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Nick Carr writes about a possible major strategic statement from Microsoft, one that would address an expansive and detailed strategy for moving its software business into the cloud. While this is only a rumor, I do not consider Nick to push anything he wouldn’t consider important or substantial, so there are some teeth here. Also, it’s been a while since Ray Ozzie came on board, and we’ve all been waiting for something like this. Like it or not (and I certainly don’t), Microsoft is the centerpiece of enterprise operations and any move which changes the behavior of CIOs the world over is not to be taken lightly. Personally, I am all for any such move. Perhaps those who look at the web as not being ready for corporate business will be forced to move in that direction.

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Google launched Google Sites yesterday after a long 16 month wait. After acquiring the promising startup, Jotspot, Google went into a long hiatus with rumors of impending launch coming out in regular intervals. Finally, Google released it as a part of Google Apps Suite yesterday night. My first reaction to the release was one of disappointment.

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Many years ago, we had desktop operating systems. The ones that succeeded were the ones that were able to develop an ecosystem of applications and developers around them. That worked very well for a long time. Then along came the web, and as the web has matured, the platform that developers build on is not a desktop operating system, but the web itself.

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I am pretty much assuming that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal will go through, much to my chagrin. The first question I had was, what about Yahoo’s open source projects. Much as I like Google, Yahoo has always been a super open source friendly company and has pioneered support for projects like Hadoop (the open source version of MapReduce).

Turns out, I am not the only one concerned about these things. It’s the question asked by Blogspotting, others on Twitter, as well as lots of commenters on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog

Dan Reed is a Microsoft employee now, so Microsoft is definitely serious about the cloud. They haven’t figured it out yet. For that matter, neither has Yahoo really, at least not the way Google has, but a Microsoft/Yahoo combo on paper can be a wonderful foil to Google. Will it work? No idea. I am certainly skeptical.

Looking forward to seeing Google’s response to this bid. Their stock is certainly taking a beating.

Looks like Jerry Yang’s time to tear down the wall has run out

Further reading:
Microsoft is serious about the cloud too

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, Hadoop

Off late, the name Yahoo appears synonymous with depression and whatever can go wrong with a company. The top level reshuffling didn’t have the much needed impact and there are rumors (expectations?) about impending job cuts. If I were a Yahoo shareholder, I would be deeply frustrated with what is happening in the company. Right now, atleast to the eyes of the outsiders, Yahoo appears like a deer in front of the headlights. The morale inside the company appears to be very low and the top management appears to be totally clueless about the necessary fix. Can Yahoo come back from its mess? Can it become competitive again? Sramana Mitra made a passionate call to Yahoo to fight back in her guest post at GigaOm. I am going to approach it from a different angle. I feel that Yahoo has the necessary tools it needs to have a bright future but they need to have a better vision and execute it well. Their vision should be consistent with the changing technology landscape and they should realign their strategies to take advantage of their existing verticals. The success of this once internet poster child depends much on how they execute in the coming months.

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The big news today is the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems. This is significant in many ways but I am excited that this deal debunks the myth that there is no big money in open source software. Sun has paid $1Billion for MySQL and it clearly shows how valuable MySQL is to the future of technology. The so called Web 2.0 era saw startups using LAMP stack in their applications and this turned the tide in favor of open source software. Only 10% of the Web 2.0 companies use proprietary software and this is a big shift from the Web 1.0 era when non proprietary software were considered ‘untouchables’. Read the rest

Deepak’s post on Information as a Service got me thinking. The discussion about Twitter’s business model (or lack of it) and the standoff between facebook and Robert Scoble made me dig deeper. These events and the nature of business in the Web 2.0 era raises a very important question, which I would like to call as the great Web 2.0 dilemma. I just want to raise the question here and get the thought process going. This is going to be very important for startups because they are going to be deeply affected by this dilemma than the big companies.

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This post is surely going to raise eyebrows as it pushes the boundaries (probably crosses them) of what we know as privacy. Wired asks the question Should web giants let startups use the information they have about you?. It is a very valid question. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and even Craigslist (used in the story) have tons of data, some of it that they perhaps never utilize in ways that might be useful to some people. Does it help them to lock up that data or is it better to share at least some of that data, and thus unlock useful information, with the rest of the ecosystem? Read the rest

Is it me, or do some of Sun’s customers seem to be a little behind the times?

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The fastest grower (in terms of datacenter infrastructure spending) was growing 100% per month.

Unless you’re Google, there is no way you should be in this situationl

The striking point … unless you’re Google, there is no way you should be in this situation
Technorati Tags: Sun, Internet

Robert Scoble wrote an excellent post, discussing his decision to leave PodTech. As you can make out from all the posts on Techmeme and the comments on a lot of the blogs, he took a lot of heat as well. However, that’s not what this post is about. Read the rest