TFD10 Prep: SolarWinds
SolarWinds are going private, and need to restructure what they do. What will it look like? Read More
Category: Economics
Cloud Mini-mills
What if cloud computing becomes the fully integrated steel mill of the future? What would disruptive mini-mills look like? I was musing on resiliency issues recently, which led to an interesting line of thinking that I’d like to share. I use the mini-mill analogy because it’s often cited in business school… Read More
On Signal and Noise
Penelope* (not her real name) is an Instagram influencer. Companies sometimes pay her, in cash or in kind, to promote their products, hoping she will somehow influence those who follow her online into buying their products. How do companies decide Penelope is worth courting? Her follower count. There’s just one problem: it’s… Read More
Google Share Details on Their Datacentre Network Evolution
On Tuesday at the ACM SIGCOMM 2015 conference in London, Google shared details, and I do mean details, on the way their internal datacentre networks are (or at least were) constructed. In a paper titled Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network [PDF] the authors describe how… Read More
Tech Companies With An OPiuM Problem, Part 3
If you haven’t read them already, check out Part 1 and Part 2 in this series. We discussed the rule of thumb for investor returns of 10-20x money raised in the first post in this series. Let’s have a look at some numbers that we actually know to see if… Read More
Tech Companies with an OPiuM Problem, Part 2
If you haven’t read it already, check out Part 1 in this series. Last time we went through a quick primer on capital markets to provide the context for how tech company financing works. Now we’re going to look at what funding rounds mean and why getting a bunch of… Read More
Tech Companies With An OPiuM Problem, Part 1
My strategy professor in business school had an amusing phrase to describe companies who take on too much external funding. He said they had an “OPM” problem: Other People’s Money. The issue with taking Other People’s Money is that, usually, they want it back. With interest. It’s basically how the… Read More
Interpreting Cloud Company Strategy
We’ve all seen the AWS numbers now, and hopefully looked at them in a bit more detail than just the headlines. I’ve written about cloud economics before, so let’s revisit things a little. The AWS business is apparently a roughly $6bn-a-year revenue business. That’s all external revenue from customers, not… Read More
AWS Financials Available. So Now What?
Last week we saw Amazon break out their AWS numbers as a separate segment for the first time, so of course, the entire tech press lost their collective minds and wrote reams about it. It’s bigger than we thought! It’s smaller than we thought! They have margin! OMG. I’ve previously… Read More
Quality of Service versus Priority Throttling
I’ve had to write this email multiple times now, so, taking my own advice, I’ll write it as a blog and then I can just send the link to people. As can you! Vendors, particularly storage vendors, like to say Quality of Service when they mean priority throttling, and they… Read More