The importance of the differences among web application platforms like .NET, JSP, PHP, etc. drops dramatically under the cloud computing paradigm. Which architecture you choose really comes down to one question: what kind of programming and support resources do you have? If the answer is "Microsoft technologies", however, you should be aware of the Microsoft cloud tax.
James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft's Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many...
Microsoft spent the money, and in relatively short order had a product that was just as good as any of their competitors (not significantly better or revolutionary, just competitive). They built a large team. They spent a lot on marketing. But the people never came.
What went wrong?
I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talking about Google's mobile strategy and the insanely cool new voice-activated Google search in the Google Mobile Application for iPhone. But what I really want to share is Vic's story...
In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.
Can Microsoft's idea of "document archetypes" and "interoperable templates" be ramped up to provide a fresh new approach to both better document interoperability and better descriptive markup?
On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly gas said that the Company will release a new version of its Windows operating system as part of a new cloud computing platform in a matter of weeks. Call it "Windows Cloud" for now, but how seriously should we take his words?
Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what...
The opening of Microsoft Research's latest facility was celebrated
today with a free one-day symposium here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I think the symposium succeeded in its goals of showing that the
research facility is an independent entity that plays by the rules of
open scientific debate and funds basic research of value to society.
While the advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! does not announce a formal "merger" of the two companies, it nonetheless signals a profound shift in the online search world, and certainly increases the likelihood that the two companies will begin a more active partnership across a broad front of activities, to the significant detriment of the company that needed a partnership most desperately with Yahoo! ... Microsoft.
Microsoft's Sam Ramji promised to answer the tough questions about his company's open source efforts. Here's the big one: will Microsoft fix its open source patent license?
A long and contentious struggle came to an end this week as ECMA Technical Committee 39, responsible for the development and maintenance of ECMAScript (known universally everywhere else as JavaScript), voted to establish ECMAScript 3.1 as the next "trunk" branch for the venerable web browser language, rather than the more ambitious (and contentious ECMAScript 4.0). While the breaking of the deadlock is a momentous achievement, not everyone is happy with it.
Microsoft's response to the emerging cloud computing platforms of Amazon, Google, and Yahoo has been spotty to say the least. Now a new white paper from distributed computing maven David Chappell proposes a taxonomy for classifying what's available today and offers a map of where Microsoft may be headed.
Yesterday's Microsoft Watch had an incisive article about Microsoft's failure to compete in the mobile phone marketplace. Echoing my own assertions that Microsoft's obsessive focus on competition with Google in search is a massive distraction, while open mobile is Google's most strategic initiative, Joe Wilcox notes: Microsoft must change its priorities. The company has wasted too much time chasing...
