The truth is that closed systems still win. Open systems, practically speaking, are basically good for making others lose. The art of business in the 21st century is figuring out how to open up your suppliers’ and competitors’ business while keeping yours tightly sealed. And in that endeavor Google has proven highly successful.

In a comment to Carr’s posting, Marc Farley — a long-time author and analyst in the storage solutions space — pointed out:

Nick, storage customers tend to be far more conservative about risk than your average web services customers. Paranoid skepticism about storage creates different market dynamics. In other words, it ain’t cost-driven. Yesterday I wrote about it on my blog.

It makes sense to me that storage solutions — whether hosted or in-house — are (or should be) subject to a higher level of “paranoid skepticism” than other types of Internet services. For users and companies, it’s all about the data. Service disruptions are annoying, but data loss is terrifying.

However, I think Marc misses several points. First, S3 is has a lot going for it beyond being “cheap”. The primary attraction of S3 is its programmatically accessibility and its ability to handle random reading and writing of files (rather than bulk update and restore). This makes it appealing to incorporate into many online and desktop applications.

Second, Marc says in his blog entry:

If you expect something like 5 nines, then I would suggest that S3’s problems today cast a different shade of cloud over those expectations.

I say that the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement — more than this week’s outage — should be the instrument that “casts a different shade of cloud” over expectations that S3 will provide 5 nines¹ availability. The SLA only commits to 3 nines² in any billing period. Businesses and individuals requiring higher availability must look elsewhere or provide their own redundancy (and read Joel’s insights about the realities of high availability).

Marc’s not entirely wrong, though. In this segment, he mostly hits the nail on the head:

The bottom line question is whether you think you can do better on your own?

That’s close to right. Expressed more fully, the bottom line is whether you think can either do it better for the same cost or do it cheaper with the same level of service. But I digress.

I imagine that Marc’s professional history is largely devoted to working with large institutions and enterprises because those have been the traditional customers for professional storage solutions. With that perspective, Marc goes on to say:

Today, most storage customers think so and I believe most will continue to think so for a long time, despite what market analyst thinkers like Nick Carr believe.

Traditional storage solution customers probably can do better on their own than by using Amazon S3, but what Nick Carr realizes that Marc Farley doesn’t is that Amazon S3 isn’t aimed that that market.

I don’t think that Marc fully appreciates the dramatic market shift that is taking place today in the storage services space. I would be shocked if a significant proportion of Amazon S3’s customer base was traditional storage solution customers. I expect that most S3 customer are small businesses, startups, sole proprietorships, and individuals. Customers in this market don’t need petabytes of storage with carrier-grade availability (at least initially) and they almost certainly don’t have the technical expertise in-house (or the money to contract for that expertise) to build their own storage solution. What these customers do need is a storage solution with low up-front costs, pay-for-what-you-use billing, and access to lots more storage on short notice in case they’re an overnight success.

Thus, Marc might be surprised by Friday’s Wired article: Customers Shrug Off S3 Service Failure, but Nicholas Carr and Wired’s CTO understand:

For startups (and even for our own startups), it is a calculated risk to put all eggs in the EC2/S3 basket. Considering the cost savings overall, today’s glitch may have been acceptable for startups that use S3, like Twitter, given the bigger picture.

Indeed.

¹ “Five nines” is 99.999% availability, which allows only 25.9 seconds a month or 5.26 minutes a year of unplanned downtime.

² “3 nines” is 99.9% availability, which allows 43.2 minutes a month or 8.76 hours a year of unplanned downtime.

To which I say: yawn!

First, the device is just plain ugly. Who wants to be seen pulling that out of their bag on the train ride to work? Anyone who is willing to drop $500 on a consumer electronics item expects it to be stylish. Even if “stylish” is asking too much, the device should at least not look like something dreamed up during the early 1980s. I know that the ’80s big glasses are back and the ’80s fashions are influencing today’s leading designers, but the ’80s look for electronics was dorky — even in the ’80s.

Speaking of people willing to spend $500 on consumer electronics, who is the target audience for this device? What is the value proposition of this device — or any ebook reader? Are ebooks going to be cheaper than printed books? Maybe a little, but so far ebook prices aren’t compellingly lower than traditional books. Certainly they are not low enough to overcome the risks associated with DRM content.

Convenience? I don’t see it. Most people read one book at a time, so the ability to carry dozens of books with you isn’t compelling. Also, for readers who consume one book at a time, trading the print edition for the ebook reader isn’t a big savings in space or weight. Finally, if I’m on the train, sitting in a Starbucks, or in the park reading the Biography of FDR, I want everyone to know that I’m reading the Biography of FDR. Yes, it’s snobbish, but so the are people who read biographies of presidents.

Some commentators are speculating that the Amazon Kindle could do to books what the iPod did to music. Not going to happen. The consumer’s relationship to books is very different than the consumer’s relationship to music. A CD holds an hour’s worth of entertainment. A book holds a day’s worth of entertainment. Musical selection is subject to mood, so the availability of a wide variety of albums or songs is great. Books are less subject to those pressures. What’s more, I don’t see digital books as having anything to offer above print books. Consequently, the ebook reader is not a compelling replacement for print books.

In fact, I assert that the whole term “ebook” is leading everyone on the wrong direction. Replacing books is not the ebook reader’s killer app. Where I do see very intriguing possibilities for ebook readers are in books for boomers, reviving periodical old media, and — most importantly — in new media.

Books for boomers. An advantage that ebook readers have over print is that ebook readers can change the size of the book’s typography. This is a huge benefit for people like my parents who love to read, but whose eyesight isn’t as sharp as their 20-something and 30-something children. Unfortunately, increasing the size of an ebook’s type makes the ebook content harder to read for long stretches by increasing the number of line breaks that the reader has to consumer per unit of content (e.g., 100 words). An obvious solution to this would be to have the ebook reader behave like MobileSafari and enlarge content without reflowing it when the screen is rotated into landscape.

As I mentioned earlier, most people aren’t interested in carrying more than one or two books at a time and books aren’t particularly heavy or bothersome. Additionally, books tend to be read start to finish, so ebook readers don’t offer a lot of advantages. Finally, most ebook content will be encumbered by DRM, which means that consumers will need to worry about whether their ebook purchases will be readable in 3, 5, or 20 years. (Yes, 20! If you spend $150-$200 on the Harry Potter series or Lord of the Rings as ebook content while in your 20s, you want to know if you’ll be able to reread them or read them to your children one day.) However, newspapers are the exact opposite of books in all of these areas. They are somewhat cumbersome (though not bad) and they are a bother to read. They are big, they get ink on your hands, and most people read newspapers by jumping around to the content that interests them. Finally, almost nobody has the strong expectation that they should be able to read today’s newspaper article in ten years. Most people have a “read and discard” relationship with newspapers and magazines. Thus, an ebook reader is nearly a perfect match for periodical traditional media. The content could be searched, cross-linked, and have “Related Articles” to facilitate scanning for the bits of interest.

I would be willing to pay the WSJ, NYTimes, Chicago Tribune, Oak Park Leaves, and Crain’s Chicago Business each small monthly fees to have subscriptions to their latest content ready to be sync’d to my ebook reader every morning in an appealing format that takes advantage of the device. I say “sync’d” because I don’t want to be tethered to the Internet to enjoy my content throughout the day. Just like I listen to podcasts while offline, I want to read content offline.

There. I just saved the newspaper industry. But they shouldn’t be too happy: the same things that make an ebook reader great for periodical traditional media make them great for blogs. Sync everything in the morning, read it on the way into work and home again. Searchable, cross-referenced, and waiting to be consumed at my leisure. No Internet connection required after synching.

While I’m talking about myself, I should note that all of the stuff I said before about why ebooks aren’t a good replacement for books don’t apply to me. In my backpack I currently have six (6!) books.

1. Essential SNMP
2. Pro Nagios 2.0
3. Java Management Extensions
4. CSS: The Missing Manual
5. GUI Bloopers 2.0
6. Agile Web Development with Rails

Notice a trend? Yes, they are all technology books. Sure, six is a bit excessive, but I haven’t unpacked from my day trip to Bloomington yet. Anyway, I commonly find myself carrying two or three computer books in my computer bag. Having all of these books available in an ebook reader would be more convenient to carry around. Many computer books — particularly those that follow the “cookbook” or “recipes” format — are specifically intended to be consumed by jumping around to the sections of interest. Computer books are often referenced later, so an ebook reader’s ability to search the books would be invaluable. Finally, I rarely care if a computer book will be readable in 5+ years. The information in it will probably be obsolete. Not all technology books are like that, of course, but many of them — I would venture to say most of them — are like that. So the DRM on ebooks wouldn’t be terribly concerning. Unfortunately, full-length technology books are almost never available in ebook format. (Although more are available as PDFs, which is encouraging.)

Running with this idea of technology books in ebook format, the finish line would seem to be plugging into the O’Reilly Safari service or similar online book lenders. I don’t currently use the Safari service because it’s restrictions are incompatible with my book usage. I don’t read books online. Articles are a comfortable length to be read online. Books — even chapters in books — are not. I want PDFs that I can print. Not just HTML pages — real PDFs that have had the tender ministrations of a print designer, including good typography. Just give me the pages directly from the book. I’m getting off topic. My point is that the Safari service would be compelling if I could dump the books on my bookshelf to an ebook reader. Slap on whatever DRM makes the publishers feel comfortable as long as I can comfortably read several chapters in one sitting and view the diagrams.

One more thought of how an ebook reader could be useful is during research. Academic journal articles, books, and so on. The ebook reader could help researchers by allowing them to “highlight” (or underline, if you’re like my wife) relevant material and provide a mechanism to copy those quotes into another application and provide full APA, MLA, Turabian, and Chicago citation styles. That would be very, very convenient.

All of this is to say that I am the target demographic for ebooks and the ebook providers are still completely failing to convince me. Until the ebook providers seriously think about ebook readers as devices unto themselves instead of as simply a mechanism to display existing books they will miss out on opportunities to make really amazing solutions.

After registering, I chatted with other developers in my company to determine what sessions would be of greatest benefit to the teams using or investigating Flex. I shuffled those in with some sessions I really wanted to attend and the resulting schedule is below.

Data Visualization with Flex

Customizing the Flex Framework

Continuous Integration with Flex, FlexUnit, and Ant

Optimizing ActionScript 3.0 Performance

Inspire Session: The Dawning of the Age of Experience

What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?

Pixel Perfect Precision

XD: Prototyping Rich Internet Applications with Fireworks CS3

XD: Adobe’s Approach to Application Design

Optimizing Flex Applications

Designers and Developers CAN Love Each Other

Creating New Flex Components

Flex on Rails

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

I upgraded to Quicktime 7.0.4 as well. That hasn’t given me problems, but apparently it doesn’t like Flip4Mac — the Quicktime plug-in to play Windows Media formats that has just been bless by Microsoft.

I also ordered family packs of iWork and iLife to upgrade the two Mac laptops in the house. When those arrived at the end of last week, I eagerly installed them.

iPhoto ’06 seems to resolve the constant iPhoto instability I suffered. The firwst time I launched it, it upgraded my 3,000+ image photo library to its new format without incident. iPhoto ’06 is much more responsive and has not yet crashed on me. Thanks, Apple — although I don’t think I should have to pay for such a critical a bug fix. One of the new iPhoto’s much-touted features is actually turning into a curse — iPhoto scrolls too quickly now — it is very difficult to stop in the general vicinity of the photos I desired using the touch pad two-finger scrolling. Finally, photocasts — despite being poorly named — are just as easy as Steve made them look on stage. I haven’t trying opening one on a non-Mac yet, but the couple I tested with my wife were sucked right into her iPhoto like magic. I can see this being an excellent way to share photos of the kids, family vacations, etc. once the entire family is Mac-enabled.

iWeb is a very nice personal Web site generator. It is easy and fun to use — in fact, it may inspire my wife to create her own little corner of the Internet. I’m playing with it now to determine if I want to migrate my aviation blog over to iWeb. It would certainly be prettier in iWeb.

I don’t use Keynote much, so I can’t really espouse the value of Keynote 3′s upgrades in iWork. However, I’ve just taken over work on a newsletter for one of my organizations and appreciate the new Pages themes. The embedded image manipulation is nice, but otherwise Pages is pretty much the same — a simple page layout engine for the rest of us.

That’s all for now.

My configuration:

Tivo unit’s service number: starts with 540

USB to Ethernet adapter: NetGear FA120

I have SpeakEasy VoIP for my phone service. Since I use VoIP, computer modems will not work for me. This could have presented a major hurdle since Tivo’s site is adamant that the first connection must be performed by phone. However, Tivo’s customer service site has this excellent advice for repeating the Guided Setup using an Internet connection.

First I setup the Tivo’s cabling to the cable box, television, home network, and power. Then I proceeded through the initial Guided Setup. When I got to the “Welcome!” screen (“You are about to begin Guided Setup…”), I picked up on Step 3 of the instructions from Tivo’s Customer Service site. The short of it is to go into Dialing Options > Set Dial Prefix and enter the value ,#401 (comma-pound-four-zero-one). Then proceed normally and when the Tivo attempts to connect, it will use the Internet instead of the phone line (which I never bothered to plug in anyway).

Possibly of interest to some is that Covad seems to be responsible for running the line from the SBC central office to my home. SpeakEasy does everything except “the last mile”, I guess. I haven’t read the forums enough to look behind the curtain on this matter.

The only caveat I have is that the connection is bridged, not routed. The up side is that all of the static IPs I get are usable, and I can add more for a fee later. There are two downsides to this, though.

The first downside of the bridged configuration is that I’m stuck using their equipment instead of my nice Cisco SOHO 97. At least until I determine how to configure it. I have picked up a CCNA study guide and started working through it, so maybe I’ll get the Cisco setup at some point. There are also threads on DSLreports.com about configuring IOS for SpeakEasy/Covad.

The second point, which is more serious in many ways, is that all of my network devices actually have public IP addresses and are on the same routed subnet as 200+ other people. I would rather have all of my home network on a private IP subnet (e.g., 10.x.y.z) and have an appliance (*cough* Cisco SOHO 97 *cough*) configured to allow transparent public-to-private IP NAT for specific hosts. This allows me to place hosts that I trust and want publicly accessible (Mac laptop, PS2) on the Internet while still allowing them to easily communicate with hosts that I don’t trust (WinXP desktop) or don’t want publicly accessible (file server, Tivo).

While I’m learning enough IOS to determine the feasibility and implementation of using my SOHO 97 to perform the NAT, I would like a simple appliance that I may configure for the same purpose. Perhaps a Linksys WRT54G (or GS) with the firmware from Sveasoft or others posted on LinksysInfo.org.