Gartner Magic Quadrant of Cloud Storage Services

I remember my early childhood when the first PC I ever owned was delivered to my house. It was a secondhand XT 8088, a very simple CPU architecture (I studied this during my engineering days later). The machine did not have a hard-disk. It had a 640 kB RAM storage which was used for the OS and any other programs that I wanted to run (mostly games).

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Food for Thought: Part Four

It’s been a tumultuous month at 13 Llama Studio. We recently shifted to a new office and are currently handling multiple projects … projects where someone has to bleed to take it to its logical conclusion. I do not mind the bleeding, as long as I manage to do a job well done in my mind (more on this later, this requires a heartfelt post). Here’s what I have been reading and bookmarking in the past few days months.

The Decline and Fall of The Great Gate

A great metaphor on how the publishing industry is changing. The folks at CopyBlogger are always a constant source of inspiration and ideas for budding bloggers. However, this story also talks about how the publishing industry is slowly changing. The Great Gate used to be publishing houses and authors used to clamor to get their books published.

With internet and blogging, all of this has changed, and now power is back to we, the people!

The Evolution of the Developer

The story of how the developer has become so central in the new paradigm of a tech enabled organization is strongly aligned to how I have seen my own career progression. It’s a great piece on how Cloud technologies are giving better results than Enterprise Software (which is often considered slow and bloated).

The enterprise IT infrastructure agenda for 2014

Here is an article from the other side, the Enterprise. Link this article with the one I just shared above and you will see the fear of Enterprise Architects and software providers who supply to Enterprises. So what is the Enterprise’s answer to Cloud computing … a private cloud of course!!

Does that help cut costs, well if you work at it, you might get operational efficiency, however the Total Cost of Ownership is always high. The way things have been running are changing, and agencies which rely on businesses have to follow suit.

Personas: The Art and Science of Understanding the Person Behind the Visit

Moz has not only become the go to community for Search Engine Optimizers, but also for all things related to increasing traffic via organic methods (read not PPC).

The article shares how to go about understanding the people who visit your site. It’s fairly indepth and requires for you to study it .. yes not read, but study! I’d suggest 1 skim while at work, and then a slow line by line comprehension when alone and free from interruptions.

Age of the Game Cloud

It was the summer of 2005, I was in the quest for knowledge in the mostly empty libraries of IIM-Indore. That’s one of the main reasons to be there, if you don’t want to be disturbed, then the library is for you … nobody goes there :-)

I found Soft War by Larry Ellison. It was an interesting read, but throughout the book, there are potshots at Microsoft and the personal PC concept. Oracle says that the era of the personal PC is over and its time everything moved onto the web with machines as dumb terminals. Although I agreed with most of the things he was saying, I could not fathom how could the PC fade into oblivion? One of the main reasons why I thought this not possible was because of games. As a gamer, I thought that PCs are here to stay, games require too much hardware support to have a successful online game.

Five years later, I stand corrected and oh so much humbled! With games like WoW, 9 Dragons, Silkroad, Eve Online, League of Legends, DotA, most of the game titles which we know are planning (if not already) a MMO version of their game. What really makes sense to the game companies is the ease of distribution and control they get over the piracy that soon ensues after a successful release. Add to that a pay-per-use business model that is inherent to the cloud architecture, and organizations really stand a chance to make a thriving profit. I am thanking the stars because creators are looking at replayability as one of the critical success factors in making an MMO.

I still have some nagging doubts about the cloud (I guess because of a higher lower total cost of ownership), but its there to stay, for games to go online and create a variety of possibilities. I wonder when people will start having company reps within these games ala social media.

Update:

Read this post after 7 years. This is now a reality, so many games are running on the cloud and require you to be online these days.