Blackflies and Black Boxes · On the grass just outside the entrance to our Menlo Park campus, there’s a big brown rectangle where they had the Blackbox sitting; it’d been taken up to San Francisco for the Analyst Summit and Education conference ... [4 comments]
Rails and Joyent · Last week, I read about Joyent running four thousand Rails requests per second with a hardware load balancer fronting six of their Accelerator thingies. Then yesterday it turned out that svn.rubyonrails.org/rails, the new Rails development cluster, is at TextDrive too. Under my Sun hat I’m happy that Solaris is apparently behind the world’s highest-performance Rails installation and is supporting both Ruby 1.9 and Rails development. My take-away, though, is that the more I hear about Joyent, the more interesting they look.
Microsoft · Last week I spent time talking to a lot of different technology people, from all over the world geographically and organizationally and culturally. The conversation kept looping back to Microsoft, and to the same sentiment: They’ve lost their mojo. Lots of people will end up using Vista, but does anyone care? The Microsoft execs look haggard and joyless, and half the interviews feel phoned-in. There’s real innovation in the Office UI, and everyone says “But it’s OK, the old keyboard shortcuts still work”. The advertising campaign is vapid and lame, but then that’s nothing new; they haven’t run an effective one in years. I’m sure that Microsoft can come back, the way IBM did after their bad patch last century; maybe the energy is building in a building in Redmond where nobody’s looking. I’ve never liked Microsoft, but now I realize how much energy they used to inject into the ecosystem, because it’s not there any more and I miss it. [9 comments]
