Tumblr has got a $1.1 Billion offer to get acquired by Yahoo! Good news for Tumblr you might say. But the question is who will gain from the acquisition. Looking at examples like Flickr and Delicious it is not good for the service itself and Yahoo. The only ones who gained are the original owners/shareholders.

The acquisition might be good for Yahoo. Marissa Mayer is reorganizing the service offering and Tumblr might really help to polish the Yahoo image. But users must be afraid that the service will degrade as per my initial examples. A scenario like the recent acquisition if Instagram by Facebook, where Instagram stays independent until now, might offer the best for both worlds.

But the ultimate scenario I read recently is to turn down the Yahoo offer, like Facebook did in 2006:

His only partial rationalization at the time was that in the history of Yahoo, it had made two $1 billion offers that were also turned down. And those were to eBay and Google. “At least I could actually make a pseudo-scientific argument that in every case Yahoo offered $1 billion and it was rejected, it was the correct thing to do,” said Thiel.

John Gruber hits the nail on the head about Larry Page whining about how everyone compares Google with the competition:

Google is a hyper-competitive company, and they repeatedly enter markets that already exist and crush competitors … They want everything; their ambition is boundless.

Marco Arment’s addition makes this even stronger:

Google seems desperate to prove that it’s a major innovator of original product ideas, despite most of its strengths lying in improving, extending, devaluing, and better executing everyone else’s.

Google definitely has an aggressive market strategy, copying ideas, extending them and disrupting the original market. That strategy does not always work, but when it works Google gets out as a monopolist. We have seen that with Mail, Maps, RSS and advertising as a whole. The latest examples of Google entering other markets are Plus, Keep and this week start hitting the personal messaging market hitting on Whatsapp.

It’s really hard to find innovative products from Google, but they are awesome at improving and offering at a lower price. The Google Cloud Platform with the improved Compute Engine is directly competing with AWS. How can we not compare Google Versus Amazon?

An excellent post bij Derick Winkworth about network automation and the role of vendors. Without giving away the whole conclusion:

The combination of SDN and DevOps tools is the clear path to real IT integration. Orchestration in the context of the larger infrastructure is the piece that is missing in many SDN discussions. Network vendors need to embrace and enhance tools that aim to fill this gap.

The cool thing is that at some point I thought he was describing our software, we cover the majority of that functionality. At the very least you can:

enjoy your beer while a bunch of vlans is being configured, massively.

As you may have read in a post from last week, I got stolen in Paris from my video-camera. A great digital Sony Handycam, which was a Christmas present from Snow B.V. in, I think, 2009.

This was one year before I left the company after helping to build the company from 6 people in 1998 to 150 in 2010. A Unix consulting firm, built on nerd culture, where people are the most important assets in the company.

Of course I knew that, part of my job was to nourish that culture. But to feel the strong connection even after three years was kind of unexpected. Someone from Snow B.V. read my post about the stolen camera and realized that there was still a spare on stock.

So when I got home one day this week, after giving a training to a client, an old colleague was standing in front of my house with a replacement camera as a present.

We can not replace the lost memories, but we can at least enable you to create new ones.

This is what I call Good Employership, thanks Snow B.V.!

Ethan Banks wrote a very nice post, sending everybody who is jumping on the SDN hype back to the drawing board.

Crafting a truthful message addressing the natural questions will help eminently practical enterprise customers – in aggregate the largest networking marketplace – get over their SDN anxiety and start seriously evaluating how their next generation network is going to function.

I think this comes down to something I said earlier: SDN is the solution, but what was the problem? And I totally agree with Ethan that SDN is not a prerequisite to automate your network. You can do that today with tools that exist today.

You don’t even have to become a programmer. Let the software developers develop their software so that you can use it to automate your network. Even worse, I have seen multiple companies with roll-your-own software that got too dependant on the one or two “programmers” that built some “software”, but unfortunately left the company.

But again: do you really need a next generation network and what are the problems it should solve? Back to the drawing board…

Yeah! My Raspberry Pi in “the cloud” is online. It is in fact a Colocated Pi running in the Datacenter of PCextreme in the Netherlands.

Where else can you get a 100 Mbit uplink, 500 GB bandwidth, power and the ability to boast about it to your friends for free?

This is a very generous offer by these guys and I accepted it in a heartbeat. Due to popularity I had to wait a bit longer, but it is finally online. What am I going to do with it?

First of all it is going to be an OpenVPN server, to be able to make safe connections from public WiFi to the Net. Second, probably a web-service, but that is not decided yet. For me it always good to have a shell somewhere on the web. This is always handy for troubleshooting purposes.

Another excellent post at F5 DevCentral about how the skills a network engineer needs are changing.

Skills that enable operations to programmatically insert services and policies into the network using network-side scripting languages like node.js will become more and more valuable as organizations begin to leverage the opportunities afforded by the more fluid network and application network architecture inherent in SDN and cloud computing models. It’s not that your operational skills are becoming obsolete, it’s simply that the methods of applying the knowledge you’ve gathered over the years are changing. You’ll use APIs instead of CLIs and HTTP instead of SNMP. You’ll just need to learn some new skills, in order to apply the very valuable skills you already have.

In practise I see a lot of engineers that are married to the CLI. They think that no tool or script can create better or faster configuration than their 10 fingers. This is not the fault of the engineers alone, network vendors are also at guilt. Their main configuration interface is most of the time still the CLI. In order to move engineers of the CLI the vendors have to create better APIs. Netconf/Yang, SDN and Openflow are a great move in the right direction, now it needs to be adopted to more devices.

I like the positive tone in this post by Kelly Herrel…

It’s time we all take a step back and view OpenDaylight for what it is: A good example of the disruptive new era in networking where speed of development blows past the historic plodding progress of a single-vendor model.

Kelly is expecting a lot from the fact that OpenDaylight is an Open Source Project. History shows indeed some projects that were very successful. Among them are projects like Apache and Postfix. But there are also examples of less successful projects. What do you think of Open-Office? It has been moved around like a hot potato. The good thing is that some more successful forks have been spun off. That’s normal practice in the Open Source world.

I see the OpenDaylight Project as a special case, call it an experiment. Multiple large commercial vendors are collaborating to create one common SDN controller. First, I hope that Kelly is right that by Open Sourcing this project, development will quantum leap. I am a bit sceptic about the role of these vendors, after all, they are competitors. But the positive side is that fresh input from outside the vendors is enhancing the overall product, especially feature wise.

I like this experiment, and I hope it is the beginning of a new era.

I used to hate commercial days like mother’s-, father’s- and secretary-day. You might as well add Valentine to that list. But since my wife is a mother of three kids I began to appreciate the job she has besides her day-job. That’s why I created this cake together with my kids to pamper their mother tomorrow and to show she is the best Mom in the world!

Happy Mother’s Day!

Last week I was pissed off at Suunto for abandoning the original Ambit in favor of the version 2 with better specs.

Thank God Suunto listens to their users and came back to their decision to abandon software development for the original Ambit. Although it must be said that I did not find official communications from Suunto about this, only rumours.

In an official communication Suunto explains the reasons behind their decision to update the hardware and apologizes for bad communication. Software development for the original Ambit will continue, although memory is limited. As much as possible of the new functions will be ported back to the original Ambit.

We realize that a big selling-point of the Ambit has been its ability to evolve and we know this feature was important when you made the decision to buy. We therefore understand that we have not lived up to your expectations and apologize for that.

Yours sincerely,
Suunto Team