A Businessman's View

Edit: ironically, this article on the latest security debacle at Facebook was released today on the Wall Street Journal. You can't script this stuff. Really. The subject for this blog entry is an oft-repeated mantra of mine. I'm not sure if I've discussed this here before, but I would argue that even if I have it is worth repeating. The inspiration for this subject is a recently reported "feature" of Facebook that any of your contacts that were kind enough to enter their phone numbers in their profile have that information visible to anyone in your network unless they were savvy enough to make that information visible to their friends only. Of course, when one of my Facebook friends found out that the had access to their friends' phone numbers they panicked. "ZOMGWTF!!1!11!!uno" was essentially the response, and all of their friends chimed in with similar ones after they confirmed it. Even Yours Truly responded in kind and dutifully reposted ...

Two weeks ago, I was at a large pharmaceutical client talking to a senior IT executive when the word "cloud" was mentioned in passing. He chuckled and responded that this was simply the nom du jour for something that has been in use for a number of years now. For example... Client / Server . When Microsoft DNA became popular with redundant web, application and database servers this was, in essence, a cloud albeit one that was limited in its ability to scale since you couldn't rapidly add new machines to the mix as demand required it. (And DNA wasn't the first time this setup was used either - Microsoft simply made it sound fashionable.) Application Service Provider (ASP). This was, in reality, a variant of Client / Server because essentially it was the exact same architecture run instead on another company's infrastructure. From a conceptual perspective, however, this was very similar to cloud computing as it's defined today: your application is deploy...