John Willis posted the below a little while ago. It’s sort of worth watching if only to see what the top brass on polar opposites of the tech world do when they’re on the same stage, crushing on each other:
Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services.
I get the feeling that “cloud” really means “middleware for SaaS,” which essentially means “stuff you sell to enterprises and ISVs.” How’s that one run up the pole?
Also of note: it sounds like IBM runs Google’s pay-roll or some part of GOOG’s ERP. Oooo! Burn!
Brazil launching its own sovereign wealth fund (read: has money to burn)
Why’s this matter for IT-land? Companies like Sun and others are gambling on emerging “leap-frogging” economies like Brazil to fuel their sales. Countries that sudden find themselves rich need IT junk and they need it fast.
On the other hand, there’s a chance to completely leap-frog the need for infrastructure and just go wireless with SaaS/cloud stuff. I honestly have no idea what that means, but my gut tells me it means something. Insert now cliché story of cellphone use in the third-world here for more pondering.
The Emperor carries no ID
Lastly, Ars brings this delightful tale about all of the US states ignoring a federal mandate to consolidate ID cards. In the States, for those who don’t know, each of the 50 states (and also territories and military IDs, no doubt) issues a drivers license and these are used as the primary means of identification (along with your federally issues social security number and, arguably, email addresses in the consumer space).
I don’t know the specifics, but the states were supposed to do something to make all these 50+ IDs more similar, compatible, if not the same. The 50 states completely ignored the mandate, and did nothing.
There are several take-aways here:
In case you didn’t know, Americans are live in fear of a single ID. I don’t know what our deal is, but we just quake in fear that we’d have one ID card, like it’d be the sign of the beast or something.
Take the enterprise architecture perspective: this is a great example of failing gracefully. The central authority mandates new policy - technology even - which the rest of the organization didn’t follow. Despite the complete failure of the “new technology” roll out, everything worked just as well as it did yesterday.
Vendors still have 50+ deep pocket customers to sell to instead of having them consolidate down to 1.
Man, if we can’t get this solved, how are we ever going to have web-wide SSO?
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