
Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads. Get Platformonomics Updates By Email I made another appearance on the Telco in 20 podcast, where we talked about hundreds of billions of HyperCAPEX spend and asked what ever happened to the…
Google Cloud sits a distant third in the cloud wars (ignoring the Chinese cloud companies, which are pretty much irrelevant to Western markets as they face a Huawei-or-the-highway reckoning). With a cloud infrastructure business generally estimated to be between a quarter or a third the size of Microsoft Azure, which in turn is about half…

“Clown-1-1” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by americanbulldogbully007 There are hyperclouds and there are hyperclowns. Hyperclouds have globe-spanning infrastructure upon which they lavish many billions of dollars every year. Hyperclowns pursue a far more asset-light approach to the same problem, but try to compensate with hot air. It has been just over two years since we last…

As we lurch erratically and haphazardly toward a new world order that finally subsumes the dilapidated remnants of the Cold War era, here are the current players in the great game: SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 – what an incredible Cinderella story. This unknown virus, a mere 29,903 nucleotides, comes out of nowhere, to disrupt the entire planet and intensify the…

“CAPEX rules everything around me…” Coming from a very asset-light software background (“You get a new laptop! You get a new laptop!”), I was enthralled by the very different set of skills and materials necessary to combine with software to build large scale data centers in the early 2000s. That fascination turned into an early…

TL;DR: Down and to the right I wasn’t going to do this post until I learned IBM PR is out browbeating reporters (one of the rare activities where the company is still world class) for being “too harsh” by including actual performance metrics in stories about IBM’s CEO transition. So I shall rally to the…