The spook's cloud, the most boring annotations you'll ever read, PE goes after EMC's future
Meta-data
Hello again, welcome to #5. This one will be short. Today we have 19 subscribers. It's starting to smell like real growth hacking up in here! I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io.
See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote.
Sponsor
Yesterday, I mentioned that my work, 451 Research, hosts small "round table" events to talk with practitioners and IT buyers. Check out this summary of some of the take-aways from one of our recent cloud events. It's free for non-clients, unlike most of our paywalled content.
Tech and World World
"We run the CIA's cloud. Here's my card. Call me if you need anything."
We record one of my podcasts Software Defined Talk every Thursday, so that episode is up. The show-notes are their own link fest. Here's the summary:
Matt Ray is at OSCON, which prompts Brandon and I to reflect on open source a bit. We then discuss CA Technologies recent quarterly earnings call, who wins in the $600m AWS CIA deal, Yahoo buying Flury, and, as always, our recommendations for the week.
There's a video, podcast feed, the show notes (which lists all this), or direct MP3 download if you like that.
DIY Genius.com on quarterly earnings calls, CA Technologies
After discovering CriticMarkup, after having upgraded to Marked2 yesterday (this is how it happens - delightful rat holes), I sat down to read CA's recent earnings call transcript and added comments with CritcMarkup. The results were mixed because I couldn't quickly figure out a way to render it nicely. You can download an HTML file of it off Dropbox, along with the raw markdown+CriticMarkup. I'd love to make it display well - with my notes floating to the right, I guess, like comments in a Word doc -- is that something you could help with?
If this kind of marginalia is useful, it'd be delightful to start publishing it. One of my "personal board of director" members (those people I ask for advice on what I should do professionally and, sometimes otherwise) Robert Brook likes to point out that one of my core-competencies is explaining complex, weird things and making them (he'd never use this word), "actionable." I am after, a professional analyst. That's what I try to do with this marginalia, other than working in references to obscure movies, of course.
Marked2
I don't know why I "do" markdown. Actually I do, because Ed told me about it a long time ago in the Back of the Envelop podcast and it seem[ed|s] cool, though unpractical for my Evernote-WYSIWG loving self who also need to frequently collaborate on documents with others (just like Ira Glass, golly!). Anyhow, I upgraded to Marked2 and it's great. One of the problems with markdown is getting it converted to something for non-nerds, like simple HTML. There's of course an export feature with all sorts custom CSS of hijinks involved, but I also just discovered that you ca "view source" in Marked2 to see very clean, well done HTML. Done!
I've also gotten slightly interested in Writer Pro, but I think that falls under the category of tools for tools. I should focus on just typing up more reports.
Extracting Cash from EMC
As we discussed in today's Software Defined Talk podcast, briefingly, a PE firm is suggesting that EMC sell off it's stakes in VMware and pivotal. You don't often get a discussion of the "federated business" that EMC is, so the details that come out of this new cycle should be interesting. To start:
EMC maintains an 80-percent stake in VMware and a 62-percent stake in Pivotal, a software company led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz in which VMware owns a sizable chunk as well.
So, there you go. EMC has hedged out innovation by spinning out, but majority owning more future looking companies. We'll see how the PE drama sorts out.
Fun
Deadwood
In case you haven't been following along, I've been watching Deadwood. It's pretty good. I feel like I die a little inside each time I watch TV, but that's my problem to deal with.
It's in Amazon Prime video, which has all (old) the HBO shows in it nowx .