The Age of Compute Services

In the past ten years we've seen the "Rise of the cloud".
Almost everyone moved their in house IT and infrastructure to Amazon/ Rackspace/ IBM/ Azure/ Google/ Whatever, got rid of their huge racks and pizzaboxes, and went on with their lives.
Enter the rise of Devops - A caste of people who control the know how of building, deploying and maintaining your servers. Mostly due to poor documentation of the host platform.
Then Docker came along - The ability to create containers for applications, which makes it even easier to run them - However, Docker comes with its own disadvantages (Irrelevant to this post.)

But recent years show a new trend - Where services like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions are actually code containers (Rather than full blown OSs).

This changes the paradigm even further - No OS needed. Just code, deploy and go. Connect it to a file system (Amazon EFS)/ storage/ database/ whatever as a service, and you've got yourself a full working server with no OS, no deployment, all managed, secured, scaled and charged on demand.

This changes the economy of cloud services, as you actually pay for what you consume, and not for what you MIGHT consume (Even if you scale down during downtimes, it's never immediate)

It also changes the paradigm of programming - No need for security concerns (All managed), just a collection of volatile services.

In this new paradigm, cloud cyber, virtualization and devops businesses should take notice. Soon, their business might be completely irrelevant.

My take on the Google/ Alphabet rehash

So Google gets a new CEO, and the leaders form a parent company named Alphabet.
I've written quite a lot about Google's ability to change, and pressure reinventing themselves out of being an ad agency.
Looks like they've come to the conclusion that they can't. Google will remain Google, and Alphabet will be... Something else?

The real question is, if you don't change the people in charge, will you be able to do new things?

Time will tell. One thing is certain: They have enough cash to begin with.

That Magic Factor

Apple came out very strong from yesterday's event.

Though nothing's really new (Macbook model was long due, though it's much more stunning than I've expected), there is one thing I take from this:


The Magic Factor.

Watch wearables, and successful ones, exist for years now. Garmin, Pebble, Android wear - They're all there. But still, none of them generates the excitement that the Apple watch does.

Than I've looked at last year's major Apple releases, and found out that each year, there was a feature released that was either magical or breakthrough - None of the competitors had it, and it worked like magic:

- Retina screen (iPad and than Macbook Pro)
- Macbook air battery life
- iPad mini form factor
- Touch ID
- iMac 5K
(And now) The watch, force touch, HR monitor, research kit...

Apple seems to have a 'game changer' out at least once a year. One thing that creates a buzz. When was the last time you were THAT excited about a product from Microsoft, Samsung or Google?

My Next Laptop

Google, The One Trick Unicorn.

A lot of people like having the discussion of picturing Google as this evil, all seeing dystopian future type conglomerate.
While Google does all but admitting to be one (A monopoly with more power than politicians, buying AI and robotic companies, creating self driving cars etc.), it's still a bit far from reality.

So let's take a step back, and see what Google is. It's the biggest ad tech company in the world. Google makes money from pushing ads.

Not a content company. Not a hardware/ space/ AI company. Not a social network, email provider. Not a hosting company.

A huge ad company.

How big is it?
It's about as big as Microsoft in terms of market capacity, but earns 44% less. And Microsoft does a lot more business than just ads.
Google is almost twice as big as Facebook, but Facebook is leaner and growing like mad these days - And video monetising is yet to come.

But the biggest fear of Google, being a one trick unicorn (I refuse to call Google a pony), is being disrupted. Because people are aching to disrupt them.

So Google is not just trying to take over the world. It MUST do that in order to survive. It needs another meaningful business. Something that IBM, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants which are here to stay have done.

Facebook stabs spam

The war on spam has failed. Though email providers like Google and Microsoft get a relatively good spam detection rate, there will never be a 100% success rate. And these guys are getting smarter.
Even Facebook were not left out, and many people get spam sent to them (check your 'other' message box...)
Well now Facebook are making a stand against spam, by charging 1$ per message to someone you don't know.
I think that's actually nice.

Google services outage and android crashes

Yesterday afternoon, I've started experiencing hiccups in my Galaxy Nexus (Running 4.2.1).
Crashes, phone getting stuck without provocation from my side, sluggish performance.
Turns out Google's services had a major disruption yesterday.
Coincidence? I don't think so. Problematic? Very much. But this is what we sign for, and this is why Google's devices are so cheap... Actually, Apple's devices are the same in terms of cloud dependency (Siri, iCloud etc.), but you pay more...

In the meantime, legislation is having it's way with Apple's software patents. That is good news for ANYONE creating software these days. (Read the last paragraph of this post for more).

The most annoying flaw of the Galaxy nexus

Don't get me wrong. I love my Nexus phone. Android jellybean is great, performance is great, Google voice and Google now rule, however there's one annoying flaw.
One of the reasons I got this phone was its form factor. The 'no buttons' concept and smooth, curved design really appealed to me. But being a long fingered man, I tend to hit the 'home' button a lot when typing on he space bar.
This is quite annoying, as you need to reactivate the app. This even happened twice when typing this post...
Well, no one's perfect.

What to do with Google plus...

I stumbled onto a recent article in techcrunch, saying that Google+ is stopping new acquisitions into its product. Could it be the beginning of the end?
Google+ is actually a cool product. Looks great, has improved a lot over its 15 month life, but still doesn't seem to move people away from Facebook.
Maybe functionality and cool mobile UX is not enough? Though Facebook's UX sucks, both in website and especially mobile, what good is it if you can't find pictures of your girlfriend's friend wearing a thong in Thailand?
It's like Google has created the coolest theme park, but no one showed up, and those who came to the premiere out of curiosity, didn't come back. One of the main failures during the launch was the fact that I was unable to import all my Facebook connections in one click. That meant I had to start building my whole network from scratch - Why the hell would I wanna do that? (Or, even worse, build the network from my gmail, which had irrelevant connections, family and a lot of spam suggestions).
Another big reason might be because g+ is all dudes. That's actually a great article, saying that G+ was designed by, and for, Googlers, and Facebook was designed by, and for, college students (Looking to score...).

Now tell me, for real - Which network would you prefer?

Short update:
gmail just added hangouts to its chat dialog. Once again (Like in the good ol' buzz days), + is coming through the back door. Considering that gmail has ~400 million users, Google might already HAVE a social network. Sort of.