Links for 11-15-2013

• The Depth of Amazon’s Ambition – tecosystems - "Big picture, re:Invent was an expansion of ambition from Amazon. Its sights are even broader than was realized heading into the show, which should give the industry pause. It has been difficult enough to compete with AWS on a rate of innovation basis in core cloud markets; with its widening portfolio of services, the task ahead of would-be competitors large and small just got more difficult."
• OpenShift Origin Community Hangout - YouTube - From #openshift origin community hangout Heat sessions were packed at #openstack Summit
• Microsoft's dystopian pitch for remote work by David of 37signals - I get the point they're trying to communicate but these ads do so very clumsily.
• elearnspace › The Failure of Udacity - My, open learning advocates are busy throwing Thrun under the bus this morning, e.g.
• Thrun Enters Burgeoning Sieve Market | Hapgood - I'm not convinced that MOOCs have ever really been about "equality of outcomes"--which is usually a pretty misguided goal. But it's fair to say that the MOOC hype promoted the benefits of broad-based access to quality on-line education for those who would otherwise lack such access. And that has indeed not generally played out.
• Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Udacity's "Pivot" - Not entirely sure I get the argument here but worth reading.
• It's not about Windows: The repairable PC is dead | ZDNet - Pretty much agree with this. I built PCs for many years until I switched to a Mac Mini about a year ago.
• Is Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry PaaS viable? — Gigaom Research - "Pivotal will provide a strong path for those VMware-heads who want the VMware mother ship to guide them to the cloud.  The cloud strategy of VMware has been somewhat confusing, especially when it comes to public clouds and PaaS.  The strategy of placing Pivotal in their own political-free domain so they could build this thing was perhaps the only way that VMware could stay in the cloud computing game."
• Udacity launching paid course enrollment | Hacker News - Having just read piece on Sebastian Thrun (Udacity founder) see Udacity will be offering paid courses w "coaches"