Links for 09-30-2011

• Selling Is Not About Relationships - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson - Harvard Business Review – "This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The remains of the book – "Up until now, there's been a fairly common assumption that a divide would emerge in the presentation of different kinds of electronic books. Reference works would get the full web treatment, tricked out with multimedia and hypermedia, while fiction and literary nonfiction would be shielded from the web's manifest destiny. They'd go digital without losing their print nature; they'd retain their edges. That assumption always struck me as naive, and Bezos's choice of a novel for his demo of X-Ray makes me even more dubious that literary works will remain exempt from webification."
• You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – "When enterprises were able to impose their will upon their employees, enterprise vendors enjoyed barriers to entry sufficient to shield them from the likes of Apple. Businesses only bought the products that they wanted, which in turn were the products enterprise vendors built for them. "
• You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – Consumerization of IT makes it more challenging f businesses to focus from @sogrady << Harder to segment
• Pan Amorama | Blogs | Vanity Fair – "But where fashion runway models are unsmiling, robotic in their militant march steps, these stews smile like mod angels, their wings pinned to their snazzy blue jackets. No, Pan Am has none of the stomach-acid accidie of Mad Men--for primetime TV, it’s a far more formula drive--but it’s a wonderful throwback to Jean Negulesco films such as Three Coins in the Fountain and The Best of Everything. (Margot Robbie’s Laura Cameron, a flight attendant who lands on the cover of Life, is the Suzy Parker figure.) Nothing about Pan Am demands to be taken seriously and the espionage angle is an absurdity (even given the Cold War era), but everything was nicely done, and the crosscutting between adjoining hotel rooms of undressing lovers about to meet smack in the middle was elegantly, Europeanly sexy."
• Ex-Fed CIO Vivek Kundra’s Cloud First policy trashed - The Troposphere – "According to the study, 92% of feds believe cloud is a good idea for federal IT, but just 29% are following the administration’s mandated “Cloud First” policy. And almost half (42%) say they are adopting a “wait-and-see” approach related to cloud. Respondents cite numerous challenges including security issues (64%), cultural issues (36%) and budget constraints (36%) as barriers to cloud computing."
• Freakonomics » The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems – "What these results suggest is that in the real world, where social influence is much stronger than in our artificial experiment, enormous differences in success may indeed be due to small, random fluctuations early on in an artist’s career, which then get amplified by a process of cumulative advantage—a “rich-get-richer” phenomenon that is thought to arise in many social systems."
• Autonomy's reaction to Oracle's statement | Business | guardian.co.uk – "Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help."
• Connections: Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt – Check out my latest podcast. I talk oVirt (open source virt mgmt) with #redhat's Carl Trieloff:
• AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure | ZDNet – "The re-launch of social link sharing site Delicious, now under the stewardship of YouTube founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley under their AVOS startup banner, is nothing short of a complete, mind-boggling disaster. How AVOS took a beloved social sharing site and ruined it from stem to stem, and up to this minute have a complete, angry user PR explosion on their hands, is as enlightening as it is hard to watch."
• redhat.com | Survey Results and Conclusions: Evolving to the Cloud – Here are results and my commentary from a survey that Red Hat conducted at VMworld
• Daring Fireball: Amazon's New Kindles – "Amazon built an alternative to the iPad, rather than a direct competitor. It’s a different market segment. As Steve Jobs explained back in 2010 at the introduction of the original iPad, there’s unexplored territory between smartphones and laptops." << Agree. It remains to be seen how viable the segment is but sometimes less really is more.
• Assess enterprise applications for cloud migration – Good, albeit probably overly academic, overview of how to think about enterprise application suitability for cloud.
• Bezos Portrays Kindle Fire as Service, Not Tablet- Bloomberg – RT @iwantmedia: Jeff Bezos: "We don't think of Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service" <
• Cisco Blog » Blog Archive » Re-Thinking Pork Bellies. Why There are No Commodity Clouds, Only Commodity Thinkers. – "Don’t confuse platform with commodity." << The "commodity" term makes me uncomfortable in a lot of contexts.
• Workshop | oVirt Project – RT @mestery: 5 weeks until #ovirt kickoff meeting @ Cisco campus in San Jose. Have you RSVP'd yet?
• Delicious.com - Discover Yourself! – is being relaunched. It does look prettier. But it seems to have broken existing APIs and tagging system.
• The myth of standardisation – "We have to accept that. It’s evolutionary, in our genes. We wouldn’t have existed without this primordial urge to grow and divert whenever we can. Evolution means upward growth, based on a firm rock bottom. Don’t you think it’s funny that we now all have mobiles, yet download apps onto those like madmen? I do. A splendid opportunity for Cloud web apps, and what happens? Install local."
• How to create an OpenShift github quick start project | Red Hat Openshift Forum – RT @gshipley: Check out my new blog post on creating #openshift quick start projects. #cloud #paas