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

Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt

oVirt is the newly announced project focused on open source virtualization management, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more. Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with Carl Trieloff, Red Hat's technical director for cloud, to discuss the ins and out of oVirt. Among the topics we cover are:

• What is oVirt?
• How does oVirt relate to the Open Virtualization Alliance and the KVM hypervisor?
• How will licensing and code contributions work?
• What's the governance model?
• What comes next?

Listen to MP3 (9:06)

Listen to OGG (9:06)

 

Links for today seems to be broken

With the, ahem, less than elegant relaunch of the delicious bookmark saving tool, I'm back on pinboard. Alas, the Javascript I've been using to format JSON feeds into a form I could use to easily generate daily postings is now broken on both sites. (The delicious version never worked on pinboard.) My very inexpert eyes don't spy the problem immediately. I may fix this or I may, at least for the moment, continue to experiment with different ways of sharing content. One of my considerations here is that, while I'm all in for posting on the social media darling of the moment, I also want to largely mirror on a site I control or can at least easily export in a meaningful form--in this case, Blogger.

Links for 09-26-2011

• auntie pixelante › get lamp - I see the point--though don't really agree. Jason's film did focus on the players who ultimately made the most impact. It's a choice and not necessarily a bad one.
• Voting to Hire a Chief Without Meeting Him - NYTimes.com - "...when the search committee of four directors narrowed the candidates to three finalists, no one else on the board was willing to interview them. And when the committee finally chose Mr. Apotheker and again suggested that other directors meet him, no one did. Remarkably, when the 12-member board voted to name Mr. Apotheker as the successor to the recently ousted chief executive, Mark Hurd, most board members had never met Mr. Apotheker."
• Why I’m Stepping Down from TechCrunch | The Reformed Broker - The sad thing is, as one commenter noted, that it takes a while to realize this is humor unless someone tells you going in.
• Bryce's Ramblings: Board Games on the iPad

Links for 09-16-2011

• How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop | Fast Company - "The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate--a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It's as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory."
• Bill Poole's Creative Abrasion: Business-IT Alignment - A nice feedback diagram.
• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
• The Agonies of Picking a Product Name - Fog Creek Blog - "Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy. It’s also a giant time-slurping vortex. And in the end, it kind of doesn’t matter."
• How many photos have ever been taken? | 1000memories
• R&D is Important, But For Whom? – tecosystems - "What the above suggests, however, is that R&D is relatively independent of financial performance for companies that conduct it, with the caveats that this is merely a five year sample and that the selection of vendors is arbitrary and cross-industry. Which in turn implies that Palmisano is correct, and that we should consider research and development separately, because the two may actually have little to do with one another."
• The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist - "TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read."
• Photos, Copyrights, and the “Mechanical Representation of Facts” - I lean towards the narrower view of copyright here. Anything else strikes me as a very steep slippery slope.
• Fountainhead: IT-as-a-Service: Models for Consumption, Operations, Technology - "The market is equating virtualization with cloud, and worse, equating cloud with IT Transformation."
• Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT - Perspectives: CA Technologies corporate blog - CA Technologies - "Consumer-driven IT extends beyond the enterprise (fire)walls too. Like all consumers, your customers are rapidly becoming used to accessing cloud services whenever it suits them; they are connecting with product and service vendors online; they are interacting with businesses through social media and portable cloud-connected apps. Yet none of this means that employees are inherently correct in their sourcing decisions."
• CrunchFund? No Matter What You Call It, It's Business as Usual in SV. - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD - "By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time."
• Be warned: cloud, virtual apps can magnify the cost of wasted software licenses | ITworld
• Red Hat's Aeolus to 'out-Linux' Rackspace's cloud • The Register
• Nikon: we don't need mirrorless cameras | News | TechRadar UK