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I wuz hacked! Call the police!

Oh, wait. There aren’t any.

It’s funny, in a not-at-all-amusing sort of way, how we’re able to maintain mental models of the world we know aren’t true until someone rubs our noses in the disconnect. The hack job on the KJR archives is a perfect example.

My mental model of the world: Someone commits a crime. The victim calls the police, who investigate and, more often than not, catch and prosecute the perpetrator.

How it really works: If we want enough police for my mental model to work, we’d better open our checkbooks wide to our local taxing authorities, because whether the subject is stolen bicycles or hacked blogs, the local gendarmes aren’t going to do anything more than take your name and express their sympathy unless we hire a lot more of them.

KJR is hosted by a cloud vendor. It provides a nice little toolkit for building websites and also the tools needed to install a WordPress instance, which means it qualifies as a PaaS vendor (platform as a service).

And as I always knew, only this time it was personal, putting your infrastructure in the cloud doesn’t make it someone else’s problem. I had to figure out how to clean up the mess, how to secure my archives better, and how to get Google to take down its warnings.

* * *

Whether you’re a cloud evangelist, skeptic, or somewhere in between, read “Why PaaS? Dev, test, staging, no waiting,” (Andrew Oliver, InfoWorld, 5/30/2013).

The business case for the cloud has been foggy since the technology’s inception. It’s rested on “advantages” like cloud spending coming out of the OpEx rather than CapEx budget. This never made any sense, but especially it makes no sense at a time when, in the aggregate, the business community is sitting on large cash reserves because most companies don’t need more employees and can’t figure out any better place to invest them than stock buy-backs or the bond market.

Nor is cloud computing necessarily cheaper than its data-center equivalents. It’s more flexible, but not cheaper: Cloud computing lets you add and shed capacity as you need it.

What Oliver adds to the discussion is a special dimension of capacity management, namely that for most businesses, the capacity needed for development and (especially) test environments is occasional rather than fixed.

Also: In traditional computing environments, managing development and test environments is, shall we say, a non-trivial task.

But with cloud providers you can spin up copies of your production environment quickly, and relatively affordably because you only pay for the capacity when you need it.

And, done right, you don’t have to migrate test to production – just switch a DNS entry and test becomes production. Then you spin down your old production environment and go on your merry way.

What’s particularly likable about this aspect of the cloud business case is that it fits the KJR model of the world: Most of the time, what matters aren’t lofty, vague, strategic visions. What makes one business successful while another fails depends, more often than not, on the basic blocking and tackling. And in IT there isn’t a lot of blocking and tackling that’s more basic than change control.

* * *

Back when the earth was young and I had more of a use for barbers, there was this innovative product called the personal computer. It changed things. A lot.

But something it didn’t change at all was the business need for mainframe computers. What PCs did for businesses was to take on tasks mainframes had a hard time scaling down for, like electronic spreadsheets and word processing.

But PCs also opened the door for distributed computing, which did reduce the business need for mainframe computers. The progression was PCs, to PC-oriented LANs, to LANs connecting PCs to servers and minicomputers, to “the network is the computer.”

I’m starting to wonder whether we have a similar dynamic going on right now with mobile computing and the cloud.

See, mobile computing, properly understood, is more than “we need to support smartphones and tablets.” It’s a matter of making a company’s computing resources available to everyone who needs them and should have access to them, wherever they are and on whatever device they’re using, in a presentation well-suited to that device.

So I wonder whether mobile computing is opening the door for the cloud in much the way the PC opened the door for distributed systems, because one of the cloud’s virtues is that it can deliver your applications wherever they’re needed.

Yes, an analogy may not be the same thing as being the same thing (creds to the Economist), but exploring analogies can provide useful insights.

Think this is one of them?

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Among the critics who wrote in response to last week’s piece (“Windows 8 beats the iPad. Really.” Keep the Joint Running, 5/27/2013), some confused “I disagree” with “you’re wrong and your motivation is suspect too.”

There was also some confusion as to what tablets are for.

On the I-disagree side was correspondence suggesting the only possible reason for my favoring Windows 8 tablets over iPads, or for saying anything favorable about them at all for that matter, is my shiny new affiliation with Dell. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

On the what-tablets-are-for side, in response to my points about why Windows 8 tablets are superior to the iPad when it comes to doing real work I got several versions of, as the source of this week’s ManagementSpeak put it, “A tablet is not a PC, and a PC is not a tablet. People do not buy a tablet to do PC work.”

Which means that in addition to my lack of integrity, I’m also not a “people.”

Here’s a thought: There’s no such thing as “PC work.” There’s just work, and the tools that help us do it. (Speaking of tools, last week I omitted one of the most important that’s available in Windows 8 and also Android, but not the iPad: A file manager. Don’t get me started.)

Another thought: If “people” don’t buy tablets to do PC work, someone better clue in the folks at Google who bought QuickOffice, not to mention all the companies that sell add-on iPad keyboards.

And to the assertion that tablets aren’t PCs and PCs aren’t tablets, there’s a growing assortment of “laplets” on the market — convertible devices that can be used as either laptops or tablets, depending on the circumstance and what you want to do.

To cut through a lot of this, let’s look at what makes tablets interesting in the first place. The view from here:

Untethering: To use a PC you need a desk. To use a laptop you need a desk or (brilliant insight alert!) a lap. Most laptops also require an AC outlet if you’re going to use them for an extended period, for example, a day.

From this perspective, tablets have more in common with books and notepads than with PCs and laptops. They untether you. You can sit on a couch or easy chair, or use them while standing. This is intensely liberating.

Apps: Even inexpensive PC applications are expensive enough to get your attention. Most tablet apps range from free to under ten bucks. This encourages experimentation, which is a good thing.

Form Factor: In round numbers a tablet is about the same size as a notepad and smaller than a day planner. Businesspeople don’t think twice about carrying things this size around. The screen has enough real-estate to give app designers a lot more flexibility than a smartphone.

Also (rapidly-approaching-fogeyhood alert!), business meetings where everyone has a laptop open in front of them feel like everyone is hiding behind a small, personal fence, working on their own business while they just happen to be in the same room.

Because of tablets’ notepad-ness, tablet-ized business meetings feel more collaborative.

Control: Out of self-defense, most IT organizations long-ago locked down everyone’s PC. It’s a bad idea … until they were locked down, PCs drove an enormous amount of innovation … but what’s best for the whole business isn’t what happens in most businesses.

See, IT didn’t get credit for the innovation. But it did and does get the blame when something bad happens, like, for example, any form of intrusion.

Which is why PCs aren’t personal anymore. Tablets still are, and to the extent they come in through the BYOD phenomenon, IT’s ability to restrict them will continue to be limited.

(And, IT will continue to get the blame if something bad happens as a result. Prepare accordingly.)

Packability: To the extent a tablet can support “real” work along with browsing, email, and various entertainment uses, they let business travelers pack just one compact computing device. This is a big deal.

And in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen …

If you’re buying a tablet for entertainment, browsing, and email, with a smattering of other work activities thrown in, either the iPad or one of the many Android tablets is probably your best bet.

But nothing about tablets make them natively uninteresting for doing actual work. So if you want a tablet’s differentiators and plan to use it for work purposes, Windows 8 tablets deserve a serious look, even though, if you buy one, you too will no longer be a people.

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(Posted using my Windows 8 tablet in a hotel room, far more easily than when I tried to post these things with my iPad.)

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