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I read an interesting article in TIME magazine last week titled: ”The men who stole the world” http://tinyurl.com/37hxm7b Surprisingly it had nothing to do with David Bowie, but I read on anyway.

The article was a look back at the men who created technologies that were to have destroyed the media industry as we know it: Gnutlella, Napster, Bittorrent, and Winamp.

In retrospect while they did have a considerable impact on the world of music and movies, ultimately big movie studios are still around, and Miley Cyrus and Justin Beiber are still able to make a decent living.

How can this be?

Within the article was a piece of insight. The new technologies these men created allowed users the ability to harness the internet to share media for “free”. The usage and impact of all these technologies was minimized by something even more attractive than free provided by Steve Jobs with ITunes and later by companies like Netflix…. EASY. It turns out even technically sophisticated users agree, easy still beats free.

Not that I ever do this ;) but if you think about the process to download a movie. To do it for free, I first have to find the files from a torrent tracking portal. Then I have to know how to use a download client. Next I have to check the file is what I want, as well as scan it for any malware. If I’ve done all this correctly I can watch my movie, and even then with my luck the quality is probably terrible. My wife on the other hand actually values her time, so she uses Netflix. All she does is browse their catalog and have the movie stream in near real time; they even have HD!

That’s the hidden cost of free: time and effort.

Up until recently many vendors in the datacenter didn’t recognize the value of their users time - command line this, terrible documentation that. Today users are demanding that they be able to bring the ease of use and user experience of consumer products in to the workplace. We are see this with products being offered in the cloud as software as a service, and for solutions that still need to reside on premises vendors are offering pre-built appliances, both software and hardware.

Focusing one ease of use and our user’s experience is exactly how we’ve tried to differentiate the PlateSpin Forge disaster recovery appliance.

But at the end of the day, you guys are the ones how determine if we’ve succeeded or not, and where we still need to improve. So if any of you out there have experience with PlateSpin Forge, or PlateSpin Protect, I want to hear from you. I’d like to know if we’re close to being the ITunes or Netflix of the datacenter. If not, where do we need to improve?

This is also a great test to see if anyone actually reads this thing :)

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.