Here’s an intro to Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform in one slide that I put together for use at Cloud Camps or other forums where you need to get the basics across quickly.  Depending on the speaker and time available, this slide could go from 5 minutes up to an hour or more.  Feedback welcome and appreciated.  Enjoy! :)

Note: I left the SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services boxes off this slide as they are not available in the Community Technology Preview at this time.  The “finished” software-as-a-service solutions SharePoint Online and Dynamics CRM Online continue to be available as supported production offerings, of course.  :)

 Note: I originally published a version of this post as a comment on the Forrester blog in response to Gene Leganza’s article here, entitled “Aligning to Emergent Strategy".  Gene’s article offers an idea for how to approach Business Architecture when business strategy is emergent – that is, when many different business groups’ actions are only recognizable and rationalized as a collective business strategy after the fact.  I thought readers here might find this interesting, as well.  

Gene, I think you are on the right track here, and +1 for bringing Mintzberg into the discussion. I like the ending vision of "street level strategy". That said, I think your core recommendation is fatally flawed:

"The solution is to go out and interview all the decision-makers who are making all the short-term decisions that will look two years from now like the strategy of 2009. Yes, all of them."

Two reasons I disagree with this advice:

1. It's not practically achievable in most cases – the world is  littered with strategies that look elegant on paper but can’t be practically executed or utilized… especially in Enterprise Architecture (EA).
   
2. It doesn't accommodate for the ontological uncertainty so often in play - whether strategies for business architecture are built top down, bottom up, or middle out, it doesn't really matter – they won’t produce the expected results if the business environment is changing faster than strategies can play out in the real world.  (For more on this front, check out my post on Ontological Uncertainty here.)

Instead, I suggest that for large organizations that have a business-IT liaison group and also an Enterprise Architecture group, these be integrated into one organization. The IT people who are responsible for understanding business issues and strategies as they emerge, and also helping business units find innovative ways to apply technology to make the business better, should be the people who drive Enterprise Architecture.

In too many organizations the EA group, even when there is a Business Architecture movement, is isolated from the business within an Application Development or Infrastructure organization, and may only interact with the IT-Business liaison people for project and architecture reviews. That doesn't work well because changes in direction, whether to avoid a cost or capture an opportunity, are often disruptive at that point. Projects may be in flight, egos are on the line, business unit and executive expectations already set, etc.

While people who understand business, technology, AND architecture well enough to flourish in this role are rare, they do exist.

Bottom line: Enterprise Architecture, and business architecture in particular are very valuable organizational capabilities – these resources need to be "pushed out to the organizational edges" where they can best make a positive impact. This optimizes for flexibility and agility to support emerging business strategies in "real time".

My 2 cents. Appreciate hearing other thoughts on this.

Suppose you were asked to design and host an interactive map for the Taste of Chicago, which gets about 3 million visitors.  No problem. 

Now, suppose you only had 2 weeks to deliver the whole thing – from first phone call to finished product.   What would you do? 

If you were West Monroe Partners, you would turn to Silverlight so your designers and developers could work together more efficiently, and to Windows Azure so you didn’t have to worry about provisioning 25 servers on top of the design and development work. 

And what would the end result look like?  Something like this.

From concept to live site, and ready to handle all 3 million visitors if needed – in 2 weeks.  Hats off to the folks at West Monroe Partners! 

Courtesy of Ina Fried, here’s Ray Ozzie speaking about Google Wave at Silicon Valley’s Churchhill Club. 

In a nutshell, Ozzie compares Google Wave to Groove, and calls it anti-web because the ethos of the web is about open data formats, open protocols, and technologies that are simple enough for people to implement themselves. 

He goes on to differentiate Live Mesh from Google Wave and Groove as being something built off the learnings from Groove… it’s web friendly, and simple enough for people to implement into their own solutions themselves.

Holy cow this is cool! 

Just announced at E3 – this is a vision based system that allows your whole body to be a controller. 

Coincidently, I’ve been thinking about vision-based gesture recognition systems lately.   It turns out that Windows 7 has an API called WM_TOUCH that allows you to bring in raw touch data from a touch screen and define your own gestures.  The advantage of this is that you get the “out of the box” Windows 7 gestures automatically, and don’t have create those from scratch.  So that’s touch – where does the vision system come in? 

Well, it should be possible to write a driver that allows a camera (or more likely multiple cameras – especially for 3D space, as is the case with Project Natal) to provide gesture capture to work with that same API.  A similar approach would let you use other techniques to capture gestures, too – e.g., you could use a special glove or a wand.   

XBOX 360 doesn’t use Windows 7, of course, but as amazing as Project Natal is, you could theoretically do your own version on a Windows 7 machine!  You just need to write that driver to capture motion and recognize gestures in 3D space.  Definitely NOT a simple task, to be sure… plan on consulting some rocket scientists…  but also not impossible.  :) 

See here for more WM_TOUCH.

For more on vision-based touch and gesture recognition options, check out these links:

• Xiroku (video)
• Albatron Optical Touch Monitor

And, of course, see here for more on Project Natal.  As impressive as the Xiroku and Albatron links above are (and they are), the fact that Project Natal works in 3D space rally raises the bar in my mind.  I can’t wait!  :)

UPDATES:

1. Turns out, Project Natal has an SDK out, too.  :)  Will post again when I have more this.
2. Good Time article on Project Natal.  Favorite quote:

"The Wii platform is totally engaging and awe-inspiring. But this is one step beyond that."

- Steven Spielberg

This VPlay app for Microsoft Surface is definitely a must-see…  makes VJing more fun, interactive, and collaborative.  Ars Technica has a write up here with a few videos + links to research papers.  This video, IMO, is the best one to really appreciate how cool this app is. 

This app from PING, called nFlight, is extremely cool.  Beautiful, sophisticated, and fun.  nFlight analyzes your golf swing to develop specifications for custom fit golf clubs.  The app performs complex simulations and renders beautiful displays that show actual ball flight with different club parameters, humidity levels, wind conditions, etc.  It even shows the leaves blowing and water rippling. 

For the richest experience and highest app performance, the PING team built this app in WPF.  Orders are sent from the retail locations where people get custom fit for their clubs off to PING for manufacturing, and PING manages updates with Synchronization Services.  A simple, but compelling example showing the best of software and services together.  :)

PING originally planned this as an 18-month project, but a year into it they were struggling.  Developing an app that was both beautiful and also computationally sophisticated proved a real challenge.  With 6 months to go before the project was due, they basically started over. 

Fortunately, they were able salvage some graphic design concepts.  Those were created in Expression Blend and handed off to developers working in Visual Studio.  You might guess how the story goes from here on out: 

• Controls that took weeks to build in their old environment were now getting done in a day
• The new workflow for developers and designers had a huge impact on the teams productivity and agility
• The nFlight app maintained high fidelity to design intent
• The PING team re-worked their original efforts in less than 3 months, and had a production version of the app 2 months after that 
• By early 2009, over 400 PING dealers around the world were using the app

For PING, the benefits of their WPF nFlight app go beyond developer and designer productivity… they make better consumer experiences practical and reinforce the innovation leadership credentials for which the PING brand is known. 

I’m a terrible golfer, but with custom-fit clubs maybe there’s hope for me?  Well, I probably still won’t be able to golf, but getting custom-fit clubs sure looks like fun!

Like to learn more? 

• Learn more about what PING did and their nFlight app here. 
• See a cool video that shows folks from PING talking through the app and showing demos here.  
• Find an nFlight fitting location near you here!

I’ve always been sort of a map nut.  In fact, I love maps (there, I said it! :) ).  Way back when I was Director of Elections for a county out in the State of Washington, I used to spend a lot of time with maps.  In particular, we had a map of the county with transparent layers that folded down showing election precinct lines, school district lines, hospital district lines, and boundaries for all kinds of other districts.  We even had a “Television Reception District” (really). 

Working with the underlying maps and the transparent data sheets wasn’t always easy.  Each transparency held data that was very precisely hand-drawn by a civil engineer (which meant we only had a couple map sets), and it was a challenge to get more than a few people gathered around the map and transparencies at any one time.  Thinking back on this experience – only 15 years ago – it’s amazing how far we’ve come in our ability to make maps and spatial analysis accessible to people.  And I’m happy to see that progress on this front continues!

The most recent advancement – IDV Solutions released Visual Fusion 4.0 today (thanks to Owen Allen for the tip).  This solution integrates with SharePoint and uses Virtual Earth as the “base map” and plots data over the map onto transparent layers created with Silverlight. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you already know I’m a fan of Silverlight and Virtual Earth, and Visual Fusion shows a great use of these technologies. 

That said, what stands out to me is the SharePoint integration the solution offers.  You can plot data from SharePoint lists – which makes it very easy for users to add their own ad hoc data.  Also, you can plot data accessed via the Business Data Catalog – which makes it easy to add data from corporate data sources.  And, you can even make Visual Fusion’s spatial analysis capability available to your SharePoint users as a web part!   This should go a long way toward making spatial analysis available to a wider audience! 

Here’s a a screenshot from IDV Solutions’ interactive demo that happens to show swine flu cases via an RSS feed.  Click on the pic below for a larger version, or click here to play with demo yourself. 

By the way, Visual Fusion 4.0 is a less common example of what Microsoft means by the term “Software-plus-services”.  Software-plus-Services is about software from the cloud, on servers, and on devices all working together well… most examples tend to focus on either the cloud, or the device (phone, PC, etc) and cloud working together.  In contrast, Visual Fusion shows software working together across server and cloud tiers, as well as composition of multiple services into a solution – a very useful solution profile! 

Use technology to make life better – for your family, friends, neighbors, customers, suppliers, partners, and yourself. 

Sounds obvious, and yet sometimes it’s not.  Take the so called “mobile web”, which excels primarily in sucking.  So often people try to do the wrong things with mobile devices.  Perhaps it’s human nature to take what we know from the web and try to move it directly to the latest new screen.  In any case, it doesn’t do much to make life better, IMHO. 

Here’s some advice on how to re-think the so-called mobile web (and thanks to Steve Clayton for the pointer).  

To re-use an example from my post here: when my wife asks me to pick up milk on my way home, I’m not really shopping – I’m commuting.  Any shopping experience I have exists within that larger context of my commute.  My local Kroger store recognized this and now puts milk at the front of the store – which means it’s more likely I’ll choose Kroger the next time my wife calls and says we’re out of milk. 

Creating a positive impact in people’s lives with technology often means spanning boundaries between compartments that exist in their lives -- showing those boundaries to be artificial -- and doing it in a way that helps them achieve things they value.  This might require experience designers to expand the way they think about the business they are in. 

A few good examples..

• The car didn’t always have a radio – bringing entertainment to driving a car was huge! 
• iTunes figured out syncing, organizing, and acquiring new music are best done together. 
• Live Search on Windows Mobile brings together searching for a business, and then finding it’s location (and me) on a map.  Plus, it lets me speak the search, and read the results.  (And yes, this was copied on the iPhone, too, but original credit goes to TellMe and the Live Search folks).
• Ford Sync lets me control my media experience in the car with steering wheel controls or voice controls, and yet also take my media with me on Zune (or ipod, or Sensa) when I leave the car.

And a few examples where things could be better:

• My car tells me when it needs service, and my phone (with calendar) is connected… why doesn’t my car propose actual service appointment times that matchup when I’m free and when the service shop has appointments available? 
  
• On the grocery store front, here’s a sampling of opportunities… (and see here for a lot more thoughts on improving the shopping experience)…
• Why do some grocery sites have up to 3 different online shopping lists – none of them connected to each other? 
• And even though the grocery store knows everything I’ve previously purchased, why is that information not available for me to create a shopping list? 
• And why is there not a task-oriented version of that list automatically on my phone so I can check things off as I buy them? 
• And when I get an idea for something to cook off of Food Network, why can’t I just click a button to send the ingredients to my shopping list? 
• And if my regular store is out of stock on an item, why doesn’t the grocery chain tell me about another store in the area that has what I need (or suggest an alternative ingredient)?
• Why can’t I check rates/availability for hotels from within my Outlook calendar -- where I do my trip planning and store travel itineraries? 

I’m not saying any of these examples would be easy to implement (but neither are any of them technically that hard, I suspect).  And I’m sure other folks have better ideas and better examples than what I’ve listed here (and I’d like to hear them). 

All of this is just my 2 cents, of course.  My sincere hope is that the slides above, and this little post, will help at least a few folks think about how to enable and empower users in ways that make their lives better.  :)

Jim Nakashima has a handy little post here on an easy way to get all the Windows Azure tools and SDK pre-requites installed.  The secret is to use the Web Platform Installer, which you can get here.  But read Jim’s post for the step-by-step guidance, links to a few hot fixes to manually install, direct link to the Windows Azure tools, etc. 

BTW, the Web Platform Installer also gives you ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, etc.  If you’re setting up a new machine, Jim’s post should save you a nice chunk of time. 

Was thinking about posting a response to the recent McKinsey report on cloud computing for large enterprises, but then came across Nick Carr’s post and he’s spared me the task.  :-)  Nick’s analysis is spot on, and is worth quoting a full paragraph. 

“Nevertheless, the McKinsey analysis is a valuable one, not least because it underscores how early we are in the development of the utility-computing grid - and why we shouldn't expect large companies to begin shutting down their data centers any time soon. Then again, I don't know of any large company that is even considering such a move today or any reasonable analyst that would suggest it. The scenario McKinsey analyzes - the wholesale replacement of a large enterprise computing operation with rented space within an external cloud - is a bot of a straw man. The real opportunity that the cloud offers large companies today is as a supplement or complement to their in-house operations rather than as a complete replacement. The cloud model offers a way to gain access to additional computing and storage capacity, particularly to cover fluctuations in demand or carry out a short-term data-crunching exercise, without having to make capital investments in new equipment or hire more workers. The cloud also, of course, provides a way to tap into powerful software-as-a-service applications that can provide substantial savings, not only in equipment and labor but in licensing and maintenance fees, over the cost of installing an in-house application. (The McKinsey analysis ignores those opportunities.)”

In short, the McKinsey report analyzes a scenario that is grossly unrealistic, and fails to consider much of the value proposition the cloud can create.  To see the full McKinsey report for yourself here.

Thumbtack is a handy little resource for organizing and sharing information you find on the web into collections.  Of course, bookmarks already provide a rudimentary way to organize things you find online, and sites like Del.ico.us, favorites.live.com, and others provide a way to share your bookmarks. 

Bookmarks and bookmark sharing services are cool, but they are fundamentally limited by the web page paradigm... and increasingly web pages are not the primary boundary for content on the web.  Similarly, we have all seen web pages where a snippet of content is especially interesting but the page as a whole isn’t. 

So the folks over at LiveLabs are exploring how to move past the page-level boundaries that bookmarks enforce, as well as how to make the sharing of content we discover online even better.   They call their experiment "Thumbtack".  You can try it out at Thumbtack.livelabs.com. 

I just tried it myself yesterday, and I found it takes a little getting used to.  But once I acquainted myself with the basic metaphors of the site it's very powerful.  As a way to learn about the service I decided to create and publish a collection of information on Microsoft's Data Centers. 

This particular collection includes whole web pages (bookmarks), snippets of text, links, and images grabbed from the various sites, and also text that I've directly typed or pasted into "clips".  Clips are the organizing metaphor for content in Thumbtack.  Each clip that I added directly was originally a separate bullet point in an email of publicly sharable information that I received from a member of the Global Foundation Services team (the people that run Microsoft's data centers).  You can tell these clips from the ones I found online because there is no link within the clip. 

To make grabbing content into clips easy, Thumbtack provides an easy to use bookmarklet and IE8 accelerator.  The bookmarklet works best to include a full web page in a clip.  To add only a piece of content from a web page into a clip, simply highlight the content you want in your clip and select “Collect with Thumbtack” from the Accelerator list and you’re done.  This works with both text and images, and also preserves any links associated with the selected content. 

In addition to clips, you can add gadgets to a Thumbtack collection.  These are little bundles of functionality that pertain to your clips.  For example, if you have addresses in your collection of clips, adding a mapping gadget will automatically show the addresses on a Virtual Earth map in a special area on the side of your screen.  There are also gadgets for different clip layouts, editing the properties of clips, and even for automatically plotting data contained within clips into a chart.  Cool!

The sharing feature is also notable.  Of course, sending a link to a collection by email is one option.  But there’s also a handy embed option.  Here’s a direct link to my Thumbtack collection at the Thumbtack site, and I’ve also embedded the collection below.  If you’d like to try thumbtack yourself, check it out at http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/ .  

And enjoy the Thumbtack collection on Microsoft’s Data Centers!

Did I just hear Kara Swisher from All Things Digital’s BoomTown blog let it slip that she agrees with Microsoft on “Software-plus-services”?    

Kara interviewed Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division, about 10 days back and asked him about his view on innovation and trends in the industry.  See interview below (the Software-plus-services stuff starts about 1:45 in). 

I think Kara works hard to be neutral and balanced in her reporting, and this interview is a good example of that.  As she discloses on BoomTown, she’s also married to a Google VP, and I’ve never known Kara to go easy on Microsoft.  So getting validation from Kara on Software-plus-services (albeit with a subtle poke at Microsoft for coining the new term) is noteworthy.  

By the way, Software-plus-services also shows up in a session title at Interop Las Vegas this May.  Is the concept starting to get some recognition as a distinct and valuable evolution from “pure-play” SaaS?

If you’re not familiar with the Software-plus-services term, it’s first and foremost an evolutionary industry trend to marry the best of rich experiences in software with services from the cloud.  Elop does a nice job explaining it in the video (at Kara’s request), and gives examples of the Facebook iPhone app, Amazon Kindle, and Google Chrome (which is both a browser and a delivery vehicle for Google-made rich client software).

Internally at Microsoft, Software-plus-services is also a strategy to lead the industry at enabling amazing experiences that bring together the best of software in the cloud, on servers, and across a wide array of “edge” devices – PCs, phones, cars, and more. 

You can learn more about Software-plus-services here.

Enjoy the video!

Patric McElroy, Group Program Manager of SQL Data Services team talks with Michael Cote of RedMonk about what’s coming with the new SDS, and where there will be symmetry with SQL Server.  Really nice interview! 

This was recorded a few weeks back at MIX09.  A few nuggets that stood out to me:

• SDS will support TDS protocol and T-SQL at v1 release.  More in the SQL Data Services FAQ here.
• For 80% of apps deployment to the cloud will simply mean pointing the deployment scripts to a new location.  The same rich toolsets used by DBAs and data programmers will still be the best way to work. 
• Improve compliance/management of departmental apps and data without the deployment friction of creating and enforcing internal centralized database hosting operations.

Just saw this fun video from a post over at Live Side… funny thing, they hone in on whether or not one of the device interfaces is a preview of Windows Mobile 7 with a Zune app.  To me, the the far more interesting thing is the qualitatively new, boundary-spanning experience they paint using technologies that are here (or almost here) today. 

Take, for example, the guy playing a video game, getting pinged with an IM (XBOX Live and ties in Messenger contacts), and then using touch UI (coming in Windows 7) to switch over to a rich graphical interface (either WPF or Silverlight 3 running out-of-browser) monitoring his cloud app presumably hosted on Windows Azure (available now in CTP, with monitoring APIs), and using the UI to literally “dial up” the capacity for his app. 

One place the video doesn’t go far enough… I’ll be surprised if someone in the future has to go in and manually turn up the capacity.  Ok, maybe in the first release.   But I think the direction of the thinking is that you will define rules that automagically keep response time under a certain threshold, up to a specific cost point… and then enforce new rules if the cost point is crossed.  For example, “maintain less than 3 second response time, up to $500/month, and then keep a 4 second response time up to $1000/month”. 

Of course, if the guy doesn’t get interrupted during his video game, then you don’t get to show the cool touch UI or capacity dial.  :)

Video: Overnight Success

See more “vision” videos and info here.