Kraft och talang

Jag har haft lite problem med Blogger under de senaste dagarna, så därför har antalet läsvärda artiklar samlats på hög. Från en ursprunglig lista på 50-60 artiklar jag hade markerat som intressanta höjde sig följande, samt de i kvällens övriga inlägg, över mängden. Det här inläggets tema är ekonomi och Internetbolag.

ACM Queue: The challenges of managing a megaservice. "In the landscape of today's megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day. What's interesting is that despite this enormous amount of traffic, Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all."

ACM Queue: The Price of Performance. "Nevertheless, performance per watt has remained roughly flat over time, even after significant efforts to design for power efficiency. In other words, every gain in performance has been accompanied by a proportional inflation in overall platform power consumption. The result of these trends is that power-related costs are an increasing fraction of the TCO."

BeyondVC: The Arms Race for Talent. "This next phase of ramping up companies is not about how much you spend on marketing as most services today are spread word-of-mouth. It is not about technology spend as it is way cheaper than years past. It is about finding and hiring the key people who know how to scale a back end infrastructure, who can create and deliver innovative product, and who know how to leverage word-of-mouth to create a huge opportunity."

VC Adventure: When should you sell your business?. "the basic idea is that companies are generally most valuable to a potential acquirer right as the technology is proven and then again as the company reaches scale (certainly most valuable releative to the money and time invested)."