New theme, vacation coming

Time for a new theme. I’m gonna stick with this one for a while. I’m also taking vacation starting tomorrow so blogging may be light- be sure that you’re subscribed to my feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/randyh for my del.icio.us updates…

Is operations the “secret sauce”?

As an interesting and somewhat related follow up to Tim O’Reilly’s excellent post last week, Nicholas Carr posits that infrastructure is not really a competitive advantage. While operations may be the “secret sauce” for some of the large scale infrastructure providers on the web, Carr contends that many of the services themselves will find it dramatically cheaper and easier to deploy and manage their services in the near future without being overly concerned about operations, scalability, and the associated costs with a high-scale web service. As a result, those factors will not provide a competitive business advantage. 

Carr writes, “Not long ago, it was hard and expensive to build an infrastructure like Amazon’s – but the fact that it was hard and expensive also made it strategic. It provided a competitive barrier, particularly against smaller, capital-constrained rivals. As IT costs fell and best practices spread, it became easier and cheaper to build the infrastructure, which lowered the competitive barrier it provided. When the infrastructure turns into a utility service, available to all comers for the same fee, the barrier collapses altogether. You no longer compete on the technology; you compete on something else.”

In Amazon’s model, the focus is primarily on the utility computing infrastructure and they don’t really tie those services into their online commerce efforts in any direct way. In the case of Windows Live/Google/Yahoo, I think you see more of a direct tie to new online services core competencies in software, services, and content delivery. So isn’t Carr’s focus on the infrastructure services just the other side of O’Reilly’s operations “coin”, where the platform providers focus not only on APIs but on hosting the applications and delivering scale and reliability? I tend to think so, but I’m not sure that Carr would agree.

Interesting new social biography sharing service

TechCrunch: “What’s so strange about [Dandelife]? The business model! Users will be able to make their stories available for branding by corporate sponsors bidding for content. Companies may license your stories for use off-site, as case studies in annual reports or advertisements, or they may sponsor a category of stories aggregated by tag.”

Sounds like an interesting service.  I think Dandelife could provide an interesting twist on the typical social networking sites focused on making business connections such as LinkedIn. With this service, I could see people mining the data to find uniquely qualified candidates based more on their total life experience than just the content of a resume. Many possibilities…