A quick update on my recent ever got pinged by your CEO? post, and some related commentary on online social media in the enterprise world.

Presumably by way of a forward-thinking PR department close to Deutsche Telekom management (indeed my employer), I recently received a LinkedIn invite to connect to DT CEO Rene Obermann.
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As an IT consultant/network administrator a few years ago, one of my clients was a small but fast-growing retailer with several remote locations spread across the country.  Having no trusted technicians available in some of these cities, it was a clear win when I chose to go with WYSE thin client terminals on many of these remote seats (I wrote a bit about that here).   While the idea of such simple and lightweight “web appliances” dates back to the late 90’s, despite a few short stints as The Next Big Thing, the devices never proved quite as popular as promised – but conditions now are more favorable than ever:

• Increasing functionality in the cloud mitigates much of the need for heavy client-side application installations (and the RAM/processor power/data storage they require)
• The current global economic climate certainly favors less expensive (and often computationally redundant) devices

There’s a third (and crucial) factor, though: now that wireless internet access has become nearly ubiquitous, we all place an increasing premium on portability (consider that by most accounts, laptop sales actually surpassed desktop sales for the first time during 2008).  What do you get, then, when you take all the innate advantages of thin computing and add today’s need for mobile computing?

The “netbook” – a small (8″ or 10″ screen) laptop with a lightweight operating system, long battery life, (and often) solid state disk (SSD) storage.  As with good bread, the Beatles, and text messaging, it’s Europe that’s been out in front on this, but that’s expected to change as US acceptance of the netbook grows.  In fact, while industry analysts at Gartner expect overall 2009 PC sales to decline by almost 12% (a historic high), they see netbook sales doubling.

To date, the low-power Intel Atom has been the netbook CPU of choice, but AMD and Motorola have each recently released new processors of their own aimed at this growing market.   As for what operating system runs on those chips, for now it’s come down to a battle between Microsoft and the Linux community (Apple having not yet demonstrated much interest in this lower-end market).  Google’s Android cell phone operating system has even been ported over to a netbook – an interesting possible future platform for the open source OS.

Many of the first netbooks ran a specialized Linux kernel, a trend that only looked to gain more momentum once Microsoft stopped stopped selling XP last June.  However, with the netbook trend starting to pick up, Vista proving too resource-hungry for many desktops (let alone netbooks), and with Windows 7 still months away, Microsoft had a change of heart – and recently decided to bring back XP Home, giving the OS a second life as their unofficial interim netbook operating system (until Windows 7 arrives, that is).  It’s an easy decision to justify: while netbooks are by definition leaner and meaner than traditional PCs, users still expect them to be more than mere terminals: in other words, people like their applications (and chances are pretty good the ones they’re used to are not going to be available for Linux).   Furthermore, despite (or maybe because of) the fate Vista met in the marketplace, many users still like XP – and in any event, to a less technical user, that oh-so familiar Microsoft desktop would have to look more reassuring (and less toy-like) than a Linux desktop – even if only on a purely emotional level.  Lastly, even if Vista was able to run on a netbook, licensing costs for the new OS would tend to put the machine well beyond the price point of the average netbook.

So, not surprisingly, the decision paid off for Microsoft: XP Home lives on and has beaten Linux out to ship on the majority of netbooks now sold (in a telling sign, HP recently stopped even offering Linux netbooks in otherwise penguin-friendly Europe).

Either way, in addition to all the other advantages, at only $200 to $400 each, these devices (much like smart phones) are inexpensive enough to be subsidized by long-term internet service agreements – so going forward it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which netbooks do not figure in heavily.   Microsoft, for one, agrees, and is committed  to releasing a lightweight version of Windows 7 optimized for netbooks (despite the economics of the netbook market dictating substantially lower license fees than Redmond is used to charging).

I think there might be one in your future too.

I know I want one – so it’s got to be cool, right?

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.)

Use Firefox?

Ever close a tab by mistake?

Ever wish you could go back to the site on the tab you closed 15 minutes ago?

Then this is for you: command-shift-T (Apple OS) or control-shift-T (Windows). Not only will this reopen the last closed tab, there appear to be an unlimited levels of undo within a given cached session (at least up to a dozen or so tabs, which is as far as I’ve cared to test). This is something I use every day, and I’m always surprised how many people don’t know about it.

Convenient? Youbetcha. I know there’s a lot of people out there tricking out Firefox with <a href=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ “>add-ons</a>, but I’m one of the vast majority for whom Firefox is fine pretty much right out the box (although I do use the OPML plug-in for getting certain RSS feeds into Google Reader).

But then again, maybe this handy little shortcut is too convenient: the other day I noticed that (unless or until a server-side inactivity timeout occurs) cmd-shift-T takes you right back into your authenticated SSL sessions, too… (!) And since it will also take you to pages you’ve deleted from the browsing history, deleting just that isn’t enough (actually, the browsing history is less dangerous than the cache, because since it’s just a URL string, any SSL sessions would have to be reauthenticated).

So let this be just another warning to delete that cache on public or semi-public machines! (I can just picture someone up to no good hitting repeatedly using this shortcut on any running instance of Firefox they come across …)

And backup your local data.

And eat your vegetables.

It’s a world of translucent shiny semi-transparent user interfaces (“What’s the difference between Web 2.0 and 1.0? – rounded corners!” …ha…)

Still, there’s one tool from the developer-world that’s so effective, so useful – and so ugly – that not enough users know about it. Total Commander is a shareware file management utility – in other words, a Windows Explorer replacement. Back in the day (and we’re talking a long time ago here), there were several such tools out there to improve on DOS file management. Then Windows Explorer came in with Windows 95, and for the average user, the need for these tools faded. But developers and other old-school type folks (such as myself) kept using Total Commander, so it’s kept going, adding features and supporting all subsequent Windows Operating Systems.

The first thing you’ll notice about Total Commander (and the other older ‘Commander’-style apps such as Norton Commander) is that there are two windows side-by-side – a ‘source’ pane and a ‘destination’ pane. These windows can have multiple tabs (which turns out to be every bit as nice a feature managing files as it is browsing websites). Working back and forth between the two panes, all the obvious file tasks can be done – but Total Commander can do so much more:

• A solid, fast FTP client (the best I’ve used), available directly from within the same Total Commander window you’re managing local files in.
• Transparent access to all networked resources (including non-mapped drives) – conceptually, Total Commander integrates the user’s Network Places into the local window structure (which is as cool as it sounds).
• Packing and unpacking in all popular (and a few not-so-popular) archiving formats, again right within the Total Commander window.
• Folder Synchronization – (really nice for ad hoc backup folders on other drives).
• Multiple File renaming (via rules or in a text editor).
• File comparison (not by name, by the actual contents – the actual 0’s and 1’s).
• File View (in Hex/Binary/Text).
• Search for duplicate files (again, by the actual bits).

I am by no means a power user – for me, what I love about Total Commander are the window tabs, the excellent onboard FTP client directly available from within the 2 Total Commander windows, and the archive functionality. For software or web developers (or anyone who does repetitive file management tasks), the deeply flexible configuration and hot key implementation might be the main sell – but if that’s not enough, there’s also a built-in command line interpreter, and there are plug-ins for almost anything you could imagine: creating ISO images, burning discs, creating AVI files from graphics files, using HTTP and POP, and much more – all within the window (it’s the polar opposite of interface-crazy software such as Nero).

In fact, my only frustration with Total Commander is that I know that there’s some much more functionality and productivity there than I’ve had the time to explore…

So feel free to submit your tips!

Total Commander – it’s not pretty. But it’s powerful, good, solid, non-bloated software.

And isn’t that refreshing?