A new war in the cloud

In this week's Economist magazine, an article talks about an ongoing technology war between Microsoft, Google and Apple, fighting to dominate the clouding computing market. The premise is that while all three companies have ample resources and niche technology to win, but the final outcome is still too early to tell -- i.e., don't bet your retirement fund in any one of the three companies. :-)

In cloud computing, there are three key elements: data centers, services and hardware periphery. Google clearly has an upper hand in building data centers. But, it's only a matter of time before the others know how to build scalable and efficient data centers. In services, Google again has a lead, but Microsoft and Apple are not too far behind. After a disastrous release of Windows Vista and a slow grasp of web-centric computing, Microsoft recently comes back with a new Windows 7, Live services and Bing search engine, bringing a new battle to Google's own turf. Unlike Google and Microsoft, Apple has always focused on selling the best designed hardware and not software. With the super successful iPhone and iTune store, Apple is the leader in mobile computing. As computing users become ever more mobile and develop an acquired taste for pervasive computing, winning this battle helps Apple to buy more time to develop its data centers and services.

The Economist article also points out other issues that could significantly alter the outcome of the ongoing battle -- antitrust issues, difference in culture and business model among the three companies and the emergence of new players, such as Amazon and Facebook.

The future of cloud computing certainly looks exciting!

Update: Oct. 12, 2009

• Google may be coming out with a new online music service
• Microsoft "owns" Twitter search and Facebook data
• Apple iPhone and iTouch's user adoption rate beats which of all popular devices
  

Microsoft photosynth demo

At TED, Microsoft demonstrated its latest computer graphics technology called photosynth.

[photosynth] takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

• How does it work? Read on.


• Want to try it on your computer? Go here.


• See a demo video. Go youtube.

Can you imagine what you can do with this technology if it's combined with Microsoft's Surface Computing?

Microsoft comes back with Office Live

Microsoft now offers free web hosting services for small business owners. This new web site called Office Live comes with free services such as free domain name hosting, 30 MB of web-site storage space, 10 GB/month data transfer, 5 email accounts (2 GB storage each) and daily backups.

If you're willing to pay for a monthly fee, Office Live will also provide you with application services for managing customers, employees, projects and the ability to synchronize data with your desktop applications (full feature comparison).

I think this is an exciting new business model for Microsoft. In the age of the new Web, a key is to enable users to personalize information and gradually migrate part of their desktop-centric computing tasks to a Web-centric environment. Given that Microsoft has been a desktop-application company, pushing highly customizable business applications for small businesses will help the company to gain foothold in the new Web 2.0 market.

Source: A Web Site to Call Your Own, The New York Times.

The New Internet Media War

To many consumers the Internet is no longer just another place to kill time, but it's a place to get things done, to be entertained, and to be educated. As the Internet becomes an important part of our everyday life, businesses waste no time in finding new adventures in hope to increase their competitive advantages.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all have been buying new media companies to boost their Internet content services. Here is a chart of "who is buying what":