Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja

path value “/”,

The servers do some computation to prepare the webpage you want. For instance, they check if there’s a Google Doodle for today,

How is sending information over the internet like shipping hot sauce?

TCP and IP

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol),

stuff is broken into smaller chunks (via TCP), sent to you through several intermediate shipments (via IP), and then reassembled into the original content (again via TCP).

HTTPS are actually built right on top of TCP and IP.

HTTP and HTTPS say, “get me this webpage,” and TCP and IP team up to actually deliver it.

TCP is like the employee splitting up and packaging your items, and IP is like the postal service.

traceroute,

traceroute tool[365]

(using TCP, IP, and HTTP/HTTPS),

trader Daniel Spivey

one company started experimenting with giant laser guns that would beam information through the air between NYC and Chicago. Since light travels faster through air than glass, information would travel far faster — and it would probably be near-impossible to beat.

As recently as the early 2000s, you would go to Blockbuster to rent movies, buy Photoshop and Microsoft Office in boxes from Best Buy, and store your company’s files in a massive computer room at your headquarters. Nowadays, you binge movies online with Netflix, pay monthly subscription fees for Photoshop and all manner of other apps, and store your company’s files in far-flung mega-computers with services like Dropbox or Amazon Web Services.

Google Drive like Uber?

new model of computing, where you store your apps and files online instead of on your own laptop, is called “cloud computing” or “the cloud.”[386]

Servers are often stored in huge buildings called

“data centers,”

(the collection of servers is colorfully called a...

the app makers get tighter control over what happens in the backend, whereas users get more control over the frontend.

But in 2013, Adobe announced a massive shift: you would no longer be able to own any of its “Creative Suite” apps, including Photoshop. Instead, you could download Photoshop for free, but you’d have to subscribe to their new Creative Cloud service, which cost about $20 a month, to keep using it.[416]

This new model of “renting” Photoshop is called software-as-a-service, or SaaS (pronounced like sass).[417]

since Photoshop now regularly connects to the internet, Adobe can constantly push updates and bug fixes instead of having to wait until the next big version is ready. This keeps customers happy and helps squash security issues faster.[422]

(This development model is called “agile development.”)

First, it’s important to note that the software-as-a-service model relies entirely on the internet, so people will only buy subscriptions if they have internet access. These days, we often take it for granted that everyone has internet access, but that hasn’t always been true. In 1997, only 18% of Americans had internet access at home, but that number had quadrupled to 72% by 2011,[432] which made it much more feasible to start selling software solely over the internet.

What do all these examples of SaaS apps have in common? You can access all these apps through a web browser, and all your data is stored on other companies’ servers. In other words, SaaS is just another name for apps that run in the cloud.[440]

“frozen-in-time”

upsell

By slowly phasing out the “legacy” frozen-in-time Office versions, Microsoft can keep customers happy in the short term as it slowly moves people to the more lucrative Office 365.

If you’re running a big website or app, you’ll need a huge server to handle all the data and computation.

Amazon Web Services is actually a family of applications, the biggest of which are the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).[455] In a nutshell, EC2 lets you run your app’s code on Amazon servers,[456] while S3 lets you store all your app’s data on those servers.[457]

SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS

SaaS refers to rentable web apps?

infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS;

platform-as-a-service (PaaS, pronounced like pass).[468]

Heroku,

The cloud offers Netflix three main benefits over owning their own servers.

“elasticity.”

Elasticity

Scalability

Redundancy

AWS to restart S3.[487]

S3

affected sites all relied on Amazon Web Services.[493]

S3).

This is an enormous amount of data. It’s huge, colossal, titanic. Or, as technologists call it,

“big.”

“information is the oil of the 21st century.”[507]

“predictive analytics”