"Small Bites All Day Long – Whatever Tastes Good."

Occasionally in the life of every commentator, even those of us who look at the future of the future day and night, you experience what amounts - yes, there is no other word for it - to an epiphany.

The earliest techno-epiphany I experienced was not, in reverse chronological order, the realization that mobile was the new normal, nor that computing was going unswervingly social, nor even that the Web was going to forever alter the economics of insight capture and distribution. Nope. It dates much further back, to the advent of the Internet itself.

Of course, as a Brit, when I talk of "the advent of the Internet" I am doing what Americans do when saying that the Second World War started in 1941...I am speaking about it from a wholly insular perspective. But this was back in the day, and that was how the world was. We are talking about the world pre-"globalization" - a world where each nation, roughly speaking, paddled its own canoe.

My employer in those days was the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it is indeed through the BBC that my epiphany came. At the time I worked for both BBC-tv and BBC Radio in separate but simultaneous capacities, so it was natural that I also ate my own dog food and both viewed and listened to the BBC more or less 24x7.

That is why it is easy for me to remember the day in the early 1990s that, on BBC Radio's most popular and influential morning show, the then Chair of the British Computer Society was called up by the presenter of the show and asked, bluntly: "So how would you go about explaining this 'Internet' thing."

The BCS Chair didn't miss a beat. Of course he'd probably been asked the question a dozen times before in the past little while, but never by a presenter from mainstream media. He could have alluded to the Internet's origins, attempted to bedazzle the huge morning audience with his erudition and knowledge. Instead he did what so few people, in such circumstances anyway, do. He nailed it.

"The best way to comprehend the unique quality of the Internet," he answered, "is first to understand that it is made up many small parts, loosely connected."

Many. Small. Parts. Loosely. Connected.

That was it. That was, unmistakeably, the very essence and core of the Internet. But it was the first time that I had ever heard it boiled down so magnificently...into just five words.

That was all a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time ago, and since then we have seen the creation of the Web, the dot-com crash, the fallow years, and now the New Boom/Bubble. But the five words still resonate with me. And what is more, they were the first thing I thought of when someone recently sent me seven rather similar words, and caused an entirely new epiphany...this time in a more personal context.

Let us not get too bogged down worrying why anyone would be giving me nutritional advice. Suffice it to say that I have been obliged recently to review my eating habits, mainly because of having lost 10% of my body weight to a radical surgical procedure aimed at curing me of pancreatic cancer. And, in this context, a fellow cancer survivor just wrote me - full knowing that I was struggling to maintain the 90% that was left, let along get my weight back to status quo ante, that's to say, before my Whipple surgery - a brief note of advice.

Here was her wise counsel: "Small bites all day long - whatever tastes good."

So what was the epiphany? Well it was this: the advice was proffered in the context of nutrition, but those seven words leapt out at me in another context completely - forgive me, dear reader, for at this point you will realize that one of the things about cancer survivors, particularly those who have been operated on successfully and are now undergoing six months' of preventative chemotherapy, is that they constantly wax philosophiocal.

I mean, surely those seven words - sent by a dear, dear friend - are a recipe not just for recovery after radical surgery...surely they're a recipe for life itself? For in the banquet of life what better advice could one possibly give a favorite nephew or a beloved son or daughter than this? "Take small bites all day long - whatever tastes good." :-)

It's Time We All Understood About The Resource Cloud

In my last post we looked at how Cloudomania was widening its global footprint in 2010, widening its lead on Virtualization as the technology du jour.

My brief post ended:

As you can see, the rise and rise of Cloud Computing, for all that it stumbled at the end of last year, has in 2010 resumed its giddy trajectory. The next question, naturally, is: why?

Anyone who looks at the technology landscape for a living as I am privileged to do knows that the following is true: Every new technology wave is

• Like all other technology waves
• Like some other technology waves
• Like no other technology wave

Let me show just how true this is of Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is Like All Other Technology Waves
The genesis of the actual term "cloud computing" is slightly fuzzy, just like the genesis of "Java" OR "SOA" OR "blogging" - somehow one difference between Internet technologies and, say, pharmaceuticals is that there's always a collectiveness about Internet innovation, even down to the naming process.


Cloud Computing is Like Some Other Technology Waves
Cloud Computing has achieved massive press attention just like "Web 2.0" and it has experienced rapid and mushrooming adoption just like Java.


Cloud Computing is Like No Other Technology Wave
This is where is starts to get really interesting. Since the inception of the Internet in 1973 (or ARPANET as it was then still called), there has never been a technology approach that had everything going for it all at once: the right name, the right technology, and the right timing.

The right timing part is easy to see: what better time, in the past 37 years, for an Internet-based technology capable of driving down CapEx, than in the immediate aftermath of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression? What better time for an approach requiring storage at commodity rates, what better time for an approach requiring widespread broadband connections, what better time for a technology approach that disrupts the enterprise IT 'priesthood' and puts IT squarely back in the possession of the business? It is truly the Perfect Storm.

Cloud Computing is demonstrably the right technology because everyone who has pioneered it has become astonishingly successful:

• Think Salesforce.com, which since 1999 has attracted 55,400 customers and over 1,500,000 subscribers, acting as the pathfinder for the business success of highly scalable applications delivered over the Internet.
• Think Amazon, which in 2006 kick-started the popularization of the whole idea when it introduced first its Simple Storage Service (S3), offering storage for the Internet, and then its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - a companion product to S3 designed to provide "resizable compute capacity in the cloud."
• Think Google, which introduced Google Apps For Your Domain - also in '06 - and which hasn't stopped innovating in the cloud since.

As for the right name, what more need be said than that Cloud Computing has caught on in a way that "Grid Computing" or "Utility Computing" or "Elastic Computing" never did?

As a metaphor is sums up perfectly the spirit of compute capacity that can be set up and torn down programatically, leaving someone else to take care of the networking and hardware.

However there's no doubt that "Cloud fatigue" is in danger of setting in as almost every existing suite of software becomes not re-engineered but merely re-branded, and give the magic C-word. Which is why my own preference is now to move to a slightly more nuanced metaphor, that of the "Resource Cloud."

Pioneered by Abiquo, whose CEO Pete Malcolm is an undisputed technology thought leader, the concept of Resource Cloud nicely encapsulates the complete separation of the physical infrastructure that provides the computing resources from the enterprises which consume them in the form of compute power, storage, or whatever other service they might choose.

This notion of a "Resource Cloud" in which providers of resources and consumers who use compute power are matched up is very powerful precisely because it is very simple. And because it injects a crucial missing ingredient into the "Cloud" metaphor: meaning.

Not everyone will immediately grasp that the providers and the enterprises who are being matched up in the Resource Cloud will need some kind of policy-driven workload management to interconnect the two; but that doesn't matter, because for me what the term "Resource Cloud" does is to immediately explain itself in a way that "The Cloud" or "Cloud Computing" doesn't.

It's time we all understood about the Resource Cloud. In my opinion, 2010 is the year in which we will.

Who Anticipated New Media's Coming Importance First? (Only Trail-Blazers Need Apply)

It is often said that becoming an entrepreneur is the modern-day equivalent of choosing to be a pioneer on the old frontier. Only people with certain strength of fiber decide to found companies. They tend to be forward thinkers by nature, natural born pathfinders.

But in age that loves metrics, how do you measure the extent to which the true trail-blazer is ahead of the pack? How prescient does a go-getter's prescience need to be to qualify for the label of business 'visionary'?

Well let us take the current new-media movement as one example. The precursor to that, undeniably, was the rapid popularization of Internet itself - without which New Media would not ever have been possible.

So who in the international marketplace of ideas were the true first movers, the ones who grasped, even in its early days, what the Internet was destined one day to become from a media perspective?

One candidate comes immediately to mind, and it is Alan Meckler*.

Why Meckler? Well, talking of metrics and empirical evidence of prescience, how about merely the fact that Alan Meckler obtained the domain name Internet.com already on May 7, 1997? Is there any clearer evidence of industry prescience than that?

Of course nowadays there are some 192 million domain names registered around the world. Or at least that was the figure at the end of 2009. By now we might be able to add a further few hundred thousand to that figure, and before too long the number of domain names is clearly going to surpass the 200 million mark. So it is easy maybe to think just "Big deal. So what?"

But the early history of domain names shows us that snagging Internet.com was the work of a master.

Things were already, after all, moving pretty rapidly in those years. By May 4, 1998, Network Solutions - at that time the sole domain name registry - had already registered its 2 millionth domain.

By August 2009, Meckler was able to sell Internet.com for an aggregate purchase price of $18 million in cash to QuinStreet, Inc. (QuinStreet also bought Insure.com that year for $16 million - with the purchase involving the transfer not just of the name but also of the established Web-based business associated with it.)

The important thing to note here is that Meckler actually took the $18M to the bank. Those would-be millionaires who are hanging on greedily to domains like dotcom.com, or cloudcomputing.com have not been so lucky. Their mistake? They should, like Meckler, have used the domain name they seek to dispose of, and thereby demonstrated its worth to whoever might seek to own it.

For example Business.com, which was purchased for $7.5 million in 1999 by Jake Winebaum, a previous chairman of the Walt Disney Internet Group, and Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink, and used as the domain name of the business search engine and web directory they built up, was sold to Yellow Pages publisher RH Donnelly for a cool $345 million in July 2007. For that Donnelly got the company as well as the domain name, of course. But even so, there's a moral there somewhere.

[*Anyone interested in reading an interview I did with Alen Meckler in 2006 can read it here.]

If you think you can do better, in terms of pinpointing the early sages of New Media, do please let me know. In particular if there are folks who you feel anticipated things way earlier than Meckler, again just please holler. "None of us is smarter than all of us," right?