Anyway, this is the time for lighter blogging, and I'm taking a clue from ReadWriteWeb who came up with the idea of publishing the 2008 Redux series. There's only a small problem: CloudAve did not exist for most of 2008, having launched only in September, so I'll be picking up some of the posts from my personal blog: not the best ones, not the most popular ones - just random picks I felt are still somewhat relevant.
Watch (and listen to) this video while reading this post - it's the start of the end of the world as some people know it and here at CloudAve we feel fine!
In recent days we've heard some pretty exciting CloudOS elated news. First Good OS the other day debuted their product "Cloud" an operating system that boots directly into a browser allowing for lightning quick access to all the important things we do each day (well - the important things for those of us living in the Clouds). Good OS is built inside the Google Chrome browser and looks like a nice lightweight Cloud OS should.
Cloud gives users access to their important web-apps and most importantly is super quick to both boot and shut down, Demo vid below.
More details about Cloud will be released at CES in January but already there is significant excitement building about the product.
Then only a few days later reports surfaced of significant amounts of web traffic originating from Google employees that had it's operating system information deliberately concealed to the outside world.
Google has always said that Android, the OS already released for mobile devices, is not limited to mobiles - one can't help but think that this blocked traffic is a massive test of an extended and full size device ready Android OS. This combined with the announcement of the release of Google Native Client heralds the coming promise of a browser/OS that can harness all the power a device has to offer.
The tide is turning for traditional operating systems. I posted over a year ago questioning the future need for the operating system as we know it. As I said (admittedly somewhat simplistically) back then;
...what is an operating system? It runs a few drivers that control some peripheral stuff. It launches the web browser that allows me to do whatever it is I want to do. But what else?
Seems like a hell of a lot of disk space, code and processing speed for very little actual use. And if this is the case then there is a serious lack of design over this aspect of the way things work.
So taking a step back from this and looking at the strategic questions facing Microsoft and Google, one can't help but (yet again) wonder how Microsoft will compete in this new paradigm. In the same way that they're ultra dependant on Office for revenue and as such there are challenges to moving to a SaaS office productivity model (announcements of future announcements notwithstanding) so to is the traditional OS a significant revenue earner for MS - in a future world where the browser is the OS, where the app is no longer installed and where revenue models have become subscription (and cheap at that) where does this leave the monster from Redmond?
I normally rely on automatic Windows updates, but reading how big a monster this Tuesday’s patch is (the biggest in five years) I decided to get a head start now and let it cook overnight. Yeah, right:
Windows could not search for new updates. But luckily enough there’s a Get help with this error link…
1 result for "WindowsUpdate_8000FFFF" : Troubleshoot problems with installing updates. Click again, we’re almost there:
Oops.. none of these describe the error. As usual, Google finds more on the problem than Microsoft. In fact too much for my taste. Sc**w it, I will leave it to auto-update, whenever it may happen… I’m p****d, but not badly – after all, nothing unexpected happened. Failure, as usual. Vintage Microsoft. 
Hardly a day goes by without another new Netbook announcement, at lower and lower prices. The first baby eee PC by ASUS was toy-like ( I returned it after a day), but the current crop are quite usable mobile computing devices.
These new Netbooks are flying off the shelf, so much so that sometimes you wonder if manufacturers rush to re-label their notebooks to netbooks, just to ride the wave. Whereas the first model had a puny 7” screen, the current standard is a minimum of 8.9, but 10” is becoming widely available, and when Dell recently announced their Inspiron Mini 12, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan rightfully noted that the netbook-notebook-laptop lines have just become blurry.
Dell’s divider line may very well be at the 12” screen size, considering anything beyond that a notebook. ASUS CEO Jerry Shen clearly draws the line at 10” – a definition that fits his own eee PC line. I think all these size-based definitions are meaningless. Size truly matters, but for another reason: when you pick a travel n*tbook, you clearly need something small and lightweight, yet with a decent keyboard and screen. But that’s not what differentiates Netbooks from any other computer.
The real divider is how you use it. A Netbook is a light mobile computing device that allows you to process information, access the Internet, and that does not store a bundle of bloated programs or data.
When computers first became personal, most of us only got one at the workplace, then years later the family PC appeared– one expensive computer shared by the entire family. Now we often have individual PC’s for just about anyone at home, including the kids, and are moving to a new pattern, where individuals will have a number of purpose-oriented computing devices, be it a desktop, workhorse laptop, netbook or smartphone. The fundamental change is that we’re not really working on the computer itself, but on the Net: the computer (keyboard, screen) is just our way to access the net. As Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood says in The Web Browser is the New Laptop :
After spending some time with a netbook, I realized that calling them "small laptops" is a mistake. Netbooks are an entirely different breed of animal. They are cheap, portable web browsers.
We’re getting to the point where for most productivity task the computer’s performance or even the operating system won’t matter anymore: all we need is a decent screen and keyboard to get online.
But computer manufacturers while jumping on this hot new trend, seem to be confused. Minor flavors aside they typically offer two major configurations:
That’s not a very smart combination, if you ask me. Statistics show the return rate of Linux vs. Windows based netbooks is 4 to 1. Buyers of the cute little netbooks are happy first, then they become frustrated that they can’t instantly do things they are used to – and a learning curve with a $400 $200 device is unacceptable. Let’s face it, Linux is not friendly enough for most non-geeks – including yours truly. But why can I not have a netbook with XP and SSD?
Typical netbook SSD's are still in the 8-16GB range, while harddisks are up to 160GB. That’s a trap that vendor themselves fall into: my sexy little netbook (an Acer Aspire One) came loaded with crapware, including trial versions of MS Office, MS Works, Intervideo WinDVD (on a DVD-less computer!) and who knows what else. Once the pattern is established, and you have large storage, you will start installing your own programs and data, too, the temptation is just too hard to resist. You no longer have a netbook, it just became a noteboook.
The New York Times ran an article this week: In Age of Impatience, Cutting Computer Start Time, discussing the problem of slow boot times. Anyone who ever had a Windows computer knows this tends to get worse over time. My own Vista desktop had a sub-minute startup time a year ago when new, not it takes 3-4 minute to boot it. The two older XP-based laptops take 6-7 minutes to reboot. This well-known Windows disease can only be cured by refreshing your system from time to time. It’s an ugly process, requires wiping out your harddisk’s content, re-installing Windows, then your programs and data. PC manufacturers don’t exactly help by providing “restore disks” instead of proper OS CD’s: why would you start with a pre- SP1 copy of WinXP and reinstall a bunch of years-old obsolete crapware when the objective was to cleanup your system in the first place?
If you want to avoid the pain, keep your netbook free of applications and data: use it as a NETbook, and it will stay nimble and fast (sort of).
Talk about fast, there’s a neat solution to reduce boot-up time: Splashtop, a quick-load platform by startup company DeviceVM can put you online within seconds, without loading the main operating system. Chances are you’d be using it 80% of the time, relegating full Windows to an as-needed basis. DeviceVM charges manufacturers about $1 per system, so why is it that it’s often found in high-end notebooks, but not in the netbooks by the same manufacturer? Splashtop should be a must on any netbook.
Finally, a word on connectivity and prices: Wifi gets you online almost, but not all the time, so obviously a 3G connection is a useful addition to your netbook. But you will pay for 3G data usage, so why don’t carriers subsidize your netbook purchase, like they do with cell phones? The day will come, as the WSJ reports, HP may be one of the first to introduce such a model: H-P Mulls Service Bundles for Netbooks. When that happens, your notebook will not be too different from a smartphone, just with a larger keyboard and display.
Image via CrunchBase
In an attempt to pre-empt Microsoft’s possible announcement about their cloud offerings in the upcoming PDC at Los Angeles later this month, Amazon Web Services has announced support for Windows Server on their EC2 instances. You can read this announcement here. You can sign up to get notified about the release at AWS website. They are currently in private beta and they are expected to go public towards the end of 2008. Windows based EC2 instances was the missing piece in the Amazon Web Services puzzle after their EBS announcement and this announcement should fulfil the wishes of many AWS customers and enthusiasts.
GoGrid, the cloud division of Servepath, already offers Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 as a part of their cloud infrastructure offerings. With this announcement, Amazon has made the space competitive and now pundits will be eagerly looking forward for PDC to see if Microsoft has anything interesting to offer in the cloud infrastructure space.
With this announcement, AWS users can set up a heterogeneous environment consisting of various Linux distributions, Solaris and Windows based servers. This will also allow users to run MS SQL inside the Amazon cloud (See the recent announcement about their support for Oracle inside Amazon cloud). This puts Amazon in a very good position to convince enterprise customers to move their current infrastructure into the AWS clouds.
Let us take a moment and check out various vistas that could open up due to this announcement.
Depending on what Microsoft is planning to announce in the upcoming PDC, this field is going to get pretty competitive and exciting. Whether we like Microsoft or not, the presence of their products inside the clouds will definitely force enterprises to take a second look at the cloud computing infrastructure for their needs.
Vista isn’t really that crappy – says Gizmodo this morning. Well, I won’t tell you what I think ( I’ve done my fair share), I'll just let you decide. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words… well, then how about a video?
Yes, all I was trying to delete empty folder structures from my own computer, using an account with full Admin rights. Makes me wonder whose permission I need.. Bill Gates? Steve Ballmer?
Incidentally, I am typing this on another Microsoft product – the one I
actually think is really good – Windows Live Writer. Too bad I recently clicked
on an update link and downloaded the latest Beta version. If you have that –
beware! Don’t switch to source mode, it’s shortcut for crash… not the long
crash that brings your system down – speedy, immediate fly-away.. as if you
never had your program open.. or you work saved.
Of course I can’t
just revert, going back to a previous release of a program is typically
a nightmare…
In the meantime my little McAfee icon is showing heavy activity – this morning it forced me to reboot again, having updated itself. On this dual-core machine it’s not too bad, but on the slower, older laptop it’s lethal… it can get busy just maintaining and protecting itself, leaving me with no available resources at all. I can’t wait to switch to better Anti-Virus protection from the Cloud.
Recently I detailed the unnecessarily complex and wasteful process of reviewing a presentation: a lot of hassle, and a huge footprint, when doing it online would have been a lot easier.
Need I go on? Desktop software is a failed model. It served us well for the first two decades of personal computing, when a typical household had one computer, or none at all – and mostly, when we did not have the Net. Today having several computers is no longer a luxury, but keeping them synchronized, protected, the OS, tools and applications updated is becoming a major nightmare. Time for a better model: accessing your apps and data from anywhere, anytime (as long as you’re connected), never get obsolete version, and easily collaborate as you need it.
Yes, I know we’ll always have at least an OS and a browser of some sort..
although if Google has their way, the bowser will become the OS. And if
innovators like DeviceVM have their
way, I can use a Splashtop-blessed
Netbook or lightweight
Green PC and even feel good about it.
