ReadWriteWeb Solution Series

Looking to spin up a virtual machine and get that project done in a hurry but not sure what your choices are in terms of cloud vendors?

Here is a listing (not a rating) of some of the top vendors and what they offer.

Collaboration apps are not new but they are gaining prominence in this brave new world where crowd-sourcing trumps individual pontification. Leaders such as Google Docs have already gained notoriety but the purpose here is to share information about great collaboration apps that may not be as well known but are certainly worth knowing about.

Here's a lineup of my favorite apps that will help you collaborate not only around documents but with video too. And many of them are also free, too.

Apps are everywhere, on desktops, smartphones, laptops, tablets, netbooks and soon to be in cars and TVs as well. So many apps on so many devices lead to a lot of loose ends for enterprises and consumers alike. But the number of zombie apps is on the rise. By that I mean abandoned mobile apps that are still active and therefore a security threat and a resource drain. Will a Buffy the Zombie App Slayer ever materialize or will the zombies have to be slain and uninstalled one tedious app at a time?

The PC era is here to stay as long as the Internet lives. That is not to say however that it won't go through some physical changes along the way, in much the same way the QWERTY keyboard has been made more ergonomic, virtualized on touchscreens, and tucked away in tiny cellphone trays, but remains essentially the same.

Certainly other manifestations of the desktop's evolution, such as in this interactive exhibit at the DDR museum in Berlin will appear in mass production eventually.

Many companies not comfortable leaping completely into the cloud are keeping one foot on the ground (aka a hybrid cloud environment). This approach will also characterize many companies' eventual relationships to desktops. That's because sometimes virtualized desktops make sense and sometimes they don't. Examples of the latter include when you need to work offline or when you want to reduce network and storage strain from all that image pooling required by virtual desktop centralization.

So, to reflect this approach, the hybrid desktop was born. You can also think of it as the rebirth of personalization.

The current cries heralding the death of desktops and the rise of the Post-PC Era ring hollow to anyone of the Video Killed the Radio Star MTV age. If history has taught us anything, it's that devices with a common purpose seldom destroy one another. It is the changes in computing processes that kills devices.

For years, the culture of the U.S. has been all about instant gratification. But it is only fairly recently that manufacturers began to seriously take interest in instant customization as a means to profit from that ravenous cultural maw. Instant Customization (IC), also known as "mass customization," is a relatively new production model built upon the idea of producing individual customizations on a massive scale.

Piracy has been the bane of software companies since the first CD was bought and underhandedly passed along to friends. Certainly peer-to-peer file sharing is alive and well, albeit usually done across the 'Net instead of via personal hand-offs these days. Then there are the mobile app heists that add to the toll. While the preferred mode of illegal distribution may have changed over time, a method to effectively stem the tide has yet to be found. More than a few software makers are eyeing the cloud in the hopes that a means to finally stop piracy resides there.

Today, Tuesday, September 20 at 10:00 a.m. PST, we'll be holding our first live chat on The Changing Nature of Storage Virtualization. We had a lively discussion on Twitter with yesterday's RWW Big Question. Now If you want to continue the conversation interactively on our live text chat, just come back to this post at 10:00 and join in the conversation.

The discussion will be led by our very own David Strom with three experts from our partner NetApp - Jean Banko, Vaughn Stewart and Julian Cates - and Wen Yu from VMware.

The cloud is hiccuping its way forward for lack of buy-in by vendors. You wouldn't necessarily know that from the pat and parceled messaging that places blame for slow cloud adoption on the timidity of buyers.

Buyers are skeptical, and have good reason to stay so until cloud vendors put some skin in the game.