msft's archive
Akamai to Make iPhone Video Streaming Smooth
Akamai today said it would provide adaptive bit-rate streaming to deliver video content from web sites to the Apple iPhone 3G and devices running the iPhone OS 3.0 operating system. Basically, using adaptive bit-rate streaming means folks can watch streaming video on their iPhones or iPod Touches with fewer stops and starts. Adaptive streaming adjusts […]
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Unisys Offers Enterprises a Security Blanket in the Cloud
Unisys, the IT services company, today became the latest with a set of products aimed at helping customers create their own internal clouds. And in a month it will offer a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that will deliver computing and storage on demand and on a per-instance basis. Like many of the traditional IT vendors, Unisys […]
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Sony CEO Stringer: It’s the Network, Stupid
Sony Walkman
Sony CEO Howard Stringer reaffirmed the consumer electronics giant’s decision to focus on networked gadgets while discussing its restructuring at a shareholders’ meeting held today, according to Reuters. Stringer said the company would lay off 16,000 workers and close eight of its 57 manufacturing sites as part of an attempt to reduce spending by […]
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Google: The Data Center Is the Computer
As folks increasingly store and access information online, the data centers powering cloud services need to be managed more like a single computing entity rather than a bunch of servers, according to a Google white paper (Google calls it a mini-book) released today.
The paper lays out the concept of warehouse-scale computers (which we have previously […]
Ray Ozzie: Cloud Platforms Are Less Profitable
Cloud services, such as Microsoft’s Azure platform, will be less profitable for the company than its software sales, said Ray Ozzie, Redmond’s chief software architect. He said the same thing back in a March 2008 interview with Om as well. Ozzie made his latest comments at an event in Silicon Valley on Thursday, adding that […]
Google and Salesforce.com Join Clouds
Google and Salesforce.com said today at the Google I/O Developer Conference that their platforms as a service will talk with one another. Using the libraries provided by Force.com for Google App Engine, developers can now access the data stored in the Salesforce.com cloud from inside Google’s App Engine. This is a powerful vote of confidence […]
Facebook’s $200M Cash Cushion May Be a Lifeline
Facebook today confirmed that it has received a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, valuing the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company at $10 billion, significantly less than it was in 2007 after an investment made by Microsoft valued it at $15 billion. In a conference call discussing today’s news, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed […]
Will Google Win When Microsoft Kills Office 2000?
Microsoft will stop issuing security updates and patches for Microsoft Office 2000 as of June. It’s Microsoft’s policy to support its business software products for up to 10 years after their release, according to ComputerWorld, and then users have to pony up for the latest upgrade if they want to keep their machines secure. For […]
Microsoft and HP Team Up to Take on Cisco
Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard said today they’ve teamed up to push Microsoft’s unified communication software and HP gear to enterprise users. The two companies are jointly spending $180 million over the next four years on what they call their Frontline Partnership to develop and market ways to use Microsoft’s communications software in HP’s machines. The partnership can […]
How the Cloud Will Disrupt the IT Status Quo
The transition to delivering software, services and compute infrastructure via the web will change the dynamics of the IT industry, shifting power away from the services players such as IBM and HP and toward companies running monolithic data center operations such as Salesforce.com, Amazon or Microsoft, according to three Forrester analysts I spoke with […]
Dell Builds a VIA-Powered Server to Cut Power Costs
Next week Dell plans to announce a server based on the Nano chip from VIA Technologies, the Taiwanese x86 vendor known for its low-power chips for netbooks and other portable computers, according to the New York Times. Putting VIA chips in servers reduces both the cost and power consumption of servers — something important for […]
Oracle Buys Virtual Iron to Beef Up its Virtualization Software
Oracle today said it would buy Virtual Iron, a startup that has built a suite of virtualization software based on the Xen hypervisor. Terms of the deal were undisclosed, but Virtual Iron has raised more than $65 million in venture capital. The company’s products compete against VMWare, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. But it’s odd […]
The Fight for the Netbook Operating System
Smartphones are becoming more like PCs in many ways, especially if you think of netbooks or mobile Internet devices as cheap computers. The underlying hardware is becoming more similar, connectivity is crucial, and the tasks people use them for are converging. But a key difference between a computer and a phone remains: the operating system.
Software […]
SpringSource Buys Hyperic for Enterprise Push
SpringSource, an open-source development platform provider, said today it’s purchased Hyperic, a move that will allow it to offer its corporate customers the ability to build, run and manage their applications together. The companies share the same investors — Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital — but Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, says the deal, the […]
Google Aims to Woo the Enterprise With Its Cloud
Google’s participation in the cloud relies less on offering raw computing power and more on offering applications such as email and a platform for coders to use. Depending on your point of view, Google has chosen to offer one of the simpler cloud experiences or is exercising draconian levels of control. But one way or another, […]
Schooner Launches Specialized Servers for Speedy Data Delivery
Schooner Information Technology, a 2-year-old year old startup in Menlo Park, Calif., today came out of stealth mode with an appliance designed to speed up the transfer of information. As online data becomes more prevalent and the patience to wait for that data wanes, the company is offering a machine that’s purpose-built to speed up […]
Schooner Launches Specialized Servers for Speedy Data Delivery
Schooner Information Technology, a 2-year-old year old startup in Menlo Park, Calif., today came out of stealth mode with an appliance designed to speed up the transfer of information. As online data becomes more prevalent and the patience to wait for that data wanes, the company is offering a machine that’s purpose-built to speed up […]
Is Microsoft Turning Away From Commodity Servers?
This week’s news of a chip designer leaving Sun to work for Microsoft could be a sign that the Redmond giant is trying to build a closer relationship between its software and others’ hardware as a way to boost performance of applications and use the underlying chips more efficiently. It may be trying to optimize […]
LBS Startups to Keep on Your Map
Now that GPS chips are becoming must-have hardware on cell phones, location-based services for mobile devices have finally arrived. They’re even infiltrating the desktop. So it’s time to start sifting through the location-aware company pitches, from newly launched apps to platforms (there’s always a few platforms). We’ve all heard about Google’s Latitude and Loopt, but […]
The Open Cloud Manifesto is Nothing But a Vapor Tiger
Late last week, we watched the big names in the IT industry play their little reindeer games over a proposed Open Cloud Manifesto put forth by IBM. I have to say, it wasn’t worth it. As far as Manifestos go, this one is pretty benign. Who cares if it was agreed to or drafted in […]
Thunder in the Cloud Over Openness
Microsoft’s Steve Martin, senior director of developer platform management at the Redmond giant, posted an inflammatory blog post last night about the creation of open standards for the cloud. In it, he touts Microsoft’s openness, proposes a wiki for the creation of open standards in the cloud, and points to a shadowy cabal of tech companies that are developing […]
SXSW Cloud Computing Panel: Clouds Still Need Work
Cloud computing and cloud services are real, but this is only the beginning. This was the message the guys who helped build Amazon Web Services, Google’s App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure clouds conveyed in Austin, Texas, this morning at South by Southwest’s only cloud computing panel. It was packed.
Given that between one-quarter and one-third of […]
With a New Server, Cisco Pushes “Comm-puting” Strategy
In a matter of hours, Cisco Systems will announce its much awaited lineup of server products, furthering its theme of unified computing. The move is part of an ongoing effort at Cisco to find new revenue opportunities that go beyond switches, routers and wireless devices. 
Verizon Data-Sharing Hysteria Points to Larger Privacy Issues
It emerged over the weekend that Verizon Wireless was trying to share your cell phone data with “affiliates, agents and parent companies.” David Weinberger read the fine print on a recent 45-page Verizon mailing to discover that tidbit, and posted a really clear set of instructions to opt out.
His worries and the subsequent media hysteria […]
Verizon Data-Sharing Hysteria Points to Larger Privacy Issues
It emerged over the weekend that Verizon Wireless was trying to share your cell phone data with “affiliates, agents and parent companies.” David Weinberger read the fine print on a recent 45-page Verizon mailing to discover that tidbit, and posted a really clear set of instructions to opt out.
His worries and the subsequent media hysteria […]
Verizon Data-Sharing Hysteria Points to Larger Privacy Issues
It emerged over the weekend that Verizon Wireless was trying to share your cell phone data with “affiliates, agents and parent companies.” David Weinberger read the fine print on a recent 45-page Verizon mailing to discover that tidbit, and posted a really clear set of instructions to opt out.
His worries and the subsequent media hysteria […]
TI Wants to Use DSPs for Low-power Computing
Texas Instruments is looking to hop on the trend of using non x86 processors in the data center, according to Kathy Brown, general manager of the company’s wireless base station infrastructure business. Last night over dinner, Brown said the wireless chip powerhouse was trying to build a software framework that would enable researchers to run […]
Telstra’s Planned App Store Is a Shift for Carriers
Australian carrier Telstra says it will open a mobile application store much like Apple’s App Store, joining the frenzy surrounding such mobile app marketplaces (Microsoft, Research in Motion and Nokia all have stores in the works as well). What’s noteworthy is that Telstra is a carrier, so its app store could become the mobile equivalent […]
Microsoft Designing Cloud Data Centers From the Silicon Up
Microsoft today is expected to announce a research and development program called Cloud Computing Futures that aims to look at how the data centers underlying cloud computing can operate as efficiently as possible. The idea behind this year-old effort that will emerge from stealth mode at Microsoft’s TechFest event in Redmond, Wash., today is to […]
Chipmakers Hope Widgets Bring the Web to TV
Broadcom said today that it would make sure content from Chumby, a nascent widget syndication effort for televisions, would run on its chips. It’s one of a handful of integration deals Broadcom has inked with software vendors to port their content to its chips. As broadband reaches more devices, deals between chipmakers and software vendors […]
Europe Backs Symbian With $630M Loan
Nokia said today it has received a €500 million loan ($630 million) from the European Investment Bank to help it further develop Symbian and keep it competitive with other mobile operating systems. The loan may change the math we’ve done on the likelihood of Symbian beating out Android, LiMo, Apple, Windows Mobile and other mobile […]
Trends to Watch For at Mobile World Congress
Next week, while most Americans are lounging about in honor of President’s Day, the people responsible for your mobile phones, netbooks and cellular networks will converge on Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress trade show. Check back on Monday for clues as to what type of devices you’ll be toting in your pockets and purses […]
Microsoft Smartphone Confirmed?
A few days months ago, Stacey reported on the rumors that Microsoft is building a Microsoft-branded smartphone based on Nvidia’s Tegra chipset. It seems those rumors might be true. Doug Freedman, chip analyst with research firm Broadpoint AmTech, wrote in a note to his clients this morning (emphasis mine):
we have been able to identify NVDA’s […]
Taking Data Privacy Day Beyond SSNs
Today is Data Privacy Day, but instead of reading about privacy violations and pledges to make good by various corporations, pick a Congressman (or woman) and explain to them that when it comes to protecting our privacy online, our laws need a rewrite. Tell him (or her) the issues go far beyond identity theft using […]
Maybe Yahoo Was Destined to Flounder
Come Tuesday, Yahoo will step up to deliver its most recently quarterly results, which I doubt will be very much fun. Still, it will be the first time recently appointed CEO Carol Bartz will have a chance to publicly address the most significant question facing the company: When is it finally going to take […]
Mobile Computing Is Killing the Desktop PC
The impact of declining desktop and laptop demand on the PC industry became that much clearer this morning, as Microsoft reported lower-then-expected second-quarter earnings driven, in part, by a deterioration of its client PC business (sever software sales are flat) and said it would cut 5,000 jobs. The crappy economy is kicking the desktop PC industry […]
Nuance Takes On Microsoft and Google With IBM Deal
Nuance Communications said today it’s bought several patents related to IBM’s speech recognition technology, joining Microsoft as one of the two the largest licensors of such technology. IBM, Nuance and Microsoft all provide speech-to-text and voice recognition products, an industry that’s growing in importance as devices makers seek more intuitive user interfaces. Even Google is trying […]
Supercomputing: It’s All About the Software
At the SC 08 show that ends today in Austin, I was struck by how much the lines between supercomputing and corporate computing have blurred. The show even had a panel on high-performance computing and cloud computing! But after visiting with vendors of all types and sizes, I realized that since supercomputers can be built with commodity chips and networking gear, high-performance computing isn’t really about the hardware like it was back in the days of Cray. Today it’s all about the software.
Heck, IBM’s Roadrunner, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, runs on AMD x86 chips and the Cell processor found in millions of PlayStation 3 gaming consoles. But it’s the software that integrates those two types of chips together that make the computer interesting. And software is what will enable HPC systems to keep moving out of the scientific niche into corporate offices and even into workstations for traders and researchers.
Reza Rooholamini, director of engineering at Dell, reinforced his boss’s keynote, in which Dell talked about the fourth wave of supercomputing. He pointed out that the next generation of supercomputers would rely most on manageability and other software features to attract customers. That will enable Dell to drive high-performance computing to the level of workstations and smaller professional nodes. “Our strategy from the inception…was how can we take this high-end expensive technology and make it available,” Rooholamini says. “This fourth wave is a focus on manageability, scalability, high availability and tools automation.”
This sentiment was echoed by John Lee, V-P of the Advanced Technology Solutions Group with Appro, a company that builds and delivers custom-high performance computers to customers ranging from Renault to Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Lee said the HPC market is attracting new customers who don’t have the experience or inclination to build and customize their own machines. When it comes to programming and operating HPC systems those corporate customers also lack the free labor provided by students who work at labs or universities, meaning the software and services piece of the equation is more important.
“Instead of a government lab where they understand the bleeding edge, now we’re talking to financial institutions and gas and oil guys who know they are behind the curve and so they rely on the vendors to make sure it will run fine,” Lee says.
So while there will always be niche players such as SiCortex, which is building custom semiconductors for the HPC set, it’s far more likely that the key to growing the market for these systems will be software — a fact underscored by Microsoft’s entry into the space in 2005 and bolstered by the software giant’s push into a desktop supercomputer offered by Cray. “Thirty-three years ago people asked Bill Gates ‘Why are you getting into computers?’” said Jeff Weirer, a senior product manager at Microsoft. “At that time Bill Gates had a vision of a PC on every desk and this is really just the evolution of that vision.”
As HPC moves downstream, plenty of vendors are lining up to make supercomputing look pretty much like personal or corporate computing. Since few people could really define a supercomputer outside of the types of jobs it does, those vendors appear to be succeeding.
SC08: The New Data Center Conference?
The folks in charge of the SC 08 conference being held in Austin, Texas, this week have trumpeted the phenomenal growth of the supercomputing show, with attendance up by almost 10 percent from the previous year, but I’m beginning to doubt that high-performance computing is driving this growth as much as the broad changes in the data center world. As Ori Aruj, CEO of switch chipmaker Dune Networks, told me when I asked why he was at the show, “This is no longer about high-performance computing and research. This is now a data center conference.”
I’m inclined to agree with him, as there are a lot of networking and storage vendors here with really large and visible booths that seem outsized compared with the HPC market opportunity. There are also attendees here from companies that have little or no business in supercomputing, such as Dune Networks, Isilon or Rackable Systems. Some of the 219 industry exhibitors (as opposed to the 118 research exhibitors) can’t possibly make enough in the HPC market to justify such a large presence at the show, although a product manager at Ciena, which makes networking gear, pointed out that HPC installations can act as an effective advertisement for other business.
So here among the 10,764 attendees at the show one might be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and a host of other consumer brands aren’t here to talk about basic computing — but supercomputing.
SC08: Michael Dell Details Everyday Supercomputing
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., in a speech at the SC08 Conference in Austin, Texas, today highlighted the democratization of supercomputing thanks to the use of standards and off-the-shelf parts. That democratization, he noted, blurs the line between high-performance computing and corporate computing, which powers services such as Facebook and Microsoft’s cloud computing service (both of which are built on Dell hardware, of course).
It also means high-performance computers will be found everywhere — even on your desktop. In his speech Dell gave a boost to Nvidia and its use of GPUs in supercomputers by announcing that Dell would add 1 teraflop to its personal HPC workstations through a Nvidia Telsa card. The idea of a supercomputer on your desktop is a big theme at the show this year, with vendors ranging from Cray to SiCortex highlighting their high-performance workstations, and vendors such as Microsoft pushing new HPC software.
Moving far beyond the desktop, Dell also announced the creation of a 96-teraflop supercomputing test bed called Project Hyperion in partnership with Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and several other vendors. A teraflop is a measure of how many floating point operations per second a computer can handle. The fastest computer today is running at more than 1 petaflop, a thousand times the power of a teraflop. The goal of the Hyperion testbed is to figure out file systems, cluster management software and networking technology in a peta-scale environment. That environment is getting closer as more power can now be crammed onto fewer machines than ever before.
As an example of the increasing power, Dell pointed to server density improvements thanks to the use of blade servers and the ability to place as many multicore processors on them as possible. He gave the example of a Dell cluster built in 2003 that used x86 processors on 1,250 servers to create a 9.8-teraflop computer. In 2008 it took 155 servers to build a 10.7-teraflop computer.
As compute power has become democratized and cheaper — Dell also noted that five years ago $1 million could buy someone 2 teraflops of computing vs. 25 teraflops today — the world is finding more uses for it. That means that in addition to the traditional scientific uses such as climate change research and gene sequencing, companies use HPC to create animated films and to virtually build products before they are ever manufactured. It also means HPC is a bright spot amid a tumbling economy.
Spurned Microsoft Scorns Yahoo
Looks like Yahoo’s Jerry Yang’s ham-handed handling of the Microsoft offer is coming back to bite him. At a Friday business lunch in Australia, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, put on the airs of a spurned lover and told luncheon attendees that he wasn’t buying Yahoo, although he might consider a search engine partnership. The Associated Press quotes Ballmer as saying:
“We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us and we moved on,” Ballmer said. “We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at $33 a share.”
Well it looks like Ballmer is reading his advice columns and standing up for his self-esteem. Either that or his lawyers have had a quick chat with him after his comments a few weeks ago, when he said a Yahoo deal still made sense economically.
Yahoo’s shares, which ended Thursday’s session at $13.96 a share, look like a bargain, and on Wednesday, Yang even said he’d do a deal with Microsoft after a search partnership with Google fell through. The question now becomes whether Yahoo would lower itself to a search partnership with Microsoft or if it will try to hold out for marriage. If the two companies let hurt feelings stand in the way of a partnership or a deal, it’s Google that wins.
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