer Fun? Hogwash! « SmoothSpan Blog - This strikes me as an informed analysis of eBay's problems. They comport pretty closely with some of my feelings as an eBay user.
• With Virtual Iron, Oracle Bought a Big Loss - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - "The documents indicate that Virtual Iron had just $3.4 million in revenue last year. That’s a big rise over $1.5 million in 2007. But Virtual Iron sure spent a lot of money to get that revenue. Its sales, marketing, research, development and administrative costs were $17.7 million last year, up from $13.6 million in 2007. So, in 2008, Virtual Iron posted a loss of $15.3 million."
• 10 Swear Words or Curse Words You Don’t Know | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog)
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The 2009 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium - Thoughtful discussion on cloud computing.
• ongoing · The Web vs. the Fallacies - Read this.
• Seesmic Adds Facebook Comments, Now I’m Looking For A Raft (Or A Boat) - I agree. No home runs yet on really managing feeds effectively.
• Barack Obama's biggest critic: Charles Krauthammer - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com - Don't agree on a number of points but worth reading.
• PIP - Online Classifieds.pdf (application/pdf Object) - Pew Report on classifieds.
• Advertising Expenditures - Newspaper Association of America: Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century - If I get a chance, I'd like to do a bit deeper analysis of this data.
• Intel drags feet on Itanium quad-core (again) • The Register - A good rundown on the Tukwila slippage situation. I'm less negative than Timothy on IBM's high-end Power situation but otherwise a pretty accurate if snarky analysis.
• Fault Tolerance (Re)Discovered - News - eWeekEurope.co.uk - Discussion (from Stratus POV) of hardware-based FT vs. software-based.
• I.B.M. Unveils Software to Find Trends in Vast Data Sets - NYTimes.com
• Freeform Comment: A(nother) Take on Cloud: ‘Nothing to Worry About’ - "None of this really matters if all you care about is the outcome you want to achieve from a third party service provider. For practical purposes today it might be easier to consider ‘The Cloud’ as simply a consolidation term, an umbrella term under which all the different types of third party service providers that existed in more narrowly defined boxes in the past now live."
• Counting Down to the End of Moore’s Law - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - "“We’re looking at a brick wall five years down the road,” Eli Harari, the chief executive of SanDisk, said to me earlier this week." We've heard this before of course. And it's not clear that our demand for denser/cheaper flash is going to necessarily have the same imperative going forward. But Moore's Law drives so much in IT that these trends are worth pondering.
• James Governor’s Monkchips » Cloud Computing: On Structural Advantages and Lessons From History #EMCWorld - Generally agree with James here. AT&T is probably the best counter-example but even that is week.
• Forrester's five phases of open-source success | The Open Road - CNET News - Somewhat amusing but pretty accurate in my experience.