Group items tagged

"THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't. THE NEXT STEP The cloud has upended the enterprise storage market, but that isn't its competitive advantage. Local scale-out storage can be competitive with cloud because network bandwidth isn't cheap. What the cloud has that no enterprise-scale datacenter will ever have is the ability to spin up 10s of thousands CPUs - a virtual supercomputer - to run analytics against the data. CPUs are expensive - and they'll remain so as long as Intel can keep them that way. The ready access to massive CPU cycles means that cloud will always be better at deep analytics, especially ad-hoc queries, than enterprise scale datacenters. But more importantly, cloud-based machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence are the next major evolution in how we use data. And that's where Google has a huge lead over Amazon. Amazon's focus on building cloud-based datacenters makes them irresistable now, but the future of the cloud is with applications that can use thousands of cores to create value. Look at what Google - and Microsoft - has done with machine translation. Yes, you need many petabytes of storage for the corpus, but the real key is in the compute resources and algorit

"Amazon has built a multibillion-dollar business in AWS, while Google is far behind. But the cloud is a rapidly evolving beast, and Amazon's advantages are about to be turned against them. THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't."

"There's a funny pattern of awakening that tends to happen when a technological advancement sneaks up on us. It starts with a mess of confusion. We don't understand the technology or its purpose: "I don't get Twitter. Why would I want to know what you had for lunch?" It then evolves into miscategorization: "The iPhone is actually a pretty crummy phone." We get so caught up in definitions, we almost miss the larger leap that's occurring: "Why would people use messenger apps when you can just text?" Then, finally, we get it: "The iPhone is not a phone at all. It's an everything device. And Twitter is not about lunch. It's about removing the barriers to real-time publishing." While we're busy missing the big picture, a rapidly growing niche of early adopters is diving in. Early adopters don't get distracted by the need to categorize or define the technology. They just use it. And in repeated agenda-less use, the bigger picture becomes clear. This same pattern is happening today with Snapchat. Hang with me. Don't roll your eyes just yet. I'm going to pay it off. I've been a Snapchat doubter for a while now. Like many others, I relegated it to a fad or a niche service for a subset of a subset of the population. I'm beginning to realize I was wrong."