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Distributed systems are hard. They are hard to set up, hard to program to, and hard to maintain. What is more, this has been the case for decades. And yet, the incredible success of the shining stars of the "Big Data" movement— Google, Amazon and Facebook— has come about directly as a result of their ability to harness massive distributed systems infrastructure for the sake of data storage and analytics. For companies looking to follow these leaders, the Hadoop open source project and its associated ecosystem of subprojects have been an incredibly powerful source of leverage. Read More

I attended a panel last night nominally on the topic of whether the local startup ecosystem was best seen as the M&A feeding grounds of big west coast technology companies. Because it was an interesting group of panelists, we wandered a bit and never really dug into the core question of whether this is true and what its implications might be for the overall technology industry in Cambridge and Boston. Having been Twitter taunted by Scott Kirsner to come prepared for a fight, I was disappointed we mostly avoided the topic. Read More

Try as I might to find objective data in their financials to show the slowing of the platform, I found it difficult to observe any cracks in the iOS money-making machine. Apple is continuing to spend fewer dollars as a percentage of revenue on both marketing and engineering (the easy way to tell at a macro level that an at-scale tech franchise is sucking wind), and their integrated approach continues to win the hearts and minds of the US consumer thus keeping legions of developers working first on iOS and later on Android. Read More