Comments on: “It would be hard to convince me Amazon needs IBM”. Bonus Erlang dorkery

By: Adventures in systems land

Adventures in systems land — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:23:50 +0000

[...] been meaning to respond to Monkchips speculation over IBM and Amazon from last year this follow-up why Amazon don’t need IBM. James and I met-up briefly before Christmas, the day I resigned from IBM UK. I wrote and posted a [...]

By: People Over Process » Your Data in the Cloud - URL-based computing, SimpleDB, Astoria, etc.

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:00:55 +0000

[...] pointed to Amazon’s SimpleDB a little while ago; I’ve been on vacation for two weeks, so I’m a bit behind. Looking over the SimpleDB [...]

By: Have a great Christmas! « Adventures in systems land

Have a great Christmas! « Adventures in systems land — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:43:11 +0000

[...] be posting at least on one topic over the holidays, although a few have got me sparked up, @monkchips post on Erlang and why Amazon doesn’t need IBM, at [...]

By: links for 2007-12-19 « Amy G. Dala

links for 2007-12-19 « Amy G. Dala — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:17:37 +0000

[...] James Governor’s Monkchips » “It would be hard to convince me Amazon needs IBM”. Bonus Erlang… (tags: amazon simpledb) [...]

By: John Willis

John Willis — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:11:17 +0000

I really liked this post. I think Amazon is causing a disruption as we speak while most people think they are only selling books (including IBM). If you are interested please see…

http://www.johnmwillis.com/wp/cloud-computing/the-ibm-amazon-missing-link/

By: The IBM Amazon Missing Link at John M Willis

The IBM Amazon Missing Link at John M Willis — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:05:51 +0000

[...] is a quote from his recent Redmonk post “It would be hard to convince me Amazon needs IBM”. IBM might be looking in the wrong places for it next big rival. Or not, this brings me back to [...]

By: jay

jay — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:14:06 +0000

James,
I agree that IBM missed a big opportunity to purchase Amazon, although as I said I don’t think it would necessarily have been in Amazon’s best interests. To me biggest revelation from your recommendation was IBM’s declining “end-consumer” presence.

I finally got around to reading this business week article on Google’s education effort, which is of course backed by IBM. I’m not sure if you saw it but it does mention Blue’s initiative.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm?campaign_id=rss_tech

Of course even in this, IBM seems content to be (or be seen as) more of an enabler then an innovator.

In the tech. industry, on a micro level the unspoken rule for employees is to never get marginalized, or supply commodity level expertise.

I’m not sure that IBM’s management has understood this in a macro level, lured by the continued big spending of enterprise backoffices.

It’s also been interesting for me to see the parallels which seem to be occurring;

There’s Amazon which seems to be building a similar set of functions to Yahoo and Google. Then you have hadoop, backed by Yahoo and IBM which is becoming an opensource Mapreduce. And will this Google + IBM “Cloud Computing” alliance be similar to EC2 ?

Don’t forget that RedHat’s throwing some weight behind Amazon too!

There definitely seems to be a gathering storm, both from a “coopetition” front as well as my curiosity behind what these “common standards” will enable.