Google Commerce Search Seeks Revenue From Online Retailers

Posted on November 8, 2009 by dsarna

Reuters reported that Google said it would begine selling Google Commerce Search at a starting price of $50,000 a year. The product allows online retailers to have Google operate the search capabilities for retail sites on Google’s own cloud-ased  computers, using a data feed that the retailers provide it of their product catalog.

Google, the leading search engine for Web pages, can perform searches of a retailer’s catalog significantly faster and better than what is currently available on many retail sites, according to Google Enterprise Search Lead Product Manager Nitin Mangtani. “Retailers convinced me that there’s a need for this type of product,” Mangtani said, adding that sluggish search performance on retail sites can send shoppers elsewhere and hurt a retailer’s sales conversion rates.

The $50,000annual  price includes up to 10 million search queries, Mangtani said. The price for retailers whose sites have a volume of more than 10 million will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, he said.

While Reyters quotes Gartner analyst Van Baker who said a recent study by his group found that very few large Internet retailers plan to make any changes to their basic e-commerce technology and “there’s not a whole lot of evidence that they’re looking to switch,” the GoogleGazer thinks many of the large and mid-sized retailers will find it very cost-effective to switch.  No chance however, that the Amazon’s and Wal-Marts of the world will switch, as they have the infrastructure, resources and corporate egos that rule out any prospect of outsourcing to Google.

Mangtani thinks there is plenty of demand from the top 1,000 retailers in key markets like the United States and Western Europe. Footwear maker Birkenstock USA is the first customer officially using the product and Mangtani said a “good number” of retailers have been testing it over the past three or four months.

Of course, if a lot of retilers end up using the product, Google will have an interesting window into on-line buying habits, and in the long run that will be worth more to them than the revenue from hosting.

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Google Sees Google In Every Cloud (and Cell Phone)

Posted on October 28, 2009 by dsarna

Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google told Forbes that Google’s strategic thinking is dominated by the confluence of ever-increasing computing power (as seen in what an Android device can do), mobile connectivity (which provides real-time data, as well as access to the network) and cloud computing. “If you put all three of those into designing software, it changes things,” he said.

He demonstrated with a new application, called Maps for Mobile, which is capable of a number of things unavailable on standard GPS systems, including real-time traffic information, access to photographs of landmarks (like highway ramps or a destination), and a strong voice-activated search function. In a demonstration at the Googleplex, the system correctly responded to the voice request “navigate to the museum in San Francisco with the King Tut exhibition” with both directions, drive time and a green indicator that the traffic was light. Had the traffic been heavy, the color would have turned to yellow, then red, and the projected drive time would have increased.If you have significant offerings in them, you can also hold a strong competitive advantage, Forbes noted. “The voice recognition system of the app, and the computing that can turn the mention of a current museum exhibition into a precise address, are both proprietary to Google. So are the app’s street view images and the stored knowledge of various locations, including personal favorites, that the app can zoom in on.”

“The general narrative over the next year,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, “is that “mobile platforms are powerful things that will connect with the cloud. Don’t limit your imagination to this set of problems.”

Surely Google won’t.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Google, Google Maps, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Future of the World According to Google

Posted on October 28, 2009 by dsarna

ReadWriteWeb reported on how Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions the Internet five years from now. He spoke in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009. He sees the Internet dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time.

Highlighted comments include:

  • Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
  • Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
  • Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
  • Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
  • “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.

  • “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
  • There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
  • “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
  • It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Filed under: Google | Leave a Comment »

Introducing “Eye on the Cloud”

Posted on September 7, 2008 by dsarna

The GoogleGazer promised to track the comings and goings of Google, its friend, and its enemies. As Google has grown, and its interests have grown, its has become challanging to fulfill that mission in a single blog. Therefore, please welcome the Cloudgazer, and EyeOnTheCloud, which will focus on Cloud Computing, On-Demand Software and Software as a Service. To Subscribe : Posts (Atom) or by email, Subscribe to Eye on the Cloud – On-Demand Software & Cloud Comp by Email.

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Investment in Cloud Computing, SaaS (On-Demand Software) Accelerating; SalesForce.com Leads the Way in Innovation

Posted on August 31, 2008 by dsarna

A cloud, of course, is a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. A cloud is also a visible mass attracted by gravity. Lately, Cloud Computing has been exerting a strong gravitational pull of its own, and has been attracting a whole mass of money. Cloud Computing is often the domicile of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, – applications which run in the Internet “Cloud” – and neither the Enterprise nor its users need worry about “managing” resources to meet fluctuating demand.

After a lot of hype, SaaS is now solidly coming into its own, and is now increasingly being renamed “On Demand” software, which is certainly more euphonious. As we shall see, some of the same types of applications that originally fueled the”time-sharing” boom in the late ’60s and early ’70s are now leading the explosive growth Cloud Computing, but with some important differences.

Allow the curmudgeonly GoogleGazer a short walk down memory lane. As a 19-year old, back when Lyndon Johnson was still president, the GoogleGazer read an article in Business Week which reported that all you needed to do to attract venture capital money was to walk down Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, CA and shout “time-sharing.” Venture money would pour on you. The idea back then was that we all needed slices of computing “on-demand” but only for short bursts of activity. Of course, back then the Teletype Model 33 was the “terminal” of choce, and its speed was limited to about 30 characters per second (300 bps), which certainly limited the use of time-sharing to applications requiring but limited date entry. Payroll data entry from branch offices, sales force management, light accounting and modeling were the prime applications. Ultimately, however, the PC revolution put the kibosh on timesharing, as for a small one-time investment users were no longer tethered to a money-guzzlng mainframe via maddeningly slow lines of communication charged for by the minute.

The concept behind timesharing, “hosted applications,”  had enduring merit. In 2004, when we first started talking about “hosted applications,” Laurie Sullivan noted in Information Week,

Hosted enterprise applications are nothing new. They first emerged as time-sharing apps in the 1960s, when companies rented hardware and software computing resources because they lacked the money and expertise to run applications internally. Among those to first offer such services were IBM (NYSE: IBM) and General Electric. The strategy eventually morphed into the [ASP] application-service-provider model in the late 1990s. The business model for both approaches failed, giving rise to the next iteration of hosted applications.”The hosted, on-demand model is the third wave,” says Jim Shepherd, a senior VP at AMR Research. “The difference is this time, heavy hitters like IBM and Oracle are pushing the concept, so there’s no question as to whether it will survive. … The question now is, how big will it become?”

At the present time, SaaS is still a tiny part of computing, but it is growing rapidly. Customer-relationship-management software offered by vendors NetSuite, RightNow Technologies, and Salesforce.com has been the software most widely adopted. Newer On-Demand vendors with promising futures include Concur, focusing on travel and expense management, Ultimate Software, an established vendor focusing on HR, Payroll, and talent management, SuccessFactors, another experienced vendor of Performance and Talent Management solutions, and DemandTec, offering integrated merchandising and marketing solutions,  The reason for these vendors’ success is that the software was [re]written specifically to function as hosted applications, and it’s all high maintenance and complex, encouraging the notion of “letting George do it.”

While the GoogleGazer is tempted to recite his mantra, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same), there are some notable differences between the limited timesharing offerings and what’s exciting today. SalesForce.com is perhaps the most advanced of all these vendors and not just because it has thoroughly integrated its applications with those of Google (others are doing that also), but because it has followed Google’s lead in making its applications available at the API-level with Force.com, greatly reducing the time and cost of developing new and unique applications that go far beyond SalesForce.coms roots in Customer Relations Management. Their free downloadable book on creating on-demand applications is highly recommended. Register free to download.

The GoogleGazer believes that the type of cloud-based offerings epitomized by Google and Force.com get us ever closer, tantalizingly close, to the holy grail of computing:  building blocks of robust, reliable and updatable software, all hosted in the Internet Cloud, allowing all of us to stand on the tall shoulders of others while quickly creating totally unique, high-volume, industrial-strength applications that were heretofore the exclusive province of the exceedingly well-to-do big businesses (the Goldman Sachs “money is no object” kind). Throughout history, and certainly since the industrial revolution, the “democratization” that brings formerly one-of-a-kind, expensive widgets (be they tailored suites, custom-built carriages, automobiles, mainframe computing or whatnot) within reach of everyone has created new jobs, and improved the standard of living around the globe.

Previously, we mentioned Hummer Winblad as a VC in the forefront of funding Cloud-based solutions, and we wrote about Elastra, a company that they funded and which shows much promise. Their portfolio discloses many other interesting SaaS and Cloud-based investments, some of which we hope to cover in future posts. Many other VCs and hedge funds are entering the fray on a daily basis. As with anything s that is new and has modest barriers to entry, there will be many entrants, and not all will succeed.

For now, however, the visible clouds out there are all Cumulus humilis (what is commonly referred to as “fair weather cumulus“) clouds (the “what a beautiful day” kind). They are formed by rising warm air that has been heated by the ground, which in turn has been heated by the sun. They have a limited depth.

For now, this too defines On-Demand software, but like the weather, that can soon change.

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Filed under: Cloud Computing, Developer Tools, Elastra, Google, SAAS, Salesforce.com, Software as Services, Technology, disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Back to the Future – With Midori is Microsoft Aiming to Deliver “Cairo” for Cloud Computing?

Posted on August 6, 2008 by dsarna

It’s “Back to the Future” time at Microsoft, folks. In 1992 the GoogleGazer wrote a long piece on ‘The Road to Cairo” about Microsoft’s plans for an Object File Store (OFS) an object-oriented database designed to make it easy to search documents and other structured data by content no matter where located. It was announced by Jim Allchin in 1991and planned for release in 1993. Ten years later, in 2002 Computerworld reported that “Windows remains uncontaminated by many of the features originally slated for Windows NT and Cairo, including OFS.” While some of Cairo made it out the door as Windows NT 4.0, its charter to build technologies for a next generation operating system that would fulfill Bill Gates‘ vision of “information at your fingertips” promulgated in 1994 and made into a book published in 1995 called The Road Ahead , was, sadly, never fulfilled.

Why not?

Simply put, the infrastructure and technology just was not there yet. Moore’’s Law, famously first stated in 1965 predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years, a prediction that has held true for over 40 years now. Indeed, computers today are 128 times more powerful than they were back then, at least. The average connection speed over the Internet has increased at least 25-fold, and Google gives each (free) user of Google Apps 7 GB of managed network storage, so we’ve made great strides in the past 14 years in these areas.

Windows has not kept pace.  Its kernel has accumulated too much baggage. Windows has gotten overly complex, and scalability is a serious issue with it. Vista is acknowledged by all to be a failure. Mean time, Linus and Open Source have blossomed, and have matured to the point that venerable IBM announced at LinuxWorld that In a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical IBM will offer “Microsoft-free” personal computers with IBM’s Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The Linux desktop computer comes fully equipped and sells for 30% less. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office. As Microsoft was forced to acknowledge in its  SEC filings, Linux and Open Source pose a significant threat to Microsoft’s long period of domination and control of the operating system and desktop.

Suffering from acute Billionaire’s Agita, Steve Ballmer saw that he needed to do something radical. He seems to have turned to a veteran Microsoftie, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy, who worked closely with Bill Gates, and headed the Servers and Tools group until 2005. His mission, and he has accepted it, is to “incubate” a project called Singularity that came out of Microsoft Research and to turn it into into Midori, a scalable, saleable product for Cloud Computing that is unburdened with the accumulated baggage of Microsoft Windows.  Ballmer chose well. Rudder is an out-of-the-box thinker. The GoogleGazer first met him shortly after Eric joined Microsoft in 1988. He is not only a clear-thinking, very smart and hard-working fellow, he is one of a handful of really nice people in the senior ranks of Microsoft. He is rumored to be Ballmer’s ultimate successor, when the time comes (really, he would be Bill’s successor). The affable and usually talkative Rudder was absolutely tight lipped about Midori, and when I asked him for comment, he first said, “I’m currently out of the country (he was in the UK); Frank should be able to make sure you get a reply for your blog,” handing me off to  Waggoner Edstrom PR flak Frank X. Shaw. The best Frank could come up with was,

Sorry that I don’t have more for you – Microsoft not really saying much about Midori:

  • Microsoft is always thinking about and exploring innovative ways for people to use technology.
  • Midori is one of many incubation projects underway at Microsoft, as such we are not talking about it at this time.

On the other hand while Shaw was not talking, some hard-working journalists seem to have gotten their hands on the real poop. David Worthington at SD Times writes that he has seen the Midori documents. He says,

Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.

Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.

According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

In Midori, concurrency (vital to support Cloud Computing) is a basic design principle.The technically inclined reader can work through this paper from Microsoft Research for some insight: “SCOPE: Easy and Efficient Parallel Processing of Massive Data Sets,”

While the GoogleGazer thought he was alone in observing the similarities to Cairo (which at one time employed over 1,000 developers), Mary Jo Foley of ZD Net seems to have found some other old geezers with long memories. We all see Cairo written all over Midori.

Everyone agrees that Midori is critical to Microsoft’s long-term health, but everyone also agrees that its delivery date is still off in the future. Ms. Foley writes:

[I]t’s likely to be launched sooner than a typical Microsoft Research project, but not so soon as to obviate the need for Windows 7 and Windows 8. In other words, we’re looking at a new non-Windows operating system to debut some time before CEO Steve Ballmer retires (a date Ballmer has said is nine or so years away), but not before late 2009/early 2010 (the target date for Windows 7).

The GoogleGazer sold his Microsoft stock at its peak years ago (one of the few times that he got it right). Present Microsoft shareholders fervently hope that Eric can pull off getting Midori to market sooner rather than later.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Microsoft, Midori | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Elastra Brings Virtual Mainframe to Cloud Computing

Posted on August 4, 2008 by dsarna

Elastra is a company with a neat kind of Cloud-based middleware. The GoogleGazer expects we’ll see more of them, and more like them. Founded by serial entrepreneur Kirill Sheynkman, who successfully sold companies to IBM and to BEA.  Elastra is funded by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, an experienced VC who invests almost exclusively in software and middleware, and lately has been investing heavily in Software As A Service (SAAS) and in Cloud Computing. John Hummer sits on their board.

Elastra aims to help you easily overcome the challenges of scalability in the Cloud, by making it seem almost transparent to you. Their “White Paper” is a good read, and discusses the problems of scaling as well as Elastra’s solutions.The following two pictures, taken from Elastra’s website summarize what they accomplish.

Elastra provides:

Industry-standard database and application infrastructure in the Cloud that is:

  • Easily architected, configured and deployed in a complete, clustered, run-time environment
  • Elastically scaled with automated system monitoring and management
  • Priced pay-for-use
  • Delivered on-demand

Right now, Elastra runs on Amazon’s infrastructure, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which provides scalability within minutes on a pay-as-you-go basis, as well as its Amazon Simple Storage Service. It would not surprise the GoogleGazer to see Elastra support some of the other platforms that we mentioned in our previous post. Mean time, they have been garnering an impressive array of clients, and support PostgreSQL, the world’s most advanced open source database, and MySQL (now owned by Sun). Besides Amazon, Elastra partners with EnterpriseDB, the world’s leading provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, Postgres Plus and Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

Expect to hear more about them.

Filed under: Amazon, Cloud Computing, Cloud Middleware, Elastra, Software As A Service (SAAS), disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Cloud Computing – Is It Old Mainframe Bess in a New Dress?

Posted on August 3, 2008 by dsarna

“Cloud Computing is all the rage,” says InfoWeek. “Some analysts and vendors,” they say, “define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is “in the cloud,” including conventional outsourcing,” the article goes on to say. Those who don’t have a Cloud Computing offering, but still want to be considered chic go with the InfoWeek’s broader definition.

The GoogleGazer prefers to define Cloud Computing as highly scalable distributed services, available on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, what we like to call “Rent-a-cloud.”

The idea of Cloud Computing is certainly not new. In his autobiography, Dr. Jack B. Dennis, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT (and MIT Class of ‘53), and a pioneer in the development of computer science wrote in 2003:

In 1960 Professor John McCarthy, now at Stanford University and known for his contributions to artificial intelligence, led the “Long Range Computer Study Group” (LRCSG) which proposed objectives for MIT’s future computer systems. I had the privilege of participating in the work of the LRCSG, which led to Project MAC and the Multics computer and operating system, under the organizational leadership of Prof. Robert Fano and the technical guidance of Prof. Fernando Corbat.

At this time Prof. Fano had a vision of the Computer Utility  the concept of the computer system as a repository for the knowledge of a community data and procedures in a form that could be readily shared a repository that could be built upon to create ever more powerful procedures, services, and active knowledge from those already in place. Prof. Corbat’s goal was to provide the kind of central computer installation and operating system that could make this vision a reality. With funding from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the result was Multics.

For those under sixty, and probably not old enough to remember, MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system, started in 1964. It proved that [mainframe-based] computing could serve many people in remote locations at the same time. It set creative minds to thinking about a generally available computer utility, connected to your house through a cable. The GoogleGazer still has an original copy of Fred Gruenberger’s influential book, Computers and Communications; Toward a Computer Utility, which he read when it first appeared in 1968, back when the GoogleGazer was an undergraduate and bra-burning and anti-Vietnam demonstrations preoccupied the college campuses, and nearly all computing was based on mainframes and batch processing. Gruenberger posited a “computing utility” which would operate much like an electrical utility, letting you draw as much or as little as you need, while paying only for what you use was articulated in detail.

Back to InfoWeek.

Utility computing, InfoWeek goes on to say,

is a [type of Cloud Computing that provides a] way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

Sure sounds like Gruenberger’s computer utility to the GoogleGazer.

This form of rent-a-cloud, as we noted earlier, is offered commercially by Amazon.com, Google, Sun (zembly.com for creating and hosting social applications, and Network.com for pay-as-you-go computing), IBM, and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand. In InfoWeeks’s view, “Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but one day, they may replace parts of the datacenter.” However, the GoogleGazer knows that many smaller, fast-growing high-tech outfits run their entire business off of the “Cloud” of one of these major vendors, and by all reports, reliability exceeds that of most IT shops.

Software As A Service (SAAS) is a type of cloud computing that delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. Salesforce.com, according to InfoWeek,  is by far the best-known example among enterprise applications, but SaaS is also common for HR applications and is also used in ERP applications from vendors such as Workday. More recently, as we have noted,  SaaS applications, such as Google Apps and Zoho Office are causing Billionaire’s Agita to Steve Ballmer and his competitors, as they are encroaching on ground long firmly held by Microsoft Office (a risk Microsoft was forced to disclose in its SEC filings). APIs are also increasingly available in the Cloud that enable developers to exploit functionality of others over the Internet, rather than developing, hosting, and delivering it themselves. These range from providers offering discrete business services — such as Strike Iron and Xignite – to the full range of APIs offered by Google Maps, Yahoo BOSS. The U.S. Postal Service, Bloomberg, and even online banking and conventional credit card processing services are headed in this direction.

So while the technology may be different, updated, and certainly faster, cheaper, more pervasive, and much more scalable, at the end of the day, Cloud Computing is a centralized mainframe-like core with distributed nodes, in a prettier, sexier new miniskirt. But hey, we like the pretty dress, and the GoogleGazer believes that Cloud Computing not only is not a fad, but it presages a fundamental paradigm shift that will have as powerful an effect on society as the Internet itself, and will turn out to be truly disruptive technology.

“Strong words,” you say? Well stay tuned for further proof as Cloud Computing matures over the next five years. Remember, you heard it first from the GoogleGazer.

Filed under: Amazon, Cloud Computing, Google, Google Maps, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Social Networking, Software As A Service (SAAS), Technology, Yahoo, disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

They’re All Up in the Clouds: Amazon, Google, IBM, and Now Intel, Microsoft and Yahoo All Want In

Posted on July 30, 2008 by dsarna

While the air is thinner up in the clouds, airspace in the Internet Cloud is definitely getting more crowded. As cloud computing races towards becoming mainstream (if it’s not already), and more and more folks want to become the Levi’s of Cloud Computing, supplying Cloud Computing infrastructure to all the would-be enterprises and entrepreneurs prospectors staking claims for their piece of this new land grab, the big guys are all buying chips at the high-stakes Poker table.

Jeff Bezos’ Amazon was the first to realize the potential for offering rent-a-cloud service on the massive Cloud that Amazon maintains. Its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, provides scalability within minutes on a pay-as-you-go basis, as addition to its Amazon Simple Storage Service for renting storage space in the Cloud. Recently, In a series of announcements, Amazon released a set of hosted e-commerce payment services, as well as an update to its Mechanical Turk service. The payment service, Checkout by Amazon, will allow online retailers to use Amazon’s one-click checkout system, calculate shipping costs and tax, as well as allow their customers to track shipments. The updates to the Mechanical Turk are mostly meant to streamline the creation of new tasks by guiding businesses through the process more efficiently.

Amazon’s rent-a-cloud service was quickly followed, as we reported earlier, by Google. Then, in October 2007, Google and IBM announced a collaberation with major universities UW (the University of Washington), Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland to further the development of cloud computing technology. Not to be outdone, HP, Intel and Yahoo jumped on the band wagon and are are teaming up with some lesser ranked groups, the most prominent of whom are the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, according to a report in eWeek and its related Google Watch blog.

Earlier, we reported that Adobe’s AIR may pose competition to Google in this space. VMware too is now focusing on virtualization in the Cloud.

Cloud Computing, as powerful as it is, is still very young and immature. It presents development challenges not present with classical software development. We, the consumers can therefore expect to be the ultimate beneficiaries of the research coming out of these competing development efforts. May the best team win!

A word to wise would-be developers of Cloud Computing infrastructure (not applicable to software tool developers supporting Cloud Computing): When the GoogleGazer observes all the big players converging at the high-stakes Poker table, he heads off to the $2 Blackjack tables, where he can hope to compete. You have been duly warned.

Filed under: Adobe AIR, Amazon, Cloud Computing, Google, Microsoft, VMware, Yahoo | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Premature Reports of the Death of Web 2.0

Posted on July 30, 2008 by dsarna

Is Web 2.0 and the really useful free services we have come to depend on over? Is the “free is good” rapid growth period coming to an end? The really well-written ReadWriteWeb blog, which covers Web 2.0 quotes Chris Shipley in Demo.com as opining that the Web 2.0 cycle has come to a close. In her own blog, she goes on to say,

Unlike the Dot Com cycle before it, the Web 2.0 phase hasn’t created tremendous business value for entrepreneurs or their investors. But the social Web – the true definition, we think, of this most recent wave – has sparked tremendous innovation. It has given us the “operating systems” for social networks, the culture of conversation and engagement, the discipline of rapid and disruptive development, and the technology basis on which to build reliable, scalable Web applications. In short, it’s delivered a platform on which to build the next phase of the Web.

Welcome to the Distributed Web. If Web 2.0 established the infrastructure and culture of the social Web, the next cycle will be all about delivering Web content and applications to the point of consumption. This next phase is not about aggregating content or visitors to a single Web site; it’s about disseminating information and applications to the users where ever they may be – another Web site, a mobile device, a consumer electronics gadget.

The Distributed Web changes the game for content creators, Web advertisers and marketers, media sites, and consumers. As content and application providers focus on serving consumers where ever they are, they will need new techniques to syndicate content and audit their audience.

The GoogleGazer affirms in part and dissents in part, and is too old to have an opinion, in part . He agrees that Web 2.0 has not [yet] lived up to its hype, and certainly concurs that the “distributed web” is the “next big thing” as usage migrates from  Microsoft-taxed desktop domination to a plethora of distributed devices and technologies. The GoogleGazer does not believe, however, that free is dead or that Software As A Service (SAAS) has peaked at all. On the impact of social computing, the GoogleGazer’s three adult children assure him that social computing networks will continue to grow like topsey, notwithstanding all of the privacy concerns inherent in the whole world knowing all you do all the time. He is just too old to get it, and as an only occasional-participant, he doesn’t feel qualified to have an opinion.

In general, however, the GoogleGazer is reminded of Samuel Clemens’  (Mark Twain) famous statement upon reading his prematurely printed obituary. In the New York Journal, in 1897, Twain said “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”; it was also thirteen years premature. Somehow, pundits are always rushing trends along, and have but limited attention spans. The GoogleGazer believes that for Web 2.0, the best is yet to come.

Filed under: Social Networking, Software As A Service (SAAS), Software as Services, Web 2.0, disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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