Web-Tones

The KM Paradox

Link: Does Knowledge Sharing Deliver on Its Promises? - Knowledge@Wharton. In many ways this research adds nothing new, essentially arguing that KM productivity "depends" on the type of knowledge you are sharing and time required to share it. Tacit knowledge, that is the "wetware" in your head, is the most effective vis-a-vis sharing, but takes the most time. Documents can be reused, but often lack the necessary context (or are dated) to deliver on the promise. The challenge is and remains, how to make the latter look more like the former.

The YouTube generation might be closer to solving this problem!

Uptime: Serious Business Indeed!

Link: RackSpace Outage Hits Home � GigaOM. No need to pile on here, but clearly this is an issue that is going to become and more and more important going forward. It is not clear whether this could have happened on Amazon's or Google's grid, but you can bet that the "big boys" are the only ones that will be left standing when all of this plays out in the next few years.

Reliability, availability and scalability are not just buzzwords...this was/is one of the reasons that mainframes remained strategic computing platforms (for some businesses) long after they were considered dead. We are not headed back to mainframes, but we do want the uptime that they represented and an order of magnitude more. Welcome to the new IT. Google is IBM. Amazon and others want a piece of the new monopoly.

The more things change...

What comes next?

Link: Intel's Fundamental Advance in Transistor Design Extends Moore's Law, Computing Performance. Here Intel discusses why Moore's law continues to rock n' roll. What this means is clearly that the trend toward cheaper and cheaper CPU cycles remains as robust as ever.

BUT, the more interesting question is what will cheap cycles mean to businesses of all types? IBM discusses the need for business model innovation (BMI) in the advertising industry here. The general takeaway, however, is that BMI is likely to drive growth across industry sectors. The availability of cheap CPU cycles is the engine that will drive the innovation.

The mantra of "innovate or die" will drive the legal industry, medicine and the mom and pop cleaners down the road. It is at the intersection of Silicon Valley and main street where the next engine of growth will emerge...the results are (as ever) likely to surprise us in novel ways.

It is the Platform Stupid!

Link: Amazon S3 Exceeds 99.99% Uptime. What Amazon is doing with S3 is remarkable indeed. We are going back to the future. When I first went to work for Shell's Information Center in Houston, it bragged that it had the most compute power in one building outside of NASA. Amazon's computing power, for obvious reasons, does not live in one building, but the level of reliability it is achieving is "NASA like" and perhaps better, and its computing power probably exceeds it. There was plenty not to like about mainframe computing, but in the three plus years I spent at Shell, I hardly remmeber anytime at all when they were not "up and running, EVER!

The time is quickly approaching where, as consumers, we are less and less willing to accept services that do not provide this kind of availability, scalability and reliability. You are either going to deliver on the promise or quickly find yourself without customers--simple as that!

Information Just Wants to be Free!

Link: blog.pmarca.com: Open Social: screencast and screenshots. Looks like Google just turned Facebook into Microsoft (i.e. proprietary social network). Ouch! Here Marc is having some fun with the new "Open Social API."

The medium indeed appears to be much, much bigger than the message. The fun is just starting....