Avid digitalmissive readers know, I have long considered the New York subway my prefered ad-hoc “test tube”, to get a read on the adoption status of the latest available digital devices and services. Turns out, when it comes to eReaders, I am really not seeing much excitement among my fellow straphangers these days.

Apart from the occasional Amazon Kindle, Big Apple subway riders don’t seem overly attracted (yet!) to the burgeoning world of portable electronic book and magazine devices.

How come?

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Have you recently taken the New York subway, let’s say, to 23rd, 66th, 86th, or 103rd street?

If you exit at any of these stops you’ll notice some of your favorite entertainment stores vanished. Shut down. Closed for good.

At 23rd and 6th Avenue Barnes&Noble, gone! At Lincoln Center Tower Records‘ flagship store, gone! Over at 86th and 2nd Avenue Circuit City, vanished. And at 102rd and Broadway Blockbuster Video closed its doors, too.

Be it for books, music, movies, or consumer electronics (for anyone 30 years or older), those were among the brands you would likely turn to first - to discover, buy and play your entertainment retail. 

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The other day I wrote about the New York subway (my favorite impromptu research panel), and a few “hang outs”, still more comfortable reading a real book rather than their e-version.

Of course, despite some anachronistic readership, the world of e-books continues its expansion undeterred. 

The latest: Online retail giant Amazon.com announced, the library of books available for it’s Kindle branded e-reader will now also be available on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.

Why is this big? 

If you hear yourself or anyone else equipped with either Apple-branded portable, we’ve all started asking what’s on it, as if asking what’s on television or on the radio.

Couple that with the by-now impressive depth and breadth of repertoire available for either device, Apple portables are anything but shy compared to, yet again, television or radio.

In other words, the iPhone / iPod combination of devices has become a media platform in its own right.

For Amazon to jump on board makes perfect sense.

More on the subject:

Amazon’s Apple Deal: Kindle Cannibal? (Business Week)

Amazon releases Kindle for iPhone, iPod Touch (LA Times)

Amazon launches Kindle application for the iPhone (TechCrunch / Washington Post)

First Look video: Kindle for iPhone (cnet)

What’s going on? 

Of the ten or so people sitting immediately around me on the New York subway from 14th to Wall Street, an impressive seven riders actually read a book!

Yes, actually reading hard and soft cover books, one page at a time, without the help of an iPod, or Kindle, or any other digital hand-held device.

Although completely anectodal (and statistically irrelevant, I know), behind my impromptu mini sample of “analog” readership, is there more than meets the eye?

Hey, it’s probably just a push back by a few, against the omnipresent popularity of overly slick and shinny digital rich media players packaged in 21st century form factor and UI.

Or maybe it is a case of “it’s the economy, stupid”.

People reading relatively inexpensive physical books today may be an indicator that previously released Zunes and iPods are now considered way to pricy.

My money, though, is on a different point: My seven fellow straphanges have either re-discovered the age-old value proposition of printed paper, or never actually abandoned their love for it.

To them I guess, when reading a real book, the tactile experience is unqiue and remains unmatched compared to any digital e-reader counterparts.

There’s also a certain emotional bind to turning pages manually, one by one. 

Oh, and if you are into dog-ears, try that with an Amazon Kindle - can’t be done.

Long story short, companies have long started working on e-paper and e-readers to recreate similar effects, but none seemed to have cracked the code on sufficiently simulating the organic experience of holding and reading an actual book. 

Until there is a similarly satisfying “touch and feel” reading experience with e-reading devices, I’d like to assume my seven subway mates probably are the equivalent of vinyl record fans amidst a sea of DVD owners.

Nothing major. Nothing to be concerned about. It’s interesting though, as the e-reader industry seems to still have ways to go.

PS: For those of you interested in “the latest and greatest” innovation in e-books, e-reading, and the like, check out these items:

In case you missed the first one, Amazon Kindle II is coming out

Amazon to offer e-books on Apple devices

Sony going next-gen with its own e-Reader, too

The bookworm project now supported by O’Reilly

Stanza, a prominent e-reader iPhone app

Google Books now officially online

Samsung has genuine interest in actual e-paper

I was recently invited to a Microsoft Developer’s Conference here in New York, and along with the muffins and the buffet lunch buffet was served a heapin’ helping of Azure, Redmond’s nascent cloud computing platform (currently in beta).

Despite the downside of potential privacy and network performance issues, cloud computing offers a lot of advantages (scalability, cost effectiveness, and ease of maintenance,  to name just a few).  This makes internet based, service-oriented computing a very attractive option (especially for small to mid-size businesses) - so we (along with almost everyone else) expect to see cloud computing continuing to gain traction.  In other words, more of your local CPU cycles are going to be moving from your desktop or local server (both probably Windows machines, I might add) up into the cloud.

Somebody’s cloud, that is - but whose?

Microsoft would prefer it to be theirs, thank you very much.  However, there are two primary competitors also in the marketplace: Google (with its Application Engine), and Amazon (with its EC2 “Elastic Computing” service):

• EC2 allows customers to rent a variable number of instances of virtual servers,  which the customer configures as needed and then installs applications on.  Originally limited to Unix and Solaris operating systems, Amazon now offers Windows Server and several flavors of Linux as well.  High marks go to Amazon for flexibility, but maintenance and overhead is as almost as high as if the servers were in a standard data center (albeit a really nice data center…)
• Google’s App Engine takes a different approach - in short, there’s less maintenance and overhead, but also less flexibility.  The service is currently limited to applications written in Python, which users administer via a web console - the underlying operating system(s) are protected and shielded from the user.   App Engine is currently in “Preview” mode (Google having evidently singlehandedly worn out the term “Beta”), so pricing is not yet known.  More importantly, it also remains to be seen whether Google will make other programming languages available besides Python.

The idea behind these two services was to leverage largely pre-existing server capacity, infrastructure, and expertise.  Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t happen to have a comparable worldwide network of internet-optimized server farms laying around unused, and they do like to think big out there in Redmond - so they are throwing the long ball on this one: at last week’s event, I learned about plans to build out 20 immense Azure data centers strategically located around the world (Microsoft is literally fork-lifting in shipping containers full of servers…)

Together, these data centers represent a $20 bil investment - which by coincidence, almost matches the $20.7 bil Microsoft holds in cash reserves - can you say “betting the farm”?   (If a less PR-challenged company was undertaking something this impressive over the next year, I think we’d be hearing a lot more about it…)

Azure Technically, what I like about Azure is that it’s more of a true single “cloud operating system” than either Google’s service (too opaque) or Amazon’s service (too fragmented).  With Azure, you’ll be able to run Microsoft’s managed code (such as ASP.net and C#), Microsoft’s native code (C++ ), and via .NET, you can also deploy Java and Ruby apps - or any combination of the above.  At the same time, the underlying system housekeeping (and most importantly, the overall failover, data storage, scalability, and load-balancing) are all Microsoft’s problems - so it would appear to be the best of both worlds.  However, I feel the real value-add of Azure has to do with these 20 planned data centers and with the effectiveness of the Azure “Fabric Controller” at managing them - if done well, it could be pretty spectacular.

Hence the title of this post:

The Most Important Person At Microsoft… To the extent computing continues to move from the desktop up to the cloud, Azure will be critical to Microsoft’s future - and since the Azure team is only about 150 people, that does narrow it down a bit (sidebar: according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s well-known research, 150 also tends to be the maximum size for effective human social groupings across a surprising variety of cultures).  But back to our “Most Important Person” award: is it Azure team leader Ray Ozzie?  Nope.  Is it either of his lieutenants Amitabh Srivastava or David Cutler?  Nu-unh.  Steve Ballmer?  No sir.

Is it Jerry Seinfeld?  Wrong again.

In my opinion, the most important person at Microsoft is Debra Chrapaty, in charge of the Azure data center infrastructure - because while Azure is currently being tested within just a single Redmond data center, how well Microsoft’s Fabric Controller will manage the Azure cloud as it expands to 20 geographically-diverse data centers is both the initiative’s largest differentiating factor and its largest unknown.

(By the way, Azure represents yet another step in the Privatization of the Internet - more on that here.)

(And here.)

(And here.)

Interesting approach?

A couple of weeks ago, Blockbuster, the country’s largest video rental service announced testing of 50 or so DVD vending kiosks in preparation for a massive 10,000 store roll-out in the next 18 months.

The company certainly lacks neither scale nor resources to put this good plan to work.

But somehow - in the age of ubiquitous, super-”liquid” consumer video - Blockbuster’s push into the stationary DVD vending business seems somewhat “backwards” I thought.

Maybe afraid to miss the boat again - especially Netflix’s DVD mail-order success comes to mind - Blockbuster may have decided it could simply not cede any more business to others.

Among those, there’s Redbox of course, operating at least 8,000 kiosks each filled with 500+ DVDs. Currently one-night rentals run at $1 per DVD. For all titles, reservations can be made online and any of Redbox’s kiosk accepts returns.

Fair enough. Both Netflix and Redbox are certainly siphoning off consumers’ video dollars away from Blockbuster stores. Obviously that must hurt.

But will simply replicating someone else’s stationary vending model be enough for the video store king to (re)claim lost market share?

By now, most consumers certainly have ample alternatives to quench their thirst for full-length commercial video without the need to drive to a local store.

Cable VOD is already available in at least 50 million US homes. Add to that a growing IPTV subscriber base (2 million and counting), plus Apple TV, Hulu.com, and soon-to-launch Amazon Video on Demand. Then there’s Sony’s internet-connected Bravia TV sets of course, pre-loaded with Hollywood hit movies and other popular fair.

The list goes on and on.

But wait. Maybe NCR can add much-needed differentiation to Blockbuster’s DVD vending idea. The former AT&T-owned company partnered with Blockbuster on its planned in-store kiosk deal but has more to offer than that.

Turns out, NCR is behind the predecessor to the 802.x WiFi standard, and knows all about RFID.

To that end, what if a Blockbuster / NCR combination lets you use your cell phones or other portables equipped to scan DVD packaging while browsing through Blockbuster stores? Or, for that matter, any other store carrying DVDs. (Similar to what Amazon.com has done for in-store books).

While you’re already heading for the door, behind that RFID system, a backend transmission network pushes your favorite Blockbuster hit straight to your residential network, and you’re ready for movie night by the time you enter your home.

No DVD kiosk required, no return date to adhere to; oh, and much lower delivery cost boosting margins on incremental sales.

Interesting approach?