Al Hoang

Tim O’Reilly is definitely one guy moving the fast lane. For awhile now he’s been covering how websites such as Amazon.com and eBay are beginning to look more like an application rather than just a site that lets you buy books or sell stuff online. They offer many other services on top of their base services which you can access via many Web Services APIs and blah blah blah.

You can find more of Tim’s writing on this here and here.

In many ways Tim is quite right about this becoming a paradigm shift. However, one has to wonder if this is eventual and how will the players turn out? To create a web services as an application first of all you need to be able to AFFORD to keep running your service. This requires lots of other ancillary-seeming things such as a web server, an application framework to hold all of yotur web services, an Internet connection, power, machines to run all of these thiings. And MOST importantly, data of some sort.

This in my opinion puts out a lot of smaller players from being able to consistently compete in this web services as an application game. The costs will eventually bleed you to death on those side parts and large companies are easily able to throw money to provide many of those other parts. And providing the web service isn’t necessarily going to get you money unless you charge for it. But then you need to offer a service people are WILLING to pay for and at the current moment many of these services as applications are dirt cheap to outright free. That doesn’t leave great margins for competing unless you have another core business that you can make money on to fund your ventures into this new territory. Obviouslly O’Reilly Associates doesn’t ahve to worry about this from the business point. They make money on books. So does Amazon.

So I ask… where does the small guy fit into this? I don’t see it. If you’re a small business you’re scraping buy and staying lean and hungry most of the time unless you’re in the growing phase. But that’s a different story.

If you’re a small business and you DON’T have core competencies in building these web services as an application paradigm I seriously doubt you’ll be able to afford:

• The system builders to buidl you a system
• The programmers involved to program the customizations for the system
• The maintainers to maintain whatever you’ve built and keep it tracked to your core competency very well

Prove me wrong here. Sure, Open Source tools are free and the aspiring person can just d/l it and try getting started. But once you hit that thorn you’re so screwed because every minute you’re spending trying to fiddle with getting a system built into place you’re losing time on your business unless you’re willing to lose sleep which will affect your bottom line eventually.

For now I only see web services as an application for the bigger players or people with enough money to just throw around

Jeremy Zawodny talks about Hardware Failures:

One of the computer industry’s dirty little secrets is hardware failure. The few of us who work in, near, or otherwise around large computer installations take this for granted. Companies like Yahoo have people on staff that spend a lot of their time dealing with failing memory, buggy motherboards, smoked power supplies, bad disks, and overheating CPUs. Google, from what I read, doesn’t even bother anymore.

…

Of course, some things fail far more often that others. Usually it’s the disks, or maybe the power supply. All the others combined are much less common that either of those–at least in my experience.

This is why I no longer put data on anything fragile without an off-site backup, RAID, or BOTH.

Spoken like a true software geek. Most software-oriented geeks hate hardware issues. Welcome to the real world, the hardware is just another system that can unexpectedly die for a laundry list of reasons that actually finding out why will cost more in terms of your time than just getting a replacement. Of course then you can have those wonderful hardware/software interaction errors like Windows Standby deciding to croak…

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Okay, that really ticked me off. I got some more work done on my big document and then put the laptop on standby and walk home. When I get home and hit the power button to power back up the laptop from standby mode…. the laptop congratulates me by showing a black screen, a lit power light, BUT NOTHING happening. I sit there banging the power key for a few more times, Ctrl-Alt-Del, keys at random for a few minutes telling myself, “NOOOO damnit please tell me I remembered to SAVE before this happened. And if I DID save please tell me Word won’t decide to take a nosedive on my one and only important document on this machine at this moment.”

Eventually, I resign myself to powering off the machine and rebooting and hoping that all of my changes haven’t evaporated in Word. Luckily I save my document every 5 minutes and every time I power down a laptop but I left Word running which could mean Word does something stupid like corrupt my file because it has nothing better to do.

Moral of the story. System Standby on Windoze SUCKS! Use Hibernate instead.


*sigh* I’ll wait until LongHorn shows its face before I trust that feature again.

Happy New Year’s all. Slashdot linked to an article on Voice over IP Adoption in Japan.

I’ve looked over the pricing structure of Voice over IP and found it not that useful if you’re a light phone caller (me) as you must factor in the costs of an Internet connection monthly which costs around 5000Y or so for a broadband connection that can support VoIP practically. On top of which you are topped a surcharge monthyl fee to activate Voice over IP and of course you are charged for usage time. After doing the math out, a phone line is slightly cheaper. . . go figure.

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