The Web Pitch

Ray Ozzie’s Word Cloud from Microsoft’s PDC 2008. I’ve also added his keynote transcript below. A very interesting read and gives us a glimpse at where today’s computing is headed.

Today, we’re in the early days of a transformation towards services across the industry, a change that’s being catalyzed by a confluence of factors, by cheap computing and cheap storage, by the increasing ubiquity of high bandwidth connectivity to the Internet, by an explosion in PC innovation from the high-end desktop to the low-end netbook, by an explosion in device innovation, Media Players, Smart Phones, net-connected devices of all shapes and sizes.

At PDC this week you’ll hear our take, Microsoft’s take on this revolution that’s happening in our industry’s software foundation, and how there’s new value to be had for users, for developers, for businesses, by deeply and genuinely combining the best of software with the best aspects of services.

Today and tomorrow morning, you’re going to hear us map out our all up software plus services strategy end-to-end. You’re going to see how this strategy is coming to life in our platforms, in our apps and in our tools. You’re going to see some great demos. You’ll get software to take home with you, and you’ll get activation codes for our new services.

So, I’ll be with you here for the next couple of days. Tomorrow, I’ll be up here and we’ll talk about the front-end of our computing experiences. We’ll focus on the innovations in our client OS and on tools and runtimes and services that enable a new generation of apps that span the PC, the phone, and the Web.

But today we’ll be focusing on our back-end innovation, platforms, infrastructure, and solutions that span from on-premises servers to services in the cloud to datacenters in the cloud.

Back-End Innovation: Platforms, Infrastructure and Solutions

You know, over the past couple of weeks I’ve ready some pretty provocative pieces online taking the position that this cloud thing might be, in fact, vastly overblown. Some say: What’s the big deal and What’s the difference between the cloud and how we’re now treating computing as a virtualized utility in most major enterprises.

And in a sense these concepts have been around for what seems like forever. The notion of utility computing was pioneered in the ’60s by service bureaus like TimeShare and Geistgo.

Virtualization was also pioneered in that same era by IBM and its VM370 took virtualization very, very broadly into the enterprise datacenter.

Today, that same virtualization technology is making a very, very strong comeback, driven by our trend toward consolidation of our PC-based servers. With racks of machines now hosting any number of Virtual Servers, computing is looking more and more like an economical shared utility, serving our enterprise users, apps and solutions.

But today, even in the best of our virtualized enterprise datacenters, most of our enterprise computing architectures have been designed for the purpose of serving and delivering inwardly facing solutions. That is, most of our systems and networks have been specifically built to target solutions for our employees, in some cases for our partners, hundreds or thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of concurrent users; desktops, datacenters, and the networks between them all scoped out, audited, controllable and controlled by an IT organization skilled in managing the enterprise as the scope of deployment.

But more and more the reach and scope that’s required of our systems has been greatly expanding. Almost every business, every organization, every school, every government is experiencing the externalization of IT, the way IT needs to engage with individuals and customers coming in from all across the Web.

These days, there’s a minimum expectation that customers have of all of our Web sites delivering product information, customer support, direct fulfillment from the Web.

But the bar is being raised as far richer forms of customer interaction are evolving very, very rapidly. Once on our Web sites, customers increasingly expect to interact with one another through community rating and ranking, through forms with reputation, through wikis and through blogs.

Companies are coming to realize that regardless of their industry, the Web has become a key demand generation mechanism, the first place customers look, every organization’s front door.

Now more than ever, the richness, reach and effectiveness of all aspects of a company’s Web presence has become critical to the overall health of the business.

And company’s IT systems now have to deal with far more outside users, their customers, than the users that they serve within their own four walls.

As a result, one of the things that’s begun to happen over the course of the past few years is that the previously separate roles of software development and operations have become incredibly enmeshed and intertwined. IT pros and developers are now finding themselves with the need to work closely together and to jointly team and jointly learn how to design and build and operate systems that support millions or tens of millions of customers or potential customers spread across the globe, clicking through ads, doing transactions, talking with the company, and talking with each other.

For some customers’ Web-facing systems the demand that they see on their Web sites might be seen in peaks and valleys. It might shoot up during the holidays or new product introductions or during product recalls or when good things or bad things are going on in the blogosphere.

And so today, at great expense many companies tend to add ample spare capacity for each of the apps for which traffic must scale, more floor space, more hardware, more power, more cooling, more experts on networks, more operations personnel.

And a company’s Web-facing challenges can go much further than that if the systems are housed in a single location and you have a variety of failures such as cable cuts, earthquakes, power shortages; you know, any of these things could cause critical continuity issues that could end up being huge for the business.

The answer, of course, is to have more than one datacenter, which helps with load balancing and redundancy. But doing this is extremely tough. It requires a good deal of human expertise in loosely coupled systems design, in data replication architectures, in networking architectures and more.

And having just two datacenters, while challenging, may not be enough. Far away customers experience network latency issues that can impact the experience or the effectiveness or the user satisfaction with the Web site.

So, to serve these global customers you may need to locate at least datacenters around the world, and this may mean dealing with a whole host of issues related to your data or the communications between the users on your Web sites that’s going on outside the borders: political issues, tax issues, a variety of issues related to sovereignty and so on.

And so reflecting back on the question I asked earlier for developers or IT professionals, is this cloud thing really any different than the things that we’ve known in the past, the answer is absolutely and resoundingly yes. Things are materially different when building systems designed to serve the world of the Web as compared with the systems designed to serve those living within a company’s own four walls.

And there’s a very significant reason why it might be beneficial to have access to a shared infrastructure designed explicitly to serve the world of the Web, one having plenty of excess capacity, providing kind of an overdraft protection for your Web site, one built and operated by someone having the IT expertise, the networking and security expertise, all kinds of expertise necessary for a service that spans the globe.

High-Scale Internet Services Infrastructure: A New Tier in Computing Architecture

A few years ago, as it happens, we at Microsoft embarked upon a detailed examination of our own Web-facing systems, systems serving hundreds of millions of customers worldwide using MSN, systems delivering updates to hundreds of millions of Windows users worldwide, systems that are visited by Office users every time they press the help key, systems such as MSDN serving millions of developers, you, worldwide, and many, many more systems.

Each one of these systems had grown organically on its own, but for all of them together across all of them we built up a tremendous amount of common expertise, expertise in understanding how and to what degree we should be investing in datacenters and networks in different places around the world, given geopolitical issues and environmental issues and a variety of other issues; expertise in anticipating how many physical machines our various services would actually need and where and when to deploy those machines, and how to cope with service interdependencies across datacenters and so on; expertise in understanding how to efficiently deploy software to these machines and how to measure, tune, and manage a broad and diverse portfolio of services; expertise in keeping the OS and apps up to date across these thousands of machines; expertise in understanding how to prepare for an cope with holiday peaks of demand, especially with products like Xbox Live and Zune.

All in all over the years we’ve accumulated lots and lots of high scale services’ expertise, but all that knowledge, technology and skill, tremendous and expensive as that asset is, wasn’t packaged in a form that could be leveraged by outside developers or in a form that could benefit our enterprise customers. It certainly wasn’t packaged in a form that might be helpful to you.

Also at any industry level we’d come to believe that the externalization of IT in extending all our enterprise systems to a world of users across the Web, that this high scale Internet services infrastructure is nothing less than a new tier in our industry’s computing architecture.

The first tier, of course, is our experience tier, the PC on your desk or the phone in your pocket. The scale of this first tier of computing is one, and it’s all about you.

The second tier is the enterprise tier, the back-end systems hosting our business infrastructure and our business solutions, and the scale of this tier is roughly the size of the enterprise, and to serve this tier is really the design center of today’s server architectures and systems management architectures and most major enterprise datacenters.

The third tier is this Web tier, externally facing systems serving your customers, your prospects, potentially everyone in the world. The scale of this third tier is the size of the Web, and this tier requires computation, storage, networking, and a broad set of high level services designed explicitly for scale with what appears to be infinite capacity, available on-demand, anywhere across the globe.

And so a few years ago, some of our best and brightest, Dave Cutler, Amitabh Srivastava, and an amazing founding team, embarked upon a mission to utilize our systems expertise to create an offering in this new Web tier, a platform for cloud computing to be used by Microsoft’s own developers, by Web developers, and enterprise developers alike.

Some months after we began to plan this new effort, Amazon launched a service called EC2, and I’d like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for their innovation and for the fact that across the industry all of us are going to be standing on their shoulders as they’ve established some base level design patterns, architectural models and business models that we’ll all learn from and grow.

In the context of Microsoft with somewhat different and definitely broader objectives, Amitabh, Dave and their team have been working for a few years now on our own platform for computing in the cloud. It’s designed to be the foundation, the bedrock underneath all of Microsoft’s service offerings for consumers and business alike, and it’s designed to be ultimately the foundation for yours as well.

Announcing Windows Azure

And so I’d like to announce a new service in the cloud, Windows Azure. (Cheers, applause.) Windows Azure is a new Windows offering at the Web tier of computing. This represents a significant extension to our family of Windows computing platforms from Windows Vista and Windows Mobile at the experience tier, Windows Server at the enterprise tier, and now Windows Azure being our Web tier offering, what you might think of as Windows in the cloud.

Windows Azure is our lowest level foundation for building and deploying a high scale service, providing core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage in the form of blogs, tables and streams, and perhaps most importantly an automated service management system, a fabric controller that handles provisioning, geo-distribution, and the entire lifecycle of a cloud-based service.

You can think of Windows Azure as a new service-based operating environment specifically targeted for this new cloud design point, striking the best possible balance between two seemingly opposing goals.

First, we felt it was critical for Windows developers to be able to utilize existing skills and existing code, for the most part writing code and developing software that leverages things that you might already know. Most of you, of course, would expect to be able to use your existing tools and runtimes like Visual Studio and .NET Framework, and, of course, you can.

But in developing for something that we would brand Windows, you’d also expect a fundamentally open environment for your innovation. You’d expect a world of tools, languages, frameworks, and runtimes, some from us, some from you, some from commercial developers, and some from a vibrant community on the Web. And so being Windows, that’s the type of familiar and developer friendly environment that we intend to foster and grow.

But at the same time, even with that familiarity, even in trying to create a familiar environment for developers, we need to help developers recognize that this cloud design point is something fundamentally new, and that there are ways that Windows Azure needs to be different than the kind of server environment that you might be used to.

Whether Windows, UNIX, Linux or the Mac, most of today’s systems and most of today’s apps are deeply, deeply rooted in a scale-up past, but the systems that we’re building right now for cloud-based computing are setting the stage for the next 50 years of systems, both outside and inside the enterprise.

And so we really need to begin laying the groundwork with new patterns and practices, new types of storage, model-based deployment, new ways of binding an app to the system, app model and app patterns designed fundamentally from the outset for a world of parallel computing and for a world of horizontal scale.

Today, here at PDC, for those of you in this audience, Windows Azure comes to life. As I said before, and as you’ll hear about more in a few minutes, Windows Azure is not software that you run on your own servers but rather it’s a service that’s running on a vast number of machines housed in Microsoft’s own datacenters first in the U.S. and soon worldwide. It’s being released today as a Community Technology Preview with the initial features being only a fraction of where you’ll see from our roadmap that it will be going.

Like any of our other high scale Internet services, Windows Azure’s development and operational processes were designed from the outset for iteration and rapid improvement, incorporating your feedback and getting better and better in a very, very dynamic way.

As you’ll see today, we’re betting on Azure ourselves, and as the system scales out, we’ll be bringing more and more of our own key apps and key services onto Windows Azure because it will be our highest scale, highest availability, most economical, and most environmentally sensitive way of hosting services in the cloud.

The Azure Services Platform

A few of those key services, when taken together with Windows Azure itself, constitute a much larger Azure Services Platform. These higher level developer services, which you can mix and match ala carte, provide functions that as Windows developers you’ll find quite valuable and familiar and useful.

Some of you may recall hearing about SQL Server Data Services, SSDS, an effort that we introduced earlier this year at our MIX conference. We’re planning to bring even more of the power of SQL Server to the cloud, including SQL Reporting Services and SQL Data Analysis Services; and as such, this offering is now called simply SQL Services, our database services in the cloud.

Our .NET services subsystem is a concrete implementation of some of the things that many of you are probably already familiar with that exist within the .NET Framework, such as workflow services, authorization services and identity federation services.

The Live services subsystem, which you’ll hear about tomorrow, provides an incredibly powerful bridge that extends Azure services outward to any given user’s PCs, phones, or devices through synchronized storage and synchronized apps.

SQL Services, .NET services, and Live services, just like Windows Azure, are all being included as a part of the Azure services platform CTP being made available to you right here at PDC.

As you are well aware, Dynamics CRM and SharePoint are two of our most capable and most extensible platforms for business content, collaboration, and rapid solutions. And later this morning, you’ll hear about how these two platforms also fill a very important role in the overall Azure Services Platform”.

Stowe Boyd presented and interesting talk on how the web needs to finds a better model to encapsulate discussion within social media.

Whilst there has been a lot of discussion around Web 2.0 – e.g. the rise of social networks. The foundations of social media seem relatively unchanged. Blogs are still pretty much stuck in a Web 1.0 timeframe. They are limited to a model of chronological posts with embedded comments and a variety of widgets in the margins that engage with other web communities, such as Digg and Del.icio.us

Bloggers today ultimately still retain full control over content posted on their blogs. Readers can leave comments, but usually can’t edit them or remove them. More often than not, The “blogger” gains an increased reputation, (within the blogosphere) from comments posted. However, what of the reputation of the person who left the comment in the first place?

Boyd also noted how the rise of RSS and RSS Readers meant that fewer and fewer people actually visited blog sites. This has the side effect of divorcing your readers from the comments. Boyd asked the audience, how many people had their comments accessible within their RSS feeds? The response was minimal from the audience.

Boyd argued that the ability to recommend and share content through RSS, actually created a further community of readers who were even more fragmented from the conversation. In other words, conversations regarding blog posts are occurring more and more in locations far removed from the blog post itself. Though the blogger may start the discussion with a blog post. The ‘social buzz’ of discussion may occur in various other communities , e.g. Digg, Friendfeed, Techmeme etc.

Boyd when onto state that "Flow" applications such as Twitter or the Facebook mini feed offer a possible replacement. He suggested that once you get used to these flow apps, it gets harder and harder to go back to blogs.

If the community all move to a flow service, you don’t lose your friendships”

If the current pace continues, will blogs become reduced to being just a publishing platform? While new commenting systems like Disqus and Intense Debate attempt to bridge this commenting gap, we are also seeing the arrival of video-based systems, such as Seesmic, that seem to offer a higher levels of immediacy and simplicity.

Picture Credit: http://berlinblase.de

Boyd shows us his “extended desktop”. He uses a number of Flow applications to engage in social communities on the web.  He uses, Snackr (RSS feed aggregator), Twhirl, (Twitter desktop tool), FriendFeed and Flickr.  These applications run everyday and automatically update in the background.

Stowe’s “Web of Flow” is a social web where we continuously watch multiple streams of social interaction, live as they happen. Our eyes gaze over communities of conversation. We then exercise our choice to ‘dip in or out’ of the conversation as we see fit. Often, we may never even venture near a blog post.

[Bonus Videos] 

Hat Tip http://blog.whoiswho.de

Boyd, continues his discussion regarding the emergence of Flow apps and their effects on Social Media.

 BerlinBlase interviewed Stowe after his talk and asked him why email was broken?

Email is dead - Stowe Boyd from dotdean on Vimeo.

Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin brought a firm focus back to reality.  At recent conferences, the mood has been dampened by current economic conditions. Funding for web start-ups is vanishing rapidly for businesses without sustainable business plans. However, responding to critics suggesting that the Web 2.0 bubble was bursting. O’Reilly asked the rhetorical question, "Do you really think that we’re done yet with exploiting this huge change [of disruptive technologies]?"

O’Reilly suggested that the ‘web winners’ in the years ahead are those businesses that are involved in:

• Cloud computing
• Software as a Service applications like Google Apps
• Open Source software
• Companies delivering value added services to consumers or businesses
• Breakthroughs in collective intelligence (harnessing the crowd)
• Entrepreneurs who innovate and concentrate on delivering value

Using the example of the PC industry in the early 1990’s. O’Reilly cited the early years when there were hundreds of PC manufactures. However, through a ‘natural consolidation’ process, the number today is greatly reduced.  He then made the conclusion that the current economic problems accelerate the consolidation process – The business with robust business models will survive. Those that do not will die.

O’Reilly advocated the use of building business that deliver value, concluding with the strategy:

"Work on stuff that matters"

Citing the example of the Berlin Airlift and the innovative efforts required to achieve it, he stressed that his point that:

"Great challenge = Great opportunity"

O’Reilly finished the keynote, urging the masses to use Web  2.0 innovations to address today’s important problems. The world doesn’t need another another “Me too”  application. However, web applications that deliver “real value” are the ones to lead the industry out of the doldrums.

Keynote Video and presentation slides follow below

Hat Tip http://media.vascellari.com

Interview with Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 Expo 2008 Berlin from DigiRedo on Vimeo.

Hat Tip to Broadstuff

Jason Hiner from ZDNet blogs that Gartner analysts Carl Claunch and Dave Cearley presented a list of top 10 technologies that will provide important strategic advantages to IT over the next three years, at Gartner’s 2008 Symposium. They encourage IT leaders to keep these technologies in mind as they formulate budgets and long-term plans.

Claunch and Cearley delivered their list in the presentation “Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas for 2009? at the Orlando event. Here’s how they defined the “strategic technologies” that made the list:

“A strategic technology is one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years. Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”

Gartner’s list follows below along with Hiner’s comments:

1. Virtualization

Gartner says: Server virtualization is already in process. Today, the two biggest opportunities in virtualization are in storage and desktops. Storage virtualization offers simplified access by pooling systems and can save big money with storage deduplication. Desktop virtualization allows users to have a portable personality across multiple systems, delivering a thick client experience with a thin client delivery model.

Hiner says: The biggest factor that could drive desktop virtualization will be the advent of cheep $100-$200 thin clients (nettops) based on Intel Atom processors. In terms of storage virtualization, dedeplication — if effective — could be a huge money saver because every enterprise has tons of duplicate versions of files clogging up their file servers.

2. Cloud Computing

Gartner says: You need to be very careful about all of the hype, but you need to take it very seriously as well. They think 80% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using some form of cloud computing services by 2012. They encouraged IT leaders to consider the back-end infrastructure and policies of cloud providers and to carefully the development models.

Hiner says: Claunch and Cearley briefing mentioned the one reason why a lot of IT leaders will eventually adopt cloud computing:  It can allow IT to move a significant chunk of money from capital expenditures to operating expenditures. That’s the story.

3. Servers: Beyond Blades

Gartner says: Blade servers introduced a shared a computing fabric that allowed some recombination of components and some efficiencies. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the needs of the server load.

Hiner says: This sounds terrific in principle because it’s about greater utilization of resources. But, how will this relate to virtualization, where the software layer is being abstracted in much the same way? Can the two work together to provide even more dynamic server resources? I also wonder about licensing, especially since this involves CPUs, which a lot of licensing is being tied to.

4. Web-Oriented Architectures

Gartner says: Expect Internet, Web and cloud-based concepts (such as SOA) to increasingly drive mainstream architectures and development models.

Hiner says: We’ve been hearing this for almost a decade now. I hope that the model is finally changing — it’s overdue — but as my ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan likes to say, “Hope is not a strategy.”

5. Enterprise Mashups

Gartner says: Mashups mix content from multiple sources by using feeds from public application programming interfaces (APIs). Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications.

Hiner says: The best part about mashups is that they eliminate duplication of effort by allowing developers to componetize their code and then re-use it themselves and offer others the ability to use it as well. There needs to be better tools for doing this and then developers need to get in the habit of thinking about what they can turn into mashable components during the development process.

6. Specialized Systems

Gartner says: Specialized server appliances can save IT time because they are largely preconfigured, but they also are not as flexible and can’t be reused as easily. A new category called heterogenous systems is emerging that offers mix-and-match hardware. Heterogeneous systems are prebuilt and supported by vendors, rather than custom-built by IT departments.

Hiner says: IT should allow experts to preconfigure systems as much as possible and whenever it makes sense. If heterogeneous systems can further commoditize servers then it’s a good thing because it will drive down costs and increase selection. Even better are virtualized appliances, which provide nearly all the benefits of appliances without the hardware drawbacks.

7. Social Software and Social Networking

Gartner says: Your organization is an entity in the broad Social Web. Get to know Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn and other social sites and applications. Listen to the language of social media, before starting to speak.

Hiner says: Beyond just looking to send out marketing messages via social networks, companies need to look at the ways social networking can allow them to better listen to customers and to empower employees to become better connected in their industry and specialty. But beware, social networking can become a time-sink and a productivity killer when not used in a disciplined way.

8. Unified Communications

Gartner says: Enterprises are realizing that they have multiple products and vendors performing the same communications functions, and that this redundancy creates additional expense, makes it more difficult for users to learn, and increases the complexity of integration. In the next three years the number of communications

Hiner says:What is the future of the good old business desk phone? Some companies such as Cisco see the desk phone becoming a video and data device. Others see the desk phone going away and mobile phones (with both a business number and a personal number) becoming the sole voice device for most business users.

9. Business Intelligence

Gartner says: Business intelligence (BI) is one of the most powerful things you can deliver to business decision makers. Even though  we’ve all been doing it for years, we’re not doing it very well because too much of the data is stuck in silos. Companies need to get serious and systematic about implementing BI and performance management solutions because they fuel smarter decisions and better results.

Hiner says: Companies now have lots of ways to collect data. The problem is that there aren’t as many good ways to dig into that data and quickly and easily turn it into actionable reports, graphs, and dashboards. That’s what business intelligence should be about — making the data easily accessible to the employees who need that data to make better decisions.

10. Green IT

Gartner says: Consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth. Many are looking at energy efficiency or ‘green’ products simply for the practical advantages in energy savings. Some companies are emphasizing green activities as part of their social responsibility. A socially conscious CEO may have funds to support some IT changes that result in a greener company.

Hiner says: Green IT is here to stay, even in a difficult economic environment. Energy will be one of the pre-eminent public concerns of the next decade and energy conservation will be an important part of the discussion. IT departments need to act now to start measuring the energy consumption of IT infrastructure and looking for strategic opportunities to reduce it, before they are forced to act due to government intervention.

Run, Grow, Transform

Cearley encouraged the attendees to ask, “How will these technologies effect the way that you run the business, grow the business, and transform the business?” With that in mind, the two analysts closed with a sample action plan based on those three principles (see below).

[Bonus] David Cearley Discussing Top 10 Strategic Technologies at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2008

Gartner’s Press Release can be found here

Today, I attended Microsoft’s event entitled, “Technologies to Change Your Business:  How Customers Are Implementing Tomorrow’s Strategies Today”, at the Southbank Centre in London. Microsoft, was showcasing a number of successful case studies on its Hyper-V technologies. However, my prime interest was the keynote speech, presented by Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer.  You can watch the entire keynote above. NB. The video is just under 40 mins!

Ballmer delivered quite an interesting exclusive. Microsoft will announce a a new operating system, codenamed “Windows Cloud”,  at the forthcoming Professional Developers Conference coming in late October. 

“We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then. But let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud’.

Also, Martin Veitch from CIO magazine, did a good job of interviewing Ballmer. (Fast forward to 22:35 in the video to skip to the Q&A). I’ve posted a few questions and answers from the interview below. A few interesting insights on Cloud Computing were revealed.

Veitch: Adrian Mannall from Imperial College London asks, given the massive investment that corporate institutions have made on hardware and Microsoft licences. What are the key factors you believe are now going to drive us into Cloud Computing? Why would we entrust Microsoft with its cloud provision, over other competitors such as Google?

Ballmer: Well, let me take it in a variety of ways. First of all, anytime there is a major disruption you want to make sure you want to take advantage of it. If you are a company like ours I think the book The Innovator’s Dilemma says, you can’t as a company that’s established miss the next major revolution. So, we are embracing, Software + Services, Cloud Computing as hard as anybody. By the time we finish our Professional Developers Conference this month, I think you’ll have to say, that there is nobody out there with as wider range of Cloud Computing services as Microsoft including dare I say it, Google. Which in fact has a great search product, but at the end of the day, doesn’t really have much  for Enterprise email, productivity, collaboration. They are trying, they are coming to the game. But are not really there yet. On the other occasion, even though we are driving disruption, our job has got to be to also give you a clean and straightforward path forward. So, you are going to want the PC’s that you own, you are going to want to be to apply the licences that your already own.  I think we have and our prices reflect an ability to let you get to the disruptive point easily, from the place you are now financially.

Veitch:  Steve, I guess the $64,000 question from a lot of people’s point of view is, is there going to be an Office for the Web, something that really competes head on with Google Docs, Google Apps?

Ballmer: Well, those are not very popular products! I hope that we are not competing head on with those! I hope we actually compete head on with Microsoft Office. If you take a look at it, Google Docs and Spreadsheets have relatively low usage and have not grown over the last six months or so.  There’s a reason. I think what people want is, something as rich as Microsoft Office, something that you can ‘click and run’, if you are not at your own desk. Something that is compatible, document wise with Microsoft Office and something that offers the kind of joint editing capabilities that is nice in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Will Microsoft Office offer that? YES! Standby for details in the next month.

Veitch:  So, in the backend of Microsoft R&D, are there people beavering away at versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc that are purely web based? Or, is it always going to be this hybrid?

Ballmer: What does it mean to be purely ‘Web based’? Do we want them to be as only as powerful as ‘runs in a browser’? No. We want software that is more powerful than runs in a browser. Does that mean we will not have some neat stuff that does run in the browser? No. We think you’ll actually want the full power of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. and you’ll want to be able to get that simply. But, if you just happen to be in an Internet cafe kiosk and you want to do some light editing, perhaps we need to have a way to support you in that as well, inside the browser. And for today, that’s going to have to be all the detail I share. Otherwise, we have no drum roll announcement coming up here in a month!

Veitch: There’s a lot of different views on what the ‘cloud’ is going to look like? Will it be a data centre that you have and you own it yourself? Will it belong to Amazon, or some other organisation? Maybe you could even franchise it and work with rivals or peers and operate a data centre in that way. What do you think it will look like? Which slice of the pie will be the biggest?

Ballmer: I think before we are done, the answer is ‘Yes’. No, all of those models will need to flourish. I think it would be nuts for me to say, that we are going to run all of the world’s data centres. I don’t think that’s practical. But, what we need to do is a build a service that we start running and we have a model for how it can also be implemented and hosted by corporations for themselves, or by other partners.  The service, must be a ‘service’. So, if it’s not in our data centre, if it’s in somebody’s else’s? You’ll still want it updated in real time, dynamically. You don’t want it to be, like today’s outsourced model. Where the outsourcer winds up locked in, and has to embrace the past more than the future. So, we need to design ‘a service for services’, if you will. That’s kind of the way we are attacking the challenge. Now, Version 1 that we will announce this month, you’ll think about it as running a Microsoft data centre, sort of like the Amazon model if you will, and yet we know and we’ve talked already with corporations and partners about going beyond it. That’s why the symmetry between the server and the cloud is important. Because if we bring back the cloud features into the server platform, it’s also possible for any corporation then to go into instance of it’s own similar services.

Veitch: Now, is this going to be Microsoft data centre that we’ll be talking to?

Ballmer: On V1, that will be the only alternative, that’s right

Veitch: Are you going to build here [UK] as well?

Ballmer: In V1, our data centre will be the only alternative, where we build data centres up in the air. By, V2 or V3 whether its our data centre or somebody else’s. We know, we have to have data centres in many, many countries around the globe. Certainly, in this big country we know we need a data centre whether we run it, or a partner runs it.

Veitch: Why has Microsoft developed Zune?

Ballmer: At the end of the day, one of the big trends is that all content is going digital. And if we don’t have the Software + Services that are useful, helpful and valuable for the consumption of music and video, we are sort of not really a player. Now, we built the Zune hardware with the Zune software and what you’ll see  more and more over time is that the Zune software will also be ported to, and be more important not just with the hardware but on the PC, on Windows Mobile devices  etc.

Veitch:   It seems to me to be a tricky one because Apple is out there, and they have a pretty good product but also they have this kind of ‘cult following’ of people who are just going to buy, because they are Apple. That must be a frustrating thing to compete against.

Ballmer: They may have a cult following in the music business and we got about 97% of PC users using our stuff. 97% may not constitute a cult!  [Audience roars with laughter] . But I wouldn’t trade that for a cult!

Fantastic keynote, come back soon Steve.

[UPDATE] Transcript picked up by CIO Magazine

Confirmed. I will be attending the FOWA conference again in a few weeks time.  This year’s speaker list looks impressive as ever. I’m particularly looking forward to Jeff Barr’s talk on Amazon Web Services and talks from Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com and Blaine Cook, formerly of Twitter.  Of course, it will be great to watch the live filming of Diggnation once again!

• You can expect live Twitter coverage, so don’t forget to follow me.
• Photos, videos and blog posts from the both of the two days
• I’m going to be armed with my Flip Video camera, so expect the odd impromptu interview.

If you are planning to attend FOWA, leave a quick comment to arrange a meet up?

What, you haven’t signed up yet?  Click on the banner ad above.

* Special thanks to Jo and Natasha at Carsonified *

A wee bit late, but then I have no broadband access at home at the moment,  eek.

Fuel, is a new brand of conference from the Carsonified team. The conference is aimed at entrepreneurs and marketers who want to learn about and use social media tools. The speakers were varied and represented a good spectrum of start-ups, corporate business and those heavily involved within the social media space.

Highlight presentations for me were from:

1. Alex Hunter, head of Virgin’s online properties. Alex discussed how Virgin America launched an airline, embraced the power of social media tools and a community.  A great case study on how Virgin launched a company WITHOUT the help of Branson.
2. Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt – Discussing her forthcoming book, “The Whuffie Factor” (See slides below)
3. Ted Hunt from Innocent Drinks discussing how Innocent capitalised on their “inner voice” and used Social Media to build their online brand.  Innocent manage to brilliantly inject personality into their brand.

Overall, a great conference with some brilliant demos of Microsoft DeepZoom and Photosynth

| View | Upload your own

Power quotes:

“…we are serious about being honest with you. Be real, talk about the good the bad and the ugly”

“Communication out, is over…. Communicate is in…"

"If you afraid of being personal, you are dead!"

Ryan Carson - Carsonified 

“Learn to harness the Ripple effect of social media

Alex Hunter – Virgin

I will post further links to presentations and conference audio as soon as they are available

Tomorrow, I will be attending Carsonified’s Fuel conference at RIBA. Expect lots of Twitter updates  (Follow Me).  Post conference reactions and write up will follow here soon!

I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Tara Hunt’s and Ted Hunt’s (no relation, I think?) talks.

Conference Schedule

Speakers

Details of FOWA 2008 have just been released and this year’s event looks bigger than ever.  Ryan and the the rest of the team at Carsonified have put on some of the most enjoyable conferences I have ever attended. A good mix of people, speakers and workshops.

This year’s schedule is here and the Speaker List is very good. A few of the confirmed speakers include:

Kevin Rose - Digg

Erick Schonfeld - Techcrunch

Kathy Sierra - JavaRanch

Bronwyn Jones - Apple

Kevin Marks - Google

Stefan Fountain - Soocial

Blaine Cook - Formerly Chief Engineer at Twitter

Matt Biddulph - Dopplr

and many more!

I’m booking my ticket for 2008 soon, are you?

Today the Thinking Digital conference kicked off at The Sage in Gateshead. This is my first visit to the conference and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The audience is made up of mainly ‘suits’, journalists, media people, as well as academics from various universities from the UK. I’m not really sure whether the suits were really grasping many of the points that were discussed. Nevertheless, I found the speaker presentations to be very good. My synopsis follows below.

The morning sessions focused on the Future of Media. Matt Locke discussed all of the exciting work he and his team are doing at Channel 4. Matt is the commissioning editor of the education team. I’ve heard a lot about Matt over the last year. But this was the first time I’ve actually heard him speak. I was very impressed. Matt is ‘switched on’ to the social media world in a big way. He discussed how his team had been researching, what he termed the ’six spaces’ for communication and interaction. The talk addressed the challenges in working out the etiquettes for communication in these spaces:

Secret Spaces – Mobile, SMS, IM

Group Spaces – Bebo, Facebook, Tagged etc,

Publishing Spaces – Livejournal, Blogger, Flickr, Photobucket, Etc

Performing Spaces – Second Life, World of Warcraft, Home, etc

Participation Spaces – Marches, Meetings, Markets, Events, etc

Watching Spaces – TV

There’s a nice report I found on Channel 4’s website which discusses the conducted research in depth. Education Briefing: Using New Media To Engage Teenage Audiences

Next, Eric Lindstrom discussed how video content is now being brought to market using ‘multi channels’. Eric had a great quote, “The new baby of the internet is entertainment…”. We were also shown a hilarious video which you can see below. What happens, when Facebook meets the real world?   Be afraid…

The next speaker was Jeremy Silver, and his presentation focused on the music industry. In particular, how this music industry is evolving and the new opportunities which have arisen in areas such as discovering new talent, music consumption, music discovery and music review.

In the afternoon session, “United we stand”, Darren Thwaites described how his newspaper, The Evening Gazette, had embraced social media with “hyper local citizen journalism” with amazing results.  I was particularly impressed with how “community bloggers” were writing stories in their local areas and posting them on the gazette blog site. The Evening Gazette’s move into social media interestingly did not cannibalise the sales of the traditional paper copy. In fact, paper distribution increased as a result of the move to social media, very cool. 

The next speaker was Ian Kennedy from Cisco, who described some of the innovative ways Cisco is helping teams to collaborate in distributed global environments. This included an incredible video of ‘telepresence’ -  two people apparently on stage together. However, one person was in Bangalore, the other in California. Gosh, Star Trek becomes reality!

The delightful Tara Hunt, [Miss Rogue] ended the morning session with a passionate account of the “Bar Camp” concept and other innovative collaborative techniques. Tara is an amazing, lively and energetic speaker. She’s also a very groovy chick. I can’t express her passion for Bar Camp in words. So, watch the video below!

http://www.barcamp.org

Here is the Bar Camp Manifesto:

“We the geeks hereby declare that we have the means to do it ourselves, so from this point forward we are not employee 95362 or 43671. We are talented and sought after individuals who can and will find the means to break free of your cubicles and ivory towers. We don’t give a damn if you have the attention of 10 billion sticky eyeballs. We don’t give a shit about sticky eyeballs. We give a shit about people. We are independent, empowered, and en-fucking-gaged.” Rock on!

I should really should get involved in this stuff! Seriously. Bar Camps plant the seeds for changing the world….forever

Tara’s presentations follow:

Happiness as Your Business Model

| View | Upload your own

Barcamp and Coworking: United We Stand…as Starfish

| View | Upload your own

The Starfish and the Spider -  book recommendation

My good matey, the Geek in Disguise presented a number of Microsoft demos to the audience.

The demos included :

Popfly

Seadragon

Deep Zoom

Live Mesh

I recorded the demo on Steve’s camera, so hopefully it will be uploaded into the cloud soon. In the meantime, check out Ian Forrester’s video below. Steve is a greater speaker and I don’t know how much Microsoft are paying him. But Mr Neil Holloway sir, please pay him more!

Finally, a presentation made by Jonathan Harris made me stop, think and took my breath away. Yep, I had a Scoble moment. Jonathan’s awesome work made me cry with tears of wonderment and joy.

Jonathan Harris @ TED

Please check out his sites located at:

http://www.number27.org

http://www.wefeelfine.org

http://iwantyoutowantme.org

http://thewhalehunt.org

Courtesy of Ian Forrester [Cubicgarden] from BBC Backstage. Please check out videos from the day’s sessions.

Day One

Session 1: The Future of Media
– Matt Locke
– Eric Lindstrom & Steve Jelley
– Jeremy Silver

Session 2: United We Stand
– Darren Thwaites
– Ian Kennedy
– Tara Hunt

An Entrepreneur’s Story
– Sean Phelan

Thinking Digital Tech Demo
– Steve Clayton
– Q&A

Session 3: Happiness
– Helen Fisher
– Caspar Berry
– Jonathan Harris

Session 4: The Singularity
– Ian Neild
– Ray Kurzweil (via Teleportec)