Apple, Google, Linux Are in Microsoft’s Sights | eWeek 07/19/2010
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Interesting take on Microsoft’s recent surge, titled “The Empire Strikes Back” at eWeek. Here’s an excerpt:
“In a post titled “Microsoft by the Numbers,” Shaw, Microsoft’s top public relations official, delivers a strong example of what the term “PR” is really all about. Shaw’s post will be alternately scrutinized, analyzed, criticized and praised. And it will likely be used as slide show fodder by more than one news outlet (I must admit that I damn near did one myself!). But the bottom line is Shaw stood up and did his job. He did the hell out of his job.
He took some swipes that Microsoft has been reluctant to overtly take in the past. Sure, the company has made many of these points before, but it has done so a bit more passively. Or it has done it through proxies or with partners—as if to give the impression that the so-called heavy hand of the software giant was not behind the jab.
However, with his post, Shaw makes no pretense that anyone other than Microsoft is behind the message. And the message is: “We’re here. We’re Microsoft. We have the numbers to prove it. Get used to it.”
Citing what he referred to as “a few of my favorite numbers,” one of the first things Shaw did in his post was talk about the success of Windows 7. And he should. He listed 150,000,000 as the “Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history.”
That was potent, but perhaps his best stroke was ending with some revenue figures. Shaw simply said:
- $5.7 Billion: Apple net income for fiscal year ending Sep 2009
- $6.5 Billion: Google net income for fiscal year ending Dec 2009
- $14.5 Billion: Microsoft net income for fiscal year ending June 2009
Shaw calmly asserts a position that stands up to all the hype and furor over Apple’s cool and market cap, Google’s ascendance to supremacy, and trash talk that Ballmer’s no longer the guy, and he says: Look at the numbers.
This stance is long overdue from Microsoft. The company needs to fight back and be proactive amid the onslaught of smacktalk.”
Shaw also puts the iPad craze into perspective. He said: “1 million Projected iPad sales for 2010. 58 million Projected netbook sales in 2010. 355 million Projected PC sales in 2010.” And he noted that although less than 10 percent of the netbooks sold in the United States in 2008 were Windows based, by the end of 2009 96 percent of the netbooks sold in the United States were running Windows.”
via eWeek.
Clash of the clouds | The Economist 11/02/2009
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Cloud computing generates a lot of heated discussion, and through all the technical arguments, issues of security and trust, and battles over control, one topic keeps getting overlooked: cost.
Reducing business cost is what’s really driving us toward cloud computing.
We will all eventually adopt cloud computing, simply because the current model of scaling servers up and down is very expensive. IT departments try to buy as many servers as they think they’ll need for computing power during estimated peak capacity. But we don’t need that capacity most of the time– so lots of servers sit idle.
Cloud computing can reduce costs, becauses it provides more capacity during the peak times, so we simply pay for it on-demand. When the peaks are over and less capacity is needed, the cost then goes down. From a business perspective, this allows a company to move much of its infrastructure costs from being a capital expenditure (CAPEX) to an operating expenditure (OPEX).
The Economist published an excellent overview of how industry giants are reacting to this massive trend:
Clash of the Titans
“The rise of cloud computing is not just shifting Microsoft’s centre of gravity. It is changing the nature of competition within the computer industry. Technological developments have hitherto pushed computing power away from central hubs: first from mainframes to minicomputers, and then to PCs. Now a combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors, and ever faster and more ubiquitous networks, is pushing power back to the centre in some respects, and even further away in others. The cloud’s data centres are, in effect, outsize public mainframes. At the same time, the PC is being pushed aside by a host of smaller, often wireless devices, such as smart-phones, netbooks (small laptops) and, perhaps soon, tablets (touch-screen computers the size of books).
Although Windows still runs 90% of PCs, the fading importance of the PC means that Microsoft is no longer an all-powerful monopolist. Others are also building big clouds, including Google, a giant of the internet, and Apple, renowned as a maker of hardware, with a market capitalisation that now exceeds those of both Google and IBM, its original arch-rival (see chart above).
Granted, there are hundreds if not thousands of firms offering cloud services—web-based applications living in data centres, such as music sites or social networks. But Microsoft, Google and Apple play in a different league. Each has its own global network of data centres. They intend to offer not just one or two services, but whole suites of them, with services including e-mail, address books, storage, collaboration tools and business applications. They are also vying to dominate the periphery, either by developing software for smart-phones and other small devices or by making such devices themselves.”
Read the whole thing, of course… Cloud computing: Clash of the clouds | The Economist.
Reshaping Cisco: The world according to Chambers | The Economist 09/08/2009
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In case you missed this article on Cisco before you headed out for your Labor Day weekend, There’s a wealth of information on where Cisco’s been and where John Chambers intends to take them. Of particular interest is their foucs on virtualization:
“In the case of servers, souped-up computers that dish up data, the market shift Cisco intends to ride is virtualisation. In essence this means that the servers in a data centre are turned into a pool of computing power to be tapped into as needed rather than being used individually. Virtualisation creates a lot of complexity, to which Cisco has found an answer, says Robert Lloyd, who heads the group that has developed what Cisco calls the “unified computing system”. Its parts—servers, storage disks, memory—are held together and managed by a powerful switch running Nx-OS, one of Cisco’s operating systems.”
As a Cisco Select Partner here at i3 Business Solutions, we see their products as essential to “making things really work.” As more and more of our business systems– and personal networks of devices– get interwoven and integrated, I can only think that Cisco ultimately will be in the middle of it, making them all work together.
via Reshaping Cisco: The world according to Chambers | The Economist.
High Performance Computing is Flying High | eWeek 05/23/2008
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“The swift rise of cloud computing—applications made available as on-demand services for enterprises and consumers over the Web—is now requiring HPC and “super” storage at all levels, Platform Computing founder and CEO Songnian Zhou told an audience of several hundred IT managers and developers here at Platform Global Conference, held May 19-21.
Platform Computing makes specialized management software for HPC data centers serving sectors such as the financial market, earth science, oil and gas exploration, health care, and government and military installations.
“Current data centers, most of them built more than 10 years ago, are costly to run and not very efficient in using power resources,” Zhou said. “What IT managers and CIOs need when they are looking to upgrade are agile, scalable, more powerful, more cost-effective servers and storage systems that use more automation, share resources, use less power and run on commodity hardware.
“Yet these new systems must be able to deliver powerful Web services 24/7. This is what HPC brings to the table.”"
Lots more stats and numbers at the origianl article: Why HPC Is Flying High
System i Morphs Into Power and ‘i’ | Maxed Out | 04/28/2008
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System i Morphs Into Power and ‘i’
“In a bold consolidation move, IBM has removed and replaced the identity of the System i by turning it into an “i” operating system that runs on IBM’s hottest POWER6-based hardware. Gone is the old identity of the integrated system, and along with it, presumably, the associations of a legacy system. The company has replaced System i and System p with a new line of unified servers with simplified pricing. The line is now officially IBM Power Systems, known as the IBM Power platform, with hardware server models branded with Power, as in, the Power 520, which will run AIX, Linux, or i5/OS. And i5/OS, by the way, really is simply “i.” IBM is essentially shedding the old, keeping the best, and embracing the new.
The plan to mainstream i5/OS is well under way.
Groundbreaking News
Mark Shearer, IBM’s vice president of marketing and offerings for the IBM Business Systems group, along with Ross Mauri, general manager of the IBM Power Systems group, jointly unveiled the massive change at a special town hall meeting today at the COMMON user group conference in Nashville. Due to a personal scheduling issue, I wasn’t able to be at the town hall meeting, but I — and several of my colleagues — were pre-briefed at COMMON by Shearer and Ian Jarman, who is now the manager of Power Systems Software. Look for additional coverage of the town hall meeting itself here tomorrow. “
Head in the Clouds | CIO Insight 03/26/2008
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The Forecast for Cloud Computing
A couple of good takeaways from a solid article:
“Like all technological advances, cloud computing isn’t without risk. For instance, there are security risks related to commingling your data with that of other companies. And reliability concerns arise whenever you depend on a third party’s systems to be up and running 24/7, as companies that rely on Amazon.com’s fledgling Simple Storage Service, or S3, learned when the service went down for two hours last month.
“Still, IT folks seem willing to put up with the glitches in exchange for the potential benefits, as indicated by one online poster who chimed in on the Wall Street Journal Web site after reading of the Amazon outage. “Cloud computing may be new and may not be at telephone reliability,” wrote the S3 user, “but Internet hosting as a utility is a trend that’s well on its way.” “
… and of course:
“Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com who built his company on the slogan “No software,” says the distress over the perceived lack of security of the “multitenant” model—in which multiple companies’ application instances are stored on the same servers—is overblown. Granted, Benioff has reason to promote such a mindset, but the analogy he uses, comparing cloud computing service providers to the banking industry, has merit.
“If you met a CFO who insisted on keeping the company treasury in a safe in the basement, you’d think that he or she were nuts.”
Linux developers considering move to Eclipse 07/09/2007
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Linux developers considering move to Eclipse
“From outside the Linux development world, it would seem that this choice is a no-brainer. However, Eclipse is still largely seen as a Java IDE, rather than an IDE for any language. Eclipse can, and has been, turned into an IDE for everything from Java and JavaScript to C, C++ and C# and scripting languages like PHP, Perl, Python and COBOL.”
Second Life open-sources its viewer application 01/12/2007
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Second Life open-sources its viewer application: “Linden Lab, creator of the ‘Second Life’ online virtual world, is open-sourcing the code of the site’s Viewer application, enabling developers to make modifications, enhancements, or add new features to the Second Life Viewer. The third-party support libraries and open-source code are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.”
Industry veterans bet on open-source model | CNET 09/28/2004
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Industry veterans bet on open-source model | CNET News.com:
“A team of computer industry veterans, including a former Microsoft executive, are launching an open-source company that aims to be the Dell of the software industry.
The company, called SourceLabs, will provide certification, testing and ongoing support services for open-source software components. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has received $3.5 million in initial funding from Ignition Partners and Index Ventures. “
Breaking the rules with open source | CNET 09/07/2004
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Breaking the rules with open source | CNET News.com: “In the space of five months, John Roberts started a software company and delivered its first product to thousands of potential customers–a process that could easily have taken years. His secret? Open-source development.
On Monday, Roberts’ new company, SugarCRM, will officially launch and announce that it has landed $2 million in outside investment, becoming one of the first open-source business application companies to be funded.”
Sony debuts Linux-based in-car nav | infotainment … 06/11/2004
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Sony debuts Linux-based in-car nav | infotainment line in Japan: “The 3D mapping interface shows actual buildings, and knows street addresses, enabling it to identify destination addresses. In the picture at right, it has identified a gas station belonging to a promotional partner. Advertising for many other businesses, such as fast food outlets, appears to be built into the maps”
Neal Stephenson Decodes Cryptonomicon 06/03/2004
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Neal Stephenson Decodes Cryptonomicon:
”Neal Stephenson has been called ‘the Quentin Tarantino of postcyberpunk science fiction’ by the Village Voice. He took the SF world by storm with his novels Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Zodiac. He’s been compared to Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson, but Stephenson has a style all his own. His hip, literate novels are read religiously by SF fans and high-tech business types alike.
In his massive novel, Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson tells an intricate, fast-paced story of World War II codebreakers, stashes of Axis gold, modern-day data havens, and digital currency. Cryptonomicon has enough tech to tantalize any cyberpunk fan — everything from undersea fiber-optic cables to a Perl script to try out at home. Stephenson stopped by Amazon.com to field some questions about undersea cable, submarines, character development, and his favorite operating system.”
LinuxPlanet | Reports | Sun Wants to Make Linux 3D 05/08/2004
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LinuxPlanet | Reports | Sun Wants to Make Linux 3D | Beyond the Second Dimension:
“Sun saw great potential in Looking Glass from its beginnings as an experimental proof of concept. ‘When we saw the prototype and saw a great opportunity, we built an engineering team around the idea. What we are doing is dissecting the original concept and rebuilding it using traditional desktop graphics technologies,’ Soto says.
While it certainly sounds like an attractive approach to an operating system, analysts say it’s too early to say what impact (if any) Looking Glass could have on Linux or the general operating system market. Tom Murphy, senior program director at Meta Group, wants to know what they will do with it.
‘I think in and of itself, it has a big wow effect. It’s cute to see these things like 3D animations of stuff moving around and think of collaborative space, but how does it make my business more productive?’ Murphy wonders. He believes, they need to tie the product to business productivity to make it successful. ‘As it’s shown (in the demonstration), if it’s not going to make me more productive, then who cares?’ “
