Waving Goodbye - Episode #4 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

Cleaned 2026-10-14: misheard names and product terms corrected; wording otherwise unchanged.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is episode number four of the CloudFocus Weekly titled Waving Goodbye for the first week of August 2010. This episode is brought to you by Arkus, cloud computing experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me is the co-host, my co-host, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing? Um, a little melancholy. We'll get to that in a second. Wow, when the clouds go by. Wait, that's that's not a good blog post. So we got a couple things to talk about today. We got fun news. Actually, we've got sort of rumor and hilarity ensuing. And then we have some bad news, which we'll talk about. So we have your blog post on Cloud2, which we'll talk about. And we also have a new blog post from the guys at Salesforce called Private Clouds, Flat Earths, and Unicorns. You can just tell that that's trying to be facetious. And then we'll talk a little bit about the Google just came out and announced sort of the end of Google Wave, which for those of you who listen to this podcast and read our blog, that's going to be a massive, a massive painful point. So let's get to that last and of course at the end, stay tuned, CloudFocus app pick of the week. So we'll, you'll stay tuned for that because it's going to be a good one this week. All right, so let's talk. So lead us off by telling us about your blog post this week and let's discuss it.

Justin Edelstein: Sure, so I wrote a blog post called From Pull to Push, Cloud2 Changes Everything. And it was inspired by reading a blog post that was posted on, I think it was like a CNN tech or a CNN money blog and I think Marc Benioff has obviously spoken about this topic, seeing as they, sort of they being Salesforce.com, have coined the term cloud2, and has spoken about this. And what it's really about is this shift of moving from trying to pull information from the web, and when we're talking about applications that you're using within your company, or even with your friends, getting information pushed at you. So it's the difference between the reference that I use or that I come up with in our blog post is buying a Bluetooth headset five years ago as opposed to buying a Bluetooth headset today.

Jason Atwood: So for those of us who don't know Cloud One.

Justin Edelstein: I should have started there, shouldn't I?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, give us a little bit of what Cloud One was and what Cloud Two is.

Justin Edelstein: So Cloud One is kind of killer internet apps, right? stuff like eBay and Amazon where you can all of a sudden... Google. What's that? Google. Sure. Apps that worked on the internet that allowed you to interact with data in ways that you couldn't before, you know, e-commerce type of stuff, bringing information to you, all great things. Now, Cloud2 is really more about interactions with people, interactions with data, much more lively if to steal from from the Salesforce playbook if if cloud one is about making business software as easy to use as Amazon then cloud two is about making business software work more like Facebook and how you have a steady news stream or news feed of things that your friends are doing whether they actually post it themselves or whether they take some action within Facebook that posts

03:55 Justin Edelstein: something for them in their news feed, you by nature of following them are being fed or pushed information and it keeps you sort of in the loop and in the

Jason Atwood: know. And the point that you brought up that I think is really good and you know pat-pat for you. Get those that off. It is the difference between you know cloud one was in your booth to this example or any example of wanting to buy something. I was actually searching. I wanted to buy some whatever some type of food the other day and I went to the social network to get it and that you know five years ago you know 20 years ago you'd go out and ask your grocer you know five years ago ten to five years ago you would go search on the internet's using a Google or a Yahoo and now you don't you go your first stop for sort of of finding information is still probably search, but it's probably coupled with the social networking. And I think that's where Cloud2, where they see Cloud2 going. And of course, Salesforce is building that into their Chatter platform and that they want Chatter to be as a leader in the Cloud2.

Jason Atwood: And they modeled it off of, obviously, off of Facebook and Twitter. But it's true. our use of the internet services, cloud computing services, has become much more interactive than it was before.

Justin Edelstein: It's also about connecting the clouds. So if you are a user, and we love Salesforce.com, if you're a user of Salesforce.com for customer service, for example, and someone is talking about your company on Twitter, you could pull that right into your CRM and actually interact with that person using your business app, your CRM app. And that is a whole different way of thinking about customer service, customer satisfaction, customer relationship. You used the example of when you were at Dreamforce last year, the big conference, You stayed at the Omni Hotel and I think you forgot your toothbrush or something like that. And you tweeted, oh wow, if you forget your toothbrush at the Omni Hotel, no worries, you just go downstairs and they'll give you a toothbrush. And then Omni tweeted back to you saying thank you for your kind words, yada yada. They were watching for people talking about Omni.

Justin Edelstein: I use my example in the blog post of, you know, if you were to buy a Bluetooth headset today you might go to the Twitterverse and write, hey does anyone have a really good Bluetooth headset that works well with iPhone 4? If there are some manufacturers of Bluetooth headsets that make a great headset for the iPhone 4, if they're smart they are utilizing cloud 2 to be monitoring that that conversation and join it and mark it directly to you by saying hey we make a Bluetooth headset this is the one you want as opposed to trusting somebody searching through links and trying to find that information that they may have

07:18 Jason Atwood: published in some silo on their website. And it's changed the scope too. I just finished a book called Twitterville which really talks a lot about this. It's basically focused very much on Twitter and the Twitter fear. Don't figure, Twitterville is focused on Twitter. You would be hard to figure that. While I thought the book was pretty good, it was a lot of stories of using Twitter. They did bring out a couple, but some of the things that I took away from it, because a lot of the stories I had already heard, people getting out of jail because of Twitter, people raising money for foundations from Twitter, people spreading news through Twitter. But I thought it was sort of interesting is how are companies interacting with their clients and with future clients using Twitter and how the rules aren't quite the same. It's not a medium of where just putting up a billboard and having people look at it.

Jason Atwood: It's a two-way conversation. I think if I could boil down the whole Twitterville down to a couple sentences, it's about taking it to a two-way conversation, taking all of our communication to two-way as opposed to one-way advertising. And Cloud2, I think that's exactly what they're trying to get at, is that it goes from just entering data into systems to data that is conversational. I think it's a great blog post. If you haven't read it, then you should. Go to blog.arkasink.com to read it. Then we have another one, second one on our agenda tonight. Another blog post called Private Clouds, Flat Earths, and Unicorns. Clearly making fun of the, you know, putting, juxtaposing two things that don't exist with another thing that people are talking about existing. And we've kind of started talking about this. So let's frame the debate, and then we can chime in.

Jason Atwood: So there's lots of different terminologies sprouting up about cloud computing. And one of them is called, there's the public cloud. There's cloud computing, and there's the public cloud, which is sort of what we talk about most of the time. And then there's a new concept that a lot of people have been bringing up and saying, well, you know, there's a new thing called a private cloud. The public cloud being something that is, you know, externally hosted, it is run by generally a different company than your own. And you're, you know, using it because they're using virtualization there. It's a easy model. You don't have to invest a lot of money, you don't have to invest in hardware or software. You're just using licenses that's scalable up or down in a shared environment, multi-tenancy. clouds now, the theory being, if you so agree to the theory, is that you can take all the technology that's used in the cloud, right, so virtualization and multi-tenancy even,

10:24 Jason Atwood: if you're going to do it in a big enough environment, and you bring it internal. So it's the idea of taking that, you know, all the, some of the economies of scale of using cloud computing and bringing it internal. So this blog post is basically poking fun at that, and it's written by Peter Coffee, It's basically saying, it doesn't exist. It's just giving another word to something that doesn't make sense. And it's making people who want to still build their data centers, giving them a feeling of why they would. It's like, oh, I'm using a private cloud and I can then go sell that to the CTO or the CIO or the CEO and they'll say, yeah, that's great. I've heard of this cloud computing thing. Go build that private cloud. Okay, go build that data center. So what are your thoughts on the article?

Justin Edelstein: Well, I'll start off by saying Peter Coffee is a phenomenal blogger and evangelist of cloud computing. If you've ever seen a Salesforce conference live streaming, he's generally the guy that hosts them. So he writes a lot of these blog posts on this cloud blog that supposedly has people like Parker Harris and Marc Benioff writing posts, but that very rarely happens. most often Peter Coffee so kudos to him for writing a interesting blog and and touching on some very interesting topics obviously with the slant towards the public cloud and in this case he you know he poses the question of you know you can't always go with you know looking at survey results because in a in a world where you can choose things that don't actually exist if given the option you're gonna choose things that don't actually exist like a flat earth where there are no time zones and and no you know no issues with certain things that you know the earth is is round and you do have to work with people that are 12 hours off from you and and things of that nature if you're working in sort of a global economy and you don't have to think about those things and and I think he draws these very interesting intricate lines between that corollary and well if you're building your own data center you have to think about that type of thing. These are imperfect boundaries that you're given to have to build something within. Why not let the professionals who are paid big bucks to build out these global data centers do that for you? At the end of the day if you're gonna choose a private cloud it sounds great, it sounds like I have amazing security that I can build my own standards to, but really if you are doing that you're only using your own security standards. You're not sort of getting the economies of scale of saying, wow hundreds of hundreds of of the biggest companies in the world all have their own security standards and they're all on this one service. So this one service has to meet all of those security standards, they're gonna meet mine, right? I, you know, all of these different, you know, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley and all these different compliance things that public clouds have to meet in order for certain companies to use them, you have to build your stuff to those specs and maintain them and have talented staff that are high paid, generally high paid resources, that you can sort of just pay in case something goes wrong. That's where you lose when you talk about the private cloud is you're paying people to sit around and not be utilized

14:04 Jason Atwood: they're basically utilized at about 10%. I think I would take that straight up into not just people and using people but using the actual One of the things that makes the ROI good on public clouds is that you're getting, when you sign up for your however many licenses of Gmail or of Salesforce or of any other cloud computing service, it's up to them to figure out what servers or what pod you go into or what data center that you're using, what their utilization is, and they might move you into this one based on how many licenses, but that's all on them. If you go build your own data center, and I have done this in my past, not huge data centers, but I've racked and stacked servers and I've run server rooms, then it's up to you. And all that economy to scale is saying, let someone else worry about if the servers are at 25% capacity or 50% capacity, or what the disaster recovery program is, or what the the offsite backup or what the upgrade schemes are. All that stuff is very detailed and difficult to do. And even the best in the world don't get it very well. You know, don't always get it right. In the case of many of your sales forces, even had cases where they've had failures and they have some of the best and brightest working on this stuff. So this kind of has the hoots but to say, well, my guys are better and we're gonna go invest these millions of dollars worth of hardware and we're gonna use it for our own people. But we know we won't be able to utilize, get the use of the servers and software up for six months a year two years and we both work at a company that if given a project to you know three million dollars in the separate annual spend it data center it but but but but they wouldn't be i mean three years later you know the people you know maybe using ten percent of it or you've lost all that money because you put in three million dollars in ten years and three years later you use using ten percent as opposed to uh... using it for you know uh... buying licenses and starting to use as much as you want. I want to use 10 licenses, I want to use 100, I want to use 1,000 tomorrow. So a good article, you know, interesting. I think the whole cloud blog thing is kind of interesting that it's on Salesforce's domain and it looks like these guys are here, right? That, you know, Marc and Parker are doing their blogging. Unlike Arkus where we actually blog right from, you know, the top officials of Arkus will blog. So that brings us, speaking of blogging, as i look at our google waves that handles are the heart of the well let's let's it's personal about the end it's only the beginning of it's the beginning of the end for me to be any end of the end of the old the little hot side story here to get us to where we are is that we've actually been talking about who wave for since we started this podcast and since we started blogging about one of our first things because it can't became a tool so we've been big evangelists and It's been kind of interesting. Well, apparently we're the kiss of death

17:07 Jason Atwood: because Google literally announced either yesterday or two days ago, I think it was yesterday, but it was through an interview and it was a weird kind of, then they actually put it up on their blogs. They announced that they are discontinuing the development of Google Wave and they're gonna move the development team off of that onto something else. And they're gonna support it till the end of the year. And at that point, they don't know. There's no like, they didn't say, and you know, all your base belong to us. They just said, you know, whatever, something will happen. Which I am gonna write a blog post about this. So this is the preview to the blog post. Here's my problem with it. And actually, I think this is a very bad, this is a bad day in cloud computing, because this is exactly what the people on the other side who don't believe in the cloud computing and want to use their own infrastructure, their own IT. This is exactly what they will point to, to say, yeah, see, there you go. That's why you don't use Google. That's why you don't use these other companies, because you don't control it. Because you went and you put time and effort into using a tool that you got, and we're using it, we actually pay for Google, or using Google's service, the pay version. So we're paying for this service, right? and yet they get to decide to take it away from us. And that is a problem with cloud computing in that you don't control it.

Justin Edelstein: Well, there's one thing though.

Jason Atwood: Well, hold on, hold on. But wait, wait, wait, let's back up. So that I think is gonna be used, that's gonna be used as a, you know, it's used as the story for IT groups who don't wanna move to things like Google and Gmail and Google Apps. and they're gonna point to this and say, you see, what happens if they put a feature into Google spreadsheet or Google Sheets or if they put a feature into something and then they don't like it and they pull it out and you rely upon that for part of your business process. It's exactly what they point to. I think this is a short-sighted bad move on top of Google. Yeah, I understand they don't wanna continue it, but it is gonna have a ramification later and a bigger one and I think it puts a black, I think I put a black spot right now on cloud computing and why people would choose not to use Google for anything else.

Justin Edelstein: Allow me to retort. Sure. Google Wave is a labs project. It's not even a beta project. It's a labs project. There's no SLA on Google Wave. When you sign up for Google Premiere, there are SLAs in place for certain products that are not labs. When you use a lab's product, they disclaim wholeheartedly, this thing may blow up, it may go away. So you're using this sort of at your own risk. This may not exist in the future. It is not a full part of our product suite. There's no SLA on this. And that's a big part of cloud computing. When you go to procure a cloud computing product, you wanna make sure that there's the appropriate service level agreements in place that you don't get, you know kicked in the rear like like i'm feeling right now by Google Wave uh... because i think i said on the last podcast i cannot imagine work company without Google Wave and and

20:36 Justin Edelstein: and here comes the you know this this blog post of doom around who wave going away with that said i have the feeling that Google Wave is not going to go away i have the feeling that this is a phenomenal product google is good at building products and really bad at rolling them out. They build some really cool stuff, but they don't know how to make it so that people use it. They sort of throw stuff at the wall and hope it sticks, but they should be more mature than that at this point.

Jason Atwood: Well, it's literally their model. I mean, they literally allow, and I don't have, do I have anybody who I know works at Google? I don't think so, but their model is that...

Justin Edelstein: I know they're allowed to take 20% of their time and sort of build whatever they want.

Jason Atwood: Well, yeah, that's more to throw to whatever you want, but they really do, and that's what the whole Labs thing's about. The one thing that I'll kind of throw back on this is, while this was a Labs product, this was also thrown out there on a big stage, and they made huge announcements on it, and then they made a huge announcement when I was one year old. And unlike other Labs products, right, they, most Labs products you can't install as part of your Google Apps thing, right? You can't. If you go into Google Apps and you try to turn on other Labs products for your org, or for your instance, your Google App instance, you can't do it, right? This one they actually made available and turned on and made it permissionable so you could roll it out to people. So I get, and you know what, I think it's a little bit of a cop-out to say, oh, it's a labs thing. Well, if it's labs, then keep it in your lab. That's the whole concept of a lab. A lab is a place that you do work that no one else sees.

Jason Atwood: When you're ready to have other people see it, you take it out of the lab, and then you let other people deal with it. Beta, I get. Lab? But then again, they moved this into the product suite, and they moved it into the Google app as something they turn on. And I think at that point, yes, there's no SLA for it, But at that point you're basically saying, this is part of the suite. And yeah, it's a lapsed product, but I think it's a mistake. And again, it's not the death of Google at all. Here's the good news. Savegooglewave.com is started up, I think today. They already have like 2,000 votes or whatever.

Justin Edelstein: I started following them on Twitter.

Jason Atwood: Yes, you follow them on Twitter. And you know what? Companies change. They change their mind. What I'm hoping is that Google Wave morphs into something else. I mean, they've already used some of the technology. The real time collaboration is already built now into, I think, Sheets and into Docs. So they're already moving some of that. I know there's pieces that are open source, so maybe someone will also run with it. But again, even to look at something like Salesforce built Google Wave adapters. They built ways to connect up Google Wave. They have a whole demo, Google Wave and Salesforce together. I mean, how does this, if I were the head of Salesforce, if I were Marc or Parker, and I put some sort of effort into kind of showing the collaboration, and then the other guy goes, yeah, we're not gonna do that anymore, I think that it doesn't suit well for anybody. And again, I think it's, and you've said this from your past experience working with smaller IT shops, that they'll say, the reason we don't want to go to something like Google is because they don't show,

24:15 Jason Atwood: they don't show very good sense of how businesses work and how to roll things out. They're very, they're, while they're, they'll roll them out without kind of letting them know that they're coming. So anyway, that's, that's the, that's the Google Wave. We will fight it right here on CloudFocus. By episode 25, we will be doing it, we will still be in the way. Join us in the fight. Join us in the fight. Alright, let's go for our CloudFocus app pick of the week. And as always, I'll let you start it off. I'm always going first. Well, because I just ended up talking, so then you talk. Alright.

Justin Edelstein: This week, I am choosing an email marketing solution. This email marketing solution is called ExactTarget. I'm choosing this one because I like the way that it integrates with Salesforce.com. So you can use Salesforce.com as sort of your source of data, your source of lists, your source of contacts, and use ExactTarget to actually send out templated emails to those contacts. and then you know see the results of opens, bounces, conversion type of stuff from within the Salesforce interface. You can even send an email from within the Salesforce interface. It has great ability to send an email to a report, which is an interesting concept. If you just run a report in Salesforce and point exact target at it and say, go send to that report, it's pretty awesome. They have some interesting Twitter integrations where they've started working with some of the social networks and Twitter. And they have a pretty intuitive, easy to use template builder. And it's sort of a top down thing. So you can have a top level marketing admin type user that can build the templates and then they have sort of a lock and publish model where the end user has a different permission set and they can take the template and modify the text in certain areas or the images in certain areas but not other areas and that's all they can really do and it allows for some pretty granular controls and like I said if you're a Salesforce user it can use Salesforce as the source of the data the the email addresses and the names and the merge fields so you can merge in all sorts of interesting data like hello, you know, name, yada yada yada, you have this type of account, etc. and then see the results from right within Salesforce. Never have to leave. It's actually on the AppExchange. What's the pricing? Pricing is kind of steep. It's a little expensive. Is it more than adjusted? It is actually expensive. It's, as you imagine, it's based on email sends. So you say I'm gonna send 200,000 emails this month and they quote you a price you know for a yearly contract. I you know I don't want to throw the price out there it's not one of those $4.99 or freemium $15 type of things because it's definitely variable on obviously the amount of services that it'll take to get it installed and working with your app and and also...

27:51 Jason Atwood: Give me a sense of the size, is it? So, I mean, this isn't for small companies.

Justin Edelstein: This is not for small companies. This is for real-deal marketing companies. It could be, you know, 20, 30 grand a year, something like that for, you know, somewhere around 200,000 emails per month, depending on who you are as a company and your negotiation skills. Cool.

Jason Atwood: All right, ExactTarget Email Marketing by ExactTarget, right, that's the name of the company? exact target you can Google my exact target I think that's been every one of your pics has been blah by blah the same person all right I like it never used it have we've done we've actually done stuff about you know with other ones like vertical response and this is a higher end tool than that right and I think that's generally the you know what we would say to clients is okay where are you in the spectrum are you gonna send five thousand or two thousand mail drop and it is for the Mac OS, Mac OS 10. It is for Entourage or Mail. And what it does very smartly is if you want to send an email if you want to have an email from, you know, in your inbox and you want to have it attached to a contact or a lead or an opportunity or a contact and or an account in Salesforce, you can just click on this this and say add, you know, basically a little app and it sits sits next to you on your desktop and you click add email or add case and it basically throws it up, you know, logs into Salesforce for you, you put that in once and then it throws it in there and it can match it up and it does a little search and gives you a little screen. This is great functionality because on the Windows side for Outlook you have something, you know, they have Salesforce, have a plugin for Outlook which does this functionality. On the Mac side, you kind of don't have this functionality.

Jason Atwood: I will say it's become, I used to use it a ton. Again, MailDropX made by Simon Fell. It's at pocketsoap.com, but it used to be very, very popular and I used to use it a ton. I would say I use it much less now because of email to Salesforce that you can just email BCC and address and that seems to work. I know we all use it because we're big Mac guys here. And it's a good one. It's up to version 2.2. It is free. So it's not $30,000 a year, it's free. The only limiter I think is that you need to have, I think a certain, no, that might not even be the case. Check with what edition it works with because it does use the API. I think they left it open for this product. He has actually a bunch, we might talk about it in future podcasts, but it's email integration for Salesforce.com from OS 10 either Entourage or mail.app. It is mail drop by SimonFell at pocketsoap.com.

31:19 Jason Atwood: And that is the end of the podcast. Wow, quick. We were told to keep it quick, so we're gonna keep it quick, people. We want you listening. If you want to find out more, if you wanna follow us, find out what we're doing. Many different ways. probably the first way to start at the blog.arkusinc.com. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C dot com. There is, we'll have blog posts. We'll actually post episodes of this podcast. So you wanna get to old podcasts. Also go to iTunes and subscribe to it in iTunes. Just go to iTunes and type in, on the iTunes store and type in CloudFocus, one word. It'll show up. It's basically the only thing named CloudFocus. You can subscribe to it. Great way of doing that. If you wanna follow us, You can follow Justin at twitter.com slash just Edelstein. And if you want to follow me, Jason, you can go to twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood. We're also on LinkedIn and our company, Arkus, is on Facebook.

Jason Atwood: So you can go to facebook.com slash Arkus Inc. And you'll show up. All good places to follow what we're doing and blog posts and interesting tidbits that we might have uh... so thank you for joining us just nearly uh... last comment they like to throw out there for the cloud people

Justin Edelstein: and no i don't actually you know i do know you know i do not do that to me and uh... can catch me off guard there

Jason Atwood: thanks there all right well you just look at you were just looking so morose about cool wave and pretty hot thank you for joining us on CloudFocus remember describe night and until next week we will talk to you later you