Please wake up, Identity trumps Privacy

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Or when reputation matters, privacy can be poisonous

I think that privacy online is a lost cause, and should be a lost cause.  Face it, you’re privacy is completely and totally compromised by advertisers, search engines, social networks, cable providers and the government.  They have the tools and motivation to figure out who you are and what you are doing.  It’s not personal.  They need to do this because you refuse to pay for the services that they provide.  That’s the deal we’ve made with the devil and it seems to be working out pretty well for the service providers.

I see trouble on the horizon and it’s not about your online privacy – it’s about your online identity.

Trustable identity is what’s missing online.  It’s the confidence that I am the person using my credit card.  Confidence that I am the person making funny (not insulting) comments to my friend’s Facebook feed.   Confidence that emails to my child’s teacher is from me.

I know that I’m not anonymous when I walk into a book store, visit my children at school, or hang out at the pool and that’s OK with me.  Why should I expect my online experience to be any different?  In fact, I want my online identity to be even more locked in a solid.  I would be horrified if someone posing as me vandalized someone’s car but that damage could be repaired.  What if someone choose to attack my online identities?  How could I repair that damage?  It would be devastating.

For your whole life (and the last few years online), you’ve been working hard to build your reputation.

A few months ago, the Westlake Picayune, our local newspaper, called my wife to get her response to accusations that were made anonymously on the paper’s website.  The allegations were false and the paper admitted that to my wife; however, they still asked her to respond and left the posts online.  It infuriates me when someone unwilling to be identified can hurt someone’s reputation.  That same person would not stand up in a public meeting and dump vitriol on the crowd, but they hide behind the false cloak of online anonymity and rant.

So I suggest that we need better identity protection online.  Once we have real identity then we can handle privacy defensibly and pragmatically in the limited cases where it really matters.  For example, we’ll know who is accessing our private medical records not just that there was an anonymous breach.  Even better, we should be able to trust that that we can authorize specific people to look at them.  Without real identity, that type of authorization is a farce at best.

I expect that we’re only one major Facebook hacking scandal away from real identity legislation.  Think of the Sarah Palin email hack – it would not require too much more than that to set things in motion.

Getting identity right is not easy, but it won’t happen until we get the priorities right: identity trumps privacy.

API vs. API: How Amazon EC2 kicks VMware, RackSpace, and Microsoft

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My day job is to try and choose and influence Cloud technologies so it’s no surprise when to hear different vendors pitching why their cloud API is more open, standards based, or performant.  They have convincing yet irrelevant arguments: the primary measure of a cloud API is the size of its ecosystem.

The API’s ecosystem is the number (and vitality) of the upstream partners, SaaS services, PaaS vendors, and ISVs that have built their business on top of that API.  The fundamental truth of this model, like all ad hoc IT standards, is that success is built on business traction, not on technical merit or endorsement by standards bodies.

So which Cloud API will be the winner?  We’re just rounding the first turn and Amazon is ahead.  Let’s look at the lead fillies

  • Amazon EC2/S3 has the clear leadership.  Their API is widely copied (without clear license to do so!), includes storage and their billing model is highly innovative.
  • Microsoft Azure is making a big push.  Windows continues to dominate as a platform and their SQL cloud helps address application porting.  In addition, their PaaS integration provides a forward migration.
  • VMware vCloud has taken to high road through the official standards bodies.  VMware dominates the private cloud space and their vCenter API represents a larger ecosystem than any other virtualization API.   This ecosystem guarantees that vCloud will be widely adopted but if they can cross over into public clouds is fuzzier.
  • RackSpace has an interesting position by offering both dedicated and shared hosting.  Their service and API have been along for a long time.  They have just not created the buzz that Amazon gets.  They could be a swing vote depending on their future decisions around Cloud APIs.

But maybe we don’t have to pick the winner!  Perhaps there’s an option for a trifecta bet where we don’t have to pick a single winner.  This scenario of building a multi-API abstraction layer is getting a lot of interest and creating a lot of value.  Vendors include RightScale, DeltaCloud (was RedHat, now Apache), and jCloud.

Right now, I’m sitting in the Delta Cloud session at RedHat Summit/JBoss World.  One of my concerns about API aggregation is that the API abstraction has to be either least common denominator (LCD) or have strange exceptions.  For example, the speaker is saying that approaches to Firewalls are very different or completely missing.  This creates a serious aggravation for aggregation:  does the API leave a gap, favor one API, or invent yet another way to solve the problem.

I believe the cloud API race is not just a single horse race for the Cloud Computing Cup, it’s more like the Triple Crown.   The real winning API will cover compute, network, and storage management.   

Then again, accelerating PaaS adoption could make these IaaS Clouds into buggy whip manufacturers.

Disclosure:  My employeer, Dell, is a partner with many of the companies listed above.

If Apple is Disney then is the iPad Miley Cyrus?

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Or Is Apple’s walled garden more like Disney World

With the iPad frenzy, I’ve been hearing a lot about Apple’s success with its walled garden approach.  I objected to their proprietary closed stance on principle for a long time.  When I finally caved in, I came to understand something fundamentally true about consumers: predictability matters to the mainstream.

This is really no surprise.   Walt Disney figured this out with his amusement parks a long time ago.

Disney World is the ultimate walled garden.  They relentlessly control every mote of our experience in their parks and my family loves it.  We happily willingly pay a premium for the experience because we know that going to Disney World will be a smooth and our fun in assured. 

However, we less willingly pay a second price for our Disney experience; it’s homogenous and bland.  It lacks the spontaneity and vibe of the Austin City Limits music festivals.   At festivals, the content is raw and fresh and things can go wonderfully wrong.  You may be delighted by Vampire Weekend when you’d planned to see the Bob Dylan.

And so, Apple provides the quality control and censorship to Disney-ify our smart phones and tablets.  They’ve created a safe place to show off their impressive innovations.  They’ve created a limited market where they can control the spot lights.  In this way, Apple reminds me of how Disney manipulates it media outlets to create multi-talent superstars like Miley Cyrus.  They craft personas for their actors and ensure that they can sing, dance, and act.  This maximizes the appeal for Disney’s platform but blocks out other talented singers, dancers, and actors. 

Way when Brittany Spears a Disney property there was room left for other (better, truer) singers like Avril Lavigne.  Today, the sanitized Miley Cyrus talent trifecta effectively blots out the sun.

So far, the iPhone has been a platform for innovation.  Please ignore the fact that developers had to buy Apple computers to write applications for it.  Please ignore the fact that developers must pass through Apple’s QA and censors.  Please ignore the fact that you must purchase an Apple device.  Please ignore the fact that you can only purchase applications through the iTunes store.  They are a platform trifecta with hardware, software, and distribution.  This is the price that you pay to ride on Space Mountain, you must enter Apple’s iPark.

I’m hearing about some interesting new products emerging that will challenge Apple’s technology; however, I’m not sure if consumers are ready to leave the park and go to the festival.  I hope they are.

Disclaimer: I am a Dell employee.  We have products (based on Android) that complete with Apple’s smart phones and tablets.

CloudCamp Austin 2010, see you there

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Dell‘s a sponsor and I’ll be heading out to help spread some cloud luv.

See: Live twitter updates

CloudCamp Austin, Jun 10, 2010

About CloudCamp:

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

Register for CloudCamp Austin, Jun 10, 2010

CloudCamp Date/Time:
June 10th,  5:30pm – 10:00pm

Buy virtual goods at Seven-11! Zyanga offers MafiaWars burrito.

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Even in the cloud provider business, we sometimes scratch our heads about how much people are willing to pay for virtual products.  A colleague was ranting enviously about a $20 virtual horse offered in World of Warcraft that sold thousands of units in the day hour it was offered.  That’s over two million dollars of revenue for a vanity accessory made of brightly colored pixels! 

In some ways, this is a generational challenge because I want to see real commodities in return for my cash.  Last week, my elementary age daughter did a grueling hour of yard work so that she could purchase some brightly colored phoenix shaped pixels Webkinz.  Normally, she’d have to buy a stuffed animal to get the unlock code but now she can bypass the plush closet dweller.  When I asked if she wanted the toy that normally accompanies the virtual goods she looked at me with the “Daddy, you are stupid but I love you anyway” look.  To her, the virtual item WAS the commodity and the toy was disposable packaging.  Upon reflection, I realized that this is a much better economic model than requiring her to purchase landfill fodder transported from sweatshops on the other side of the planet.

But I digress….

I was pumping gas today and noticed that Seven-11 is pimping concessions that are co-marketed with Zyanga.  This is not just a Zyanga advertising campaign – it is a fully integrated physical-for-virtual-goods marketing genius.  Here’s the deal: if you buy physical food from Seven-11 then I suspect that you get codes to things like unlock virtual food in FarmVille, yoyos in YoVille, and Seven-11’s to rob in MafiaWars.  They even appear to target specific foods to individual games – the MafiaWars burrito was simultaneously spooky and inspiring.

I suspect that ultimately these items will only by available by purchasing goods at Seven-11.  We’re already seeing applications like Gowalla that hope to bundle physical experiences (visiting specific stores) with coupons (free Starbucks).  It’s a logic step to assume that we’ll soon be directed to physical activities (buying a slurpee) to shape virtual experiences (bumping off a crime boss).   Since it seems like a marketer dream come true, I’m absolutely certain that you’ll see it coming to a social network near you.

So now I’m watching for the day when having physical lunch with my virtual Facebook friends may earn us some useful currency.  I wonder what that currency will be.

Speaking at RedHat Summit / JBoss World 2010

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I’ve been enlisted by my employer, Dell, to speak about cloud software architecture JBoss World 2010 in Boston the week of June 21st.

My talk will expand on the “RAIN” posts that I’ve written before with some practical examples on our we are using Joyent to create applications using these models.

Here’s the abstract:

The need for hyper-scale and the lack of SLAs on public clouds has forced architects to stripe their applications across multiple servers. Similar to disk RAID striping, application striping creates redundancy using an array of inexpensive nodes (RAIN). This technique enables applications to have dramatic performance bursts while improving fault tolerance and reducing costs.

In this session, Rob will review how to use JBoss Enterprise Middleware to create a RAIN configuration using technologies available through the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications and on Joyent public cloud hosting. He will review the essential role of the virtual load balancer using Zeus ZXTM. Rob will also show specific architectures that can be implemented quickly and explain how ZXTM can deliver scale-out ready SQL read-write splitting without recoding.

Java makes stange bedfellows of VMware and Google

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I was thinking about Sci-Tech’s story about VMware and Google. I’ve been watching and wondering how giants VMware and Google will dance to the music of Java (now an Oracle asset). VMware’s Spring and Groovy seems like a natural fit with Google’s AppEngine. However, neither own the Java platform yet both are banking big on it becoming the major development language. It puts them into the interesting position of having the evangelize Java together.

If they can marshall their shared interests then this combination could be a potent counter point to Microsoft’s .NET. They could provide the corporate support and lift that Sun did not. Or they could just create more confusion and dilution for an already fragmented platform.

6/29 update: after the JBoss World show, I need to add RedHat to the list of java supporters. Starting to take on an AntiMS feeling.

Putting on my Dell hat, accelerating these platforms helps our customers and our industry.