Finbarr McCarthy

Cloud Computing & Social Media (Technologies of The Future)

Posts Tagged Microsoft

Has Cloud Computing Killed The Operating System?

Oct 3

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 9 Comments

The Operating System originated as a common set of platform management abstractions, to free software developers from the complexity of managing hardware. To many of us that concept has become somewhat distant and when we think OS we usually think in terms of UI or GUI (Graphical User Interface). Most of the current generation of operating systems have become exceedingly bloated primarily because, their creators have been pushing the notion of the OS as a competitive differentiator for many years.

In the early days computers had a single CPU and the obvious thing to do was to build an Operating System that could run many different applications, preferably at once. This created the need for more functionality to manage resources and also manage the applications themselves. Added to this, many OS vendors started to bundle even more widgets, gadgets and applications to their offerings and hey presto - it takes me several minutes to wait for my computer to start-up anytime I want to do anything, this despite the fact that all I want to do is get at Firefox.

My gut-feeling is that Cloud Computing is about to kill the operating system as we know it. The fatal blow has in-fact already been dealt but the demise will not likely be recognised for some time yet.

Desktop Operating Systems

With increasing adoption of Cloud Computing and SaaS it seems to me that, increasingly the tasks I want to complete on a computer are presented to me in a browser. My browser runs on top of my operating system which has a bunch of features and complexity that I would rather forget about. In order to run my operating system with all its bells and whistles the hardware I have is, no doubt vastly over-specked - yet it still takes a number of minutes for me to get going every-time I start-up (Windows Vista in this case is shamefully bloated and slow).

Google recognised this frustration and in July of this year came out and announced its Google Chrome OS. My understanding of Chrome OS is that, in essence it will be a stripped out and hardened Linux Kernel with the ability to run a browser and little or no extra functionality. Google claim they will have users up and running in seconds and promise an end to security vulnerabilities, viruses and malware. This sounds like a good proposition to me - and it will be free, better again.

Meanwhile Microsoft came out and told the world about its research on Gazelle. Gazelle is a research program Microsoft are running under the title “The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser”. Its interesting that Microsoft’s approach is still underpinned by Windows 7, which I admit I haven’t seen or tested yet, but I have my concerns about its bloat-factor having observed many new Microsoft OSes over many years.

I am not aware of significant research efforts by other companies into offerings that will compete head-on with Goggle’s Chrome OS or Gazelle, however many Linux OSes are very nicely placed to jump into this changing eco-system and capture significant market share. In my view there are three primary reasons that have, thus far stopped Linux from taking a much more significant desktop market share;

  • The Ugly Factor
  • The inability to install and support mainstream applications
  • The lack of branding and consumer awareness



    • Breaking this down a little bit, most Linux OSes are extremely robust and efficient platforms, the GUI in most instances runs as an added application but in my view is pug ugly. So simply by removing the GUI app and running your choice of browser directly on the OS possibly provides a realistic alternative. As mentioned previously, most of what today’s and tomorrows users require is presented to them in a browser, so why bother with the rest of the OS? I guess this is what Google are doing with Chrome OS - but with independent Linux offerings users are not necessarily tied to a specific browser. The problem of installing mainstream applications is quickly disappearing with browser delivered SaaS models, and finally the branding issue? Perhaps there is room here for Firefox, who have a very significant browser market share compared to the resources available to them to jump in and disrupt the market?

    So in conclusion, perhaps the Desktop Operating System isnt whats under threat here, maybe we will see the OS going all the way back to its roots again becoming a set of platform management abstractions. Maybe then its the GUI that is at stake? This could explain why Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO) recently went on the offensive talking trash about the Google Chrome OS and Apples Safari browser, calling them “rounding errors”. In the same breath he also noted that Mozilla’s Firefox was (in the browser market) the most successful so-far. Evidently what is really upsetting Balmer is Google’s recent announcement of its “Internet Explorer Chrome Frame Plug-in”, this according to Balmer is Google replacing Microsoft’s browser rendering engine without telling you, and he calls it an “unanticipated competitive attack factor”.

    Microsoft after-all has reason to be concerned, there is a lot at stake here, in their fiscal year 2009 they had revenues of almost $15 Billion from selling their Operating Systems. 80% of which was received from OEM’s (computer manufacturers who bundle windows on their products). If there were to be any significant shift in this pattern it would have an immediate impact on what appears to be Microsoft’s most profitable business line. Additionally the broad market penetration of Windows Desktops eases the way for many of Microsoft’s other products.

    Server Operating Systems

    Over on the server OS front there is likely to be an even more interesting evolution over time. While many IT Departments and Hosting Companies have for the past couple of years put significant investment of time and resources into virtualising their server infrastructure, little has changed because most of this virtualisation still uses the principle of running a single Server OS on a single virtual machine (basically swapping bare-metal for VM’s).

    On the Cloud Computing front Amazon offers an excellent alternative to in-house virtualisation with its EC2 offering and recent analysis by Guy Rosen estimates the number of Amazon EC2 instances launched daily in their us-east-1 region at 50,000 (bear in mind that this is only one of a handful of regions for Amazon EC2).

    However many commentators are predicting that Virtual Machines and even Amazons EC2 are only a stop-gap measure on our way to something completely different. The argument is that the Operating System as the owner of a single servers hardware (either bare-metal or virtualised) will lose dominance over time as the the abstractions of computing, storage and networking that enable resource pooling, multi-tenancy, high availability, dynamic workload balancing and the other benefits that arise from a virtualised infrastructure become a reality.

    This concept is already taking root with a number of vendors. Noteably Microsoft’s Azure platform decouples the infrastructure completely from the application layer providing flexible virtualised compute, storage and networking capabilities for developers. Currently Azure only supports .NET but as I understand it, support for Ruby-on-Rails, Python and PHP will be added in the near future. Over at Amazon there are 2 services in this category that are also gaining traction, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3, SimpleDB is a virtualised database service and S3 is a storage service.

    With all these compute, networking database and storage resources being presented to us as virtual layers and the availability of other major cloud computing offerings such as Google Apps, SalesForce.com, etc., etc., it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to see where the traditional server operating system fits into the IT puzzle of the future.

    As always, your comments are welcome.

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    Will Cloud Computing Define Your I.T. Career?

    Jul 11

    Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 7 Comments

    Despite what many people neatly ignore and categorize as “hype”, cloud computing is slowly but steadily gaining ground. Surprisingly, a recent Rack Space survey indicated that 67% of small business and 47% of mid sized businesses in the U.K. were not familiar with the term “cloud computing”. I am guessing here but, I think the reason that so many IT professionals are not yet familiar with this technology shift is simply down to the fact that they are swamped.

    As I have mentioned in previous posts, the current economic headwinds haven’t dampened the insatiable appetite for computer storage space and resources and with tighter budgets many I.T. folks are running flat out on daily tasks and are thus fully occupied in maintenance mode, this doesn’t leave any time to take a step back and consider strategic directions for the medium and long term. I have also seen some evidence to suggest that cloud computing is actively being resisted or ignored because some I.T. practitioners see it as a threat to their jobs. I can certainly understand the sentiment, after all, would you walk into your boss’s office and say;

    Ever hear of cloud computing?

    Ever hear of cloud computing?

    “hey boss!, you know all this money you pay me to keep all these systems going and all the money we spend on technology, what would you say if I told you that you don’t need to pay me any more and you can buy the same services for a fraction of the cost using this thing called cloud computing?”

    Interesting scenario, huh?

    In reality this situation is nothing new in I.T., as always, the technology keeps changing and getting cheaper, and tasks that start out requiring specialist I.T. skills to complete soon become mainstream, get packaged with proper user friendly interfaces and are passed off to consumers and end users to take care of themselves. In the greater scheme of things, its not that long ago that I.T. professionals were paid to take a computer out of a box and plug it in, or when an I.T. guru was required to plug a modem into a P.C. and setup an internet connection for an end user. A typical end user today is capable of doing as much (or more) as many I.T. professionals just a decade ago. Think about it, most users today can go down to their local P.C. store, buy their equipment, setup home networks, connect to the internet and create or update their web-pages / blogs or social network profiles, etc.

    One interesting trend over the past number of years has been the divergence between what has been seen as corporate systems and consumer systems. For example, most corporates have adopted Microsoft Exchange or Lotus notes as messaging systems while consumers have tended to opt for Yahoo, HotMail or Google Mail. Anyone familiar with implementing and maintaining corporate messaging systems will be well aware of the complexity and cost of this endeavor and most end users don’t understand why they are restricted to small storage limits at work, especially when they can get 50 or 100 times more storage space on their personal email systems. Similar examples can be found all across the spectrum of enterprise systems. The easy (and often free) availability of consumer systems combined with restrictions imposed on end users by corporate I.T. has ignited a trend where many users tend to circumvent corporate systems in favour of their personal services.

    Meanwhile there has been something else very interesting happening in the divergent paths between corporate and consumer technology / systems. While corporate systems have in my view been getting more and more complex, costly and bloated, consumer systems have become far more simple and usable. Take the example of Google Docs V’s Microsoft Office, I have used office for many years and like most everyone else, upgraded to the latest version (2007) as soon as it became available. In honesty I find the newer MS Office experience very frustrating because of a number of things including, changed file formats (I have to be mindful when sending documents to others who may not be able to open them) and a whole bunch of new complexity and features that I don’t need, want or use, added to this is the fact that I have to email myself documents to take them from home to work (or vice versa) and I frequently run into versioning problems with documents stored in many places. More recently I have started using Google Docs, Its free, simple, intuitive and I can get at my documents from wherever I go, looking through the menus I can appreciate that the functionality is far more limited than Microsoft Word, but I haven’t yet found anything limiting about it. I have stopped bringing a laptop with me when I travel and instead tend to do everything I want through an internet browser.

    This all brings me to the point where I am wondering if we, as an I.T. community need to “press the reset button”?

    Are we really adding value to the organisations which we serve or are we so immersed in what we do, that we simply keep blindly doing what we have always done? I appreciate that every organisation is different and many companies need to run very specialist and perhaps niche applications, however, I also believe that the great majority of corporate computer users have been given tools that are, outdated, bloated and not easy or friendly to use. To add insult to injury, we continue to invest heavily in time and money to keep many of these systems alive while users circumvent these systems and embrace technologies and services that we should probably be embracing instead of resisting.

    This brings me to the main point I wanted to make, if the I.T. community continues to resist (or ignore) the adoption of cloud computing (where it makes sense), how long do you think it will take before the I.T. department and the people working in I.T. are bypassed and become irrelevant within a company? Many core services that I.T. departments provide to a company are now available to savvy end users who can actually provision the services themselves and get better service at a better price. The same trend is rapidly emerging in more significant ways, particularly in provisioning virtual servers on Amazon AWS, All you need now to setup a server farm is a credit card and a web browser.

    It is my belief that we need to re-examine and understand what our users actually want to achieve. After all, does your boss, or the average employee at your company really care what server hardware you use? or what type, let alone what version of a particular type of software you use? I don’t think so! Most people just want to do their day jobs and not wrestle with the systems they use.

    In conclusion, my advice would be to look around at the various different solutions you can use to help simplify your users life and pluck up the courage to walk into your boss’s office and suggest how you can make your I.T. department, your systems and your users a whole lot more efficient while simplifying the technology and reducing costs. Wouldn’t it be better for you to suggest this to your boss today, as opposed to him/her telling you that he/she has done this in six months time?

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    The Case for Google Apps (gmail) V’s Microsoft Exchange

    Jul 5

    Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 5 Comments

    Many IT departments and companies are either currently unaware of, or adopting a “wait and see” approach to cloud computing. Unfortunately the cloud computing concept still seems to be somewhat abstract for some IT professionals who are running flat-out to maintain existing systems. Additionally, current budget and resource constraints at many organisations are preventing network and IT managers the time to adequately explore the benefits that cloud computing could bring to their organisations. In light of this I thought it might be beneficial to bring forward a very specific solution to a very common problem.

    Despite the economic slowdown, demands for enterprise messaging, collaboration and storage space continue to grow at a phenomenal pace. IT departments (like everyone else) have had to make do with tighter budgets and this has resulted in reduced capital spending on servers and systems. Paradoxically the reduced spend has caused the total cost of ownership for systems like Microsoft Exchange to grow higher because IT engineers are now spending significantly more time trying to free up storage space and keep older systems running smoothly.

    The age old solution to this problem would be to ride out the recession and once the economy gets back on track look at freeing up some budget to get back on the hardware and software upgrade treadmill. However there is another, I believe better solution.

    Move your enterprise to Google Apps (Gmail, Google Docs, Etc.)!

    I can already hear the screams of heresy coming from the hallways, but before you tie me to a stake, hear me out. I accept that Microsoft Exchange has been the de facto standard for enterprise messaging for many years. When Microsoft Exchange came to prominence it offered a much better solution than pretty much anything else on the market. However, since then the requirement has grown for a myriad of add-ons and extensions to Exchange to scan for viruses, block spam, archive emails, add legal disclaimers, add signatures, filter content, compress attachments, etc. Depending on your environment, the list is pretty staggering. The simple truth is that the add-ons can cost your organisation as much as 50% of the cost of the Exchange environment itself. Indicated T.C.O. figures for Microsoft Exchange vary wildly from $24 to $72 per user / month (median $36), this does not include the listed add-ons which can typically cost $8-$12 extra per user / month.

    Enter Google Apps, the price? $50 per user / year ($4.16 per month). For your 50 bucks you get a brand-able solution with, email, calendar, project & team site creation, document and video collaboration & sharing and Google Talk (instant messaging, voice over IP and video conferencing). The solution works with your own domain name(s) and has all the extra features built-in (virus scanning, spam filtering, content filtering, archiving, disclaimers etc, etc.) There are a host of other benefits such as 25 GB email accounts for everyone and best of all it will work through the familiar web client, your outlook client, your iPhone, windows mobile device or your blackberry enterprise server.

    Setup of this service is also extremely easy and can be done for a small organisation in a matter of hours or a large organisation in a couple of days. Beyond setting up users initially there is virtually no maintenance with the exception of additions/deletions or other routine changes.

    The move from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps could potentially save your organisation $502 / User / Year.

    When I started looking at Google Apps I immediately thought it would be ideal for S.M.E. but I soon found case studies on very significant corporate users (Genentech & G.E.) and Local Governments such as The District of Columbia which has 28,000 employees on the system.

    Here is a video on the D.C. Government implementation.

    In conclusion, I appreciate that moving your enterprise messaging and collaboration solutions onto the cloud is likely to be an emotive issue but I am finding it difficult to find any significant reason to keep it in-house. I would like to hear your thoughts on this topic (whether you agree or disagree).

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    The Future of Cloud Computing

    Jun 16

    Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing, Future Web | 1 Comment

    I have seen a good deal of commentary lately on cloud computing where people (who should be “in the know”) have put forward opinions that cloud computing is hosting by another name.

    To put the record straight, yes you can use cloud computing as an alternative means of traditional server or website hosting, but it is so much more than that.  Unlike traditional hosting arrangements cloud computing offers many different layers and opportunities right now, and many new layers and opportunities are either just unfolding or yet to be discovered.

    We are all familiar with SaaS (Software as a Service).  Well Cloud Computing readily provides the ability to use the cloud as PaaS (Platform as a Service).  One of the massive benefits of Cloud Computing is the flexible infrastructural platform it provides and the ability to change computing resource from a capital intensive / skills intensive investment into a utility.  Just like your electricity or gas supply, plug in and pay for as much or little as you use.

    There are a number of industry heavy-weights investing heavily right now in cloud computing, including Amazon, IBM, Google, HP, Dell, Microsoft & Others.  All of these providers currently have their efforts concentrated on providing standalone public clouds.  Meanwhile VM Ware, and Red Hat are currently offering customers the ability to build private cloud computing platforms.

    My view is that cloud computing platforms will soon reach a tipping point where it will no longer be at the cutting edge but instead will be the de-facto mechanism used for providing computing resources.  However, in order for this to happen there is one significant hurdle overcome first, that is, the ability for all the public and private clouds to interconnect seamlessly.  Consider it the “Inter-Cloud”.  For a comparison consider the growth of the internet, firstly there were a bunch of private networks that were not connected to each other, then with the emergence of the internet private networks began to connect to the internet using gateways.  Before too long the emergence and broad adoption of standard protocols (TCP/IP) eliminated the requirement for gateways and everything became connected to everything.  Something similar is inevitable for cloud computing and it is probably going to happen sooner than you think.

    One technology to watch here is Red Hats MRG.  MRG stands for Messaging Real-Time Grid and is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  With technologies like MRG, Cloud Computing Consultants can now offer clients incredible computing power from existing server and desktop inventory by enabling scheduling to local and remote grids, rented cloud capacity and cycle-stealing from desktop PCs.

    This is the start of something big, next time I post I will outline some very specific ideas I have on how these changes not only affect the IT industry but are also going to have a dramatic affect on how the world works.

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    Zombie Thinking In The Digital Age

    Jun 7

    Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in OnLine Marketing | 1 Comment

    Zombie thinking is mindlessly doing what has always been done while ignoring diminishing returns.  It might seem like an odd opener but it seems to be happening alot lately.  Consider General Motors, for many decades the ultimate blue-chip company ground into bankruptcy because of zombie thinking.  There are any number of explanations for GM’s fate, but the main reason seems to stem from the fact that they didn’t listen to their customers and continued to produce products that they didn’t want.

    On a smaller scale many companies suffer from a similar fate with their online efforts.  The difficulty starts out with the assumption that online marketing is the same as traditional marketing.  This view was OK with Web 1.0, but with the phenomenal adoption of Web 2.0 all the rules have changed.

    It’s difficult to define the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in a single sentence - One simple explanation is Web 1.0 was a monologue and Web 2.0 is a dialogue.  Traditionally, brand owners created, distributed and controlled the message, it was very much a one-way feed.  Nowadays the situation is very different, consumers now have a real voice, both individually and collectively.

    Yes you can try to get hip by creating a company blog, a facebook page and even a twitter account.  You can pull out your brand guidelines book and customise these pages with your company colours and fonts, but is anyone actually looking?

    “People communicate with people on Social Media, not with companies”


    So you decide to let some of your employees start communicating with your customers via blogs, twitter and facebook, you pull out your brand guidelines book, but you can’t find the section that deals with this, sounds familiar?

    The truth is that the majority of companies have not yet gotten around to deciding how to deal with this opportunity, some have taken the step of blocking it because they don’t understand it (this happened many times before - remember companies blocking internet access and email because it was only a distraction).

    The road to success with Web 2.0 is a challenging one.  If you accept the basic principle of putting your people out in front of your brand you will have many difficult questions to address.

    In addition to the areas you will already have covered such as, tone of voice, phrases to own, tense etc, you will now also need to provide guidelines on grammar, personal exposure (what you can reveal about yourself), politics, religion, interests, passions, etc.  Additionally, you need to start a campaign to monitor mentions of your company on the wire and decide whether or not your policy is to respond to every post, how to deal with criticism and even what to do with positive mentions and compliments.

    There is also the discomforting fact that what your employees write doesn’t get sanitised by your PR and Legal departments, this actually gets at the essence of what Web 2.0 is about, if every statement were to be sanitised through the corporate mill there may be no message left at the end of it and after all your customers are looking for human interaction not polished corporate spiel accompanied by a ten page legal disclaimer.

    One company who has stepped up to this challenge particularly well is Microsoft, for many years Microsoft was the company that everyone loved to hate, over the past couple of years Microsoft has used the power of its own people to put a personal face to the company and re-vitalise the brand in the eyes of its customers.  They refer to each of their employees as “Brand Ambassadors” and give them the responsibility to represent the Microsoft brand to the world in a very personal way.  For one, I think they have achieved remarkable success.

    Here are a couple of tips to guide your efforts;

    • Dont ignore Web 2.0, its not going away anytime soon
    • Do participate in conversations but don’t try to dominate
    • Do use Buzz Monitoring Tools
    • Do update your brand guidelines to set some ground-rules for your employees engaging with customers on-line
    • Dont be afraid of making the odd mistake, afterall we are all human
    • Do let people have a little fun with this

    “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Charles Darwin

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    Blue Skies For Clouds Computing?

    Jun 30

    Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | No Comments

    Increasingly companies are realising the vast potential cloud computing has to offer.  Like many others the New York Times has recently created a new website which gives users a fully searchable archive of all the articles it published between 1851 and 1922, that’s about 13 million articles.

    More impressively, it has done this without installing any new servers or bandwidth.

    How did they do this? Simple! They used Amazons cloud computing service offering.

    Cloud computing is one of the most promising new uses of technology we have seen in a long time.  Just a few years ago if you wanted to do something on the web, you needed to go out and buy servers, software, etc - get it all connected to the internet and then start worrying about your project.

    With the advent of Web 2.0 and the usage of “The Network as a Platform” this has all changed.  Cloud computing has the nice advantage of having software, hardware and bandwidth as a pay as you go service.

    Many organisations are now looking at cloud computing and realising that it makes a lot of sense, instead of having to dedicate precious resources keeping their own data centres running they can opt to pay someone like Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Dell a modest fee to worry about keeping all the hardware, infrastructure and software running 24/7 for them.

    It probably works out a lot greener and less expensive too.  Traditionally companies scaled their data centers and bandwidth to deal with their busiest periods.  This often meant way over specified connections and processing power that was well under utilised 95% or more of the time.  As we all know, servers running waiting for someone to use them cost us all a lot in terms of money and carbon footprint.

    Google has been a big proponent of this technology, providing services like GMail, and it Google Apps which provide email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets and storage to any web connect device - no software required.

    Since Google launched it enterprise apps in early 2007 it has already in excess of half a million subscribers using the service.  Microsoft has just followed suit launching “Office Live” and Microsoft On-Line.

    These are excellent tools for individuals and small businesses who don’t want to invest in all the software, servers and data centers typically required to run simple tasks like email and word processing.

    But what about larger enterprises? It is true that there is some resistance to implementing these services, however, take Coca Cola for example; It has recently signed a deal with Microsoft that will effectively move all it email and documents off its own network and onto Microsoft Live.

    There are some concerns about security and data sensitivity, after all if you embrace cloud computing you do need to trust the company providing you with this service and ultimately that is going to be an individual call for each company.

    Trust me, this is one of the biggest developments since the sliced pan.

    www.amazon.com/aws

    www.google.com/apps

    http://www.officelive.com/

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