derek abdinor

IBM announced today their version of cloud computing, Blue Cloud. This comes shortly after Amazon’s announcement of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

“As more Web 2.0-style applications, which include lots of content contributed by end users, come online, companies will need to have better tools to handle them”, said Dennis Quan, chief technology officer of high performance on demand solutions at IBM.

“What’s at the heart of this is the realization that this technology is not restricted to universities or academic institutions. There’s a broad applicability for this technology,” Quan said.

Cloud computer primer
Cloud computing is essentially the harnessing of computer power to scale to a massive size, which allows for the following:

• replicating the size of the internet or a part thereof
• testing application viability (esp Web 2.0 apps) by simulating user adoption across the internet
• crunching numbers on a massive, scientific scale. Think the Genome Project, SETi@Home, scanning pictures of Space or the desert. Apparently, in the 50s-80s academics used to book time on a computer to perform data analysis (like calculating pi) and they can now buy time on Blue Cloud or EC2/S3.

A recent analysis by Bear Stearns (BS) recommends that Yahoo! adopt a social networking (hmm, sound familiar in the local context?) by buying Facebook. One of my favourite Web 2.0 characteristics is that comment to a feature is regularly more illuminating than the feature itself, and in this case its true again; roll the good comments please:

• BS has questionable statistics, showing that the 35-54 age demographic as being the biggest social networkers. This is intuitively inaccurate ( ever seen the over 30s groups on FB?).
• Yahoo! Has all the social networking tools it will ever need. It had them in the 90s already. They cant see the wood for the trees, and good suggestions include merging them all into one powerful app, not 20 different ones (cf FB).
• Yahoo! Should not buy FB, unless it will do so only to remove a competitor. It should rather go back to its roots, or rummage around its dev shed and bring all its toys out and reengineer them for Web 2.0.

Yahoo!, WTF? You were the web for many years, synonomous with search, free mail and free hosting. I was hooked from 1999. Sure, I got mad when Yahoo! shut down my account after 6 months of inactivity and when my girlfriend dropped me via Yahoo! mail, but you were like the rock band one grows up with at 13 who can never do wrong.

PS: I’ve registered for another account and am giving Yahoo! another chance. They have the brains, for one. Its surreal writing about Yahoo!s fortunes as I did the same for my dissertation in 1999 when Yahoo! stood for everything the web could be.