Microsoft on SWiK

Inside the Cloud: 9 Sectors to Watch

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 06:46:39 -0700

There’s already a ton of activity taking place in the cloud computing space, so much so that it can be hard to know who to watch. In many cases, it’s too early to pick winners. But there are distinct sectors of the IT industry that are particularly well suited to the on-demand, pay-as-you-go economics of cloud computing. Here are eight segments — and one company that’s a segment all its own — that we’re tracking closely.

Hosting companies that make the jump: When it comes to reliable managed hosting, Rackspace leads the pack. (Its VMware-based Mosso offering may appeal more to enterprises trying the cloud for the first time.) Clouds like XCalibre’s Flexiscale and Joyent are already there, but don’t have Rackspace’s installed base.

Stack-specific clouds: While Google and Amazon get the headlines, Engine Yard is heavily involved in the Ruby on Rails development community. Competitor Heroku is also Rails-focused, but relies on Amazon for its hosting platform.

Tools to wrangle virtual machines: To manage your EC2 machines, you’re going to need help. RightScale makes software for managing machines in the cloud; its tight focus on Amazon has made it an early favorite. Elastra, Enomalism and others have similar solutions.

Testing sandboxes: For many enterprises, a testing sandbox is the perfect way to start using on-demand infrastructure. CohesiveFT’s Skytap (a sister to Flexiscale) spins up testing machines in a cloud, but incumbent Surgient and recent entrant StackSafe aren’t far behind. And once you’ve tested a machine and seen that it works, why not leave it in the cloud?

Cloud-based development platforms: Companies like Rollbase and Coghead let non-developers build data-driven applications of any sort (as opposed to more specialized platforms like those of Salesforce and Ning.) But Intuit’s Quickbase, which now has access to Quickbooks data, has a head start: Millions of small businesses. Is this how SMB gets cloud?

Scaling frameworks: Wall Street needed fast, reliable applications that grew easily. Instead of adding more, bigger servers, they used Gigaspaces to bundle whole server clusters into discrete “processing units” that can be cloned to add capacity. In addition to being faster and scaling better, these units don’t care whether they’re in a private data center or a cloud.

Application delivery networks: What has tens of thousands of servers worldwide, a global network connecting them, and isn’t Google? Akamai. What was once a way of getting bits to far-flung corners of the Net is an often-overlooked cloud: Akamai has been able to run code at the edge since 2000. Its 2007 acquisition of Netli made it matter to enterprises even more. Akamai can weather heavy load and may be able to withstand attacks better than centralized clouds.

Cloud builders: 3Tera lets companies get into the cloud business. Enterprises can make in-house clouds on existing data centers; or service providerscan build their own cloud offeringsin the way Enki and others have. In 3Tera’s model, subscribers drag and drop the firewalls, servers and appliances they need. The company’s software then maps these virtual application stacks to servers and network segments. The results are impressive: On seeing 3Tera for the first time, ESM guru John Willis was so impressed he insisted on logging in to the icons on his screen to verify that it wasn’t just a demo.

The obvious one: Of the three big virtualization firms, only one (Microsoft) also has millions of desktops, two handset platforms, licensing for desktops, servers and applications, synchronization, and a huge online presence. Up until now, the Redmond giant has been treading carefully; it has to convert billions of dollars of shrink-wrap sales to on-demand revenue streams. But Microsoft’s going to be a huge player in the cloud.

For more insights into cloud computing trends, check out the recent GigaOM/Bitcurrent briefing on cloud computing that was launched at Structure 08.

TechCrunchIT " Blog Archive " Next Year's Headline: Microsoft fails to do anything significant with Powerset

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:46:11 -0700

Difficulties in using Powerset with live search because of open source / closed platform non-compatibility

The Microsoft VMware Smack Down: Perspectives behind the Headlines

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:53:24 -0700

A collection of blog posts from Archimedius about the smack down between VMware and Microsoft as analysts prepare for VMware's upcoming earnings announcement Tuesday July 22.

Memo to Jerry, Steve and Carl: Just Do It!

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:56:46 -0700

Summer is generally a slower time for news and this summer is no exception. But the kind folks at Microsoft, Yahoo and Carl Icahn’s investment firm are charitably offering up a form of entertainment with their ongoing Let’s Make a Deal saga.

The latest installment is a letter to shareholders from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang that accuses Microsoft of flip-flopping, creating confusion and generally not wanting to make a deal. The letter also also reiterates Yahoo’s desire to sell the entire company at $33 per share — or if that’s not interesting, just the search assets.

Let me tell you, Yahoo, playing hard to get is smart, but this letter is no way to get the guy of your dreams. In fact, rumor has it Microsoft is seeing AOL now, and everyone knows AOL hasn’t always made the best choice in relationships.

This stuff may play well in Silicon Valley, but outside of it the world is not watching. While Kara Swisher dutifully calls her sources and provides us with the ins and outs of the wheeling and dealing, the audience outside the tech world is yawning. This started back in February (2007 if you believe the original offer from Microsoft). Let’s finish this, so the world can really focus on the banking crisis or high gas prices.

Microsoft Update, Apple Software Update et Ubuntu Archive [Etude comparative]

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Microsoft Searches Jump 15% After Live Cashback Launch

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:50:23 -0700

This isn’t enough data to declare Microsoft’s much derided Live Cashback search product a winner, but the first full month after it launched (June) shows a 15% gain in search volume v. the previous month, according to Comscore. This erases the previous month’s losses, bringing Microsoft up to 9.2% overall search share.

Live Search CashBack gives advertisers the option of offering users a direct rebate for purchases made after searching on Microsoft. The product shifts search advertising from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) and give a lot of the revenue back to users.

Live Search Cashback isn’t designed to grab a ton of market share away from Google and Yahoo, but Microsoft is hopeful that more users will come to them when doing searches around buying goods online. And those queries tend to bring in the lion’s share of advertising dollars. This won’t affect Microsoft’s bottom line much, of course, since they are passing most of the money from purchases right back to consumers.

This is far from a definitive statement of Live Search Cashback’s success as an ongoing product, but the jump is an early sign that consumers may be intrigued. Let the debates continue.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Martian Headsets - Joel on Software

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Specifying Systems

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Home | Pidgin

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The messenger program I usually use. :)

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Microsoft Hypocrites - Pro MS sites that run open source

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pache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) - From the site: "Commenting and sharing about all aspects of Microsoft and its products." Obviously, using Apache on a Red Hat machine comments on Microsoft t

Why Silicon Valley Should Be Worried

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:56:27 -0700

Updated at the bottom: We have short memories in Silicon Valley, which is both a blessing and a curse. We forget the bad times as quickly as we forget the good times.

At the turn of the century, everything went to hell with the dot-com bust. Then the pendulum started to swing the other way; the pessimism that once reigned supreme was being replaced by wild-eyed optimism. Now Silicon Valley is in for a long-overdue reality check, one that should worry one and all. Why? Because the news coming out of advertising-focused companies is not good.

Yesterday ValueClick, a display advertising network, said it now expects its second-quarter revenues to range from $162 million to $164 million, lower than the previously forecasted $170 million. The company also cut its full-year 2008 sales guidance by about 10 percent, to between $655 million and $675 million. It blamed weakness in its display and comparison advertising business, and flatness even in its lead-generation business.

Time Warner’s Platform-A advertising division isn’t doing so well either, according to some of my sources. The company is instituting wide-scale belt-tightening measures, including freezing travel budgets. Pali Capital in a blog post today forecast, “AOL’s display advertising revenues down about 8% in Q2 (Q1 ‘08 was down about 10% organically), with the back-half down mid-single digits.”

Microsoft, in its fourth-quarter 2008 earnings call today, also admitted that online advertising was tough. “The one proviso to that is in the online advertising space…it was weak in the fourth quarter. There is a direct impact and we’re not immune in the online space, ” Microsoft CFO Chris Liddel said in a conference call with analysts. “The online advertising area is part of the business that we think is most challenging…the online advertising area is very difficult at the moment.”

And if that wasn’t enough, Google just announced spectacular growth in its second-quarter revenues — about 39 percent over the same period lat year — but fell short of Wall Street’s profit expectations. Between The Lines blog notes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in his company’s conference call with investors, said they would survive the downturn because there will be a flight to quality, and that they will provide a better return on investment. Maybe! Larry Dignan hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

“Color me skeptical. Anyone that lived through the dot-com bust has heard these lines before and no company is immune if there’s a recession.”

Like him, the skeptical me went straight to the traffic acquisition costs (TAC), which is where I think the real story lies. If you look at the image below you’ll see that Google’s traffic acquisition costs have declined rapidly while its revenues have ballooned. TAC in general and AdSense specifically are like a black box – no one quite knows how much Google gives out. Sometimes it feels like Google can use this “black box” to come up with pretty much any numbers it wants to.

We’ll get a better sense of the overall health of the market when Yahoo reports its latest numbers, but the way I see it, things are sort of troubling. We wrote about this nagging problem back in May. I think that as we go forward things are only going to get worse — and even Silicon Valley can’t ignore what’s been going on in the overall economy.

The housing crisis is being replaced by a much scarier problem: the personal credit crunch. In a recent report, American Express noted that it has started to see a sharp increase in late card payments. Now folks, this is American Express, whose customers skew towards the affluent, especially compared to those of its competitors. The company has boosted loss provisions for its U.S. card business, profits have declined, and defaults are up.

Will these problems escalate? Probably. Consumers struggling with the housing crisis and rising fuel costs — and thus higher basic living expenses — will be forced to cut back on other spending, which will lead to slower sales and in turn, less money for advertising.

We know the housing and financial sector-related ads have already declined drastically, now we’re going to start to see other sectors cut back on advertising, too — and that is going to have a negative impact on everyone from large social networks to ad networks to Yahoo and Google to small startups, including weblogs like ours. I guess Provigil sales are going to take a nosedive in the Valley as we stay up all night worrying about everything.

Update: And there’s more bad news today. The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors is going to sharply cut back on advertising. GM is one of the big spenders in U.S. — last year the company spent about 32 percent of its $2.3 billion dollar ad budget on newspapers and 11 percent on television networks — but it looks like those expenditures are going to get hacked. It’s not clear from the report how this move will impact Internet advertising.

Photo courtesy of ZDNet

Microsoft Testing Self Serve Publisher Advertising Product For The First Time

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:46:30 -0700

Microsoft is testing a new pilot program that will let third party publishers add Microsoft’s contextual ads next to their content in a self-serve format. From what we can tell from the email below, it will be very similar to Google’ Adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network.

Google dominates this space (and all other contextual advertising) because it offers publishers far higher fees for ads. Yahoo and Microsoft have made up for that shortfall by offering guarantees in the past. Or in the case of Yahoo, by offering more flexible products like allowing their ads to be shown next to third party search results.

The new program will begin on July 21. No word on how Microsoft will get more money to these sites than what is offered by Google today but they are not requiring exclusivity: “You may also use Microsoft ads on the same sites and pages as Google ads as long as you do not have a specific exclusivity agreement with them.”

Putting ads on third parties is a controversial product, since advertisers expect the kinds of click throughs and conversions that they get from search. Earlier this week Google was sued for fraud because ads placed on parked pages weren’t producing results.

Still, if Microsoft is willing to take a bath and pay publishers more than Google does, they can get a lot of page views quickly and build up inventory.

Full email is below. I’ve contacted Microsoft for a comment. From what we can determine this is the first time Microsoft has experimented with a self-serve product. Until now, you had to enter into a partnership agreement with them and they only targeted very high traffic sites.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson says this trial has actually been underway since earlier this year with a small group of publishers, but won’t say when or if this will officially roll out publicly.

Update 2: Microsoft has sent us the following statement:

Microsoft’s self-serve advertising offering for publishers is still under development and is currently in a private pilot phase, being tested by select publishers who met the participation requirements. The private pilot phase began earlier this year. A private, phased approach allows us to learn more about customer interest in content advertising and provide guidance as to how we can improve the product and deliver the right features required to meet publisher and advertiser needs. It’s our intention to continue to expand our high quality network and relevant audience gradually and intelligently over time for our advertisers. We will evaluate customer interest and product performance as we move through the private pilot, but we have no specific launch plans to announce at this time.

We encourage publishers who are interested in joining the pilot to fill out an interest form here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher

Dear xxxxxx:

Thank you for your recent completion of the self-submission form on the Microsoft adCenter site for this program. Below is more information for you about the pilot. I can answer general questions you may have about participation. Please let me know if you would like to proceed and I can invite you formally on Monday July 21st to begin.

The pilot is small and not public, and participants will be asked to agree to a Confidentiality Statement before taking part – this means that you will not be able to blog about the program or discuss it outside of your company.. We would be seeking feedback and suggestions from you about the service, its interface, and its effectiveness in generating revenue for your site. There is no exclusivity requirement and no minimum requirement for the number of ad units you may implement. You may use other contextual ads on the same pages as Microsoft ads during the pilot or implement only on the most relevant pages on your site.

You may also use Microsoft ads on the same sites and pages as Google ads as long as you do not have a specific exclusivity agreement with them.

“Competitive Ads and Services: In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.”

In addition, please take note of the following:

•We would request that you agree to take part in the pilot for at least two months or two full payment cycles.

•Only publishers who are U.S. based may take part; completing a W9 form is necessary to receive payment.

•Click rates will be closely monitored during the pilot and publishers whose click rates give cause for concern or are anomalous will be removed from the program and will not be paid for clicks on their ads.

•Microsoft can make no guarantee regarding the amount of any payments you may receive for the ads shown on your website during this test although the purpose of the program is to monetize your site with contextual advertising.

•We would ask that you not use a third party provider to serve Microsoft ads during this test program. If this is an impossible obstacle for you, please contact me about it.

•For the purposes of the pilot, you will be limited to a single account but you may implement ads on up to ten approved web properties that comply with the Microsoft adCenter editorial guidelines.

Best regards,

XXXXXXXX (for Aditi) at Microsoft

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