Author Archives: admin

Identity mashup

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Via Tim Daneliuk: Andy Oram on The Long View of Identity:

Because I care intently about online identity myself, I was excited to attend the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law school’s Berkman Center, one in a series of identity conferences held there. Coming out of a technology space into this legal space was a bit of a culture shock for me. When lawyers consider things–to speak very broadly–they look at how things can hurt people, while I might make an initial categorization of identity systems along social lines, such as:

* Identity systems that help individuals find each other
* Identity systems that facilitate commerce
* Identity systems that promote communities
* Identity systems that support online government
* etc.

…or along technical lines, such as:

* Identity systems based on taxonomies
* Identity systems based on the web of trust
* Identity systems based on digital signatures
* etc.

In contrast, lawyers categorize them as:

* Identity systems that facilitate fraud
* Identity systems that violate privacy
* Identity systems that let corporations control people
* etc.

Fortunately, the far-thinking Berkman Center can encompass all these different categorizations at once. The conference turned out to be a wonderful mashup of legal, technical, social, and business aspects of online identity. The value of such a conference became most apparent on the third day, when the formal sessions that attracted some two hundred attendees came to an end, but over fifty people from all sorts of disciplines came to a kind of unconference with no preset agenda.

We think Xen is ready

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From Jeff Jaffe’s blog:

In my last post, I argued that Linux needed enhancements to fully address the demands of a data center. I identified 7 key characteristics which were required. I also committed that I would describe how SUSE’s Code 10 addressed these needs. In my next post, I will provide some of this detail. But there’s some press play out there right now about one of the critical new benefits available in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 – virtualization – that I can’t let pass. A Red Hat VP has been telling the press that, although there is “unbelievable” demand for virtualization, that Xen, the leading open source virtualization offering, is not ready yet for the enterprise.

What does Novell believe? Xen is ready! What do other companies say? IBM has made it clear they’re supporting Xen now. I’m looking at another corporate press release supporting Xen from March 2006. The company “Formally Announces Integrated Virtualization”. Who is that company? Why, it is Red Hat! Do they really believe Xen virtualization is not ready? Or are they trying to introduce a little FUD into the market because another Linux vendor has beaten them to the punch by a good half year in terms of an integrated virtualization offering, including Xen? (In fact, Red Hat seems to be backtracking today, according to this story in the Register, so I’m not sure where they stand.) Xen is the leading open source project for virtualization for a reason – because it’s so strong. Novell and many others in the industry support it. If you have virtualization needs in the data center, we can deliver it today. Don’t be fooled….

The rise of the mass affluent business jet?

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I couldn’t sleep last night, so I did a little analysis on the fractional ownership side of the new “very light aircraft” segment.

There’s a lot of talk about new business models emerging with this new segment. Eclipse just got their Eclipse 500 certified and Honda is also looking to enter the market, either as an engine manufacturer (they have a small jet engine they’ve developed) or selling a whole plane. Will these new light jets spawn an air taxi industry? Will they create a whole new class of private pilots?

My guess is that they will expand the market for fractional ownership beyond the mogul and movie star demographic to what the financial services industry call the “mass affluent,” people who have enough money to need (or think they need) private banking-like services, above and beyond what they can get at their local S&L. These people have lots of disposable income but they don’t have the millions you need to plunk down for a big jet. They’re what used to be called “rich”, a category now eclipsed (pardon the pun) by the “obscenely rich.” But rich is still a good market to go after.

In order to figure out how much fractional ownership of one of these new jets might cost, I got sample rates from NetJets, the industry leader, for each of three jets on offer: the Raytheon Hawker 400XP and 800XP and the Falcon 2000EX.

I looked at a 1/8 share, which they define as 100 occupied hours per year for five years.

NetJets charges for four things: “acquisition”, management, usage, and misc. I also found the retail prices for those jets, which gave me a ratio for the NetJets “acquisition cost” to retail, which is about 12%.

If you apply that to an Eclipse 500, which retails for $1.3m, you get $160,000.

The other costs, for management and usage, are not as sensitive to the type of plane; you pay a pilot more or less the same whether he’s flying a Hawker 400 or an Honda Jet. You might be able to get away paying a guy a bit less for a smaller plane, but not a lot. Likewise with maintenance; sure, it’s going to be less, but by how much? The reservation system and the other infrastructure are more or less fixed. They need to make their money somehow. I eyeballed the rates for the other segments and decided that it was $10,000/month for management and $1,500 for hourly usage. Maybe if it’s not NetJets these rates are lower. Whatever.

So let’s say you use it for the full 100 hours per year. The hourly cost is $150,000 per year for that. The management costs are $120,000 per year. And the acquisition cost is ‘only’ $32,000 per year.

So you’re left, ballpark, with the use of a jet for 100 hours a year for $300,000/year for five years.

Now, I can’t spend $300,000/year on a jet. But there are a lot of other people who can.

The very light jets typically have a range of 1,000 to 1,500 nautical miles, enough to take someone from their house in New Jersey to their vacation house in Maine, say, or from their local municipal airport in southern California to their clients’ local municipal airport in Colorado.

Day Jet and Linear Air are going to try to use these jets; Day Jet is starting an air taxi service, first in Florida, and Linear Air is selling tickets on regularly scheduled flights (e.g., Teterboro to Nantucket for $415 each way) in the northeast US. It’ll be interesting to see what business model shakes out of this new technology.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

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From Jon Udell and Tim O’Reilly (and here, about the headline):

When entrepreneurs pitch their software-as-a-service ideas to me, I always ask how they plan to compete with what I call the galactic clusters — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These giants have set a high bar for Internet-scale operations, and they’re relentlessly pushing it higher.

The answer usually comes back: “We’re confident we can scale out as needed.” Maybe yes, maybe no. A lot depends on architectural choices and operational competence. But either way, if you are merely a planet, you don’t want to butt heads with a galaxy.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. In the days of the old giants, that meant moving into a platform ecosystem, such as Microsoft’s or Apple’s, and then nimbly occupying the available niches until the landlord decided to kick you out.

Will the era of the new giants be any different? Tim O’Reilly raised this key question on his blog. “Being a developer ‘on someone’s platform’ may ultimately mean running your app in their datacenter,” he wrote, adding, “Microsoft has a key advantage over open source, because the Windows Live team and the Windows Server and tools team work far more closely together than open source projects work with companies such as Yahoo!, Amazon, or Google.”

It’s both a stunning observation and a stirring call to action. Neil McAllister, who edits this column and writes the Open Enterprise column, said last week that Microsoft can no longer laugh off the long-heralded “year of the Linux desktop.” I agree, and I saluted Neil the other night as I installed the latest Ubuntu release on my aging ThinkPad. But the desktop isn’t the battleground it once was. I float like a butterfly from Windows to OS X to Linux. My home is in the cloud, and that’s the next frontier for the champions of free and open commodity infrastructure.