Links for 11-22-2011

• An Open Letter to Chip and Dan Heath about Second Life « It’s All Virtual - A counterpoint to the latest Second Life is dead argument. A lot depends on your perspective. It didn't come close to living up to the initial hype but it plods along at a certain level.
• Google Drops The Price Of Chromebooks to $299 And Polishes The Interface | TechCrunch - Chromebooks never made much of an impact, did they?
• Farage: The Euro is a Failure - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Quite the video.
• What cloud boils down to for the enterprise — Cloud Computing News - "What you do bring to the table–er, service–is code, data, configuration metadata and/or policies that are, in fact, what makes any cloud service valuable to you as an individual or an organization. Your task in consuming a cloud service is to deliver those elements to a service that turns them into functionality that drives business value. Thus, a new order of operations has to evolve in order to meet the demands of this new model."
• Cloud Computing's Vendor Lock-In Problem: Why the Industry is Taking a Step Backward - Forbes - "Only one thing will eliminate or reduce the risk of vendor lock-in in the long run: if end-user customers start demanding standardization and interoperability, just as they have in the past with on-premises applications. “Once it dawns among organizations that use third-party clouds that they need to demand this from cloud providers, then the cloud providers will fall in line.”"