Racklabs - Thoughts on the Hosted IT Revolution

Quick Thoughts on Hot Topics

Some views on the big stories from the last few weeks:

1. I think the Kindle is going to surprise people. The world does need this device. As someone who loves physical books and buys many many of them, I still could use the Kindle. Business books, beach reads, all sorts of documents I need to catch up on would be great to have in one simple package electronically. I think Amazon has a winner.

2. Google can’t be caught. 60% share and growing. Truth is they have built a great tool and marketed it well. But, everyone hates the big guy. I expect a real competitor to emerge in the next few years. For me, I am finding myself addicted to the much maligned Mahalo. When they have a human created result it is 10x better than Google. When they do not, Google (and many other search engine) results are right there. Best competitor yet.

3. More “I am going to kill Microsoft Office” companies. The problem with all of these efforts, including Google’s is they are a solution without a problem. Office works just fine. The only reason to move from Office is price. Microsoft is going to lose margin from price competition, but I don’t see them losing share anytime soon. Its software people! Hard to beat the incumbent on price when marginal costs are pretty much zero.

4. Everyone enters the virtualization game. That’s what a $40bn market cap company (VMWare) creates — competition. I have written before that this market will be interesting to watch. VMWare is in the lead and has the best product. It is their market to lose. But, they better take these guys seriously.

5. The Internet is fragile. Our own outage in a portion of our DFW facility made the news and created discussion on the stability of the Internet. The whole conversation shows how critical the Internet has become. Without making excuses, the truth is all highly redundant facilities, including ours, are susceptible to multiple unlikely events in a row creating issues albeit very very rarely. Look for site/application high availability (i.e. replication in two facilities) and disaster recovery to go mainstream over the next year or two. New technologies should help bring the costs down and create options for even cash strapped startups to be covered. More to come on this one…In the meantime, we will keep working to make the chance of these things happening as close to zero as possible. We truly appreciate our customers’ candor and patience throughout an unacceptable event. Keep the feedback coming.