I posted a few months ago about the fact that the NZ Government had purchased the national rail service (that they sold a few years previously but that’s another story).
At the time I said that;
Bear in mind that this is the same rail network we sold years ago, it’s fallen into disrepair and is under-utilised. It appears that the selling party played a bluffing game, feigning reluctance to sell in order to ratchet up the price.
Now it appears that the rumours back then were correct - it seems a paper from late 2006 valued the asset at some $570 million LESS than the NZ Government pad for it in July of this year - that’s a fair increase in value in only 18 months (like five times the value!)
Yet again another case of people in office with no real-world commercial experience being swayed by smooth talking snake-oil merchants. My vote…. a benign dictatorship!
Finance Minister Michael Cullen said yesterday that a huge range of valuations for Toll’s rail asset existed;
As the government had to take national interest factors into account and as the existing owners of the track itself, we were always going to have to pay more than commercial rail operators who did not have an interest in keeping services open. We paid a reasonable and fair price
At the recent office 2.0 conference I had the good fortune to listen to a panel on which Doug Harr of Ingres spoke. I’ve swapped a couple of emails with Doug and came across a post on his blog where he discusses Open Source software and whether or not it is in fact free.
Ingres has developed the majority of their customer facing applications using pen Source tools and utilities - so by definition they’re a believer in the concept of Open Source - the community development and agility that goes with it. However Ingres does not consider itself a user of free software - it invests in paid deployment, support and maintenance services that go along with the OpenSource software they use.
Doug calls for a change in naming - rather than calling OpenSource software "free" we should call it "complimentary" - where the software itself comes without a charge - but the add on services can be purchased.
As Doug so rightly points out;
We want resources behind the solution who we can call at 2 am if that application is mission critical or even subject to at least 95.95% availability
TechCrunch waxes poetical on the threat to Microsoft, and in particular the exalted position of Outlook, that Facebook poses.
TechCrunch says that;
Facebook succeeds because it is the killer web application for communications and personal information management. Facebook Mail is not without its problems, but the combination of Facebook Mail, Facebook Chat, and what is functionally an auto updating address book, makes Facebook into the new Outlook not only for those who are inside of Silicon Valley, but for anyone of the millions of people who use Facebook as either their sole or their primary digital identity
Now don’t get me wrong - I’m an evangelist for web-based solutions and I’m also a fan boy (does that term work for anything other than Apple) of disruption in general - but lets look dispassionately at this one. The statistics are pretty telling, Outlook has massive market share in the business world (read - where the dollars are MS is) and rather than being disrupted outright, my view is that Microsoft will iterate their products to meet the market. We’ve already seen some things along these lines (check out Xobni if you haven’t already - great search and social aspects for Outlook) - at one stage Microsoft was rumoured to be in the process of purchasing Xobni, this never eventuated but clearly it is an area where Outlook may move.
As TechCrunch says;
what is the take away from all of this? For Microsoft to pick up the proverbial ball and start running with it, it will need to listen to what the consumer wants, and design products that fit those needs, rather than assuming that the consumer will buy whatever it is that Microsoft hands them, just because it is a Microsoft product. And, the young consumers of today, the big spenders of tomorrow, want products that are focused on mobility, ease of use, speed, and simplicity
I agree entirely - but caution people not to write of Microsoft just yet
The end of our first week! CloudAve launched on Monday after lots of behind the scenes work by people all over the place - we’re stoked to be here (or more correctly there) and hope you’ll join us for the ride. As you’ll see below it’s been a busy week with a lot of valuable content for our readers - we hope you agree!
Editors welcome
Both Zoli and Ben welcomed the world to CloudAve and discussed whether we’re actually on a suicide mission with this cloud thing - especially after comments made by Harry Debes. Later in the week we looked at a response to Debes’ comment by Dave Duffield.
Cloud Computing to the fore
We took a look at the trend towards self-provisioning of hardware within enterprise and said it’s yet another justification for Cloud Computing being the way forward.
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