Entries tagged with business - Channel 10

Millions of Servers Coming to the Cloud

sarahintampa — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:13:00 GMT

At the TechEd Conference, Bill Gates gave his last speech as a Microsoft full-time employee and one of the topics he discussed was Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing. (Full transcript is here.) In the speech, Gates spoke of Microsoft’s plan to have “many millions” of servers in the cloud, running all the services that traditional I.T. shops run today like Exchange, SQL Server, BizTalk, and more. These Microsoft cloud services will come in three different options – free, ad-supported, and commercial (fee-based), he said. One has to wonder how this will position the I.T. guys in the future – it looks like their role will be changing. Whereas before, I.T. needed to know how to set up, install, manage, and support the servers in their organization, it seems like the new I.T. guy will be more a facilitator, helping a company pick out the best cloud services for the business and handling the administrative aspects of setting them up. This work will be less “geeky” than before, but still just as critical to a business’s success. It should be really interesting to watch as these things change the way the business world runs.

(img courtesy of News from Microsoft Ireland)

Chris Carper's "The Business of Silverlight" blog launched

benwaggoner — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:25:00 GMT

My colleague Chris Carper has just launched a new blog, The Business of Silverlight. He'll be talking about Silverlight from a business perspective, as the title suggests, and also discussing details of some of the big Silverlight projects we've got going with partners.

He's already got some good posts up, in particular this one about how we're going to be Using Silverlight on Microsoft.com.

Mobile phones can fight poverty

Jesse — Tue, 08 May 2007 16:37:00 GMT

Mobile phones are arguably the ultimate gadget, and as a gadget they sometimes get a bad rap as distractions or time wasters. To realign your appreciation for mobiles however, you simply need to spend fifteen minutes with Iqbal Quadir’s TED Talk: The power of the mobile phone to end poverty. Throughout history technological advances have enabled the masses to upgrade their abilities and quality of life, and Iqbal argues that the connectivity that comes from mobiles (like the Motorola MOTOFONE you see here) can help to empower citizens to bring themselves out of poverty. The whole thing makes us wonder; is there a ‘Sponsor a mobile customer’ program out there?

Microsoft could acquire Yahoo: What do you think?

Jesse — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:41:00 GMT

If you ever wanted to see a perfect storm of hyperlinked news, today’s revelation that Microsoft wants to talk to Yahoo about a merger is it. For those who haven’t already been deafened by twitter exclamations and email flurries, let’s walk through the news thus far. That bastion of responsible news reporting The New York Post, broke the story this morning. Apparently when Google picked up DoubleClick last month, the big heads here in Redmond decided it may be time to ante up in the acquisition game, and reopened a longstanding dialog with Yahoo. The ever-anonymous ‘sources’ were sure to include a $50b price tag, as well as reminding us that combining the search advertising shares of MSFT and YHOO would represent 27 percent against GOOG’s 65 percent.

David Kaplan of paidContent.org chimed in early, echoing the NY Post article, as well as reminding everyone of Jerry Yang’s avoidance of Microsoft products, and how much an acquisition could close the gap between Microsoft and Google. Reuters also covered the story with this choice quote from Peter Lobravico of Wall Street Access: “You can’t find a stronger buyer than Microsoft and while it would spur a lot of political and regulatory noise, everyone knows in the end that the deal would go through.”

Scott Beale picked the right graphic for Laughing Squid’s coverage, and also highlighted the 18 point jump in Yahoo’s stock on news of the negotiations. He also pointed out Eric Schonfeld’s post at The Next Net, which notes that the deal would have an air of desperation, and that, “The culture-clash of two companies could undermine any financial gains a Microsoft-Yahoo merger could produce.” Some astute opinion came from Henry Blodget at Internet Outisder, who recommends the two companies join, and then for Microsoft to spin off a Yahoo-MSN organization.

This questions raised by this morning’s news are far more interesting than the coverage of it, given that very little has actually transpired. So what are the questions then? What are your wildest fantasies about how a Microhoo/Yahsoft would exist, and what sort of combinations could make the new company insanely great?

Virtually deploying Vista in the enterprise

Jesse — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 18:31:00 GMT

This morning the Windows Business Group announced two new ways to deploy Vista in enterprise scenarios, both of which seem to be targeted at a return to 70’s cool. The first is simply a change in the EULA that allows for Vista to be used on diskless machines. This agreement allows customers to operate Vista on individual machines that access either individual drives or disk images that are centrally stored. The second option has been dubbed Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (please update your acronym directories to include VECD), which reflects the growing excitement around virtualization. By deploying this setup, Vista can be operated on server hardware, and then delivered to thin clients or traditional machines. The VECD license will be available on a per-device subscription basis, and also requires being a Software Assurance customer—if you know what that is then please tell us ;)

As Jeremy points out at Ars Technica, this ability to essentially stream Vista is great news for admins, who until now would’ve had to look longingly at *NIX operating systems which boot over the network. While Mary Jo says Wall Street and the Feds are prime candidates for this, the question should be raised around smaller groups of users. New Web-based operating systems are cropping up all the time as Richard points out at Read/Write with Desktop On Demand, and you can’t get anywhere near northern California without hearing about Goobuntu (though I prefer my own term, GooOS). There’s more to be found on Microsoft’s virtualization plans courtesy of Clive Watson’s posting of new whitepapers, as well as Rodney Buike’s post on the Future of the Server Room tour next month.