Saturday, June 03, 2006

Amazon S3 and Innovation Ecosystems

Amazon S3 is a grid based storage systems that supports many protocols (among them bit torrent) and allows developers to make web-scalable applications. As anybody can imagine is grid based in an architecture similar to the one that Google uses for its servers (inexpensive grid coupled computers, completely fault tolerant). One of the nicest things about Amazon S3 is its price,
  • Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
  • $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

and the reason why the price is so low -> because they want to create opportunities for innovation and make the innovation ecosystem around it possible.

This is one of many companies that conceive business and innovation beyond the traditional lets make the best product - they realize that social adoption and unexpected uses are key elements for certain type of products and markets and that they can only emerge from a healty ecosystem.

Adobe - MS and greediness

Microsoft, which last October announced it would support Adobe's PDF format in its upcoming Office upgrade . However Adobe wants the software giant to remove the PDF "save as" feature from its beta version of Office 2007 or to charge a fee for it. Heiner, the deputy general who overseas MS antitrust cases said:"The 'save as PDF' feature is the second most popular request we get from customers, ... Adobe has told the world that PDF is an open format...and (rival) products OpenOffice, WordPerfect Office and Apple (Computer's applications) already support PDF and tout it as a selling feature. Microsoft should be able to support PDF as well." Adobe has threatened to file an antitrust complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission if the software giant includes the PDF "save as" feature in its Office 2007, Heiner added. Well - I am sorry Adobe - pdf were free - weren't they?

Friday, June 02, 2006

Dear FBI: I lost the URL of a neat privacy site I visited last year. Can you help? Here's a rare bit of GMSV investment advice: Go long on storage -- because if this government keeps extending the monitoring of its citizens' activities, it's going to run out of places to stash the harvest.

This is a headline of "Good Morning Silicon Valley" - the on-line edition of S. Jose Mercury News :-) Well maybe they can provide a recovery service as a subproduct :-)