Week 7: "Muddy/Clear" Application Software 2

This week was all on the cloud and opensource. I have never heard of these things, actually I have but I never knew what they were or I didn’t give any thought to it. I mean like my best friend of 20 years works for EMC and I also know the widow of one of three original founders to EMC. Shows how much I pay attention to things that go on around me.... That’s where the muddy part comes in, as far as the principals of this technology it was pretty clear. Not too hard to comprehend. The video below is from EMC and published with permission with the standard youtube license.

The idea of owning a company or starting up a company and not having to worry about having any type of server in my building is amazing. Then on top of that to not even have to pay all those costs for windows and use Linux for free. There are pro’s and con’s of everything and that is why they stressed this week about being a manger and weighing costs to see what is or will be beneficial to the company.

When I saw the servers in cargo containers I thought that was pure genius and I can see why these major corporations make so much money. Why do you need a multimillion dollar building? Just put the servers in some metal storage container out in a field somewhere with thousands of other storage containers. Then have some web based application that customers can access with their monthly accounts to hook them up to these servers.

Another great thing I learned about software this week was that once you spend the millions of dollars paying programmers to write up the code it costs pennies to produce more of your software. I compare this to cars, say it cost 20,000 to build my Honda and I paid 27,000. This is only 7,000 per car minus all other costs that the dealer incurs in each car sale. But for windows 7 or Microsoft office, the code was written and it has its cost to pay the programmers, but when it’s loaded on every Dell machine practically sold the profit is out of this world. Hence, this is why Bill Gates is one of the wealthiest philanthropists on the planet. Maybe I could learn a thing or two about this.