Little room for vertical scalability or single points of failure

As Netflix moved into the cloud, we needed to find the appropriate mechanisms to persist and query data within our highly distributed infrastructure. Our goal is to build fast, fault tolerant systems at Internet scale. We realized that in order to achieve this goal, we needed to move beyond the constraints of the traditional relational model. In the distributed world governed by Eric Brewer’s CAP theorem , high availability (a.k.a. better customer experience) usually trumps strong consistency. There is little room for vertical scalability or single points of failure. And while it is not easy to re-architect your systems to not run join queries, or not rely on read-after-write consistency (hey, just cache the value in your app!), we have found ourselves braving the new frontier of NoSQL distributed databases.

Source: Netflix Tech Blog

Some winning cards in its legal poker game

Pierre Ferragu, an analyst with BernsteinResearch, believes the takeover of S3 will provide HTC with some winning cards in its legal poker game. It also shows, says Mr Ferragu, that the next phase of mobile-phone development will be driven at least as much by the courts as by consumers.

Source: Economist

"Business is like a multidimensional probabilistic chessboard. The rules aren’t set, and the same moves don’t always make you win. A lot of people can be really good in a set-piece battle; my biggest differentiating skill is I can invent new pieces."

Source: Elon Musk

Buzz about HTML5 is everywhere

Indeed, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor has said his company is putting a “huge amount of our investment” in HTML5, and Google recently debuted its first homepage doodle composed entirely with the HTML5 mark-up language. It may seem like buzz about HTML5 is everywhere already, but if the latest research is correct, we’re only at the beginning.

Source: gigaom

"Facebook is a huge success. You can’t argue with 750 million users and growing. And I don’t see Google+ making a big dent in that. What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon."

Source: Cringely

All divisions showing strong revenue numbers

New Tablets tremendous growth not necessarily means end of the road for PC’s. Microsoft’s business of selling software will adapt and will be very much around for a long time.

It was overall a great year for Microsoft, with all divisions showing strong revenue numbers and all bar one showing significant growth. Even Windows revenue remained strong, suggesting that for all the talk that is made of tablets, they haven’t yet started to make serious inroads on PC sales—and hence Windows sales. Nonetheless, investors can’t help but notice the way that Apple has enjoyed such explosive growth in both revenue and profit. Microsoft’s gains have been quite modest in comparison.

Source: ars technica

"If you just look in the sideview mirror at what are particular companies doing, and then you start to say Twitter is going to be the world in your pocket — now with video chat! — then you lose your way… we’re going to offer simplicity in a world of complexity."

Source: gigaom

Stall Speed?

This is mostly rear view mirror thinking, does not consider the big unknown that is, new industries being born and opening up markets for products/services and contributing to growth.

If the developed world was growing at 5 per cent like developing economies, the risks would be far less. At 2 per cent, however, “stall speed” connotes an inability to behave like the historical capitalistic model should. Corporations lose incentives to invest because profit growth stagnates, unemployed workers are not rehired and the standard cyclical model of seasonal rebirth is jeopardised.

Source: FT

Apple cracks China market

Probably one of very few international companies to do so I might add.

“China was very key to our results” Apple COO Tim Cook during today’s earnings call, announcing that the country accounted for $3.8 billion in revenue this quarter and $8.8 billion cumulatively in the first three quarters of this year. Cook said that while the company hadn’t “learned to play perfectly” in the market he didn’t think anyone would have believed that the world’s most populous country would comprise such a large percentage of total revenue a year ago. Apple stores in China are the fastest growing and have the highest numbers on average in terms of both traffic and revenue.

Source: TechCrunch

Push luck until it runs out

But such a policy was always risky, because if institutions did not match aspirations then the resulting strains would jeopardise not just future progress but the gains already made. The fate of those who push their luck until it runs out is one of the most familiar stories of business, politics and finance – and is the fate of Europe today.

Source: FT