Displaying items by tag: Cloud Computing

Windows 8, Microsoft’s heavily cloud based operating system, is due to hit the market in four days along with their Surface RT Tablet. While Microsoft (including Bill Gates) is talking up the operating system and its virtues there are many in the industry that are concerned about what will happen once (really if) a larger number of people start using these cloud services. This is highlighted today by yet another outage at Amazon that brought down many services including Reddit.

If you are student and your school does not use Microsoft's online productivity suite Office 365 for Education, your time has come and you will be able to get a 4 year subscription to the service for only $79.99. If you consider that you get all of the standard Office products like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access this is really a nice bargain. The Office 365 for Education online services are used by over 22 million students already. This University edition will also be available to faculty and staff, but it's not clear if they will be able to renew the license after four years like students can (but only once).

Irony is one of those things that you really have to savor. We are sure that both Intel and AMD are savoring the irony of AMD launching a new line of servers running Intel Xeon E3-1260L CPUs. The new server will be sold by AMD’s wholly owned subsidiary Seamicro, but we all know that AMD is the name behind it all. AMD bought Seamicro last year primarily for their interconnect technology, but we are also sure their rising server business was a bonus.

We are not a fan of the push to the cloud as you might have figured out from our articles. The reasons are many including, but not limited to, security, privacy, and a general dishonesty about what the cloud is and what it really means to the many companies that are offering cloud services (predictable revenue stream). All of that aside, there is a side effect to the present cloud push that we actually overlooked that explains more than a few things that are going on in the market as a whole. This is an unexpected impact on the sale of PCs (all PCs) across the consumer and potentially commercial market.

Back in October of last year we talked a little bit about AMD’s plans and where Rory Reed saw AMD heading. We knew from his past work with Lenovo that he was fascinated with the mobile world and that he felt it was the future of computing. Since that time we have heard him talk more and more about how the current laptops and desktops have more than enough power to do what they need to do. His reasoning is that the computer world is going to shift to the cloud and back into the traditional client/server infrastructure or more accurately the mainframe/terminal infrastructure. Looking at the current state of the cloud the Mainframe/Terminal model is the way that many companies want to go anyway. They want to do all of your calculations, rendering, compiling and then send you the output.  All your “PC” needs to be able to do is display that output. This is the future that Rory Reed envisions for AMD.

With all of the focus on the Samsung V Apple case recently there have been some interesting happenings in the Microsoft house that many of you might find interesting. It seems that Microsoft has made a few interesting moves lately; at least one that they obviously regret and a couple that they hope will help their position with their partners and their upcoming release of Windows 8. As most of you already know Windows 8 is set for release in October of this year and should hit the market with a healthy selection of products which are designed just for the new cloud based and touch centric OS.

From the very beginning it was certain that the main concern about Cloud computing would be security. No one can feel comfortable about placing his private data in remote storage, no matter how high of a security level is promised by the service provider. This weekend we could see security issues coming into the spotlight as Gizmodo's twitter feed god hacked, after one of their former writers, Mat Honan, had his Cloud penetrated by a group calling themselves Clan W3. They sent racist and offensive tweets to around 415,000 followers, luckily Gizmodo managed to quickly regain control of it's account.

Going as far back as the initial Build release of Windows 8 we picked up a change in Microsoft’s business plans and their push in the market. It was not a subtle shift as some will have you think. It was the type of shift that borders on the desperate. It is like seeing someone that knows they have run out of time grasping at anything to make something stick. At that time we knew that something had to change and it brought back a conversation I had with a couple of investors while waiting in line for an nVidia press conferences at CES in 2011. The conversation was about modular components and how manufacturers could create an independent revenue stream by allowing for modular upgrades and online services.  For some reason we ended up talking about Azure and how it had become something of a failure for what Microsoft had wanted it to be.

Today was a bad day for the cloud as first Google Talk, then Microsoft Azure, and finally Twitter all faced outages that ran into hours of downtime or intermittent problems. The incident highlights one of the problems that companies face in putting their eggs in very large baskets. The outages began with Google talk and kicked off around 4am this morning (7-26-2012). This was not a simple issue with being able to connect to the servers though, it was something more widespread.

Cisco is now facing exactly what we think will happen when people realize how tied down they will be with Windows 8. The networking giant attempted to force people that own their Linksys consumer line of wireless routers to use their cloud services to control simple management and administrative items in these devices. According to most reports the shift came after an automatic firmware update. This meant that most of the users complaining were never given the chance to accept this. According to some reports the update was required to continue using the product at all.