The power of good design. Interesting read about the different design decisions that went into the Amazon review system:
This is a case of a simple question – asked in the right way at the right time – that can have a dramatic affect on the success of the organization. Simple, subtle design once again proves it has great magical powers (and, in the right circumstances, very lucrative ones).
Interesting bit of shopper trivia: “while only one in 1,300 purchasers of the product writes a review, the number who indicate a review was helpful is even fewer.”
Simple as a Service. Speaking of Amazon, AWS this time. The secret to its success may well be doing less:
When you look at the market though its pretty clear the fabric players are suffering from feature-itis. No surprises there given cloud definitions are so flaky, but in the meantime Amazon is just getting on with it.
Amazon is the new VMWare. The adoption patterns are going to similar. Enterprise will see AWS as a test and development environment first, but over time production workloads will migrate there.
Obviously I’m biased, but all this cloudy stuff is starting to look like WS-* all over again, only this time with better blog coverage.
Being practical. Language choice being a consequence of the tools it affords:
… once upon a time the standard was LAMP: namely Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. MySQL is being eaten from below by SQLite3, and the time may be ripe for getting eaten from above. Over time PHP became “PHP, Perl, Python, and sometimes Ruby”. But the more interesting trend is that the language choice itself is no longer as primary as it once was, the real choices are increasingly drupal, django, and rails, with the language being a consequence of that choice.
Top acts. Did you know there’s an htop, iftop, iotop and apachetop?
Backup mechanics. All backups are subject to quantum mechanical effects.
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