Chad Lawler's Discussions
Accenture creates its own Facebook-like network matrix- Companies warm up to social networks
2 Replies
Started this discussion. Last reply by Rick Mans Sep. 11, 2008.
Cloudbursting - Approach for Hybrid Application Hosting
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Started this discussion. Last reply by Chad Lawler Sep. 15, 2008.
Chad Lawler's My Page on The Mesh
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Chad Lawler's Blog
Google, Yahoo Deal with DOJ as Microsoft Lobbies to Stop Them
Google, Yahoo Deal with DOJ as Microsoft Lobbies to Stop Them
Posted by Clint Boulton on October 14, 2008 12:25 PM
It looks like civil heads are prevailing among the parties involved in the search ad deal between Google and Yahoo.
The Wall Street Journal today said Google and Yahoo are hashing out concessions that will make it easier for the U.S. Justice De… Continue
Posted on October 16, 2008 at 12:05am —
Messaging & Collaboration - Enterprise 2.0 Software to Take Hard Hits Amid Competition, Weak Economy
Messaging & Collaboration
Enterprise 2.0 Software to Take Hard Hits Amid Competition, Weak Economy
By Clint Boulton
2008-10-10
Article Views: 6056
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Table of Contents:
Enterprise 2.0 Software to Take Hard Hits Amid Competition, Weak Economy
Blogs, Wikis, RSS to Get Commoditized
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Posted on October 16, 2008 at 12:03am —
MS Office & Google Docs - Google Apps Boots Office Out of DC
Google Apps Boots Office Out of DC
Slow news day brings on this nugget of news that leaves us wanting more.
October 14, 2008 · posted by Lee Pender
Whoever wins the presidential election in a few weeks' time, George W. Bush will be on his way out of Washington, DC -- and Microsoft Office will be right behind him.
OK, so we're only talking about the municipal level in DC here, not the federal big time, but Google Apps scored a victory recently wi… Continue
Posted on October 16, 2008 at 12:01am —
On The Topic Of SLAs in The Cloud...
Great article, funny comic, good points and questions about SLAs in the cloud. - C
Posted on October 7, 2008 at 6:01pm —
Why Google Should Enable Exchange Support for Android
http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/hello_android/why_google_should_enable_exchange_support_for_android.html?kc=WBGNLWMU10022008STR6
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 6:23 PM/EST, Posted by Clint Boulton
Last week, T-Mobile unveiled the G1 to a flurry of interest from the public who wanted to see th… Continue
Posted on October 2, 2008 at 8:32pm — 1 Comment
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Skytap’s Virtual Lab service lets developers subscribe to virtual machines (VMs) and provides a VM image library and a virtual lab-management app.
http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=1105
by Jeffrey Schwartz August 2008
Virtualization has revolutionized entire sectors of the IT industry, including the arena of software testing. Unfortunately, developers don't always have ready access to virtualized resources -- the key barrier being cost. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to set up the simplest of virtualized infrastructures -- or it can be much more, depending on the scalability and capacity required.
Skytap Inc., a startup formed by veterans of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and EMC Corp., aims to provide ad hoc virtualization to organizations that otherwise might be put off by steep hardware and infrastructure investments.
Skytap's Virtual Lab service lets developers subscribe to virtual machines (VMs) for as little as $100 per month. Hosted at Skytap's Seattle headquarters, Virtual Lab provides a pool of shared hardware and a selection of VMs, including VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer. Support for Microsoft Hyper-V is also planned.
The service provides a library of VM images and a Virtual Lab management app. Skytap is making the service available now, and the company will let customers automatically subscribe to its service this fall.
Growing Presence
One early Virtual Lab customer is Kivati Software LLC, a Bellevue, Wash.-based supplier of scripting software. The company had looked into deploying a VMware ESX virtual environment to test and rework its software, and faced an all-too-common challenge.
"The biggest problem we ran into was the astronomical cost it would have run us to build that environment," says Jack Nichols, group product manager at Kivati. "We didn't want to lay out that kind of capital to do that."
Previously known as Illumita, Skytap came out of stealth mode in April. It's funded by former Microsoft executive Brad Silverberg's Ignition Partners, as well as Madrona Venture Group Inc. The company has started stepping up its public profile, appearing at the recent VirtualizationWorld conference in New York and last month's Association for Software Testing conference in Toronto.
Virtual Lab will likely compete with the cloud-based offerings of larger players, including Microsoft's own SQL Server Data Services. The company is pitching its multivendor approach as a key differentiator.
Quote by Ian Knox
Beyond Test
Will Virtual Lab appeal to a broad universe of developers? Ian Knox, the company's director of product management, says the value of the service goes beyond eliminating large capital outlays associated with virtualized infrastructure.
According to Knox, Virtual Lab could be particularly helpful in easing the burdens of development testing and debugging activities. He says the service gives dev teams a whole new way to sleuth problems.
"What you really want is the ability to take the environment -- the whole system-when it fails, and stop it, suspend it, and check it into the library, and you can send out an e-mail to a developer that says," Here's the problem, here's the issue that happened. "Then the developer can bring their own environment up and figure out exactly what went wrong," Knox says.
The service lets .NET developers freeze an entire environment and send it to the test team using virtualized resources, Knox says. "It's incredibly powerful, the way you can manipulate machines and move them around, whereas before it was just impossible."
At Long Last, Hyper-V Ships
Microsoft's recent release of the long-promised Hyper-V virtualization component to Windows Server 2008 isn't expected to have a major impact on .NET developers in the short term, but like any new technology from Redmond, it promises to shift the balance of power in a virtualization market long dominated by VMware Inc.
Although VMware continues to maintain market and mind-share, experts believe .NET and Windows developers are likely to focus more on Microsoft's virtualization strategy over time.
"Many of the customers I speak with have made a sizeable investment in VMware, which continues to own significant mind- and wallet-share in the server-virtualization market," says Christopher Voce, industry analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "But many of them are waiting to see what Microsoft does next in this area."
Even though Microsoft's offerings don't match up feature-for-feature with VMware's offerings, the company is providing a good base-functionality in the Hyper-V hypervisor and an evolving set of management features with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, he adds.
Virtualization, by definition, should be transparent to application developers, says industry analyst Neil Macehiter, of U.K.-based Macehiter Ward-Dutton Ltd. But this technology is not just for servers anymore.
"Developers shouldn't know, or need to know, that their application is running in a virtualized environment," Macehiter says. "But developers are beginning to think about using virtualization to help manage the software development lifecycle -- indeed, this is where VMware began -- through the creation of development and test environments, and by using virtualization to ease the creation of environments by cloning the files that represent virtual operating system instances."
The fact that Microsoft came late to the virtualization party is all but irrelevant, Macehiter observes.
"Think of SQL Server versus Oracle, Sybase [and] Ingres, and look where SQL Server is now," he says. "Microsoft's virtualization strategy is a key foundational pillar of the company's Dynamic IT strategy."
If you look at the company's strategy, it addresses many of the key virtualization requirements: server, desktop and application virtualization, plus the associated management solutions. It's still early days for aspects of the strategy, but it's clear that virtualization is of strategic importance to the company."
-- John K. Waters
Jeffrey Schwartz is executive editor, features, for Redmond Developer News.
Chad M. Lawler, MSIEM, MCSE, ITIL, TOGAF | Capgemini | NA | Dallas
Sr. Manager & Sr. Enterprise Architect | AOS | Project Delivery | Strategy & Architecture
E: chad.lawler@capgemini.com | O: 972.507.8553 | M: 817.528.8659 | 200 W. John Carpenter Freeway, Irving TX 75063
www.capgemini.com | themesh.ning.com/profile/ChadLawler | www.linkedin.com/in/chadmlawler | engr.smu.edu/emis/disastertolerant
Together: The Collaborative Business Experience - Free Your Energies
____________________________________________
Outages Force Cloud Computing Users To Rethink Tactics
IT departments scramble to devise backup plans following service disruptions at Amazon, Citrix, and Google.
By J. Nicholas Hoover
InformationWeek
August 16, 2008 12:01 AM (From the August 18, 2008 issue)
If an on-premises server fails, IT departments cut over to a backup system immediately. But what do you do when your cloud computing service goes on the blink?
As more companies plug into the cloud, IT professionals are trying to answer that question. And fast. Last week, Google's Gmail went down for two hours, the second time in two weeks. Citrix's GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar were temporarily unavailable. A month ago, Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service was out of commission for an excruciating eight hours.
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"Outages are just a reality," says Tim O'Brien, director of platform strategy for Microsoft. "Microsoft is a reputable company, Google's a reputable company, and Amazon's a reputable company. Even if you do your due diligence, you still have to manage around these risks, even if the risks are particularly low."
All of which is forcing customers to rethink their dependency on software as a service and other cloud services, and devise strategies for the inevitable breakdowns, as market researcher Harris Interactive has done. "We have some users who absolutely live and die by that database and the data in Salesforce.com," says Dan Chiazza, Harris Interactive director of global sales operations. "For them, they would have no business coming into work if it wasn't up."
There are steps companies can take to minimize the risk, including storing data with multiple service providers and regularly backing up SaaS data on on-premises servers. Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert recommends that customers ask whether a prospective service provider has geographically dispersed redundancy built into its architecture and how long it would take to get service running on backup. Salesforce provides visibility into its system reliability at trust.salesforce.com.
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Be wary of service providers with a short track record. The cloud computing market is full of startups, and while new service providers shouldn't be shunned, extra diligence is in order. Ask about their data center facilities, customer references, and any assurances they can provide that your data and applications will stay online. Archiving-as-a-service startup Casdex has gone so far as to set aside funds to ensure that its service keeps running for six months even if Casdex itself runs into financial trouble, says CTO David Barley. The Linkup, a storage service for consumers, closed down Aug. 8, leaving some customers with no way to access their data.
When negotiating for cloud computing services, IT departments should insist on service-level agreements that have some teeth to them, Herbert says. SLAs that guarantee a high level of uptime aren't necessarily standard. Salesforce doesn't commit to uptime thresholds -- unless you insist on it during negotiations, she says.
Most SLAs reimburse customers for lost service, but not for revenue lost as a consequence of service outages. Amazon applies a 10% credit if S3 availability dips below 99.9% in a month, and last month's outage forced Amazon to make good on that policy. "That's all well and good, but doesn't make the business whole relative to the damage," says Gartner analyst Rob DeSisto.
Stopgap Measures
(Page 2 of 2) August 16, 2008 12:01 AM (From the August 18, 2008 issue)
STOPGAP MEASURES
Another coping technique: Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), and some other SaaS providers offer PC applications that tie into their services, so users can work offline. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) will do the same with the multitenant versions of its Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online services, which are in beta testing. Microsoft's Dynamics CRM Online is already available as a multitenant offering.
In the case of Google and Salesforce, their PC applets are intended for on-the-go and disconnected users, but they can be stopgap measures during a service outage, too. Harris Interactive recommends that its users download Salesforce's offline edition, which contains a copy of contacts and accounts and lets users synchronize their data when they regain online access to Salesforce. The drawback is that the offline versions of SaaS applications generally aren't as feature-rich as the cloud ones.
More Services Insights
White Papers
* Document Solutions: IP Faxing Versus Conventional Faxing
* Cloud Computing for National Security Applications
Another tactic is to limit your dependency on cloud services for business-critical processes. "You need to be thoughtful about how use you use cloud resources, so that the things you do have lower risk. If it takes an extra day to run, you don't really care," says Russ Daniels, VP and CTO of Hewlett-Packard's cloud services business. "Be thoughtful about where this stuff sits, rather than imagining that your existing systems will be replaced by stuff in the cloud and it will all be OK."
Clouds Vaporize
Aug. 12
Scheduled maintenance for Apple's MobileMe service has a ripple effect on users
Aug. 11
Glitch in Google Gmail's contacts system causes a two-hour outage for some users
Aug. 7
Citrix blames GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar service disruption on a surge in demand
Aug. 6
Google Gmail out of commission for up to 14 hours for some users
July 20
Internal system problem causes Amazon S3 service to be inaccessible for up to eight hours
There's also a choice to be made between multitenant services, in which multiple SaaS customers are hosted on the same system, and single-tenant services that devote one or more servers to a customer. Microsoft will offer both multitenant and single-tenant versions of its Online applications. The single-tenant version will cost a bit more, but it also will give customers peace of mind knowing that their applications are insulated from others'.
The worst-case scenario would be your SaaS provider going out of business, as The Linkup did recently. Storage company Iron Mountain has developed a safety net for companies worried about that risk. Its SaaSProtect Escrow service lets IT departments store data or applications with Iron Mountain and access them if the SaaS provider goes belly up. "We can sit in the background and help create at least some safety," says Iron Mountain CTO Fred Engel.
Some companies will seek to get the benefits of cloud services--the ability to quickly provision applications as needed, for example--without the disruptions by building "private clouds" in their own data centers. Others will wait until cloud service providers get more experience and see that change reflected in fewer and shorter outages and SLAs that demonstrate greater confidence in service availability. The early adopters of cloud services, meanwhile, need to develop fortitude--and backup plans.
Amazon adds persistent storage to compute cloud
James Niccolai, IDG News Service08.21.2008
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* Applications
* IDGNS
* Software
* Software & Web
* Storage
* Web-hosted
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Amazon has rolled out a persistent storage feature for its EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, which should allow developers to use its hosted computing services for a much broader range of applications.
The feature, called Elastic Block Store, allows developers to create a storage volume of between 1G byte and 1T byte and attach it to "instances" of applications running in Amazon's cloud. Developers can then detach the storage volume and use it later for other application instances and back it up to Amazon's S3 storage service if they need more durability.
Without EBS, the storage volume is tied to a particular instance and the data lost when the job is terminated, Amazon said. EBS had been in closed beta testing for several months and was made widely available Thursday.
Right Scale, a company that provides tools and services for EC2 users, described EBS as "a Storage Area Network in the cloud." It said it will open EC2 to new usage scenarios, including allowing developers to take traditional relational database applications and move them to the Amazon cloud.
"What does EBS enable? In short: traditional processing on large datasets and reliable storage for many servers," Right Scale said in a blog posting.
Besides database applications, Amazon said EBS is suitable for "many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage." It said multiple storage volumes can be attached to the same application instance, and developers can create "point in time snapshots" of volumes if they are backed up to S3.
EBS is priced at US$0.10 per allocated gigabyte per month, plus $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests made to a volume. So, a 100G-byte Web site database averaging 100 I/O requests per second would cost $36 per month, Amazon said.
The company has been working hard to attract more businesses to its cloud services, but recent outages haven't helped its cause. The S3 storage service was down for several hours last month, for example, which left some customers that depend on the service stranded.
Amazon gives marching orders to cloudy storage
Nomadic volumes
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View → More by this author
Published Thursday 21st August 2008 20:21 GMT
How IT Management Can "Green" the Data Center - Free Download
Amazon.com continues to offer deeper penetration into its cloud. The company this week unfurled a storage service for hard-core users that will let you keep data and file systems in separate piles.
The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) builds on the existing Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) processing service and lower-level storage and database services - Simple Storage Service and SimpleDB, respectively. The EBS effort allows customers to break the ties between their data and the EC2 service, so you can control volumes of information on their own and move them around as needed rather than always accessing the information via EC2. "Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3," Amazon said.
This marks a natural progression with Amazon's online services and shows that the company is really out pacing its competitors by adding fresh features at a regular clip.
Amazon reckons that the EBS service will have particular appeal for customers looking to set up databases and those with applications that need access to block-level storage. "As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers," the company said.
You can set up volumes, ranging in size from 1GB to 1TB and can mount multiple volumes as part of a single instance.
There's more information available on the new service here. ®
Cloud Computing Considerations Are More than Just Money
Back in the early days of data center outsourcing, some pioneer adopters got a rude surprise.; These companies had outsourced all or large parts of their data centers to specialty providers who bought their equipment, hired their staff and offered attractive contract terms that shaved millions of dollars in expenses in the first year.;
The surprise was that the contract terms weren't so that attractive once the outsourcer became embedded in the client’s expense line.; Customers found that nearly everything carried hefty escalator fees, ranging from unbudgeted capacity increases to software patches to staff overtime. But there was little customers could do; they were locked into the contractor and the cost of unlocking themselves was prohibitive.
This story came to mind recently during a chat with Bob McFarlane, a principal at facilities design firm Shen Milsom & Wilke. McFarlane is an expert in data center design, and his no-nonsense approach to customer advocacy has made him a hit with audiences around the country.;
McFarlane thinks the current hype around hosted or "cloud” computing is getting out of touch with reality.; Cloud computing, which I’ve written about before, involves outsourcing data processing needs to a remote service, which theoretically can provide world-class security, availability and scalability. Cloud computing is very popular with startups these days, and it’s beginning to creep onto the agenda of even very large firms as they reconsider their data processing architectures.
The Internet isn't necessarily a perfect application platform, however. Google demonstrated that again this week with a two-hour Gmail outage. Other highly visible services like Amazon's S3 and Twitter have suffered reliability problems recently.
The economics of cloud computing is compelling.; For some small companies in particular, it may never make financial sense to build a captive data center because the costs of outsourcing the whole thing are so low.; McFarlane, however, cautions that value has many dimensions.;
What is the value, for example, of being able to triple your processing capacity because of a holiday promotion?; Not all hosting services offer that kind of flexibility in their contract, or if they do, may charge handsomely for it.
What is the value of knowing that your data center has adequate power provisioning, environmentals and backups in case of a disaster? Last year, a power failure in San Francisco knocked several prominent websites offline for several hours when backup generators failed to kick in. Hosting services in earthquake or flood-prone regions, for example, need extra layers of protection.
McFarlane’s point is to not buy a hosting service based on undocumented claims or marketing materials. You can walk into your own data center and kick a power cord out of the wall to see what happens.; Chances are you can't do that in a remote facility.; There are no government regulations for data center quality, so you pretty much have to rely on hosting providers to tell the truth.;
Most of them do, of course, but even the truth can be subject to interpretation. The Uptime Institute has created a tiered system for classifying infrastructure performance. However, McFarlane recalls one hosting provider that advertised top-level Uptime Institute compliance but didn’t employ redundant power sources, which is a basic requirement for that designation.
This doesn't mean you should ignore the appealing benefits of cloud computing, but you should look beyond the simple per-transaction cost savings. Scrutinize contracts for escalator clauses and availability guarantees.; Penalties should give you appropriate compensation.; While you won’t convince a hosting service to refund you the value of lost business, you should look for something more than a simple credit toward your monthly fee.
If you can, plan a visit to a prospective hosting provider and tour its facilities.; Reputable organizations should have no problem letting you inside the data centers and allowing you to bring along an expert to verify their claims. They should also be more than willing to provide you with contact information for reference customers. Familiarity, in this case, can breed peace of mind.
$0.00
Chris Anderson (left), editor of Wired magazine and author of the bestselling book The Long Tail, is writing another book and he’s planning to give it away for free.
It won’t be free in every form, mind you. You’ll still have to plunk down a credit card at Barnes & Noble to purchase a hard copy of Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. But the book will also be available at no charge in audio form and as a downloadable PDF. Why? Because books published in those media cost next to nothing to distribute. That’s why free is the model that Anderson believes will define the future of digital commerce.
You see evidence of Anderson’s argument all around you. The free software that runs my business today would have cost hundreds of dollars five years ago. The news and information services that keep me current are also free. I subscribe to no newspapers and just a handful of magazines. I download entire books to read a single chapter. The new bands I listen to give away their music in hopes of landing concert bookings.
To some degree, the giveaway model has existed for a long time, but the Internet is accelerating the process. Movies have started in theatres and ended up on television in a cycle that used to take years. Today, movies go from general release to the airwaves in just a few months Publishers have long sold books on remainder when their run on the shelves ended. Today, they give away hundreds of copies in advance in hopes of jump-starting a viral publicity campaign. Record stores used to discount slow moving titles as a way to clear inventory. Today, the only way a new music act can gain traction is by distributing its work at no cost online and hoping to build a following.
The trend is spreading outside of information industries, too. Irish carrier RyanAir claims to have given away more than one million flights. It makes its money on amenities and events, including gambling excursions. The CEO of RyanAir has said that his goal is to make commercial flights free.
The new economic reality is that the price of goods moves toward the marginal cost of production. For information assets, that cost reaches zero faster than it ever has before. The first few customers may pay handsomely for the privilege of exclusivity, but once a product is open for mass distribution, the price goes to whatever the market will bear.
This could be a problem for businesses that have thrived on charging big money for their intellectual property, but some companies are learning to use this to their advantage. A couple of weeks ago, a commercial software utility maker contacted me offering to give away its data backup product to subscribers to my newsletter. The reason: the $40 package had been superseded by a newer version. Rather than discontinue the earlier product, the publisher decided to give it away as a means to develop a prospect list. And the product is very good.
The trend toward free will force many businesses to reevaluate their models. Creators of digital products will need to find new sources of revenue. Perhaps that's consulting, support services, speaking fees or analysis services. Maybe it means giving away customized versions of data that is already publicly available. Technology is obviating one of the factors that used to create cost. That’s good news for most of us, but it will also force us to be more innovative.
Wozniak: I Wanted to be an Engineer for Life
By Scott Ferguson
2008-08-21
At the 2008 Intel Developer Forum, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak took the main stage to talk about his love of engineering and science, the process behind developing the Apple II personal computer, and what it’s like to be “Employee No. 1” at Apple. Wozniak also spoke of the impact Steve Jobs still has on Apple and its slew of successful products, from the iPod to the iPhone.
SAN FRANCISCO – If Steve Wozniak had his wish, he would have remained an engineer for life at Hewlett-Packard.
Instead, Steve Jobs encouraged Wozniak to leave the safe confines of HP and venture out into a new company—Apple—where the two would work to bring the Apple II personal computer into every household, school and business.
With some reluctance, Wozniak left HP and became—and still remains—“Employee No. 1” at Apple. In his partnership with Jobs, Wozniak would remain the engineer, and Jobs would sell what Wozniak would invent.
“A lot of times you become what you want to be in life, and I wanted to be an engineer,” said Wozniak at the conclusion of the Intel Developer Forum here.
“I never wanted to run a company. I didn’t want to worry about money. I didn’t want to move up the management chain,” Wozniak said. “I wanted to be an engineer for life, and I wanted to stay at Hewlett-Packard. Steve [Jobs] had this dream to be one of the great people that wanted to create companies and make products that would change the world and be one of those people like Shakespeare and Einstein, who become well known. He wanted to be in that group. So, every time I designed something great, from the time we were very young, he would say, 'Let’s sell it.'”
The story of Jobs, Wozniak, and the incredible rise of Apple and the personal computer market have been told numerous times, but Wozniak sat down with Moira Gunn of National Public Radio’s “Tech Nation” on the last day of IDF to trace his personal contributions to technology and what became the worldwide PC market.
During the 45-minute interview, Wozniak detailed his efforts at building more and more complex machines from the time he was a young teen-ager to the time he left college to work as an engineer at HP and then moved on to co-found Apple with Jobs.
Along the way, Wozniak used what he learned from early computer manuals to create his own designs. A lack of money and his shyness actually helped him see through complicated problems with building some of the world’s first PCs.
“I had very different approaches to things, and I was mostly self-taught,” said Wozniak. “I would usually show my circuits and my code to people, and it was a little different at first. Once they got it, it was so compacted, it was easy to understand, and they appreciated it.”
When he began working on his own computers, Wozniak said he was very interested in the type of microprocessor that Intel had begun to create. This processor had fewer pins, which meant less wiring complexity. The problem was it was expensive at the time, but Jobs had Intel ship Apple a few samples to experiment with in its PCs.
While Wozniak’s role in creating the Apple II is undeniable, he told the audience that it was the floppy disk drive and the creation of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program—the “first killer app”—that really brought the PC out of labs and into the hands of small business owners.
Wozniak credits Jobs with keeping Apple ahead of many of the other PC vendors out there today. He described Jobs' role as pushing cutting edge technologies, such as the iPod and iPhone, while cutting out products that don’t work. “Steve has got one mind when it comes to controlling products, and I think that’s what makes them so good,” Wozniak said.
While Wozniak retains a limited role at Apple these days, he is still innovating and tinkering with different devices. On bigger issues, Wozniak said he was interested in the type of silicon photonics that Intel had been developing during the last several years and was also interested in how processing power has changed the graphics of today’s PCs.
Even with his special access, Wozniak said he still waited in line for his first and then second iPhone. It's always a funny moment when he gives out his employee number for discounts at Apple stores, he said. However, his place within the Apple hierarchy is exactly where he wishes to remain, and his role as the company’s first engineer is secure.
“I’ve been at the bottom of the Apple org chart since day one,” he said.
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