“Watching the GE team in action yesterday, I was reminded of the late 49ers coach Bill Walsh springing his West Coast offense on the NFL. Only in reverse. The [Silicon] Valley has not seen much like Immelt and GE.”
– Vinnie Merchandani, industry analyst and Deal Architect blogger
“I think that Steve Ballmer’s very public and very passionate embrace of the concept [tightly coupling hardware and software development from the ground up] — in which he didn’t just describe it as something fairly interesting but indeed said it was a key factor in driving deep-seated innovation — is going to inspire other IT companies to stop noodling around and commit fully to the engineered-systems approach.”
– Bob Evans, senior vice president, communications, Oracle
“It’s a tossup which SLA is worse. HP has a monthly credit period and an easier claim process [than AWS], but … that’s totally offset by HP essentially defining an outage as something impacting every [Availability Zone] in a region — something which can happen if there’s an AZ failure coupled with a massive control-plane failure in a region, but not otherwise likely.”
– Lydia Leong, analyst, Gartner
“While it’s still early days in this market, if Google is going to displace a strong and entrenched competitor such as AWS, it’s going to have to be incrementally better or significantly cheaper. Alternatively, Google could try to redefine the game to be one that it has a greater chance of winning. . . . developing highly scalable web and mobile applications.”
– Chris Potter, co-founder, Screenlight
“Privacy is clearly at the very back of the Facebook’s mind when creating an application that enables this kind of uploading of photographs to be easier when it, in fact, it should be made more difficult.”
– Emma Carr, deputy director, Big Brother Watch
“I’ve believed all along that the [Microsoft] goal is not to be the leading tablet hardware vendor, but rather to [use Surface to] seed the market with Windows 8 tablets. Microsoft wants to have enough devices sold to get people interested in Windows 8, then basically turn over the market to its Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). This is the same strategy that Google uses with Android phones and tablets.”
– Jack Gold, analyst, J. Gold Associates