I switched over to the Opera browser the other day on my main work computer. The Oslo-based Opera Software has only been able to grab about 2% of the browser market, but at least this number has remained fairly steady for almost a decade. It may gain momentum in the mobile space as the company focuses on it and as smartphones continue to proliferate.

I switched because I consider IE to be disease-laden, Firefox to be a memory hog, and hey, Google Chrome has been acting funky on me recently. Things crash, Flash keeps needing to be installed, etc. Opera also seems to give me a clearer view, something my old eyes appreciate.

This led me to wonder about browser market share. I remember a few years back, before Chrome, when Firefox was steadily eating about 1 percentage point per month of marketshare from IE. What’s been going on lately?

I found some stats put together by the Refsnes gang, three Norwegian siblings who’ve been tracking browser market share for the past decade. This family’s company W3 Schools offers oodles of online instruction, and is not without controversy. However, it looks to me as if its browser stats are solid.

The years between 2002 and 2012 show a shocking downfall of Internet Explorer from 86% to 16%. Does this tell you all you need to know about Microsoft’s performance over the past decade?

Meanwhile, Firefox had an immediate 16% share when it emerged from Mozilla’s shadows in 2005. It rose to almost 48% in mid-2009 (compared to IE at 39%). Even at that time, Chrome (introduced late in 2008) had garnered 7% of the market.

Today, Chrome holds 45% of the market, Firefox has 32%, and IE the afore-mentioned 16%. Safari (which is my iPad browser) toodles along at about 4%.

For now, I’m proud to a “2 per center” who likes Opera. I have no idea what any of this marketshare means, other than it presents challenges for website developers who need their stuff to look good in any window, so to speak. I’m curious, though, why people use the browser they use. Tweet me with your opinion.

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Human-like technology. The potential downfall of the data center. Hyper-personalization of data. These are some of the responses IT leaders gave to us when we asked, “What will business technology look like in 2020?”
In 2020, tech experts say, computers could learn from experience, much like the human brain. The end of the data center as we know it might arrive. And technology will know the most important things about us to help us become more productive.
In our new ebook, Business Technology 2020, the experts — who represent organizations such as Intel, IBM, Frost and Sullivan, Aberdeen, ATLANTIC-ACM and Current Analysis and more — also cover topics that include the cloud, health care, cognitive computing and the role of the CIO, giving a holistic preview of how technology will impact your business in and leading up to 2020.

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To keep its cloud at the fore, Amazon Web Services has dropped the price of its S3 storage by roughly 25% across-the-board.
The new prices take effect December 1 in all regions.
By Amazon’s count that’s its 23rd price cut since 2006, “largely in the absence of any competitive pressure to do so.”
Amazon and Google have both cut prices on infrastructure services recently and, according to ReadWrite, are locked in a price war along with Microsoft.
AWS chief Andy Jassy puts the move down to demand begetting lower prices by virtue of economies of scale on the infrastructure. Anyway, it suits Amazon high-volume low-cost model and, according to the company, represents a challenge to traditional vendors who don’t understand the cloud business and are busy selling cloudwash.

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HP has broadened its BSM solutions to deliver better end-to-end visibility into IT applications and services by exploiting powerful, real-time and historical analytics.
As organizations have adopted virtualization and cloud technologies, the complexity to effectively monitor trouble across these systems has skyrocketed. And, with the rise of shared services, IT no longer knows or controls all the technologies supporting their businesses.
“IT organizations are looking for new ways to deliver predictable service levels,» said Ajei Gopal, senior vice president and general manager, Hybrid and Cloud Products, Software at HP. “The new HP Business Service Management software delivers end-to-end operational intelligence to help IT make better decisions and improve service levels in complex, dynamic IT environments.”

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Too often overlooked, SIEM (security information event management) needs to be a integral part of any enterprises security best practices. It facilitates a holistic view of an IT landscape and allows a company to be more proactive with its security initiatives.
First and foremost, SIEM (and to a certain extent log management) is about visibility. Who is doing what and when on your network. It is as much about understanding the holistic landscape of your infrastructure as it is protecting proprietary assets. Without it, it’s akin to coaching the Big Game without any idea who is the opponent; or for that matter if you even have a starting left guard.

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What are the technical benefits of building a business on the cloud? If that cloud is open, are the benefits fewer or are they more plentiful? In this CTO Power Panel at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan discussed these and a host of other questions with Alistair Farquharson, CTO at SOA Software; Dan Graves, Cloud CTO at Symantec; Gordon Haff, Cloud Evangelist at Red Hat; Wayne Ariola, Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at Parasoft; Alok Rishi, Chief Technologist at Coraid; and Dr. John Bates, EVP and CTO at Progress Software

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In this «CEO Power Panel» moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA, Chris C. Kemp, Co-Founder & CEO of Nebula; Lawrence Guillory, CEO of Racemi Inc.; Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore, LLC; Rob Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing; Joe Weinman, Sr. VP of Cloud Services & Strategy at Telx; Art Landro, CEO of Cordys; and Rodney Rogers; Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Virtustream discussed the business-related issues that are currently front of mind with chief executives of today’s foremost Cloud and Big Data based companies.

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Cloud hosting has been creating quite a buzz lately as being the latest, and some claim also the best type of web hosting around. It is quite different to your usually hosting server and certainly requires a lot of skill to use. Most of the time it cannot be run by a single person, but rather by a team of people who can get the job done at a quicker pace. One of the most popular websites in the world that uses cloud hosting is Google. Ever seen Google’s website down? No. So there really must be some excellent points to cloud hosting that we will now look at.
The single most important thing that you need to know about cloud hosting is that the whole process of creating your website, as well as its components and files, are spread out to different servers, instead of everything being packed into one. They are all still available at the same time, and required parts of information can always be taken when needed. This branching of files is what makes the most impressing advantage of cloud hosting – almost zero downtime. None. Because if one page goes down on a server, the other server automatically reboots it. Ok, so there is a tiny bit of downtime in between, but it is literally done in milliseconds, which makes it almost unnoticeable. Other websites that use this type of server are Amazon and PayPal, as well as any other website that simply cannot afford to go down even for a second.

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Google’s got Amazon Web Services and Rackspace/OpenStack in its sights.
It’s upgrading its young Infrastructure-as-a-Service Compute Engine, still in preview, and piling on 36 new types of server configurations with different virtual cores, memory and disk types, up from the four basic instances it had at introduction in June.
They include high-memory and high-CPU instances as well as a lower-cost diskless file configuration for applications that don’t need a dedicated disk attached to their server.
Google, which is reputedly “blazingly fast” compared to Amazon, also cut prices on its four main instances by around 5% and its standard storage by around 20%.

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Last month Gartner Analyst Jay Heiser conducted an extremely informative and thought-provoking webinar entitled “The Current and Future State of Cloud Security, Risk and Privacy.” During the presentation, Mr. Heiser highlighted what he called the “Public Cloud Risk Gap,” characterized in part by inadequate processes and technologies by the cloud service providers and in part by a lack of diligence and planning by enterprises using public cloud applications. In many ways, it was a call to arms to ensure that adequate controls, thought and preparation are put to use before public clouds are adopted by enterprises and public sector organizations.
From the side of the cloud application provider, the webinar noted that most cloud service offerings are incomplete when measured against traditional “on-premise” security standards, there are relatively few security-related Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and there is minimal transparency on the security posture of most cloud services. From the enterprise side (the cloud service consumer), he points out that they frequently come to the table with inadequate planning and consideration in the area of security requirements definition and have an incomplete data sensitivity classification governing their data assets. Despite this, the webinar highlighted that organizations of all sizes are increasingly willing to place their data externally, and they are increasingly likely to have at least some formalized processes for the assessment of the associated risk – which is good news.

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