Short Takes: October 1, 2008

By SD Times News Team

October 1, 2008 —

VMware moves mountains
With everyone screaming about cloud computing these days, I'm really impressed with VMware's new road map. My friends all call me brainwashed and remain curmudgeonly, calling cloud the new SOA: Everyone's got a cloud product now, and most of them seem fairly useless or nebulous.

But in my opinion, VMware hit the nail right on the head with is Virtual Datacenter Operating System. Why rent time on someone else's cloud when you can buy an operating system that can run and manage thousands of systems all at once? The road map also shows a future where external and internal clouds can be synchronized, something users of Amazon's Web Services will be happy to hear about; AWS took a nosedive in August, resulting in time lost for all those hosted on the service.

When the day comes when a downed Amazon cloud can be replaced in moments with an internally hosted one, we will have reached the future.

Alex Handy

Show me the funny, Jerry!
By now, many of us have seen the Microsoft commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, and the majority of folks who have seen it are wondering why it was made.

The commercial basically has Seinfeld meet Gates in a shoe store, with meaningless dialogue ensuing. There’s a reference to a conquistador and talk of a computer that can be eaten like a cake, but the one thing the commercial is missing is humor. You know, the type of humor Jerry was able to give us for over 10 years on his show. But for whatever reason, that whole humor thing seemed to elude Jerry in this one-minute commercial.

Jerry, we know you haven’t done much since your show went off the air a decade ago, aside from that animated movie about bees. Nevertheless, couldn’t you have given us at little bit of the old Seinfeld, as in, “What’s the deal with Vista?!!”

Jeff Feinman

Apple more delicious than BlackBerry
So I finally caved into my consumerist impulses and purchased a 16GB iPhone when my BlackBerry went on the fritz. The iPhone was out of contract and cost me much more than a new BlackBerry would have.

After a few days with the iPhone, my cognitive dissonance faded away. It is an outstanding device, and I use it as my primary business telephone. It was also far easier to set up my corporate e-mail. The prototype BlackBerry Bold that I saw at a trade show a few months back did not impress me all that much.

The iPhone may not have the best hardware, but insofar as the user experience goes, Apple has made another slam-dunk.

David Worthington

The editor is nonplussed
Is it just me, or has everyone you know created a Facebook page this week?

I've been on Facebook for close to a year, mostly to try to monitor what my teenagers are doing online at 3 o'clock in the morning. But lately, my e-mail inbox has been filled with "friend" requests from current and former work colleagues, and from people I haven't seen nor spoken to in literally 30 years.

After posting to a couple of friends' walls and waiting days for a reply, I've learned that Facebook isn't about conversations; it's about people putting their lives on display for their invitation-only circle of friends to view and perhaps comment on. Even if I haven't wondered what kind of day a former co-worker is having, that "status" will automatically pop up on my Facebook home page, so I am informed even when I wasn't curious.

And some people scream "Look at me!" by updating their personal statuses every five minutes with the most mundane occurrences—"Jane is eating oatmeal and watching Regis." Do I need to know this? These are the same people who write those lengthy Christmas-time letters letting you know their kids learned to ride a horse at camp this summer, and they got new aluminum siding in the fall, and that Mom passed a kidney stone. If I knew you well enough, or CARED, I'd ask about those things.

But one thing the technology has done is to make us choose sides, if even unwittingly. Do you post photos and update your status frequently, or do you simply watch the activity of others? In other words, are you a narcissist or a voyeur?

David Rubinstein

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, virtualization, BlackBerry, Facebook, Microsoft, VMware

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/32874

Shakeup at VMware shows its lead is shrinking While Diane Greene was hailed for her technological intelligence, her business acumen left much to be desired. She was removed as CEO in order to bolster its lead, which is being threatened by companies like Microsoft and Oracle.

VMware faces threats from economy, Microsoft CEO Paul Maritz is confident in VMware's long-term growth through the global economic downturn, and so far the company has seen increased revenue despite its management shakeup. Theresa Lanowitz says that competitors, particularly Microsoft, are still poised to decrease VMware's market share.

With vSphere rebranding, VMware refocuses from virtualization to cloud VMware has rebranded and optimized its virtualization platform. What once was the virtual data center operating system is now the cloud operating system.

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