We try to avoid taking positions on provocative subjects here at digitalmissive – health care town hall meetings, South African track star gender issues – things like that. But I’ve recently found myself sitting in front of a completely Microsoft-free workstation at my current client site – no Windows, no Word, no (gasp) Excel, no nuthin’. So at the risk of upsetting a few of the religious faithful on either side of the great Cupertino-Redmond divide, I now find myself with a few (somewhat unexpected) observations to share.

I’ve been a Windows user for some time now. The bloat, the ambivalence (at best) towards open standards, the security concerns – all this can get annoying at times. By and large, though, I’ve been one pretty happy XP camper for a while now (like many, I sat out Vista). Lately, though, like many of us John Hodgman types, I’ve secretly wondered if I too could one day be as cool as Drew-Barrymore-boyfriend guy….

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Who knew? Barack Obama, of all things, now as Microsoft Office Clip Art!

With almost half a billion copies of the software giant’s Office application suite installed around the globe, anyone featured here is likely seen more often than Kim Kardashian on Dancing With the Stars ever will.

Clearly, Microsoft’s clip art has the reach most media outlets crave – a real asset, especially in today’s increasingly disintermediated world.

Which brings up the question, who at Microsoft decides over who’s in (the library) and who stays out?

In lieu of an answer, I was curious enough to check what other contemporary or past celebrity made the cut according to Microsoft’s Clip Art staff.

Turns out, neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton are included.

Neither is Adolf Hitler. (Thought I’d check, just to be sure).

But Mahatma Gandhi is.

And so is Abraham Lincoln.

Which brings us right back to Barack Obama, who has recently received much (self-induced) comparison to the iconic 16th US President.

Is someone in Redmond having fun channeling the travails of current-day politics via cliché PC clip art?

CeBIT, held each year in Hannover (Germany), is the biggest technology show in the world.  What makes it larger than CES is that rather than limit itself to consumer electronics, it includes both home and office technology – in other words, all things digital.  I’m not at the show, but having read a few of the articles starting to show up online (the show’s currently running until March 8th), one company stands out as having at least a few good ideas:  Asus.

I’ve already written about how the time is right for netbooks – Asus has a 60% share of the European market and a 30% share of the worldwide market – so they’ve been doing something right.  In addition, the company has some serious plans for bring the Google Android operation system to the netbook.  It’s worth noting that while Android has had the iPhone headwind to fight in the smartphone market, no such incumbant hands-down winner exists in the netbook operating system market.  In fact, with netbooks gaining traction, Android evolving, and a lightweight netbook version of Windows 7 on the horizon, the netbook OS market could prove to be a major front in the epic battle between you-know-who and you-know-who.

But I digress.  Let’s talk some gizmo. At left is an Asus “concept netbook.”   It starts with the tablet computer concept from a few years back and takes it a step or two further – a completely touch screen-based interface, and a second monitor.  Although not yet commercially available, a few thoughts do come to mind:

• The clamshell design nicely solves the problem of maximizing screen real estate while at the same time protecting the portable device’s touch screens.
• To the extent a touch screen Netbook interface becomes popular, XP Home becomes obsolete as a netbook OS, forcing Microsoft’s hand in getting a Windows 7 Netbook OS out there quickly.
• Is this the perfect Kindle platform, or what??



Speaking of touchscreens – here’s an interesting device, looking very much like the result of crossing a computer keyboard with an iPhone.  While adding a touchscreen to a keyboard is a cool enough idea in and of itself (and as the most cost-effective way to enjoy the next generation of touch-enabled operating systems, probably something we’ll see a lot of), there’s more here than meets the eye: this is actually a netbook running XP Home! With an 802.11g wireless interface and a wireless HDMI interface (that’s a new one on me), you’ve yourself got a cable-free internet streaming solution, as well as a computer for the coffee table and the couch.  It’s my feeling users would be more interested in the former than the latter, but either way, a pretty cool device – and another idea that’s hard to imagining not becoming popular.

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.)

The New York Times has discovered (or rediscovered) thin computing: a small simple device (or ‘terminal’) with just enough under the hood to send mouse & keyboard clicks to a server upon which all the applications actually ran.  Initially hyped as a challenge to Microsoft’s domination of the workplace desktop, the concept had its 15 minutes as The Next Big Thing a few years back, only to fall from favor due to network performance issues (while it’s acceptable if an application is a teensy bit slower over the network, sluggish mouse/keyboard response is a non-starter for most users).

But look at the advantages, though: rather than a $1000 workstation with Windows and Office installed, we’re talking about a simple paperback-sized box and monitor for $400, all in.  Granted, MS Terminal Server (and especially Citrix) licenses do cost, but on the other hand consider that there’s no fan noise, no hard drive failures, no long boot-up time, no virus susceptibility, no user-installed malware, space savings, power consumption savings – the list goes on and on.

And I speak from experience – several years ago, as the network administrator for a small business with half a dozen retail and office locations spread across  the country, I moved a good portion of my remote users to these devices.  This not only solved my problem of how to install and maintain remote these workstations, the client (who was growing quickly at the time) loved the immediate hardware savings (which more than made up for the terminal server licenses).

I was a hero; life was good (in a keep-the-trains-running job like network administration, you remember those win-win moments).

While I chose devices from Wyse, as the NY Times article points out, thin client computing is becoming The Next Big Thing all over again – so there are more and more manufacturers out there.  So many, in fact, that it begs the question:

What about the home market?

What I’m getting at is the return of the web appliance.  Like thin clients, this is another concept from a few years back that never quite took off – the only difference being the addition of an onboard web browser of some sort (maybe the well-received Opera browser, since Sony is already embedding that into its new Internet Video Link hardware).  Because in a world of Hulu, Flickr, and Google Docs (services which, unlike Windows Terminal Server or Citrix, are generally free), a simple little box with a browser and a handful of drivers for peripherals would just about do it for a lot of folks, wouldn’t it?

Clearly, cloud computing is The Next Big Thing now – at least Google thinks so, and Microsoft thinks so too.   Are there potential network reliability and privacy issues related to cloud computing?  Sure.  On the other hand, though, consider the upside: cheaper, simpler, instant-on hardware.

So thin computing is back. Again. Who knows, maybe the time is finally becoming right again for the web appliance too; maybe the browser is the new operating system.

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?