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One of Apple’s great successes this decade has been its ability to unite the cell phone, the portable MP3 player and the music store in one ingenious handheld device, the iPhone. As new applications arise that allow on-demand streaming music on non-Apple phones such as those powered by Google’s Android operating system, however, Apple’s great strength and longstanding investment in music may become a crucial vulnerability that will force the company to make difficult choices in years to come.

This week, European streaming music service Spotify demonstrated its Android app, which features on-demand streams of songs the user doesn’t own, as well as an offline synchronization and caching function that allows a listener to enjoy a song on the go, regardless of whether the phone is connected to a data network at that moment. That’s dangerously close to owning a song, and speculation is already rife that Apple won’t accept Spotify’s planned iPhone app because it’s too much of a threat to Apple’s iTunes music store.

Spotify, whose free desktop service is popular in Europe, doesn’t offer anything in the U.S. yet, and the Stockholm-based company has hinted that it may charge users in all geographies for premium accounts in order to use the mobile service. But it seems inevitable that consumers everywhere will eventually demand ubiquitous on-demand mobile streams, whether from Spotify or someone else, making ownership of music less popular and iTunes therefore less important. And in that respect, Apple’s decade of investment in music and current domination of the online music world may become an Achilles’ heel, as Android’s openness and neutrality give it greater flexibility than Apple’s closed system to offer consumers what they want as alternatives arise.

Thus far, Apple has shown considerable flexibility in working with streaming music providers. Companies such as Imeem have challenged Apple’s boundaries on the iPhone, but have always played nice, offering helpful links to buy songs through iTunes. On the PC, Apple has always endeavored to offer a superior experience compared to free services: no ads, a clean and organized interface, and interactivity between the store and the software (and by extension, the portable hardware). But those advantages could erode as increasingly simple and powerful apps are introduced on mobile devices — applications Apple may have to reject while other phones accept them. And that could give avid music consumers a reason to own Android-based phones instead of iPhones.

On-demand streaming isn’t a perfect science, and Apple’s user experience is still stronger than any application can provide. Nor is multitasking an option with most apps, never mind how much the ones that do can drain a device’s battery life. But as the trend toward streaming music rather than owning it, once confined to the desktop, shifts to the mobile sphere, Apple will have to make new choices to fend off its competition. Perhaps it will counter with a long-rumored subscription service of its own, although it has largely held off “music rental” services Rhapsody and Napster on the PC without doing so. Growth in full-track mobile downloads is still expected to outpace subscription-based mobile streaming over the next few years, according to a recent report. But music is the one content area to which Apple is committed while Android is not, and while that commitment has yielded benefits throughout the current decade, openness and neutrality will pose a real threat to it in the next one.

Image courtesy of Spotify.

There exists, as I have previously noted, sufficient motivation for more advanced resource controls in IT infrastructure components. But while there are encouraging indications that component manufacturers are responding to this need, we have some distance yet to travel.

Horizontal aggregation

As we consider infrastructure components, we know that the physical and virtual worlds can diverge. This divergence gives us a chance to create new physical devices optimized for scale and equipped with more granular resource management functions, while preserving in virtual form the existing industry abstractions. Put a different way, the IT industry has an opportunity to rethink its physical deployment building blocks and, in the process, insert a new level of QoS control in the environments built with these components. Some vendors are already seizing this opportunity.

I’m excited to see the development of products and protocols on the part of Cisco and HP meant to address some of these needs. These new devices share common characteristics — they have high levels of integrated functionality provided efficiently at scale with management software designed to independently operate in the virtual and the physical worlds. These are good first steps toward the types of devices that will be the heart of the next-generation data center, where more of the enterprise data center role shifts to that of service provider in multitenant environments.

In building these new devices, the old physical device boundaries are being redrawn. For example, Cisco’s Unified Computing System UCS integrates server and switching functions and also reallocates the functions of each to achieve better economics. This form of “horizontal aggregation” will be common in the IT components of the future.

The stacker

New systems won’t be only horizontally aggregated. They will be vertically aggregated, too, as software building block boundaries are also revisited. Database server, application server, and web server software can be combined with hardware, creating a new IT device ready for application integration. Oracle has started discussing these types of systems as a result of its proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Other major consolidations could follow. The result may yield a new competitive landscape in IT components, where the old world of interoperable software stack components and general purpose servers and operating systems that support them (and all of the associated compatibility and integration complexity) gives way to the “stacker” –- a completely integrated application deployment platform component with sufficient resource capacity. The stacker supports several complete instances of virtualized application stacks and associated internal and external network in one physical device.

It is into this evolving physical landscape that we want to incorporate more complete QoS controls, thereby enabling enterprise-grade, multitenant cloud services. To accomplish this goal, the focus needs to be on both hardware and software resources. The stacker must support end-to-end QoS controls by preserving customer context, priority, and policy through all logical and physical resource dependencies, including required threads, memory, queuing, and concurrency controls to truly support multitenancy. The efficacy of this entire path affects the performance of the application from an end user perspective and thus must be assured.

As more and more enterprises seek to optimize their IT infrastructure spend, the challenge before IT industry infrastructure component manufacturers is to enable the service provider to deliver true shared environment economics for a wide range of enterprise applications. This will be achieved not just through large-scale systems, but through the continued enhancement of QoS controls that govern both the hardware and software resources in these environments.

The opportunity is now. The evolution of existing IT components toward the stacker and the separation of virtual and physical design forces provides the opportunity to incorporate these controls into the building blocks of the future service provider cloud. I’d like to see the industry accelerate efforts to harden and standardize newly emerging concepts and protocols in these areas.

This is the third post in a 3-part series. Please also see Part 1, Cloud Computing: A System of Control, and Part 2, Cloud Computing: Building Blocks for the Enterprise.

Bryan Doerr is chief technology officer for Savvis.

Ever heard the phrase “Spend less than you earn?” Personally, I like to take it a notch higher and spend much, much less than I earn. I can’t help it. I think I’m frugal by nature and that contributes a lot to my feeling of security with online work.

Frugality and web working go hand in hand, especially in a tough economy. Even if you find your business thriving, the cost of commodities tends to go up and some clients might unexpectedly close up shop. I also find that frugality comes with freedom — any extra money I can set aside goes to fund new opportunities or allows me to take some time off.

So whether the economy is struggling or thriving, it’s still a good idea to keep your expenses as low as possible, without sacrificing the quality of your work or your life. Here are some things you can do to keep the cost of web working as low as possible:

Tap your network to get deals and advice. Have many friends and contacts on social networks? Great! Ask them for advice whenever you’re looking to purchase a new item for your office or computer. Sometimes, you might be lucky enough to get some coupons or freebies.

Take advantage of garage sales and second-hand stores. Rather than buying new items from the store, it often makes sense to buy second-hand furniture.

Watch your electricity and phone bills. Nothing gives me a headache like an unexpected spike in my bills. Because of this, I tend to be mindful of overconsumption. Here are some ways to keep bills low:

• If you’re using a laptop, be mindful of when it’s completely charged, then unplug it from the socket.
• When an electrical gadget is broken and can’t be fixed, find energy-efficient replacements.
• Use VoIP rather than a landline for international calls.
• For home offices with closets and cabinets, be sure to keep them closed to lessen the area that needs cooling/heating.

Know how to balance free and paid web apps. The cost of web apps can add up to a lot. If you can’t afford to subscribe to every app you want, you need to better evaluate your needs.

Get your office space as a tax deduction. Talk to an accountant to see the possibility of making your home office tax deductible. If you live in the U.S., you can visit this page from the IRS for more information.

Upgrade rather than replace old equipment. Instead of buying a new computer why not find cheaper ways to boost its performance? Sometimes, just purchasing additional memory can make an old computer work as smoothly as a brand new one.

Have a work-related emergency fund. Why is this frugal? Well, having cash ready means that you won’t have to get into credit card debt for emergency work expenses. I often save 2 percent of my income for work-related emergencies like replacing irreparable computer components. That may seem like a small amount, but it adds up to quite a lot over a few months.

Use your computer as your entertainment system. The only reason why my house has cable TV subscription — and the only reason why we have a TV at all — is my housemates. They aren’t very computer-savvy. If I lived alone, I’d do away with both the TV and the cable subscription. I can easily replace it with something like Hulu or iTunes. Most of the downloads from iTunes are paid, so you might be wondering what makes it frugal. For me, ordering entertainment “à la carte” can often be cheaper, especially since I’ll be careful about where both my time and my money go.

Since needs and experiences vary from person to person, I suggest that you take the advice you can use and forget the rest. After all, there’s no such thing as the right way to save money — there’s only what’s right for you.

Do you think you’re frugal? How do you keep your work expenses low?

Image by scol22 from sxc.hu

Liz Gannes said it best in a chat today: “Infomercial spoofs are too easy, yet so good.” So many ridiculous products available for sale, so many commercials attempting to convince Americans that they secretly want. And so many parodies have come out as a result.

The Slap-Chop’s demonstration of the device’s quick-dicing action got it a fair amount of attention earlier this year, remixed as a frankly phat rap video…

And bluntly re-imagined as a destroyer of men’s manhoods (NSFW).

The Sham-Wow’s miraculous ability to absorb liquid, meanwhile, reminded YouTube user MagicHugs of another time-saving cleaning apparatus: paper towels.

And Jack Douglas has practically made a career out of redubbing infomercials — he acquired notoriety for his mockery of the MacBook Air and the ShamWow, his profanity-filled attack on the Slanket tries to deeply shame anyone who might succumb to wearing a blanket with sleeves. (Just remember, you’re wearing it as a joke.)

Does the comedic and viral success of these videos speak to a brutal attack on American consumerist instincts? Or is it just a bunch of dudes online picking low-hanging fruit? I say the former. Then again, I may just have Slanket envy.