Archive for July, 2006

Price of Storage, Thumper from Sun

Posted July 30, 2006 * Comments(1)

Raw disks cost ~$0.5 a GB, and sinking fast. A high-end redundant storage system with all the bells and whistles cost anywhere from $20-50 per usable GB, coming down much more slowly than the price of disks. Only about $2 of the gap could be attributed to redundancy and the cost of hardware needed to process the bits and bytes before delivering them to an application. The remaining costs are accounted by software.

Along comes Sun’s Thumper:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=the_rise_of_the_general

It marries a general purpose OS with storage, and delivers the whole thing at $2.50 per GB - and that box packs 24 TB of storage! Sun is very interesting, again - as a company that uses Java technology extensively, we are very happy to see Sun’s resurgence. Way to go, Jonathan!

Seth Godin on the Luck Factor

Posted July 27, 2006 * Comments(0)

Seth Godin has run his classic post on Factor L in his blog. He has been an inspiration for me for a long time, and this post tells you why.

I just cannot resist quoting him:


Quote:

Why do some products and services succeed while others fail? Why do some ideas go viral, rocketing across the marketplace, while others wither and die in obscurity?

….

We’d all love to know the series of steps to follow, the calculus we need to run, the hoops we need to go through in order to launch a product or service that is guaranteed to succeed. It would save us a lot of angst and disappointment if we could put our hearts and souls into something with a reasonable expectation of success.

It used to be that way, of course. If you had a very good product and a fairly sophisticated ad campaign (and enough money to keep both of them going), you could buy attention and turn it into market share. Creating new products was largely about having the will (and the means) to get your market to sit up and notice.

Today, it feels like more of a crapshoot.

…

As our marketplaces have changed, our approaches haven’t. We still overinvest to ensure success. We still make sure we have just a few eggs, in just one basket, and then we watch that basket really closely. Big mistake.

We live in a world of fashion, not rational computation. A world where everything from brake linings and ball bearings to clothes and airlines is chosen for unpredictable reasons.

The way to grow in the future is to acknowledge how important luck is and to diversify your risk. Do that with lots of products, not just one or two. Cut your overhead so you have plenty of chips, ready for another spin of the roulette wheel.

Priceless advice.

Toll Free Lines Down

Posted July 26, 2006 * Comments(0)

Our service provider had an outage, and our toll-free lines are down. We are working with them to get this back up. If you have urgent support issues, please use the forums, and we will respond ASAP.

(Update): The cause turned out to be power black-outs due to the heat wave in California. It impacted one of our telecom gateways. Now service has been restored. Thank you for your patience.

Economic Outlook …

Posted July 17, 2006 * Comments(0)

I get the feeling that this is 2000 all over again, this time the housing market playing the role of dotcoms/telecoms that imploded. The root cause remains the same, namely Federal Reserve’s easy credit see-no-bubble policy, ably assisted by Asian central banks, including Japan, China and to a lesser extent, India. This policy has unleashed the inflationary beast world-wide. The housing bubble is global in scope. I notice it in California, and I notice it in Chennai - literally prices have doubled or tripled in the last 5-6 years in both places.

Inflation is really running strong in India, to the extent that the ruling Congress Party felt it politically expedient to warn the government headed by itself inflation. Indians, of course, hate inflation, and will severely punish the party in power when inflation goes up. Partly it comes from the affinity to gold - almost every Indian knows the prevailing gold price, so inflation is hard to hide. I believe this one single fact, more than anything else, keeps government power in some check in India.

But the end game from all this easy-credit is going to be misery. The only question is the depth, breadth and duration of the misery. Stock market around the world, as usual, sense that something bad is coming our way.