2008 REDUX Another piece in the 2008 Redux series, originally posted in March 2008. The computing landscape has somewhat changed with the appearance of netbooks, but I am still waiting for the cellphone-aware PC-less PC.
Mike Egan @ Computerworld makes the case for PC’s to be smarter, with improved awareness of cell-phones, which means of their owners.
PCs would benefit greatly from awareness about the location of the user. Is she sitting in front of me? Is she out of the building? Imagine if your PC performed routine maintenance, or kicked into security mode when it knew you weren’t around. Since we take them wherever we go, cell phones are ideal devices to inform our PCs whether we’re in the room or not.
We like to set up our PCs just so, with color schemes and specific files and applications we like to use. Imagine if our phones could carry sets of configurations around and magically transform any PC we happen to be using into one set up just like the computer at home or in the office.
We work on documents, then go home and work on them some more. Why don’t phones automatically carry the latest version and upload it to whichever PC we’re using? Why do most of us still use e-mail for this?
A recent Gartner study discusses similar concepts named “Portable Personality Solutions.” Whether the media is thumb drives as in the Gartner study, or cell phones as in Egan’s vision, the core idea is the same: your preferences, your “digital personality” is always with you in your device, and is uploaded and downloaded wirelessly and automatically to whatever computer you want to use.
I like the concept, but it involves unnecessary steps: far too many uploads and downloads, a sure sign that it’s based on today’s computing model, instead of tomorrow’s. I laid out a similar but more far-reaching concept last year:
Can you spot the key difference? There is no computer. Yes, the PC is gone, the display and keyboard are there for convenience reasons (who doesn’t like large displays?) the mobile device can do the minimal processing I need since the heavy workload is carried in the Cloud. Granted this is not the solution for 3-D Modeling, Video Editing and the like, just for regular productivity work, which is what most of us use computers for anyway.
Now, to be fair, this is not really my concept, I was just interpreting Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu’s personal computing nirvana vision. Recently he developed his vision a step further (actually, it’s not him dreaming further, it’s the technology that advances fast):
Given how mobile phones pack a whole lot of functionality in a tiny package, I have wondered if the ideal server farm is just tens of thousands of mobile phones packed together. It seems to me that the semiconductor technology behind mobile devices is far, far more power efficient than the stuff that goes in servers. Partly it is a backwards compatibility issue, with servers having to run code written all the way back to 1980s, while mobile phones simply didn’t exist that far back. Partly, it is also a function of how traditional client-server applications were architectural monoliths, compared to the deeply distributed “service-oriented architecture” that is common in web applications today.
With mobile phones approaching very respectable CPU & memory capacity, packaging them together as a server cluster makes a lot of sense. Linux can run on almost all of the modern CPUs common in cell-phones, and the mobile version of Java seems actually well-suited for server use, particularly for deeply partitioned, distributed applications. Lightweightness is actually an advantage in server software, just as it is in mobile software.
I wonder how far-fetched this vision is, but have to say this former Qualcomm engineer who just spent a few millions of dollars to create two data centers which will soon provide automatic failover might just know what he is talking about… 
Update: “Spanning Sync” Charlie is thinking along similar lines: Will Your Next PC be an iPhone?
Update (4/13): Is it Time For a Portable Dumb Terminal?
Steve posted about the newly available (well soon and only if you're in the US) online versions of Exchange and SharePoint. It seems the Microsoft boffins have worked out that the change could see small businesses access a level of functionality recently only available to massive corporates (say oh ah please) like Coca Cola and Phillips. Steve recounted that;
In a nutshell, this is Microsoft offering to host Exchange and SharePoint in our datacenters for customers of all sizes. Previously available only to big businesses like Phillips, Coca Cola and others with many thousands of users, the door as now open for business (in the US at least) for all businesses.
As Ina Fried reports, Elop told the crowd that Microsoft estimates that companies can save at least 10% (and up to 50%) by letting Microsoft run their messaging and collaboration software for them.
Microsoft waxes poetic about the advantages saying that;
Some of the customers quoted today were Lotus Notes users who have chosen to move to Exchange using this Online option and for those scenarios there are potential big savings in the move from capital expenditure on hardware (CAPEX) to operating expenditure on software and services (OPEX). You don’t need to know much about the current economic climate to know that is music to the finance directors ears.
You don't say - haven't us SaaS evangelists been spouting OPEX vs CAPEX for years - all the time shouted down by the MS crew claiming that installed is the way of the past, present and future?
Anyway - enough sour grapes. I'll see your 10% ( yeah OK 10% and up to 50%) and raise you a little. It's called Google Applications Enterprise Edition and it costs $50 per user per year.
Worried that, contrary to its motto, Google is in fact evil? (And no - I don't concur with that view).
Cool - go Zoho (disclosure - Zoho sponsors CloudAve) the services comparable with the Microsoft offerings (Zoho docs/wiki/mail) are free for a sub 10 person company. Thereafter $50 a year per person sees you sorted.
Royal flush anyone?
How old is your work computer? – asks the Wall Street Journal.
Mine is a year-and-a half old. The dual-core former screamer (obviously not the one the the pic to the right) has become an average slow machine now that quad-core is the standard, but I could not care less. I don’t need a faster, bigger computer for work, in fact not even for video-conferencing or watching movies. If I were a gamer, or editing video, well, that’s a different story, but for running productivity apps, and simply managing everyday tasks, including communications, we simply don’t need super-computers.
In fact I (and most of us) don’t even need 1-2 year-old computers, either. I still have and use a 2-year old XP laptop, and even a 6-year-old faithful Sony laptop, which is pretty much limited to Internet-browsing. But if I can browse, I can also create. The “old junk” is still good enough for email, creating online documents, i.e. 90% of what most of do on our computer. Let me correct that: not on the computer, but in the browser.
And therein lies the rub. You need to get off your computers to keep them perform well. No, I am not kidding, after all, the browser is the computer now. Now, you’ve heard this a zillion times, but let me present another side: the more you use your computers, the slower they get.
Data gets fragmented, applications you install and uninstall leave garbage behind (files left, invalid Registry entries ..etc), so eventually your formerly fast computer becomes slow. This Vista-based east of mine used to have a sub-minute boot time, now it takes 4-5 minutes. But it gets worse: you don’t even have to use your computers: they get slower by themselves.
How? Again, it’s all because of locally stored information. Dan Morrill detailed the security problem:
The issues start with the very large data files that contain hashes of viruses, scans of the local computing environment, near real-time black hole lists, and the continuous updating of the security suit that protects modern computing environments.
I’m experiencing it first hand. The McAfee virus-scan that used to run under an hour now takes half a day on my older XP notebooks. But it gets worse. The two older laptops are part of the home network, and I run synchronization / backup software on them. Old habits die hard, and even know I am now a Cloud user, (Gmail, GCal and the Zoho Suite mostly), there’s a ton of legacy stuff I am still storing on these computers. So here’s what happened when I turned on the old laptop after not using it for a week or so:
I’ve probably left out something … suffice to say, I left the laptop alone for a couple of hours… these housecleaning tasks now take up all resources, not leaving any to me, the user. I
I need a radical solution, a tabula rasa. That means reinstalling windows (a major ordeal, thanks to the ridiculous OEM practice of not providing clean XP CD’s), radically cut down on the apps I install, and moving even my old data to the Cloud. I will end up with 3 lightweight, fast Net Computers, which is all I need.
I’ve used personal examples, but the same goes for businesses. Here’s a really smart CEO, Ridgely Evers, one of the original creators of Quickbooks, now CEO of Netbooks, a small-business focused SaaS provider describing how he buys refurbished, second (third) generation computers for his business.
Just keep them clean. Oh, and with all the money you save, be generous in one area: ergonomics. That means good screens (inexpensive) and comfortable chairs (expensive but last forever).
No service is a 100% available, and of course your SaaS provider’s outage always comes in the ‘worst time’, just when you have a deadline to meet… what really gets painful is when you have no information whatsoever on what just happened and how long the outage may be. Major providers like Salesforce.com and Amazon learned the lesson the hard way, and they both released their status dashboards after extended outages and the customer uproar that followed:
Free services rarely display such level of transparency, but that’s exactly what Zoho is announcing today: they created Zoho Status , a monitoring service which displays the health of all Zoho Applications – currently 24. Here’s a partial screen-print:
If it looks familiar, perhaps you followed my earlier advice on using Zoho’s Site24×7 service on your own site or even blog. I’ve been using it for two years now, and received alerts of outages that neither I nor my service provider were aware of.
Zoho took their own tools and turned it into a public availability display, monitoring their services from six different locations: Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany and Australia. For now the display is rather “boring”, being all green. Obviously we’re all better off if it stays that way 
and we have no reason to check the status site.
What makes sense, however, is to use Site24×7 on your own site, or on any service you are dependent on (you don’t have to install anything, it’s all external monitoring). As usual, it starts with a free level, adding extra paid services – the new addition today is the Enterprise version, allowing SLA definition, compliance tracking and reporting.
Finally, I’m taking the opportunity to plug our most-popular post ever, and a very relevant one: Questions To Ask Before Trusting a Cloud Vendor.
Related posts:
(Disclaimer: Zoho is the exclusive Sponsor for CloudAve)
Image by nedward.org via Flickr
While this is not a completely surprising thing for the University of Washington to do, the interesting part is how Microsoft’s web based offerings will work on a college campus, where the predominate operating system might not be Windows based, and people are probably not using Internet Explorer. The Seattle PI is reporting that the University of Washington is preparing the beta roll out of Microsoft’s web based office products on the campus, and while odds are highly in favor of the beta testing being done across all platforms, there are a number of very real issues, that need to be explored.
This is not so much to be completely supportive of computer based programs, there is much to be said about cloud computing which the Microsoft Web Based Office provides, but in a research university, where researchers make or break their careers based on what grants they get, what research they are doing, or how that research can parlay into viable companies.
The Universities research has spun off a number of companies from Bio Fuels, to brand new ways of managing library resources, doing everything on the Microsoft network might not be the optimal solution here for truly sensitive documents. From the students view point through, this is a huge cost savings, and while students will also use just about any platform they want to, odds are likely that it is either windows or apple.
There is no current version of Internet Explorer for Mac, but with the Apple virtualization process, bringing up a Microsoft Operating system will not be that difficult, it just depends on who is going to pay for it if the Microsoft product does not seem to be compatible with Apple’s own safari browser. Although Microsoft should be browser agnostic, SharePoint and Firefox or safari interaction leaves much to be desired.
Many of the active components in SharePoint do not work or render correctly in any other browser but Internet Explorer. This does though provide the university with a good foray in cutting down costs for students and staff that use Microsoft products. When the University laid off 66 workers in June 2008 due to a perfect storm of events, they were also looking at crossing over people to Google mail for the enterprise to help reduce costs. Going to the cloud for non-sensitive documents and other information makes sense as an overall cost cutting measure.
The interesting part of the Seattle PI article though was that they are going with a local company, rather than using Google or Zoho for their on line office needs. As long as the University has looked at the security ramifications of cloud computing for the general mass of people, and keeps the research side of the house out of the cloud until it matures, this is going to be a significant cost savings for them, and something that makes sense in an educational environment. Cloud computing is something that many people are doing; it makes sense for the University of Washington to do the same thing as a cost savings measure.
Yes, you read it right: the first announcement of Zoho Mail’s general availability, with Google Gears-based offline support did not come from Zoho, but from the Google Gears team, which released this video discussing Zoho’s use of Google Gears, synchronization, the Marketplace and a lot more a bit prematurely:
Somewhat used to it (see TechCrunch Releases New Zoho Service: Invoice) the Zoho folks decided to play along and released their own announcement.
This announcement somewhat symbolizes the interesting dynamics between Zoho and Google: competitors, yet collaborators. ReadWriteWeb is probably right:
But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.
(Talk about dynamics, this is the time to disclose the Zoho is CloudAve’s exclusive sponsor. We strive to be independent to the point that we barely ever discuss our sponsor here. In fact I wrote about them only once. But this is an important announcement, besides, I am actually quite critical of Zoho Mail – read on to find why – so I guess that makes for a balanced view, sponsorhip aside.)
First of all what’s in today’s announcement:
So with all that, why am I unhappy? I’m a die-hard Gmail fan, mostly for its productivity boosting features:
Zoho Mail handles the latter two well, but I am not too happy with the way conversation threading works. My business conversations last weeks, include dozens of emails, and on a traditional mail system the threads are basically a pain to put together before responding to someone. Gmail handles it automagically, and as a side-effect, it presents a lot more information on it’s list screen - since the dozen individual emails are now compressed into one line.
But we all have different usage patterns. When debating the importance of threads, I looked at other Zoho Mail users whose conversations are typically one-off, so they won’t value threading feature at all. In fact not everyone needs productivity. Not everyone wants to go through a paradigm change.
AOL, YAHOO, Hotmail are the absolute web-mail market leaders,and they should do whatever it takes to keep their customers. Their mainstream users are corporate employees who use Outlook in the Office, whether they like it or not is irrelevant, they are used to it. When they go home, they may not email a lot. Some will check their emails daily, once a week, or less. They want a personal email that resembles to what they already know. For them familiarity is more important than productivity.
As much as I hate to admit it, I am NOT the mainstream Zoho customer. I am probably more a part of the TechCrunch 53,651 (even though it’s 1M now) than the mainstream customer base Zoho targets. And if it wasn’t clear before, the current crisis brought home the message loud and clear: only businesses with real revenues survive. Which probably means that for all my yelling and screaming, Zoho is quite right coming out with an email system that meets the needs of businesses who actually pay for it. After all, this is what enables them to offer all the other apps I like for free. And I like free. 
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Steve Clayton from Microsoft is a great guy with one of the blogs I religiously follow (and I follow a lot of RSS feeds). I actually quite like his somewhat defensive stance - it must be hard working for a company that, from appearances, is reviled by all the cool kids in town, and to be at the receiving end of all those "I'm a Mac" ads must get a little tiresome. He's not blindly pro Microsoft - and can admit when MS competitors have good products offerings.
He does however have to toe the party line, hell hath no fury like Steve Ballmer spurned, and I'm sure even Ray Ozzie has a bite and a bark. Sometimes this party line just get's a little too much.
Steve posted the other day about Software+Services, Microsoft's play on SaaS saying that;
It’s taking the best of services and combining with the best of local software to deliver the experience the user wants – the power of choice. At some point in the future we may consume all of our software across the Internet but I’m willing to bet against it – there is much to be gained from using the best of both worlds. Services than run in the “cloud” of the Internet and software than runs locally on a phone, games box, PC, Mac, iPod, television or all manner of other devices.
That’s it in a nutshell. Software plus Services is a Microsoft term that explains an industry trend and whilst I don’t expect others, not least our competitors, to use that term they’re doing Software plus Services. The reach of Internet services combined with the power of local software. It’s as simple as that.
But everyone else calls it SaaS Steve - sure S+S is a Microsoft term but is there any need for yet another term? - why oh why does Microsoft insist on creating a worldwide industry standard followed by one industry player - it doesn't do MS any good, it confuses the marketplace and it's just argumentative.
Image via Wikipedia
One of the biggest selling points of cloud computing is that it levels the playing field for small companies to compete with bigger ones in terms of IT infrastructure. Well, I will go one step further and argue that cloud computing helps players in developing countries to compete on a par with those in more advanced nations. It helps both the individuals and businesses in the developing world and I want to highlight this compelling story here in this blog. For the sake of brevity, I will split this post into two parts. In the first part, I will talk about how cloud computing can empower individual developers, and in the second part, I will discuss how it helps businesses in these countries compete in a global economy.
A few months back, I was reading a New York Times story about the impact of the iPhone in places like Nairobi in Africa. No, Apple didn’t release the iPhone in Nairobi. The story is about a 22 year old developer in Kenya who developed an iPhone app using the online iPhone simulator. During the interview with the reporter, he said something that struck me about the kind of transitions we are making in our world due to rapid technological advances, in general, and cloud computing, in particular. Let me quote the developer here.
Even if I don’t have an iPhone,” Mr. Mworia says defiantly, “I can still have a world market for my work.
This is a very powerful statement about the changes technology has brought into this world. The non-availability of the iPhone didn’t matter to this person in Kenya. The Internet cloud provided him an opportunity to use an online simulator hosted in a far away country and develop the app using his knowledge (which can also be honed with the help of world class universities by virtually attending the classes through the internet).
This is not unique to Mr. Mworia alone. With the proliferation of cloud computing technologies, millions of developers from the developing countries are in a position to compete directly with developers working from a garage in Silicon Valley or Colorado or New York. In my first post, here at Cloud Ave, I talked about Platform as a Service (PaaS) and how it helps developers scale their app easily. These Platform as a Service offerings can help developers in the developing world in ways unimaginable till a couple of years back.
In the traditional world, the developers in these countries had to subscribe to a shared hosting plan to showcase their apps. For many developers, the cost of shared hosting alone was prohibitive enough to bury their dreams and creations even before they could conceptualize them. Even for those who managed to get a shared hosting plan, either by doing extra hours of hard work or by borrowing money from friends and relatives, it was next to impossible to scale their app as they couldn’t afford to rent dedicated servers or clusters needed for scaling. The economic disparity in the world had put the developers in the developing countries at a disadvantaged position, ending their dreams even before it began.
With the advent of Platform as a Service, especially with services like Google App Engine and others, the situation has changed drastically. Now a developer sitting in Kenya or a rural village in India can compete with a developer working from Starbucks in Seattle. They can showcase their app for free and, as their app gets traction, they can scale for a very small fee (which can even be paid by the developer using the money he/she earns from Google ad services or similar ad services from other companies). The developer sitting in Kenya can now build an app that can be scaled to a level of a high end startup in the Valley without any need to raise money. This is the kind of playing field Adam Smith would have visualized while coming up with his market ideas.
This could only happen due to the emergence and proliferation of cloud computing. Companies like Google can offer free computing resources which are used by the developers in the developing world because these companies have technology that helps them scale at a very low cost. The low cost of hardware and the network, combined with the availability of easily scalable software architecture, allows them to offer an opportunity to the developers and help them bring their dreams to reality.
Do you think we are now seeing a leveling of playing field due to the advances in technology? Especially, I would like to hear from developers in the developing nations about how (or whether) they benefited from these technologies. If you have a success story to share, please contact us and we will try our best to highlight your story in this space.
