Welcome back to Mostly Cloudy! Anything interesting happen over the last 2.5 years?
As most of you have probably learned by now, Politico Media Group made the decision earlier this month to shut down Protocol, the tech media startup I joined in early 2020 a few months before it ever published a story. I paused Mostly Cloudy and joined Protocol because I believed — and continue to believe — that enterprise computing deserves quality journalism; news and analysis written from the buyer’s perspective that attempts to go beyond the jargon-filled, sponcon-adjacent “news” that dominates this industry, backed by a business team that understands the unique value created by that approach.
You agreed: Protocol Enterprise (née Protocol Cloud) was the first industry-vertical newsletter we created at Protocol, and quickly grew to become one of the company’s most vibrant products until its last edition came out on last Monday. Yet for a variety of reasons far beyond my control, Politico Media Group and Axel Springer have decided they no longer want to be home to such a foundational and lucrative sector of the tech industry.
So starting next week at AWS re:Invent, Mostly Cloudy will return as a free, several-times-a-week newsletter/blog filling the gap created by the demise of Protocol Enterprise. This newsletter was very much the template for Protocol Enterprise, so if you liked that approach and style, you’ll find something very similar here.
It’s too early to say whether or not I’ll join the ranks of the Substack publishing revolution and try to make this into a full-time gig. But given the slow downward spiral of Twitter ahead of one of the most important weeks of the enterprise tech calendar, the timing seemed right to reboot this project.
I’ll be in Las Vegas Monday the 28th through Thursday the 1st, and will provide coverage of re:Invent here while helping all the after-parties on the calendar hit their food and beverage minimums. I’d love to have as many conversations as possible next week about the future of enterprise computing and the journalism required to support it: Simply reply to this email, or reach me here, if you want to get in touch.
And please don’t forget about the wonderful team we assembled at Protocol to cover enterprise tech. This is a great group of folks who would be an asset to any organization.
See you at re:Invent.