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mojave

www.mojaveexperiment.com

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image credit - New York Times

 

Everything it getting cloudy at the moment – right in the middle of our UK summer too. Fortunately it’s not affecting the weather here today at TVP towers (our UK HQ).  Network World highlighted some of the issue in their post on Cloud computing's dark side examined and one in particular interested me – data location.

In the era of massively distributed Internet clouds, how important is it that you know where your data is? My Flickr photos – frankly I don’t care if they’re on a server in Dublin, California or Timbuktu as long as I can access them anytime, any place. If you’re a business customer you may care more though. If you’re a government you care a lot and it’s something we think about here at Microsoft.

As we rollout Microsoft Online Services this becomes a crucial factor especially when you begin to delve in to the laws and regulations of each country and how they implement data privacy.

What’s my point here? My point is that all clouds are not made equal and it’s not a simple thing to flip from being a consumer cloud vendor to an enterprise cloud vendor. The rules and expectations are very different. Flipping the other way, enterprise to consumer is a damn sight easier I’d say.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

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another fun cloud cartoon and accompanying blog post from Brandon Watson

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fam082

Welcome to Mr Pattern Matcher.

At around 22 mins in to Ray’s talk at FAM today he gets a great question from Rick Sherlund – check out the smile on Ray’s face when he answers. He seems kinda pleased to be able to answers all the nuances of Rick’s question. It’s also clear that Ray loves dialogue much more than presenting.

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fam081


A slide from Steve Ballmer’s FAM presentation. Me like :)

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Oh dear…Uncle Walt sings the death knell for Apple’s MobileMe. It’s a shame as the concept is great but as Apple has found, implementation of cloud services at scale may mean they need to take a few “Geniuses” off the bar and back to the datacentre. Meantime, Live Mesh which is in Tech Preview is pretty solid – but the Tech Preview moniker is there for a reason. This stuff is hard. It needs user testing – especially before you try to charge people for it.

Does this sound vitriolic? Well only in the same way it did when Apple announced this and people said they’d beaten Live Mesh to the punch :) Frankly they’re not the same but right now I prefer the Ozzie approach to cloud computing over the Jobs one.

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fam fam1

You would think the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting (aka FAM) would be a tedious, boring affair but for the last two years it’s been a proving ground for Microsoft execs and it’s where you can find the seeds of Ray Ozzie’s Software plus Services plans. That’s why later today I’ll be tuned in to see what Ray in particular has to say.

Let’s just remind ourselves of Ray’s FAM presentation from last year – concentrate on the slides above for the most fun.

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[image credit - Rui Curado Silva]

Does the answer to Vista lie in the desert? Brad Brooks talked at the Worldwide Partner Conference about drawing a line in the sand and maybe this is what he was referring to. I was fascinated by a post from Ian Fried at CNET today on Mojave. Here it is in nutshell

 

Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista.

Now we’re talking. This is the kind of grass roots, real advertising we should be doing. Not the canned actors (or paid comedians) telling people what Vista is like. Ina suggests this may get an airing today at the FAM or perhaps later this week. I hope so and note to the marketers – make the video “embeddable”. Give us that embed code and let’s spread it around the web.

On a personal note, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that Dave Webster is behind this with Veghte (according to CNET). Smart cookies IMHO.

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Fantastic – I expect to be using this in my presentation a lot over the next year.

Hat tip to Rob Cottingham at RWW

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Wow, I just found out from lilich and frankarr that Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley mentioned my blog when asked which Microsoft employee blogs she reads. I’m honoured!

Todd Bishop has audio of his interview - Mary Jo Foley on 'Microsoft 2.0' where she talks about her book, Windows 7, SteveB, StevenSi and more. I suspect someone in the audience asked which blogs Mary Jo reads.

I’m hoping to get my book signed at the PDC and catch up with MJF. If you’re interested at all you should read the book – there are some great insights in it and stories I’d not picked up on. As Mary Jo says in the audio, with a 90,000 person company one way to keep up is to follow the stuff she writes. If nothing else if gives you an “outside the borg” perspective :)

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Groovy…I finally got it working thanks to reading Jamie’s blog post – I just needed to change my locale to US for the upload to work. Annoying but worth it momentarily.

Feel free to friend me on Zune – I’m stevecla

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More and more Softies are getting to Twitter, encouraged by recent large events we had in Houston and Atlanta where Twitter can be way more efficient than SMS. TinyTwitter for Windows Mobile helps a lot too.

A recent addition from our UK employees is Alex Ball who manages our Technet IT pro engagement. Please add here to you follows and check out the growing list of Softies at http://twitter.com/MSTweeters – though it hasn’t been updated in a while :(

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Direction on Microsoft occasionally puts some of their articles available online for free – they write great stuff with a lot of insight so I was pleased to see they have put their recent Software Plus Services and Developers article online.

Worth checking out if you’re getting your head around S+S as an ISV.

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I’ve blogged about Brian Hall before – he’s our General Manager for Windows Live – and here he chats with Scoble about Yahoo, Live, competition and more. Brian is a great guy (IMHO) as he’s candid, smart and realistic about our position and our challenges.

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Okay, so Vista wasn’t a hit when it arrived but things are changing and as Ed Bott points out the campaign is just beginning to surface. The ad above goes to “Windows Vista: Look how far we’ve come.” which then offers this

When Windows Vista debuted in January 2007, we declared it the best operating system we had ever made. “Windows Vista is beautiful,” The New York Times raved. It’s humbling that millions of you agree.

But we know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest Windows wasn’t always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product.

We know that’s what some people are saying on the Internet. And in its early days, Windows Vista did experience some compatibility problems. But thanks to our industry partners’ efforts during the past 18 months, here’s where things stand today.

and there follow a list of stats such as

  • Windows Vista now supports 77,000 printers, cameras, speakers and other devices.
  • Over 2,700 software programs are now certified to work on Windows Vista, including 98 of the top 100 consumer applications.
  • 62% of small business said Windows Vista saves them time, and 70% said that it makes them more productive, according to an independent survey
  • 71% of Windows Vista customers liked it better than their last operating system.

 

Not a bad start but a long way to go.

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