The 100 Oldest Companies

I picked up this link, about the 100 oldest companies in the world, from a post by Kevin Kelly on the Long Now blog. The profiles of the companies are really interesting. What do you want to bet that these companies have consistently worried about cash flow and profitability more than they have worried about share price?

Charter school will focus on homeland security.

I really want this to be a joke.

Sky marshals on the no-fly list

This is ridiculous -- but makes me feel marginally better about the trouble I've had with the list myself.

The Next Big Thing

Since I left Oracle last January, I've been spending time looking around the technology industry for interesting trends. Sooner or later I will have to take a job, so this is my chance to pick a horse that will be fun to ride.

There are now roughly one million Software-as-a-Service companies per square mile in Silicon Valley (they are thicker than that in Palo Alto, but Stanford has always been peculiarly fecund). Even Microsoft is on the bandwagon, so you can be sure that SaaS has jumped the shark. Just lately, I've seen pitches for Data-as-a-Service, Hardware-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

Here at the Subclock blog, we're getting out in front of this thing. I'm pleased to announce today the creation of Service-as-a-Service. Want to start your own -as-a-Service company, but not sure what that means, exactly? Just set your business plan down on top of Service-as-a-Service and let that advertising revenue roll in! In fact, Service-as-a-Service is itself built on Service-as-a-Service. It's turtles all the way down, baby!

Service-as-a-Service takes advantage of all the latest Web buzzwords. It's platform-enabled, naturally. It's fully cloud-compliant. We leverage community. Our tech is simultaneously green and clean. We've sprayed so much Xen around here that the floors are sticky.

Service-as-a-Service isn't a company. It's way more Valley than that. Think big O'Reilly-style unconference, with probably some blogs and a wiki. Think Facebook, but cooler. Think tweet storm. Most of all, think huge VC investment opportunity. Got an office on Sand Hill Road? Give us a call here at the Subclock blog -- operators are standing by.

More security theater.

Tom Kyte posts a story about crossing into the US from Canada.

Tenacious search.

Well-known database researcher Jim Gray is missing. A group of friends and colleagues is organized to help with the search. We're posting updates here.

Concentrating.

Steve O'Grady has an interesting suggestion for Sun: Get out of the fulfilment business that your new Startup Essentials program created for you, since you're not a Web commerce company. Steve suggests Amazon or eBay as order and fulfilment partners.

Coincidentally, I finally got around to listening to Werner Vogel's podcast at ITConversations on scalability, reliable services delivery and Amazon's Web Services APIs. He describes an Amazon very different from the bookstore many people think about. Much of what Werner says supports Steve's argument: You'd be crazy to build your own store, these days, with AWS' e-commerce APIs and systems at your disposal.