Size and internal vs. external coordination costs matter a lot. North of 100 people in a company, employees don’t all know each other. Politics become important. Incentives change. Signaling that work is being done may become more important than actually doing work. These costs are almost always underestimated. Yet they are so prevalent that professional investors should and do seriously reconsider before investing in companies that have more than one office.

I'll have a little cameo on a webinar tomorrow, speaking broadly to Dell's cloud strategy. It'd a good chance to see what we're up to now-a-days and how we think about it. This will be one of the first, public overviews of our cloud approach since we announced we were no longer building and running our own public cloud. And, it's got a snappy title: Is Cloud Meeting Your Expectations? Today’s Results….

In addition to Azure, Microsoft is offering other cloud services through Intune, its Internet-based computer management service. Developed for small offices with limited IT help, Intune provides a set of automated updating and management functionality for keeping Windows-based business computers in operating order. A quiet success for Microsoft, Intune now is used by more than 35,000 organizations, according to the company. –Microsoft TechEd focuses IT pros on the 'Cloud OS'

I’m not actually mad at either Scalzi or Amazon; I’m getting good entertainment value for money. But I am in awe at the effortlessness with which successive instalments of cash are being whisked out of my wallet. In the hands of someone evil, this could be dangerous. –The Scalzi/Amazon Trap Have you seen that meme - most recently in Mary Meeker's annual chart-porn montage - about The Market having lots of credit cards and one click buying?

Pretty detailed overview of SoftLayer and their approach to cloud: With over 100,000 servers under management in 13 data centers, SoftLayer has one of the largest IT operations in the world. –SoftLayer sticks with Super Micro servers, ponders Open Compute

three years ago 65-70 percent of Spiceworks users were from companies that had fewer than 100 employees. In the last 24 months, however, that has completely turned on its head, and now 75 percent of usage comes from companies with 100 employees or more. Specifically the two fastest growing segments are companies with 500-1,000 employees and companies with 1,000 employees and above. As of last month there were 13,000 installations with more than 1,000 devices, implying that 60-65 percent of enterprises in the world use Spiceworks for something.

The engineer says for $7,500 a month, Amazon will guarantee they will be on dedicated hardware, and not just have the IP addresses segmented through the VPC. Noisy neighbors are usually only a problem for larger customers though, he says. … He considers Google to be a serious threat to AWS, but not Azure. "Anyone who thinks there is a ‘cloud war’ currently and AWS is seeing any type of real challenge is just fooling themselves.

It's expected to have a valuation of $1.4B. I love it when pure play software company IPO's because you get a peak at their financials and how they're run for a specific type of software. More: Tableau IPO'ing - Big DATA

“By starting with test and dev with virtualization, you could ensure that you had a high degree of success, gain your skills and then move on to infrastructure and finally tier-two apps. Then maybe three years later you got to business-critical apps. “Just as it was a big mistake to try to start virtualization with the most complex workloads, it is true for clouds too." –Ten years on: How did that cloud strategy pan out?

It's a slow race to capture the white-collar worker segment. More: Google pools cloud storage