The Pervasive Datacenter

I've already written positively about my experiences at Microsoft's MIX08 conference in March. It had a wholly different feel from any Microsoft event I've attended in years.

There were lots of interesting sessions but I wanted to draw your attention to one in particular: The Story of the Ribbon, given by Jensen Harris. The video is online (requires Silverlight). The reason I liked it so much is that Jensen gives a really great historical tour through the evolution of the Microsoft Word interface and explains why and how Microsoft decided that they needed to start with a (mostly) clean sheet of paper.

Microsoft hasn't gotten the credit it deserves for breaking with the past in Office 2007. In fact, they've taken a lot of heat and generated no small glee in competitive circles for putting users through such a dramatic user interface shift. However, it seems unfair to, on the one hand, consistently harp on Microsoft's lack of innovation (and many do, with some justification) and then turn around and hit them with brick bats when they do head off in a new direction.

Lots of large system and software vendors, even (or perhaps especially) those who have traditionally focused largely on enterprise sales, talk loudly and often about the midmarket these days.

Or they use terms like "SMB" (small and medium business) or "SME" (small and medium enterprise)--categories that aren't really the same thing but nonetheless often get used more or less interchangeably to denote companies with about 100 to 1,000 employees.

The reason for the interest is pretty simple. There are far more smaller businesses than there are larger ones--especially in developing economies. Midmarket IT spending is also growing quickly in many categories. As a result, it's not especially surprising that even those vendors most accustomed to selling to enterprises are itching to boost their midmarket share as well.

The challenge they face is that IT at midmarket companies bears, at best, a passing resemblance to that of enterprises. Development and operations staffs are small and are far more likely to be made up of generalists than specialists. Furthermore, most selling to midmarket companies takes place through regional or vertical market partners of some sort. Thus, the vendor seeking to increase midmarket footprint typically has to put together different types of product packaging, if not entirely different products, and craft go-to-market (GTM) approaches that differ in substantial ways from those supporting large enterprise sales.

Given these complexities, it's natural that historically enterprise-y vendors have taken awhile to craft successful midmarket plans. Even IBM, which has long had ... Read more

It's probably not a wholly accurate description, but to call Mix '08 the conference for "the new Microsoft" doesn't seem that far off. Perhaps even more apt would be to think of it as the show for Microsoft as it aspires to be. Other possibilities? Well, if one were cynical, maybe "the conference for Microsoft as it wishes others to see it." Or if one were sympathetic to the travails of companies with large, and fundamentally conservative, installed bases how about this for a tag line: "If only change were easy as giving a slick conference."

Yet, for all that, having attended numerous Microsoft events over the years, the gestalt of this one was palpably different. One would never mistake Mix '08, held in Las Vegas earlier this month, for a Tech-Ed, much less a WinHEC. It's not just a case of different session tracks or appropriate obeisance to the rise of network-based computing in a Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie keynote, though those were certainly present. Rather it was an infusion of different attitudes and behaviors--and software releases that offered evidence of at least nascent change.

Silverlight, Microsoft's Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework, makes a good study point. Silverlight is most notably a competitor to the Adobe Integrated Runtime (aka AIR, nee Apollo). It's essentially an approach to using the horsepower of a "thick client" PC to allow applications being delivered over the network be as responsive and immersive as they would be ... Read more

With the ProLiant DL785 G5 Server, Hewlett-Packard has re-entered the 8-socket x86 server space. This system has twice the computing headroom of the quad-processor servers that are generally considered at the top end of the volume or so-called commodity server space.

HP isn't new to this market segment. In 1997, Intel bought a company by the name of Corollary that was in the process of developing a chipset that effectively "glued together" two standard quad-processor x86 busses into a single 8-way symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP). Intel not only completed development, it also gave the chipset legitimacy by giving it an Intel blaze. Then Microsoft provided the last major missing piece with Windows 2000, an OS that not only showed real progress in reliability and scalability over its predecessors, but also lent credibility to Microsoft's efforts to be perceived as a serious OS vendor for serious servers.

ProLiant, initially as a Compaq server brand and then after its acquisition by HP, used this chipset and its successors for a succession of server products--even after Intel decided to stop contributing to further development. (Intel had, at various points, planned to do a Xeon version of Itanium's 870 chipset, but this never ended up happening.) Compaq's own version, the "ProLiant F8" chipset, adapted Profusion for the architecture and bus speeds associated with newer Intel processors, but did not fundamentally alter the design. (Subscribers can read about more of the historical background here.)

However, HP eventually decided to pull the plug ... Read more

Radio frequency identification, a technology that allows identification of objects using radio waves, hasn't exactly been a failure. The Wikipedia article on RFID lists all manner of examples of RFID use, ranging from the whimsical to the more substantive. And early proponents of RFID, such as Wal-Mart and the U.S. Department of Defense, have moved ahead with large-scale RFID deployments affecting both themselves and their suppliers--albeit at a slower pace and in a more limited way than originally envisioned.

Still, if you contrast the selective use of RFID to the ubiquity of barcodes, the contrast is striking. It's arguably just a normal technology adoption curve--"valley of despair" and all that--but that doesn't make it any less disappointing for its proponents. In general, at least from the supply chain angle, RFID is so far mostly focused on goods that are either high-value individually (such as parts for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner) or in aggregate (such as full pallets of less expensive items).

Thus it was with both interest and some amusement that I discovered Alta in Utah (where I'm skiing this week) now using RFID for its lift tickets, replacing the familiar sticky paper and metal "wicket" that are still the most familiar form of ticket to most skiers. You put this plastic RFID card in a jacket pocket (preferably away from credit cards and electronics) and a little gate swings open at the lift if you have a valid, paid ticket.

It'... Read more

When photo site SmugMug initially contacted me, it was in the context of some of the pieces that I had written about competitor Flickr and some of the issues associated with protecting photographers' works online.

In a nutshell, relative to Flickr, SmugMug has opted for less of a open-community orientation than for ways to store and display photos with a rather granular set of access controls. (See some discussion by CEO and "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill.)

These are important topics that I'll be discussing further in due course, but today, I'm going to focus on SmugMug's physical infrastructure.

During my conversation last week with President Chris MacAskill, he made some points about using Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (S3) that may not be widely appreciated. (S3 is Amazon's "storage as a service" offering that users pay for based on the amount of storage space used and data transferred.

Like Amazon's EC2 compute service, it falls roughly into the "Hardware-as-a-Service" concept.)

SmugMug was one of the earliest S3 users. As Chris tells the story, SmugMug was buying a "mindblowing" number of Xserves from Apple. The Silicon Valley-based company was running out of power and space--the usual story.

However, Chris raised another point that bears mention. The company was having to buy all this gear up-front, in advance of the revenues (i.e. user subscriptions) that it would hopefully generate. This was difficult from a cash flow perspective--especially for a company that wasn't venture ... Read more

For all the company's overall success, some of its individual entrants sometimes seem not just lagging and wanting, but sometimes just plain... off.

I'm not so much talking here about sites like Orkut and Google Video that were more-or-less representative of and competitive with social media and video sharing sites (respectively) at the time they came on the scene. They simply didn't rise to the top of the pile for complicated and somewhat elusive reasons that would make for another long discussion.

However, other examples from Google just seem oddly out of tune.

Take Google Browser Sync for example. Social bookmarking may be the red-headed stepchild of social media, as I've written about previously. But that's an opportunity for Google. So what do they do? They come up with some relatively lame mechanism to share bookmarks among multiple computers. I might have found this useful five years ago. However, for many people (especially those who worry about coordinating multiple computers), bookmarks have become something to be stored in the network rather than locally. At least if you aren't storing the content as well as the URL, it's not like they're much use if you're disconnected from the network cloud anyway.

And then there's the peculiar case of Picasa. At the end of the day, Picasa is much more about a simple image cataloging and editing program for the PC than it is a vibrant online photo site. Strip away the ... Read more

We put stuff into computers (and, for that matter, get stuff out) in pretty much the same way we have for a good couple of decades.

Of course, we still use keyboards of a fairly standard design as our primary mechanism to feed words into a computer and mice are well-ensconced as the navigational tool of choice. Over in the gaming world, it's the familiar two-handed game controller that predominates. In fact, I sense that one sees fewer joysticks, steering wheels, various oddball keyboards, and trackballs than one saw in the past. This probably reflects that "productivity" PCs are shifting toward notebooks on the one hand and that gaming is moving toward consoles on the other.

The one clear counter-example is the emergence of "thumbing" (as opposed to typing). But this is really more about making compromises in service of the form factor of handheld devices than it is a genuine innovation--however commonplace it has become.

However, we may be starting to see some genuine change.

The motion-sensing Nintendo Wii remote isn't a particularly new concept. We've see academic work in data gloves of various types going back to the 1990s. What's different is that the Wii is mass market. Volumes mean not only lower cost, but an incentive for software makers to write games and other applications that support and use the device in interesting ways. Because it corresponds to the physical world, hand movement seems a natural fit with many tasks and manipulations. As ... Read more

Beginning January 1, new Department of Transportation rules about lithium and lithium ion batteries in checked and carry-on baggage in airplanes supposedly went into effect. The announcement generated some fevered commentary at the time. This was in part because the rules were in the form of government writing commonly known as bureaucratese, leading a lot of people to think that they were far more onerous than they in fact are. (I discussed the new rules in an earlier posting.)

Well, I recently returned from a trip to California and there's no evidence that the new restrictions are being enforced in any way. No screening. No signs. No notices. Nada. When I arrived home I did some poking around on the Web and, as far as I can tell, nobody else has run across any noteworthy changes to battery screening procedures either. For example, under the new rules, loose batteries are now supposed to be placed in individual plastic bags or otherwise stored in a way that their contacts can't be shorted out. I've seen no evidence that anyone is paying any attention to this requirement.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Especially if you're transporting multiple large batteries for professional video equipment and the like (which is the sort of thing that the rule change really targeted), it may still be worth trying to get some clarification--for whatever good that will do. However, it certainly appears that the government has effectively shelved putting the new safety ... Read more

Writing in Computerworld, Eric Lai notes that:

Despite the popularity of .Net within companies and other employers, Microsoft has seen its standing among students continue to be eroded by a combination of open-source programming tools and Adobe Systems Inc.'s Web design software. Now, after years of using half-measures to try to beat those technologies on college campuses, Microsoft is taking a bolder step by making four pillars of the .Net platform available free of charge to tens of millions of students in the U.S., Canada, China and eight European countries.

A few observations here.

If you're a follower of Sun and Solaris as I have been for many years, there's a familiar thread here. A major cause of Sun's financial problems--which the company is still working to put behind it--was that it lost a goodly chunk of the core developer constituency that gave it market relevance. And, in CEO Jonathan Schwartz' words: "To establish a high-integrity relationship with a broad and participative community is really the principal objective of bringing Solaris into the open-source world." Yes, there are still many developers for Windows and other Microsoft software platforms, but it often seems a dutiful and passionless crowd.

The analogy between Microsoft/Windows and Sun/Solaris is not a perfect one. Perhaps the most notable distinction is that Microsoft has a broad presence in both consumer and SMB markets that Sun did not (and does not). The inertia this provides insulates Microsoft to at least some ... Read more