Who has the clouds

In 10 years, which company will own the cloud computing space? That question has been the subject of long and contentious funding debates over the past year, especially here on Sand Hill Road. And while I know that predicting the future is an inaccurate science, I think that when it comes to evaluating this nascent industry, the VC community has been focusing on the wrong criteria.
Today, cloud computing offerings are application-specific frameworks that are run by companies both large and small. Google’s App Engine is a cloud for running Python applications; EngineYard is a cloud for Ruby-on-Rails; Amazon’s EC2 and S3 provide generic compute and storage clouds, and so forth. While each of these companies addresses a vertical market need, I believe that by 2018, clouds will instead be evaluated based on three generic criteria: transactions, user experience and presence. And as with any active market, it’s a safe bet that there will be plenty of companies that best showcase each of them. One of the emerging trends in cloud computing is providing infrastructure that allows businesses to perform transactions. Two companies that immediately come to mind are eBay and Amazon; both have significant infrastructure expertise and business divisions devoted to processing their customers’ transactions. Amazon in particular just launched Checkout, which facilitates highly scalable transaction services. Imagine if over the next 10 years these companies find a way to bring their scale and transaction expertise to a cloud offering across multiple industries and market segments.

What will become increasingly critical is providing cloud consumers with a spectacular user experience, something nobody does better than Apple. While I realize the company is not strictly focused on cloud computing today, imagine a scenario in which it leverages the success and elegance of iTunes — essentially a cloud for selling digital media — to other markets. I can foresee a cloud computing environment where Apple allows users to build applications using their user interface templates and designs; every application developer that strives to make their application “as sexy as iTunes” could leverage this infrastructure. A current example of Apple’s approach can be found in its new MobileMe cloud, which emphasizes ease-of-use and user experience for keeping email, calendar and contacts synchronized. Elsewhere, Google Gears and Microsoft Live Mesh are also attempting to be environments in which users develop cloud applications, but they don’t seem to have the same focus on consistency of user experience.

Speaking of Microsoft, when it comes to presence in the computing space, they have an enviable position. With their software presence on the PC, mobile phone, game console, media center and even autos, they’re set up to be everywhere for at least the next decade. And the Redmond giant has recently changed its PR to emphasize software and services, which leads me to think that they’re moving to offer a wealth of cloud-based services.

The key will be leveraging their almost ubiquitous presence across nearly every aspect of the computing space to convert their hordes of desktop and IT application developers to work on their cloud in order to come up with future services for the same markets. If Microsoft can execute on this strategy, use their presence and motivate their developers, they will be a significant player in the cloud computing market in 2018.

It seems clear that the dominant cloud computing company in 2018 will be able to process transactions on the scale of Amazon and eBay, have the eye-popping user experience of Apple and the presence of Microsoft. Which cloud company do you think it will be?

Fellow GigaOM writer Alistair Croll contributed heavily to this post.

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IBM Prepares to Fight off Microsoft

IBM/Lotus Thursday hit back at Microsoft's boast that it plans to steal 5 million Notes customers this year by detailing a new 300,000-seat licensing deal with an Asian company and strong interest in Notes from emerging markets.

Last week, Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner told financial analysts that his goal is to have the company's messaging and collaboration software displace 5 million Notes seats this year. Turner also said Microsoft has replaced 8 million seats of Notes in the past two years.

It was another shot in a messaging and collaboration war that has been going on between the two for nearly 20 years. In the late 1990s, the two jousted using e-mail seat-count numbers that were often inflated if not outright dubious.

"It is very difficult to tell what Microsoft is talking about when they talk about numbers of seats or costs because they shove so much into their environment, but I do know we have been engaging against them and winning," says Bob Picciano, general manager of Lotus Software.

IBM/Lotus seems to be doing a better job of integrating current messaging and collaboration tools with next-generation tools like social networking.

In June at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, the two squared off on stage around social software (Lotus Connections vs. SharePoint) with IBM/Lotus showing its Connections tools as "the clear winner across the board," according to Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group who moderated the session. Gotta in his blog later chastised Microsoft, saying it "did a poor job of showing and explaining why business and/or technical decision-makers should consider SharePoint as a credible solution to meet the social computing needs of an organization."

A month later Microsoft's Turner lit into IBM/Lotus, which is now on the offensive and detailing what it calls strong fiscal second-quarter sales of Notes/Domino 8. The platform, which shipped a year ago, features a modular client architecture that can be customized as the front end for component-based applications.

The company says an Asian firm, which executives said would be named at a later date, will license 300,000 seats of Notes, as well as Lotus Symphony, IBM's open source suite of productivity applications.

IBM/Lotus says the deal is its largest ever in Asia.

IBM also listed a number of foreign companies that chose Notes over Microsoft, including Max New York Life, Reliance Industries, Vedanta, and Aviva in India; GD Development Bank, Johnson Electric, HKG Environ Protect, CED, DL Cosco Shipyard in China; Affin Bank and Trakando in Singapore; and Russian Railways in Russia.

It did not provide seat numbers.

IBM/Lotus also reported that in the fiscal second quarter it recorded its largest client win in North America: 150,000 seats in a "big six" accounting firm.

Like the Asian deal, IBM would not name the company, but IBM executives said Lotus Notes, Sametime, Connections, IBM Lotus Quickr and WebSphere Portal were picked over the Microsoft collaboration portfolio that included Exchange and SharePoint.

The battle is heating up as Microsoft's SharePoint is garnering the lion's share of coverage despite a number of issues corporate users face when considering the platform.

IBM/Lotus has been feeling the heat from SharePoint.

In May, the company released IBM Lotus Quickr Content Integrator, which provides wizards and templates for moving content in mass to Quickr from SharePoint sites. Lotus is betting the tool will help keep users on its content management platform and away from Microsoft, which could use SharePoint as the hook to get users to switch to its entire portfolio of messaging and collaboration tools.

As part of its most recent announcement IBM/Lotus noted other companies that have recently picked Lotus Notes and other Lotus software over other competitors, including Colgate-Palmolive, Ineos of Belgium, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, NutraFlo, Dutch Railways, Rohm Haas, Imerys and the Salvation Army.

New Lotus Notes 8 customers were listed as CFE Compagnie d'Enterprises of France, Virginia Commonwealth University, Winsol International, the U.S. General Services Administration, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Standard Insurance, New York Life, Kentucky Baptist Convention, Verizon, Publishers Printing, Hyatt Hotels, Union Pacific and Nationwide Insurance.

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Microsoft confirms Danger acquisition was a $500 million purchase

Its now official, Microsoft spent $500 million on the purchase of Danger. Of course this does not come as much of a surprise, after all that figure was the exact number that was rumored several months back. However, thanks to Microsoft’s most recent quarterly report this number has been confirmed.

Microsoft filed its quarterly report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, and in addition to financial revelations about its recent acquisitions, the tech titan also gave a more formal glimpse at how it views and plans to deal with the growing threat posed by Google and Apple, as well as longtime nemesis open source. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer touched on many of these issues last week at the start of the company's financial analysts meeting.

In a section titled "Challenges to our business model may reduce our revenues and operating margins," Microsoft reiterated that its bottom line may suffer if it has to drop the prices of its products to compete with Linux.

Proponents of open-source software continue efforts to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of open-source software in their purchase and deployment of software products. Although we believe our products provide customers with significant advantages in security, productivity, and total cost of ownership, the open-source software model continues to pose a significant challenge to our business model. To the extent open-source software gains increasing market acceptance, sales of our products may decline, we may have to reduce the prices we charge for our products, and revenue and operating margins may decline.

In the same section, Microsoft also pointed to the business model challenge posed by its main search rival which has far more scale. The report seems to express admiration for the business model and says the company is throwing "significant resources" at attempting to emulate it.

Another development is the software-as-a-service business model, under which companies provide applications, data, and related services over the Internet. Providers use primarily advertising or subscription-based revenue models. Recent advances in computing and communications technologies have made this model viable and enabled the rapid growth of some of our competitors. We are devoting significant resources toward developing our own competing software plus services strategies. It is uncertain whether these strategies will be successful.

Another section addresses the threat posed by Apple, while conceding that competing with the model may prove expensive.

An important element of our business model has been to create platform-based ecosystems on which many participants can build diverse solutions. A competing vertically-integrated model, in which a single firm controls both the software and hardware elements of a product, has been successful with certain consumer products such as personal computers, mobile phones and digital music players. We also offer vertically-integrated hardware and software products; however, efforts to compete with the vertically integrated model may increase our cost of sales and reduce operating margins.

Also in its report, Microsoft confirmed that it spent $500 million for its acquisition earlier this year of Sidekick maker Danger.

The company also made its larger $1.3 billion purchase of Norway's Fast Search and Transfer and closed its $5.9 billion Aquantive purchase. Other deals made during the year added another $1.1 billion, Microsoft said.

Other interesting Microsoft facts from the report:

Microsoft now occupies 2 million square feet of real estate that it owns and 8 million square feet of leased space.

It ended the year with $23.66 billion in cash and short-term investments, up slightly from the $23.41 billion it had as of June 30, 2007.

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253 million Internet users and 80s post-marketing

"Article 22 of the China Internet Development Report" showed that as at the end of June 2008, the number of Internet users in China reached 253 million, substantially more than the first time the United States, Internet users ranks first in the world scale.

Chinese Internet users is still the mainstay of the following 30 years of age and younger groups, the groups of Internet users account for 68.6 percent of Chinese netizens, the total number of Internet users over 2 / 3.

80 after the literal meaning is that in 1980-89-born population, some people have predicted that, after 80 "Beat Generation", "not the most responsible generation", "Yu Wei generation," and "the most selfish Generation, "and" the most rebellious generation. " After the narrow 80: 80-89, refers to people born and, by extension, after 80: 80 refers to people born after.

According to "China Statistical Yearbook," the data in 1980 to 1989, those born between about 204 million. This generation of more than 200 million Chinese people have been known as the "80 after."

In 1980 when the country to promote a couple birth of a child. 1984 to 1987, according to the actual situation in rural areas, central to the fertility policy has been adjusted to allow hygiene in the rural areas of the regeneration of a girl child. At the same time the rural population base, so the Chinese people born in the 1980s, in fact most children in rural areas. As a whole should be at least 80 ethnic groups after the 3 / 4.

July 1, 1986 will go into effect, "People's Republic of China Compulsory Education Law", was born in the early 1980s many children start compulsory education, so that more of the rural population has begun to enter after the 80 cities, and the city after the owners began 80 Competition.

But the 253 million Internet users and 204 million of 80 after the two data, to a certain extent, reflected in 80 Internet users after the proportion of ethnic groups.

Mainly young Internet users, including students and the community just as soon the young people. These two groups of media contacts is the most important feature:

First, the life trajectory of the media surrounded the campus media, Focus Media, mobile TV, outdoor signs, such media dissemination of information in a time of relative uncertainty, a comprehensive brand communication to a certain extent Limitations.

Second, to a certain extent dependent on networks, including Internet and mobile phone networks. Network people become entertainment, social, an important platform for access to information.

Third, information and entertainment have a certain preference, the mainstream official media show a certain degree of resentment and conflict, even watch TV but do not look at cctv South Korea, Taiwan's entertainment; do not see what Daily newspaper. . . So the mainstream media's access is very limited.

Fourth, housing men and woman home not a small proportion, interpersonal little direct interaction. Living in a small circle of relatively limited scope, access to information networks rely on search engines and other tools, shopping on the Internet a greater degree of dependence, many of the means of subsistence through door-to-door manner.

Fifth, the autonomy of the strong, rebellious nature, and do not like言听计从, the authority showed no reason for the conflict, I believe their feelings, believe in themselves.

Faced with such a group, how do the brand marketing »

Fast moving consumer goods is whether they can be spread on the track of life, can meet them to feel » Whether through convenient access to » What kind of attitude and their dialogue »

Durable goods are to meet their needs, whether in their economic sustainability of the » There is not enough personality » Is not able to represent them in the image and status »

The current master of the situation after 50s, 60s, 70s post-marketing whether enough IN, can understand what we think » What we need » What we are doing »

Personal view is that, I just I just consumer brands, because no one more than we know ourselves. So, although I undergraduate professional, vehicle engineering, but I will not do high-grade automotive customers, because to me as the representative after the 80 ethnic groups are not currently a luxury car the core consumer groups; I will not do high-grade flats, Because we are not a majority of 80 luxury flats after the consumer groups.

I will only choose life after 80 and we are closely related to products related to the brand. Because we understand our own needs » We also understand that and how our own dialogue is the most effective.

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Panoramio picture address changes

Panoramio is based on the popular Google Earth geographical picture of the social sharing site, allows users to upload pictures and pictures of geographical indications. Panoramio the default Google Earth is one of the layers. These days, Panoramio quietly changed its photo storage domain, was originally stored in Panoramio domain, now stored in the mw2.google.com the names under. This use of Google Earth on the Panoramio picture shows a change in address.


It is depressing that, mw2.google.com this address is in China's telecommunications lines are unable to access, IP address Ping could not Netcom lines available. Results from Google Earth View, click on the photos after all are not showing. As shown below.

To allow the use of the Internet networks of China Telecom Beijing Olympic venues to see the photo, I appeal to the China Telecom deal with the timely, Panoramio pictures can be stored address from the telecommunications normal visit.
by http://geek-seeker.blogspot.com/

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