Follow-upIt’s been awhile, a little over a month. I hope to see y’all more regularly. I was reading the excellent TechReckoning Dispatch and thought: what the fuck am I doing over here? Tech & Work WorldMeanwhile, at work…I’ve been up to hijinks over at Pivotal. Check out my recent posts there: We did a round of briefing analysts on a bundle of announcements around Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It was fun being on that side of the table again.

After two weeks away from home, I’m finally back. SponsorsThis Memo is sponsored by The Craftsman PM - Amp up your skills and get to the top at this Whole Product Workshop Feb 21–22 in Austin and Mar 7–8 NYC. Grab a spot at 10% off for just Cote Memo readers (use code: cotememo62) before it’s all gone: http://bit.ly/cotememo62 FRONTSIDE.IO - HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside.

Follow-upWe’re up to 90 subscribers and one of you went a helped out one of our sponsors (The Craftsman PM), so thanks! Tech & Work WorldSayulitaI had a nice chance to spend the week in Mexico this week. A friend of mine rented a house here in Sayulita and asked if we wanted to go along. Since I work remotely, so long as there’s a fast enough Internet connection, I’m good to go.

Follow-upIn reponse to the analyst access commentary from last time, a reader wrote in: Are you familiar with Securosis? They’re a security-only analyst firm. Their business model is pretty different – everything they publish is free, and make money through sponsorship and inquiries etc. They have a model they call totally transparent research. I don’t know how much they make – but apparently they make enough to cover themselves. Tech & Work WorldWorking at PivotalI started a new job earlier this month at Pivotal.

We’ve got a new sponsor this week, see below. There’s a 10% coupon. I’m planning on going to the event to get my lurn on. Also, I wrote this pretty fast. Pardon messups. Tech & Work WorldThe Problem with Analyst AccessOne of the core opportunity/problem diachotomies in the analyst industry is “access”: access to the analyst’s insights, access to the analysist content, and access to the analysts themselves. Gate-keeping this access is the basis for much of the business: paywalls, paying for consulting, etc.

Tech & Work WorldHaving an opinion, or notIn the types of jobs I've found myself in over recent years - analyst, strategist, "content producer" in the form of podcasts and blogs - you have to generate a lot of opinions. The best actually seem to really care about the things they have opinions over and can express, at length, why they think like they do. Think about the ATP crew or any of the other podcasts out there: they really care about Apple!

Follow-upThe Docker piece I mentioned last time is up. Check out the summary on my blog, and 451 clients can read it behind our paywall. Because Docker links always come in pairs, here's the recording of the closing panel at DockerConEU, where I was one of the panelists. Software Defined Talk listeners will notice I'm wearing one of my recommendations. No Kirkland products, though, sadly. Tech & Work WorldWhatever happened to "

Tech & Work WorldThe Cloud is DevelopersIt's an exaggeration, but for the most part "cloud" is all about supporting developers. What I mean by this is that it's not exactly the best way to run packaged applications: there's VMware, Linux, etc. for that it seems. When I was working on cloud strategy at Dell, I'd often joke that we should do some field material ("field" == "sales") that was a crude decision tree, like you'd see in magazines.

Tech & Work WorldQuick HitsPuppet Labs pushes ahead with more staff, broader enterprise DevOps deployments - a recent 451 Research report from Jay Lyman on my team, now free for everyone. Software Defined Talk #17: DevOps is the New Agile - another fine episode of Software Defined Talk. Be sure to check out my cheesy DevOps market timing if you like that kind of thing. Under Development Podcast #12: Talk to your children about notifications - our all too infrequent podcast on development has a new episode out.

Follow-upI mentioned the Software Defined Talk recording last week, the episode is up for those who were waiting. At DockerCon EU - turns out I'll be at the Amsterdam DocerCon the first week of Dec, just for a day and half, though. If you're there, it'd be fun to meetup. I'll have been traveling all of that week, so you can see my brain turned to mush! Tech & Work WorldQuick HitsNetcraft: DigitalOcean Now Third-Largest Cloud - measurements like these are always weird, but the point is still there: DigitalOcean is on mega-growth, them developers like it.