Software Plus Services is Only Part of the Equation

Looking out at yesterday's Amazon S3 outage through his Microsoft Watch-colored glasses, my colleague Joe Wilcox views the hosted storage slip-up as a selling point Microsoft's Software Plus Services twist on cloud computing.

The software plus services pitch goes something like this: Rather than jump into cloud-based services with both feet, organizations and individuals should pursue a blended strategy, based on traditional on-premises software, complemented by hosted services where appropriate.

The software plus services strategy makes a lot of sense, and organizations investigating whether to shift vital systems from an on-premises to a hosted model shouldn't allow themselves to get so caught up in cloud excitement that they overlook the relative immaturity of hosted services.

With all that said, however, it's important to keep in mind that the tagline "Software Plus Services" doesn't tell the whole story. Sitting behind that familiar and friendly word, "software," are a chain of significantly more sticky concerns. A more accurately descriptive slogan might be, "Software plus Hardware plus Power plus Bandwidth plus Real Estate plus Management plus Services."

When you take into account everything that's required for a business to host its own software--particularly for a startup out to break into a market, or an established player looking to avoid being bumped out of its place--putting up with a certain amount of downtime can be viewed as a cost of staying in business.

Google's Got Your Workgroup in Its Sites

Today, Google rolled a much-anticipated new component into its family of online applications: Google Sites.

The new service is the fruit of Google's 2006 purchase of hosted wiki provider JotSpot, and I've been looking forward for some time now to see what the search giant would do with its purchase, and to see how well it would integrate it with the rest of the Google Apps suite.

I've only spent a short time with Sites so far, but the service looks impressive.

I Want More from Firefox

Back when Windows XP was in development, I wrote a column titled, "Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead (Almost)!"

I was writing about how Windows 98 was soon to done in by a more stable, more secure version of Windows, and about how the new version would, alongside OS X and Linux, usher in an era in which applications would be more sanely isolated from each other. No longer would we have to worry about single applications crashing and taking down our whole systems.

Lately, though, I've been displeased to find that misbehavior of certain applications I use is visited upon other, totally unrelated applications, leading to crashes, system resource problems and even potential security breaches on the machines I use. The problem is that a growing number of the applications I rely on are served up to me through my Web browser, and compared to operating systems, Web browsers do a lousy job playing host to applications.

Long Live San Francisco Free WiFi

When word came out that SF's deal with Earthlink and Google to roll out free wireless Internet to every corner the city had fallen apart, I was feeling pretty disappointed.

However, a better way forward would be for those of us in San Francisco who would benefit from a citywide wireless network to build one of our own. As luck would have it, the city has the opportunity to just that...