I think both of these links illustrate that errors happen, mistakes happen, software has bugs, and murphy's law always strikes. The question is, when it strikes, do you have enough control to fix the problem? If you've outsourced the solution, does the provider have enough control/knowledge to fix the problem?
These things will get much worse before they get better, and it's best to think of all these abstractions as being a double edge sword.
This is fantastic news. I worked at IronPort prior to the Cisco acquisition, and Scott was a very effective CEO. IronPort was a significantly under-reported success story in the Valley, and a tremendous place to work. There was a huge emphasis on building out not just a great technology company, but a great company culture.
Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer and the WXGA screen is significantly larger than what the emulator normally handles, emulator performance is much slower than usual.
In particular, initializing the emulator can be slow and can take several minutes, depending on your hardware. When the emulator is booting there is limited user feedback, so please be patient and continue waiting until you see the home screen appear.
We're working hard to resolve the performance issues in the emulator and it will improve in future releases. In the meantime, we wanted to give developers access to new APIs and an basic test environment as early as possible.
Keeping in mind that performance on the emulator does not reflect the speed or performance of apps on actual devices running Android 3.0, developing and testing on the emulator is still an important tool in evaluating your application's appearance and functionality on the new platform.
I actually think there's quite a bit of potential for the Kinect, but it's really hampered by one giant bug:
It's an xbox.
The whole experience still screams "I'm a hardcore game device". Hell, it's called an "XBOX" for crying out loud. That doesn't sound warm and fuzzy. When you unbox it, you still need to use the xbox controller with it's intimidating array of input buttons, pads, triggers, and sticks. Most people are going to be scared and intimidated by that.
If you power it up, you're going to be confused by xbox live. You're going to be confused by how many accounts you need to create. You're going to be confused by the number of options.
You're going to be intimidated by ads for Call Of Duty.
You're going to be confused what is an arcade game and what is a demo.
In short, as much polish there is on the Kinect, it can't overcome the fact that it's a bolt-on product for an Xbox. If it was a brand-new, $199 device it would fly off the shelves. What it needs is a 60 second demo: when you have a friend over, you need to be able to turn on the device and be playing Kinect 60 seconds later without ever seeing the xbox controller.
In short, as much polish there is on the Kinect, it can't overcome the fact that it's a bolt-on product for an Xbox. If it was a brand-new, $199 device it would fly off the shelves. What it needs is a 60 second demo: when you have a friend over, you need to be able to turn on the device and be playing Kinect 60 seconds later without ever seeing the xbox controller.
Recently got a friend a Kinect for his birthday... turns out you can hit the 60 second mark pretty easily. His mom loved it, and was playing it all the time. Dance Central, in particular, was a hit, as well as the included-in-the-box Dance Central.
Actually it hits the 60 second mark pretty easily. I got our family our very first console this Christmas, the XBox Kinect bundle. Our usage is: turn it on, insert disk, play game.
People aren't stupid, they're lazy. They expect things to just work out of the box. They don't want to create online accounts,they don't look through the setup menus and they certainly don't read the manual.
I think the point is that Kinect is only part of the package. Nintendo delivered the full thing with the Wii: a friendly, non-gaming-related name and brand, accessibility with the Wii Remote from the first minute you turn it on, a low price point, what they call "bridge" games (games designed to get hardcore and casual playing together, like Mario Kart - unsurprisingly, Mario Kart outsold and continues to outsell games like Wii Fit), etc. Kinect just provides casual games and a UI for those games.
There needs to be more, and hopefully Microsoft will grow in that direction. Obviously their decision right now was to spur the growth and sales of the Xbox brand for the next few years by releasing Kinect as an addon instead of a separate device, but there was a lot of wisdom in Nintendo's move away from the "Nintendo" people associate with 80's videogames and Super Mario.
build software that people want to use instead of
software that managers want to buy
It seems that people have learned this lesson. Marketing folks even have a term for it: The Consumerization of IT. Spend some time around Gartner reading folk, and you'll hear it incessantly. http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_138285_11.html
Of course, now we have real success stories to point to. The iPhone's enterprise adoption is generally driven by normal folks, and the blackberry driven by managers.
I thought this was Saul Griffith's startup, but I see no mention of him on the about page. At his Long Now talk last year, I recall him talking about Makani as being his new effort.
Saul seems totally awesome; his Long Now talk "Climate Change Revisited" was a fantastic survey of alternative energy solutions, and how no one was the answer, but that a cocktail of solutions is. His ability to put big numbers in context was stunning, especially his equating of industrial output in the US pre-WWII to the effort required to build wind turbines to cover half the usage of the current US electricity grid.
Yea, and I doubt that the footers lawyers append to every email mean much in terms of disclosure, but that doesn't stop law firms from trying it anyway.
I think read receipts fall into the category of "good faith effort", and not much more.
Excluding the graphics company, it sounds like they're trying to build out an application suite that makes it easy to keep firing up new vmware nodes as you grow.
My guess is what you're seeing is the slow buildout of a platform to provide the enterprise with it's own app store.
Think about it this way: what's a huge risk to VMWare's business? Customers deciding that moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud because the scaling and uptime requirements are too expensive to do in house.
Every company that moves their Exchange mailboxes to Google Apps is a lost VMWare customer.
My guess is that a lot of this infrastructure is to support them moving to new technologies while the old ones are in place. Changing the engine while the car is in motion requires a lot of piecemeal engineering work, and I think you're seeing that effort here.
