Xensys Blog May 2009
Google Upgrades Business E-Mail
New York Times 05/11/2009
by Reuters Corporation
Last week Google and Postini announced the multimillion dollar take over
of the latter, which would mean an infusion of cash into the relatively small IT messaging solutions
provider. The duo will offer messaging solutions, but in terms of market and consumer responsiveness
they might be looking like a 5,000 pound guerilla. That means they won't give customers what they want. Wasn't the economy and adoption
rate response by Reuters a little off?
By 2017 the costs to maintain physical hardware and software, including
upgrades and consultants, or an in-house IT department, will far exceed the benefit of waiting to
adopt present 2007 technology. With the Fed's recent .50% reduction of the discount rate
(meaning cheaper loans to the consumer, the Fed is attempting to increase the amount of cash available for consumer banks to loan
out, this meaning that the cost of capital for private and corporate loans is lower), corporate
spending could be on the increase. What does this mean? If companies have been looking to increase
capital spending, now may be the time. Will they then target spending on cost-cutting measures
such as eliminating in house software programs, including e-mail, in exchange for hosted, Software
as a Service (SaaS) solutions?
Although such a move is decidedly an economic one, it is one that mid-level management
may see as a more wholly employee efficiency argument. An employee can get more done in less time
by eliminating the redundancy of the traditional local installed software and email solutions and
employing a SaaS model. But, a $50 per user price tag may not equal the efficiency the mid-level managers are hoping to buy.
Read this article at Reuters.
Comments? blog@xensys.net
This blog article is not representative of Xensys Corporation. The thoughts and opinions expressed herein are
solely the property of the article author and the blogger.
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Xensys Blog April 2009
"If Internet security breaches threaten the [computer's] ability to perform
reliably, consumers will not see the [computer's] merit." This by the Harvard entrepreneurial law professor slash
Oxford University internet governance professor Jonathan Zittrain, who also quipped in his recent
article that "cyberspace can be made safer from the chaos and crime that threaten to overwhelm it."
But how do we go about such a thing? Sitting in the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet
and Society, Zittrain pontificates from his academic pulpit on the perils and joys of an
Internet-based society and in that an attempt to point a finger in the direction of a lofty
solution.
The Internet had no business plan or CEO the Harvard professor notes, and so it
grew out of the needs of do-it-yourselfers, researchers, and governments. Zittrain's article cruises through a
history of personal computers (PCs) and the Internet, where he comments on that the initial design
of the Worldwide Network was not actually for commerce, but rather for a purely academic and
strategic sharing of knowledge and information. Once this unfortunate veil was lifted, the
Internet swelled into, what, according to the overall Professor's sentiment, a seemingly chaotic
online anarchy of a user-developed Internet.
Upon the advent of ubiquitous technology manufacturers are releasing what is called "Tethered
Appliances" such as BlackBerry or Steve Jobs' iPhone. Tethered appliances are consumer products
not readily adaptable as PCs are; instead they are highly controlled in what applications can be
used. This, he postulates, limits the potential for malware, spam, and other illicit uses of the
Internet. But does Zittrain leave an undertone of a need for lassoing of the Internet's prowess?
Zittrain counters this control argument with a discussion on Generative products, and services
for that matter, which create "innovative output, [or] new things that improve people's lives,
[while also allowing] the opportunity to connect other people, to work with them, and to express
one's own individuality." This heralds a triumphant view of the very dogma underlying the use and
success of the Internet: free information for all. It is sort of like a Statue of Liberty, a
brazen giant signaling from in the Cloud, for all the information hungry of the world.
But we need someone to watch out for our Internet, don't we? In this wild west of places,
Zittrain hints at shoot out style O.K. Corral encounter. With "zombie computers" and the new
business model for "bad code" producing sleeper cell "botnets," only an online Wyatt Earp and
Doc Holiday can protect us all from this invisible enemy within the Internet Cloud.
Zittrain reminds us of the Mydoom Worm of 2004, though commenting that viruses of this nature are
like the "crime of graffiti," but counters with his description of the "business model for bad
code - one that gives many viruses and worms payloads for purposes other than simple reproduction.
What seemed truly remarkable when it was first discovered is now commonplace: viruses that
compromise PCs to create large "botnets" open to later instructions [e.g. Trojans]. Such
instructions have included directing the PC to become the botnet's own e-mail server, sending spam
by the millions to e-mail addresses harvested from the hard disk of the machine." Approximately
100-150 million computers worldwide have been captured and designated as "botnets," or "zombie
computers" which is one forth of all computers worldwide currently accessing the Internet, as of
January 2007. As if this frightening number were not enough, these zombies pump out over 80% of
the global spam epidemic and virus. The Harvard Professor leaves us with the
latest 2007 e-mail statistics: 80% of all e-mail is spam.
For us to create a solution to this global threat, we must look to the Internet itself to forge
a solution. Until then, we must view the Internet as a "work in progress."
Purchase this article from Harvard
Business Online.
Comments? blog@xensys.net
The thoughts and opinions expressed herein are solely the property of the article author and the blogger.
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