Nicolas DEBOCK's List: Webtools

• More points below:

   

  Google is a extremely young company living in the most dynamic & competitive environment, so why Google can “die” in less than 7 years?

   

  Against Google:

   

  - A new search engine entering the game: imagine a search engine in the [buzz] cloud where you can choose between different page ranks? or implement your own?
   - A more ethical adwords/adsense, probably with a keyword market exchange connecting different networks.
   - Mobile phones will run independent GNU/Linux (or any other free OS) distributions sooner or later.
   - “Extreme” open source activists were late to understand that’s important to enforce a license for web sites (Affero), but will do because if many applications lives in the [buzz] cloud or follow a SaaS model, current licenses has a loophole inside. So Google is overusing the ‘open’ world like in social. Where is the search engine api?

   

  - People ‘genetically’ blind to Ads and alternative ad networks.

   

  - Google doesn’t understand that HTML is not for Spreadsheets and AJAX is a hack. Yes, it’s nice for sharing it with your friends. Sooner or Later a complete UI will win (Silverlight? Flash?). Remember that Google analytics uses flash.

   

  For Google:
   - Why nobody could copy adwords/analytics experience? Seems like Yahoo(Overture) and Microsoft can’t do it. There is/was some execution excelence in Google nobody could copy.

   

  - Incredible Research & Development, Microsoft spent a lot of money on R&D but google is ahead in the scientific community, so more disruption is on the Google side.

   

  - Services: Why don’t build a services area for information/reality analysis/mining instead of focus on pennies? I think their information is as or more important to the economy as the government or private statistics.

• It’s the most comprehensive (and I might say, mind-blowing) visual layout of how over 100 companies in the cloud space fit together. More importantly, it highlights opportunities for both startups and technology giants alike.

• • RAM is the New Disk

     

    The superiority of RAM is at the heart of the RAM is the New Disk paradigm. As an architecture it combines the holy quadrinity of computing:
     

  • Performance is better because data is accessed from memory instead of through a database to a disk.
     
  • Scalability is linear because as more servers are added data is transparently load balanced across the servers so there is an automated in-memory sharding.
     
  • Availability is higher because multiple copies of data are kept in memory and the entire system reroutes on failure.
     
  • Application development is faster because there’s only one layer of software to deal with, the cache, and its API is simple. All the complexity is hidden from the programmer which means all a developer has to do is get and put data. 

    Access disk on the critical path of any transaction limits both throughput and latency. Committing a transaction over the network in-memory is faster than writing through to disk. Reading data from memory is also faster than reading data from disk. So the idea is to skip disk, except perhaps as an asynchronous write-behind option, archival storage, and for large files.
• Cloud computing is about using many computers to scale problems that were once limited by the capabilities of a single computer. That's what makes clouds exciting, at least to me. But most will argue that cloud computing is a better economic model for running many instances of a
   single computer
• If you view the cloud as a new model for scalable applications, it is a radical change in computing platform. Most people see the cloud through the lens of EC2, which is just another way to run a server that you have to manage and control, then the cloud is little more than a rather
   boring business model. When clouds evolve to point that applications and databases can utilize whatever resources then need to meet demand without the constraint of single machine limitations, we'll have something really neat.
• Separates data from code. Data is forever, code changes all the time. That's one of the common reasons for preferring a database instead of an objectbase. This also dovetails with the language independence issue. Any application can access data from any language and any platform from now and into the future. That's a good quality to have.
• We are on the edge of two potent technological changes: Clouds and Memory Based Architectures. This evolution will rip open a chasm where new players can enter and prosper. Google is the master of disk. You can't beat them at a game they perfected. Disk based databases like SimpleDB and BigTable are complicated beasts, typical last gasp products of any aging technology before a change. The next era is the age of Memory and Cloud which will allow for new players to succeed. The tipping point is soon.

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