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Think before you migrate! A CIO friend of mine, when asked about migrating large legacy application says you have two choices: "Lose or lose big." What he means is politically, you can't win. Facts like high maintenance costs, vendor lock-in and nobody wants to do Cobol seem insurmountable. On the other hand, freezing an application for 6 months (18 months if you're a realist) means productivity goes down the tubes. Worse yet, if your crazy enough to try to migrate without a freeze you might put your company into bankruptcy. My advice: 1) Avoid the migration and wage a war of attrition instead; 2) Give Cobol programmers a raise or outsource; 3) prepare three envelopes...dvellante

Why don't more online sellers offer customer reviews? Amazon is the exception when it comes to online sellers offering good customer product reviews. Why? When we buy semi-expensive consumer products online, we always search for customer reviews before purchasing. Why not make it easier for customers? Retailers fear that bad reviews will hurt product sales but isn't the job of the seller to help the buyer choose the right product? Honest reviews do that. Trusted and insightful customer reviews, served up as part of the shopping experience play three vital roles: 1) they tend to keep the customer on your site while providing useful advice; 2) they can effectively address buyer objections (e.g. 'expensive but worth every penny'); and 3) they build credibility and trust while at the same time weeding out sub-par prodcuts. Make customer reviews an integral part of the online shopping experience. It will build loyalty, trust and sales. dvellante

From a hardware perspective, our Wikibon community tells us that the iPhone is equal (perhaps even superior) to the standard of consumer-gadget excellence set by the iPod. However, the catalyst of success for the iPod was iTunes, which for the first time provided a truly simple mechanism for managing personal, digital media across multiple devices. By suggesting that Apple will recast the concept of phone, CEO Jobs had better have something much more than a piece of hardware up his sleeve. If Apple pulls this off, the key will be "iCall" or even "iMedia": the iTune-like services that turn the iPhone into a universal mechanism for digital participation. About that mechanism, we still know nothing -- except that it's been promised by phone companies for more than a decade. Stay skeptical, Wikibonners! PBurris

Service-oriented storage: An idea whose time has come. Service-oriented Storage (SoS) adopts Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts to improve delivery of storage to applications. Like SOA, SoS packages function as a set of menu-driven services, allowing business process, not technology to define, create and deliver a loosely coupled set of reusable services to the business.

SoS is coming and it will change the delivery of storage forever. Read more dvellante

Marketing without borders Yes, the Internet removes boundaries but seeing it first hand is impressive. My daughter and I were blown away tonight looking at the Wikibon traffic map. We started formally tracking traffic January 4th and were mesmorized by the geographic overlay report we generated using Google Analytics. The British Empire would be humbled by the demographics displayed. Canada, US, Central & South America, Western Europe, The Balkans, The Russian Federation, Middle East, African countries, India and Asia/Pacific. And the cities in Southeast Asia-- Welcome Bangkok, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, Bogor and the Solomon Islands (okay not a city but who really knows the capital city is Honiara?)! Community can be both worldwide and local. With Google enabling geo-targeting, businesses with local emphasis can now leverage the Web with micro-marketing initiatives while specialty sites can expand their global reach. C'mon Antarctica...be the first to join Wikibon! dvellante

The Microsoft entertainment monster Sunday's 2007 CES keynote speech featured an industry first-- Bill Gates gave a talk where the demo didn't crash. Of course the credit goes to Justin Hutchinson, Bill's 'stunt double' who actually ran the demo. Gates talked about connected entertainment based on what he called 'Media Centered PC's (now there's a name that instills confidence in my entertainment experience) where Microsoft devours TV's, movies, tunes, games and every gadget you can imagine. It's a vision where you jam your entire media experience into devices controlled by Microsoft hardware and software and of course can parse them out into mobile devices and even your car (Mr. Softy announced a deal with Ford). Sound like a vision only a geek could make work? One can only hope Apple gets it right this time around. dvellante

Top five predictions for 2007 What events will dominate the next twelve months? Focus on business and IT, but maybe a BS/K-Fed reconciliation (or not) may have some global impact. I'll start with five, but edit them -- please! I'm curious to see what the community thinks.

1. With many IPOs being discussed, Wall Street sell-side gets excited about tech -- again!
2. Dollar remains weak.
3. "Green conservatism" becomes a political force, first in Europe.
4. Small-town newspapers re-emerge as a great business in U.S.
5. The official height of "sea level" is raised.
6. My sixth: Apple takes a bite out of the phone companies! Larryspeak

BONUS PREDICTION: The Wikibon community successfully marries thought with action! PBurris

End user application authoring The profound issue facing suppliers of IT products and services (including IT organizations) is simple: How much authority over applications can and should IT "professionals" grant to users? The explosive adoption of blogging, wiki, and related technologies in part is attributable to the fact that users can build cool applications that perform meaningful work without professional help. If the trend continues, code will become as easy to write as Powerpoint. What then? PBurris

Can a Service Orientation Change the Perception of IT?</strong> Back in 2003, when Nicholas Carr wrote his infamous HBR article entitled "Does IT Matter?," the entire industry rushed to defend their turf and explain why Mr. Carr was wrong. Regardless of your opinion about the merits of Mr. Carr's arguments, the article perfectly underscored CEO attitudes toward discretionary IT spending. The trend to services orientation has the potential to change this negative perception if IT learns from past mistakes. Read more dvellante

<strong>Why is the TV on if Nobody's Watching! When our family moved into a new home ten years ago, we had one computer and a TV. Like most families we now have several computers, multiple TV's and a zillion gadgets. Our monthly energy bill has nearly tripled. Does it kill us? No. Do we notice it more-- you bet. Good thing I'm not running a large data center. Read more dvellante

Viral Marketing: Grow or Die! Viral marketing is a term that has stuck like gum on a shoe in Internet marketing circles. It sounds disgusting but viral marketing enabled services like hotmail to skyrocket in the early days of the Web and more recently allowed companies like Wikia to become a top 2,000 site based on Alexa rankings - spending peanuts on marketing. Master the elements of viral marketing and thrive. Ignore them and spend way more than your competitors on promotion. Read more dvellante

Email archiving: Not just an IT problem any more. Organizations relying on lawyers to avoid producing damaging emails by claiming in court that retrieving them is “too onerous and costly" are playing with fire. Often, organizations have email destruction policies, claim that emails are confidential communication or deliver truckloads of printed emails during a discovery process? Watch out... if you employ these techniques you could be next. Read more

Disaster recovery plan too risky to test? I'll bet the disaster recovery testing procedures in your organization are too casual. If I'm right, they're giving you a false sense of security. You can't just test in one direction where production systems failover to the backup recovery site. That's the easy part, failing back to the production site (for real) needs to be tested frequently to ensure survivability in a disaster. If only parts of the recovery system are tested on non-production machines infrequently (e.g. once a year), your DR plan is a recipe for disaster. David Floyer Read more

The promise of ILM - twenty years later. In the late 1980’s IBM announced DFSMS, or system managed storage, designed to automate the management of data over a useful life. Back then, metadata classifications were unreliable and data movement couldn’t easily be automated. SMS, which had a strong ILM flavor lived up to some of its promises but fell short of others.

Why does it seem not much has changed in twenty years? Read more dvellante

In search of storage ROI. I've often tried to make the case that cost savings is greatly impacted by factors other than just the specific storage technology deployed, namely the applications and workloads running on a storage infrastructure (see Storage TCO - comparing apples to apples). I’d like to explore this reality in a bit more depth and provide some guidelines on hard-dollar storage cost justification methods. Read moredvellante

Storage TCO - comparing apples to apples. One of the most common flaws of storage total cost of ownership (TCO) is comparing two configurations or storage approaches that appear similar but are actually quite different. This can lead to erroneous conclusions and poor technology choices. Beware of blanket vendor claims declaring one technology is superior to another. Read moredvellante

Wikia announces Openserving. On Monday, 11 December, Wikia announced Openserving, a new model for attracting web application users, with specific emphasis on bloggers and wikiers. The gist of the announcement is that not only is everything is free -- hosting, bandwidth, software -- but also Wikia will give partners 100% of the ad revenue published to their Wikia sites. Wikia management -- including Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales -- is being coy on how they'll make money, but my guess is that they'll just start buying successful sites in their partner portfolio. It's a new model for venture capitalism. PBurris

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