Microsoft COO Goes on Competitor-Bashing Spree

For his annual keynote at the Microsoft Wordwide Partner Conference, taking place this week in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner wasted little time challenging Microsoft's many competitors. He flouted the supposed weaknesses of Cisco, IBM, Google, Oracle and others, letting attendees know that Microsoft is gunning for these companies' business.

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With VMware (VMW), he referred to something he called the "VMware tax," noting that Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software offers the ability to run more virtual machines, after the first six, at no additional cost. "We caught VMware flat-footed because of the economics of the cloud," he said. "The more VMs you add, the more you save."

This is not the first year that Turner has bashed competitors. Last year at WPC, Turner mocked Apple (AAPL) for its problems with the then recently released iPhone 4, calling it Apple's Vista, referring to Microsoft's own less-than-enthusiastically received operating system.

Apple was not spared Turner 's mockery this year either. Comparing Apple's approach to its operating systems with Microsoft's, Turned mused that "your guess is as good as mine as to when [Apple will merge] the iOS and MacOS." Windows 8, in contrast, will be a single OS that will bridge a wide range of different devices, he noted.

Turner also took apparent delight in displaying photos of an unnamed authorized Apple reseller store in Latin America that was selling Apple desktops and Apple laptops running Windows 7. "That should tell you a lot about having a great OS."

Some of Turner's jibes were more enthusiastic than coherent. "It is so good to have something to compete with Salesforce.com (CRM) head-to-head," Turner trumpeted, referring to Microsoft's Dynamics CRM Online, which has gone live in direct competition with Salesforce.com's offerings. "Now, we have this humongous pacifier to stick in the mouth of [Salesforce.com CEO] Marc Benioff."

Not all of Turner's talk was bluster. He also took the opportunity to provide a eulogy for Microsoft products that the company hopes its users will upgrade, namely Windows XP, Office 2003 and Internet Explorer 6. "Those products deserve a standing ovation. They have been so good to so many people. But you know what? They are dead. End-of-life is 2014," Turner said.

These widely used products define what Microsoft is for far too many people, he added. "The reality is that is not what we are at all. You can't even begin to get someone's mind around Lync and SharePoint and the cloud until we get these old applications remediated and moved forward," he said.

Turner also outlined the strategy partners should take to help get their customers onto the Microsoft Azure cloud. Microsoft's Azure service has already collected 40,000 customers across 41 countries, although this is a small percentage of the customers Microsoft would like to have using this service. He explained that the two vital pieces of software that every organizations should have to get cloud ready is Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Active Directory.

"When they want they want to go to the cloud, these two assets will make that possible," he said. "If they are not quite ready to go to cloud, it doesn't matter. We'll take them when they are ready."

8 hot features in Windows 8

The rumor mill is in high gear as people speculate about new features in Microsoft's latest version of Windows. Here's a compilation of the latest leaks, rumors and previews.

Microsoft recently allowed select OEM partners to download updated preview builds of Windows 8. Since then, there have been several leaked images of supposedly new features that you might see in the next version of Windows when it launches (perhaps in early 2012). And Microsoft showed off some features in a preview last week. Here we have compiled the most interesting ones. (Watch a slideshow version.)

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First look at Windows 8

1. Windows Phone 7's theme and UI

Last week, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 8 will have a tiles-based interface. Called Immersive, this GUI is meant to be used in full-screen mode, and is probably targeted at tablets running Windows 8. Source.

2. Ribbon User Interface in Explorer

It looks like Microsoft is taking the Ribbon GUI that they introduced in Office 2007, and gradually extended to their other software products including Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows 8. So expect a Ribbonized Explorer. Source.

3. Cloud Integration

The Windows 8 Explorer interface suggests it will access Microsoft's cloud services, possibly SkyDrive and Windows Live Mesh. SkyDrive is an online storage space that you can put your files in, and Mesh lets you sync your other Windows computers and mobile devices remotely. Both are already available by installing Windows Live Essentials 2011 onto Windows 7 or Vista. Source.

4. Windows Live Integration

Along with being more wedded to Microsoft's cloud services, the Windows 8 preview suggests that you'll be able to use your Windows Live (or Hotmail) account to log into your Windows 8 computer. The profile image of your Windows Live user profile would then appear to the far right of the system tray. If you want to experience how this might work, this unofficial, user-created app mimics this feature for Windows 7. Source.

5. Built-In PDF Reader

Microsoft may include the capability for Windows 8 to load and display PDFs, with its own PDF reader they're calling Modern Reader. So there will be no more need to download and install Adobe Reader or its speedier competitor Foxit Reader. The user interface and look of Modern Reader is full-on Metro. Source.

6. ISO Mounting

It looks like you'll be able to mount an ISO file to Windows 8 and access its contents as though it is a data CD or DVD drive. Having this functionality in prior versions of Windows has been available only as a third-party program, such as Virtual CloneDrive or Daemon Tools. Source.

7. File Download Verification

First implemented into Internet Explorer, it looks like Microsoft may be expanding its SmartScreen filter feature throughout the Windows 8 ecosystem. So when you try to download a file, SmartScreen will kick in and evaluate whether the source URL is known to distribute malware. Source.

8. Aero Auto-Colorization

Here's something that doesn't address the critical nuts-and-bolts of Windows 8, but could be fun: Aero can be set to automatically change the colors of your Windows theme based on the primary colors of a desktop wallpaper image you use. The result could be harmonious or awful, of course. This is one of those tinker-around-with toys. There's already a program that does the same thing for Windows 7 called Aura. Source.
8 more rumored features of Windows 8

The following have been publicly announced, reported or heavily rumored:

1. App Store: It seems like every company has or is about to launch an app store, so it should come as no surprise that we're probably going to see one in Windows 8. There has been debate for months whether screenshots that have been leaked are fake.

2. ARM Processor Support: Indicating Microsoft is probably looking to position Windows 8 for tablet use as well, the company confirmed the OS will support ARM, the processor used mostly in embedded systems and mobile devices.

3. Factory Settings Restore: If your Windows computer has been hit with Trojans, worms or viruses, Windows 8 could have an option to restore it to its "factory settings" -- like the daisy-fresh way it worked when you first started it up. This is supposed to be faster to run than using the restore method that comes with most OEM computers.

4. History Vault: Windows' long-time "restore to a given point in time" function will be renamed History Vault and become like OS X's Time Machine. It will be a more robust tool that takes a "snapshot" copy of the entire contents of your Windows 8 computer's hard drive and then lets you easily restore things to that prior system state.

5. Instant-On and Improved Power Settings: There have always been minor to annoying power setting issues with Windows. Rumors of near instant-on and better efforts to save on power consumption would fit into Microsoft's goal to make Windows 8 more tablet-friendly.

6. Internet Explorer 10: Yep, Microsoft only recently launched IE 9 and has yet to release a preview of its follow-up. It's probably a safe bet IE 10 will be in Windows 8 when the OS launches.

7. Multi-Touch Interface Support: Another sign that Microsoft likely wants to make Windows 8 more appealing for tablets is rumored support for multi-touch interfaces. We can probably assume that the aforementioned Immersive UI is being developed to work ideally with a multi-touch screen. (In fact, Microsoft did confirm multi-touch capabilities in a preview late last week.)

8. Really Fast Install: Supposedly, installing Windows 8 will take up less than half the time it does with Windows 7.

How to survive a cloud outage

You can't prevent your cloud service provider from going down, but there are ways to protect yourself

Amazon's infamous cloud outage in April brought down a number of popular Web sites, including foursquare and Reddit - but many of Amazon's enterprise cloud customers were able to weather the storm without experiencing downtime.

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Guide to cloud management software
They architected their systems for resiliency by using multiple availability zones, having hot backups in traditional data centers, or having a backup cloud provider set up and ready to go in case of a problem.

Silicon Valley-based photosharing company SmugMug stayed up through the outage even as its peers failed. That was partly because it avoided the use of Amazon's Elastic Block Storage - the particular service component that went down.

But the company also spread its systems across several Amazon data centers - what Amazon calls "availability zones."

Other companies would have stayed up as well if they had also distributed their applications, says SmugMug CEO Chris MacAskill. He also recommends that companies also use multiple Amazon regions, which are more isolated from one another than availability zones. Of course, Amazon does charge extra for using multiple zones, so that needs to be taken into account.

SmugMug relies heavily on Amazon, using its cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3) to store customer photos and videos. SmugMug also uses many instances of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). But instead of using Elastic Block Storage - which is attached to individual EC2 instances, and often used to store operational data - the company still uses traditional data centers.

That has its own downsides - the week of Amazon's outage, for example, the company lost a core router, its backup, and a core master database server. "I wish I didn't have to deal with routers or database hardware failures anymore, which is why we're still marching towards the cloud," MacAskill says.

And, despite the outage, the cloud-based services that he gets from Amazon are still better than what SmugMug could have on its own, he adds, and better than other cloud service providers. "We're very committed to them," he says.

Israel-based startup Kitely Ltd. only used one of Amazon's availability zones - but, fortunately, not the one that went down.

However, the company plans to learn from the experience. "We intend to split all of our services across multiple availability zones," Kitely CTO Oren Hurvitz says.

Kitely, which runs cloud-based virtual meeting and collaboration environments based on the OpenSim platform, also performs continuous checks to ensure that all of its services are up and running.

"Our system is designed with the assumption that any service might stop working at any time," he says. "If we discover that a server is not responding then we terminate it and start a new server instead."
Traditional backups

Another company unaffected by the outage because it used multiple availability zones was Mashery, which provides APIs to more than 100 companies such as BestBuy, Hoovers and The New York Times. But Mashery also has another backup plan - a traditional data center.

"We very early on realized that there could be a service problem where Amazon would be entirely unavailable, and we decided that we needed fail-over infrastructure," Mashery CEO Oren Michels says. "We have dedicated hardware with Internap."

Atlanta-based Internap Network Services Corp. provides not only a hot backup site for Mashery but also a production environment for customers that need lower latency than possible with a cloud, or services delivered in geographic areas where Amazon is not available.

"We maintain plenty of infrastructure on both sides to handle peak load," he says.

When Mashery was first building its cloud infrastructure two years ago, Amazon was the only real player in town. Backing up to another cloud was not an option back then - but it might be possible now.

"We're definitely keeping our eye on it," he says. "But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Amazon has worked amazingly well for us. Likewise, Internap has been a great partner and continues to provide us the services we need."

Internap has even lowered its prices to stay competitive, he adds, though price isn't the major factor in his decision-making.

"We have a hundred huge brands as customers," he says. "It's more expensive to lose customers in case their stuff goes down. Our customers pay us to solve their API problems, and that includes that we stay up if there's an outage."

Companies that are just making the transition to the cloud often use traditional data centers as backups at the start of the process, says Rob Enderle, an analyst at research firm Enderle Group.

"You can have a set of lesser resources that are on stand-by that you can failover to," he says. "Often, that's whatever you had before you moved to the cloud. You can fail-over to a lower-performing technology and still hold your customers."

Companies that have some applications running in a traditional data center and some running in the cloud may be able to double up, he says, and use the same disaster recovery site for both, since the odds are low that Amazon would go down at the same exact time as the traditional data center.

But he warned against trusting too much in using one set of cloud services as a backup for another set of cloud services on the same cloud.

"A redundant service might use some of the same resources as the primary service," he says. "Care should be taken to ensure that redundancies are, in fact, redundant and not simply a different name for overlapping hardware and software."
Secondary cloud providers

Using a cloud service provider as a backup for a traditional data center is typically more cost-effective than the other way around.

That's because with a cloud service provider, you pay for computing cycles. When it's not being used, customers need only have the minimum computing power running to enable a quick switch-over, and then add more server capacity as needed.

With a traditional data center, enough servers have to be available to handle peak workload, even if they are rarely used. That translates to hardware costs as well as power and staffing requirements - typically a traditional backup center would double total computing costs, while a cloud backup would only add a fraction.