Microsoft

Microsoft is set to announce on Monday that it is ready with a second beta version of its Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 developer tools. Both products are set for a final release on March 22, Microsoft said.

"Microsoft has reached the home stretch for Visual Studio 2010," said Dave Mendlen, a senior director in Microsoft's developer division. "This is probably the biggest release we've had in many years."

Among the product's features is a Tivo-like recording feature that Microsoft has now dubbed "IntelliTrace."

"That's our time machine," Mendlen said. "We're very proud of that."

Other features new to the 2010 release include support for Windows 7 and Windows Azure as well as tools for building on top of Microsoft's Sharepoint product.

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is also taking the opportunity to scale back the number of different versions it sells, cutting the number of subscription options from seven to three. In a telephone interview, Microsoft Vice President S. "Soma" Somasegar said that move came from customer requests.

They told us "one place you can do better is making it simpler how you package your products," Somasegar said.

Under the new plan, myriad Visual Studio options will be consolidated into Professional, Premium, and Ultimate. Microsoft is planning an "ultimate offer" promotion that will give many current subscribers access to the next-higher version of Visual Studio as well as 750 Windows Azure compute hours per month. Next year, the company plans to change that to offer varying amounts of Azure compute time based on the level of the Visual Studio subscription.

The massive data failure at Microsoft's Danger subsidiary threatens to put a dark cloud over the company's broader "software plus services" strategy.

A key tenet of that approach is that businesses and consumers can trust Microsoft to reliably store valuable data on their servers.

T-Mobile Sidekick Slide

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

A week ago, though, Microsoft's Danger unit experienced a huge outage that left many T-Mobile Sidekick users without access to their calendar, address book, and other key data. That's because the Sidekick keeps nearly all its data in the cloud as opposed to keeping the primary copy on the devices themselves.

Things got even worse on Saturday, as Microsoft said in a statement that data not recovered thus far may be permanently lost. It's not immediately clear how many people lost their data. The outage earlier in the week affected a broad swath of Sidekick users, though many had data return during the week.

While outages in the cloud computing world are common (one need only look at recent issues with Twitter or Gmail), data losses are another story. And this one stands as one of the more stunning ones in recent memory.

The Danger outage comes just a month before Microsoft is expected to launch its operating system in the cloud--Windows Azure. That announcement is expected at November's Professional Developer Conference. One of the characteristics of Azure is that programs written for it can be run only via Microsoft's data centers and not on a company's own servers.

It should be pointed out that the Azure setup is entirely different from what Danger uses: the Sidekick uses an architecture Microsoft inherited rather than built (Microsoft bought Danger last year). Still, the failure would seem to be enough to give any CIO pause.

Update, 2 p.m. PT, 10/11/2009: I asked Microsoft for comment Saturday when I was writing this, in particular as to how the rest of its cloud might differ from the Danger set up.

Microsoft said Sunday that its the fabric controller that manages the Azure service is built with redundancy in mind.

"We write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail," Windows Azure general manager Doug Hauger said in a statement to CNET News.

That doesn't mean Azure is immune from data loss, though I'm told an entire data center would have to be wiped out, as opposed to just a server or collection of servers. I'd be interested to know whether Microsoft will also offer multiple location options so that users that want to can have their data in more than one physical spot as well.

But that's just one of many questions raised by this spectacular failure. Among the other questions still looming large in my head are:

1. What backup procedures did Danger have?

2. Just how many of T-mobile's Sidekick customers lost their data? (Feel free to let me know, Sidekick users.)

3. What impact will this have on the Pink project, which was largely seen as the evolution of the Sidekick, and some say was already in trouble?

4. Will this hurt Microsoft's efforts to build a brand around the notion of Windows Phone even though that uses a different architecture (with its own challenges, to be sure)?

Microsoft's Chicago data center offers a merge of old and new techniques. The ground floor features sealed containers with tightly packed racks of servers, while the second floor houses more traditional server rooms.

(Credit: Microsoft)

CHICAGO--On most days it takes the right access badge and a biometric scan to make it inside the doors of Microsoft's massive data center. But on Wednesday, the company allowed a group of reporters, customers, and partners to tour the 700,000 square foot facility.

The data center, along with another just-opened facility in Dublin, Ireland and existing centers in San Antonio and Quincy, Wash., serve as the guts behind Microsoft's online ambitions, from Bing to Hotmail to Windows Azure.

But, for all its strategic import, the ground floor of the Chicago plant looks more like a truck parking lot than a traditional data center. In each parking spot, though, Microsoft can drop off a container packed with up to 2,000 servers.

Right now, only about a dozen of the 56 container spots are filled, but Microsoft executives said they expect that to change quickly. The software maker expects to eventually spend up to $500 million filling up the Chicago site with gear.

The site was originally slated to open months earlier, but Microsoft delayed things due to the economy. Eventually, though, it decided to move forward.

"Investing in these uncertain economic times is always a tough choice," said Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services Microsoft's data center operations. But, he added, "We take a very long-term approach to the business.

The data center itself is housed in an unmarked warehouse in one of the Chicago area's many industrial districts. (The software maker didn't want the exact location disclosed.)

Microsoft picked the spot because of its convenient spot close to cheap and abundant power as well as the fact it sits atop a major Internet connection point that houses major east-west and north-south fiber routes.

"It's a lot about location, location, location," Josefsberg said.

I'll have a ton more to say in a follow-up post, including a bunch more pictures and some video interviews, but I wanted to share a few initial thoughts before hopping a plane to the Seattle area, where I will be working for the rest of the week.

Microsoft said on Friday that it plans next month to end support for a test version of its Live Framework, which was essentially the developer side of its Live Mesh service.

The idea of Live Framework is to give developers of Web-based applications the ability to add desktop components, while those writing traditional applications could use the Live Framework to add synchronizing and other online capabilities.

In a blog posting, Microsoft said it plans to integrate many of the concepts behind the Live Framework into the next version of Windows Live. In the mean time, though, developers will lose access to the test version of the Live Framework as of September 8.

"The Live Framework will be integrated into the next release of Windows Live. Stay tuned to Dev.live.com for more details in the future," Microsoft said in its blog. "If you are a Live Framework technology preview user, we ask you to please download any data and/or code from the service prior to September 8th as well as remove your devices from the service."

Developers can expect to hear more about where Microsoft plans to go with Live Framework at this November's Professional Developer Conference.

Microsoft rolled out the Live Framework as a community technology preview at last year's Professional Developer Conference, though its launch was somewhat overshadowed by the debut of Windows Azure. At the time, Microsoft said it was supporting both platforms, with Azure being a more basic set of building blocks and the Live Framework a collection of more finished services.

Microsoft's consumer-facing Live Mesh application is not affected by the move, Microsoft said.

Organizationally, Microsoft moved the Live Mesh effort into the Windows Live unit at the beginning of the year.

One of the limiting factors for Windows Azure--Microsoft's operating system for the cloud--is that it only runs in Microsoft's data centers.

Some have wondered why Microsoft doesn't just package it up and offer it as something that businesses or hosters can run in their own data centers.

Server and Tools head Bob Muglia on Tuesday announced pricing and other details for Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud-based operating system.

(Credit: CNET News)

Server and Tools boss Bob Muglia said in an interview Tuesday that Windows Server will start to take on attributes of Azure, but said there are good reasons why Azure doesn't make sense as a standalone product.

The main reason, Muglia said, is that it isn't built to offer choice. Because Microsoft knows exactly the hardware that will run on Azure, it hasn't built it to support different kinds of hardware or software.

"Windows Azure obviously runs in our own data center," Muglia said. "It is very much restricted. It only needs to run the hardware that we are trying to run on. It's not really appropriate for us to deliver it to customers in that form."

Businesses and hosters will want to offer their own clouds he said, and Microsoft will have tools for them, but Azure isn't their answer. Instead, he said, Windows Server, System Center, and Virtual Machine Manager will get a lot better at operating in a cloud-based environment, while still offering customers lots more choice.

"We will be taking our Virtual Machine Manager product and evolve it over time to much more straightforwardly allow customers to build their own private cloud," Muglia said.

Just because they will remain separate products, though, doesn't mean there won't be overlap between the Azure and Windows Server teams, he said. He noted that Windows Server 2008 R2, the version of Windows 7 for the server, has the ability to boot from a virtual hard drive--a feature developed by the Windows Azure team. Conversely, Azure supports applications written in PHP, a feature that it was able to offer because of work the Windows Server team had done in its last release.

Both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Azure are set for release in the coming months. Microsoft announced Azure pricing on Tuesday and said it will launch commercially at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference in November. Meanwhile, Windows Server 2008 R2 is set to be available to volume license customers September 1, the same time as Windows 7.

As for Azure, rival Salesforce.com had some hard words on Tuesday.

"When Microsoft, the company that has the most to lose from cloud computing, enters the market, you know that 'The End of Software' has arrived," Salesforce.com VP of strategy Bruce Francis said in an e-mail. "However, instead of solving the problems of the cost and complexity of client server, Microsoft is just moving those problems to the cloud. We believe that Azure will do for cloud computing what the Zune has done for media players."

But Muglia said that Azure is actually leading the way by allowing companies a way to move to the cloud that doesn't make them create whole new ways of writing software.

"There are many millions of customers today that are running very business critical applications today in the server environment," Muglia said. "We are focused on providing those customers with a smooth easy on-ramp into the cloud where they can leverage their skills and get the scale-out benefits the cloud will provide."

As Microsoft spells out the first service terms and pricing for its Azure development and hosting platform, ZDNet UK spoke to Mark Taylor, the company's director of developer and platform evangelism.

We quizzed Taylor about issues ranging from risk and resilience to private clouds and interoperability.

Microsoft's Mark Taylor

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

Q: When Azure becomes available in November, what will Microsoft be doing to convince people it is worth taking up?
Taylor: Since last November, we have been running our CTP [Community Technology Preview] program, which provides the ability to use Azure without paying for it. That will remain free until November when we go into commercial mode. Organizations can put applications up there and see how it goes. Many thousands worldwide are trying before they buy.

From November, the beauty of the pay-as-you-go model is that organizations can put up applications without having to make a substantial upfront commitment. As they get a better sense of their predicted volumes, they can move to a more formal arrangement.

Once the full Microsoft marketing muscle gets behind Azure to push uptake, what sort of provisions will you have in place to cope with surges in demand, if a service suddenly proves unexpectedly popular?
Taylor: The architecture we've built out so far has a vast amount of redundancy in it, and we're confident we can deliver against our service levels for the predicted volumes that we have come up with. We've got an aggressive program to continue to expand in terms of data centers and the capability within data centers.

A big chunk of the data center we have in Dublin looks like a loading dock from a supermarket. We have the ability to reverse containers in -- the power and the taps are there -- and they just become part of the data center. The ability to scale very rapidly without having to build new facilities has been a real core part of the data center strategy. The cost and agility we can take from that approach will serve us very well.

In your Azure service-level agreements (SLAs), you're offering credits against failure to meet certain uptime thresholds -- effectively credits to compensate for a customer's potential loss of business. How do think those guarantees match up to the risks that businesses are taking in moving to the cloud?
Taylor: If you have a failure, it depends where the failure is. We provide the platform, the storage, the connectivity. A failure within an application, for instance, would have a similar consequence if it was running in a traditional infrastructure.

The cloud industry is a new one. As we evolve, as we learn, as we understand -- and this is an industry-wide issue -- what the right kind of commercial arrangements are, then I'm quite sure our SLAs along with all the others will evolve to accommodate that.

This is a new industry and a new approach to IT, and we are all learning. I'd be amazed if we don't see an evolution in terms of resilience and geographic location of data.

In the same way, I imagine we'll continue to evolve the contractual offerings, service levels and pricing models that we're coming out with initially. Competition will always drive that, as will pragmatic experience.

What can you do to reassure people, especially when the link between the customer and Azure may not be in your hands?
Taylor: That's a very good point. The network between the cloud and the end user becomes a point of failure like everything else. What will happen -- we're seeing it now with organizations such as Akamai and Limelight with streaming -- with the increased dependency on public networks, we'll see the network operators step up as well. People will be building in a high degree of redundancy into their network provision, and that will become as important as everything else.

If you're entrusting your line of business to the cloud, you need to make sure not only the back end is as resilient and as scalable as you need, but equally that network resilience needs to be there as well. There will be an increase in the strength of service-level provisions of network operators as well.

What else can businesses do to ensure against cloud failures?
Taylor: One thing is to understand where the points of weakness or the points of concentration are and obviously, when you are architecting an application, to design as something that is going to be delivered by the cloud.

One of the aspects of our approach is that customers can use a programming model that is familiar to them in .Net, and the extensions that you can provide to make it Azure-aware are the thing to focus on.

Are private Azure clouds going to be feasible?
Taylor: One of the benefits of the cloud approach is that multi-tenancy provides the kinds of economies that you can deliver back to customers. If you go from that to a dedicated cloud, you get some technology advantages when it comes to scalability and provisioning, but you're not taking advantage of multi-tenancy.

"Private cloud" is one of those terms that is used a lot, but there isn't a standard definition for it. Virtualization from the server level upwards gives you a high degree of abstraction and privacy, and that's where the real economies come in.

But it depends on the level of abstraction you want to achieve. You can get right to the point where you've got your own data center running your own cloud. What you get there is the elasticity within the capacity you've got, but you do lose a lot of the economies because you still have to own all the infrastructure.

There's no doubt there will be a market for that kind of service, but it's really a question of where you want that abstraction point that creates your private cloud -- and you can have it in multiple places.

What is Microsoft doing to address the issue of interoperability between Azure and other cloud services and on-premise applications?
Taylor: What we've tried to do when it comes to the Azure service is that you architect applications in the same way as you would if you were just doing an in-house client/server application, for instance. When it comes to, say, SQL Azure, the database types and so on, the way you deal with the database is just the same as you would if it were in-house.

There is no doubt there will be a need to interoperate between different cloud services, and that is something we're fully committed to cooperating with. In the future, there will be the need to have the ability to, say, imbed a web service that is hosted on another cloud system.

The key question is whether there are new standards to be defined or whether the standards we have now are good enough, because what you're getting in the cloud is something that's very similar to what you would get with a standard approach. But either way, that's something that we're fully committed to participating in.

Do you have any suggestions for people who may be taking their first steps into the cloud and into Azure in particular?
Taylor: I would definitely suggest taking a fairly simple existing application that's targeting the .Net framework and just to put it up there. The work involved to move it to a cloud structure is fairly trivial for a competent programmer.

That experience is very useful for organizations, not just because of the experience of how it operates when it's in the cloud, but the whole way you get it there -- the various staging and testing.

One of our design goals with Azure is that you don't need to relearn too much, so you can use the languages, frameworks and databases that you're familiar with. The great thing right now is that it's free, and so the opportunity is there now for people to dabble with it and just get comfortable with it.

Toby Wolpe of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Microsoft's Bob Muglia announces Microsoft's Windows Azure plans at last year's professional developer conference. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced how it will charge for the service and what level of guarantees it will provide.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Microsoft on Tuesday announced how much it will charge companies that want to use its Windows Azure cloud computing service when it is released in final form this fall.

The software maker announced a variety of plans, including one that charges purely on consumption and another that offers discounted rates for those that agree to a six-month commitment.

With the launch of Azure, Microsoft finds itself in a new type of business, where it competes with the likes of Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com's Force.com.

The cloud operating system isn't launching in final form until Microsoft's November Professional Developer Conference, but a top executive had told CNET News that the pricing announcement would be made at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference, which is taking place in New Orleans. Microsoft first announced its Azure plans at last year's PDC and the product has been available as a free technology preview form since then.

On a pure consumption basis, Microsoft said it will charge 12 cents per hour for computing, 15 cents per gigabyte for storage and 10 cents per 10,000 storage transactions. For network bandwidth, the software maker is charging between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte.

The discount plan, dubbed the "development accelerator" comes in two forms and offers a 15 percent to 30 percent discount off the consumption charges. It requires a six-month commitment, with overage charges billed at the regular rates. After six months, the pricing reverts to the standard Azure rates.

Microsoft also announced pricing for its SQL Azure database, charging $9.99 for the basic Web edition, including up to a 1GB relational database and $99.99 for the Business Edition, which includes up to a 10GB database.

The software maker said it would promise 99.95 percent reliability for its compute and connectivity and 99.9 percent for role instance and storage. Ultimately, though, Ray Ozzie has said that trust will play a big role in which company businesses are willing to choose to host their applications.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated the incorrect time for the Professional Developer Conference. It will take place November 17 to 19 in Los Angeles.

Microsoft's move into the energy monitoring business may sound like a stretch, but to Craig Mundie, it's one of several natural new businesses for the software maker.

Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, said the company has its eye on any area that can be helped by technology and in which society is spending a lot of money and not seeing the return it would like.

Microsoft's Hohm service lets users enter information about their home and energy use to get tips on cutting their gas and electric bills.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Energy consumption specifically, and environmental issues more broadly, were natural areas for the company to delve into, he said, and follow Microsoft's moves into other thorny challenges such as education and health care. On Wednesday, Microsoft is officially announcing Hohm, a free service that households can use to monitor their household energy use and get tips on how they can cut their gas and electric bills.

Mundie said Microsoft started with the residential market because it accounts for $160 billion of the $365 billion that the U.S. spends on electricity use.

"The big industrial guys have already entered into special contracts," Mundie said, noting that businesses often have done energy audits and agreed to cut their use in exchange for lower rates. "To some extent, they don't need it so much."

Hohm, which was code-named Niagara, is the culmination of about two years of work in the area, Mundie said. It's also one of the first commercial services to launch running on Windows Azure, the cloud-based operating system that Microsoft introduced last year.

One of the big questions though, is whether the issue is that people don't know what is using energy in their home, or if they just don't care.

"I don't think anybody can tell," Mundie said. "So you give it a try."

But Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds notes that we have seen signs that apathy rather than ignorance may be the biggest hurdle when it comes to cutting energy consumption. Reynolds noted that even when gas prices tripled, most Americans opted to pay more rather than to dramatically change their energy use.

That same attitude will be a challenge in the home, Reynolds said, noting that he gets a chilly reception when he suggests a family member put on a sweater rather than turn on the heat.

For its part, Microsoft is betting there are enough people who are focused either on their energy consumption or their bills to make the investment pay off.

While the business model isn't totally clear, Mundie said there is potentially money to be made both from advertising as well as from connecting consumers to products and services that might cut their energy use.

There are other reasons Microsoft may be interested in energy, including the fact that its chief nemesis, Google, has also made a move in the arena.

The big difference in approach, Microsoft said, is that unlike services from other big companies and start-ups, Hohm works without needing any sort of special smart plugs or other gear, though it can work with such products as well.

"We didn't want to start with something predicated on some major infrastructural change," Mundie said. Microsoft is partnering with utilities so that consumers can get their energy use data directly imported into Hohm, but for those whose provider isn't one of the early partners, Mundie said consumers can enter information from their bill.

Hohm works by asking people a series of questions about their home and energy use. Consumers can enter as little as their zip code. But the more information a consumer gives, the more detailed the recommendations.

"You can answer one question or a hundred questions," Mundie said.

To hear more from Mundie, check out our video interview above.

Microsoft plans to announce next month more of the business details behind its Windows Azure operating system.

The software maker unveiled the cloud-based operating system at a developer conference last year. It has said that some of the services, currently in free testing, will be released in final form this year. The company has said that it will run Azure applications in its data centers and will charge users based on the computing resources they need.

Watson

(Credit: Microsoft)

In an interview on Monday, Corporate Vice President Allison Watson said that the company will get concrete about the financial details and say how partners can help sell Azure at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference which runs July 13-16 in New Orleans.

Until now, Microsoft has said merely that it plans to be "competitive with the marketplace" when it comes to pricing Azure.

Microsoft has also talked about perhaps having partners run Azure data centers in other locations, but Watson said that announcements on that front are probably further out.

"The economics of running a giant hosted business are different," Watson said. "They are interesting."

Microsoft is still trying to figure out exactly which businesses it wants to be in and which should be left to partners, she said. When Microsoft announced Azure, it said that all of the applications would be run from its data centers. However, Watson said the company is also looking at ways that partners can host cloud-based solutions.

"We've had some interesting conversations," Watson said.

Microsoft already competes directly with its hosting partners in other parts of its services business. For example, Microsoft offers online versions of SharePoint and Exchange, but also has partners that host their own copies of those products for customers.

Even in a world where Microsoft is selling services as much as software and using the Internet to deliver many of those products, Watson says that partners remain key to Microsoft's strategy.

"Partners have been our secret ingredient for how we grow and how we get things done," Watson said.

She noted that some of the key growth areas of technology--virtualization, mobility, and unified communications are places where customers need the skills of a partner as opposed to buying a software or service "off the shelf."

Even many of Microsoft's longtime competitors, folks with big internal sales efforts like IBM and Oracle, are starting to place more emphasis on the role of partners, she said. Even Google, she said, is starting to get in the partner game, announcing a program earlier this year.

For Microsoft, it continues to invest in that area despite the economy, Watson said.

While Microsoft has cut some from its internal field sales ranks, Watson said the company has actually added some to its partner sales channel in hopes that third parties might be able to pick up some of the slack on the sales front.

And while the overall enterprise software business is projected to be roughly flat this year, Watson notes that rate is better than on the hardware side. Since last October, Microsoft has been trying to convince partners that selling Microsoft's software can be a bright spot in an otherwise tough economy.

As for the Azure push, Watson didn't want to give away too much more. In the mean time, below is an interview I did with Ray Ozzie when Azure was unveiled. He also spoke about his cloud-based vision in a recent speech at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley.