CIOs looking to harness the power of talent retention should look no further than Apple’s low-paid workers. Wait, something doesn’t sound right about that plan.

Got a BlackBerry? You’re quickly becoming an endangered user.

Did you think Dell had slowed down with the buyouts? Silly reader. Dell is acquiring Quest Software this week.

CIOs got heart, too. Check out the CIO Scholarship Fund event to help future IT leaders with tuition.

The leap second caused outages on many sites over the weekend, like Reddit, BuzzFeed, Gawker, LinkedIn and Yelp, plus scores of Linux sites. Bad news for lovers of cloud computing services. You’ll be happy to know that the TechTarget network was just fine.

And if the leap second wasn’t bad enough, real storm clouds knocked out Amazon’s data center, wiping swaths of the Internet’s cloud computing services with it, including Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest.

At this month’s SearchCIO360 dinner, we met Seth Kutty, director of IT at Tesla Motors, one of the ten companies that are changing the world. Don’t miss our upcoming dinners in Chicago and Boston!

Oracle has completed its sixth acquisition of 2011, purchasing cloud-based customer service provider RightNow Technologies for its motley crew of cloud services. We’ll see whether Amazon.com starts shaking in its boots, but it seems doubtful that this acquisition will affect trends in cloud computing.

If networks start to look like the cloud, does networking need its own DevOps movement? Stacey Higginbottom thinks so.

Something to consider for your next user-integration project: Computer voices are mostly female because our brains are wired to like them better. Unless, of course, it’s Morgan Freeman’s voice; then, all bets are off.

We’re all sick of those reports about the sky falling, but in this case, the sky is indeed falling. A German satellite has made an “uncontrolled re-entry,” crashing somewhere in Southeast Asia.

It’s been 10 years since Apple introduced the world to the iPod. The event was a new high-water mark for the company as it moved from being a boutique brand to a major player in the tech arena. IPods used to max out at 10 GB. They grow up so fast!

IT leaders should focus on simplicity, calculated risks and trends like cloud computing and desktop virtualization, advised analysts at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.

Worried that the PC is dead? Rumors of its death seem to be greatly exaggerated. Even in a floundering economy, Intel’s quarterly results are better than those from Apple, which missed its Q4 earnings estimates.

Another major birthday: Ubuntu turned 7 this week. Mark Shuttleworth points out that the use of Ubuntu is one of the biggest trends in cloud computing.

CIOs today are certainly no strangers to tough economic times and working up IT cost reduction strategies, but when the economy doesn’t seem to be getting any better, and as they wait out the possibility of a double-dip recession, CIOs are finding themselves at the end of their technological rope. Delayed buying decisions have left them with geriatric server, storage and networking infrastructure that is no longer nice to replace but necessary to replace. But with every pundit in the universe screaming about cloud computing — and when you’re working with a budget as dry as the Sahara after six years without rain — how do you justify new capital expenses to the business?

If we lift our heads above the noise, confusion and discomfort of economic austerity, IT infrastructure investment can be a good dollar-and-cents move you can easily justify to the business.

Cloud computing is often presented as a sort of panacea when it comes to IT cost reduction strategies and eliminating IT complexities. There are IT cost reduction strategies that involve moving to the cloud that will save on capital expenses and maybe even improve reliability and remote access. For midmarket companies, email infrastructure can be handed off to a cloud/Software as a Service provider. Lots of companies offer Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes or more generic Web-based mail and calendaring, and our old pal Google even offers Gmail as a service for businesses. These services often have highly redundant infrastructure to protect your data and offer better access for remote users and branch offices. They come bundled with security and spam filtering as well, further reducing infrastructure needs in the data center.

Life without spam — doesn’t that sound like a dream come true? I read recently that as much as half of any company’s bandwidth is consumed by spam. It’s like the gift that keeps on giving.

But as with most things, moving services to the cloud has its complexities. One argument against shipping off crucial IT services is whether we aren’t also eliminating the need for IT roles in the future. Of course, there are many IT functions that simply cannot be shipped off to the cloud. In-house applications, sensitive data and low-latency applications must stay in the company data center, as should the ownership of the technological advances developed by the company.

Don’t buy into the fear and panic, folks — we live in the most technologically advancing time in world history, and CIOs are at the wheel driving the change.

Even if you wouldn’t know it by looking at your 2012 IT budget.

• SearchCIO-Midmarket.com Editorial Director Scot Petersen wonders if we should care about the impending release date of Windows 8.

• A whopping 40% of IT security workers have admitted that they could hold their employers hostage even after they’d left for other employment, according to a recent survey conducted by Infosecurity Europe 2011.

• Twitter is losing CTO Greg Pass, according to a recent tweet from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Meanwhile, in other social media news, Mark Zuckerburg plans to only eat what he kills. Let’s hope this trend doesn’t go viral.

• With the recent news-breaking storms hitting the country, Cisco voice instructor and blogger Dave Bateman suggests that you do a personal inventory of how well you can manage without electricity.

• Amazon would have done well to test its load sharing before the public failure of a huge cloud services promotion last week. CIOs can avoid Sony’s bad example by taking a page from Netflix’s “Chaos Monkey” and randomly hiring outsiders to hack into your systems, suggests Infoboom blogger Bob Warfield.

• Along with the release date of Windows 8, CIOs also need to consider virtualization licensing risks when thinking about cloud security, warns TotalCIO blogger Christina Torode.

Wrong. As the consumers logged on and purchased en masse, Amazon’s servers were slammed, causing download delays and eventual download failures. Amazon issued apologies over its Twitter feed but as of bedtime last night, my MP3 files still hadn’t started downloading. This morning, I woke to only half the transfer completed and had to open a customer service help ticket to have the other half pushed again. The album itself received dozens of poor reviews on its Amazon page, primarily based on the technical failures in delivering the files rather than the artistic merit of the music (Amazon has since redacted those reviews, rightfully so). Similarly, users who were banking on Amazon cloud storage are reporting that the link-up doesn’t even work and are warning other users not to even try it.

Obviously, lesson No. 1 here is, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew.” Did Amazon triple check to make sure that its infrastructure could withstand the worst-case scenario in traffic spikes — and then some? Every one of us could be (and has been) caught off guard, but with the embarrassing Amazon Web Services outage not even a month ago, Amazon is killing the credibility in its technical services with this very public fiasco. What could have been a public relations coup for Amazon ended up being a public relations nightmare. Some analysts are predicting that consumers will move elsewhere for their music, reducing Amazon’s already tiny percentage of digital music purchases.

Of course, if someone would have told me 10 years ago that we’d trust a bookstore to run our servers, I would have laughed and laughed, but Amazon was able to get past that mental leap and become a viable name in cloud services. Hopefully, they’ll be able to come out swinging in the next few months and figure out how to really shine as I don’t think consumer confidence in Amazon’s cloud storage techfu will stand another one of these truly embarrassing blunders.

It is a sign of the struggle going on in many IT organizations: If users bypass IT to buy cloud services, is IT in turn responsible for that service and the support problems that come up?

This CIO, who was one of the attendees of a roundtable on cloud services sponsored by the trade and investment arm of the British Consulate-General in Boston, felt that he needed to make a point. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to help the manager, but in the future, he wanted the business to come to him before signing a deal with an external service provider. In the end, he felt that IT should be involved in selecting the provider and negotiating the contract.

Several of the attendees, a mix of CIOs, cloud providers and consultants, voiced their concerns about the growing demand for IT to support external services.

What they wanted to see was a service provider, or software vendor, that could develop an integrated services management layer for a mix of internal and external services, or several public cloud services. This layer has yet to appear, they said, yet many companies are moving in this hybrid direction. Of 500 IT executives surveyed, 43% said they plan to have a hybrid cloud services strategy (a mix of private and public cloud services) within the next three years, according to consulting firm Sand Hill Group. Read about the study in this blog post by Sand Hill’s head of cloud research, Kamesh Pemmaraju.

This sounds like a great opportunity for vendors, cloud providers or perhaps a new breed of startups to step in, but for now the attendees said they are developing their own standards and management layer for hybrid clouds.

Let us know what you think about managing cloud services. Email me at ctorode@techtarget.com.