More cloud updates

Since my last post I have been sent a few and read a few other articles that I thought might be worthy of note related to what clouds are and why it is important.

Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos did an interview with Informationweek and discussed some of the efforts that SUN has going on. One of the biggest items of note in that article is the new Drizzle product coming out of the MySQL work. There are many articles and blog posts on the topic as well but the gist is that it is an effort to Cloud-smarten MySQL. Seeing how "MySQL gets used, people only use a subset of the relational capabilities because it has a horizontal scale and there are all these concerns that go into large-scale deployments. So Drizzle sort of strips back down to a small core and then builds up the distributed capabilities." I have made no secret of my feeling that Data is no longer relational. So I think this is encouraging news though as seems to be the case lately with SUN it may be too late for MySQL.

(Aside... Greg Papadopoulos and David Douglas recently co-authored Citizen Engineer: A handbook for socially responsible engineering. Though it is not yet available you can check out an interview with David Douglas on the book and engineering at the Mercury News. Personally I find this to be a refreshing take on the responsibility of Engineering as a profession and all of the personal and corporate responsibility that should go along with it.)

As if they noticed Microsoft pushing cloud tech Amazon announced a few new items in their own cloud initiatives. The ability to reserve capacity for known needs. They also expanded the ability of Windows based services in another Amazon zone. All of this from a company that sells stuff, proof that necessity is the mother of invention.

Even Microsoft realizes it’s all about the cloud. (though opinions still differ on what a cloud exactly is… I personally like the blind men describing the elephant/cloud analogy)

Wired did an interview with Ray Ozzie - Long article but worth reading even if you are an ABM coalition member. (I have always thought highly of Ray Ozzie, even if I did hate Notes itself as an administrator and user, it was visionary in its setup and ahead of its time. Heck… Ray even saw P2P coming before the rest of the industry started to catch up.)

Further proof of the gap between the over-served and the under-served. The question is if Microsoft is late enough to the cloud innovation game that their delay will actually cause them harm in market share. They have rallied before and come in with overwhelming response. (e.g. I.E.) The truth is the services such as PPT, DOC etc is so ubiquitous in the work environment it will be difficult to displace them with anything else. The question though becomes more of what will happen to those types of documents and will they be service disassembled themselves enabling other innovation plugs to go in. Also, who knows maybe Microsoft will have the bones to push further change into media distribution and synch. Though Apple has a pretty strong hold and the media providers can’t seem to understand that technology can help versus hurt their business (self destroying DVRs anyone? Eventually a multi-billion dollar DVD business… sigh)

What a great time to be a technologist.

Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo

It has been in the rumor mill for a while now that Microsoft was seeking to buy Yahoo. When there is sufficient smoke there seems to be fire and now the deal is officially proceeding. There are reasons for it and reasons against it. Apparently Live has not pulled in the traction that Microsoft wants and the desire for ad revenue and internet traffic control as a business model is

Google brings up some interesting points on the combination having more webmail and portal traffic than anyone else and Microsofts track record of following the path of Embrace, Extend, Exterminate when it comes to competition. But that input from a competitor is unlikely to bring about any sort of block of the deal. In fact some reports are even suggesting that the deal could be good for competition.

I am not 100% decided on the deal and it's positive or negative effects. Microsoft has a long record of proven execution and when they really set their eyes on something they can make it happen. There is a wide range of incredibly bright people there that when unified to a cause can deliver. The big change that I see though is in release management. Microsoft has a history of classical software development with releases taking years and subsequent patches taking months. In the internet world, and Google is a great example of this, change is constant, the ability to roll out new versions and try new approaches every week is key to success. This will be a big change from the default Microsoft dev approach. Will this Agile development change cross over into Microsoft's standard products? Another one of those much discussed items, SAAS Software As A Service suddenly becomes a lot more of a potential reality. To me this is the real reason for the desired purchase. Ads and Eyeballs are great to monetize and transform what Microsoft has done for a long time.

No matter what finally happens, this aught to be fun to watch.