Joel Spolsky posted an hilarious rant about storage in the cloud. You should read it. I’ll wait.

Joel is upset because the software industry heavyweights are chasing the dream. You know the dream. It’s the dream of every management consultant, technophile and (in Joel’s words) architecture astronaut. The dream comes in many different guises. In various times, in various places, the dream has lured many to destruction — or at least to waste gobs of money and years of effort.

I call it One System to Rule Them All.

It’s the utopian idea that with enough effort you can craft an all-encompassing solution for a vast array of problems using a single, perfect framework. This year’s flavor of the dream happens to be storage in the cloud, or perhaps the belief that click-based advertising can fund everything. A few years ago, solid, respectable banking types had subscribed to the dream of the New Economy. A real estate agent once assured me that house prises in Northern Virginia never fell.

Well, never say never.

Godel’s incompleteness theorem says that all but the simplest mathematical systems will fail internal consistency tests. Most grand theories contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Most organizations of significant size will have hybrid system architectures. No single office suite, operating platform, or synchronized filing system can accomplish everything. One size doesn’t fit all, nor should it. Vive la différence.

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ReadWriteWeb, (the most impossible web site to actually say aloud), carries a great article this morning on Zappos – an online shoe company that has dived, boots and all into Twitter.

The tweets of every Zappos employee, including the CEO, can be found aggregated on the company web site.

I think this is a really inspired piece of thinking. Twitter allows me to see that the company is made up of people — real people, with thoughts and feelings, and senses of humor. It allows a transparent view into the company, which tells me that Zappos must actually trust and value it’s employees. (Hey — It even made me want to write this blog post about them).

There was a time when the most important thing a CEO did was to constantly present a “professional business” approach to the community. Zappos’ CEO, on the other hand, is apparently having troubles getting his pants to stay on.

Is that going to hurt sales? is it going to be ‘bad for business’?

Nope. In fact, I bet it does just the opposite.

(Dean and I are so busy right now, that we don’t update as much as we should, but you can find us on twitter too – we’d love to hear from you!)

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