Soylent Green — Now Made with More Women!

Soylent_greenSoylent Green is the punchline of a bad joke told to me at the breakfast table by Channing, my 13 year-old son, but in a way it is fitting for this column about women executives in danger of being chewed-up by their corporate machines. And kudos to you if you caught the reference to Edward G. Robinson’s final film — about an over-populated world where people are recycled into cookies.

First up is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, whom I’m told is rapidly losing the support of her hand-picked board. Mayer, who is expecting twins, will probably not be returning from her upcoming maternity leave and Wall Street has begun speculating about possible successors. […]

By |November 30th, 2015|2015, cloud computing, Companies, competition, Industry, strategy, Technology|76 Comments
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AWS shows Cloud is NOT a high-margin business

AWSearningsLast week Amazon.com was the first of the large cloud service companies other than Rackspace to finally break out revenue and expenses for its cloud operation. The market was cheered by news that Amazon Web Services (AWS) last quarter made an operating profit of $265 million with an operating profit margin of 19.6 percent. AWS, which many thought was running at break-even or possibly at a loss, turns out to be for Amazon a $5 billion business generating a third of the company’s total profits. That’s good, right? Not if it establishes a benchmark for typical-to-good cloud service provider performance. In fact it suggests that some companies — IBM […]

By |April 27th, 2015|2015, cloud computing, Companies, Industry, Internet|38 Comments
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Try editing your images in the cloud via Mainframe2

This may be the future of computing in the post-PC era. Embedded in this page is a fully functional copy of Adobe Photoshop running in the cloud using the Mainframe2 interface to Amazon Web Services’ EC2 graphical cloud that I mentioned last week and the week before.

You can’t (yet) upload your own pictures to this demo but you can open pre-loaded files and manipulate them as you like. Try it on Windows or Mac using Safari or Chrome for now (more html5 browsers coming including those for Android and iOS). No plugins!  Let me know how it works for you. And remember this application was ported to the cloud in about 10 minutes.

I’ll be […]

By |November 14th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, cloud computing, Software, Technology|79 Comments
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Amazon’s new graphical cloud helps make desktops obsolete

g2_gpu_model_4Amazon Web Services quietly released on Tuesday a pair of new instances on its EC2 cloud computing service. Not just new instances but a whole new type of instance aimed at 2D and 3D graphical computing. For the first time from AWS in a generally available instance, developers and users will have access to virtual machines with GPUs. It’s like putting a PC in the cloud. More properly it is like putting your PC in the cloud. I think this has great disruptive potential. And that means we’ll see similar services coming soon from other cloud providers.

Autodesk must think it has potential, too, because they’ll be offering several applications on the new platform, […]

By |November 6th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, cloud computing, Software|67 Comments
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