I love this cycle, where internet business heats up and companies start building datacenters to keep up with perceived demand. It happened the last time around, with companies like Exodus, Cable & Wireless, and all the others who were overbuilt when demand didn't materialize.
Anything over 50k sf of datacenter is more than enough, assuming you've got cheap and available power, and close to a couple fiber loops. The big reason that these new datacenters are so large (200k-400k sf, compared that to 1 floor of a high rise office at 30k sf) is because they aren't allowed to have the power density (elec co can only supply so much at reasonable price). With servers more power hungry, yet smaller, there's a need for more power/cooling, but less space.
Building new isn't all that different in cost of retrofitting an old warehouse. I'd just buy one of the small operators out there and be up and running for a % of the cost. The problem there is that there's a company called Digital Realty Trust buying all a lot of the datacenters in the market, and they've got a ton of cash.
So maybe the rust belt should be fighting for these developments, but they can't overcome 1 issue - companies want to be close to their datacenter. It goes against the security mission, the cost justification, and just about everything else; but these always get built right next to corporate HQ or in some metropolitan area. Doh!
With no real collateral for the loan from the borrower, and the lack of a need to sell the loan to Wall St., you'll likely see a lot of defaults on questionable credit and no recourse.
Great! The borrower takes on even more debt they can't afford. The lender loses their "small" investment. The market makes 1-3% on every loan with no risk.
The point the City is making is that, while Google will pay market value rent for their space and utilities, there are going to be unfunded projects.
The article lacked detail, but I didn't see anything about building a new school to support the 2000 new houses. Guess who is going to pay for and run that school? Google? NASA?
The second problem is that, in a normal lease, Google would pay real estate taxes that are passed on by the Landlord. The article mentions a $850,000 per year figure, which is probably low because the property hasn't sold recently to be reappraised.
Leasing on the Fed's land is going to eliminate that expense, and I doubt that the Feds increased the rent because they were so giddy to get Google to bail them out of a bunch of unproductive land the local bureaucrats would eventually start asking to use.
This whole Morse Code vs. SMS went down on Leno a few weeks ago, why is it news today? Obviously Google is having a slow news day.
As an aside of the aside, the hidden benefits to the company (the one paying for the text messaging!) include maintaining auditable records, communicating with multiple people, and being able to recall the message for your own review.
I can't seem to find the Morse to Serial adapter I need to print my Morse Code message.
If 1 email exploiting company content costs $50k (even losing employee, product details, etc. could easily cost that much), and you can stop a half dozen a year, then it's worth the money for the staff and equipment.
Nice responses, but I didn't think so. You're an IT guy who wants the best hardware, brand new, all the time.
Yes, leasing does provide balance sheet benefit because it doesn't have to be depreciated, which reduces profits (in accountant fairy land).
Of course, I'm not a CPA either, so how can you lease and still get what you want? Learn how to negotiate! You don't think IBM loves to say they have Fortune 500 clients?
So write a better contract. You know you can't change price or lease terms (smart CPAs should do that), but get the things that matter - repairs, turnaround time, replacement after estimated lifetime, excess parts, etc.
Vendors will play ball, probably buy you lunch too.
Not trying to be a Microsoft cheerleader, but I'm not sure the issue with a Windows ATM. If they're already using M$ for web servers, and you're using M$ to access their site, that's basically the same risk....
Actually it's probably more risk, because I vaguely remember something that happens when I go an ATM - I put a freakin' card in the machine!
Assuming every/.'er isn't clicking the ads on his site, I would guess all the top "asbestos" advertisters are now husting because their CTR is getting killed by all the impressions and no clicks.
So the top laywers either had to spend a ton to keep their position, or we've helped the crappy lawyer on page 3 get to the top after the others ran out of their daily budget. awesome!
I enjoy this conversation so much, because it never addresses the fundamental problem - IT is a COST center in most organizations.
So when Mr. CFO looks at the IT budget, he doesn't see any revenue, and therefore none of the costs can be justified. Isn't it odd the CFO comes to IT every year at every company?
The only way around this cost problem is to become a profit center in your organization. You need to show you're financially viable in your organization (this can often counter the argument to outsource everything as well).
Start by hiring a MBA student who understands IT and accounting, and billing him to the CFO's budget in response to his desire to "cut costs". Next get the smart kid to track what services you provide (aka Blackberry support for the CFO, email support for the CFO, the web app for the CFO, the report writing for the CFO) and how much they cost in the market and how often your IT department performs these services. Give the company a 20% discount for efficiency purposes and putting a roof over your head.
Now hopefully you're in the black...Then go to the CFO and explain your new plan to charge the other departments to justify your service. In reality it's an accounting exercise, and you likely track what you do anyway, so nothing has really changed.
Best of all, IT's work will now be focused on what matters - the (internal) client. Shoot, when you finally get realigned to what you're supposed to be doing, you'll probably be able to propose work to other departments with a predictable cost instead of debating which piece of open source software is best to do a cool task that means little to the company's bottom line.
Oh, and tell your vendor sales reps that IT is going to be outsourced if you can't cut costs. It's amazing how flexible the pricing can be when it's the difference between a reduced commission and no commission.
...but what happened to renting a car? Won't Enterprise Rent a Car "pick you up"? I understand you've got to have it for the whole day, but it has to be cheaper on a weekday, right?
Of course maybe I'm just insensitive, in the OC Ferrari and Mercedes are more common than Ford and Chevy.
I expected a big finale, an explosion, something more than "I sent an email". I wanted to read you found a foreign company to do DoS attacks for you, had Interpol storm his house, or bought the hosting company and shut down his server. All he got was an email, probably didn't even need a smoke after that.
Common sense would say that an hour later it was back up, or even better, he used your tactics. He knows your IP address now, so he could easily serve up different products for you and still offer your software for sale to everyone else!
And I don't believe much of what he said, but his claim of other sites sounds credible, which means he's probably still selling your software on those too!
I hate to play lawyer, but you need more than an email apology at this point if you hope to protect your software.
It's a secret because it's bad for profit!
on
Amazon Sales Record
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Amazon.com strategy: sell everything at a loss and make it up in volume.
Yes, they sold 2.8 million units, but since it was the day after Thanksgiving, I'm sure most of those qualified for free shipping which can't be a good for the bottom line.
So why didn't Amazon make a bigger deal out of it? Because at the end of the quarter someone's going to want see some profit, and that isn't going to happen unless the accountants and marketing people get together.
Better yet, do you think they analyzed the readership to figure out how many unique readers they had? I assume that's the point of paying millions of dollars for content that you could buy a lot cheaper. If you've got 10% overlap, you just paid a couple million for thin air.
word has it, they're going to use the cash for a pr campaign to convince the public that the dot com bust was a myth. they're also going to buy any former pets.com employees a hot meal this Christmas
So this means I can register google in adwords? On google alone that would net me 20000 clicks! Why? I have no idea, but if you want some traffic you should check it out.
bazily
Slashdot Mirror
...you can pay your Adwords bill with PayPal?
It worked.
who knew Scoble http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ had so much influence?
Not to mention the screener noticed the reporter standing there watching the whole thing and taking notes.
I love this cycle, where internet business heats up and companies start building datacenters to keep up with perceived demand. It happened the last time around, with companies like Exodus, Cable & Wireless, and all the others who were overbuilt when demand didn't materialize.
Anything over 50k sf of datacenter is more than enough, assuming you've got cheap and available power, and close to a couple fiber loops. The big reason that these new datacenters are so large (200k-400k sf, compared that to 1 floor of a high rise office at 30k sf) is because they aren't allowed to have the power density (elec co can only supply so much at reasonable price). With servers more power hungry, yet smaller, there's a need for more power/cooling, but less space.
Building new isn't all that different in cost of retrofitting an old warehouse. I'd just buy one of the small operators out there and be up and running for a % of the cost. The problem there is that there's a company called Digital Realty Trust buying all a lot of the datacenters in the market, and they've got a ton of cash.
So maybe the rust belt should be fighting for these developments, but they can't overcome 1 issue - companies want to be close to their datacenter. It goes against the security mission, the cost justification, and just about everything else; but these always get built right next to corporate HQ or in some metropolitan area. Doh!
With no real collateral for the loan from the borrower, and the lack of a need to sell the loan to Wall St., you'll likely see a lot of defaults on questionable credit and no recourse.
Great!
The borrower takes on even more debt they can't afford.
The lender loses their "small" investment.
The market makes 1-3% on every loan with no risk.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffic e.html
The point the City is making is that, while Google will pay market value rent for their space and utilities, there are going to be unfunded projects.
The article lacked detail, but I didn't see anything about building a new school to support the 2000 new houses. Guess who is going to pay for and run that school? Google? NASA?
The second problem is that, in a normal lease, Google would pay real estate taxes that are passed on by the Landlord. The article mentions a $850,000 per year figure, which is probably low because the property hasn't sold recently to be reappraised.
Leasing on the Fed's land is going to eliminate that expense, and I doubt that the Feds increased the rent because they were so giddy to get Google to bail them out of a bunch of unproductive land the local bureaucrats would eventually start asking to use.
As an aside of the aside, the hidden benefits to the company (the one paying for the text messaging!) include maintaining auditable records, communicating with multiple people, and being able to recall the message for your own review.
I can't seem to find the Morse to Serial adapter I need to print my Morse Code message.
needed a token Google story today to fill our quota for Google stories this week. Way to go team!
If 1 email exploiting company content costs $50k (even losing employee, product details, etc. could easily cost that much), and you can stop a half dozen a year, then it's worth the money for the staff and equipment.
As long as we're living a year in the past, I've got a hunch this Google IPO is going to go through the roof!
-bazily
Yes, leasing does provide balance sheet benefit because it doesn't have to be depreciated, which reduces profits (in accountant fairy land).
Of course, I'm not a CPA either, so how can you lease and still get what you want? Learn how to negotiate! You don't think IBM loves to say they have Fortune 500 clients?
So write a better contract. You know you can't change price or lease terms (smart CPAs should do that), but get the things that matter - repairs, turnaround time, replacement after estimated lifetime, excess parts, etc.
Vendors will play ball, probably buy you lunch too.
Not trying to be a Microsoft cheerleader, but I'm not sure the issue with a Windows ATM. If they're already using M$ for web servers, and you're using M$ to access their site, that's basically the same risk....
Actually it's probably more risk, because I vaguely remember something that happens when I go an ATM - I put a freakin' card in the machine!
Assuming every /.'er isn't clicking the ads on his site, I would guess all the top "asbestos" advertisters are now husting because their CTR is getting killed by all the impressions and no clicks.
So the top laywers either had to spend a ton to keep their position, or we've helped the crappy lawyer on page 3 get to the top after the others ran out of their daily budget. awesome!
I enjoy this conversation so much, because it never addresses the fundamental problem - IT is a COST center in most organizations.
So when Mr. CFO looks at the IT budget, he doesn't see any revenue, and therefore none of the costs can be justified. Isn't it odd the CFO comes to IT every year at every company?
The only way around this cost problem is to become a profit center in your organization. You need to show you're financially viable in your organization (this can often counter the argument to outsource everything as well).
Start by hiring a MBA student who understands IT and accounting, and billing him to the CFO's budget in response to his desire to "cut costs". Next get the smart kid to track what services you provide (aka Blackberry support for the CFO, email support for the CFO, the web app for the CFO, the report writing for the CFO) and how much they cost in the market and how often your IT department performs these services. Give the company a 20% discount for efficiency purposes and putting a roof over your head.
Now hopefully you're in the black...Then go to the CFO and explain your new plan to charge the other departments to justify your service. In reality it's an accounting exercise, and you likely track what you do anyway, so nothing has really changed.
Best of all, IT's work will now be focused on what matters - the (internal) client. Shoot, when you finally get realigned to what you're supposed to be doing, you'll probably be able to propose work to other departments with a predictable cost instead of debating which piece of open source software is best to do a cool task that means little to the company's bottom line.
Oh, and tell your vendor sales reps that IT is going to be outsourced if you can't cut costs. It's amazing how flexible the pricing can be when it's the difference between a reduced commission and no commission.
Well, a recent call to the all-things-internet company left me on hold, with a catchy tune playing.
What was it?
The United Airlines theme song!
I can see it now - faster planes, free tickets, AdWords on the screens in front of you based on your conversation. Watch out Jetblue.
------------------
Google Real Estate - http://www.gibsoncompany.com
Has anyone seen a good reference for the particulars of each state's "freedom of information" laws and process? I'm ready to stick to someone!
Of course maybe I'm just insensitive, in the OC Ferrari and Mercedes are more common than Ford and Chevy.
Bazily
--
Lease an Office in the OC
Common sense would say that an hour later it was back up, or even better, he used your tactics. He knows your IP address now, so he could easily serve up different products for you and still offer your software for sale to everyone else!
And I don't believe much of what he said, but his claim of other sites sounds credible, which means he's probably still selling your software on those too!
I hate to play lawyer, but you need more than an email apology at this point if you hope to protect your software.
bazily
--
http://www.gibsoncompany.com/ - Office space for lawyers
Yes, they sold 2.8 million units, but since it was the day after Thanksgiving, I'm sure most of those qualified for free shipping which can't be a good for the bottom line.
So why didn't Amazon make a bigger deal out of it? Because at the end of the quarter someone's going to want see some profit, and that isn't going to happen unless the accountants and marketing people get together.
bazily
------------
http://www.gibsoncompany.com/ - Office space for profitable companies!
The dot com era is back!
bazily
------- .com office!
Sublease a former
bazily
------
http://gibsoncompany.com/
real estate for bankrupt dotcom companies
So this means I can register google in adwords? On google alone that would net me 20000 clicks! Why? I have no idea, but if you want some traffic you should check it out. bazily
Sharing video must be a threat to national security too!