The day google went down
Web Services Management, an emerging set of capabilities for handling the runtime requirements of emerging Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), is set for rapid growth, concludes ZapThink's latest report, "Web Services Management: The Maturation of a Transitional Market," released today. The short-term trend in the Web Services management market is primarily one of fragmentation, as the vendors in the space focus on solving various customer problems. However, in the long-term, the market will consolidate as customers look to their current vendors to provide coordinated frameworks that offer not just management capabilities, but all the components needed to build, run, and manage SOAs.
"Companies are coming to understand that Web Services Management is critical for both the operation of Web Services as well as SOAs," said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. "As a result, vendors in this space are finding customer traction by offering a range of different capabilities, from monitoring, to SOA enablement, to metadata management." ZapThink's report discusses the strategies of all the vendors in the space, and lays out a detailed map of how the Web Services management market will continue to transform as it matures. The report also provides clear advice and direction to companies looking to understand and take advantage of the Web Services management products that are currently available. Other key findings of the report include:
- The total Web Services Management market will reach $30.4 billion by 2010, where 85% of that market will be represented by incumbent System Management vendors who have Service-enabled their products.
- The opportunities for new entrants in the Web Services Management (WSM) market will peak in 2004-2005, and drop off rapidly thereafter as incumbents move to consolidate the market.
There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity of at most two years for new entrants in the WSM space to achieve sufficient customer traction to establish themselves as successful WSM vendors.
- The WSM market is especially cutthroat, as vendors seek to achieve sufficient traction in advance of the dominance of the incumbent players. This market for new entrant WSM vendors will peak at $350 million in 2006, and then gradually be subsumed into the incumbent System Management and SOA markets.
In his new book, Call of the Mall, Paco Underhill explains that the reason the rest rooms in America's shopping malls are typically located at the end of a long, gloomy corridor : the suburban equivalent of a city alley : is because malls are built by real estate developers, not merchants. Real estate developers, says Underhill, so resent having to dedicate any space to a non-revenue producing amenity, that they tuck it out of the way. If you are looking for a rest room at almost any mall in the U.S., Underhill advises, look for an uninviting, dimly-lit hallway. You're there. .... Underhill explains why the stores closest to mall entrances tend to be occupied by hair salons or banks, not shops catering to impulse buyers: "When we enter any building we need a series of steps just to make the adjustment between out there and in here," he writes. "We need time to allow our eyes to adjust. We are not ready to make any buying decisions. If there is a sign close to the door, you won't read it." Thus the best locations are further in the mall. And since the mall owner charges tenants a flat rent based on space plus a percentage of sales, it is in the mall's own interest to have the hottest stores in prime locations, says Underhill. He says every mall has a food court because they prolong a shopper's stay. The food court is usually noisy and the offerings not exactly gourmet. But, he asks, "is there another place where the quasi-foodstuffs of Mexico, China, Italy, Thailand, Greece, Japan and South Philadelphia come together like this?"....
CSS Drop Shadows: Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design … until now. CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death: Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution. This article combines several of the freshest CSS and markup methods the web design community has devised over the past two years, blending them into something shiny, smart, useful, and new. Zebra Tables: While misused tables are becoming increasingly rare, the table retains a legitimate role in data formatting. A little CSS and JavaScript magic can make tables better at what they do best: displaying tabular data. This one is for all designers who have ever wanted to differentiate table rows by color without hacking up their markup. Until all browsers correctly support all of CSS3, Zebra Tables are the answer.
I recently finished reading "The Tipping Point" and I came away from it wondering if Scoble is a connector? The ability of a popular blogger to create a memetic epidemic seems plausible. Especially if they are connected to other connectors. Are bloggers influential just because they are widely read? If Scoble says "read this book", will you read it? Well, I read "The Tipping Point" after I read about it on someone's blog and I've ordered quite a few other books from Amazon after reading about them in various blogs lately. I don't think this in itself is enough to cause a global epidemic. But the impact of this "word of mouth" promotion of new technologies is something I can imagine.
Well, For me, Scoble is definitely a Sneezer (read Unleashing the Ideavirus to find more about it). To all unintiated ones, A sneezer is a person who is believed when he tells large number of people about some new thing. So when, people like me and Cameron follow his blog(RSS) and finds a good review of software like Lookout, they try with full trust that this guy will not fool us. Scoble is a Powerful Sneezer.
Note: You can read an excerpt of Unleashing the Ideavirus book here which discusses exactly this topic of Sneezers.
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Microsoft's bet-the-company initiative turns 4 this year. Are developers happier? Has the Windows experience improved? We take stock of .Net's tools and technologies for a top-to-bottom evaluation
"It's important for India that IT services and outsourcing be part of the open trade, global trade paradigm..." "...The WTO is about free trade and it's important that some of these things that are important to us be part of those agreements.."
Read more here. Also, note how the same news story gets different header on Reuters India (Use WTO to bolster outsourcing, says tech guru Vinod Khosla) and Reuters US (Use WTO to Bolster Outsourcing, Says Pro-Bush Tech Guru) websites.
