After two weeks away from home, I’m finally back.

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Follow-up

Some reader follow-up on the Mexican matches from @MordodeMaru:

That match-box sure is another mindfuck. I think the key is the de lujo rather than the Clásicos. De lujo means high-class, luxurious and those objects (except for the Parthenon temple) are considered high society objects. It’s a very typical Spanish expression to say something is de lujo to mean cool, and this is something publicity picks up very frequently.

Tech & Work World

The industry analyst business - meta-level

I finally wrapped a long post on the tech industry analyst market. As I talked about in a recording for thenewstack.io analyst podcast, I originally wrote the first draft back in April of last year when Ben Thompson first launched Exponent.fm. In a more recent episode, he went over how his business has been going (very well!) which reminded me that I should finish up the post.

In the proceding time there was new data out there which allowed me to rate his success by revenue, broadly. And, since I’d left the analyst world, I felt a little more free in analyizing that world.

Anyhow, it’s been nice to hear the reception from other analyst types. In talking through the piece with Alex Williams today, I think the part that I found lacking (as I disclaimed in an aisde at the top of the post) was an explanation of how this new crop of analysts could better attract buy-side customers.

What the new analysts do is mostly “vendor sports” which is appealing to the investment community (who wants to know how to allocate their money), vendors (who want ideas and competative intel), and the smaller “general audience” that just wants tech news. Buyers want advice about what IT to buy and how to use it. Alex and others are exploring ways of doing that…but there could be a lot more done there to marry-up the kind of work Ben Thompson, Horace Dediu, and even RedMonk does with Wirecutter style reviews (credit to SDT co-host Brandon Whichard for the Wirecutting framing which I think is spot on).

The issue, as I do cover in the post, is that doing these kinds of reviews and advice for enterprise technology is really expensive. Imagine what it would take to build out labs and tests to evaluate all the OpenStack distros, running in various modes…and then compare them to VMware and Microsoft virtualization. Or to evaluate all the ERP software out there.

I think it’s technically possible and would even be interesting. The problem is the opportnity cost for people involved: if you had the analytical and technical acumen to do that kind of testing, you can probably make more money working for an actual enterprise or vendor.

The problem always comes down to what people want to pay for, and it doesn’t seem easy to make money off the hard work in IT analyst land. That’s part of why Gartner has such a strong position, and, as I advise in the piece, an area they could defence against well.

As a side-note, I left out something I’d noticed about Forrester while putting together charts for the piece: they seem to be loosing profits, I’m not sure why, could be for growth or something bad.

Quick Hits

• Speaking in Tech: Woohoo – we’re CUTTING OFF THE CABLE COMPANIES - I was guest on the Speaking in Tech podcaat last week, a podcast I like a lot. It was mostly just me explaing myself, but the first half before that is fun!

• Private cloud failure, a pounding - Matt Asay does his usual curration-style post sprining off Bittman’s private cloud failure pie chart from the other day.

• Cloud Foundry Names Sam Ramji as CEO - I’ve worked with Sam in the past; it’s awesome that he’s in the Cloud Foundry world now, in the role that he’s in!

• Opinion: What Should I Run in My Containers? — On Docker - computers: still considered difficult.

• Survey: 70% of enterprises adopting Docker containers - SD Times - I haven’t dug into this yet - surveys done by vendors always need a close eye, but it’s data nonetheless. Speaking of, check out this year’s RightScale cloud survey.

• OpenStack comes up huge for Walmart - this is a big win for OpenStack. There’s not that many production stories like this out there at all; most of the users of OpenStack are either vendors, service providers (clouds themselves), or enterprises doing PoC’s.I’m eager to hear all the details!

• Check out the new podcast from Dave Briggs and Robert Brook. It’s what you’d expect, which is fantastic.

On-premise or cloud? It can be hard to know which is the best strategy. My handy flow chart will help you decide. pic.twitter.com/1hZofyQtVp

— Richard Copley (@Copley_Rich) February 16, 2015

Fun & IRL

It looks like you’re supposed to drink 3–5 cups of coffee a day now. That and two glasses of wine a day, and we’ll finally be livin’ the life!

Honestly, I can’t keep up with all this stuff. Is there some source for nutritional advice that can be trusted more than 24 months?

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